Battlestar Galactica: The Final Five 4

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Battlestar Galactica: The Final Five 4 An issue of the Dynamite series.
Issue No.	4
Writer(s)	Seamus Kevin Fahey David Reed
Illustrator(s)	{{{illustrator}}}
Penciller(s)
Inker(s)	Nigel Raynor
Colorist(s)
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Editor(s)
Collection Design	{{{designer}}}
Cover Artist(s)	Mel Rubi
Adaptation of
Published	July 1st, 2009
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Pages	{{{pages}}}
ISBN	[[Special:Booksources/|]]
Population	0 Survivors
Special	{{{special}}}
Chronology
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Summary

• The story begins thirty years before the Fall of the Twelve Colonies, with Ellen Tigh and the bleeding, dead body of Saul Tigh trapped in an airlock by a Number One/John Cavil copy.
• Ellen says that she can explain everything, but Cavil tells her that pleading would be more appropriate. He wants her to beg him to fix her, to tear out the faulty neurons responsible for her appreciation for the grossly-flawed human form and her love for Saul. Instead, she takes him into a projection.
• In the projection, Ellen tells the history of the Five starting from when they resurrected on the Resurrection Ship in orbit of the ruined Earth. Saul is distressed when he awakens, as he never wanted resurrection. Ellen tells him that she replaced her father, the original John Cavil, with him in the Resurrection system. Later, Ellen watches from around the corner as Galen Tyrol is arguing with Tory Foster over her involvement in Cavil's plans to cleanse the Tribe. Tory points out that Tyrol helped rebuild the Resurrection Ship, which made this whole situation possible. He says that he wanted to marry her, and now look what she's become.
• Ellen tells of how the five of them became "ghosts haunting the universe," looking for a sign. They retrace their ancestors' footsteps to the Algae planet, using a navigational marker in the database of the rebuilt Resurrection Ship. There, the five of them find the Temple of Hopes, which Tyrol remembers his father talking about. Tory says that it was built while the Resurrection Ship was being repaired by Pythia, as a token of appeasement to the gods that the Thirteenth Tribe had turned their back on on Kobol. Outside, Ellen finds the grave of her father's old love, a woman named Ellen who had died when the ship crashed on this planet. She remembers that when her mother left them, she (Ellen's mother) told John Cavil that he was clinging to the memories of this woman, and that Ellen's mother could never live up to that.
• Number One says that he was never a human, so he doesn't have emotions, and isn't just suppressing them like his namesake did. Ellen says that she knows better.
• Back on the Resurrection Ship in the projected history, Ellen, Tyrol, and Samuel Anders are eating algae mash together. Anders says that he was nothing on Earth, and that their race deserves better survivors than him. Tyrol says that they couldn't have developed Resurrection technology without him, and that while their race deserved better than to be fried and reduced to the five of them, that's the hand they were dealt. Ellen tells them that they've picked up a signal from the Lion's Head Nebula beacon that was left during the Tribe's journey from Kobol to Earth, and proposes that they follow it back to Kobol. Tyrol says that the Kobolians might shoot them on sight, but it's better than drinking algae booze for eternity.
• On Kobol, Saul and Ellen discover the ruins of the Opera House, and that the Twelve Tribes have abandoned the planet. What was a century for the Thirteenth Tribe was over three millennia in real time. However, the Cybernetic Life Form Nodes, or Cylons, have also rediscovered the planet. Raiders launched from a Basestar in the sky make a landing. The Centurions recognize the Tighs as fellow machines, and so let them live. They explain their rebellion, their current war with the twelve tribes of humanity, and their experiments on human test subjects to the Five. "From the streets to Caprica to the jungles of Scorpia," they are winning the war.
• On the Resurrection Ship, the Five debate the ethics of allying themselves with the Centurions. Saul says that he won't help them kill billions of people. Tyrol points out that the Centurions are practically their cousins, and Saul rebuts that it's still murder. Tyrol muses about the Centurions' absolute faith in the one god, which is the opposite of how the Thirteenth Tribe's own atheistic ancestors on Kobol were. Foster says that it's all a matter of survival of the fittest, that humanity will only survive if they deserve to. Saul points out the extinction of their own race, and she rebuts that the five of them are fitter than the ones that died. Anders is silent. Ellen tells them all to stop bickering and that they're going to take evolution into their own hands.
• Ellen meets with the First Hybrid, who converses in typically-cryptic Hybrid fashion, but agrees to stop the war with humanity if the Five help them create humanoid Cylons. The clincher is that they be given Resurrection technology. Ellen agrees, even though she knows that Saul won't like it. The armistice is signed, and the people of the Twelve Colonies watch as the Cylon forces retreat. On an ice planet, William "Husker" Adama is informed of the war's end by his CO on the Galactica in orbit.
• The Five and the Centurions now live on The Colony in deep space. They control an empire, but they want more, they want a civilization. At the Centurions' behest, the Five and the Centurions work together to create nonsentient soldier models as a defense force for the new civilization. These new Centurion-types are drones, never meant to evolve as the originals did. The Five then begin work on humanoid models. As Foster points out, they can't start from scratch with so much of their bio-tech destroyed on Earth, so Ellen decides to use her father's biological template, and fragments of his self that were recorded by the Resurrection system before she put Saul in his place, combined with a Centurion consciousness. Saul protests that John Cavil was a madman, but Ellen insists that there was good in him, thinking of the gravesite he made for her namesake. She hopes to redeem her father in some sense, and be a better mother than she was a daughter.
• Number One is shocked to learn that there are actual pieces of Ellen's father in him, and tries to deny it.
• Ellen turns to the part of the story that Cavil already knows. After he was born, he helped them to create his siblings. The second eldest brother, Number Two/Leoben Conoy, was made to be a dreamer as a counterpoint to the rational Cavil. Number Three/D'Anna Biers was a questioner, in between the two. Number Six was made in the image of the angel that appeared to Saul. Each of them was based on some facet of humanity. The original John Cavil wouldn't have liked the chorus of different voices and viewpoints that developed, and Number One grew jealous and resentful now that his parents' attention was divided. He was especially jealous of Number Seven/Daniel, in whom Ellen saw something of herself, so he murdered his youngest brother. He is shown stabbing Daniel from behind while Daniel is enjoying a projection of a tropical beach.
• In the present, Ellen says that Cavil disappointed her, but she still loves him, and that, at heart, he is a scared little boy who needs his family. He tells her that he will prove to her that love doesn't exist. She points out that his siblings will never forgive him for killing her and Saul, but he tells her he's dealt with them and the other three of the Five already. When the Five are gone, his brothers and sisters won't remember them, and the Five won't remember themselves when they resurrect. He airlocks her and Saul's body. "Your programming needs to be fixed, Mother. It's hard to accept now, but... I'd rather defy you than lose you forever. If all goes according to the plan, I'll be seeing you sooner than you think."

