Spoilers for last night's "Battlestar Galactica" coming up just as soon as I find out if there are any Cylon hobos..."I think we have to accept what we are." -Bill AdamaI don't usually like to bother with a lot of recapping in these reviews, working under the assumption that if you're reading it, you watched the episode like me. But because "No Exit" was 99% exposition, and answered so many questions we've had about the history of the Cylon race, the Final Five, Earth, etc., I think the best way to start is to sum up all the things we learned and then try to parse some meaning from it all.
So here's what I got out of this (and feel free to add anything I left out; obviously, there was a lot):
• The 13th Tribe of humanoid Cylons was created by the humans on Kobol.
• They traveled to Earth, stopping by the algae planet along the way.
• At some point in the distant past, they built robotic servants, the servants rebelled, and decided to nuke them all.
• Five 13th Tribesmen -- Ellen, Tigh, Anders, Tyrol and Tory -- had developed the process for downloading their consciousnesses into new bodies, which they employed when the nukes hit to get into a spaceship they had parked in orbit.
• Once resurrected, the Final Five -- a name which now has a different meaning, as they're the final five members of the 13th Tribe, as opposed to the final five members of Cavil's race -- directed their spaceship towards the homes of the other 12 Colonies to warn them about creating their own robot servants, but they got there too late, in the midst of the first Cylon War.
• The Final Five saw that these Cylons had been trying to create their own skinjobs, but were unable to do any better than the Hybrids, and so they offered the Cylons a deal: peace with humanity in exchange for the secrets of skinjob tech and resurrection.
• The concept of the monotheistic god originated not from the Final Five, or from their new skinjob creations, but from the robotic Centurions.
• Cavil -- or, as Ellen named him, John -- was the first new skinjob, based on Ellen's father, and he helped make the others.
• There were eight skinjob models, not seven, but Cavil killed off one named Daniel because he resented how mama Ellen seemed to favor him.
• Cavil, hating his five parents for so many reasons -- including his lack of interest in being human like the ones who had enslaved his robotic brothers, staged his own coup, locking the Final Five into bodies with altered, Boomer-ized memories and dumping them in humanity so they could witness the eventual genocide of the human race.
• I'm also assuming, though it isn't explicitly stated, that Cavil is the one who programmed the other six remaining skinjob models to not want to look for or even think about the Final Five. When D'Anna rebelled against that bit of programming, he boxed her.
• Cavil joined Anders' resistance, became Tyrol's confessor, cut out Tigh's eye, etc., all as a way to prolong his parents' suffering.
• There is a "colony" out in space somewhere with the technology to build a new resurrection hub, but the skinjobs (Cavil included) don't know how to use it, and even Ellen (given back her full memories when she resurrects after Saul poisons her on New Caprica) says she would need the other four with her to do it.
• With Anders apparently brain-dead, re-building resurrection may be impossible. But the Final Five are able to sire offspring (it seems only the skinjob men are infertile), and at least one human/skinjob offspring has been created (Hera), and now Adama is reluctantly introducing organic Cylon technology into Galactica, and... who knows where the intermingling of humanity and Cylon will end this time?
That about all?
Now, there's almost no point in analyzing "No Exit" as an episode of drama. There are dramatic moments in it (Sam's seizure, Boomer helping Ellen escape), but it's largely an info-dump -- or, as Mo Ryan put it, a download directly into each viewers' brain -- so that we can stop asking many of our questions(*) and start pondering the philosophical and practical implications of all this knowledge.
(*) There are still a number of issues left to be resolved, including whether there really is a larger force (the Cylon god? Daniel?) orchestrating this, the meaning of the opera house vision, Kara's identity, and the nature of the head characters, but they really cleared a lot of questions off the white board, didn't they?
But while you're musing over the larger meaning of this, and whether the answers are satisfying after all the build-up over the years, I want to look at the major thematic element moving throughout the hour, encapsulated by the Adama quote above: how it's so hard for the characters, be they human or Cylon, to accept who and what they really are, and how much pain is caused by their denial.
Humanity wanted to be more like the gods, so they created their own life-forms, and it repeatedly led to disaster. The Final Five wanted to be gods, and the Centurions wanted to be more like humans, and so the skinjobs were created -- only Cavil decided he'd much rather be like a robot, and the roots of the genocide were born. Roslin and the rest of the fleet spent four years clinging to the notion of the original 12 colonies and ran the Quorum accordingly, even though it didn't really represent the nature or needs of the rag-tag fleet.
