Unsolicited BSG theories and speculation
Next week, the first part of BSG's three hour series finale will air. For some weeks now, I've been meaning to collect everything that I know and everything that I predict into one post and see if I can trash-compactor it all into some semblance of a theory, but I haven't gotten around to it 'til now. So here we are.
Spoilers here for every episode that has aired so far, and if I've accidentally gotten anything right, spoilers for that, too.
I don't think I know any information that doesn't come directly from the episodes or from RDM's podcasts, and as far as I can tell, the podcasts don't give anything away - beyond an occasional glimpse into RDM's vision or values for the show, the kind of insight that might lend weight to a theory, for example, but nothing that would really give you any new ideas. In fact, off the top of my head, I can mostly only think of one thing I've learned from the podcasts that I found especially shocking, and I will get it out of the way right now and not mention it again. It's pretty well-known that, had the writer's strike cut Galactica short prematurely and permanently, the mid-season finale would have served as a series finale, but: (highlight to read): I took this to mean that the series would have ended with the shots of a devastated Earth. In fact, according to his podcast on Revelations, Ron Moore would have cut that sequence and ended the series with the fleet's joy at finally arriving. A *happy* ending. Weird, huh? Though perhaps the decision would really have been a kind of counter-intuitive protest? A simple, uncomplicated ending to a complicated project, as a way of protesting the squandering of the show's potential, had it been cut short? I dunno. That is all.
Now without further ado, I collate:
I. Earth
The decimated Earth of Battlestar Galactica must be related to our Earth in one of the following ways:
1. It is the Earth of our future.
2. It is the Earth of our past.
3. It is the Earth of another timeline/parallel universe, utterly unrelated to ours.
#3 will always remain an option, so I'm not ruling it out, but it's not especially interesting to me, so I'm going to neglect it somewhat. #1 is pretty standard scifi fare (we inevitably nuked our planet again, oh noes) but it's hard to reconcile the Cylon exodus from Kobol (between 3000 and 4000 years ago is the date I've seen presumed accurate) with Earth history. The Cylons show up on Earth and we (or our ancestors or descendants?) are already living here, at which point we all get along until somebody destroys us or we collectively destroy ourselves? It would seem that the Cylon civilization on Earth lived in peace for generations - maybe thousands of years - before Kobol and Earth both suffered devastation at approx. the same time - roughly 2000 years ago. And none of the Final Five have mentioned there being humans living on their planet. (Maybe the Cylons arrive on earth, kill all of us, and then live where we lived. But then where did we earthlings come from? Not Kobol, right?)
#2 would, at first blush, seem impossible. Because Earth is a wasteland, and nobody is gonna be living there anytime soon. But it is also, in my opinion, by far the most interesting option. If the remaining Cylons and the remnant of the human fleet can find a way to settle on Earth and interbreed, then the two sundered branches of Kobol's family get reunited at last, and the Cylons become part of our ancestry - which is both a silly and a pretty neat twist. Also, I don't know much about the original BSG, but I've heard the episodes began with the words, 'Life here began out there.' If that's true, then this series would end on the theme that began the old series - nice symmetry there.
But Earth is a cinder, so what are we to do? Moving on:
II. Where They All End Up
This list is less exclusive, but here are the most likely options, as I see it:
1. A new planet no one has seen or heard of so far. (This would feel like a deus ex machina).
2. At 'the Colony.' Presumably, the Colony *is* the Cylon homeworld of yore, only it can be moved, which explains why the rebel Cylons can't currently find it? This could happen. But, egad, the Cylon architecture - creepy. From what we've seen of it so far, the Colony is much better suited to play the role of Haunted Castle and seat of Cavil's Evil Mastermind. I say it gets blowed up in the final conflict. But if it doesn't, the fleet may yet make it home; beggars can't be choosers.
3. On Kobol or New Caprica. If the fleet can wipe out all their enemies, is there any reason why they can't return to one of these two planets safely? Only potent thematic reasons, in each case; they're never going back. Especially not to New Caprica. (On that note... could the original Colonies be rendered habitable again?)
4. No home for you; the fleet keeps Star Trekking across the universe. This would seem a more viable option to me if it looked like many of the people of Galactica were going to die and the ship were going to survive. But at this rate, everyone (except probably Roslin) may live, and Galactica herself is going down. A continuing voyage with no Battlestar Galactica? About the lousiest closure I can think of. (Unless it's a 'faithful remnant' type variant, where everybody but a prized few 'settle,' literally and figuratively, while the remnant carry on. Still: probably a pretty lame choice).
5. BLAM; everybody dies. This could still happen.
6. Back to the beginning; we find a way to live on Earth. (Wait for it, wait for it).
III. The Usual Suspects
This section is all about economizing the number of parties we suppose to be out there, doin' stuff. Here is some unexplained stuff that got did:
1. Somebody caused a disaster on Kobol 2000 years ago that precipitated the Exodus of the human tribes. (Elosha quotes Pythia: 'And the blaze pursued them...')
2. Somebody caused a disaster on Earth 2000 years ago that killed all the Cylons except the Final Five. It may have been the same somebody, but Kobol recovered and Earth did not.
