Cylon Questions

[lls_mutant]

A few questions about the 1/4/5 faction of Cylons. Can anyone help me out? The story I'm working on takes place starting at the webisodes.

1.) Do the 1/4/5's know that the Final Five are in the Fleet, and that's why the Raiders turned back at Crossroads?

2.) Do the 1/4/5's know who the Final Five are... well, ever?

3.) Do the Ones (save Cavil), Fours, and Fives know of Ellen's presence on the baseship? If so, do they know she's a final fiver?

4.) Cavil's characterization: do you think the other Ones, Fours, and Fives are treating him as a military leader? Or is he still maintaining the illusion of a voting society?

5.) A non-1/4/5 question. The bearded engineer Two is a big player in my story. I'm debating on a name for him. I'm debating between two names: Tim and Jesse. (I can't use the "Tom" I used in Softly Tread, because Tom Zarek is alive and important in this story.) I'm also debating about the last name. Before, we'd never been given multiple Cylons of the same model that took full human names. Now we have Gina Inervere (or however you spell it) and Natalie Faust. I was debating giving the Two the last name Conoy to signify the brothership the Twos felt, but I'm not sure if that's what I want to do. Thoughts?

6.) Do all the Cylons in the same model tend to dress in the same style? I'm thinking no- Natalie certainly dresses more conservatively than Cap6 ever did, and Engineer!Two is wearing a snappy red shirt as opposed to raiding Wash's wardrobe like Leoben does. But I want to check my instincts on that.

7.) Out of curiosity, where ARE the Cylons getting all these clothes and their food and the like from?

8.) Cavil says he doesn't eat, doesn't sleep. I have the impression that's a Cavil thing alone, not all the Cylons. Am I correct on that? (This is actually important, as there's a job for something kind of silly in my fic.)

9.) Okay, this is one of those things that drives me nuts, because the show does it too. My assumption is that the numbers apply to an entire model line, but the names apply to a specific Cylon. Thus "Aaron Doyle" is the consciousness that was giving tours of the Galactica in the mini-series, and if you yelled "Aaron!" at a bunch of Fives, only one would turn. Ditto "John Cavil", "Simon", "Leoben Conoy", "D'Anna Biers", etc. Sharon is a little different because the two Cylons with the name "Sharon" were meant to be passed off to humans as the same distinct individual at one point. Granted, the characters call them "the Sharons" and "the Leobens" and all that, but does this thinking make sense?

10.) I don't really have a ten right now- I just like putting ten things on a list.

I think that's it. If anyone can help me on these, I'd really, REALLY appreciate it. THANKS! :)

Comments

[geekbynight.livejournal.com]

I think I can answer a few of them. Being lame and all I didn't answer them in order ;)

9. I believe the names Cavil, Sharon, Leoben, etc. are meant to be the standard name for all the models. I base this mostly on the fact that the Final Five named them so perhaps they just picked one name for the whole line of each model.

4. I think they're treating it as a military dictatorship.

2. My opinion is that at least all of the Ones know who the final five are. The Ones seem to share a closer bond to each other, a bit like the Sixes and so I think Cavil would let the other Ones know. He trusts them.

8. Cavil's all about wanting to be a true machine. Machines don't need to eat or sleep. I think this is just a Cavil thing.

7. I like to think it's off the backs of the dead humans. Or maybe there's a trade route that takes them back to the Tweleve Colonies and to the stores ;) Can't think of a more serious explanation, unless the Centurions have to do sewing duties as well.

5. Jesse Conroy has a nice ring to it. I'd go with that.

3. At least some of the Fours have to know who Ellen is because they are going to open her brain to get the secrets to ressurrection.

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Hopefully that should help. I usually don't write Cylons, so this is driving me a bit bonkers. :)

Also, now I want to write a crackfic where the Centurions are sewing clothing and gossiping about the skinjobs.

[geekbynight.livejournal.com]

The only cylon I actually got invested in was Boomer so I'm a bit sketchy on the canon details (what little there are).

That fic would be epic :)

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

Also, now I want to write a crackfic where the Centurions are sewing clothing and gossiping about the skinjobs.

I, uh, wrote something along those lines after a What Not to Wear binge. But it didn't get the centurion POV at all, which would indeed be EPIC and AWESOME.

[grey-sw.livejournal.com]

First off: none of this stuff was ever explained, so I think you're free to do pretty much whatever you like. What follows is just my impression of these questions.

1.) Do the 1/4/5's know that the Final Five are in the Fleet, and that's why the Raiders turned back at Crossroads?
2.) Do the 1/4/5's know who the Final Five are... well, ever?

Season 4.5 implies that at least the Ones knew where and who the Five were. I think the Fours and Fives depend on how you want to play it. Personally, I think they always knew, but it's your call.

