My belated “No Exit” review

Kenneth Hynek • 18th Feb 2009 • Entertainment, Science Fiction
Adam and Eve, AI, aphasia, atheism, Battlestar Galactica, Bear McCreary, BSG, Cain and Abel, Caprica, Caprica Six, Cavil, Cylon, D'Anna Biers, Daniel Graystone, Denise Richards, DS9, Earth, Ellen Tigh, Felix Gaeta, FTL, Gaius Baltar, Galen Tyrol, gazelle, God, Head Baltar, Head Six, Heaven, Hell, Helo, Hera Agathon, iPod, IT, Jean-Paul Sarte, Kara Thrace, Kobol, Lords of Kobol, Mother Teresa, resurrection, Resurrection Hub, Samuel Anders, Saul Tigh, Sex, Sharon Agathon, Sharon Valeri, Ship of Lights, Starbuck, Temple of Five, Temple of Hopes, Theology, Tory Foster, VFX, William Adama, Zak Adama

Mind the spoilers.

There was a lot about the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica that I liked, and a few things I didn’t like. I stuffed the episode onto my iPod so that I could watch it again, because I had the feeling that I’d missed a few things…and sure enough, I had. Which serves as the segue into my first real problem with the episode: if you thought The Oath happened at a break-neck pace, No Exit will leave you breathless. It starts a bit slowly, but once the characters start talking, it’s positively relentless in its pacing.

So relentless, in fact, that Bear McCreary — the show’s talented composer — didn’t do his usual analysis of the show’s musical cues:

I’m certain some of you will miss my in-depth musical analysis for these entries. The reality is that the unusual amount of fast-paced and essential dialog in these two shows left little room for big musical statements.

(hat tip)

And to be fair, No Exit is a pretty important episode, so important that the show’s producers opted to place a special title sequence in front of it, giving a concise history of the human/Cylon conflict and detailing the eleven “known to be alive” humanoid Cylon models, and the one model that was “sacrificed” — Ellen Tigh. Yes, this is the episode Ellen returns in. Or, rather, this is the episode that details her return; within the show’s chronology, Ellen resurrected “eighteen months ago,” or shortly after the events of the third season episode Exodus, Part II.

Before I continue, I want to discuss structure for a moment. Much of the episode seems to follow what strikes me as a kind of odd parallelism.

The title of the episode is apparently derived from a play written by Jean-Paul Sarte, about three people trapped in Hell, each of whom loathes the other two. This is the essential framework for what transpires on the basestar between Ellen, Sharon Valeri (“Boomer”), and Cavil (whose first name, we learn, is “John”). This framework forms one half of the parallelism; roughly half of the important revelations that take place in the show take place in the conversations that result from the meeting of these three characters.

And if the Cylon basestar in which the above takes place can be likened to the setting of Hell in Sarte’s play, I wonder if perhaps the Galactica isn’t meant by the show’s writers to be, by contrast, a kind of Heaven. Sarte’s play contained the notable line “Hell is other people,” but the scenes that happen on the Galactica would seem to argue that Heaven is, likewise, other people. These scenes focus almost exclusively on the character of Samuel Anders, who is about to undergo surgery to remove a bullet from his brain — an injury incurred at the end of the recent mutiny. They too feature a seemingly non-stop torrent of backstory revelations, as Anders attempts to tell the other “Final Fivers” — Galen Tyrol, Tory Foster, and Saul Tigh — and Starbuck all that is being recalled to him before the “brain guy” cuts into his head. But whereas the scenes on the basestar are full of anger and rage, the scenes on the battlestar are full of supportiveness, love (especially on the part of Kara Thrace, who in the wake of his trauma has jumped head-first into the role of being Anders’ wife, it seems), and curiosity.

The two halves of the episode, then, are joined by one common point: the mysterious Daniel, the Number Seven Cylon model (whose existence I speculated about previously), which both Ellen and Anders discuss, but in different ways. And actually, that difference extends to pretty much all of what each character talks about. Ellen mostly talks about what happened after Cavil was created, while Anders mostly talks about what happened before Cavil was created. One further contrast exists in regard to chronology; the events surrounding Ellen happen in flashbacks, while the events surrounding Anders happen in the present.

