Think like RDM in deciding who will be the final Cylon

Ok, so you're RDM and you've got 5 Cylons left and you have declared they are a special, distinct group of Cylons and they are much older than the 7 shown before, so they can be anybody.

You may have picked your final Cylon long ago, you only picked the other 4 while writing Season 3.

You plan some "big reveal" scenes. You have a few planned for the show. The first one will be to reveal the F5 are special, possibly associated with an Earth Temple. Your next one is to apparently kill Starbuck and have her come back courtesy of some Earth folks.

Two of the biggest reveals you have planned are to show four of the final 5, and then in season 4 to show the last one.

Showing the 4 is going to be dramatic, because you're going to show a lot of people that their assumptions were wrong, by giving them Tigh.

But you are going to leave one Cylon unrevealed. And all the rules of drama demand that this one left over is the big one. The revalation of this Cylon should be an even bigger dramatic event than the revalation of the first 4.

So of your five, who are you going to leave out? Gaeta? Duala? Hardly. How can their revalation be anything but a dramatic letdown compared to what you have done so far. If they are Cylons, reveal them now and leave Tigh a secret. It's not a minor character.

No, it has to be a major character, one whose revalation will be bigger than Tigh, Tyrol, Anders and Foster together.

Now the two biggest characters are Adama and Roslin, however in the final podcast of the season, Moore ruled them out as Cylons. (Or rather, ruled them out as candidates for the 4 Dylan fans. He may have been very careful about his words.)

Starbuck seems to have another destiny, leaving her out though people still consider her a potential chance.

Now there are effectively only 2 characters left, Baltar and Apollo.

  • Apollo: Booooring. At one point that would have been a shocking revalation, in particular because in many viewer's minds that character was the star of TOS, the soul of the show. And Leoben said "Adama is a Cylon," and though he could well be lying, it is an interesting clue. Apollo is one character whose head we have never seen inside.
  • Baltar: Some interesting thoughts there but he has so much else going on, he would have to be a very special Cylon not to make this anticlimactic. (That's why I have developed a side theory that Baltar is possibly not a Cylon, but just possibly an unaware incarnation of the Cylon God.)

One minor character also is an outside shot:

  • Cain. Yeah, she's dead. But she also escaped the attack. And she's coming back in flashbacks for the special fall BSG movie so she's becoming a bigger character. She's a badass. She would provide a nice shock to the audience. (Though after Razor I have to discount this a bit.)

But the winner is...

Big question for any of them.. Sleeper or not. Baltar has to be sleeper. Apollo not necessarily.

Forget the clues and rules from the show for a while because the writers, while they double check them to make sure it all works, realize they write the rules and can bend them and retcon them. The writers think in terms of drama. That's their goal. When choosing the 5th Cylon, think like RDM will have thought.

Comments

There is no Seven for a somewhat obvious reason that has nothing to do with Battlestar Galactica. Seven already exists as Seven of Nine from Star Trek, so Battlestar steered clear of that number.

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