3.) Do the Ones (save Cavil), Fours, and Fives know of Ellen's presence on the baseship? If so, do they know she's a final fiver?

I think No Exit implies that Cavil was hiding her. That said, he had the Simons ready to do brain surgery on her (unless he was lying about that), so at least the Fours must have known, at least by the end? I think you could play this either way.

4.) Cavil's characterization: do you think the other Ones, Fours, and Fives are treating him as a military leader? Or is he still maintaining the illusion of a voting society?

I think this could go either way. I kinda like a combination of both: Cavil makes most of the decisions, and then the others vote "yes" to them. :P I think Cavil would definitely have wanted that illusion.

5.) A non-1/4/5 question. The bearded engineer Two is a big player in my story. I'm debating on a name for him. I'm debating between two names: Tim and Jesse. (I can't use the "Tom" I used in Softly Tread, because Tom Zarek is alive and important in this story.) I'm also debating about the last name. Before, we'd never been given multiple Cylons of the same model that took full human names. Now we have Gina Inervere (or however you spell it) and Natalie Faust. I was debating giving the Two the last name Conwoy to signify the brothership the Twos felt, but I'm not sure if that's what I want to do. Thoughts?

Calling him "Tim Conoy" or the like would be a nice way to signify the brotherhood of the Twos. I like Tim over Jesse.

6.) Do all the Cylons in the same model tend to dress in the same style? I'm thinking no- Natalie certainly dresses more conservatively than Cap6 ever did, and Engineer!Two is wearing a snappy red shirt as opposed to raiding Wash's wardrobe like Leoben does. But I want to check my instincts on that.

The Ones, Fours, Fives, and Eights all seem to wear the same general style all the time. The Twos, Threes, and Sixes seem to mix it up. If you go with that, I think you're fine.

7.) Out of curiosity, where ARE the Cylons getting all these clothes and their food and the like from?

"From the Colonies" is a fun (and cruel) idea. I think you can make up whatever you like, though. :) Or, you could ignore this question, just as the writers seem to have done.

8.) Cavil says he doesn't eat, doesn't sleep. I have the impression that's a Cavil thing alone, not all the Cylons. Am I correct on that? (This is actually important, as there's a job for something kind of silly in my fic.)

My guess is that this is only the Ones. Possibly also Boomer and/or the Fours and Fives, if you want to play it as the sort of thing Cavil handed out as a favor.

9.) Okay, this is one of those things that drives me nuts, because the show does it too. My assumption is that the numbers apply to an entire model line, but the names apply to a specific Cylon. Thus "Aaron Doyle" is the consciousness that was giving tours of the Galactica in the mini-series, and if you yelled "Aaron!" at a bunch of Fives, only one would turn. Ditto "John Cavil", "Simon", "Leoben Conwoy", "D'Anna Biers", etc.

I got the idea that the names are generally universal -- all the Dorals are "Aaron Doral", all the Leobens are "Leoben Conoy", all the Cavils are "John Cavil", etc., until the point (in season 4/4.5) where they begin to individuate and choose names of their own. The exception is the Sixes, who seem to have lots of different names throughout. Again, though, you could play this however you want, since it was never explained.

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

I was hoping you would answer, because you are essentially my Cylon goddess, especially when it comes to the Ones. (And I knew I needed to check spellings- I was just being lazy.)

I think this could go either way. I kinda like a combination of both: Cavil makes most of the decisions, and then the others vote "yes" to them. :P I think Cavil would definitely have wanted that illusion.

This is pretty much how I was going. Kind of like parenting toddlers :) If it's a little decision, I can see him letting them make it, because it gives them a feeling of power and control, but if it's a bigger one, less discussion, more tyranny.

Or, you could ignore this question, just as the writers seem to have done.

this is actually my planned course of action, except for having Felix wonder about it at one point, because no Cylons are going to sit down and explain where they're getting all this stuff from to a prisoner :)

Thanks a lot for the answers!!! :)

[grey-sw.livejournal.com]

I was hoping you would answer, because you are essentially my Cylon goddess, especially when it comes to the Ones.

*blush*

This is pretty much how I was going. Kind of like parenting toddlers :) If it's a little decision, I can see him letting them make it, because it gives them a feeling of power and control, but if it's a bigger one, less discussion, more tyranny.

heh, yeah. In my head, they're a like-minded bunch, anyway... Cavil comes up with fun new things for them to do (yay, torture! yay, weird science!) and they're more than happy to go along. It's less like tyranny than like younger brothers who always follow their eldest brother around, I guess.