Anyhow, that was a slightly longer aside than I thought it would be, and it was supposed to serve as a kind of skeletal outline for the rest of the review.

Ellen

One of the things I’m not sure I liked in this episode was the fact that Ellen is a completely different character than what we knew before. Barb Nicolosi noted this as well in her brief comments on the episode:

What is it about being resurrected that turned Ellen the Ditzy Whore into Mother Teresa, eh? Ellen Tigh was a narcissistic, unbalanced, sexual predator, who routinely betrayed anyone who got n the way of her own desires and ambitions. Now, we are supposed to believe that she is the wise, technically brilliant, maternal, creator of the skin jobs and resurrection technology. Yeah, I’m buying that like I bought Denise Richards as a PhD in physics in one of the Bond movies…Just having had your memory stripped wouldn’t turn you into a silly serial sensualist. She would have remained brilliant and loving, even if she couldn’t remember having created a race of nearly perfect human clones.

Now, to be fair, I don’t wholly agree, and for two reasons. One, I don’t think Barb’s comments really demonstrate a complete understanding of the show’s premise where Cylon resurrection is concerned (and the fact that newly “downloaded” Cylons have access to the memories of every member of their model line), and two, I don’t think she’s really understood just what heights of sadism Cavil has achieved. It would be the delight — the pure, unadulterated, sadistic joy — of Cavil to re-wire the motherly, wise Ellen into a drunken sex fiend, to turn someone loving maternal into someone lustful and primal. And we know already that the Cylons are excellent at writing personality “software.”

I think my issue is not so much that Ellen is a wholly different character (a premise I’m willing to buy into), but that her reversion to her original personality is not well-explained. The show opens with a rather amusing, Matrix-like VFX sequence of data moving through void and wires, which leads up to the shot of Ellen surging out of the goo of a resurrection tank; could the writers maybe have spared us an additional thirty seconds to better illustrate her reversion by her accessing her original memories and personality?

But that’s a minor quibble..

From the first hint we had of her as the final Cylon, in Sometimes a Great Notion, Ellen has seemed to be the one most in charge out of all the Final Five; in this episode, she seems to emerge (in how Cavil portrays her) as the principal architect of the “skinjobs,” and Anders further notes that it was her innovation that ultimately brought to fruition the work the other four “Final Fivers” were doing to rebuild resurrection technology back in their “original” lives on the cinder planet called Earth. To those qualities, we can now add a very motherly air, and a mind as sharp as good surgical steel — she is able to balance or deflect everything Cavil says to her in his banter, driving him time and again into fits of apoplexy.

The first Cylon Ellen meets upon resurrecting is a Centurion, which hesitates in its response after she asks it for help up out of the resurrection tank. I think it’s obvious that the Centurions recognize the Final Five, then, and that they hold the Five in some kind of special reverence. For much of the rest of the time, she sees only Boomer and Cavil, although a Centurion is present during the final scene.

In regard to the Centurions, I find I’m actually curious about one point: while it’s probable that on Cavil’s ships, the Centurions have not had their inhibitors removed, I wonder what would have happened had Cavil actually succeeded in his attempt to perform invasive surgery on Ellen? Would the Centurions have intervened to protect one of the Final Five?

There’s also a very interesting symbolism that happens between Ellen and Boomer in one scene, after Boomer brings lunch and Cavil instructs her to stay with Ellen and talk for a bit. Ellen picks up an apple from a tray of fruit and offers it to Boomer — this is meant as an allusion to the temptation offered by the serpent to Eve, the temptation of knowledge. Of course, in an inversion of this, Ellen isn’t offering Boomer the keys to forbidden knowledge per sé, but is instead encouraging her to seek knowledge for herself, rather than accept what Cavil is spoon-feeding to her.

