The Final Fifth Cylon Is….

Mechanical Vegetable Extractor Revealed to Be Enemy of Humanity

There were only three old-school cylon models–centurian, IL series (the ones with the awesome disco heads) and the goat-faced, purple-afro’d Imperious Leader, who had this unexplainable obsession with sitting thirty feet high in the air under a mood light.   Purists will say, yes, a fourth humaniod model was added in Galactica 1980.  And the really obsessed will say, yes, there was a fifth “civilian” cylon model present at the Battle of Gamoray in “The Living Legend Part II”.  Fine.  But now there’s twelve cylons in the new series, and we don’t even know who they are.  They don’t even know who they are.   And after being off the air for what, 9 or 12 months, it’s hard to remember the ones that we did figure out.   But slowly it’s ramping up speed again.  Maybe it’s the fact that they keep saying “The Final Episodes” in the commercials…closure is a good thing.

Rampant speculation fueled the Internet regarding who the final fifth cylon was: Starbuck?  Apollo?  Roslin?  That smarmy lawyer dude?  Now the truth has been revealed, and it’s just somewhat of a “meh” revelation.  Meanwhile, a Cute Robot Movie From Disney swarmed out of Pixar land and took over western culture for a while.  Gee, let’s take Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, strand him on the Earth with mountains of garbage, and give him really, really sad eyes, like a puppy whose favorite chew toy just got taken away.  Oh, yeah, let him collect sporks, and maybe old lunchboxes.   And humanity is all fat and bloblike, cruising through space with all their needs taken care of.  (How did they do it without sporks and lunchboxes?!?!) Don’t get me wrong, Wall-E was beautifully animated and very, very well done, and if heavy-handed environmental moralizing is your thing, you might want to see it again.  Wall-E’s “girlfriend” is EVE, and automated vegetable extraction robot (and exemplar of the term “probe droid”) whose task is to see if the Earth can sustain life again.  EVE has a bit of a mean streak, though, and is a little too trigger-happy with her killer lasers.  Poor Wall-E, who has no weapons, is dating a ‘bot that could mop up the floor with him, despite the whole puppy-dog thing he’s got going on.  It’s the old “girlfriend with a black belt” syndrome.

When we come away from Nuevo Galatica, what lesson are we supposed to learn?  That blonde women are evil, they get inside your head, and there’s lots of them?  That your bald with a capital “B”, hard-drinking XO is really an evil robot with a thing for Dylan tunes, and that his wife is even eviller (is that a word?  is now…) cause she’s mean to the evil hard drinking friend you didn’t even know was a robot?    Or maybe it’s just that your tools shouldn’t think on their own.  Not even the ones you send to look for emerging plant life.  Or maybe…if you have a hard-driving executive officer who’s bald and also secretly an evil robot…send him to look for sporks and lunchboxes?