ItsInMyVeins said:
They don't even have guards down there in Dogsville? I was kinda surprised that Baltar & Co got robbed right there, out in the open. I don't get why Adama gave Baltar and his crew weapons either.
Deleted scenes from the episode expanded on all of this: they are down in Marines because of the mutiny, so they can no longer maintain order. The reason that he gives Baltar's group the weapons is that their only other option is bringing over Centurions from the baseship, and that kind of blending isn't what Adama has in mind. Hence why Baltar is able to sell Adama on this as the final "human solution."
Wouldn't it have been great if that was in the episode?
By who? Oh sure the initial concept sounded cool I bet, but it's led them down the very shitty path of "who are the final five" which took away the emphasis of finding Earth.
Nevermind it completely destroyed any menace the Cylons had and turned them into a bunch of clueless fucks instead of the near no mercy "DESTROY ALL HUMANS" thing they had going on.
I've been trying to figure out how best to respond to this all day, and have never quite found the right response.
First, on the question of Earth, this was never actually an emphasis. In the tradition of the Romantic Quest Narrative, it was quite literally an aimless quest. There was no map, there was no clear cut path, and the result was that it was much less about the actual end goal and rather the journey of those who are on that path. The quest for Earth has never been about actually getting to Earth: Adama didn't even know if it existed when he created the quest, just wanting to restore hope to his people. The quest for Earth was instead something that would in many instances divide or bring together the fleet: Roslin's religion and Adama's pragmatism, for instance, are two major character traits that the search for Earth really brought to the surface.
The reason that Earth being destroyed worked so well in theory was that it took what was always a point of hope more than a point of substance and showed it for what it was: all of a sudden, the entire fleet had reason to doubt their leadership, to doubt that the people who were trusted with this quest had led them to the best of their ability. The quest for Earth was about giving guidance and hope to a people who had neither, and due to its lack of actual substance could never have been the show's only preoccupation.
As for the question of the Cylons becoming too weak, I don't think that "Downloaded" can be blamed for this particular criticism. From the point of the first season, in Boomer, we began to see the type of conflict between human and Cylon identity, and as the second season continued Athena brought this question to the forefront by relating more with the humans and with Helo/Adama in particular. The binary between human and Cylon was becoming more complex, and "Downloaded" was only picking up on those elements by focusing on the idea of what happens when Cylons
aren't the type of people who are born killers, who have interacted with humans enough to be more aware of their creators (or who they believed to be their creators) and the ways in which they operated.
The Cylons could never have been sustained as absolute killing machines, because this show has never been interested in being the definitive Science Fiction series as you seem to have wanted it to be: yes, the show might have been on that path in the very early episodes like "33," but that kind of pace and that kind of simplicity was never sustainable. Starting with Boomer, and extending into the second and third seasons, the questions of human and Cylon interaction were inherently complicated, and while I will agree that parts of Season 3 dragged I don't feel it was because they were wrong to focus on the question of the identity of the Final Five, but rather due to the show's normal pacing problems within 22 episode seasons. To trace any of those problems back to "Downloaded" is not judging the show on its own merits, but rather taking the show you wanted it to become and pretending as if the show ever had a chance of existing.
