Motherfrakker!
Big motherfrakking SciFi Friday post.
[Yeah. Am SO going to abuse that one for a long time.]
Atlantis:
Season One: A non-corporeal ascended being is stuck in the city.
Season Two: A non-corporal computer virus is stuck in the Daedalus.
Oh, Rodney. Your penis will not end up in a wall, don't worry. And if it did, I assure you, covering it with your hands wouldn't have done any good.
"...is he supposed to be naked like that?" !!! *COLLAPSE*
But, yeah. Anyway. COFFEE SCENE! NAPKINHOLDER OF LOVE tm taylorkate!! So it's been a month, between their time on Earth and the 18 days they've been on the Daedalus? *waits for the porn*
Seriously. Pardon me for having absolutely no faith in TPTB when it comes to writing even vaguely romantic backstory for characters, but when this is the second episode in a row where Weir, for all intents and not shippy purposes, is flirting with Sheppard, and then we see in her flashbacks from Earth that she broke up with her boyfriend, WHAT are we supposed to think aside from... you know? I don't think I can chalk this up to me shipping them during the Lowdown and thus being VERY VERY CRAZY anymore. Because... just... AHDJALAFNHAFHFMJDA *incoherent*.
SPEAKING of Simon. omg, how awkward would THAT have been if he had signed up? "Um, hi. This is... my boyfriend. He won't be needing quarters of his own." I can't believe that would have been okayed by the higher-ups? and JESUS GOD HOW MANY TIMES WAS SIMON HIT WITH THE UGLY STICK??! Christ. If you were trying to go for the rustic Aiden look, you failed. Horribly. He doens't look like Narim, yes, but he also now resembles a homeless bum who hallucinates that he's a doctor being asked to go to another galaxy to be with his girlfriend.
Teyla was in charge of Atlantis for something like two monthes? Um. Er. All right.
And until anyone tells me otherwise, I am going to assume that the subtext under the "I know the chain of command can get sort of fuzzy in Atlantis" and its proceeding flashback was that everything thinks Weir's sleeping with Sheppard. 'Cause, just, you know, I am that very crazy person who shipped them during the freaking Lowdown.
(Everytime I start to think about how basically the entire premise of the show is ruined by being able to get back to Earth, I distract myself with OMG COFFEE SCENE. This show is my brain-slightly-off show, okay?)
BSG:
Damn. Longest day of their lives, yo. Or at least, the longest day since that other time, when the world blew up. Just so we're clear, in one day (roughly), people get stranded on Kobol, Kara steals the Raider that's supposed to save them, they blew up a base star that's preventing access to Kobol, ADAMA GETS SHOT, ANOTHER BASE STAR SHOWS UP, THEY BRIEFLY LOSE PART OF THE FLEET BECAUSE THEY JUMP TO THE WRONG SPOT, and then they network the computers and get a virus and get themselves boarded. YIKES. I will never, ever complain about data entry ever again.
"Let's go toaster shopping" was awesome, though.
I'm scared to get a body count next week. Or see how far that number in the opening credits drops. There were lots of dead bodies being stepped over.
KARA'S APARTMENT! Holy. Crap. My image of her has shifted a bit, but that's not a bad thing. It's... come into focus. The best part, though, was she and Helo flexing their respective leg wounds and wincing in pain. And also the part where she sits on the Arrow and smokes a cigar. And basically everything about those scenes. "Everyone I know is fighting to get back what they had. I'm fighting because I don't how to do anything else." GOD DAMN, WHY DOES THIS SHOW BREAK MY HEART EVERY WEEK?
But I had the majority of this post already laid out prior to this episode, as I had mucho amounts of thinking time available at work to do so.
Basically, I think the Cylons lack the art of symbolism and metaphor. But really, they're machines, is that entirely their fault? And anyway, they've got themselves a religion, so that can't be right. Right?
I'm thinking of the two interpretation of the Kobol prophecy in "Hand of God." For Roslin, serpents numbered two and twenty came as a hallucination. It meant nothing, really, except that it turned out to also be religious imagery-- and that the snakes she saw crawling all over her podium weren't real. But for Six, those serpents have to be real, because reality is religion and religion is reality. For Six, serpents numbered two and twenty are the Vipers from Galactica. They move. They act and they can physically play their part in the prophecy. Six can recite scripture, but she interprets it literally.