Actually, Ellen displays quite a lot of contempt for the idea that Cavil would in any way relate to one of the other Significant Seven Cylon models, and even wonders at whether the rapport he claims exists between himself and Boomer extends to “the Swirl.” Given Cavil’s reaction (and the fact that he’s made comments in the past about the breasts of the Number Eight models, and that he’s enjoyed nude dances given by Eights as well), it’s probably safe to assume that Sex plays a major role in keeping Cavil’s mood toward Sharon Valeri amicable.

Then again, perhaps — in an extension of her disgust at the Oedipal relations between her and Cavil — she is just upset at the thought that her children are behaving in what are essentially incestuous ways, from her point of view.

Cavil

In a lot of ways, Cavil is the star of this episode; he gets what are arguably the best lines, and seems at once to be following two different allegories. There’s an obvious Oedipal aspect to him, given that he knew all along that Ellen was a Final Fiver and, moreover, that she was his “mother” (so to speak) — this makes his pursuit of sexual relations with her in the third season’s opening episodes all the more depraved. Moreover, he throws this in Ellen’s face early on in the episode, and it’s the one time in the show that she demonstrates an attitude of what could be called disgust, or perhaps sorrow.

For much of the rest of the episode, Cavil rails against the limitations of his human body, argues at one point that metal might have been a better structural choice, and even laments that he is unable to “smell” dark matter. Of course, this probably communicates a whole host of underlying fears on Cavil’s part. If nothing else, his statements contain a handful of points that threw up flags for me:

• if he hates his human body so much, and if he thinks metal would be superior, and if the Cylons in general have made as many advances in regard to brain analysis and programming as he claims, why not just transfer himself into an upgraded Centurion or Raider? Why not become a basestar?
• one notes that Cavil’s stated preference for e.g. a metal body wouldn’t bring him any closer to his stated desire of wanting to experience a supernova to the point at which he could feel the solar wind and shockwave washing over him.
• at their core, Cavil’s actions seem to speak of some deep-seated fears. Not being particularly in tune with modern psychology, I can’t quite say what, although I notice that he seems very self-hating, and I wonder if his lamentations about his inherent limitations speaks of a larger fear of disappointing others (e.g. his “creators”)?
• Ellen notes that Cavil was always a petulant, jealous boy, and I seem to recall that early personality indicators of this sort can serve as strong indicators for atheism later on in life, a trait which Cavil also displays.

Cavil also seems to be on a Cain (as in Cain and Abel) character arc, for his murder of the Number Seven model out of fear that it was the more favoured of its creators (Ellen admits the possibility). Three’s actually more to this; Cain was the firstborn of Adam and Eve, while Cavil is the “firstborn” of the Final Five. Of course, the Oedipal character aspects fuse with the Cain character aspects in the final scenes of the show, as Cavil plots to cut Ellen open in order to plumb the depths of her brain for the secrets of resurrection after she refuses his demands that she rebuild the technology in the wake of the Resurrection Hub’s destruction.

Not that Ellen could rebuild the system by herself anyhow. But this limitation wouldn’t stop Cavil from enacting one last sadistic act of spite against Ellen.

Sadism is one other trait that really marks Cavil, and the full extent of it is revealed in this episode; not only did he arrange for the deaths of the Final Five initially (and then by means of suffocation; not a nice way to go), but he then interfered with their resurrection process and released each of them into the Colonies, one at a time, with altered memories and personalities. Taking a cue from what he did to Ellen, it seems furthermore that he fitted them with personalities that were the polar opposite of their original selves — not only did he turn the maternal, wise Ellen into a lustful, drunken whore, but he turned the spiritual and inventive Anders into a carefree jock. One wonders if he did the same to the other three Fivers?

Building the skinjobs

There’s an interesting new twist to the notion of cyclical history introduced in this show — disparate societies sharing only a common origin developing essentially identical technologies, albeit at different times. Whatever the origin of the Cylons that made up the Thirteenth Tribe, it is clear that they developed their own form of Centurions, and pressed these into service as essentially slave labour; their Centurions subsequently rebelled and brought about a nuclear holocaust. Perhaps because of the lack of FTL technology, though, the Thirteenth Tribe Centurions were ultimately wiped out alongside their former masters — but then, perhaps they viewed this as the preferable fate. We don’t really know for sure, as yet.

