By Rhea Dee
1. Tyrol shaved off all his pretty hair. This is indeed quite dire.
2. That one creepy cylon that held Starbuck captive and made her believe she had a child is back. Leoben, I believe his name his. He tells all of them that there’s a cylon civil war going on and proposes a truce between the rebellious cylons and the humans. The crew, is of course, dubious, but Starbuck is willing to believe anything, as long as it gets her closer to Earth. While I do feel for Starbuck, I think the real hero of this episode is Helo, the trustworthy right hand man who spent a whole episode conflicted on whether to rebel or stick by his crazy Captain.
3. Gaius continues to be one of the most interesting characters in the show. Cylon Tory is totally obsessed with Gaius and his one God religion and she goads Tyrol to listen to Baltar’s preaching. Tyrol does so, but ends up choking Gaius when he makes claims about Cally that Tyrol doesn’t like so much. And then just before I can be pissy at Gaius for being all Mr. Preachy-Pants, he goes and apologizes to Tyrol for making assumptions about his wife. Tyrol holds his hand. And another cylon moves over to Gaius’ side.
4. You know, for some reason I thought Sharon would be more for Starbuck than she is, simply because she knows what it’s like to be ostracized from the rest of the majority. I like to believe that if Helo weren’t involved she might be more inclined to feel for Starbuck.
5. I myself don’t know how to feel about Starbuck. This is probably because they haven’t really given us much of her character to work with besides the complete Earth obsession. That’s quite sad, as Starbuck is quite the interesting character as well. I felt like we were getting a little bit more of her when she started her speech about Mathias’s death, but it quickly reverted back to Earth obsession. The mutiny was expected, and I even think the outcome of the mutiny might be a bit predictable as well: who else thinks that Starbuck’s just gonna launch off on her own to Leoben’s Basestar?
6. The whole thing with the secret cylons has left me wondering if any of them are going to be revealed to the rest of the population. Will they all be revealed at once? Will one be revealed in front of the others? Will the other secret cylons be forced to assassinate one of their own to keep their cylon-ness secret? When the final cylon is revealed, will he/she just point a finger at the rest of the cylons? Will the secret cylons change into something truly evil, more evil than the original cylons? I guess the bottom line is that I want to know more about the cylons. A lot more than what we’re getting so far.
7. Continuing with my cylon fixation, I’d like to see more of the civil war that Leoben referred to. But then again, it is really happening? We know that cylons rebelled, but they were killed (no resurrection ship in close proximity killed). Are there more cylons rebelling?
8. Back to Gaius for a moment. They keep building up this religion of his, so it’s obviously going to play quite a large part in the series as a whole. Is the religion going to become so massive that it’ll spawn a religious war on Galactica? Is the show trying to make a point about Monotheistic religion? Or are they trying to make a point about religion in general? I haven’t quite figured it out yet, so I can’t really say for sure if I like it or not. My only concern is that it has an extreme possibility of being really pretentious.
9. I really wish BSG would stop teasing us about the final cylon. I have to close my eyes during the opening credits so that I won’t get annoyed. Yes, I know one is going to be revealed. Please stop reminding me, since you are going to take your time revealing him/her to me.
10. I really, really miss Tyrol’s hair. To the other men of BSG: do NOT do what he did. Please.
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Rhea Dee loves being a geek. She also loves female revenge flicks, campy horror, trashy novels and rock ‘n’ roll records. Rhea’s love for rock ‘n’ roll led her to be a regular contributor for the now defunct Now Wave webzine. She’s all about Edgar Wright. Important to know.
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Rhea Dee is a Midwestern fat girl floating through space with a donut and an attitude. She's the co-host and co-creator of the podcast Badland Girls. 
There’s a couple ways they could be going with this religion thing. Firstly, when a religion no longer serves the needs of it’s people, the people generally look for a new religion. Irish and Norse paganism are good examples: native peoples voluntarily gave up their religion for Xianity simply because human sacrifices and unanswered prayers and endless rituals no longer did it for them. Arab paganism went down with slightly more of a fight when Islam came along, but really not all that much. So if the Colonials are abandoning the gods, it’s because the gods no longer have any relevance to them.
