"I don’t know if this is the intentional message"

I doubt it. I think they just made up that story because it was the best explanation they could think of for the Final Five.

I think Cavil made it clear, in his rant at Helen about being made of flesh and bone, that he hated being humanoid because of it's percieved limitations, he hated them, in part, because they had the choice to create him to be stronger, to be able to "See Gamma Rays", etc., and instead put him in a fragile body... In the end you can't really understand him, because he's a fricken nutcase, full of self loathing and jealousy. No doubt they could have done a better job of explaining Cavil during the series, and certainly during "The Plan (or lack there of)", but I don't think it would have ever been explained to anyones satisfaction.

I like your writeups, but I think you're trying to make sense out of something that can't make sense. That was the job of its creators, and they couldn't be bothered. I mean, think about how idiotic Cavil's whole exercise is. He's starting off with five people who saw their entire world and everyone they loved killed, then travelled God only knows how long to find a faux sense of redemption creating new children who then killed them. And his idea is to make them live a few more years on the Colonies so they'll realize life sucks? Exactly how stupid does they think they are? Burning down your house and killing your family may not have broken you, but this series of traffic tickets is sure to do the trick.

And then the culmination of his stupid plan (such as it is) is thrown off by having a tiny, tiny fraction of the people he wanted to annihilate initially survive. I think that would have been a given, and he did better than he could reasonably have expected in the initial attack.

Basically, Cavil is an idiot, but that's not his fault. He was just written that way. I like to think of his final death, not as a suicide, but as one final act of idiocy--he simply miscalculated which direction the gun barrel was pointed.

Isn't it all obvious at this point. RDM and company never had a Plan, they were winging it all along, and at the end they pasted this idiotic "Cavil as supervillain" thing over it because they didn't know what else to do. I wouldn't watch "The Plan" on a bet, because it would only contaminate my memories of the first 2.5 season when I thought the show wasgreat.

I agree with the earlier comments that "The Plan" was a cash-in, and there's no point in trying to make sense of a story that just doesn't make sense.

After discussing the end of sci-fi in here it's interesting to note that PC pro has run an article asking has sci-fi run out of steam?

I've no idea if this will provoke Brad into writing an essay that more properly polishes Battlestar Galactica or reinvigorates sci-fi but I'd certainly read such a monster.

Well, I just watched The Plan. I agree with everything that Brad and the other commenters have said. However, I was delighted that it was not so bad as to retroactively ruin the excellent first 2 seasons of BSG. You can still watch those and try to forget about the nonsense that followed.

The Plan confirmed one very clear point: the show was largely ruined when the writers decided to introduce the concept of the Final Five. At that point, the show ceased to be a gritty, reality-driven drama about flawed and complex human beings and instead became a show about 5 supergenius-20something humanoid robots from another planet who re-invent resurrection, use it on themselves, take off in a spaceship, travel across the galaxy for the very first time, find the Colonies, stop a war, create more robots, get their memories wiped, and get injected as major characters into our story. I feel embarrassed just articulating it. It really is Ed Wood bad.

And it isn't the kind of mistake that can run its course and be left behind, since the Final Five, the search to uncover the Final Five, and the reactions to the disclosure of the Final Five impact every character in the show for a season and a half. They needed whole episodes just to provide a basic explanation of what was going on (No Exit). It is no accident that the season 4 eps that seemed to recapture the quality and realism of the 1st season were the 2 mutiny eps, both of which were a welcome break from Final Five nonsense.

The Plan was inconsistent on things great and small. To take but a few examples, it ridiculously has Cavil flitting around Galactica and at least 2 other ships in the fleet w/o any problem. This in a time of war, with limited resources, when all inter-ship transit is done by request. Heck, he even gets to have a private chat with Boomer only minutes or hours after she shoots Adama. And no one listens in, debriefs him, or even questions why a priest is going to visit a robotic sleeper agent.