3. Somebody warned the Final Five that the end was near. If the 'man' and 'woman' Anders and Tory saw were an ordinary man and woman, they might have been anyone - Kara, for example, or enemy agents. If they were a man and a woman no one else could see, then they might be of the same order as Head!Six or (much more likely) Not!Leoben.
4. Somebody gave Kara a new body - complete with tattoos and matching accessories - and outfitted her with a pristine duplicate of her Viper designed to pick up the signal that would lead the fleet to Earth. Maybe this was a miracle - the work of the Lords of Kobol, perhaps? - or maybe it was a form of Cylon resurrection technology. Perhaps the most curious fact, to me, is that whoever did this made copies of Kara's wedding ring and dogtag. Her body and her Viper were destroyed in the crash, but her ring and dogtag were not; they were left for her to find.
5. Somebody transmitted the music that only the Final Five could hear.
6. Somebody appears to Baltar on a regular basis in the guise of a Six.
7. Somebody appeared to Starbuck and prepared her for death.
8. Possibly: somebody gave the Final Five a reason to think they ought to return to the twelve Colonies to end/ try to prevent the Cylon wars. (Or maybe they just had this idea all along. But if the Cylons left Kobol about a thousand years before the humans, how did they even know there *were* twelve colonies, or where to find them?)
A guiding principle:
Ron Moore may not always succeed in keeping his resolution - some events on Galactica may read to viewers as too obviously miraculous or too obviously dismissive of the miraculous - but he likes to leave the Grand Design aspect of the Galactica mythology always at least partly ambiguous. I don't see him resolving everything with the appearance of the Lords of Kobol in their full Olympic regalia, doing away, once and for all, with any doubts that the nonbelievers might have. There might, however, be suggestions by the end that the Lords of Kobol or their messengers have been guiding certain characters - except the characters still have to wonder if they may only have been hallucinating, dreaming, or projecting. It would be kind of interesting, for example, to leave permanently unresolved the question whether Head!Six is a morally-ambiguous, capricious demi-goddess or simply a product of Baltar's imagination. If she is a deity, it says something about the gods. If she's a hallucination, it mostly only tells us things we already knew about Baltar.
People who may have done the stuff that got did:
A. The Lords of Kobol
B. The Cylons of Earth
C. The human tribes
D. The Final Five
E. Cavil and his legions
F. The fleet
G. Secret choice G: somebody I've forgotten or that we've never heard of.
Now let's play a matching game!
Who had the ability to resurrect Kara Thrace? Only two parties seem likely: the Lords of Kobol and the Final Five - back when they remembered who they are, that is. If the Lords of Kobol orchestrated Kara's return, that would explain the pristine Viper, the miraculous circumstances (Lee saw her ship explode), and the coherence, such as it is, of the wider mythology. Helpful, but also a rather overt option. Who did it? Ta-dah! The gods! If this is the avenue down which the show is heading, the ambiguity will have to be pushed back a step - refocused on the question of who the gods really are, whether deities or some other powerful sort of being the Colonists once worshipped. (Everyone knows the Egyptian gods were aliens who came to Earth through the Stargate!) This, the Lords of Kobol theory, is most readily supported by the dearth of other options and Kara's visions of the wise Not!Leoben before her death.
Meanwhile, as I've suggested elsewhere, depending on the sophistication of their original equipment, the Final Five might have had the technology to duplicate Kara's consciousness and clone her a new body. (After all: it seems to be the case that the Final Five weren't born with duplicate bodies; they cloned their own. And then they created eight new duplicable bodies, possibly based on people they had known on Earth). This theory has the main advantage of not appealing to the gods. It has the main disadvantage of requiring an explanation as to how Kara could have crash-landed on earth when the Final Five still lived there 2000 years ago. (Dun dun dun!)
It seems highly unlikely that those Cylon models who now comprise the Rebels would have had the means to resurrect Kara. It is slightly more likely that Cavil might have had the means to resurrect Kara for some sinister purpose of his own, but the idea doesn't gel easily with Cavil's inability to recreate the resurrection apparatus without Ellen's help. (Maybe he knew how to work it, but not how to rebuild it?) Still, there has never been any evidence that the regular, run-of-the-mill Cylons can duplicate Colonials; surely such a skill would have come in handy by now? (You know, back when the Cylons were like, Hey baby, wanna kill all humans?)
Next: either Kobol and Earth were attacked by the same force (but who?) or perhaps an attack on one resulted in a counterattack on the other. It is hard to come up with a single likely perpetrator from the options on that list. Like, what? The Lords of Kobol, whoever they were, partially destroyed their own world as a way of testing humanity? Maybe, but not so very likely.
