I just read a thoughtful post on the Pop Culture and Philosophy blog about the concept of balance in the Force in Star Wars. I’ve been struggling to understand that concept myself as I’ve been reading through a lot of the Star Wars comics, both Legends canon and new canon, and thinking them through in light of the movies, Clone Wars show, and Rebels show. I don’t think the post I linked to has it right, but I’m linking to it as a thoughtful piece trying to come to grips with this issue. A quick Google search revealed quite a number of other views on this, again none of it seeming to me to get things quite right. So I wanted to put some of my own thoughts on this into writing, however, so here are some rough musings attempting to put many months of thought on this into something somewhat digestible.

Here are several things that didn’t make a lot of sense to me, when put together:

​These are my rankings of Doctor Who stories from the First Doctor period. I have categorized them into five categories, rather than finding a linear ranking order for each story.

Cream of the Crop

10. The Dalek Invasion of Earth: One of the best First Doctor stories. It's the second appearance of the Daleks, and given the original naming conventions (where individual episodes were named, not overall serials, as became standard practice later in the show) you wouldn't have gotten the presence of the Daleks spoiled by the title until the end of the first episode. The TARDIS crew ends up in 22nd Century London, where the city has been devastated, with very few people in sight, all of them acting in a robotic manner. When they discover the first Dalek they come across, it's a bit of a shock, because they'd only met the Daleks on their home planet in their first appearance. Despite a ridiculous sci-fi premise for why the Daleks have invaded Earth, this story works incredibly well, which certainly isn't true of all the Terry Nation Dalek stories in this period. I don't think it's his best. That honor goes to The Daleks' Master Plan. But this is among the truly classic stories of the First Doctor period.

21. The Daleks' Master Plan: This is by far my favorite First Doctor story. A full dozen episodes (a baker's dozen, if you count the prologue episode Mission to the Unknown, which came two stories before but was really part of this story). Unfortunately, only three episodes survive, so you either have to listen to the soundtracks for the rest or watch the fan-created reconstructions based on the large number of set photos that exist and the existing soundtracks. But it's worth it. The stakes are higher than any previous Dalek story, and it has better good science fiction concepts than many of the other non-historical earlier episodes. We get to see a future Earth empire with a military that knows all about the Daleks and is trained to fight them, including two noteworthy characters, a brother and sister played by Nicholas Courtney, who later went on to play Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, and Jean Marsh as Sara Kingdom, one of my favorite companions over the entire run of the origianl series. Marsh also had earlier played Princess Joanna in The Crusade and much later returned to play Morgana in the Seventh Doctor story Battlefield, which was also the final appearance of Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in the Doctor Who show. This was the only story featuring Sara Kingdom, unfortunately, but she's present for something like eight or nine episodes of it. Terry Nation wrote episodes 1-5 and 7. Unfortunately, the seventh was a Christmas episode that has nothing to do with the rest of the story, which is its only real low point. By that point in the story, we're reliving The Chase, where the Doctor, The Meddling Monk (from The Time Meddler), and the Daleks are running around through time, and it slows down a bit, but those parts are a little better than the middle episodes of The Chase in my view. But the first half of this story and the last two or three episodes are as enjoyable as the First Doctor gets, even with reconstructions of the episodes.

23. The Ark: This is one of the better "future of humans" stories of the First Doctor. The TARDIS appears on a human ship in the future, and there's another intelligent species serving humans as slaves, in effect, although from all appearances it's consensual, and the humans are unaware of the full intelligence of these beings. Halfway through, the TARDIS crew has resolved their original problem keeping them there, and they reappear in the same spot but much further in the future. Since this is a time when the Doctor had no control at all over where the TARDIS ends up, that seems remarkably odd. Then they discover that a revolution has occurred, and the other species has turned the tables on their human masters. Instead of being victims that we feel sorry for, they are now the villains. This was a nice nod to the common phenomenon in human history of the victims gaining control and becoming just as bad oppressors as those who had oppressed them. We also get to see an invisible (i.e. money-saving) but very powerful alien race that reminded me much of the sort of thing you might see on the original series of Star Trek, which was being made around the same time period as this episode. This episode didn't win me over to new companion Dodo. But it has some funny moments between her and the Doctor, where her slang expressions (that are entirely commonplace now, to a point where it shocked me that anyone wouldn't be used to it) give us a glimpse of the First Doctor's cantankerous nature in his complaints that she's not speaking English (which I should note is her first language and not his). And this is one of the few First Doctor stories that I'd gladly show to someone who wanted to see a good example of what the best of his period was like.