Even Adama wants to cling to the idea of Galactica as this indesctructible old bird, built by humans, for humans, and tries to resist Tyrol's attempts to introduce both Cylon workers and Cylon technology into the repair effort. (It appears he did learn some lessons from the mutiny, after all.) But in the end, the glimpse of the cracks extending to his own bathroom -- a crack he probably never noticed before, or paid little attention to -- hits home just how bad things have gotten, and so he authorizes Tyrol's plan, just as Roslin approves Lee's idea to finally try to make the civilian government practical for the fleet.
Cavil, on the other hand, isn't so flexible. We're getting a lot of plot exposition in this hour, but we're also getting a much fuller picture of who Cavil is, and why he's done what he does. (We'll get even more in the TV-movie, which Ron Moore confirmed in the latest podcast will be told largely from Cavil's point of view of events earlier in the series.) We find that Cavil is not only the first of the new skinjobs, but a cruel hybrid of the Biblical Cain (he murdered his brother, and his mother is fond of apples), Oedipus (has sex with his mother, though the eye he puts out belongs to his father) and a kind of Pinocchio in reverse. It's been a hallmark of sci-fi stories that we're supposed to cheer on the robot that aspires to be something more human, like Data. But Cavil believes that to be human is actually something less, and his monologue about being forced to observe a supernova within the limits of his human senses -- wonderfully played, as usual, by Dean Stockwell -- suggested, as so much of "Galactica" does, that our traditional sci-fi assumptions aren't always correct. Cavil's a monster, but Ellen and the others inadvertently created him to be one, didn't they?
Boomer has, going back to the first season, been the series' symbol of characters straining to be something they're not. She's the real Pinocchio figure here, and in that lovely cut from Boomer asking whom she would want to love to Tyrol walking the Galactica corridors, we're reminded that she still has strong human connections, strong enough to make her betray Cavil and bring Ellen back to the fleet.
This means my hope of finally getting a Tyrol/Boomer scene where they talk about being unwitting Cylons will almost certainly come to pass. But what else happens if/when Boomer and Ellen hook up with Galactica? Does Saul try for a very French relationship with Ellen and Caprica? Do they inadvertently lead Cavil, Simon and Doral right to the fleet -- at a time when Galactica is in no shape to either fight or run?
And after laying so much knowledge on us in a single episode, how do the writers and the characters plan to use that knowledge over the final five episodes?
Some other thoughts:
• If you go to Mo Ryan's post, you'll see she's soliciting questions to ask the writer of this episode, Ryan Mottesheard (a long-time script coordinator doing his first teleplay for the series), so feel free to suggest your own.
• I had worried for a while that the explanation of Cylon history and how it tied into the ruined Earth would be compromised in some way to allow for the events of "Caprica," but I felt like this works for both "Galactica" as a self-contained series and as something that can tie into what Moore says will be a more down-to-Earth (or down-to-Caprica) prequel series.
• John Hodgman, sometime-PC and constant accumulator of all world knowledge, makes a cameo as the brain surgeon, adding a bit of levity to an otherwise dark and info-heavy hour.
• I liked that so much of Anders' free-associating sounded like the monologues of the hybrids. Seemed appropriate.
• Also appropriate: the revamped opening, which helped set us up for an episode that was going to be so backstory-intensive.
• As coincidence would have it, I was just watching the jump-into-the-atmosphere scene from "Exodus Pt. II" the other day, and it made me think, "You know, that's probably not good for the integrity of the ship's hull." And, sure enough, Tyrol lists that as one of the many abuses the old bird has suffered over the years.
• Have we ever seen Tigh as purely happy as he was kissing Caprica's pregnant belly? Wonderfully played by Michael Hogan, and of course you know this means it will all end horribly for him and his amazing acting eyeball.
• Ellen's refusal to put on the surgical gown, or whatever that was that Boomer had brought her, because she didn't want to "legitimize John's final bit of theater," was a nice parallel to Adama's refusal to play along with Gaeta's sham trial last week.
Finally, a reminder and a request: No talking about anything in the previews (or any other thing that would be even remotely considered a spoiler for future episodes), and if you're going to ask a question or propose a theory, please try to at least skim all the previous comments.
I bring the latter point up because we're now routinely topping 100 comments per episode (some weeks approaching 200), and a decent percentage of that is from people who are repeating points and re-asking questions made earlier, often with the preamble "Sorry I couldn't read all the previous comments, but..."
I recognize that people are busy, and that it's a lot to read through, but please try, out of respect for the people who took the time to comment before you -- and, especially, out of respect for the people (including me) who read each and every one.
What did everybody else think?
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