Is there any way the Final Five could have caused the destruction of Earth themselves? It would, no doubt, be a surprising twist, but pretty bizarre. (I'm not even ready to believe that Ellen and Tory nuked their planet behind the other Fives' backs, and they're the evillest their little cabal has to offer - unless the boys were eviller in their past lives). And if the Five were responsible, we still have to explain Kobol. Did they make a pitstop? Surely if it took them almost 2000 years to arrive at the Colonies, it would have taken too long to get to Kobol for the two attacks to have happened at roughly the same time. Plus, it seems a strange thing to bother with a 2000 year journey in the service of interspecies peace, if you are just going to quietly nuke your sacred home planet on the way there. But such an objection presumes that the Final Five have told the truth about their objectives, and that they are (and were) all in agreement.
One fairly sensible theory is that the humans and the Cylons, in whichever order, attacked each other. (This would fit with the ingrained cycle of violence between the two kinds). Perhaps the tribes became paranoid that the Cylons would come home and do them violence, so they wiped out the Cylons' world - but not before Kobol was attacked, as well. (The problem of no-FTL remains, unless the tribes had FTL and the Cylons did not. Or unless the only ship available to the Final Five just happened to lack an FTL drive?) Or perhaps Kobol was attacked, either by the Cylons from Earth or an unknown force, and the tribes blamed the Cylons. Some of the humans went to form the Colonies, and others of them followed the course of the Cylons to Earth and retaliated, nuking the planet. (The map to Earth in the Tomb of Athena seems awfully peaceful and magical to have been conceived as a map to vengeance. Earth was the place where the thirteenth tribe could look up into the night sky and see their twelve brothers. Does it seem like the Colonists and the original Cylons parted on such bad terms?)
Some version of the latter seems likely enough to me. I harbor just one (pretty melodramatic) alternative. Cavil (*strokes mustache*) and his legions have the serious problem of existing in the present day, not 2000 years ago. But if that hurdle could be conquered, a) Cavil does have FTL, and fancy Cylon FTL at that, so he could attack both planets in a shortish amount of time, and b) it would be just like him to destroy the homeworld of the Final Five and to desecrate the spiritual home of all thirteen colonies. Except, of course, for the fact that if the world of the Final Five were not ever to be destroyed, the Five might not leave their planet to come all the way to the Colonies and give Cavil the gelatinous orbs he resents so much. He might be better off deferring the honor.
I'm pretty sure that by the end, we'll have a strong suggestion of an explanation for the various apparitions characters have seen, but I expect that whatever explanation that is, the show will leave it in doubt. We'll skip that one for now, then.
Leaving us with one more major happening (I can think of) that needs explaining: someone played the Song and triggered the Final Fives' awareness that they were Cylons. Whoever did this knew the significance of the song. Anders said he played the song, on Earth, for a woman. (My first thought was Tory - perhaps because Anders and Tory got it on that one time - but Tory was with Tyrol, apparently, so maybe not. Not that playing a song for someone means you're romantically involved, but something about the way he said it...) Maybe Anders wrote the song. Most likely, the Final Five taught the song to Daniel, who probably fathered and taught the song to Starbuck. Unless Daniel is secretly still alive and, wherever he is, can find the Colonial Fleet, he probably did not transmit the song.
Furthermore, there is, at least, a connection between the Song and the Colonial signal Kara's viper could pick up. RDM said the signal transmitted the rhythm, if not the tune, of the Song.
Setting aside the ever-present option to explain mysterious events by an appeal to the miraculous, I think the most reasonable persons to suspect of transmitting the signal are the Final Five themselves. 'It's like someone wants the Cylons and the Humans to find Earth together,' one of them said in 'Revelations'. (I paraphrase). Of course, this explanation, like so many others I have suggested, depends on the Final Five knowing they would have reason to do so one day and being able to prepare ahead of time. Which only makes sense if they had some glimpse of their future.
So let's get to it, shall we? I'm sure you can already sense what kind of crackity-crack I'm peddling, and indeed, I have suggested some of it before now. But as of now, I'm prepared to go further. Here, I suggest, is one possible storyline that would give us both an ending and an explanation for certain unexplained events:
In 'Maelstrom,' which I am rewatching right now, Kara seems to understand something - maybe something no longer clear to her after her return. 'I'll see you on the other side, Lee,' she says, and, 'They're waiting for me.' Of course, I don't think the creators of the show actually had an endgame by 'Maelstrom,' and it's highly probably that Kara meant the gods or the dead or whoever had been guiding her that way. But Kara ended up in another solar system (er, the Solar system), where she crash-landed her viper and died. Unless she died once in the maelstrom and a second time on Earth, and still lived to fight another day, it seems as though the eye of that storm sent her somewhere.
Later, in her Earth-driven ramblings, Kara will say that she was on earth and she felt it and she recognized it. I believe she speaks of grass, specifically, and also says it felt like she had been there before. (For this I have no specific explanation beyond the 'ancestral homeland' feeling, if Daniel is Starbuck's father, or maybe simply that Earth matched Starbuck's experience of the star-map in the Tomb of Athena). The Earth of Kara's recollection - the Earth so good that she risked everything to get the fleet to follow her - didn't sound like a cinder. Either that Earth was a false memory - a vision, say, (and why would someone, even a god, who had the power to give Kara a false memory of Earth, give it to her, only to send her to a place destroyed thousands of years ago? Cavil is the only one I can think of who might do that, out of his hatred for Daniel, and Cavil did not seem to foresee the Cylon/Human alliance resulting in a successful pilgrimage to Earth) - or Kara arrived on Earth and was resurrected before it was destroyed.
