Michael Hogan can’t vote because he’s a Canadian, but I strongly suspect that he’s hoping that John McCain pulls out a voctory in November. I can’t imagine a better actor to play the part. Take John McCain, lose him a little bit of hair, shave off some years, and add some virility and a boatload of bitterness and Michael Hogan playing Colonel Saul Tigh is pretty much what you get, visually anyway.
Here’s a video. About half-way through you get a slightly better look at him:
-{Spoilers below}-
So apparently one of the big secrets at the end of last season was that Tigh, along with two minor characters and a pretty major one, are actually Cylons. Cylons, for non-BSG fans, are the bad robots that look like humans. I’ve got to say, this plot twist makes more sense than just about any other plot twist on the entire show.
He annoys the crap out of me, which I think he’s supposed to do. From the beginning of the series, I’ve wondered to myself why exactly Tigh exists. The answer, clearly enough, is that he exists to be wrong about everything! He reminds me of Roger Ebert’s description of one of the bureaucrats in Die Hard:
As nearly as I can tell, the deputy chief is in the movie for only one purpose: to be consistently wrong at every step of the way and to provide a phony counterpoint to Willis’ progress. The character is so willfully useless, so dumb, so much a product of the Idiot Plot Syndrome, that all by himself he successfully undermines the last half of the movie.
Tigh doesn’t undermine the show, but he does give away plot points. If he says that they should do one thing, invariably they should do whatever the other alternative. He hates, hates, hates the Cylons and I get that I do… but he’s only around dispensing advice whenever they actually need to trust the Cylons. He’s the dissenting voice… dissenting from whatever course of action they clearly need to take. There is literally one instance that I can think of where he was on the right side of an issue… and of course that involved the treachery of stealing an election.
But now that all makes sense! As a Cylon, it’s his job to undermine the humans. It was his job to be a monumentally disastrous commander while Admiral Adama was laid up in surgery. He’s not an obnoxious idiot because he’s an obnoxious idiot, he was programmed that way. Double duty, so to speak, as an annoying plot device and saboteur!
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5 Responses to John McCain’s Terrible Secret
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Dude, if you’re putting spoilers in a post, let people know. I still haven’t even started watching season 3, as I don’t get the sci-fi channel, and am having to wait a very long time for the dvd’s to become available.
Aw hell, maybe I should just bail on the show entirely. I’ve done without it for a solid year, so maybe I shouldn’t get re-hooked on it.
Sorry about that. I figured that I was safe because it had been a year since this little tidbit was revealed, but I should have thought about the delayed DVD release. Having finally gotten caught up last week I figured that I was just about the last to know.
In any case, there is quite a bit more to the fourth season than this little tidbit. So if you enjoy the show, by all means watch it despite my goof.
Delayed DVD releases shouldn’t figure into spoiler warnings. An hour or two after East Coast US airing (even less if people just use caution) should be more than enough time for people to shy away from spoilers. Once it’s been released into the general populace, it’s fair game and woe be unto me if I didn’t catch it at the time it aired. It’s not fair to everyone else to wait on me to catch up.
And I’m talking about spoiler warnings themselves, not just discussing the episode. Heck if we follow that logic to its conclusion, we should never post anything about Darth being Luke’s father – that’s one surprise that existed for one generation and one generation only…the folks who saw Empire in the theatre in 1980. After that, well, it’s part of movie history. Same with other big twists, like Sixth Sense or The Crying Game. Everyone had their chance to see them, and now that window is closed for “spoiler warning” discussions. I’ve never seen Citizen Kane but I have no problem seeing an in-depth discussion on sleds…
Delayed DVD releases shouldn’t figure into spoiler warnings.
So if I chose to not blow $40 a month just to see BSG when it comes out, I deserve to have my eventual fun spoiled? Why?
And honestly, why pay over $60 a month for an entire cable package, when I can get the basic channels (plus TBS and History) for less than $20/month? Other than BSG, and perhaps South Park, I never watched anything on those extra channels.
Yeah, I had to wait a year for BSG, but even after buying season three, I’m still ahead by about $440. It’s beyond me why more people don’t opt-out of paying for all extra channels.
So if I chose to not blow $40 a month just to see BSG when it comes out, I deserve to have my eventual fun spoiled? Why?
Because that’s just it – are first-run BSG and the Sci-Fi Channel not offered in your Cable/Dish package? Even so, there’s an infinite lag time between airing and someone buying a DVD package. If you plan to watch the show but haven’t yet then expect to be spoiled if you catch a discussion on it. Because the ratio of people who have watched an episode vs. those who are waiting on the DVD release is pretty small. And if there’s a long delay in release, get onto the distributing company about it.