Very Enjoyable Stories

2. The Daleks (AKA The Mutants, not to be confused with a later Third Doctor story): This is the serial that gave the show its initial success. It drags a bit about 3/4 of the way through, but overall this is a great introduction to the Daleks. As with most of Terry Nation's Doctor Who stories, there are deeper themes to the story than just an action/adventure romp. In contrast to some of the emphasis of later Doctor Who stories (including some of Nation's own), here we see the Doctor encouraging pacifists to take up arms to destroy a menace that would otherwise end up destroying them. This is one of the best First Doctor stories.

17. The Time Meddler: In this story we get the introduction of our first Time Lord character (not that we have that name yet) besides the Doctor and Susan, and we even get to see his TARDIS, both inside and out. His chameleon circuit works, so we see a TARDIS properly disguised. The Meddling Monk returns as well in the Daleks' Master Plan, so he's also a recurring villain. A renegade Time Lord seeking to change history for some unclear profit motive (or perhaps for some higher good, but in any case the Doctor disapproves), the Meddling Monk has set himself up at a monastery, where he's pretending a whole group of monks are present by using future technology (including a phonograph with recordings of medieval-style chant) to give the appearance of a larger population of monks (as well as to make his stay more comfortable with appliances such as a toaster). The Doctor and his companions eventually figure out what's going on, and the Doctor manages to show some know-how when it comes to how a TARDIS works by sabotaging the Monk's TARDIS (which unfortunately never manages to help him get his TARDIS working properly again so he can actually control where it goes, not until the Time Lords help him later on during the Third Doctor period). This is the first time we see a historical setting with something non-historical worked in, a formula that the show eventually uses almost exclusively for stories taking place in the Earth's past, but we still have another season or so of purely historical episodes to go before that becomes standard. It's the first time also for the new lineup of the Doctor, Vicki, and Steven. It has some moments of lagging, as historical episodes tend to do, and it's the first historical episode with discussion of the real possibility of history-changing (see The Space Museum for the first instance of this, however, although this doesn't have the complete incoherence of that story). That is a disappointment from the perspective of metaphysics, but the unique elements of this story more than make up for it.

27. The War Machines: This is one of my favorite. If it weren't for the musical companions, it would be in the top category. The adventure starts with the Doctor and Dodo arriving in Dodo's own time period (roughly the time the episode aired). She's in the first episode and maybe part of the second. She never even appears to say goodbye to the Doctor. It introduced Ben and Polly, but Polly is brainwashed for most of the episode, so we don't get to see her in her right mind very much. And much of the episode Ben hasn't really connected with the Doctor. So it's not really the usual Doctor and his companion (or companions) sort of piece. That being said, this was a great introduction to what became a much more standard format for the Second Doctor period, where the Doctor (and in the other cases his companions) is in the time period when the show was being made, the mid-late 1960s, fighting off some menace threatening the time period of the viewers of the show. In this case, it's an artificial intelligence that, in a rare case, seems to have nothing to do with aliens, but you do get some rather rudimentary-looking robot threats (in keeping with the era they couldn't have them be too sci-fi looking). The Doctor uses logical paradoxes to undo the machine, as he does in several other stories (The Green Death, Death to the Daleks, and Shada come to mind). I do tend to like Ben and Polly, but we don't see a lot of Polly in this one. There's a nice scene at the end where the Doctor thinks he's all alone for the first time since the show began, but he ends up getting surprised with some unintended stowaways at the end, leading into the next season (and his final two stories).

