Tyrol strikes again, reveals Cylon history

io9 put out a major spoiler this morning that goes into the history of the Cylons from the current Battlestar Galactica series. Aaron Douglas apparently has a tough time keeping what he knows to himself these days (see previous entry on his comments at Dragon*Con), and in an interview with SFX Magazine, he dropped a huge bomb. Be careful, after the jump thar be spoilers.

In his interview with SFX, Aaron “Tyrol” Douglas said:

The four that were revealed at the end of season three are what they are, but they’re one-offs. They’re the original Cylons. Hundreds of years ago, when there were 13 colonies on Kobol, 12 went that way and one went that way to found Earth — or create an Earth — and that colony was actually Cylons. They’re individuals, there’s no multiple models. The seven that we know are a different kind of Cylon that came much later. They’re probably ten, 20 years old, born out of the metal machines that fought back in the Cylon wars of the 12 colonies. So they’re essentially like the gods. And we were on the new Earth, and destroyed that and came back to the 12 colonies to rejoin humanity to find the cycle of time.

Why do we create a world and destroy ourselves? Why does humanity do that? And why do we as Cylons follow that path to humanity? So we sort of turned off the Cylon part of us and went and joined the humans. They don’t know we’re Cylons, and we didn’t know until we started getting closer to Earth — that’s when we started hearing that music at the end of the last season and get woken up to the fact that we are.

Holy. Frackin. Gods. First off, notice that he only talks about the 4 that we’ve seen. No mention of the final 5th Cylon and how he or she plays into this history. So, these four were from the original Earth that had many, many individual “models” of Cylons. Really a whole race of unique Cylons that made up the 13th colony. I’m interested to see the skeletons he mentions, and how we know they are Cylons - are their skeletons metal? I’m thinking some kind of synthetic bone of sorts, as I’d have a hard time understanding how Tigh and Tyrol went through fleet medical exams without any red flags going up. Metal skeletons would probably be tough to cover up.

So, anyway, these four somehow destroyed that world and decided to rejoin the humans for reasons we don’t really know except they wanted to rejoin humanity. We don’t really know how long ago that was, though, but it’s maybe somewhere in the middle of the 40 year period of time between the Cylon wars ended and the destruction of the 12 colonies. Maybe it was triggered by the first Cylon war on the 12 colonies.

Here’s the head-spinner for me, though, knowing what we know about “Caprica” and how Daniel Greystone creates the first Caprica-based Cylon. What if Greystone is actually the final Cylon? Hear me out here. Hundreds, maybe thousands of years prior to “Caprica”, the humans split into the 12 colonies, and the “13th tribe” (which Douglas is calling the original Cylons) went to, or stayed on, Earth. They weren’t Cylons like the current skin-job models, they can reproduce, are unique to each other, more than likely indistinguishable from humans in most ways. Years and years pass and the 13th colony becomes legend, part of the religion of the 12 colonies and their Gods. At some point, one of the 13th tribe comes back to Caprica to rejoin the humans and create the first Cylon(s), maybe this is Daniel Greystone. He does this knowing he must continue the cylce (”This has all happened before, and will happen again”) and, though what we see in the “Caprica” mini-series eventually creates the Toasters to help serve mankind on the 12 colonies. Eventually, through the cycle, they become self aware, wage war against the 12 colonies, and evolve themselves into the 7 models of skin-jobs that we’ve met. Somehow, after the first war, the 13th tribe on Earth hears about the creation of the new Cylons and, through events that will certainly unfold, we’ll see the last 4 models either destroy Earth themselves or escape the destruction and rejoin the humans on Caprica, basically becoming human. All the events of BSG unfold up to this point, and we get back to Earth where they discover the destruction and Cylon skeletons. Now, how the series ends is still the big secret and is supposedly perfect and wraps everything up. They can either break the cycle in some way, or we can see the cycle begin again with humans and Cylons living together. Maybe we’ll see that Hera and Nicholas are the first human-cylon hybrids that make the 13th tribe style Cylons?

Ok, my brain hurts now, and my head is spinning from the revelation of this history and the possibilities this opens up. And January is looking like it’s a loooooong way away. Frak…

Original links to SFX Magazine article via Battlestar Blog and io9 post

Previous post on Caprica mini-series / series

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3. What the frak? Maybe no BSG until April 2009?
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