So when last we left our plucky band of Colonials and their Cylon allies, the ragtag fleet had made it to Earth. Earth! Birthplace of James Dobson and George W. Bush. Earth! Where the dollars are double, but so is the danger. Earth! Where the streets are paved with molybdenum, and the rivers flow with Kamala tea. Yes, truly Earth is the promised land, which is why, like most promised lands, it was bombed out and wasted.
Or was it?
Tonight, we found out, but for those of you wanting to avoid spoilers, here’s some mad Gaius Baltar video.
Okay, everyone who’s left, be very aware that spoilers aplenty exist after this point, so for the love of Gods, please don’t read further if you’re still back at the miniseries.
First of all, “Sometimes a Great Notion” was Battlestar at its best, and by “best” I mean “most frakkin’ depressing.” Yes, they were evidently on Earth — all four of the Final Five remembered being there, though they weren’t clear on how they got from a planet that had been nuked 2000 years ago to the Colonies.
And make no mistake — Earth had been bombed to Hell and back. There was nothing left there for anyone to go to. Two millennia after the apocalypse, there was nothing there but a dead, radioactive world. Which is, once again, a reason why we generally try to avoid all-out nuclear war. It’s not a good long-term survival strategy.
So what do we find on Earth? Well, most of the Colonial fleet — along with D’anna Biers, the lone surviving Three — find despair and horror. It makes sense — they’ve all been beating their brains in for years, trying to find the land of milk and honey, and it turns out that the land of milk and honey is just a slightly aged version of Caprica or Picon, with fewer people and more desolation. Of everyone, it affects Adm. Adama and Lt. Dualla the most — pushing both to the brink of suicide, and one of them over the brink.
No, it’s not Bill Adama, though he comes awfully damn close. Dee finds her spirit shattered by the discovery of the wasteland that is Earth, and after an evening of flirting with Lee — Dee kills herself in a truly shocking and depressing way. It may be the most shocking moment of the series — and damn, but the series has had its share of shocking.
Starbuck, meanwhile, explores with Leoben, and comes across a Colonial fighter bearing the markings of her fighter, with a pilot inside. Wearing dog tags. That are hers.
What that means is anyone’s guess.
So who is the fifth Cylon? It’s given as almost an afterthought at the end — Saul Tigh has a flashback to Earth, right before the apocalypse. He’s trying to unbury a woman. A woman he knows. A woman you know — Ellen Tigh.
Which, of course, is intriguing, because Ellen died on New Caprica.
Or did she?
There are a lot of unanswered questions at the end of the show. As the ragtag fleet prepares to start searching for a new home, we don’t know if Ellen is alive (she could be; she was poisoned, if you recall, by Saul for collaborating with the Cylons. Yes, that’s bitter irony. She could also be resurrected as part of Caprica Six; we’ve seen Saul see her as Ellen from time to time. Or she could be dead.)
We don’t know what the Promised Land really is. It obviously isn’t Earth. But there are some nice stars nearby that might harbor habitable planets — Alpha Centauri A is a good bet — and the universe is a big place.
Of course, Brother Cavil may or may not be alive still; I’m not betting against him. And even if he isn’t, there are plenty of Ones, Fours, and Fives still out there, willing to blow the fleet to Kingdom come.
It should be an interesting ride. Certainly, things look awfully bleak right now. But it’s always darkest just before the dawn — unless it goes totally pitch black.
As I told my husband last night, I do not think that it is a coincidence that there were twelve models of Cylon (counting the final five) and twelve colonies. Now we have the thirteenth tribe, a tribe of Cylons.
Does it not stand to reason, then, that given the numbers don’t line up, that we have a thirteenth, unknown model of Cylon as well?
Honestly, I don’t think this series can end on any planet besides Earth. To have them settle on any ol’ place after all this? Nuh uh.
And the afterthought-nature of Ellen’s debut as a Cylon makes me verrrry suspicious. I’m with Spider – I think there’s something deeper going on here, especially considering Starbuck’s… situation, and the fact that George W. Bush, James Dobson, you, me, and everyone reading this is, apparently, a Cylon. I feel like this is intimately connected to the prophecy that Starbuck will lead to everyone’s deaths.
Poor Dee… when she was talking to herself on the raptor, I suspected that she was suicidal, but I managed to completely forget about it by the time it actually happened.
Definitely check out the lengthy post at “The Watcher” on this episode. It includes an interview with Ronald Moore; a great deal about the creation of this episode from the episode’s writers, Bradley Thompson and David Weddle; and an interview with episode director Michael Nankin.
There’s a lot of really interesting stuff there about how the episode was created. For example, due to the writer’s strike, Ronald Moore and the writers couldn’t be on-set while the episode was being filmed, and many of the actors and crew thought this might be the final episode they’d ever film.
Ahha! But Starbuck is the harbinger of death who will lead them to their end! She is NOT leading everyone to their death but to their end.
Starbuck is the one whose quest to lead everyone to Earth led to the destruction of the Hub and the end of Cylons being able to download. I think if you remember that, it becomes eminently more interesting. She’ll lead them to their end. Break the cycle D’Anna was talking about.
!!!!!
I didn’t even think of that! Nice reading between the lines there.
In addition to the Ronald Moore interview, there’s also an interview with Kandyse McClure, who played Dualla, which, if not a psyops campaign, makes it look like she was indeed Killed Off For Real. Of course, IIRC, there were also interviews with Katee Sackhoff after Starbuck flew her viper into the malestrom, where she said that she was upset with how things panned out, and thought her death was all wrong, despite the fact that she and everyone else on the crew knew that she was going to be resurrected a few episodes later.
Well, we’ve still never determined why there is no Model Number 7….
I was also shocked by Dee’s suicide, but I’m intrigued by one thing: on Earth, we see Dee pick up a handful of jacks. Tyrol, Tory, Anders, and Tigh all have flashbacks to their lives on Earth after handling objects from the planet.
So what was running through Dee’s mind after she picked up those jacks?
Ellen being the fifth cylon just doesn’t ring true, at least at the moment.