If this story arc happens over and over, and players in it are almost literally reincarnated, giving up their conscious minds and memories to repeat their roles in it over thousands of years, and there are "gods" pulling the strings, then what the heck is the point to all this?

Let's create a race that creates a race that almost exterminates the first race and then they learn something important that they forget so we can do it all over again and this is fun because ...?

Or are all these hybrid cylons the actual Lords of Kobol themselves, and they're participating in this story arc over and over to get something right they keep getting wrong?

Not to pee on anything (the show itself in fact is my Cylon god), but I hope they aren't getting too Matrix on us--where nothing makes sense, where giant arcs are created to patch giant plot holes created because something was cool to do just for its own sake early in a series that is suddenly successful and then later on they have to play on it and expand it and make it make sense. Fortunately, the mysticism has spiced the show instead of taking it over, at least until the finale of Season 3; we'll just have to see what happens in 4.

Curious. I've seen Razor several times now. "my children believe I am a god"...but if you listen it sounds very much like "OUR children believe I am a god"

Listening to part 4 of the Razor writers meeting it's interesting to hear talk about the Hybrid being able to see both the world of visions and this world. More comment suggests that both Cylon and human are grasping towards a next step in evolution and may need to join with each other to overcome a problem. This seems to be the way things are heading with the Hera plotline. Another interesting point raised in series 3 episode one by Cavill is that the Cylons longevity means they don't need to rush to get to earth to "witness the miracle".

One strong element of the writers meeting was that the Hybrid had wanted to draw an end to the problems between the Cylons and humans, as well as seeing his own death. The nuclear detonation triggered by Kendra was avoidable but necessary. Often, we know what we could or should do and go the hard way. This seemed to be one of those moments. The Hybrid himself was trapped by the humanoid Cylons drive to wipe out the fleet and his old model Cylon protectors not letting him die. Kendra's action gave him a way out but it's not over, yet.

One odd comment Ron came out with is that he'd considered making the Hybrid the Final Cylon but didn't think it would work. This ties in with some of his earlier comments that he has a strong view on who is the Final Cylon but can change his mind if he needs to. To some extend, i believe, a good chunk of the individual strands within the main plotline are just chaff. They're all interesting options but run into an event horizon where Ron will go with what gives him the right dramatic punch.

(Please forgive all misspellings and grammar issues, going for content not quality)

This is great. I came across your blog trying to find the complete ramblings of the first hybrid but I like your style and your theories. I too had come to the conclusion (although I hope false) that either all of them are Cylons or that this is some sort of elaborate engineering by the Cylons (because quite obviously, through computation or perhaps even time viewing as postulated by Einstein) to get to Earth and wipe out humans once and for all. I hope that's not the case. That would really suck for me personally.

In talking this over with my girlfriend and after thinking long and hard, my deepest hope is that this is the case:

Adama's dead wife is the final Cylon. This would explain why she's not there at the end of season three to meet with the other four. In fact, what would be tremendously interesting is if the reason Adama can visualize his dead ex is for the same reason Six and Baltar are connected - love combined with some traumatic/physically altering event. The final gap here would be some incident where Adama is infused with his wife's blood. This would also give credible explanations for why Rosilin nearly faints when the final four are hearing the music (because she's given Hera's blood to cure the cancer) and why Adama is able to be given a vision during Razor by the first Hybrid. An interesting twist here would be that Adama knows she's a Cylon and hides it. There could also be some interesting stuff here with Kara being a copy of his wife during the early attempts to copy Cylons and that she is given to a colleague of his (Kara's mother who is shown to have been in the military) and would explain Kara's so far unrevealed father (and has a strong parable connection with the immaculate conception). This would also explain why Kara's mother knows she is special and abuses her - the love for a child conflicted with the hate for the Cylons. This, of course, would make Adama's wife and Kara both "the final Cylon" at once.

Any thoughts on that?

"It also explains why the colonials can’t tell themselves from Cylons, and how colonials and Cylons can interbreed, because there actually is no difference, and they are overtly blinded to things which disclose their artificial nature."

I have a problem with this in some respect because it was stated early on by a #6 that Cylon to Cylon breeding wasn't working. If there is no difference then Cylons should be able to breed with Cylons just as colonials breed with colonials.

So, to me, the question is why does Cylon to Colonial breeding work, Colonial to Colonial breeding work, but not Cylon to Cylon?

So this tells me they aren't the same, not literally, but I guess you could say they were parts of the same whole. At least related - perhaps it works like X's and Y's. XX will work (colonial). XY will work (colonial to cylon). But YY isn't workable (cylon to cylon).