And there's no art to the child she shows Baltar on Kobol, either. Because she is a Cylon and a machine and a computer, the baby girl can't be a representative of humanity's new children. She cannot be nameless, faceless, and a symbol of what Cylons are attempting to achive; no, she has to be an actual person, with a mother and a father, even if (as Baltar points out) Six only exists in Baltar's mind and that makes NO SENSE. Again, it's the literal answer, the way you put something into a translator and it comes out with the literal translation.
The Cylons are holed up in the museum at Delphi at the end of Season One because they are protecting the Arrow, as they believe it's the one in the prophecy and the one the humans are going to want. That alone makes me highly suspect that that Arrow is actually the one the prophecy's refering to. Prophecies are art, religion is art, and art is metaphor and symbolism. All these things, the serpents, the Arrow of Apollo, the Temple of Athena, even Kobol itself, I think it's all one BIG GIANT METAPHOR. We have a character whose callsign is "Apollo"-- surely, the fact that he shares a name with some that was prophecized can't be a coincidence? Everyone keeps saying "all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again," and maybe you have to look at the WHOLE PICTURE. Everyone.
I'm also not buying anything Six tells Baltar on Kobol. That humans will try to kill their baby, that the humans on Kobol practiced ritual sacrifice to their gods and possibly murdered their gods, too. Everything she says, it's all to convince Baltar of his part in the supposed destiny of the world. Which, by the way, is the CYLON interpretation of said destiny and probably far too literal to be Right.
Fun aside on Greek mythology: Uranus once ruled the universe, as he was a god and gods are wont to do those things. But he was afraid of the other things roaming around (Titans, Cyclops, and the like), so he Oppressed them. His son, Chronus, a Titan, finally stood up to his father, on behalf of the Oppressed People, by CASTRATING HIS FATHER and throwing his genitals into the ocean. No, really. Thus, he became ruler of the universe... but eventually descended into his own paranoia, Oppressed people, until he was killed by son Zeus blah blah blah-- THE POINT IS, from Uranus' genitals in the ocean and the ensuing foam (knock. it. off.) came APHRODITE. Venus on a clam shell, you know? Aphrodite. Whom fandom suspects is embodied in Six. A Cylon. Yes.
(For what it's worth, here's another spin on the whole "dying leader" part of that Kobol prophecy: didn't someone once say that we're all dying from the second we're born? If so, that prophecy could be talking about anyone. Granted, if I had to choose between Random Otherwise Healthy Guy and the Woman With Terminal Breast Cancer, I'd go with the later, but still...)
See, if you must know, this all started when I tried to theorize that Gaeta Is A Toaster. And there are probably so many holes in this, but I'll give to you now anyway, since taylorkate had to sit through the Thai Toasters today and whatnot. Feel free to poke at said holes and/or tell me I really am that very crazy person I mentioned earlier.
So. Gaeta is a Cylon. He probably doesn't know it yet, as he's one of those sleeper agents with their inner Cylon occasionally bleeding through.
Fact: It's Gaeta who tells Kelly what has transpired when Boomer shoots Adama; namely, that Boomer's a Cylon. Why does he jump to that conclusion? Granted, yes, Boomer was a well-respected Raptor pilot and it was the heat of the moment, but on its face, there's nothing about the events that transpire that indicate that Boomer is anyone other than a very disgruntled Raptor pilot. Yet he goes right ahead and goes "Boomer shot the Old Man, she's a Cylon!" Is this like post-9/11 paranoia, is everyone who commits a crime automatically a terrorist a Cylon? Is this simply bad writing?
When Six was telling Baltar in KLG that "you don't want to be here when It happens," she's not referring to Adama simply being shot, because that's thinking too small and inconsequential to Baltar. She's referring to the fact that Galactica is boarded by toasters, a boarding that is explicitly aided by the fact that they finally removed their only defense and networked their computers and thus got a virus. And whose idea was the network? Gaeta's. Of course. The same person who was magically able to deduce that Boomer was a Cylon also conceived and "failed" to execute the one plan that helped to Cylons. (I say "failed," because if he IS a toaster, then he didn't exactly fail, did he?)
