Blessed by the Potato

After a long hiatus due to the writers’ strike, Battlestar Galactica returned for another season this week. One thing I noticed is that the delay seems to have given the animators more time to render the first big battle sequence, “spiffifying” it to a degree I haven’t noticed in previous seasons. Before this episode aired, I was speculating with some friends at work about what this season might have in store, which I will discuss after the

Spoiler warning!

So at the end of last season, we found Col. Tigh, the mechanic guy, and two other meat bags hearing music in their heads, and deciding that they were Cylons. I figured that there was no way they could be Cylons; or rather, no way Colonel Tigh could be a Cylon, since he had been with Adama since before the Cylons started their hybrid/humanesque experiments in the last war. While it’s pretty clear in this episode that the humans suspect that the Cylons might have the ability to copy a real human and make a damned bloody machine out of them, as far as we know the Cylon technology only allows them to grow a very limited number of humanesque Cylon models. Models created de novo. That aspect is even mentioned when discussing their suspicions about Starbuck: if she’s a Cylon, it must mean she was always a Cylon. Since it seems impossible that Colonel Tigh could have been replaced (especially under the watchful eye of Bill Adama), then it must mean that he’s not a Cylon. One guy at work agreed, also saying that “it would just be too goddamned easy for the writers to make Tigh a Cylon. It’s an easy out for them after all the prickish inhuman things he did in the resistance. If he’s a Cylon, he’ll never really have to answer or come to terms with that.”

That lead me to conclude that the musical four must instead be some kind of nascent prophets. There is, after all, plenty of religious and quasireligious events in the series, including numerous visions by various main characters, include Madame President herself, so I figured it stood to reason that the god(s) of the humans had selected those four loony bins to help guide the fleet towards Earth (which only part of me hopes is not trapped 1980), or find a way to negotiate with the Cylons (perhaps by leading them to think they were Cylons, and thus open up a dialogue), or to find a way to bring the holy fire of vengeance to bear against those godless (er… godfull) machines that nuked the 12 colonies of Cobol.

Of course, that line of reasoning looks to have been shot down as Anders looked straight into the red eye of a raider (who bleed this season, by the way; wonder if that’ll be retconned into some of the DVD releases) and had a response… of some sort.

Anyway, it promises to be an interesting season. And we can thank the writers’ strike for potentially opening up the summer months to new episodes for the first time ever. Hopefully that’ll stay and we’ll get more episodes per season of our favourite shows (that, or that the networks will decide to continue to air other good series through the summer instead of reruns and filler crap).