Galactica musings (and spoilers)
If you aren’t a Battlestar Galactica fan, you can ignore this post.
If you are, but haven’t seen the season-three finalé, “Crossroads,” you should ignore this post.
I just want to put this out there so some day I can look back and say, “Boy, were you wrong.”
* * *
Based on the events in the show, and on a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette interview with Ron Moore, here’s my wild and guaranteed-incorrect guess at the whole backstory:
About 75,000 years ago, some beings come to Earth and say, “Hey, cute Neanderthals. Let’s take some.” And they do, bringing them to a planet — Kobol.
The Neanderthals do the evolution thing, eventually becoming modern humans who interact with the beings who originally brought them to Kobol.
For some reason, there’s a need to leave Kobol — maybe a natural disaster, maybe an argument among the “gods,” whatever. Of the Kobolians, 12 factions set off for a new star system, but a 13th says, “Hey, we wanna go back to the homeworld. Earth.”
And they do.
Arriving at Earth, things don’t go so well in terms of their civilization. It collapses within a few hundred years. Still, they’re able to out-do the Neanderthals living there, eventually becoming the dominant life form. (After all, it’s not clear why Homo sapiens suddenly took over from Homo neanderthalensis.)
Thus we have stone-age humans on Earth, while a more advanced civilization flourishes on the 12 colonies.
Almost two thousand years pass. The Cylons (created by humans) fight with their creators, leave, and bump into none other than the “gods” — the beings who brought the humans to Kobol.
The Cylons recognize the “gods” as advanced life forms (not worthy of worship). Instead, they begin to obsess about being human and decide there is only one god.
The “gods” take the Cylons under their wings (so to speak), teaching them about humans and helping them create humanoid versions of themselves. But, knowing the Cylons (and humans) might want to find Earth someday, they also plant five special Cylons in human culture — Cylons that are designed to help bring everyone to Earth when the time is right.
When is the time right? When they’re capable of reaching a point in space on the road to Earth. Which is what happened in Crossroads part 1.
The genocide wasn’t part of the plan — that was just Cylon nastiness. The plan was all about bringing everyone back together where it all started: Earth.
It’s a pre-civilization Earth to be sure (no lights on the night side at the end of Crossroads 2), but it’s Earth.
Maybe the “gods” will make them give up all their tech before they land, and they’ll become our ancestors.
Or… everything in this post may be wrong. :)
Steve says:
What you’ve got to say here is pretty interesting, I like the idea of an explaination that fits in with actual Earth history. I would prefer that they encounter earth in a future state though, that would more properly explain the similarities in culture, (they wear twentieth century style clothes and they exibit multi ethnic morphology that mimics that of Earth). As far as the lights being out? I don’t know, maybe The Earth-native humans left and set it up as a nature reserve.