The Plan also fails to explain the numerous inconsistencies created by RDM's make-it-up-as-you-go-along approach. For example, it doesn't tell us how Leoben could have had very specific prophetic visions about Kara Thrace finding Kobol and then Earth. Or why he was painting the mandala. Or why he was getting images of scenes that took place inside Thrace's head and involved the Angel Leoben, not the real Leoben. It completely fails to explain the point of the Farms or what the Cylons did with Thrace's fallopian tube, or why Simon would have any particular interest in Thrace at all or why any of them, least of all Cavil, would be interested in cross-breeding the races. Or why there was an elaborate scheme to trick Helo into falling in love with Sharon, even though we now know that a human had fallen in love with and had married Simon and that the Chief (whom everyone except Cavil believed to be human) had fallen in love with Boomer. Or why, after deciding that humans and Cylons should go their separate ways, the Cylons show up a year later to erect a nanny state on New Caprica.

RDM created too much of a mess to be cleaned up and The Plan doesn't even really try. On the plus side, it did have some good lines and some really cool scenes. I particularly liked the brief shots of those top-of-the-line battlestars, which seemed to me to be bigger and more impressive than the Pegasus. I also liked getting to see some colonies for the first time. I liked the massive base star fleet, but it is ridiculous that there should be so many. I think it was like 100 base stars. If there were so many, then why only send 2 to Ragnar, have only 1 orbiting Kobol (where they knew the humans would go) and only have 2 or 3 pursuing Galactica thereafter?

For you see, Ellen and the other 4 did keep their creation close. They loved John, and raised him like a boy. Ellen was willing to forgive John in spite of all he had done.

I got the opposite impression -- I think Cavil and the Five were definitely supposed to be another instance of the "can't wash your hands of the things you've created" theme.

Ellen obviously loved her idealized "John", but she didn't have much love for Cavil. I think it's likely that the Five withdrew their love and approval of him, at some point (Ellen just about says as much in No Exit), and even her forgiveness comes with conditions ("you can be good; you can be the boy I made"). And it's worth noting that the Cavils wanted "apologies" and "hugs" and such in The Plan, and thought of themselves as "irredeemable" even before they killed the humans... so even if the Five were actually good to Cavil, he didn't seem to feel as if they were.

Frankly, I don't see how One could have ended up the way he was if his parents *hadn't* washed their hands of him. I guess you could just assume he's a psychopath, but The Plan seems to refute that. Hat!Cavil figured the whole thing out the minute somebody was kind to him, so it can't just be that the Ones really *are* irredeemable. If the Five were such great parents, then why didn't Anders explain the whole "love is forever no matter what" thing BEFORE his kids blew up the Colonies? It's not like that's out of Parenting 402... and if *that* is the huge revelation which caused Cavil's heart to grow two sizes or whatever, I think that suggests something very unpleasant about the Five.

Besides, if the Five were so loving toward Cavil, then why is the kid who comes to Cavil a boy named John that nobody wants? The symbolism was pretty blatant, there.

I agree with you that the Final Five plot wrecked the show, but I think this particular aspect of it goes well enough with the theme. It's the ridiculous retcons and the finale (in which God and the Five finally do wash their hands of the 1/4/5s, and get a heavenly reward for it, no less) that really screw things up.

Grey: I absolutely agree about the Final Five and Cavil. There has to be more to the story than the simplistic exposition we were given, but they needed Cavil to be Cobra Commander to force the show to an arbitrary end. C'est la vie.

Not sure anyone got a heavenly reward, least of all the Five. Tory gets strangled, Chief goes off to commit suicide on a frozen island, and Anders gets melted in a goo bath. Yeah, Tigh and Ellen look faux happy, but you know they'll be at each others throats gnawing at fermented magos twenty minutes after the end credits roll. Two hours later they'll probable be being gnawed on by a pack of hyenas.

Interestingly enough, I've just been reading an excellent Season 5 fan fiction that, among other things, does exactly what you suggest with the backstory of the Final Five. It's genuinely compelling. Too bad that level of thought didn't go into the show.

Disappointed. Just forgot to type the name field.

There is a problem with your assessment of John's anger over Cylon slavery... You insinuate that he needs to have been enslaved himself to have the anger, that flies in the face of reality. That's like saying there aren't any blacks in the U.S. who are still angry over slavery, that's like saying there are no Jews in the world born 20 years ago who are still angry over the holocaust. John was not far removed from the events that fueled his hatred. There are Jews in this world born decades after WW2 who are still looking for Nazi war criminals to punish... John's feelings and actions are entirely normal and plausible.