But like I said before, they never explained any of this, so you can go wherever you want with it. I kinda doubt The Plan will explain it in any detail, either. :(

[grey-sw.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, and you should check all the Cylon names on the Wiki, because I think you had some minor mistakes. Hope all this helps. :)

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

I think the Cylons who have full names are the ones who have infiltrated human society, so they have them to pass, e.g., Gina Inviere, Aaron Doral, D'Anna Biers, Shelley Godfrey etc. I'm guessing the others don't have names at all prior to the genocide (Caprica Six seems to be the trailblazer in this regard), so they refer to them as the Leobens or Cavils etc. more for the audience than anything else.

Also, it's Conoy, not Conwoy.

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

Yeah, caught that :) Thanks.

Thanks- that's kind of what I figure- that they call them the Cavils or the Leobens for the audience, and because the Colonials themselves would sort of think that way, especially because there were two Sharon Valariis. But I've got an Eight and a Two both taking names, and just a whole baseship of 1/4/5s to deal with. It gets so confusing at times! :)

Thanks!

[grey-sw.livejournal.com]

Thanks- that's kind of what I figure- that they call them the Cavils or the Leobens for the audience, and because the Colonials themselves would sort of think that way, especially because there were two Sharon Valariis.

Yeah. If you're gonna be strict about it, they seem to use model numbers amongst themselves... but that also makes for very awkward dialogue, unfortunately. Since this is set during the webisodes, I think you can get away with using "Cavil", "Simon", and "Aaron" or "Doral" for the 1/4/5s; they've been around humans for a while, and by Six Of One at least, Natalie called One "Cavil".

Cavil himself seems to be more uptight about this, and tends to use model numbers... but, again, awkward dialogue. And even Cavil mentioned "the Simons" during No Exit. He does seem to call Boomer "eight", though.

Personally, I think being strict about this makes the dialogue too wooden, so I tend to use the names most of the time, and then the model numbers for emphasis (the way a human being might use a nickname and a full name, respectively), or to refer to the model as a whole. But, again, it's up to you.

[puszysty.livejournal.com]

2. One (Cavil's died multiple times, so the memory sharing thing comes into play. And actually, which Cavil are we talking? The Cavil that the colonials first met got airlocked after the resurrection ship was destroyed, so that guy doesn't exist anymore) does. The other two, likely not.

3. I'm guessing no. That'd be something Cavil wanted to keep secret. All the other models were there too when Ellen showed up, and notifying others of her presence would cause great distress, not to mention make the Twos all religious crazy and drive D'Anna even more on her purposely downloading quest.

4. I think military leader. The voting system got blown to hell with the cylon civil war. I doubt they'd continue it after it turned out so badly.

6. In a general sense, yes (like, all the fives tend to wear gaudy shirts, ones tend to go for grey tones, etc), but we've seen models of the same number wearing different outfits in the room together before.

7. Good question. Maybe they've figured out how to genetically construct food?

8. Yes. Remember Gina when we first see her? Gaius brings her fruit, and she goes right for it, looking like she's been starved and needs it. My theory is they still need food and sleep because their bodies are built to function like a human one, just less than humans do (or they notice the need less).

[lls-mutant.livejournal.com]

Thank you! That helps a lot- the Cylons generally confuse me and make my head hurt if I think too much about them. Unfortunately, for this fic, I have to!

Thanks again!

[magnetic-pole.livejournal.com]

Not reading too carefully because I don't want to spoil myself, but I really want to know the answers to these questions! M.

[kappamaki33.livejournal.com]

1, 2, and 3: Cavil knows all about the Final Five, the whole time. I really wonder why the 4s and 5s would know, though, because that seems like a big risk for Cavil to take, to tell some of the Seven but work so very hard to keep it a secret from the others. However, once the 2/6/8 and 1/4/5 factions split, I think you can play a lot faster and looser with how much everyone knows. Maybe Cavil tells them once they split, if that works better for your story. Maybe he only tells them once it becomes necessary to dissect Ellen. I have always wondered how Cavil managed to hide the spare Final Five bodies in cold storage from everyone for so long, though...

5. I like the "Conoy" brotherhood connection. Your other option would be to go with something semi-spiritual, like Gina "Invierre" (meaning "resurrection" in Old Gemenese, and, apparently, Romanian, too).

6. Maybe it's more a personality thing than a Cylon thing. The Sixes like clothes, so they dress in a lot of different styles. Same goes for the Threes. The Ones like uniformity, order, the perfection of machines, so they all dress roughly the same. The Eights have this weird, teenaged "we love you because you're just like us!" thing going, so they all dress roughly the same because they like uniformity, but for different reasons. The Twos seem to march to the beats of their own drummers, so they all dress somewhat eccentrically, but they have different eccentricities. The Fives all have bad, used-car salesman taste. The Fours act all professional, so they all wear button-down shirts and suits and the like.

7. For food, well, if they can grow spare bodies, they can certainly grow pineapples. Clothing, I always kind of liked the image of the sewing Centurion ;). Hey, even if they got clothes from dead humans on the Colonies, somebody has to do the alterations and mending.