But we do know that the Cylons of the Thirteenth Tribe built their own Cylons (as weird as that sounds), and were done in by those creations. The Final Five fled Earth and attempted to reach the Twelve Colonies in order to warn them about using Cylon slave labour — they anticipated that humanity would continue to research AI and cybernetics technologies, and furthermore anticipated the probable uses toward which humanity would put any developments made in those fields.

Of course, they arrived too late; the Centurions of the Twelve Colonies had already rebelled by the time the Final Five arrived. The Five stopped the war by offering to help the Colonial Cylons build skinjobs (they had succeeded in developing the basestar Hybrids, but nothing more than that — this explains what we saw in Razor).

Cavil — John — was the first skinjob, of eight models in total. In a fit of jealousy, he wiped out the Number Seven models, the Daniels, and obviously exerted some power in helping to create the other six models with which we are familiar. Once he wiped out the Final Five and released them into the Colonies, it appears that he also began to exert influence in other areas. The Centurions stopped their war against the Colonies in exchange for “skinjob technology,” but Cavil — per his statement that he gave the Final Five “ringside seats to a holocaust” — appears to have picked away the scab on that conflict, and it looks as though he was ultimately the one who masterminded the destruction of the Twelve Colonies.

Ellen calls him on that, somewhat, noting that if his rejection of human ideals is really as comprehensive as he boasts that it is, he shouldn’t be engaging in something as petty and human as vengeance. Cavil replies that he’s out for justice for “the Centurion side” of his “family,” but this objection rings hollow — given everything else that he’s corrupted, it’s probable that he’s the one responsible for putting the inhibitors into the Centurions that deny them free will; he is therefore every bit as much guilty of enslaving his “family” as are the humans, according to his own reasoning.

What I found really interesting, though, is that it isn’t just the humans that display a cyclical, predictable research pattern; the Cylons created by the Twelve Colonies were likewise researching how to manufacture humanoid Cylons, paralleling the earlier development of the humanoid Cylons of the Thirteenth Tribe.

And if we retroject the cyclical model of history back to the days that humanity dwelt on Kobol, in light of the above, we can begin to speculate as to what might have happened on that world that led up to the cataclysm that ultimately drove the various tribes off of it. Obviously, the Thirteenth Colony humanoid Cylons were developed by humans — or “humans,” let’s say — at some previous point in history, probably on Kobol. At some point — and then thousands of years before the final exodus from Kobol — these Cylons left the “birthplace of mankind” behind.

Two thousand years later, some unknown cataclysm struck Kobol, forcing the evacuation of the remaining tribes; this destruction paralleled the destruction of Earth, and we are meant to reason that there is some kind of connection between the two events — could a Cylon rebellion have taken place on Earth at the same time that “humanity’s children” were sending a revenge fleet from Earth to Kobol?

Update: Earth was destroyed because the Cylons’ “metal battlebots” turned on them. From Chicago Tribune

(source)

There’s a wider question here, of course: what was the nature of the humans on Kobol in the first place? Were they “human” in the sense that you and I, good reader, are human? Or were they an even earlier incarnation of humanoid Cylons, created by the Lords of Kobol in much the same way as the Significant Seven were created by the Final Five?

Gadzooks, I’m going to have to draw a picture just to keep this all straight.

The other interesting issue that comes up is echoed in Boomer’s questions for Ellen, which attempt to replicate Cavil’s sentiments but end up sounding a bit forced: Boomer wonders, somewhat ineptly, if Ellen feels any remorse for having made Cavil as she did. Ellen’s reply is a definitive “no,” coupled with an explanation of the actual end goals the Final Five had in fabricating the Significant Seven…which was to make them capable of free will, love, and compassion.

Cylon infertility

The issue of Cylon infertility adds to the previous questions, possibly. Bear with me, because the following is highly speculative.

