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Old 02-18-2009, 10:52 PM
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4x15 - "No Exit"

Well, that was... new. My suspicion that the writers might have a plan after all has been sorta not quite halfway confirmed, ish. I still think the Final Five idea goes back no farther than Season 3, and the choices of the Five even less far. They would have planted so many more hints if they'd known these particular characters were Cylons. But no, these five don't have something in common that we hadn't picked up on; they were just planted randomly in the population.

And the explanation we get this episode isn't perfect. In particular, the "lost" number 7 reeks of backpedaling -- first they chose 8 as Boomer's number, then at some point they decided the five models we hadn't seen were special and (among other things) didn't have numbers, and only later did it occur to them that this meant there were at least eight numbers for only seven models. Some are speculating that the now-thirteen models have something to do with the 13 tribes of Kobol, but now that we know the models have such radically different origins, there's no reason they should add up to anything.

All that said... just by giving the backstory at all, this episode did something huge that I wasn't sure would get done. The answers were never going to be perfect. But they work. We now know why there are two kinds of humanoid Cylon, why the Final Five didn't remember anything, how Tigh in particular was around before the Cylons had human models, what happened to Earth, why the Cylons struck again. We even know why Cavil took such disproportionate action against D'Anna last year.

We can fight over the answers, and we will -- but Moore could have just never shown his hand. The lesson of Chris Carter is that being coy works. He got away with it for much longer. Shows like Lost have made dangling weirdness their stock in trade. And hell, much as I love ENT, it still annoys me that we never found out who the Evil Future Guy was. Moore deserves some credit for finally putting his money where his mouth has been all this time.

All that said, this infodump definitely creates a ton of questions and plotholes, some of which I'll be posting about next.
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