8. That's a Cavil thing. I took it as him explaining to Ellen how he'd rewritten the way she had originally programmed him. It does seem like it might be something Boomer would be interested in trying, to separate out her human side further.

9. Two points. One, the humans were the ones whom we first saw using these names to describe entire model lines. It may be that the Cylons took to copying their habit, particularly when communicating with humans, for clarity's sake. Two, Ellen did give John Cavil and Daniel their names at the very least. But I'm not sure that we know if Ellen intended there to be dozens of Cavils alive at once or if the extra bodies were there as back-ups--she might have just been ensuring immortality, like with the Final Five, who each only had one of themselves running around at any given time, rather than creating multiple copies. So, you can probably play it either way.

[puszysty.livejournal.com]

who each only had one of themselves running around at any given time, rather than creating multiple copies I hadn't thought about before. That's interesting to think about though. That the cylons that they created got out of their hands and became something they hadn't intended. Fits in well with the "all this has happened before, etc." theme that extended all the way to the cylons on first!earth.

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

I see you've gotten a lot of responses already, so I'll just say: I like Jesse better than Tim, only because Tim sounds too much like Tom.

Do all the Cylons in the same model tend to dress in the same style? I'm thinking no- Natalie certainly dresses more conservatively than Cap6 ever did, and Engineer!Two is wearing a snappy red shirt as opposed to raiding Wash's wardrobe like Leoben does. But I want to check my instincts on that.

I think there's a range. I doubt a Two would ever wear a Simon-style snappy suit, but I've spotted them wearing ordinary shirts and plain pants on occasion.

re: #9 I like the idea of each model's prototype getting a name from their (crazy) parents/creators, which some of them keep as time passes and others don't. And for whatever reason, the Sixes are quicker to individualize than the other models.

(Sorry, I accidentally hit post comment before I was done.)

[kappamaki33.livejournal.com]

I have nothing intelligent to add, but OMG, *love* your icon!

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

Hee! Thanks! I stole the pic and text from that lolcats site, I believe.
Feel free to snag, if you want--I certainly don't have any creative rights to it, other than cropping the pic and redoing the text.

[nai-is-not.livejournal.com]

Oh gosh, not answering these questions, because everyone else has had fabulous responses, but I have a question! When does it say that Cavil doesn't eat? I remember the whole not sleeping thing from No Exit, but this is the second time I've heard this, and I... can't... remember if I actually heard it in the series or not. /o\

[(Anonymous)]

Hello!

I write BSG fanfics,too, but in my native german. Since I like to keep close to canon, where it does not hinder any AU story, I made myself knowledgeable about the RTF and cylons. Hope my reply can help you a bit.
1,2 and 3: The Cavils definitely and considering the unwavering loyality of the 4s and 5s, at least the "headhonchos" :-) of these lines as well. And it´s clear why the Ones never told the Twos, Sixes and Threes. The Twos are too religious for Cavils taste and would become bothersome for him. As seen in the series, the Ones, Threes and Sixes are the main leaders among the model lines. Why should the powerhungry Cavils give his opposition, even when it was still peace among the cylons, such useful info?
4: I´m sure, the Ones keep the voting going, as long as it´s about small things, to keep the illusion the Simons and Dorals have "weight" in politics, but serious topics will be "moderated" by the 1s.
5: I don´t have an opinion which surname is better (i dislike both), but it should definitely be Conoy as the last name. When it comes to names, clothes, hairstyle, etc., the Cylons are rather uniform, with the distict exception of the Sixes.
6: It depends on model line. The Sixes are the most individual line and so have different styles, but tend generally for a classy, fashion look. The Threes like clothes as much as the Sixes do, but while more diverse than cylon standard, they are more uniform than the Sixes.
All other lines are very uniform in style, with only small "deviances". The ones go for the, as one user wrote, "retired Indiana Jones" style and are the most uniform. The Twos like eccentric, but with differing core themes. The 4s and 5s are suit types, with the former more formal and the latter more salesman. The 8s have a thing for the cargo and "schoolgirl" style.
7: The clothes are made on the "colony" and the basestars. From what we have seen, the basestars are nearly autarkic, so machines or centurios make the clothes following the wishes of the model lines.
8:Correct, it´s a Cavil thing. But he might share it with his closest allies over time.
9: When you take full names(Natalie Faust, Leoben Conoy), then yes, only one cylon out of a whole bunch would turn. But shouting only Leoben or Aaron, then several would turn. The surnames are fixed for the majority of a model line. As always, the Sixes are the exception to the rule. Now after the rebels joined the RTF, the 2s and 8s might get more individual full names, but i think that a strong minority of them will keep at least the surname or last name with a new part added.
All Good!