Suppose that was what happened. Suppose the Maelstrom transported Kara to our system (in one Eye of Jupiter and out another? It's doesn't seem likely, but it does sound sorta cute), and she crashed on Earth. Lee was partly wrong; he didn't see Kara's viper explode. He saw it catching fire and coming apart, and then he saw a massive explosion that obscured it from view. Suppose the Final Five learned of a Colonial ship crash-landing on Earth, and they duplicated Kara's consciousness and gave her a new body? From Kara, they learned about the Cylon/Human wars back at the Colonies. They learned where the Colonies were located. They also learned that Kara knew them in her time, as well, but that they would be living as human beings in the fleet, without their memories. (Or maybe they could not conclusively know that they would lose their memories - because Kara couldn't know that; she would be more likely to suppose that they were only pretending to be human - but they could put two and two together when Cavil started acting sinister). Maybe Anders played The Song for Kara. Who knows how long she stayed on Earth before she and the Five had to escape the dying world? Kara's hair was longer when she came back.
Knowledge of the Cylon/Human wars would give the Final Five reason to travel to the Colonies in an effort to bring peace, but mathematical calculations might be enough to let them know they wouldn't arrive on time. Meanwhile, the Final Five also had warning to the effect that Earth was going to be attacked/destroyed.
What if 2000 years ago, the Final Five tried to derive a single solution to their problems in both the past and the future? In the past, their planet was about to be destroyed. No one would be coming to help them. In the future, they would find themselves with no homes, part of a fleet charged with hatred and suspicion of Cylons. If they could only send a signal to that fleet that would make them instrumental in helping the humans locate earth, and if they could only prime Kara from her childhood to locate the wormhole in the maelstrom, then maybe Galactica could pass through the maelstrom, as well. Maybe help could arrive in the past, in time to stop Earth's destruction. Then the dream of Kobol could perchance be realized: Cylons and Humans living together on one planet, Earth, in peace.
The addition of time/space distortion to the Galactica universe may seem a little sudden, but we have seen little touches, here and there, that might not put it entirely out of bounds. There was the spatial distortion in the Tomb of Athena, and then there was the way Kara seemed able to travel to her mother's deathbed. It's entirely possible, of course, that both were illusions, but maybe they weren't. The commercial for BSG's finale shows Adama saying something like, 'This is likely to be a one-way trip.' Does he mean a suicide mission? Does he mean they simply don't have enough juice to go much further? Or could he mean that passing through the maelstrom may be too much stress for their battered ships to handle?
Meanwhile, the biggest hitches in my plan are as follows (and they are big enough, to be sure):
1. Ellen Tigh has her memory back. If the Final Five set the discovery of Scorched Earth in motion so that Earth could ultimately be saved, then Ellen is concealing what she knows and preventing that opportunity. It wouldn't be the first time she's schemed, of course, but what could she possibly have to gain by stalling? Egads, Liza, there's already a hole in the Bucket!
2. Probably an even more serious problem: Nobody likes Time Travel Mixed-LogicFAIL! In fiction, there are generally two ways of thinking about Time Travel, though art always admits of exceptions. On the one hand, there are stories where characters from the future make incursions in time that change things. Homer steps on a bug, and the whole world is different when he gets back to his own time. If the Colonials can prevent Earth's destruction, then they will have changed the past. This could result in an extreeemely weird consequence, when, as the future of their intervention plays out, they arrive at Earth and discover, instead of a charred hulk, happy playgrounds full of their own descendants.
Meanwhile, on the other hand, there are stories where characters travel back in time, only to find out that their actions in the past were absorbed in the timeline all along. On this understanding, incursions in time change nothing in the future, because any traveling back in time is a past event, even when you, in the present, haven't done it yet. Unfortunately, if Galactica's story does involve time travel and the writers are playing fair, it seems like they have already committed themselves to this way of thinking about time. If Kara arrived on earth 2000 years ago, and the Final Five set certain plans in motion because of what they learned from her, then Kara's incursion in time has been guiding the story all along, even before her own birth. If Kara is half-Cylon and the Final Five knew this, they may even have helped arrange her parents' relationship. Supposing all that's true, it would seem that the future can't be changed. Galactica cannot prevent Earth's destruction, because if they could, the results would already be visible in their future. (Hello playgrounds with lots of babies).
Galactica would hardly be the first show or story to break these rules, but I do tend to think it's a little beneath them. As such, my best theory - and it is the best I've got - is still seriously problematized.
I guess we will know the truth in a couple of weeks, eh? ALL WILL BE REVEALED. In the meantime, I'm interested in knowing what everybody thinks. Do you see another excellent option? Do you see any major holes in what I've outlined? Are you waiting for the next game-changer before you make any guesses prematurely?
I hope you weigh in, Galactiflist! It's our last chance for a crack!fest!
