Star Wars & Sc-Fi Talk

That's a nice interpretation but you're forgetting that was mostly told in the second half of the series run. Sounds like a good story but I'm coming from the perspective of how it wasn't a well executed show which why viewers were turned off and the show ratings sunk as a result. If you remember the pilot mini-series, humans didn't know there were human-looking Cylons so how do they explain this historic rift between human-looking cylons and humans? They don't have history books? In the beginning of the series these human Cylons were seen as the next level of Cylon advancement and a threat because they could infiltrate as they did when Boomer tried to assassinate Adama. That's the contradiction to that angle which tells me the producers didn't have anything planned out and at that time the angle you brought up wasn't even thought up yet. This show isn't like a detective drama where it's espisodic. There's an end goal for the entire series which was to find Earth. And they never really attempted it until the last season. There was no real journey and it happened instantaneously like Earth was in their backyard. I'm only touching the tip of the iceberg. For one why was Starbuck killed and then brought back and then she finds her body in the wreckage of her Viper on the Cylon homeworld? Was she Jesus Christ? To me it was a gimmick to just spur watercooler talk the next day... her being killed-off, then being brough back to life, then discover her own body in the wreckage. That was three weeks worth of watercooler talk until the next episode. What purpose did it serve other than to shock and stir. That's why I brought up before "suspension of disbelief" and BSG failed to do that. When you have a story where the bad guy dies in an extraodinary manner like a piano falls on top of them, you have to establish in that world that a piano existed beforehand and in this case movers would have to be moving furniture to an upper story in a highrise where you see a piano waiting to be moved. If you don't then a piano all of the sudden dropping on the bad guy's head to save the protagonist would be absurd. When you're creating another universe, the more you have to setup the parameters of how the universe works beforehand. In the case of BSG, they showed us the piano, but in the end the piano just dropped and crashed nowhere near the bad guy and served no purpose.

Not forgetting anything. When Boomer tried to assassinate Adams she shot him point blank three times, and still failed to kill him. Chief Tyrol figured something wasn't right. The humanoid Cylons were created for peace between Cylon and human, but Cavill changed their programming to suit his vengeance plans. He tried to make them into his warriors, but they weren't created for that purpose and reverted to type sooner or later. Those skin jobs who didn't mix with Humans maintained their antipathy, but those that lived amongst them couldn't keep hating, and began to question their programming. I already explained the rift between skin jobs and humans, it goes back 3600 years to Kobol. The humans of the twelve tribes at the time of the series had long since forgotten about their own history beyond legends, hence they didn't realise the thirteenth tribe were actually the original Cylons. In the show there were actually three sides at work, Humans, Cylons and the 'Higher Power' represented by the 'Numer six' only Baltar could see and the 'Baltar' only Caprica Six could see, guides to nudge Humans and Cylons in the right direction. Starbuck had to deal with her own life and free herself of the past before she could be reborn, she was guided to that conclusion by another 'angel' in the form of Leoben, who admitted he wasn't who he appeared to be. When she returned to the fleet her purpose was to 'guide humanity to it's end' or rather to the end of it;s current phase of existence before moving on to the next phase (present day us). She returned as an 'Angel', though she was unaware of her true nature until the end. Witness her disappearing act. She knew her work was done and her time was over. Finding her own body on 'Original Earth' was a way of letting her know she had been reborn. The homing beacon from her Viper had been used to lead the fleet to Earth, and it could only be detected by the Dradis unit in her 'new' Viper. She was then given clues on how to find the 'New Earth' but she wasn't in a position to lead the fleet there until after Humans and Cylons had united in a nobler cause, rescuing Hera from Cavill and the rest of the Cylons.

The Ratings for BSG were consistently good this side of the pond BTW.

I wasn't talking about Boomer's motivations or what Cavil was plotting. The whole point of that scene was to establish to the colonists there were human looking Cylons that represented a new threat. If there was this human Cylon and human rift in history, why did the colonialists act like they never knew human-looking Cylons existed? They certainly got all paranoid discovering it. It doesn't matter what the story they spin in the end. None of it played out until the second half. That says they didn't think this out from the beginning. And that's why it lost viewers from the start of the second season because the show was meandering around with personal stories because they didn't know how it was going to end and just hoped viewers kept on watching. I'm sure they went back to cover as many holes as they can but they can't cover them all. There was no hint of the human Cylon and human rift in the start of the show meaning back then that plot point didn't exist. Also I 'm sure they faced budget concerns too to which why telling personal drama keeps the budget down.

That's also why I brought up the meandering throughout the seasons is a sign they didn't know how it was going to play out to the end.

Obi Wan I concur that “ Humanity failed to respect what it had created” and often derogatorily refer to Cylons as "toasters," due to the resemblance of the Cylon centurions from the first Human/Cylon war . The humanoid models are referred to as "skin-jobs" to differentiate the two variants. Gaius Balter referred to the number 6 as “a Toaster with great legs”.
The difference between the original BSG Cylons genocidal mission and the second BSG series is religion. They (the Cylons) consider humans to be a sinful and flawed creations who therefore do not deserve to survive (Adama alludes to this in the first season during a funeral, "as to if the human race is worth saving").

