Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I’m late to the game on Battlestar Galactica, I know. In retrospect, I’m almost ashamed that I haven’t been following the show since it started. Time magazine ranked it as one of the ten best shows of 2006, and in my own mind it has done the impossible and supplanted Firefly as the Best Sci-Fi of the Last Ten Years.

So now that I’m on the same page as the rest of you, let’s talk about season three, shall we? Spoilers ahead.

Talking in broad strokes about the season, it’s not quite as good as season two, but that’s a bit like comparing a Ferrari to a Porsche. Battlestar Galactica, even in its weaker moments, still makes for better television than you’re likely to find anywhere else. As I see it, the biggest problem with season three was the awkward and frustrating Starbuck/Apollo/Dualla/Anders rectangle of emotional torture. As a rule, love stories don’t mix well with science fiction (not to be confused with Tolkein-esque fantasy, where it also doesn’t mix so well). Star Wars had those little bits between Han and Leia, but it was really, and rightly, all about Vader and Luke. Star Trek had Kirk transmitting galactic gonorrhea to women of virtually every color and species, but hardly ever had a substantial romance (the notable exception being Edith Keeler in the classic, “The City on the Edge of Forever“). Likewise with The Next Generation, the romantic subplots were more often just devices to introduce strange pieces of technology gone awry or alien beings that feed off of human emotion.

With Starbuck and Apollo maddeningly wed to people who are not each other at the end of season two, I knew that we wouldn’t get through season three without addressing the craziness of it all. The first episode to really tackle the love stories gave me high hopes. It handled the love rectangle through flashbacks by way of boxing match. You get to see characters beating the crap out of each other both emotionally and physically. How perfect is that? Alas, it was not to last. Despite BSG‘s consistently magnificent writing, the constant need to return to the tortured quartet and the anticlimactic resolution noticeably dragged on the season’s momentum.

Luckily, the season was mostly about the search for Earth, Gaius Baltar’s unenviable position as a despised traitor to both the Colonials and the Cylons, a dash of political commentary (particularly in the first four episodes, apparently the Cylons are America), and the semi-mystical quest to uncover the identities of the final five humanoid Cylons.

Ah yes, that surreal season cliffhanger. With “All Along the Watchtower” humming ominously in the background, Anders, Tori, Tyrol, and Tigh are revealed as four of the final five Cylons. Ron Moore has confirmed that it’s not a trick; they really are Cylons, albeit of a “fundamentally different” type than the seven we’ve seen up to this point.

At first I was angry. It feels cheap, doesn’t it? To simply put pen to paper and scribble out, “EVERYONE U LUV IS A CYLON K THX BYE!!!1″ Set aside your initial shock, however, and things get really interesting. Tori materialized out of nowhere in the middle of season two to replace Billy as Roslin’s personal aide, and if anyone was going to be revealed as a Cylon at some point, it was her. Anders and Tyrol are pretty shocking, but Anders somehow had the skill and tenacity to run a resistance movement on Caprica against overwhelming odds, and Tyrol did have that recurring nightmare about killing himself because he felt he was a Cylon. The real shocker is Tigh, who fought in both Cylon wars. Remember, during the first Cylon War, the Cylons still looked entirely robotic. They then disappeared for forty years and came back with the power to appear human.

This suggests that the race we currently know as “the Cylons” is comprised of more than just the rebellious robotic servants that the Colonials created all those decades ago. The Cylons must be receiving some kind of ultra-secretive assistance from another group, and because Tigh is a Cylon, it’s clear that they’ve been receiving that assistance since the moment they decided to rebel. In this view, the creation of humanoid or “skinjob” Cylons is not just a tactical evolution, but a concerted effort to bring the robots closer to the clearly humanoid forces that have been helping them.

So, from where comes this god-like outside assistance? It’s science fiction, so anything’s possible. It could be some strange envoy from Earth, but this makes little sense, as both the Colonials and the Cylons are trying desperately to find the mythical planet. Unless, of course, the intelligences of Earth are pitting human against Cylon in a contest to see who deserves to land on the planet. Now we’ve entered the realm of wild and unfounded speculation. You might as well hypothesize time travel, an actual, sentient God, or an as yet unseen alien civilization pulling the strings. Whatever it turns out to be, I have faith that it won’t come off feeling like a complete deus ex machina (it’s also sure to involve Starbuck). The four newly revealed Cylons obviously have a profound dislike for this grand mental revelation. What implications does this have for their free wills? Boomer was suicidal over her intuitive fears of being a Cylon, but ultimately there was subconscious programming pulling her strings, making her plant bombs and shoot Adama. The new four are, as Moore said, “fundamentally different.” If you’ve lived a complete human life full of complete human memories and, moreover, you don’t like yourself when you find out what you really are, can you even call yourself a Cylon?