Looking Out To Sea

We watched up to episode 8 (“Hero”) of Battlestar Galactica season 3. Then we opened the second box to find two copies of disc 4 and no disc 3 at all! Horror! I took the set back but every single replacement the shop could muster had the same fault. Doubleplusungood.

So this seems a good time to look at what’s happened already this season. Obviously, major spoiler warning. Don’t look further if you haven’t seen the first 8 episodes of season 3.

I thought Col Tigh’s part in the first few episodes was great. He got to wear a patch over one eye, have a grizzly white beard and lurch about leaning on a spade for support. I bet he loved that part. I wonder how many takes they did where it just descended into piratical farce? Argh! Would ye be a collaborator, matey? Walk the plank ye scurvy Cylon!

I’m beginning to get rather annoyed at the unspecified BDQ. I mean specifically — just how human are the humanoid Cylons? One of the first things they established was that the humanoid Cylons were almost impossible to distinguish from humans, even under a microscope. This doesn’t easily tie in with their ability to download their consciousness on point of death, or being able to directly plug their bodies into computer hardware. If the doctors on board can’t tell the difference between someone with a USB port in their arm and a radio transmitter in their spinal column on one hand and an ordinary human on the other, I seriously have to doubt their knowledge of anatomy.

And then we discover they have some strange immunity problems, which suggests the human DNA they used to construct their bodies doesn’t come from any of the human colonies they know about. They don’t have the immunity to lymphocytic choriomeningitis which all the human colonists have. The biological weaknesses of the “human” Cylons is an interesting story, which makes the best use of War of the Worlds plot that I’ve seen. Certainly far more plausible than Independence Day!

It was revealing but ultimately rather silly to see inside the Cylon ship and see their command procedures. The idea of the sentient ship is well used in science fiction (Star Trek: TNG, Farscape, all Culture novels) and it was interesting how like Minority Report they made the hybrid. But the squabbling idiots in the command room were really something else. If I were a Cylon I’d be embarrassed to show Gaius Baltar that mess. They would have fared much better if they’d just kept all that hidden and make the Cylons seem at least slightly menacing.

I find it really interesting the opinion that many of the humans seem to have regarding the humanoid Cylons. Everyone calls them “toaster ovens”, even though they are indistinguishable from “real” humans. Clearly they need to get some Turing test for humanity: if you can fool an intelligent human observer into believing you’re human, then you’re human. Heh, for all we know the Cylons are human, and totally unrelated to the Centurion mechanoids.

Maybe this whole thing is just a religious war between human factions, only one side has good AI and lots of supporting hardware to compensate for the fact that they’re all clones with no genetic diversity. (This is in fact a plot from Star Trek: TNG though I don’t know the episode. I’m not that sad!) The other side have, to paraphrase Johnny Mnemonic¹, gone really primitive to counter their enemies’ sophistication.

So where was I? The Cylons are human enough that it makes no odds to the pathogens floating around in millennia-old beacons. The colonists should be paying less attention to what the Cylons are and more on what they are trying to do. After a couple of years on the run we still don’t know why they attacked in the first place. Everyone just takes for granted that the other side “are/aren’t human” and so “can’t be trusted” and so it stands to reason that “they” would be so treacherous/deceptive. After a while it becomes tediously like real life…