In other news, a good sammich: crusty wheat bread, red pepper hummus, layer of spinach leaves, GREAT BIG HONKIN' SLICE OF GREAT BIG HONKIN' TOMATO!
Spoilers here for every episode that has aired so far, and if I've accidentally gotten anything right, spoilers for that, too.
I don't think I know any information that doesn't come directly from the episodes or from RDM's podcasts, and as far as I can tell, the podcasts don't give anything away - beyond an occasional glimpse into RDM's vision or values for the show, the kind of insight that might lend weight to a theory, for example, but nothing that would really give you any new ideas. In fact, off the top of my head, I can mostly only think of one thing I've learned from the podcasts that I found especially shocking, and I will get it out of the way right now and not mention it again. It's pretty well-known that, had the writer's strike cut Galactica short prematurely and permanently, the mid-season finale would have served as a series finale, but: (highlight to read): I took this to mean that the series would have ended with the shots of a devastated Earth. In fact, according to his podcast on Revelations, Ron Moore would have cut that sequence and ended the series with the fleet's joy at finally arriving. A *happy* ending. Weird, huh? Though perhaps the decision would really have been a kind of counter-intuitive protest? A simple, uncomplicated ending to a complicated project, as a way of protesting the squandering of the show's potential, had it been cut short? I dunno. That is all.
Now without further ado, I collate:
I. Earth
The decimated Earth of Battlestar Galactica must be related to our Earth in one of the following ways:
1. It is the Earth of our future.
2. It is the Earth of our past.
3. It is the Earth of another timeline/parallel universe, utterly unrelated to ours.
#3 will always remain an option, so I'm not ruling it out, but it's not especially interesting to me, so I'm going to neglect it somewhat. #1 is pretty standard scifi fare (we inevitably nuked our planet again, oh noes) but it's hard to reconcile the Cylon exodus from Kobol (between 3000 and 4000 years ago is the date I've seen presumed accurate) with Earth history. The Cylons show up on Earth and we (or our ancestors or descendants?) are already living here, at which point we all get along until somebody destroys us or we collectively destroy ourselves? It would seem that the Cylon civilization on Earth lived in peace for generations - maybe thousands of years - before Kobol and Earth both suffered devastation at approx. the same time - roughly 2000 years ago. And none of the Final Five have mentioned there being humans living on their planet. (Maybe the Cylons arrive on earth, kill all of us, and then live where we lived. But then where did we earthlings come from? Not Kobol, right?)
#2 would, at first blush, seem impossible. Because Earth is a wasteland, and nobody is gonna be living there anytime soon. But it is also, in my opinion, by far the most interesting option. If the remaining Cylons and the remnant of the human fleet can find a way to settle on Earth and interbreed, then the two sundered branches of Kobol's family get reunited at last, and the Cylons become part of our ancestry - which is both a silly and a pretty neat twist. Also, I don't know much about the original BSG, but I've heard the episodes began with the words, 'Life here began out there.' If that's true, then this series would end on the theme that began the old series - nice symmetry there.
But Earth is a cinder, so what are we to do? Moving on:
II. Where They All End Up
This list is less exclusive, but here are the most likely options, as I see it:
1. A new planet no one has seen or heard of so far. (This would feel like a deus ex machina).
2. At 'the Colony.' Presumably, the Colony *is* the Cylon homeworld of yore, only it can be moved, which explains why the rebel Cylons can't currently find it? This could happen. But, egad, the Cylon architecture - creepy. From what we've seen of it so far, the Colony is much better suited to play the role of Haunted Castle and seat of Cavil's Evil Mastermind. I say it gets blowed up in the final conflict. But if it doesn't, the fleet may yet make it home; beggars can't be choosers.
3. On Kobol or New Caprica. If the fleet can wipe out all their enemies, is there any reason why they can't return to one of these two planets safely? Only potent thematic reasons, in each case; they're never going back. Especially not to New Caprica. (On that note... could the original Colonies be rendered habitable again?)
4. No home for you; the fleet keeps Star Trekking across the universe. This would seem a more viable option to me if it looked like many of the people of Galactica were going to die and the ship were going to survive. But at this rate, everyone (except probably Roslin) may live, and Galactica herself is going down. A continuing voyage with no Battlestar Galactica? About the lousiest closure I can think of. (Unless it's a 'faithful remnant' type variant, where everybody but a prized few 'settle,' literally and figuratively, while the remnant carry on. Still: probably a pretty lame choice).
5. BLAM; everybody dies. This could still happen.
6. Back to the beginning; we find a way to live on Earth. (Wait for it, wait for it).
III. The Usual Suspects
This section is all about economizing the number of parties we suppose to be out there, doin' stuff. Here is some unexplained stuff that got did:
1. Somebody caused a disaster on Kobol 2000 years ago that precipitated the Exodus of the human tribes. (Elosha quotes Pythia: 'And the blaze pursued them...')
2. Somebody caused a disaster on Earth 2000 years ago that killed all the Cylons except the Final Five. It may have been the same somebody, but Kobol recovered and Earth did not.