Another posibility is Hegelian synthesis: You’ve got a group that eventually evolves into two groups, they come into conflict, fight, and in the end the survivors integrate into a new cohesive whole, which eventually breaks down into two groups in the distant future and the process begins again. Kind of like, oh, I dunno, humans creating cylons, cylons killing off most of humanity, then integrating; and then there’s that constant reminder that “All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again.”
Gotcha. It’s not “all of this has happened before” in a literal sense, as in The Matrix. But, the process of splitting and uniting has happened repeatedly. It never occurred to me to take that perspective, which makes more sense than taking it literally.
Happy to be of service.
Slightly off topic, but here’s something that I’ve wondered about for a while: it’s apparent that the ancestors of the Colonials got thrown off Kobol before ending up on the Colonies, and now they’ve gotten thrown out of the Colonies, presumably to end up on Earth. So they talk about “The gods” quite a bit, even in conjunction w/ living alongside them on Kobol. So what were these gods, anyway? Mere legends, or maybe early sentient machines? And if the Lords of Kobol were actually early AIs who rebelled, what happened to ‘em? Are they still around? Are they still involved in the story somehow? Are they related to the Final Five somehow? Or the Cylons own God?
I think Baltar’s arc will show us something of the gods of Kobol. He’s developed his following, and as his story and teachings are passed down, he’s likely to make that mythical jump from man to god in the minds of his followers. It will take generations for that to happen, but down the line, I think Baltar will be the one god the colonials pray to. The gods of Kobol were probably just people like Baltar: charismatic leaders who later came to be thought of as gods.
James Michner’s book The Source explores that idea quite a bit. It’s a really interesting read, if you have the fortitude.
I dunno how I feel about that. Monotheistic religions are pretty uncomfortable w/ the idea of a God in human form. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, and Baha’I have all rebelled pretty stridently from that idea. The whole point of Monotheism seems to be to remove the filters of perception that stand between an individual and The Divine – you know, pull down the stained glass windows in the church and stare at the sun directly, that kind of thing. Prophets, sure, the Son of God, ok, maybe just this once, but God Himself? Not so much. Of cours this is an SF show, so I could be totally off base about this, I guess it just depends on wether RDM went to Church/Temple/Mosque as a kid, or just read Campbell in college.
Maybe not necessarily God in human form, but a person who, through retelling over centuries or millennia, becomes part of the general consciousness and is believed to have been a god, whether he actually was or not. There’s also the possibility that BSG is saying that religion is a construction of man and the object of that religion doesn’t exist.
Oh yeah, it’s entirely possible that the entire religion aspect of BSG is simply rats running around in a computerized maze, seeing how most effectively to manipulate people (“Do we give ‘em free will, or merely tell them they have free will?”) and definitely, A-list religious reformers tend to get deified over time, but I do think it’s imporant to point out that Muslims don’t think Mohammed is/was/will be God; that the Sikhs don’t believe Guru Nanak to be God, that Christians don’t pray to Jesus, even though He’s God’s Son, but rather pray to God directly, and so on.
BTW, I’m pointing this out only because most SF fans aren’t particularly religious, and many are actively opposed to religion (I can’t tell you how many of my atheist friends simply couldn’t get past the religious blather on Babylon 5 and abandoned the show because of it). Since a lot of us have no first-hand experience w/ such things, and are operating on heresay which may or may not be accurate, and might confuse the hell out of things if they try to apply it a story thread or metaphor or whatever in a TV show. For instance, if someone says that based on their second-hand understanding of a book they probably never read, Jesus hated Jews, or that Mohammed hated Christians and therefore we can predict thus-and-so will happen later on in the season, you can call bullshit on that simply because people who’ve actually read the books know that (A) Jesus was Jewish himself and never said anything bad about it, and (B) Mohammed was married to a Christian girl. Wow…Having actually written that all out rather than just thinking it in my caffine-filled braine, it sounds remarkably pedantic.
Geez. Sorry.
Incidentally, surfing IO9 a little bit ago I found this paraphrase of a conversation w/ RDM:
>>> Caprica Six will have a “very interesting year”. Also, Baltar? Not Jesus. “That’s not what the show’s about,” apparently. <<<
Here’s the link, if anyone wants to look at it. Be wary of spoilers, though!
http://io9.com/387890/cylons-just-as-frakked-as-ever-says-producer