NBSG Series Bible

[sirocco]

from what I understood, the Colonies' system is mindbogglingly huge: there are just not 12 inhabited planets; you have to count too the moons and the mining bases and probably the space stations, like those you saw in the pilots. Monitoring the traffic between them is easy since people followed the same routes since they got spaceships. You kinda expect to be there. On the opposite, someone coming from deep space, far from any habitable world is very unlikely to be seen.

It's like the people traveling through the Sahara. They have been following the same routes for millennia and nearly know the position of every oasis in the desert. People living in some of them know too when they will come and where they will come from. It's set in stone. But from time to time you have explorers/adventurers/tourists just wandering around, out of the usual ways. Some are lucky. Some were never seen again.

So back to the subject, the cylons are more likely to avoid the traditional routes between the 12 colonies, and take their chance with the smugglers. Though instead of bribing smugglers into taking them in (probably hooded so that they won't notice that they all look alike), I tend to think that they just started by infiltrating them, taking advantage of their limited access to information. Even if they were found, they wouldn't have any qualm about killing everyone and just bombing themselves beyond recognition. And I don't think that the colonists would bother with investigating all these "accidents" on the edges of the system.

From there the cylons probably started forging identities for the operatives like Sharon Valerii.

[Sarevok]

Smuggling people into colonies is possible. It's how far they penetrated Colonial security that's the problem. They could come up with infallible official backgrounds for people that never existed. They made up a decorated war record for Tigh and got him placed as XO of the Galactica. A celebrity like Anders was created even though we all know tabloids are hungry for each and every personal detail. What ? Is no one going to notice Anders never existed a few years back ? That he has no known family, no friends that knew him older than a few years at most ? Or the simple fact no enterprising journalist could trace where he supposedly spent his youth ?

[sirocco]

Smuggling people into colonies is possible. It's how far they penetrated Colonial security that's the problem. They could come up with infallible official backgrounds for people that never existed. They made up a decorated war record for Tigh and got him placed as XO of the Galactica. A celebrity like Anders was created even though we all know tabloids are hungry for each and every personal detail. What ? Is no one going to notice Anders never existed a few years back ? That he has no known family, no friends that knew him older than a few years at most ? Or the simple fact no enterprising journalist could trace where he supposedly spent his youth ?

Cavil did it

[Sarevok]

Man I hated how they ruined Cavil's character, going as far as making him into a literal baby killer (his quest to dissect Hera). It's like half way through the series they wanted a villain. Cavil went from the cool guy making awesome smart quips to a supervillain hiding behind every bush on Caprica.

[OmegaChief]

One thing you have to remember about Tigh, is that he's apparently been around since the first Cylon war.

Around as in, in the clonies and everything, we even see him in a flashback with hair talking to Admiral Adama about getting back into miltiary service for crying out loud.

So we don't really know how much of his record they had to forge, plus in the aftermath of the first war there'd be enough chaos around to sneak people in on refugee transports.

Of course this doesn't help all the inflitrators who moved in after that.

[Sarevok]

I don't know. Creating a fake decorated WW 2 vet and inserting him as the XO of the USS Midway would be pretty damn hard in the 50s. If anything the collective memory of the war would mean chances of getting is higher. Same situation applies here but on a even massive scale. You can fake paperwork, you can give Tigh new memories. But you cant manufacture all the people expected to know the XO during his long illustrious career.

[jollyreaper]

I don't know. Creating a fake decorated WW 2 vet and inserting him as the XO of the USS Midway would be pretty damn hard in the 50s. If anything the collective memory of the war would mean chances of getting is higher. Same situation applies here but on a even massive scale. You can fake paperwork, you can give Tigh new memories. But you cant manufacture all the people expected to know the XO during his long illustrious career.

Not only that but his existence predates the supposed creation of the biological Cylons. It's the same sort of continuity error with having that flashback to Adama commanding the battlestar involved with the stealth fighter investigation into Cylon space. If he commanded that and knew the Cylons were still out there and a threat, nuking the colonies shouldn't have been a surprise but something he'd been anticipating the whole time. He'd be the guy muttering about Cylons hiding behind every asteroid and insisting the Galactica remain combat ready against all reason and thus would have been as prepared as possible when the attack finally came. Actually, you could have had a serious policy disagreement between the civilians and the military where the civilians insisted there is no Cylon threat, you saw nothing, do not panic the voters. And the military would have been forced to obey the letter of the law while officers who knew the facts would possibly have set up secret contingency plans. They could not openly prepare for the Cylon attack but they could at least informally share what they knew amongst trustworthy officers. There have been many cases in human history where the military has been aware of the likelihood of a war coming before the political leadership was willing to admit it. Of course, there are also examples of the political leadership trying to push for a war the military knows is unnecessary or the military trying to push the politicians into a war they don't want. The politicians could have seen this as a power grab by the military using the Cylon bogeyman to scare them. Would have made for good drama.

That's the sort of continuity error writers should really avoid introducing into a storyline, especially seeing as it isn't a minor oversight but a pretty obvious uh-oh.

[jollyreaper]

He'd be the guy muttering about Cylons hiding behind every asteroid and insisting the Galactica remain combat ready against all reason and thus would have been as prepared as possible when the attack finally came. [...] the military would have been forced to obey the letter of the law while officers who knew the facts would possibly have set up secret contingency plans.

