4.2 Six Of One

Season 4, for me, is struggling to get going. Probably this is because the end of Season 3 left such an explosive and dramatic pile of plot threads and gasping revelations to be picked up the pace couldn’t be maintained. So it seems to me that this episode was designed explicitly to slow things right down so a new momentum could be gathered.

For example, on Galactica there was little in the way of progression from what we had already come to learn about from the previous episode. Apollo was still leaving his position as CAG, and this episode gave him an emotional send off from all the crew (who seem somewhat quick to forget his swift courtroom defence of Gaius, along with his father!). And then there was Starbuck who failed to convince Laura she was wrong, but slowly managed to win Adama round into giving her a shot.

So the episode ended with Starbuck, Helo, and potentially a small crew being given licence to take a ship and go searching for Earth. This is almost surely going to turn into a massive decision, and a crucial element in the future of the show. I’ll be watching that plot thread with great interest.

Gaius, meanwhile, was being slowly seduced by Tori on orders of Tigh and the other Final Four Cylons to try and ascertain if he was the last Cylon. Tori seemed to become convinced that she had found her man, but I am still not convinced. There was the startling moment for Gaius, however, when his own doppelganger mental apparition turned up to talk to him!

Now what the hell was all that about? The Six in his head has now been traded for himself!? Does this mean Caprica Six may start seeing visions of her own self? This does, potentially, create the idea that the manifestations Gaius, and later Six, have been plagued with since the beginning are an entity entirely distinct and separate somehow. Quite HOW I don’t know.

In a welcome break we also got treated to some Cylon action, with them deciding what to do about the Raiders thinking for themselves and withdrawing their attacks by their own command. Cavell, and two other models of Cylon, decided to have the Raiders lobotomised so they could no longer function by themselves. Caprica Six and others decided that was not acceptable, and so took matters into their own hands.

The ‘release’ of the Centurions to have free will may have opened the door to the potential extinction of all the Cylon moulds. If all of this has happened and will happen again, what perhaps needs to happen is that the Centurions destroy their Cylon masters (as they once turned on their human masters) to become the dominant race of the Cylon species. Maybe for a while the humans and the Cylons will live in harmony, and then there’s a war, and an armistice. . . And maybe the whole thing starts all over again. That’s my hunch guess at how the show could play out (as I believe this is the last series and so my mind cannot help but start concerning itself with potential conclusions).

It’s a heck of a guess, but I am sure that Centurion free will has to have a major say in the shape of the future for the Cylons. Now that at least three of the moulds have been destroyed (I assume all of the Cavells and the Black Guy and the PR Guy were destroyed otherwise killing that one group would serve no purpose, since they can be downloaded easily enough) perhaps Six and the Boomer and Leoben moulds will start making key decisions that will govern the fate of the Cylons and the human race and their combined destinies.

Well, you’d hope so!