Gaeta. Cylon.
Aside from Adama and the version of Six attempting to reveal Baltar's treason against the race, Gaeta is the only other personnel intimately involved in "Six Degrees of Seperation." That's the same attempt that puts Baltar's reputation on the up and up, which gets him selected for the Quorum in "Colonial Day" and then elected Vice President, which then gives him the power to accompany the Raptor team that surveys the Kobol.
Leoben tells Kara in "Flesh and Blone" that they're going to find Kobol. They do. If the Cylons truly are simple machines and not blessed with the divine art of prophecy, which I don't believe they are, then he has to know they're going to find Kobol because THE CYLONS ARE GOING TO SHOW THEM. And, gee, who "accidentally" plots Boomer's Raptor to find Kobol? Gaeta.
Already Gaeta has set in motion two events that have led to the toasters raiding Galactica. Once at Kobol, the Cylons give them a base star to deal with. They know Galactica has a Raider, but Leoben also knew that Kara would believe the prophecy and the things about Earth. His analysis of the situation was probably downloaded into another body, and they deduce that Kara will believe she has to retrieve this arrow, so they post a Six in Delphi to wait for her. They know that Boomer will be the next likely candidate for a suicide mission, having attempted suicide herself, and on the base star, she really DOES tell the Cylons Galactica's location, however indirectly and against her will. All those Boomers were communicating telepathically, it seemed, so why couldn't they read her thoughts, too?
Boomer fulfills her destiny. She shoots Adama. And with him out of the picture, so too goes the only other obstacle between Galactica and the Cylons: dismantling her computer systems to allow boarding to be more easy. After assessing the situation, Gaeta breaches that very idea-- let's network the computers! Yeah!
And they do.
And the Cylons board.
And lots of people die.
Gaeta is a toaster. Fandom has ruined me.
Oh... God. I've been writing this post for so long that BSG is on again. *head desk*
[Yeah. Am SO going to abuse that one for a long time.]
Atlantis:
Season One: A non-corporeal ascended being is stuck in the city.
Season Two: A non-corporal computer virus is stuck in the Daedalus.
Oh, Rodney. Your penis will not end up in a wall, don't worry. And if it did, I assure you, covering it with your hands wouldn't have done any good.
"...is he supposed to be naked like that?" !!! *COLLAPSE*
But, yeah. Anyway. COFFEE SCENE! NAPKINHOLDER OF LOVE tm taylorkate!! So it's been a month, between their time on Earth and the 18 days they've been on the Daedalus? *waits for the porn*
Seriously. Pardon me for having absolutely no faith in TPTB when it comes to writing even vaguely romantic backstory for characters, but when this is the second episode in a row where Weir, for all intents and not shippy purposes, is flirting with Sheppard, and then we see in her flashbacks from Earth that she broke up with her boyfriend, WHAT are we supposed to think aside from... you know? I don't think I can chalk this up to me shipping them during the Lowdown and thus being VERY VERY CRAZY anymore. Because... just... AHDJALAFNHAFHFMJDA *incoherent*.
SPEAKING of Simon. omg, how awkward would THAT have been if he had signed up? "Um, hi. This is... my boyfriend. He won't be needing quarters of his own." I can't believe that would have been okayed by the higher-ups? and JESUS GOD HOW MANY TIMES WAS SIMON HIT WITH THE UGLY STICK??! Christ. If you were trying to go for the rustic Aiden look, you failed. Horribly. He doens't look like Narim, yes, but he also now resembles a homeless bum who hallucinates that he's a doctor being asked to go to another galaxy to be with his girlfriend.
Teyla was in charge of Atlantis for something like two monthes? Um. Er. All right.
And until anyone tells me otherwise, I am going to assume that the subtext under the "I know the chain of command can get sort of fuzzy in Atlantis" and its proceeding flashback was that everything thinks Weir's sleeping with Sheppard. 'Cause, just, you know, I am that very crazy person who shipped them during the freaking Lowdown.
