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Crazy Talk

On a much less serious note, via Yglesias I see that Julian Sanchez has come up with a crazy prediction about the rest of Battlestar Galactica. It’s a nice try, but I’m afraid Sanchez is way off on this one. BSG spoilers abound in Sanchez’s post and in the post below. If you don’t want […]

On a much less serious note, via Yglesias I see that Julian Sanchez has come up with a crazy prediction about the rest of Battlestar Galactica. It’s a nice try, but I’m afraid Sanchez is way off on this one. BSG spoilers abound in Sanchez’s post and in the post below. If you don’t want to know what happened in Friday’s episode, don’t read this post.

Since I deleted the post from several months ago when I predicted that Ellen Tigh would be the final Cylon, I cannot prove that I saw this coming for a long time (maybe one of my readers can corroborate the claim), but once I had seen “Revelations” (the last episode prior to the mid-season break) it became clear that the list of candidates for the fifth of the Five was extremely short. In other words, it had to be someone who had died prior to the exodus from New Caprica, and obviously it also had to be someone who had not died after the hub had been destroyed, and there are only a very few high-profile characters who fit that description. Once Tigh was revealed to be a Cylon, making his wife one as well is the obvious, increasingly lazy move that the BSG writers have naturally resorted to (just as they explained away almost every other personal relationship with a Cylon by revealing the “human” participants to be Cylons).

Sanchez cites Dualla’s first name, Anastasia, as evidence that she will be revealed as the twelfth model, but this simply doesn’t hold up. I credit Sanchez with his understanding of what Anastasia means and his attention to detail, but he is wrong. First of all, we have important external evidence that Kandyse McClure’s contract was limited to 13 episodes, which means that we will not be seeing her again. As she played what was very nearly my favorite character, this annoys me very much, but there it is. The evidence from the show is also quite compelling. It explains why Ellen appeared out of nowhere in middle of season 1, and it is consistent with the claim that the fifth was not in the fleet by the middle of season 4. As Cylons are supposed to regard suicide as a sin, and we have never seen a Cylon successfully commit suicide, it is implausible that one of the Five would do this, so Dualla cannot be the fifth, as much as her fans might like to see her return.

P.S. It occurred to me after seeing Friday’s episode that the major female characters on BSG are far more likely to suffer violent death or injury, and the more I thought about it the more it seemed that BSG is overflowing with images of violence against women. I suppose I don’t have any great insight about this, except to note that this is the case and it seems very unusual.

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