Well, I finally got back into Bstar this weekend. After our holiday, I was looking for some entertainment and came up with 15 episodes of unwatched scifi. So I started watching them. In all honesty, I started in the second week of February, but carried on last night.
It is quite addictive and Tricia Helfer is quite the sublime machine and woman in this series. By far, her character is the most notable. There is an interesting duality between the 6 in Baltar’s mind and the flesh and blood 6 that he interacts with daily.
Last season ended with the fleet settling down on New Caprica. As the fleet made a home and lived their lives for a few years, the Cylons arrived and took over, after they had stopped chasing the fleet, they restarted their efforts.
They took hold of the colony not before part of the fleet and the two battlestars could escape. The colony of New Caprica was left under the heel of the Cylons. Baltar surrendered and the occupation began.
For some obscure reason, the Cylons believe that they need humanity in order to get closer to God. Meanwhile the detentions and tortures, an insurgency begins, waging bloody war onto the occupiers. Kernel Ty is released after loosing his eye and part of his humanity, and then the war steps into another arena. Captain Thrace is being detained by a Cylon model who thinks he is in love with her. She keeps killing him and he keeps coming back from the ressurection ships. He tries to manipulate her by telling her that a child is hers that he had created from her fertilized egg. He tells her that the child has been living with a human for the last two years.
Major Lee Adama has let himself go and put on at least 50 pounds. It is amazing to see that the actor put on so much weight. I am unsure if it was prosthetics or simply a weight gain for the part, but it looked quite authentic. It was even more surprising when he shed most of the weight in the 7th episode.
Baltar is running the colony and doing the Cylons’ bidding. He authorizes over 200 executions. Felix Gaeta is the inside source, feeding information to the resistance. Kernel Ty starts to employ suicide bombers. His wife Helen betrays him and he has to kill her for it, as she collaborated and slept with Cylons.
Hera, Sharon’s child is still alive and well. Laura Roslin is released from detention and continues the fight. Things really start to get heavy when Galactica is able to make contact with the resistance. They orchestrate the rescue of most of the civilians and population on New Caprica.
The Sharon that is living with the fleet on Galactica is promoted lieutenant and makes one of the first drops into New Caprica to prepare them for the imminent assault by Galactica. When Callie, who has a son by the Chief and is married to him now, is going to be executed, a rescue attempt is mounted. Jammer who is now in charge of the turncoat police, saves her but that isn’t enough to clear him of all the deaths as he is spaced for his crimes against humanity later on Galactica by The Circle, the secret organization that judges collaborators that had been set-up by the President.
Admiral Adama orders Lee to escape with the fleet and to wait for Galactica. Lee obeys and continues his training to loose weight.
When Galactica drops into the atmosphere of New Caprica and the insurgency detroys a lot of important targets in a coordinated attack, the raptors attack. Right before Galactica is about to hit the ground, the ship uses its FTL drive to jump out of there and into orbit.
The Cylons deploy four baseships to destroy Galactica and Adama sees that this will be then end. But in the last moment, Pegasus appears and destroys a baseship. Pegasus takes the blunt of the attack and her captain knew it would be a one way trip. He orders his crew to abandon ship while taking Pegasus to ramming speed and taking out two more baseships.
On the ground, most of the colonists are rescued, but Hera is lost to the humans as she is found by Baltar. Gatea wanted to kill Baltar, but was stopped as he promised to try and deactivate the nuke that the Cylons were going to set off.
In the seventh episode, Baltar is on a baseship and we see more of the workings behind the Cylons. There is something called a hybrid that runs each baseship. The Cylons have twelve total models, but we see only 7. 6 tells Baltar that they never speak of the other 5. The other 6 implanted into Baltar’s mind helps him to understand projection and how the Cylons use it to alter their perceptual reality. Basically, they map other visuals and worlds onto their perceptions. Baltar thinks that he is a Cylon for a moment, since he can project into his mind and interact with the non-corporeal 6. He uses this to escape torture as the Cylons want answers for the destruction of one of their baseships.
Since Baltar is on the baseship, his life is in constant danger. He helps the Cylons to discover the route to Earth. The Cylons send in a baseship, only to be infected by a infectious agent harmful to machines. Galactica, who is on the same route, finds the abandoned basehip and tries to use it to destroy the Cylons. The virus infects the Cylons brains’ and if they die near a ressurection ship, they will infect the rest of the Cylons.
But Sharon’s husband, out of love for a Cylon, kills the infected Cylons before the plan can succeed.
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This season is quite addictive, as the previous seasons where. The show has become more polished and has allowed time to pass to allow an evolution in the characters and their relationships. Most of the main characters are now married.
I find the whole show very interesting because it has never been releaved why the Cylons chase the humans exactly and how they evolved. Their internal mechanics are also a mystery, but we see now that their immortality is real, even though supposedly each death gets more painful.
The way that the Cylons are organized, using partly biological units called hybrids to run their ships and using ressurection ships to birth killed Cylons once more is fascinating. I want to know more of this and how exactly the Cylons rebelled.
The humans had their chance to wipe out the Cylons completely and totally failed, even though they tried.
Because they did not want to become as monstrous as the Cylons?
Why are the Cylons so intent on killing the humans?
And now, the Cylons want to find Earth as well to live on it.
Hopefully, part of these questions will be answered before the end of the season. A show can only remain mysterious for so long before it becomes tiring.
In contrast to the largely unexplained reason for the original Cylons’ genocidal mission, religion is the primary motivation of the Cylon race in the re-imagined series. They consider humanity to be sinful and a flawed creation of God, and therefore do not “deserve” to survive. The Cylons’ monotheistic faith and their descriptions of “God” indicate a strong similarity to the Abrahamic religions. ¹
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The show has been renewed for at least 13 more episodes for a 4th season to begin airing in January 2008. A spin off show, called Caprica, has been also announced last year. The new show will take place 50 years before the Cylon war and will tell us how and why the Cylons rebelled.
For more information about the new Battlestar Galactica, please visit the following links:
memoirs on a rainy day 
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