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I understand that Sky couldn't really show an advert for another station, but we UK viewers were sort of jacked (in terms of being able to understand what's going on with the Cylons and their internal balance of power One Year Later) by not being able to see some version of the following (taken from the Television Without Pity recap):
Immediately as the credits start to roll, a SciFi promo hits the screen; a woman's voice over shots of the cast, and all the Cylons we know, set to poundy drums, breathtaking in its enormity:
"Humanity has surrendered, the war is finally over. We must now fulfill our true destiny -- so we will love them, and take care of them. Show them the glory of peace. And, like God, our infinite mercy will be matched only by our power. And complete control."
That is the Cylon's position at the end of 'Lay Down Your Burdens'. They love us, and we can't be trusted to take care of ourselves, as they've learnt from studying us. So that becomes their job.
There are three more-or-less worldviews, or political/philosophical camps, that we know of among the Cylons.
1. Destroy All Humans (Or Not): this is the mainstream Cylon position as original presented to us, probably best embodied by the D'Anna Biers/Lucy Lawless model, but also by Doral, the Six who beat up Helo's Boomer and died fighting Starbuck on Caprica, and maybe that fake doctor guy from 'The Farm'. It's actually not a particularly simple position even of itself, but we can summarise it as: kill 99% of humanity in informative and fun ways, use the rest as breeding stock.
2. The War Heroes: the Six & Boomer from 'Downloaded'. I think the end of that episode deliberately misled us into thinking this position was either more benign or just more well-resolved than perhaps it is. All we really know about it is that it's something like: don't kill 99% of humans, instead treat them a more loving manner of which the Cylon God would approve.
That's a pretty big unknowable right there: what constitutes love in the minds of these two heavily-traumatised alien robots? It could be exactly what we see at the end of 'LDYB', except that that doesn't explain why the occupation of the Colonies and the pursuit of the Fleet were abandonned, assuming Cavill wasn't lying.
Or maybe another explanation is that the War Heroes thought that what they wanted to do was leave humanity alone, but got lonely - they love humans, specifically Gaius and Chief, and they went and disappeared off their map of the galaxy! Incidentally, I think we can assume that however long it took for the Cylons to decide that they wanted to 'look after' humanity, the interference around New Caprica did work, which means that Gina, the Six from Pegasus, was the only reason the Cylons found the place, which in turn means that this whole damn mess is a) even more Baltar's fault than it was already (even if settling wasn't in itself such a bad idea), and b) actually reall down to Cain and the Pegasus crew, so there's your pay-off and consequences for their actions.
Anyway, for whatever reason, I think it's clear that some sort of a working compromise between (or perhaps even a synthesis of) positions 1 & 2 has occurred at some point in the year-long break. There's some very subtle interplay between the two camps in that scene on Colonial One at the end of the finale, with Six and Boomer playing Good Cylon and Doral playing Bad.
War Hero Boomer: "As long as you offer no resistance, you won't be harmed."
Baltar: "How do I know that?"
Doral: "You don't. You also don't have any choice."
3. Brother Cavill: thinks the attack on humanity was an error, but not a moral error particularly, just an exercise is grossly misplaced priorities. He's an atheist, which is very interesting, because it puts him in neither of the above camps. It's important not to confuse this with position 2, and once you realise that they're not the same, you understand that he could be telling the truth in his 'message'. Cavill probably thought he'd found allies, finally, for his argument that this whole obsession with wiping out the humans was a waste of time and energy - and hey, even if at least one of these two ladies is still a deluded religious nutbar, they're saying the same thing he's said from the start, so great, he's with them. It might be significant that we don't see Cavill at the end of the episode: the decision to go find and 'look after' humanity after all probably pissed him off no end just when he thought that error had been corrected.
Fuck knows what Leoben's up to: while we know his previous models weren't atheists, I'd say the model that's looking for Starbuck could subsribe to any of the above positions, and so have anything in mind. He's sneaky like that.
Did I mention that I thought the whole finale was awesome? |
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