Justin Cox Presents:

I Now Know what a Cylon is

For the longest time I had no idea. Awhile back, when the new season of Battlestar Galactica began, Cylons were the talk of Twitter. Realizing I had no idea what such a thing was, I gave up caring. Then, in her transition to big kid blogging, Ashley Awesome ran a contest and posted the first five minutes of the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries and I found out just what a Cylon is. As a result, the wonderful people at Netflix sent me said miniseries which I screened the other night. I am now enlightened.

Minor plot spoilers will be contained in the paragraphs that follow. In the instance of a major spoiler I’ll be using my fancy spoiler tags simply because I can. I’ll try and keep the information mostly spoiler free, but just in case something comes up, it’ll be blacked out. Mouse over to read the line. Note that the spoiler tags don’t work in RSS so you have been warned.

The Cast of the Battlestar Galactica Miniseries

Cylons are robots that man created to make life easier and, like all robots eventually do, turned on mankind and attempted to kill everyone. A truce was reached and the war ended. That was 40 years ago. The Battlestar Galactica is a special battleship that was designed to fight in the Cylon War. It has no networked computers and extremely antiquated equipment. As such, it’s being decommissioned and turned into a museum. Though on the day this ceremony is taking place, the Cylons decide to return and eradicate the human race thus quickly bringing the Galactica out of retirement.

Over the course of the three hour miniseries the remaining 50,000 human survivors are gathered and make a Faster Than Light (FTL) jump to a remote outpost where ammunition and supplies are stored. Here a major air battle is fought before another FTL jump towards destination unknown in an effort to run from the Cylon forces and preserve the human race.

Among the survivors not enlisted and assigned to the Galactica are Dr. Gaius Baltar, the premiere advanced robotic mind who, unbeknownst to everyone including himself, was sleeping with a Cylon before the nukes started to fall; President Laura Roslin who, before the bombs fell, was actually the Secretary of Education; some little kid who won a lottery instituted by Lt. Boomer while she was fixing her ship on Caprica; and some others I don’t feel like pointing out.

The major revelation to the crew of the Galactica is that the Cylons have 12 new models that look, feel, and bleed like humans. Over the course of the miniseries 4 models are revealed: the attractive one that Gaius was sleeping with whom he still sees and interacts with despite her actually being there, a smuggler Captain Adama kills while they are getting supplies from the outpost, a “survivor” on the President’s ship, and — in the twist at the end of the series — Lt. Boomer herself. Evidently some of the models are “sleeper agents” and don’t know they are Cylons. Seemingly until the 12 models are discovered, the human race isn’t safe.

The miniseries concludes with a roaring speech given by Captain Adama about a mythical planet in deep space that could be used as refuge — if they can find it (or it exists). The plant, the destination for the Galactica and the survivors, is Earth. It’ll be cool to see if they ever make it or run into anybody along the way.

The miniseries is pretty solid, though was a little boring until about the last hour or so. I’ll give it a little grace considering they had a lot of characters and history to introduce. It’s like the Star Wars: Episode I curse. Either way, by the end I was pretty engaged and am curious to see how things play out.

Given that the Cylons seem to be tricky folk, I am going to make some bold predictions. I think that all of the characters I introduced above — Gaius, President Roslin, and that creepy kid — are all Cylons whether they know it or not. In the case of Gaius and Roslin, I don’t think they know it. My other guess for a Cylon is Colonel Tigh just because I don’t like him very much. Granted, I’m more than likely wrong on all of these, but that’s why I call them bold predictions. Frankly, I hope I’m wrong because then watching the episodes unfold wouldn’t be very fun. I was surprised when Boomer was revealed a Cylon so hopefully the rest of them will be just as surprising.

There you have it. I now know what a Cylon is and can use it in multiple sentences with varying degrees of interest — depending on who you are I guess.