We've debated what the deal with the devastated Earth is ... and whether it's really Earth at all. And now the other major question left to be hashed over is this: Who the frak is the final Cylon?

We got a lot of clues in recent episodes of Battlestar Galactica, though mostly they've opened up more questions rather than answering any, and sometimes they've been contradictory. The Final Five have been to Earth. D'Anna saw the faces of the Final Five, and that's why she was boxed, because merely thinking about the Final Five is forbidden. What matters most to the rebel Cylon skinjobs is being with the Final Five. The Final Five are in the colonial fleet. No, wait, the unboxed D'Anna said that only four of the Final Five are in the fleet. Tigh, once he confesses to being a skinjob, suggests that the fifth may be "another kind of Cylon," and not a skinjob at all.

But ... but ... but ... How can the Final Five (or even only four of them) both be in the fleet and have been to Earth, when no one's been to Earth as far as we can see? Why is it forbidden for the skinjobs to talk about the Final Five?

Oh, and there's one more clue that comes not from the episodes themselves but from the series' producers: The fifth Cylon is not pictured in the "last supper" photo.

I'm gonna make an easy guess: The final Cylon is Felix Gaeta. The other four -- Saul Tigh, Galen Tyrol, Sam Anders, and Tory Foster were leaders of the resistance on New Caprica, and Gaeta worked to undermine the Cylons from the inside, too. That's one big indication. The other one is more subtle: Gaeta's lost leg. We see in the online-only Webisode series "Face of the Enemy" that Gaeta's gotten a cyborg limb as a replacement. Questions about just how "machine" the skinjobs are have haunted the series from the beginning. Are they, perhaps, genetically engineered but nevertheless still entirely organic? Do they have cybernetic components? Episode 6 of "Face of the Enemy" seems to suggest that the latter is actually the case, and now here, all of a sudden, is our boy Gaeta with an obvious machine part.

Of course, the motif could go in the other direction. It's not a lack of machine parts that make a Cylon any more than machine parts can turn a human into a Cylon, as illustrated by not-skinjob Gaeta, who isn't suddenly a toaster merely because he now has a machine leg. Either way, though, I suspect that, thematically speaking, Gaeta's injury must have some importance still to be revealed.

If Gaeta is not the final Cylon, well, then, could Tigh be correct? Could we be looking at another kind of Cylon? If so, here's a crazy guess: The final Cylon is Starbuck's pristine Viper. We know it had been to Earth before the fleet, if only just before. Maybe the frakking thing will suddenly spring to life on the hanger deck and start singing a Cylon national anthem.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
MaryAnn Johanson, not a frakkin' Cylon (email me)

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