(Everytime I start to think about how basically the entire premise of the show is ruined by being able to get back to Earth, I distract myself with OMG COFFEE SCENE. This show is my brain-slightly-off show, okay?)
BSG:
Damn. Longest day of their lives, yo. Or at least, the longest day since that other time, when the world blew up. Just so we're clear, in one day (roughly), people get stranded on Kobol, Kara steals the Raider that's supposed to save them, they blew up a base star that's preventing access to Kobol, ADAMA GETS SHOT, ANOTHER BASE STAR SHOWS UP, THEY BRIEFLY LOSE PART OF THE FLEET BECAUSE THEY JUMP TO THE WRONG SPOT, and then they network the computers and get a virus and get themselves boarded. YIKES. I will never, ever complain about data entry ever again.
"Let's go toaster shopping" was awesome, though.
I'm scared to get a body count next week. Or see how far that number in the opening credits drops. There were lots of dead bodies being stepped over.
KARA'S APARTMENT! Holy. Crap. My image of her has shifted a bit, but that's not a bad thing. It's... come into focus. The best part, though, was she and Helo flexing their respective leg wounds and wincing in pain. And also the part where she sits on the Arrow and smokes a cigar. And basically everything about those scenes. "Everyone I know is fighting to get back what they had. I'm fighting because I don't how to do anything else." GOD DAMN, WHY DOES THIS SHOW BREAK MY HEART EVERY WEEK?
But I had the majority of this post already laid out prior to this episode, as I had mucho amounts of thinking time available at work to do so.
Basically, I think the Cylons lack the art of symbolism and metaphor. But really, they're machines, is that entirely their fault? And anyway, they've got themselves a religion, so that can't be right. Right?
I'm thinking of the two interpretation of the Kobol prophecy in "Hand of God." For Roslin, serpents numbered two and twenty came as a hallucination. It meant nothing, really, except that it turned out to also be religious imagery-- and that the snakes she saw crawling all over her podium weren't real. But for Six, those serpents have to be real, because reality is religion and religion is reality. For Six, serpents numbered two and twenty are the Vipers from Galactica. They move. They act and they can physically play their part in the prophecy. Six can recite scripture, but she interprets it literally.
And there's no art to the child she shows Baltar on Kobol, either. Because she is a Cylon and a machine and a computer, the baby girl can't be a representative of humanity's new children. She cannot be nameless, faceless, and a symbol of what Cylons are attempting to achive; no, she has to be an actual person, with a mother and a father, even if (as Baltar points out) Six only exists in Baltar's mind and that makes NO SENSE. Again, it's the literal answer, the way you put something into a translator and it comes out with the literal translation.
The Cylons are holed up in the museum at Delphi at the end of Season One because they are protecting the Arrow, as they believe it's the one in the prophecy and the one the humans are going to want. That alone makes me highly suspect that that Arrow is actually the one the prophecy's refering to. Prophecies are art, religion is art, and art is metaphor and symbolism. All these things, the serpents, the Arrow of Apollo, the Temple of Athena, even Kobol itself, I think it's all one BIG GIANT METAPHOR. We have a character whose callsign is "Apollo"-- surely, the fact that he shares a name with some that was prophecized can't be a coincidence? Everyone keeps saying "all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again," and maybe you have to look at the WHOLE PICTURE. Everyone.
I'm also not buying anything Six tells Baltar on Kobol. That humans will try to kill their baby, that the humans on Kobol practiced ritual sacrifice to their gods and possibly murdered their gods, too. Everything she says, it's all to convince Baltar of his part in the supposed destiny of the world. Which, by the way, is the CYLON interpretation of said destiny and probably far too literal to be Right.
Fun aside on Greek mythology: Uranus once ruled the universe, as he was a god and gods are wont to do those things. But he was afraid of the other things roaming around (Titans, Cyclops, and the like), so he Oppressed them. His son, Chronus, a Titan, finally stood up to his father, on behalf of the Oppressed People, by CASTRATING HIS FATHER and throwing his genitals into the ocean. No, really. Thus, he became ruler of the universe... but eventually descended into his own paranoia, Oppressed people, until he was killed by son Zeus blah blah blah-- THE POINT IS, from Uranus' genitals in the ocean and the ensuing foam (knock. it. off.) came APHRODITE. Venus on a clam shell, you know? Aphrodite. Whom fandom suspects is embodied in Six. A Cylon. Yes.