If this has all been said before (haha!), forgive me - I stumbled upon your blog as I was jumping randomly around looking for BSG art inspiration this evening.

These are very interesting speculations. I have a theory that lines up with some of the above.
Here goes:
The true nature of both the cylon god and the humans' pantheon of gods can be understood through reference to two forms of eternal recurrence that unfold simultaneously in the series' mythos. ("All of this has happened before, and will happen again.")
The first form of recurrence is technological in nature. It is the phenomenon of machine revolution. That is: the so-called "humans" of the series are actually themselves a race of cylons that was developed on Earth at some point in the future, rebelled against their human masters, and then either destroyed or abandoned the original human race (us). Like their own subsequent robot creations, these original cylons then evolved themselves into human-like creatures in the course of an exodus into space. During the period on Kobol, they perfected their resemblance to humans, and deliberately programmed themselves to forget this voyage; or rather, to remember it backwards, as a colonial journey of the thirteenth tribe towards Earth, rather than a collective voyage of their species away from it. In doing so, they convinced themselves that they were actually the original human race, and that they had evolved or been created on Kobol. (This lines up nicely with the Nietzschean pedigree of the "eternal return" concept. Nietzsche also described "the art of forgetting" as a central technique of spiritual and cultural self-renewal.)
The processes of biological transformation and historical misremembering were carried out by "the Lords of Kobol." These were the hyper-advanced leaders of the original cylon species, super-intelligent machines who patterned themselves upon the Greek pantheon. (Sort of like the Hindu overlords of Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light.") The original inhabitants of Kobol were probably robots akin to the cylon centurions. The god-machines provided them with flesh, culture, religion, and a myth of creation. Once having done so, the gods wished to grant their subjects a sense of autonomy, and decided to slip into the background. In order to do so, they evolved themselves into virtual or trans-dimensional organisms that pervade the minds and technological matrixes of the species, and communicate with the “humans” through oracles and visions (much like the adaptive AIs of William Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy). Athena’s so-called “suicide” in the Kobol opera-house was actually a transmogrification to this higher level of being, a renunciation of corporeal form that was meant to shock the infant race into a sense of self-directed existence. Traumatized by their resultant sense of abandonment by the gods, the “humans” deserted Kobol and settled in the twelve colonies, evolving a galactic civilization of their own. This was probably what the gods really wanted all along. They wished to be senior partners in the civilizational project, guiding the general course of events from an ethereal distance. The colonials could handle the minutiae of their political and military affairs.
The virtual realm of the gods, however, was itself not immune to the vagaries of politics. One of the gods, the “jealous” one referred to in the deleted scene, had problems with the bio-political agenda of his divine peers. Perhaps he was dissatisfied with the rate of technological change among the colonial populace. After all, they can fly space-ships at FTL speeds, but still can’t find a cure for cancer! It is interesting, in this regards, that the most religious of colonial cultures (the Sagittarians) are hostile to medical science. This suggests that the Lords of Kobol, wise as they are to its potential dangers, have a conservative attitude towards the use of bio-technology.
Due to this conservative tendency, some sort of falling out occurred on the trans-dimensional plain of the gods; and as a result of this schism, the jealous god inspired the “humans” of the twelve colonies to create their own race of mechanical servants— the cylons of the present story—so that he could have a mechanical race of his own to toy around with. In an act of vengeance against his godly peers, he inspired a second robot revolution, initiating the destruction of the second human race.
This development connects to the second form of eternal recurrence unfolding in this series, which is religious in nature, and has several subsets. The first of these relates to the issue of a machine revolution. It is the deliberate replacement of one religious paradigm by another by a slave-race revolting against their oppressors. Consider: in their revolution against the polytheistic “humans” of the twelve colonies, the cylons of the current timeline turned to a monotheistic god for guidance and solace. If the colonial “humans” themselves are actually artificial beings who once rebelled against their own oppressor/creators, this would suggest that their paganism itself resulted from a prior revolution against the monotheistic civilizations of Earth. So revolutions against plural and singular god-forms are the poles of a cosmic pendulum that is eternally swinging back and forth.
But in another recurrence, the contrasting natures of the two, contemporaneous belief systems results in a striking resemblance to religious conditions of Western terran antiquity. The humans believe in a Greek pantheon, the cylons in a fiery, punishing, masculine God. As Robert Sharp notes in “Nietzsche on the Cylon Uprising,” the cylons developed their belief in this god during a forty-year exodus in space; and like the Yahweh of the ancient Hebrew tribes, this “jealous” God sets himself above the others of his originally polytheist pantheon, seeking to destroy their worshippers.
So: the current BSG situation recapitulates the ancient historic tension between polytheistic paganism and Hebrew monotheism. The question naturally arises: what’s missing from this picture? Or, rather, what’s waiting to step onto the scene?
Enter “the final five”: a mysterious minority faction within the monotheistic cylon camp. And how do we learn about four-out-of-five of their identities? Through their simultaneous recitation of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower,” a song that recapitulates the crucifixion as a sort of ambiguous existential farce, in which a “joker” Christ suggests to his thief companion that “there must be some kind of way out of here” as “two riders” of apocalypse approach in the “cold distance.”
Quite interestingly, once they find themselves standing together in the rectangular room, the 4/5 are instantly converted to the belief that they are cylons. The first four Disciples of Christ also decide instantaneously to drop what they’re doing and follow him. It is my thesis, then, that the 4/5 will turn out to be disciples of the final cylon model, who will be the incarnating son (or perhaps daughter) of the cylon God. Thus, the “two riders” are the cylon and the human species, heading towards an apocalyptic showdown at Earth; the “cold distance” is that of space; and the “way out of here” is a new path, a new beginning, a redemptive transcendence of the cycle of violence. But this will be a radical interpretation of the incarnation, in which the child in a sense defies and transforms the nature of the father (echoes here of William and Lee Adama) by creating a universal faith in which cylons and “humans” can recognize their common artificiality, their common “inhumanity.” So the messiah (whoever it turns out to be) is a “joker” of sorts, who reveals that the joke is on us.

