The Chosen One

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Hybrid Chamber

(Kara looks at the Hybrid.)

Hybrid: ... All these things at once and many more not because it wishes harm but because it likes violent vibrations to change constantly then shall the maidens rejoice at the dance structural integrity of node seven restored repressurizing the children of the one reborn shall find their own country the intruders swarmed like flame like the whirlwind hopes soaring to slaughter all their best against our hulls ...

Starbuck: I'm here. You wanted me here, so...

Hybrid: ... Replace internal control accumulators 4 through 19 they'll start going ripe on us pretty soon compartmentalize integrity conflicts with the obligation to provide access FTL sync fault uncorrected no ceremonies are necessary ...

Hybrid: ... then shall the maidens rejoice at the dance structural integrity of node seven restored repressurizing the children of the one reborn shall find their own country. End of line, reset. Track mode monitor malfunction traced recharge compressors increase the output to 50% assume the relaxation length of photons transfers contact is inevitable leading to information bleed FTL sync fault stands uncorrected no ceremonies are necessary...

Starbuck, crouching: I don't understand.

Hybrid: ... Centrifugal force reacts to the rotating frame of reference the obstinate toy soldier becomes pliant the city devours the land...

Leoben, kneeling: You can't hurry her. You have to absorb her words. Allow them to caress your associative mind. Don't expect the fate of two great races to be delivered easily.

Hybrid: ... Assume the relaxation length of photons in the sample atmosphere is constant the intruders swarmed like flame like the whirlwind hopes soaring to slaughter all their best against our hulls...

(Helo paces the Demetrius CIC; Gaeta is looking rough in his makeshift sickbay.)

Hybrid: ...All these things at once and many more not because it wishes harm but because it likes violent vibrations to change constantly then shall the ...

Athena: Hey, we're rigged and ready. It's time to pull her offline and get out of here before we miss our rendezvous.

Hybrid: ...Reset...

Athena: Any luck, Captain?

Starbuck: Not a frakkin' thing.

Hybrid: ... But you are a spark of God's fire core update complete...

Starbuck: Frak it! Unplug the damn thing. Let's get the frak out of here.

Hybrid: ... Threat detection matrix enabled dendritic response bypassed the received dose is altered by the delayed gamma burst going active execute the children of the one reborn shall find their own country, end of line.

(An Eight opens a panel and unplugs the Hybrid, who shouts in an unceasing scream. A Centurion steps forward, converting guns.)

Natalie, angrily: Stop!

(The Centurion fires, dropping the Eight. Kara and Athena destroy it.)

Anders, entering: ...What the hell happened?

(The Eight's blood pollutes the water in the Hybrid tank; she's still screaming.)

Starbuck: What do you want from me? Please, I need you.

(She finally stops, and pulls one hand from the water with a calm smile.)

Hybrid: ...Thus will it come to pass the Dying Leader will know the truth of the Opera House the missing Three will give you the Five who have come from the home of the Thirteenth you are the harbinger of death Kara Thrace you will lead them all to their end.

(Kara is stricken.)

Hybrid: End of line.

(The Hybrid goes limp, and Athena fully unplugs her; the room goes dark.)

Comments

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

I agree that leaving it open-ended and ambiguous as they thought they did, just translated to lazy to me.

I feel the same way not just about this religious stuff but with the cylons. I really wonder what they originally conceived as an endgame for the show (if they did). In later seasons they seemed to be working pretty damn hard to get to a "we have to accept each other because we are all we have" kind of conclusion but I think they skipped a step in that whole acceptance thing, because they never even defined what made the cylons different really. I mean they focused a lot on certain things: they worship one God rather than multi; they can't procreate but they can resurrect. But then they didn't answer other things like how they can be both man and machine but not just flesh over metal, but Sharon can jack in to some computer in her veins and send a virus out, etc. etc.

Anyway, I really agree with a point that I read from someone yesterday or the day before somewhere (vague enough? Lol), that the mystical stuff was always intriguing, until they decided that Kara could come back but not be a cylon and that they didn't have to explain it. Because that opened the door to it being a show where anything at all could happen and totally changed the tone of things. And her "destiny" was so completely unsatisfying and not....grand, in any kind of way. Bah.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I agree with you that the Cylons remained unsatisfyingly vague throughout the series as well. Part of what made the baseship boring was that it didn't have the feel of a real culture, the way the Galactica did. Why would machine-people put chaise lounges in the middle of rooms and wander around in the nude while listening to the piano? You have yet to convince me you have put any real thought into how they live, or why, writers. They just felt consistently shallow, and I for one was not surprised that neither they nor Head!Six's god seemed to actually have a plan.

I know some people were bothered by the fact that the gods resurrected Kara, because they thought that broke the established rules of the show. I guess it didn't bother me that much because it seems like the gods were already shown to have extreme powers, like making suns explode, and it was also implied that they had a power over life and death. Besides being a traditional power ascribed to gods, you have elements like the "cost in blood" to be extracted on Kobol, or Roslin being the "dying leader," presumably a fate the gods set out for her and described through the Pythian prophecies. If they can control cancer, cursing Roslin with that role in the story in the first place, then granting her a temporary reprieve, and then overriding the miracle Cylon cure to turn her back into the Dying Leader as the endgame for Earth approached, then what they did to Kara seems of a piece with that. I'm not trying to argue anyone into liking these parts of the story, I'm just saying that for me, I would have been fine with the idea that the gods could grant life as well as doom it if the reasons why they did so had been more clearly and compellingly established. As it is, with Kara it seems like their blessings and curses were arbitrary.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Why would machine-people put chaise lounges in the middle of rooms and wander around in the nude while listening to the piano? You have yet to convince me you have put any real thought into how they live, or why, writers. They just felt consistently shallow

LOL. I always felt zero connection to the cylons personally and I think that while that worked for the first season where you were indeed supposed to mostly identify with the humans, it became a lot more problematic when the show decided to spend time giving them equal weight but without fleshing them out very much at all. (And for me, none of the actors playing cylons intrigued me or offered any kind of empathetic way to related to them. If Chief instead of Boomer had been revealed as a cylon at the end of the mini, I would've been so much more invested.)

By the time Downloaded rolled around, I still didn't care about any of those people enough to really pay much attention to a whole hour devoted to them.

Re: Kara. Hindsight is naturally 20/20 and all, and my problem with the storyline definitely lies in the execution of it, but death/resurrection seemed like a much larger hurdle to suspend some disbelief over than someone having visions or their cancer temporarily cured by half-cylon blood. I mean the one logical route in their world to resurrection was through cylonity, except the show wanted to be cagey and say she wasn't a cylon, that this is just another free-standing miracle of the Gods, and it just always felt a little false and a little forced. The writers wanted us to love the story so much that we'd understand that what she was or how it had happened wasn't the point, but...they kind of failed to make a point, or to make all the rest of it so engaging that we could handwave those things. A story needs answers and just saying "because God made it so" as the resolution to a seven-year saga is both lame and unsatisfying answer.

I wouldn't say it broke the rules of the show, exactly, though it certainly did invalidate some of the tenets of their story bible () (i.e. "We will eschew the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mindcontrol,
evil twins, God-like powers and all the other cliches of the genre.") I was just more interested in what the original story told in the mini and s1 would have played out like.