What is the agenda of the powers that be?
Forces in BSG are being driven by offstage powers but I must admit "there's too much confusion" over their agenda right now, especially concerning Starbuck.
Starbuck is teleported to Earth and back, in a new viper, and she doesn't really remember it well. In the viper are photos she took and little else. She describes some sights (and paints them in a mural) on the way back from Earth, the comet, ringed-planet and flashing triple star. They seem to be clues about the way to Earth.
But why such strange clues? If they just wanted to let Starbuck guide the fleet to Earth, they could have just given her coordinates. Or, while she was at Earth, she could have photographed a number of useful stellar signposts which would allow any trained interstellar navigator (which Starbuck is) to find it again. Great things to notice are the disk of the galaxy, close galaxies like Andromeda and the Magellanic clouds and prominent star clusters and nebulae like the Pleiades, M8/Lagoon and M13. And bright stars like Deneb and Antares can be seen for 20,000 light years. Getting a spectrograph on any bright stars would identify them and quickly position Earth.
Now to a good computer, the Zodiac will do the job once within a few hundred light years. You just have to search the stars you can see to find one that has the Zodiac pattern in its sky. The other sky-marks are for finding the area from further away.
Instead they give her these visions, which may be all in the same system. Ringed gas giants are everywhere, as are comets. Flashing triples are not common. It is not likely this is Alpha Centauri -- and besides, get close enough to see that and the Zodiac takes you home anyway.
So why cryptic clues? Why a new viper, sure to make them distrust her, when powers like that could surely provide an old one too. This all ties in to Starbuck's "destiny," which the powers have been planning since her birth, and probably before. They planted an image of a supernova in her mind, and steeled her for this life. Leoben appears to be their agent, along with the Hybrids and the Final Five -- all of these played a role in fulfilling this destiny. And the First Hybrid tell us this strange warning of her destiny, as harbinger of death, bringer of the human race to its end and herald of the apocalypse.
So this all has something to do with her destiny, but for now it's hard to make sense of it.
Let's not forget all the other things the powers have arranged, though there may be competing powers behind these events:
- The Temple of Five, triggered to activate at a supernova, planned 4,000 years prior.
- The coming of the Cylons to that planet at the supernova, along with the humans, and the many, many special things which brought them there at that time.
- The placement of the Final Five with the fleet, and with Adama and Roslin, particularly as Adama's lifelong friend.
- Waking them up at the Ionian nebula and giving them powers but no information about why.
- Meeting and battle at the Ionian nebula
- Baltar's reaching the fleet, and Anders'
And many more
Comments
Chris
Thu, 2008-05-01 22:03
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The History of the Cylons
I have questions regarding whether your interpretation of the events involving Number Three and the Temple of the Five are correct. I think there is a completely valid interpretation of what happened without requiring:
* the ancientness of the Final Five (This is a questionable point, for if these models were so ancient, then why aren't they models 1-5 instead of 7, 9-12? It seems like something happened AFTER the mapping out of the twelve models to inaugurate the 7/5 split. It only seems so ancient to the Significant 7 because when something is erased and wiped over from a computer's hard drive, what used to be there might as well be ancient history.)
* the overlooking of the back story given in some official commentary, forgive me for getting where specifically, that after their arrival at the twelve colonies, each colony went through an extended period not unlike our Dark Ages in which technological knowledge was lost and the level of technology actually went backwards to an equal level as our ancient times.
- This helps to answer your point about the level of technology not being congruent with producing robots and FTL drives. That is, not all technology should be on par with the Jetsons. All in all, though, much of your critical point still has much validity. Another thing to consider, though, is that perhaps the refinery ship is from a poorer colony, e.g., Aerelon, whose corporations are unable to afford better technology as a Caprican vessel, for instance, could (or would) have had.
* a so precisely scripted plan by the Final Five for Galactica. (You mentioned already that Tory's survival is highly fortuitous in a Galactica-centered plan. In terms of Anders, it would be a stretch to image that there plan would include getting the survivors to send someone to the occupied colonies in order to meet and eventually rescue one of the Final Five. And to have Tigh and Tyrol on the ship, it would mean a much larger conspiracy on the level of those found today saying that the Jews or reptilian aliens in human disguises are running the media and/or the economy and/or the world's governments. The Final Five would would then have to have had significant control of the Colonial Fleet to keep these 'persons' assigned to the same ship.)
* requirement of the Final Five's foreknowledge of the Significant Seven's genocidal plans, which might also then remove the basis for a single-copy (among the Colonials ever, at least) theory of the Final Five.
This explanation is that the radiation focused by the Temple's architecture uniquely affected Number Three's Cylon neurostructure such that she saw through the programming blocks regarding thinking of the Final Five. Why this explanation is plausible is that this exposure killed her. In this state, Number Three's own mind would have made up the details beyond the identities, such as the robes and august surroundings. Cylon psychology is based upon human psychology, and a fact of the latter is that the human mind does not do well with blanks and habitually fills in blanks whenever they appear.
Okay, your response is now: why then would Roslin (who has been "infected," by the technical sense of the word, with Cylon blood and thus some greater connection with the Cylons than any other human), Caprica-Six, and Athena see the same building in their shared vision? I answer, I don't know why, but it could just be something as simple as an important trope or 'latent memory' from the original programming of the Cylon's metalloid and/or humanoid models, part of those databases the future Athena references in Razor when speaking of the Guardians. All in all, taking Occam's Razor to one's theories makes theories that are much more easily incorporated into the world as has been shown and given to us thus far.
brad
Thu, 2008-05-01 22:28
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Not a big fake out
Three wasn't meant to go into the temple. The Hybrid said the secrets would be revealed to the chosen one (Baltar.) Head-six confirmed this. The Hybrid sent Baltar and the Cylons to the temple, and she takes her orders from the God. As Baltar says, "it's not chance" that they all meet there at that exact time.
He ain't kidding.
That Opera House is also seen by Baltar in the visions given to him by his inner Six, with Hera in a crib. No, it's no fake out. Three didn't make it up. And don't forget that Tyrol, member of the Final Five, had programming to make him find the temple, and programming that made him disobey direct orders to blow it up. No, the temple "of five" -- no coincidence that -- is definitely tied to the Final Five, and it's 4,000 years old, and it's built by people from Earth, as #3 says.
And the Final Five made themselves trigger at the Ionian Nebula, a place they would only go after seeing the nova at the Temple of Five. For this to be a fake out would be a serious dramatic flaw.
As for the numbering, it seems to be pretty accepted they assigned the numbers at random, and only later decided to make 5 of them special, but it was too late, they already had a 3, 6 and 8 -- no way to make the 5 be contiguous.
I never heard of a backstory of collapse, but it does seem likely, since their records of the Kobol days are scrolls and legends, not computer files. But oddly they had a virus from those days in the computer files, an Earth virus to boot.
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