3. Somebody warned the Final Five that the end was near. If the 'man' and 'woman' Anders and Tory saw were an ordinary man and woman, they might have been anyone - Kara, for example, or enemy agents. If they were a man and a woman no one else could see, then they might be of the same order as Head!Six or (much more likely) Not!Leoben.
4. Somebody gave Kara a new body - complete with tattoos and matching accessories - and outfitted her with a pristine duplicate of her Viper designed to pick up the signal that would lead the fleet to Earth. Maybe this was a miracle - the work of the Lords of Kobol, perhaps? - or maybe it was a form of Cylon resurrection technology. Perhaps the most curious fact, to me, is that whoever did this made copies of Kara's wedding ring and dogtag. Her body and her Viper were destroyed in the crash, but her ring and dogtag were not; they were left for her to find.
5. Somebody transmitted the music that only the Final Five could hear.
6. Somebody appears to Baltar on a regular basis in the guise of a Six.
7. Somebody appeared to Starbuck and prepared her for death.
8. Possibly: somebody gave the Final Five a reason to think they ought to return to the twelve Colonies to end/ try to prevent the Cylon wars. (Or maybe they just had this idea all along. But if the Cylons left Kobol about a thousand years before the humans, how did they even know there *were* twelve colonies, or where to find them?)
A guiding principle:
Ron Moore may not always succeed in keeping his resolution - some events on Galactica may read to viewers as too obviously miraculous or too obviously dismissive of the miraculous - but he likes to leave the Grand Design aspect of the Galactica mythology always at least partly ambiguous. I don't see him resolving everything with the appearance of the Lords of Kobol in their full Olympic regalia, doing away, once and for all, with any doubts that the nonbelievers might have. There might, however, be suggestions by the end that the Lords of Kobol or their messengers have been guiding certain characters - except the characters still have to wonder if they may only have been hallucinating, dreaming, or projecting. It would be kind of interesting, for example, to leave permanently unresolved the question whether Head!Six is a morally-ambiguous, capricious demi-goddess or simply a product of Baltar's imagination. If she is a deity, it says something about the gods. If she's a hallucination, it mostly only tells us things we already knew about Baltar.
People who may have done the stuff that got did:
A. The Lords of Kobol
B. The Cylons of Earth
C. The human tribes
D. The Final Five
E. Cavil and his legions
F. The fleet
G. Secret choice G: somebody I've forgotten or that we've never heard of.
Now let's play a matching game!
Who had the ability to resurrect Kara Thrace? Only two parties seem likely: the Lords of Kobol and the Final Five - back when they remembered who they are, that is. If the Lords of Kobol orchestrated Kara's return, that would explain the pristine Viper, the miraculous circumstances (Lee saw her ship explode), and the coherence, such as it is, of the wider mythology. Helpful, but also a rather overt option. Who did it? Ta-dah! The gods! If this is the avenue down which the show is heading, the ambiguity will have to be pushed back a step - refocused on the question of who the gods really are, whether deities or some other powerful sort of being the Colonists once worshipped. (Everyone knows the Egyptian gods were aliens who came to Earth through the Stargate!) This, the Lords of Kobol theory, is most readily supported by the dearth of other options and Kara's visions of the wise Not!Leoben before her death.
Meanwhile, as I've suggested elsewhere, depending on the sophistication of their original equipment, the Final Five might have had the technology to duplicate Kara's consciousness and clone her a new body. (After all: it seems to be the case that the Final Five weren't born with duplicate bodies; they cloned their own. And then they created eight new duplicable bodies, possibly based on people they had known on Earth). This theory has the main advantage of not appealing to the gods. It has the main disadvantage of requiring an explanation as to how Kara could have crash-landed on earth when the Final Five still lived there 2000 years ago. (Dun dun dun!)
It seems highly unlikely that those Cylon models who now comprise the Rebels would have had the means to resurrect Kara. It is slightly more likely that Cavil might have had the means to resurrect Kara for some sinister purpose of his own, but the idea doesn't gel easily with Cavil's inability to recreate the resurrection apparatus without Ellen's help. (Maybe he knew how to work it, but not how to rebuild it?) Still, there has never been any evidence that the regular, run-of-the-mill Cylons can duplicate Colonials; surely such a skill would have come in handy by now? (You know, back when the Cylons were like, Hey baby, wanna kill all humans?)
Next: either Kobol and Earth were attacked by the same force (but who?) or perhaps an attack on one resulted in a counterattack on the other. It is hard to come up with a single likely perpetrator from the options on that list. Like, what? The Lords of Kobol, whoever they were, partially destroyed their own world as a way of testing humanity? Maybe, but not so very likely.
Is there any way the Final Five could have caused the destruction of Earth themselves? It would, no doubt, be a surprising twist, but pretty bizarre. (I'm not even ready to believe that Ellen and Tory nuked their planet behind the other Fives' backs, and they're the evillest their little cabal has to offer - unless the boys were eviller in their past lives). And if the Five were responsible, we still have to explain Kobol. Did they make a pitstop? Surely if it took them almost 2000 years to arrive at the Colonies, it would have taken too long to get to Kobol for the two attacks to have happened at roughly the same time. Plus, it seems a strange thing to bother with a 2000 year journey in the service of interspecies peace, if you are just going to quietly nuke your sacred home planet on the way there. But such an objection presumes that the Final Five have told the truth about their objectives, and that they are (and were) all in agreement.