(For what it's worth, here's another spin on the whole "dying leader" part of that Kobol prophecy: didn't someone once say that we're all dying from the second we're born? If so, that prophecy could be talking about anyone. Granted, if I had to choose between Random Otherwise Healthy Guy and the Woman With Terminal Breast Cancer, I'd go with the later, but still...)
See, if you must know, this all started when I tried to theorize that Gaeta Is A Toaster. And there are probably so many holes in this, but I'll give to you now anyway, since taylorkate had to sit through the Thai Toasters today and whatnot. Feel free to poke at said holes and/or tell me I really am that very crazy person I mentioned earlier.
So. Gaeta is a Cylon. He probably doesn't know it yet, as he's one of those sleeper agents with their inner Cylon occasionally bleeding through.
Fact: It's Gaeta who tells Kelly what has transpired when Boomer shoots Adama; namely, that Boomer's a Cylon. Why does he jump to that conclusion? Granted, yes, Boomer was a well-respected Raptor pilot and it was the heat of the moment, but on its face, there's nothing about the events that transpire that indicate that Boomer is anyone other than a very disgruntled Raptor pilot. Yet he goes right ahead and goes "Boomer shot the Old Man, she's a Cylon!" Is this like post-9/11 paranoia, is everyone who commits a crime automatically a terrorist a Cylon? Is this simply bad writing?
When Six was telling Baltar in KLG that "you don't want to be here when It happens," she's not referring to Adama simply being shot, because that's thinking too small and inconsequential to Baltar. She's referring to the fact that Galactica is boarded by toasters, a boarding that is explicitly aided by the fact that they finally removed their only defense and networked their computers and thus got a virus. And whose idea was the network? Gaeta's. Of course. The same person who was magically able to deduce that Boomer was a Cylon also conceived and "failed" to execute the one plan that helped to Cylons. (I say "failed," because if he IS a toaster, then he didn't exactly fail, did he?)
Gaeta. Cylon.
Aside from Adama and the version of Six attempting to reveal Baltar's treason against the race, Gaeta is the only other personnel intimately involved in "Six Degrees of Seperation." That's the same attempt that puts Baltar's reputation on the up and up, which gets him selected for the Quorum in "Colonial Day" and then elected Vice President, which then gives him the power to accompany the Raptor team that surveys the Kobol.
Leoben tells Kara in "Flesh and Blone" that they're going to find Kobol. They do. If the Cylons truly are simple machines and not blessed with the divine art of prophecy, which I don't believe they are, then he has to know they're going to find Kobol because THE CYLONS ARE GOING TO SHOW THEM. And, gee, who "accidentally" plots Boomer's Raptor to find Kobol? Gaeta.
Already Gaeta has set in motion two events that have led to the toasters raiding Galactica. Once at Kobol, the Cylons give them a base star to deal with. They know Galactica has a Raider, but Leoben also knew that Kara would believe the prophecy and the things about Earth. His analysis of the situation was probably downloaded into another body, and they deduce that Kara will believe she has to retrieve this arrow, so they post a Six in Delphi to wait for her. They know that Boomer will be the next likely candidate for a suicide mission, having attempted suicide herself, and on the base star, she really DOES tell the Cylons Galactica's location, however indirectly and against her will. All those Boomers were communicating telepathically, it seemed, so why couldn't they read her thoughts, too?
Boomer fulfills her destiny. She shoots Adama. And with him out of the picture, so too goes the only other obstacle between Galactica and the Cylons: dismantling her computer systems to allow boarding to be more easy. After assessing the situation, Gaeta breaches that very idea-- let's network the computers! Yeah!
And they do.
And the Cylons board.
And lots of people die.
Gaeta is a toaster. Fandom has ruined me.
Oh... God. I've been writing this post for so long that BSG is on again. *head desk*