Consider:

1. The Significant Seven Cylons, apparently by design (although it may be that Cavil has removed this knowledge from the other models, and then encouraged attempts at reproduction among them in another act of sadism — this time in the form of what is essentially a mind game) cannot reproduce sexually — they are creatures which can continue to exist only by means of resurrection.
2. The Final Five come from a colony of humanoid Cylons that at one point propagated by means of resurrection technology, but which developed (or always possessed, and simply opted to make wider use of) the ability to procreate sexually.

There appears here to be the start of a pattern; with each “generation” of humanoid Cylon, sexual procreation appears subject to more and more limitation. Retrojecting this back to Kobol, there’s an argument to be made that the “humans” of Kobol could well have been skinjobs as well, albeit ones that were fully capable of both reproduction and, presumably, resurrection; Anders notes that “organic memory transfer” technology originated on Kobol, but does not mention in what capacity this technology was used. Could it have been used to create a paradise, complete with “eternal life”, for the “humans” of Kobol?

There’s two other points I want to touch on, before moving on.

• Infertility in the Significant Seven Cylons seems to be implemented through the male models; two separate female models have demonstrated the ability to become pregnant. This would actually be in keeping with other shows Ron Moore has worked on; in DS9, for example, birth control was implemented by giving men some kind of injection.
• There may be a very good reason indeed, why the Final Five withheld reproductive capabilities from the Significant Seven, or at least made it impossible for them to breed. Perhaps that was a design choice that would make necessary, in the event that the ability to resurrect was disrupted (could this have been the plan all along?), human-Cylon interbreeding. The overall goal of the Final Five seems to be peace, and seems to be driven by a desire to see human and Cylon co-exist beneficially; this sort of design choice would proceed naturally enough from such a desire.

Anders

In contrast to all we learn through Ellen, Anders doesn’t give us all that many details about what happened after the Final Five arrived at the Colonies (and actually, he doesn’t give us much information that I really want to comment on). He does, due to his aphasia, have several Hybrid-like utterances, which Lisa details in her review of the episode, and some of these seem to have significance both to No Exit and, possibly, to what is yet to come in the series.

In particular, his declaration that “[t]here is a new tide, and all the forgotten faces, all the forgotten children; we seek the great forgotten language,” is interesting, and I can’t help but wonder if isn’t hinting at what I’m speculating at in the section above, regarding whether the “humans” of Kobol were actually human at all, in the sense that e.g. I am human. Is it possible that the people of Kobol are all just “children” of humanity, forgotten among many, and that Anders’ utterances speak of some greater desire on the part of humanity/God/the Lords of Kobol to see all the children brought back together again?

(Could the Lords themselves be yet another iteration of humanoid Cylon, the original “children” of humanity?)

The really interesting part of what Anders has to say has to do with the warnings that he and the other members of the Final Five received about the impending holocaust on Earth, delivered by beings of some kind that none of the others could perceive. Anders himself saw a woman, Tory saw a man, and Tyrol wondered whether he was going nuts, whether he had a chip in his head.

Gee…we’ve heard that before, haven’t we?

These warnings inspired the Final Five to re-invent resurrection technology — Tyrol evidently did a lot of the engineering work on the system, while it was Ellen’s intuition that ultimately figured out how to put the system into action. They launched some kind of early-model Resurrection Ship and, when the holocaust happened, set out from their doomed world on a mission to try and save the other colonies from a similar fate. Of course, for as advanced as their colony had been in regard to resurrection and organic memory transfer, it had lagged behind in developing FTL capabilities, and so their journey had to happen at sub-luminal velocities; it took them the better part of 2,000 years to cover the distance.

(I’m looking forward to Michael Hall’s promised analysis of this point.)