One fairly sensible theory is that the humans and the Cylons, in whichever order, attacked each other. (This would fit with the ingrained cycle of violence between the two kinds). Perhaps the tribes became paranoid that the Cylons would come home and do them violence, so they wiped out the Cylons' world - but not before Kobol was attacked, as well. (The problem of no-FTL remains, unless the tribes had FTL and the Cylons did not. Or unless the only ship available to the Final Five just happened to lack an FTL drive?) Or perhaps Kobol was attacked, either by the Cylons from Earth or an unknown force, and the tribes blamed the Cylons. Some of the humans went to form the Colonies, and others of them followed the course of the Cylons to Earth and retaliated, nuking the planet. (The map to Earth in the Tomb of Athena seems awfully peaceful and magical to have been conceived as a map to vengeance. Earth was the place where the thirteenth tribe could look up into the night sky and see their twelve brothers. Does it seem like the Colonists and the original Cylons parted on such bad terms?)
Some version of the latter seems likely enough to me. I harbor just one (pretty melodramatic) alternative. Cavil (*strokes mustache*) and his legions have the serious problem of existing in the present day, not 2000 years ago. But if that hurdle could be conquered, a) Cavil does have FTL, and fancy Cylon FTL at that, so he could attack both planets in a shortish amount of time, and b) it would be just like him to destroy the homeworld of the Final Five and to desecrate the spiritual home of all thirteen colonies. Except, of course, for the fact that if the world of the Final Five were not ever to be destroyed, the Five might not leave their planet to come all the way to the Colonies and give Cavil the gelatinous orbs he resents so much. He might be better off deferring the honor.
I'm pretty sure that by the end, we'll have a strong suggestion of an explanation for the various apparitions characters have seen, but I expect that whatever explanation that is, the show will leave it in doubt. We'll skip that one for now, then.
Leaving us with one more major happening (I can think of) that needs explaining: someone played the Song and triggered the Final Fives' awareness that they were Cylons. Whoever did this knew the significance of the song. Anders said he played the song, on Earth, for a woman. (My first thought was Tory - perhaps because Anders and Tory got it on that one time - but Tory was with Tyrol, apparently, so maybe not. Not that playing a song for someone means you're romantically involved, but something about the way he said it...) Maybe Anders wrote the song. Most likely, the Final Five taught the song to Daniel, who probably fathered and taught the song to Starbuck. Unless Daniel is secretly still alive and, wherever he is, can find the Colonial Fleet, he probably did not transmit the song.
Furthermore, there is, at least, a connection between the Song and the Colonial signal Kara's viper could pick up. RDM said the signal transmitted the rhythm, if not the tune, of the Song.
Setting aside the ever-present option to explain mysterious events by an appeal to the miraculous, I think the most reasonable persons to suspect of transmitting the signal are the Final Five themselves. 'It's like someone wants the Cylons and the Humans to find Earth together,' one of them said in 'Revelations'. (I paraphrase). Of course, this explanation, like so many others I have suggested, depends on the Final Five knowing they would have reason to do so one day and being able to prepare ahead of time. Which only makes sense if they had some glimpse of their future.
So let's get to it, shall we? I'm sure you can already sense what kind of crackity-crack I'm peddling, and indeed, I have suggested some of it before now. But as of now, I'm prepared to go further. Here, I suggest, is one possible storyline that would give us both an ending and an explanation for certain unexplained events:
In 'Maelstrom,' which I am rewatching right now, Kara seems to understand something - maybe something no longer clear to her after her return. 'I'll see you on the other side, Lee,' she says, and, 'They're waiting for me.' Of course, I don't think the creators of the show actually had an endgame by 'Maelstrom,' and it's highly probably that Kara meant the gods or the dead or whoever had been guiding her that way. But Kara ended up in another solar system (er, the Solar system), where she crash-landed her viper and died. Unless she died once in the maelstrom and a second time on Earth, and still lived to fight another day, it seems as though the eye of that storm sent her somewhere.
Later, in her Earth-driven ramblings, Kara will say that she was on earth and she felt it and she recognized it. I believe she speaks of grass, specifically, and also says it felt like she had been there before. (For this I have no specific explanation beyond the 'ancestral homeland' feeling, if Daniel is Starbuck's father, or maybe simply that Earth matched Starbuck's experience of the star-map in the Tomb of Athena). The Earth of Kara's recollection - the Earth so good that she risked everything to get the fleet to follow her - didn't sound like a cinder. Either that Earth was a false memory - a vision, say, (and why would someone, even a god, who had the power to give Kara a false memory of Earth, give it to her, only to send her to a place destroyed thousands of years ago? Cavil is the only one I can think of who might do that, out of his hatred for Daniel, and Cavil did not seem to foresee the Cylon/Human alliance resulting in a successful pilgrimage to Earth) - or Kara arrived on Earth and was resurrected before it was destroyed.