Heh, that reminds me of the original show. They were at the peace conference. The president kept saying the war is over, no need to fight (he was probably trying to convince himself...) and ordered no fighting.

Adama took this order, but suggested to Tigh it was time to do a battle "drill"...

Ah, yes. Back when the original series was interesting, before they started ripping off the plots of popular Hollywood movies. I'm just glad they didn't do that with the new show, we'd have had torture porn and sappy romantic comedies all over the place. Could you imagine them trying to work in popular celebs as guest stars? Lady Gaga as a Cylon, maybe someone from the Jersey Shore to play an alien. (with tans that orange, they wouldn't even need any makeup) And could you imagine if the Skiffy Channel had tried to get them to insert characters that could be marketed to children? "The show needs an Ewok to sell to kids. Didn't the original have a robot dog? Maybe the Cylons created human models but also created dog models, too. It needs to be plush and cute and something the chinese can deliver by the gross. Time to make some money, people!"

[OmegaChief]

I don't know. Creating a fake decorated WW 2 vet and inserting him as the XO of the USS Midway would be pretty damn hard in the 50s. If anything the collective memory of the war would mean chances of getting is higher. Same situation applies here but on a even massive scale. You can fake paperwork, you can give Tigh new memories. But you cant manufacture all the people expected to know the XO during his long illustrious career.

But.... they didn't insert him as an XO, he was sent in as just some other fighter jockey like Adama who rose up through the ranks to become XO of that ship over time....

[jollyreaper]

I don't know. Creating a fake decorated WW 2 vet and inserting him as the XO of the USS Midway would be pretty damn hard in the 50s. If anything the collective memory of the war would mean chances of getting is higher. Same situation applies here but on a even massive scale. You can fake paperwork, you can give Tigh new memories. But you cant manufacture all the people expected to know the XO during his long illustrious career.

But.... they didn't insert him as an XO, he was sent in as just some other fighter jockey like Adama who rose up through the ranks to become XO of that ship over time....

1. They sent him back before the war, before the skinjobs were invented?
2. Nobody thought it was weird that he was a complete blank before the war started? Colonial security doesn't run background checks on personnel?

I think the point about Anders is an even better one. He's a sports star not one of his obsessive fans found out his history is a blank slate? There's also the sheer randomness of it all. He just happens to be placed with a Pyramid team (why? what sort of sabotage could he do there?) and randomly survives the war and the fighting to eventually get back to Galactica.

The number of infiltrators on Galactica would have made more sense if the survival of that ship was part of the plan, if the Cylons were trying to force prophecy. The original bible said the thought was that maybe the Cylons wanted the humans to find Earth. Maybe the Cylon religion said that they could not find Earth but the humans could. So they recreate the events of the original exodus to the 12 colonies so that the hummies can lead them to the 13th colony. The infiltrators are within the ragtag fleet to keep tabs on them and the Cylon fleet is shadowing them to make sure the exodus has a proper scriptural feel to it, pursued by demonic forces.

That would be pretty terrifying, sort of like how I think the Jews must view support from evangelical Christians. The evangelicals want the Jews to have Israel because they see it as another step in fulfilling the prophecy of Christ's return. Then Israel will be destroyed, the Jews will be offered a chance to convert to Christianity or be doomed to eternal damnation and the rest of the apocalypse can proceed on schedule. Scary stuff.

[OmegaChief]

I don't know. Creating a fake decorated WW 2 vet and inserting him as the XO of the USS Midway would be pretty damn hard in the 50s. If anything the collective memory of the war would mean chances of getting is higher. Same situation applies here but on a even massive scale. You can fake paperwork, you can give Tigh new memories. But you cant manufacture all the people expected to know the XO during his long illustrious career.

But.... they didn't insert him as an XO, he was sent in as just some other fighter jockey like Adama who rose up through the ranks to become XO of that ship over time....

1. They sent him back before the war, before the skinjobs were invented?
2. Nobody thought it was weird that he was a complete blank before the war started? Colonial security doesn't run background checks on personnel?

Well it has been a while since I saw the show, but didn't the Final Five (Who were already Skin Jobs from Cylon Earth) arrive just at the end of the Cylon War, where they go working with the Centurians to create the other skinjobs, probably using thier ressuraction technology.

Of course I've got no come backs for anyone other then Tigh, unless they all have backgrounds like the unfortunate minign accent on Troy which convinantly left the local records almsot unrecoverable and/or easy to tamper with?

[Anguirus]

Somebody is getting the Final Five confused with the other seven (who weren't actually designed as infiltrators anyway).

[Johonebesus]

If my memory serves, after the war Adama left the military for a while and went into civilian space service, and that's where he met fellow veteran Tigh. Later they both re-enlisted together.

As to their aging, my guess is that they weren't supposed to, but Cavil programmed the Five to age. He evidently reprogrammed himself to remove the need for sleep. It would seem awfully cruel of the Five to give Cavil an elderly body from the start if he was doomed to a few years of further decline until getting a new body past its prime. The Cylons left on Terra might have been eternally young, but given their physical limitations they would probably end up getting killed by one thing or another over the millennia, assuming they didn't just off themselves after seeing how hard and unpleasant paeleolithic life was.