So let's assume – and I'm making a wild guess here – let's assume you're a geek. Tonight's a big test: what kind of a geek are you? Are you most excited: 1. that Ellen Tigh (Kate Vernon), now revealed as the Twelfth Cylon, makes an appearance tonight and unlocks more secrets of the tangled Cylon/Human canon? Or 2.: that John Hodgman – the PC guy, the This American Life and Daily Show guy, the dark dork prince of quirk – has a cameo? Count me in camp 1, because it rubs me wrong that one of the crucial plot nights of the series also has the misplaced comic relief of Hodgson's cameo. Come on Ron Moore, this ain't The Love Boat, and Hodgman ain't Don Ameche. Eyes on the prize, dude.
That said: tonight's episode, "No Exit," was one of my absolute favorites. Not because it had stellar action or stand-out performances, or even many emotional high notes. If you're the kind of fan who bathes in backstory, who wants to see how it all connects, tonight's episode delivered some of the best exposition I've ever seen from anything. It's not that I expected them to dish out the big secrets in the classic "one scientist explains something to another scientist, until – twist ending!" style of golden age sci-fi. But I never thought it would be this subtle, that they could focus more on the who's and why's than the what's, or that they could explain so much of the mystery while keeping it so mysterious.
The plot was simple: on Galactica, Anders is in the sick bay with a bullet in his brain, and he's started to remember things – how the Final Five knew each other on Earth, how they escaped, and how they played a part in the war that kicked the series off. To recap – well jeez, how far back should I go? Well, let's go back to Kobol. Humanity is born. People have sex and make babies and die, and it's a pretty good way to keep the species going. But the 13th tribe came up with a system of "organic memory transfer." It allowed them to transfer memories from one body to the next, and effectively invent resurrection. But somewhere along the way – either on the way to Earth, or after they landed – the 13th tribe, who became the Cylons, decided to go back to the sex thing, and they forgot about resurrection. Forgot it, that is, until the Final Five rediscovered it, largely thanks to Ellen Tigh.
Anders tells this to Tigh, Tyrol, and Tori – the other members of the Final Five, who are huddled around him on Galactica. They're only missing one Final Fiver, Ellen. And that's the other half ot tonight's story: Ellen's alive! Turns out that when Tigh executed her on New Caprica, she resurrected – in a secret facility on a base ship, where Brother Cavil could pick her up and hide her from the rest of (well, most of the rest of) the Cylons. So let's recap the rest of the history.
The Final Five were on Earth, and they rediscovered resurrection. But they also knew that a nuclear war is coming – presumably because the Earthlings had invented Centurions, and pissed the Centurions off, and somewhere a Centurion got hold of a nuke, and so we know how that goes. The Final Five don't wait around for it. They build a resurrection ship of their own, which is out in orbit, and when the bombs fly, they find themselves on their space ship – which they pilot back to the other 12 colonies, where they're going to warn the humans not to invent artificial life, or at least not to be mean to it. But of course they're too late.
But they're not too late to run into the Centurions – who want to invent artificial life, and who got as far as making hybrids, but who don't know how to make the flesh-and-blood Cylons. The Final Five agree to teach them.
Lemme just add here that I love the way we're learning this. We don't see flashbacks or dramatizations of any of these wars. We don't see this magical little space ship, which plods at sub-light speeds and in a relativistic time warp on its way to the 12 colonies. We don't see Ellen and the gang land at the Temple of Hope. We're just listening to Anders talk. Or Ellen and Cavil argue. It's one step above cavemen hanging around a campfire. It feels a little shady or shadowy: we don't get the objective truth of what the show can stage for us, but the limited viewpoint of what these characters can explain.
And these characters are very unreliable. We spend half the show with Ellen and Cavil, as well as Cavil's "pet" Eight, Boomer, who watches them bicker. No mystery where they got the episode title this week: the episode is staged like Jean-Paul Sartre's play (and a Centurion as the Valet is a great touch). Except that instead of a three-way torment, we're really focused on one relationship: Cavil hates his creator Ellen, in part because he hates himself. By the timestamps, we are led to believe that he and Ellen have been tormenting each other on the baseship for eighteen months, Ellen staying cool and a little maternal while Cavil rages and rants at her. Why did she make him so human? Why does he have these squirrely little eyes, instead of sensors that could see the whole spectrum of light? "I'm a machine. And I could know so much more. I could experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body."
He doesn't want to be human, yet he's vengeful and jealous. We learn that back in the day, there was actually a 13th model of Cylon. Don't get excited, it's noone that we've ever seen: the 13th model, Number Seven, was Daniel, a sensitive artsy-type who was a favorite of Ellen's. Cavil got jealous – so jealous that he didn't just box the Daniels, he killed them all, infecting the amniotic fluid in their tanks. Cavil also imprisoned the Final Five, and eventually wiped their minds and dropped them in the 12 colonies, so they could suffer with the humans, and endure terrible pain and torment, all so they could come back and tell Cavil that he was right, humanity sucks, being a machine is a good gig. That's what he wants Ellen to say, and he also wants Ellen to admit that everything wrong with him is her fault, not his, plus he loves her – and in their final exchange, they bicker like God and Lucifer, mom and son, father and daughter, and two lovers, all in one scene.