Suppose that was what happened. Suppose the Maelstrom transported Kara to our system (in one Eye of Jupiter and out another? It's doesn't seem likely, but it does sound sorta cute), and she crashed on Earth. Lee was partly wrong; he didn't see Kara's viper explode. He saw it catching fire and coming apart, and then he saw a massive explosion that obscured it from view. Suppose the Final Five learned of a Colonial ship crash-landing on Earth, and they duplicated Kara's consciousness and gave her a new body? From Kara, they learned about the Cylon/Human wars back at the Colonies. They learned where the Colonies were located. They also learned that Kara knew them in her time, as well, but that they would be living as human beings in the fleet, without their memories. (Or maybe they could not conclusively know that they would lose their memories - because Kara couldn't know that; she would be more likely to suppose that they were only pretending to be human - but they could put two and two together when Cavil started acting sinister). Maybe Anders played The Song for Kara. Who knows how long she stayed on Earth before she and the Five had to escape the dying world? Kara's hair was longer when she came back.
Knowledge of the Cylon/Human wars would give the Final Five reason to travel to the Colonies in an effort to bring peace, but mathematical calculations might be enough to let them know they wouldn't arrive on time. Meanwhile, the Final Five also had warning to the effect that Earth was going to be attacked/destroyed.
What if 2000 years ago, the Final Five tried to derive a single solution to their problems in both the past and the future? In the past, their planet was about to be destroyed. No one would be coming to help them. In the future, they would find themselves with no homes, part of a fleet charged with hatred and suspicion of Cylons. If they could only send a signal to that fleet that would make them instrumental in helping the humans locate earth, and if they could only prime Kara from her childhood to locate the wormhole in the maelstrom, then maybe Galactica could pass through the maelstrom, as well. Maybe help could arrive in the past, in time to stop Earth's destruction. Then the dream of Kobol could perchance be realized: Cylons and Humans living together on one planet, Earth, in peace.
The addition of time/space distortion to the Galactica universe may seem a little sudden, but we have seen little touches, here and there, that might not put it entirely out of bounds. There was the spatial distortion in the Tomb of Athena, and then there was the way Kara seemed able to travel to her mother's deathbed. It's entirely possible, of course, that both were illusions, but maybe they weren't. The commercial for BSG's finale shows Adama saying something like, 'This is likely to be a one-way trip.' Does he mean a suicide mission? Does he mean they simply don't have enough juice to go much further? Or could he mean that passing through the maelstrom may be too much stress for their battered ships to handle?
Meanwhile, the biggest hitches in my plan are as follows (and they are big enough, to be sure):
1. Ellen Tigh has her memory back. If the Final Five set the discovery of Scorched Earth in motion so that Earth could ultimately be saved, then Ellen is concealing what she knows and preventing that opportunity. It wouldn't be the first time she's schemed, of course, but what could she possibly have to gain by stalling? Egads, Liza, there's already a hole in the Bucket!
2. Probably an even more serious problem: Nobody likes Time Travel Mixed-LogicFAIL! In fiction, there are generally two ways of thinking about Time Travel, though art always admits of exceptions. On the one hand, there are stories where characters from the future make incursions in time that change things. Homer steps on a bug, and the whole world is different when he gets back to his own time. If the Colonials can prevent Earth's destruction, then they will have changed the past. This could result in an extreeemely weird consequence, when, as the future of their intervention plays out, they arrive at Earth and discover, instead of a charred hulk, happy playgrounds full of their own descendants.
Meanwhile, on the other hand, there are stories where characters travel back in time, only to find out that their actions in the past were absorbed in the timeline all along. On this understanding, incursions in time change nothing in the future, because any traveling back in time is a past event, even when you, in the present, haven't done it yet. Unfortunately, if Galactica's story does involve time travel and the writers are playing fair, it seems like they have already committed themselves to this way of thinking about time. If Kara arrived on earth 2000 years ago, and the Final Five set certain plans in motion because of what they learned from her, then Kara's incursion in time has been guiding the story all along, even before her own birth. If Kara is half-Cylon and the Final Five knew this, they may even have helped arrange her parents' relationship. Supposing all that's true, it would seem that the future can't be changed. Galactica cannot prevent Earth's destruction, because if they could, the results would already be visible in their future. (Hello playgrounds with lots of babies).
Galactica would hardly be the first show or story to break these rules, but I do tend to think it's a little beneath them. As such, my best theory - and it is the best I've got - is still seriously problematized.
I guess we will know the truth in a couple of weeks, eh? ALL WILL BE REVEALED. In the meantime, I'm interested in knowing what everybody thinks. Do you see another excellent option? Do you see any major holes in what I've outlined? Are you waiting for the next game-changer before you make any guesses prematurely?
I hope you weigh in, Galactiflist! It's our last chance for a crack!fest!
In other news, a good sammich: crusty wheat bread, red pepper hummus, layer of spinach leaves, GREAT BIG HONKIN' SLICE OF GREAT BIG HONKIN' TOMATO!