We haven’t seen Head Six (or Head Baltar) for a while now, but it appears that there are more “head” characters in the mix now (though we may never see the others). There’s no indication yet what these characters might be; Ron Moore has said that he won’t be incorporating “aliens” into BSG, so we are currently left with three possibilities as to what the head characters might be:

• illusions
• delusions
• OR supernatural beings of some kind (angels/demons)

I’m ruling out “delusions,” given that all the head characters seem to be driving things toward a common purpose of some sort; actual delusions wouldn’t demonstrate that sort of clarity of purpose and consistency in message. The possibility that these are illusions — some in-built feature of every Cylon, tracing back to the original Cylons, whenever and wherever those existed — remains open, as does the possibility that these head people are actually supernatural beings of some kind, akin to the Seraphs of the Ship of Lights in the original series.

But if so, are they angels, or demons?

Love

Saul Tigh and Kara Thrace ares the other character of some significance in this episode, or at least the ones that really caught my attention.

Take Tigh, for instance. Not only does he serve as a balance against Tory Foster’s unrelenting misanthropy when he notes that humans and Cylons probably come out sharing the blame for all that has happened, but he demonstrates a real sense of wonder and love when he learns, from Caprica Six, that their child — a son, apparently (is this in some way significant, given that Hera Agathon is female?) — had started to kick in the womb.

I think this contrasts Ellen’s remark to Boomer about her rapport with Cavil including “the Swirl,” in that it contrasts a very debased, lustful, and potentially sadistic view of sexuality (represented by Cavil and Boomer) with a loving and life-giving view of sexuality (represented by Tigh and Caprica, and by their child).

Kara, as previously noted, has become the loving wife seemingly overnight. But then, traumas are sometimes like that — it is only when faced with the prospect of losing something that we begin to understand how dear it actually might just be to us.

The other interesting example is Boomer, strangely enough. Despite her wondering who among the humans she could even love, in response to what Ellen says about giving the Significant Seven the ability to love, Boomer evidently is swayed by Ellen’s words. (The director gives us a none-too-subtle hint of this by cutting away to Tyrol after Boomer finishes asking her question.) I don’t completely grasp Boomer’s motives in helping Ellen escape, but I’m pretty sure it stems from rejecting Cavil in some capacity.

Then again, maybe not; one notes that in an upcoming episode, she apparently uses her identicality to Sharon Agathon to trick her way into bed with Helo.

Rebuilding Resurrection

Lisa notes, and I agree, that Ellen seems relatively unconcerned with the destruction of the resurrection hub, and deflects Cavil’s demands that she rebuild the technology with the observation that she doesn’t have all the necessary knowledge. We’ve already discussed what this motivates Cavil to threaten to do, but I want to revisit one other point just to make it clearer.

In my review of The Hub, I described the Resurrection Hub as a “single point of failure” — an IT term denoting a critical piece of hardware in a system which, should it fail, would bring down said system entirely. “As to why the Cylons made resurrection dependent on a single facility that could be destroyed, I [didn't] really care to speculate — [at the time, I was] willing to accept that the process of resurrection [was] so ludicrously complex to manage that they had not yet thought out a way to develop a distributed solution (the Cylons aren’t gods, after all — at least as far as we know).”

And I know that other bloggers wondered openly as to why the Cylons would put something so critical into just a single facility.

Of course, with the revelation that the Colonial Cylons didn’t invent resurrection, but were instead gifted with the technology by the Final Five, I’m beginning to wonder if there wasn’t indeed a measure of deliberateness in making the entire mechanism of Cylon resurrection dependent on that single point of failure. Could the Final Five have built the system with its failure not only in mind, but as the end goal?

As noted in the section concerning reproduction, the Significant Seven cannot reproduce with each other by design. Coupled with the Final Five’s desire to see peace between human and Cylon — or between successive iterations of Cylons, as the case may be — it could well be that the destruction of the Hub was intended to happen eventually, thus forcing the issue for the Significant Seven: either die out and be forgotten, or interbreed with humanity and bring the humano-Cylon division to an end.

Of course, the big revelation that came out of the discussion of rebuilding resurrection was the revelation that the various research tools (at least) necessary to constructing the system still exist at “The Colony,” whatever that is (we are told that it is significant, however). My first thought, since the initial revelation of “The Colony” happened in a flashback that took place –chronologically — before Revelations, was that it might be a reference to the planet found in Revelations, the planet called Earth.

