Gaeta’s mutiny is over, and the fleet has disposed of the two major mischief makers. They are now bereft their Quorum, and Galen has discovered that Galactica is falling apart. But neither of those are important compared to the two other parallel storylines. Read on if you’re prepared for spoilers.
One storyline his purely expositional. Anders has a bullet lodged in his brain, and it has unlocked some memories of Earth, which he lays out for the other Final Five. Err. Except Ellen, who is of course dead. Oh well, I’m man enough to admit that my great unifying theory of everyone being a cylon was wrong. Still cooler, but I’ll deal.
Anyway, he explains that the Final Five were actually the Original Five. The Thirteenth Tribe were all Cylons. They were ultimately quite low-tech skinjobs. They had lost superluminal travel and communications, resurrection, and had gained the ability to reproduce biologically.
The Five were scientists who had rediscovered resurrection (Ellen being the one who made the “intuitive leap” to make it all work), and used this technology to escape to a spacecraft in orbit above earth when Earth was attacked (presumably by Centurion Cylons of their own making).
Let’s stop there, because it’s all expositional and things are far more interesting elsewhere in the galaxy. After all, Ellen was killed, but she’s a Cylon and she was poisoned well before the destruction of the Resurrection Hub.
She wakes up on a baseship to find herself imprisoned by a One that she calls “John”. Turns out she’s got all her memories back, and is the mother figure to all the models One through Eight. “But wait!” you exclaim. “Yes, Boomer’s an Eight, but we’ve only seen seven skinjobs outside the Final Five!” Yes, we’ll get to that in a second.
Wait follows is a dialogue between Ellen and John that goes on for months. He’s really bitter about being made “human”. Human senses, frail flesh body, illogical emotions, sleep. It’s actually a thinly veiled rehash of a very basic argument around the existence of the Judeo-Christian god:
If you made us in your image, and you are so powerful, why are we so weak?
If you made us so perfect, then why are we capable of creating and experiencing so much suffering?
If you are so omnipotent, then why do you allow such suffering to continue?
That last question comes just as the Resurrection Hub is destroyed. John is desperate to maintain his competitive advantage over humanity that he demands Ellen give him the key to resurrection (which she apparently can’t do without the rest of the Five) or he will take it forcibly from her brain.
Surgery on God’s brain huh? The fantasy of many bitter people, I’m sure. But let’s stop there. This whole episode explains so much about the entire series. He has such a strong Oedipal complex that if you didn’t flash back to what happened on New Caprica, you should probably think about re-watching those episodes. Now that we know that Ellen is effectively his mother, and Sol was her husband, it puts his campaign of rape on Ellen and violence on Sol in a much more disturbing perspective.
We also realise that the whole campaign to wipe out humanity was done just so that John could show the Final Five exactly how upset he was at being made human. Billions of people died because of his mummy issues.
Ellen continues to play the Loving God. Even after he admits to all of that, to destroying the Seventh model (one Daniel who was Ellen’s favourite), Ellen opens her arms and says that none of it matters if only he can look past it all. I do wonder what the conversation would have been like if Sol had resurrected instead.
I mentioned the Seventh model, Daniel. As he is prepped for surgery, Anders recalls Daniel as well. Starbuck is still struggling with her own identity as not a Cylon, but maybe that skeleton on Earth was her. Hoping she’s the Seven, she presses Anders for confirmation that the Seven was Daniel and not Kara.
Damn. She’s not a Cylon. Or is she? Her father’s name was Daniel, and he was some whacked out Artist/Musician. Some of that talent obviously passed from on to her. We’ll find out in the episodes to come whether she can take the place of the missing Seven.