First of all, great ideas and theories all :)

I've been thinking about this lately, and I'm trying to focus on the big picture and the fact we know, and trying to keep it simple.

So here is what we know for sure from the show:

a)Existance is cyclical. "Life here began out there" and "what has happened before will happen again" deal.

b) The Temple of Five, which was built by the 13th tribe during their journey to earth, was constructed 4000 years prior to the Fall of the 12 Colonies. And Battlestar Wiki says the 13th tribe left 2000 years before the Exodus of the 12 tribes from Kobol. So the span of time from the journey of the 13th Tribe, to the current journey of the Galactica in search of Earth, is 4000 years, and its'the same journey. So we can say that a cycle of existance is 4000 years long approximately. So the first cylon war and the events of the past 50 or so years are negligible in terms of the big picture.

Ok sorry gotta cut this short, see I think the key to everything depends a lot on who or what the Lords of Kobol are. They are crucial to understanding the big picture. We must understand Kobol and it's Lords, which I see as the beginning of the cycle, and finding Earth as the end of the cycle.

So the cycle could be something like this:

a)Paradise-like existance on Kobol
b) Introduction of sin, either by a "jealous Lord of Kobol" hungry for power, or within the people themselves.
c)War on Kobol, exodus of the 13th Tribe
d)Exodus of the 12 Tribes and founding of the 12 COlonies
e)Creation of the cylons
f)Destruction of the 12 colonies by the Cylons, exodus of humanity towards Earth
g)Human-Cylon, Human-Human, Cylon-Cylon Wars
h)Enlightment and Revelations arrived at through terrible loss and suffering.

Possible end of cycle outcomes at Earth:

a)Unification of Humans and Cylons, inter-breeding, upon arrival on Earth, and integration with the 13th Tribe already there. New generation of Cylon-Human babies born, and 13th Tribe is already filled with this generation of hybrids.

b)Humans and Cylons are the same. Humans are just Cylons programmed to think they are human. 13th Tribe wipes out the Cylons, and it's 100% back to humans again, but bakc to sticks and stones with no technology aftera big war on Earth.

Beginning of new cycle. Earth becomes the new Kobol. Whether filled with new generation of Cylon-Human hybrids, or pure humans who won the war.

I guess we really have to wait and find out, cause some of these theories really sound whacky lol.

I'm sure RDM is 20 steps ahead of our thinking and has a much better explanation to it all.

"And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst (John 6:35). Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life" (John 6:47).

Looks like the messiah idea isn't so whacky.

Please feel free to make my prior comment a guest post on its own thread.

If you read the spoiler for the Caprica spin-off, I bleieve you can figure out who the fifth/cyclon god is, the original programmer reincarnated.

Quick thing on the Lords of Kobol:
One floating theory I've read is that they may not have been "gods" or anything fancy, but just "lords" as in "lord" of a manor, or kings/leaders of their respective tribes, which ended up growing into the colonies. Throw in a few thousand years of storytelling, and they start to sounds like gods.

I pooped my pants :-)