Recap - 4x07 Guess What's Coming to Dinner?

[prophetkristy]

(If it means anything in exchange for my tardiness and utter failure at concision, this took me a lot longer chunk of time than I was planning on. meep.)
Previously on BSG: TPTB finally gave up trying to claim that the Cylons had a Plan; Kara was crazy; Leoben was creepy; Gaeta got shot; and the Hybrid told Kara more about her Special Destiny.

Comments

[grey_sw]

Awesome picspam!

I remember being really pissed at Natalie's pointless death, and equally blown away by Gaeta's plotline; the lack of followup makes this episode less powerful in retrospect, though.

What does death truly mean to Cylon existence--and, for that matter, our own?

The End, of course. It takes a real bunch of geniuses to go from almost totally annihilating the enemy's culture to teaming up with the enemy to fully annihilate their own culture.

The sad part is, any human could have told them that ~~~meaning~~~ wasn't going to magically fill their lives as if it was the prize at the bottom of the Hub. You have to create your own meaning, and the Cylons could have done that (and were already in the process of doing it!) in their own way. Instead, they gave up on their own way of life, and guess what? 150,000 years later, nobody remembers anything about projection or copies or Centurions, yet everyone knows who Zeus was.

Way to go, guys. Nothing says Enduring Legacy like being somebody else's mitochondria.

[prophetkristy]

Thank you!

Season 4 is rife with lack of followup. Sigh.

Nothing says Enduring Legacy like being somebody else's mitochondria.

*snorfle!*

It's almost too bad that was such a last-minute asspull. Because I'd buy it if there was ANY background to believe that a) Hera was a fertile hybrid and b) her offsring would be more fit than any of the others. If she's mitochondrial Eve, it means her descendants are the ONLY humans that survive to become modern Homo sapiens. (Now that I think of it that way, even without the BSG mythos, I'm a little uncomfortable with the whole "mitochondria Eve" theory anyway. I much prefer my evolutionary thinking to encompass populations rather than individuals.)

Um. my biology brain doesn't turn off anymore, sorry. ;-)

[grey_sw]

Yeah, that's part of why the ending was so stupid. Mitochondrial Eve is just the most recent common matrilineal ancestor, which is not that big a frakkin' deal (and it's a moving target, anyway -- the woman who's MitoEve now probably won't be in another 200,000 years, even assuming humans survive that long). Hell, our most recent common ancestor may have lived just 5,000 years ago, and was probably entirely unremarkable at the time.

Whether one's offspring's-offspring's-offspring survive to reproduce depends as much on luck (oh, excuse me, I meant ~~~*destiny*~~~, my bad) as on fitness; I bet a lot of very successful gene-lines got cut off at Pompeii, for example, and it ain't because Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandma wasn't a magic Cylon baby. :P

[prophetkristy]

OK, now I want to go do more research on this. whee!

[queen_of_snapes]

This is one awesome recap! Love the comments, particularly the poptart! That child seriously feaked me out when she said "bye-bye".

[prophetkristy]

Thank you! She's so frakkin' cute. That child must have been spoiled rotten by cast and crew. But that was a very spine-chilling moment.