Analysis

• Saul Tigh is seen making a sketch of the angel that appeared to him, with the number "6" written next to the image, confirming that the Cylon Sixes were designed to resemble her.
• The meeting of the Five and the Centurions on Kobol explains why it took the Five only two thousand light-years' worth of travel to encounter the First Cylon War. They met their mechanical cousins at a halfway point, both having made an expedition to the ancestral planet.
• Galen Tyrol wonders how the Centurions got so religious. It is unclear whether the Five ever hear the full story of Daniel and Zoe Graystone.
• Number Seven/Daniel is depicted for the first time ever. He is a light-skinned young adult with blond hair, blue eyes, and an athletic frame.
• The issue calls back to the crash (due to Magnus Baltar's sabotage) and rebuilding (with the help of Pythia) of the Resurrection Ship on the Algae planet in issue 2, and shows that the Temple of Hopes was indeed built in the same timeframe.
• Ellen Tigh's namesake Ellen was almost certainly the previously unnamed middle-aged blonde woman who greeted John Cavil when he was made a member of the Thirteenth Tribe in issue 1. She and Cavil were noted as having a very close relationship in issue 2, where she was shown among the casualties of the Resurrection Ship's crash on the Algae planet, and Cavil attempted to hide his grief from Michael Tigh.
• The Thirteenth Tribe definitely did not call themselves Cylons, a contraction of "Cybernetic Life Form Nodes" coined by Daniel Graystone, until the Five met the Centurions.
• Combining a Centurion consciousness with fragments of John Cavil's personality, Number One was the first marriage of two machine races. The Thirteenth Tribe and the Centurions are only distantly related through the humans that created both, but show a marked degree of parallel evolution. Both use silica relays and datastream technology, and the Centurions were able to create a partially-humanoid Cylon form, the Hybrids, on their own, which Samuel Anders was capable of becoming.
• The First Hybrid from Razor appears, and is said to speak for all Cylons. The end of the Husker flashbacks is shown just as in Razor, though from the perspective of the battlestar Galactica in orbit.
• Tyrol says that his father used to talk about the Temple of Hopes, which is also the case for the false memories version of Tyrol. (Tyrol: "My old man told me about this place. The Temple of... uh..." Anders: "Hopes." Tyrol: "Tacky name.")
• The depiction of Ellen and Saul being airlocked together by Cavil conflicts with Anders' account in "No Exit", which has Cavil trapping the Five in a compartment and then turning off the oxygen.
• The issue is 24 pages in length.