But in looking over the BSG timeline at Battlestar Wiki, I’m not so sure. That would imply that Cavil knew about Earth, so why wasn’t he just waiting there to wipe out the fleet when it arrived? The timeline at Battlestar Wiki implies that “The Colony,” whatever it is, was established after the creation of Cavil, and so would be known to him in that way; this makes more sense to me as a hypothesis, since there was really no indication given that anything — even lab equipment — survived the holocaust on Earth.

Galactica

Galactica was built by the lowest bidder, it seems, and corners were cut. That was a hilarious little revelation, if I do say so myself. But in a roundabout way, it introduces another aspect of something I’ve touched on a few times already: the unification of human and Cylon.

Adama is initially reluctant to have Cylons even working on the repairs to his ship, and he utterly rejects Tyrol’s suggestion of using the organic resin to repair and strengthen the micro-fractured skeletal structure of the ship. He reverses, at least, the latter decision, thus agreeing to effectively “mate” Cylon hull technology with Colonial hull design, to produce a hybridized result that will be stronger in the end.

Which is clearly not any sort of allusion or foreshadowing on the part of the writers. No sir.

Fun with dates

Oh good gravy, but things are jumbled now.

Firstly, I think Ellen flubbed continuity a bit when she noted that the Temple of Hopes/Temple of Five was built only 3,000 years ago; this contradicts Tyrol’s dating of the temple (4,000 years), but actually affirms William Adama’s repetition of Cottle’s findings regarding the virus found on the Lion’s Head beacon, which put the date of the Thirteenth Tribe’s exodus at only 3,000 years prior to the events of the series.

So…who knows?

God, gods, and Biblical references

There’s a bunch of Biblical references in the dialogue in this episode, and while I haven’t time to catalogue them all, I did want to draw attention to Anders’ identification of Ellen as “the gazelle.” Though this could be an allusion to sexual virility, it could also be an allusion to Song of Solomon 4:5, which refers to the dorcus gazelle — a symbol of beauty, lightness, and grace, and warm affection.

As I say, there’s other references too, but I’ve not got the time to catalogue them all at present. Maybe tomorrow, or Friday.

What’s interesting to note is that in what was arguably the big, expository episode for the season (we can hope), Moore and his writers didn’t really slam shut many of the openings through which God has been peeking. Ellen forcefully asserts that she and the rest of the Final Five had nothing to do with the imagery projected in the Temple of Five when the star went nova — she attributes the vision D’Anna Biers saw to “the one true God.” Moreover, both she and Anders assert that it was the discovery of the Colonial Centurion’s belief in “one true God” that “changed everything” — as Anders noted, “[i]f the Cylons embraced love and mercy, then the cycle of violence could end.”

(Which, incidentally, brings us back to the discussion of resurrection, reproduction, and the intent behind the limitations in the design of the Significant Seven’s ability to procreate.)

What is implied in all of this is that the Final Five — and, by extension, the Thirteenth Tribe — were polytheistic at first. The question of whether they were polytheists or monotheists came up in a discussion I had on the blog a while back, and at the time we couldn’t say with certainty what the deal was. Now, apparently, we know; monotheism came from the Colonial Centurions (another Caprica tie-in, by the way).

This would seem to cast doubts on the hypothesis that the Thirteenth Tribe are the children or devotees of “The One Who Cannot Be Named,” since we would expect them to be monotheists in that case. Of course, in that case, the whole nature of the Temple of Hopes/Five is cast into doubt…but then, we’re not even sure when it was built anymore, or to what purpose. Ellen’s assertion was that it was built by the Thirteenth Tribe, and that God (unary) answered their prayers and showed them the way to Earth from there. But again, monotheism came from the Colonial Centurions (per Anders’ statements), so shouldn’t the Thirteenth Tribe have stopped to pray to the gods (e.g. the Lords of Kobol)?

Or did devotees of “The One Who Cannot Be Named” still acknowledge the other gods, albeit as lesser deities?

