To know the face of God is to know madness.

[daygloparker]

Here I am, in my living room, attempting to decipher Jane Eyre's anxiety dreams and the incident with the veil, and what do I find on television as my background noise? Laura Roslin's dream/vision in "Flesh and Bone."

Comments

[raincitygirl]

I think they're so petrified of her they don't want to go near her. Adama sends Helo to ask Sharon about the logic bomb. He doesn't send one of the guys who figured it out, Gaeta or Baltar, and he doesn't go himself, in spite of the imminent threat it poses to his ship. He sends a guy who isn't a computer expert, and whose loyalty is in significant question (note that Adama ordered Tyrol to guard everyone when he went into the Tomb of Athena: the Cylon, the terrorist whose buddy just tried to assassinate Adama, and Helo). If Helo were collaborating with the Cylons, sending him to question Sharon about the Cylon virus would be a fairly stupid move.

I figure Adama's operating on the principle that any contact with Sharon whatsoever is dangerous, except for Helo who's already been thoroughly "contaminated". Previous Cylon prisoners yielded no useful information when interrogated, and managed to seriously mess with their interrogators' heads before they died. So he's not letting anyone go near her, and since everybody on the ship is terrified of her, they're not exactly lining up to argue the point with him.

Of course, Sharon is different from the previous prisoners because she's an alleged defector. Which means that if she's sincere, she's an information goldmine, and if she's insincere, she'll have to give them some good intel prior to screwing them over. Either way, it's probably a good idea to ask her a bunch of questions, or even hand her a pencil and a pad of paper and tell her to sketch the biocylons the Fleet hasn't yet encountered. But I don't think anybody is ready to contemplate the idea that Sharon's defection might be legit, because of the consequences for their worldview of the Cylons as a monolithic destructive force with no emotions, no ability to deviate from their programming, no humanity. Which of course is a flawed premise because if the Cylons were unable to deviate from their programming, they never would've rebelled in the first place. After all, one assumes the original toasters weren't programmed by the humans to see themselves as slaves, seek to kill their masters, launch a major R&D program to make themselves organic, and worship God. Incidentally, given that the metal Cylons we see now are mere footsolders, but they managed to fight the Colonies to a stalemate back in the day, my theory is that at some point after the Armistice, the most intelligent of the Cylons transferred their consciousnesses into the new, more organic models).

We the viewers are able to see matters more clearly, and see that Sharon might well be a genuine defector, but we aren't genocide survivors who've been running for our lives for months, and are faced with a technologically superior enemy which we have always seen as soulless machines rather than sentient lifeforms of synthetic origin who may well have free will.

Personally, I think the Cylons are sentient, they definitely have emotions, and those without Manchurian Candidate-style hidden programming appear to have a significant measure of free will, even if they don't have entirely individuated consciousnesses in the human style. By and large they seem to be highly unpleasant and murderous beings, but capable of human-style emotion and moral judgments. After all, Sharon had only been with Helo for a few weeks when she turned on her own people. And Six, though her motivations are significantly more ambiguous than Sharon's, does not seem to be marching in lockstep with her fellow Cylons, but is motivated primarily by her quest to make Baltar love her.

Adama fears the Cylons will contaminate the humans, but ironically, it seems more as though exposure to humans has contaminated the Cylons.

[mylittleredgirl]

But see, I'm not talking about trusting her. If anyone (besides Helo) trusted her at this point, I would SCREAM at them. I mean, I LOVE Boomer, but, as you said, I'm not in their situation.

I was more just surprised that they didn't want to beat the hell out of her (or threaten to -- not actually have to if she just talks openly) and hit her up for information, or at least run experiments on her. They were going to do that with the old Sharon, who I miss a lot *sobs*. I just... eh. I don't think that Fear Of Her -- or even the desire to keep her a secret from the rest of the fleet -- is a good enough excuse to really make this make sense. They don't HAVE to accept that she is who or what she says she is in order to go forward here. Roslin was ready to shove her out an airlock before she proved useful.. so... exploit the usefulness, omg! I'm most surprised that Roslin didn't insist on having her debriefed and/or interrogated... but I suppose Roslin has, er, other things on her mind at the moment.

You're also right about how TOTALLY WEIRD it was that they sent Helo to talk to her. It's remarkable they weren't more paranoid about accepting him back into their midst. I mean -- do they even know that humans can't be replicated into cylon models indistinguishable from regular humans?

Argh! This is why I never want to THINK about this show! Layers upon layers, people. *hides*