Final 4/5 Cylons? (and motherf*$%@!# Windows)

So I finally caught up to the season finale.  My friends all hounded me until I got there because they were dying to talk about the latest four Cylons and what’s happening with the rest of the fleet.  For the final episode of the season I prepared a bag of buttery popcorn, cracked open an ice cold Sam Adams, plopped down in front of the desktop PC, and prepared to be blown away…by choppy, laggy, out of sync video.  Apparently Windows Vista and iTunes don’t get along.  I closed every damn program on the computer and even tried rebooting in safe mode but nothing allowed me to watch Battlestar on my PC.  By now I was ready to fly across the country and kick you know you in the gonads but my roommate came up with the ultimate solution:

“Just watch in on your laptop dude.”

Oh bliss! Bliss and heaven! Oh, it was gorgeousness and gorgeousity made flesh. It was like a bird of rarest-spun heaven metal or like silvery wine flowing in a spaceship, gravity all nonsense now. As I slooshied, I knew such lovely pictures! And then I watched Battlestar.

 *ARGGH, THERE BE SPOILERS AHEAD*

So four of the five have finally been revealed:  Chief Tyrol, Col. Tigh, Samuel Anders, and Tory Foster.  Half of me says that I should be surprised, but the other half of me says DUH!  Let’s look at Tyrol first.  A dozen episodes ago he is freaking out and having nightmares about being a Cylon.  The priest he visits basically say that the gods don’t care about him or the humans anymore and that the humans are SOL.  Coincidentally the priest turns out to be a Cylon himself so I understand the bias.  Regardless, by suggesting the chief is a Cylon earleir in the series then attributing it to stress and dreams we, the audience, are fooled into a false sense of security.  Chief can’t be a Cylon because the writers are being so obvious about him possibly being a Cylon.  

A modern audience expects a twist out of left field like the President…or her aide! [scary music].  Okay, I’ll admit that Tory surprised me but not because I never thought of her as a Cylon but rather because I never though about her.  Unlike Billy from seasons past, Tory is never really focused on.  She says stuff but it never really mattered to me.  If she’s a Cylon it’s like, oh wait, who’s she?  annoying.

Col. Tigh’s Cylon-ness was almost too easy.  How surprised would we be if the most anti-toaster man in the fleet was actually a toaster?  Well, actually I was surprised, but not by his designation as a Cylon.  In the final episode I had thought he was just hearing things because he was drunk.  Then when he declared that the infiltration device was in the ship I expected the Cylon fleet to jump in and blow everything to hell.  But instead of it being a tracking device it was a trigger.  That surprised me.

Anders as a Cylon was the only one I had never considered (except Tory).  His devotion to Starbuck and his fraility (relatively speaking, the Viper he fell off wasn’t that high) really lulled me into feeling he was immune to toasting.  I guess I could believe the devotion if I really though about it because Caprica 6 is quite in love with Dr. Baltar and Athena/Boomer was/are in love with the chief.  On a side note, if Heilo was with Boomer but is now with Athena, does that make the office parties weird?

 Anyway, what I’ve been thinking about all this time is that we don’t actually know who the Cylons are.  I know that they were “revealed” but seriously, watch the episode again.  Who says that they are Cylons?  They do.  Tyrol, Tigh, Anders, and Tory.  They assume that because they all came to this room together they are toasters.  But after that’s revealed via Deus Ex Machina (God from the machine, a tactic in Greek theatre in which the truth is revealed through a revelation from the Gods) they go their separate ways to do their various jobs on the ship.  When Boomer was triggered by the Cylons she shot Admiral Adama.  Why don’t the new four blow something up?  They just go back to what they were doing, just a little shakier.  But still, the only suggestion that they are Cylons is the music that only they hear and their collective meeting.  And again, they only assume that they are Cylons.  There is no definitive proof that they are four of the five.  If anything, the proof says otherwise.  None of them have super strength, or the ability to project, or anything really Cylon.  But maybe that’s the point.  Maybe we all have those abilities but we just think we don’t.  Maybe every human is able to project.  But regardless, we don’t really know who the Cylons are.