The term Cylon stands for Cybernetic Life form Node.

Still doesn't answer the question how come the colonists didn't know about the human Cylon/human rift that occured in history. Why didn't they show up in the first Cylon War? It's because the timeline they were going by then is human Cylons didn't exist and when they showed up in the 2nd CylonWar where the series starts, they were new advanced Cylon models not from long ago.

I think that compared to other Television series BSG was better than most. With that said the main impediment to most good programing are the management, studio executives and accountants that are more concerned about rating, costs, political correctness, etc…..So sometimes the writers have to make corrections as they go.

Nothing in this life is perfect (this does not mean we cannot strive for it), we have to take the good things and leave the bad and enjoy the series for what it was, good Sci-Fi, drama, special effects, etc…

I to have a bad habit (I personally don’t think it is) of looking for continuity in films and series, and it drives me nuts, and annoys my friends. I’ve learned to just enjoy the story and turn my brain off for a few hours.

I can tell right off their priority was to make money riding off the name of the original Battlestar Galactica to get viewers watching. The human Cylons were advanced newer models because that's what they have to do to update the series. Plus it was cheaper than making costumes or using CGI for Cylons. If they had thought up that story from the beginning, the series would've been excuted better. But they didn't because like I said you didn't hear any hint about what went down until the second half and the Colonialists were obviously clueless about it needing Starbuck and the other few with their supernatural connection to know anything about it which was the easy way to explain it. If you guys like the story, that's fine but I will call that challenge as it being one of the best sci-fi series ever.

AssassinsMace said:

Still doesn't answer the question how come the colonists didn't know about the human Cylon/human rift that occured in history. Why didn't they show up in the first Cylon War? It's because the timeline they were going by then is human Cylons didn't exist and when they showed up in the 2nd CylonWar where the series starts, they were new advanced Cylon models not from long ago.

Click to expand...

Already explained. Human history had included major upheavals, eg the exodus from Kobol which took place 1600 years after the departure of the thirteenth tribe for Original Earth. Records and history books were lost in the upheaval, leaving mainly oral history and legend. The following two thousand years humanity was more concerned with establishing the new colonies and rebuilding their society, less concerned with the finer details of history. As the split with the Cylons (who probably went by another name back then anyway, indeed calling them the '13th tribe of Humanity' may have been a derogatory term back then) was hardly a shining moment in human history, the passage of time will probably have helped the twelve tribes to quietly forget the details. We do the same today, I grew up in the 70s and TV had wall to wall war movies and tv shows, so most of my contemporaries know a great deal of history about WW2. Kids today in general haven't the faintest idea who Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, or Tojo were. How soon we forget. That's just after 70 years, the Colonials had 3600 to forget their less than glorious past.

Uh, there's a problem with that. Have you watched Caprica? Adama, I think it was his grandfather, played by Esai Morales, had role in the origin of the Cylons. So all this happened within two generations. Besides if you're technically advanced to create Cylon robots, I think you'll have the technology to keep records.

I forgot all about Caprica. They intentionally screwed with their own narrative from BSG to Caprica. Why? They wanted to create some connection with Adama that people can relate to from BSG so those fans go watch Caprica. That pretty much says the producers don't care about their inconsistencies.

Like BSG, I have the dvd box sets of Caprica. 'Joseph Adama' did indeed have an inadvertent hand in the creation of the Cylons, or should I say recreation? Cylons were an inevitable product of the progress of human technology and had been created before, 3600 years ago on Kobol, then 2000 years ago on Earth (Centurions created by the Thirteenth tribe and treated with the same disrespect they had been by their Human forefathers). Then finally the cycle started again with the Graystones. The technology is inevitable as part of Human progress, but the reaction to it is what counts. The Adamas would have been keen to put their involvement with the early Cylon development behind them, Joseph lost his wife, daughter and son William (1st) over thematter, and his broother was a hit man for the mob anyway so wouldn't have talked about it to his family (William 'Bill' Adama 2nd). The events of Caprica took place 58 years before 'the Fall' of the colonies, and were primarily concerned with the creation of the Centurion type Cylons, the 'Skin Jobs' came later when the Final Five arrived from Earth during the first Cylon War. They persuaded the Centurions to end the war in return for creating a new race of Skin Jobs, allowing the Cylon race to evolve. Humanity didn't know about this until forty years later. As I said previously, the colonials had no memory or records of the creation of Cylons on Kobol 3600 years previously and had had no contact with Earth at all so knew nothing of events there.

If you watch the final episode of Caprica, there is a three minute 'Next Season on Caprica' trailer (made by that time in the knowledge that the show had been cancelled) (also available on youtube) (please excuse all these brackets) which fills in a lot of the gaps and ties up a lot of loose ends, while still leaving much hanging. It does hint that the Graystones also made a prototype skin job body to house the conciousness of their daughter Zoey, but it has to be assumed she was a one off and her existence/nature remained unknown to the Colonial authorities. The Centurions tried to make their own Humanoids during the 1st Cylon War (see 'Razor' flashbacks) but only managed to produce the 'Hybrids' which were an evolutionary dead end but useful as the central control units of their Base Stars.