This is a really confusing point which I hope gets resolved soon.

Update: “The Final Five were polytheists until they met the Centurions, who were monotheists.” From Chicago Tribune

(source)

There’s also something interestingly theological in what Ellen says to Cavil at one point. Previously, we’d heard Baltar’s prognostications concerning that which God loves — to Baltar’s way of thinking, God only loves that which is perfect. I had previously commented on how this was an inversion of Christian Theology, which asserts that God perfects that which He loves. And it’s this latter sentiment that Ellen displays toward Cavil; despite noting his imperfections, she offers him love at every turn, even attempting to hug him as a mother might an angry child.

Cavil, of course, spurns her…but it’s interesting to note the meaning of the moment all the same. Whereas before we’ve heard only Baltar’s spouting off about how God only loves that which is perfect, here we see genuine love: the love of a parent for a child, however imperfect, whose perfection she desires to see and bring about, but whose imperfections do not in any way cause her to love him less.

Information overload & new loose ends

I hate to end on a bad note, but I have a few things to say about what I didn’t like about the episode.

Firstly, I’m not a huge fan of the “tell all” episode format. The way they did it here did work, admittedly…but I wonder if things couldn’t have been better structured earlier in the season so as to ease the quantity of information that necessarily had to come out in the dialogue at this point in time. Because…good gravy, it was an overload. As noted previously, I had to watch things through again just to be able to feel as though I’d actually watched the episode once.

Sheesh.

The thing that annoyed me the most about No Exit, though, was how, with a couple quick strokes, it turned two different plotlines that have thus far driven the series forward — the hunt for the Final Five (and then later the Final Cylon) and the search for Earth — into little more than massive red herrings. Now, suddenly, we have a new Final Cylon dangled in front of us (Daniel, the Number Seven model), and a new planet (“the Colony”) to find.

There’s sleight of hand, and then there’s bait and switch. The former can be amusing, while the latter never is, and this kind of feels like the latter.

Not that I’ve become dis-invested in the show over it, mind you; it’s a gripe I have, but it hasn’t taken me out of my enjoyment of the story, and I’m still excited to see what happens in the next few episodes. I have been convinced for some time now that there was still another planet — the real “promised land,” per the Pythian prophecy — to be discovered…I’m just not sure I’m happy with how that plotline has been introduced, in a throwaway reference by Cavil (and also, somewhat, by Anders).

(Could “the Colony” be “our” Earth, the Earth shown at the end of Season 3? Michael Hall notes that the constellations around Cavil’s fleet match those that can be seen from the surface of the planet we are currently on, good reader; if the location of “the Colony” was known to Cavil, could he have positioned himself near it…and, by extension, near the real Earth?)

This bit about Daniel, though…I know it exists to tie us in to the Caprica series that will be Ron Moore’s next project. I just…I don’t know. It feels kind of “late in the game” (although, arguably, we’ve known about the Number Seven “gap” for about a season’s worth of episodes now).

At any rate, it may well be an explicit reference to Daniel Graystone, who will feature in the new series as the computer engineer primarily responsible for the creation of the Cylons.

That said, this Daniel was an artist and a sensitive soul, rather than a heartbroken engineer, so I’m fairly certain that we’re being set up for one last Cylon reveal. As to who “Daniel” could be…well, there was Felix Gaeta’s confession to Gaius Baltar in the previous episode, in which he expressed a love of various artistic pursuits. Starbuck is another possibility, given her past experiments in painting. And I suppose that Zak Adama emerges as a possibility as well — we don’t know for sure what kind of artistic talent he might have had, but he certainly wasn’t meant for a gruff life of service in war.

Possibly Related Stuff:

• March 9, 2009 -- Islanded in a Stream of Stars (and oddly familiar planets)
• February 24, 2009 -- “His name was Liam.”
• March 23, 2009 -- “You know, I know about farming.” (BSG)
• January 19, 2009 -- Sometimes a Great…Ellen?
• May 13, 2008 -- After watching “Faith”