29. The Tenth Planet: This is the introduction of the Cybermen and the last story for the First Doctor, so there's particular significance to it, but it doesn't work as well as I'd like. The Second Doctor Cybermen stories are much better. They look like they're wearing cloth outfits instead of metal. It's hard to hear what they're saying sometimes. The Doctor is showing his age, and several of his scenes had to be given to Ben or Polly. (Both Hartnell and the character are dying of old age at this point.) At the end, after defeating the Cybermen, he just collapses and dies, only to be regenerated into the Second Doctor. They don't explain the regenaration all that well, and the final episode is missing (although there are copies of the regeneration scene that have been released on DVD and online). Fortunately, this is one of the missing episodes that have now been animated. Still, this is a decent base-under-siege story, a template that becomes much more common with the Second Doctor, and as the introduction to the Cybermen and the final First Doctor story, it's certainly one to see.

I recently rewatched the 1975 Doctor Who episode "Genesis of the Daleks" by Terry Nation. Some online discussions I looked at about "Genesis of the Daleks" made some interesting, and to my mind obviously false, claims about how it fits (or doesn't) into the overall canonical fictional world of Doctor Who.

One claim in particular claim that caught my interest was the accusation that Terry Nation contradicted some of his earlier Doctor Who episodes about the Daleks in giving the origin of the Daleks in this serial. One discussion pointed out that Nation had made an effort not to contradict his first serial "The Daleks" from 1963, where he establishes the Daleks as creations of a race called the Dals in their war against the Thals. The supposed contradiction comes with "Genesis of the Daleks" when Nation actually shows us this war between the Thals and the race that created the Daleks, and the creator race is not called the Dals but is called The Kaleds.

Here's my problem. This is not a contradiction. A contradiction takes the form 'P and not-P". There is nothing of that form here. What you do have is:

1. The race who created the Daleks at the time of the Daleks' creation called themselves the Kaleds.
2. The Thals also called them the Kaleds at that time.
3. At a much later time, probably many centuries later, after an apocalyptic destruction of all civilization and a loss of a good deal of accurate information about the details of that earlier time, someone speaks of the race that created the Daleks as the Dals.

I'm sorry, but I'm not seeing how any of that makes for an inconsistency. If we were sure the person telling us they were called the Dals was speaking the truth, that would even be difficult to get a contradiction, because it's possible they came to be called the Dals at some time after "Genesis of the Daleks" or that they were called that at some earlier time, and that name came to be the more common one to use again after the apocalypse. But we can't even be sure the Thal telling us this has the right information. Maybe it's just that the wrong name was preserved. There are quite a number of things that could explain how 1-3 might all be true. Terry Nation simply did not contradict his earlier Dalek stories. What he did is use a different name without explaining why different names were used at those two different times, but it's not a contradiction.

I think there's a certain personality type that just likes to find contradictions in everything. A lot of fan criticism of science fiction and fantasy stories exhibits similar problems to the one I've been discussing here. I could point out lots of other examples. That doesn't mean there aren't legitimate criticisms to level against authors. I've criticized J.K. Rowling in print about her concept of changing the past in the third Harry Potter novel, although I did so after pointing out some rather implausible ways of making the story work to avoid the problem I raised. The implausibility there would involve reliable narrators who would know better telling untruths, however, which is more of a stretch than someone centuries after an apocalyptic event getting a name of an extinct civilization wrong or the possibility that the group was actually called by two different names.

How you evaluate such attempts to make canonical worlds coherent in part does depend on how plausible the explanation might be to avoid the contradiction. It's nice for fictional worlds to be coherent. Sometimes that's impossible. Sometimes it involves an implausibility but is possible. And sometimes it's not all that implausible if you just think a little harder to see how things might fit together, when at first they seem not to.

It's hard not to think of critics who like to find contradictions in the Bible when I look at these stories. There are some genuine difficulties in fitting together some parts of the Bible. I've never seen one that guarantees a contradiction, especially when you take into account that inerrantists don't take the current manuscripts to be inerrant but allow for errors in transcription from manuscript to manuscript. But I have seen places where it's not easy to come up with one highly plausible explanation that shows for sure why the apparent contradiction is not a real one. In most of them, there have been several explanations, where not one stands out as the most plausible, and even most of them involve something somewhat unlikely but possible. There's none I know of where I would judge all the explanations as so implausible as to require rational evaluators to think it has to involve two contradictory statements that can't be resolved. But I'm coming from an epistemological standpoint where I think the prior plausibility is relatively high. I consider myself to be in a position where I think I have good reasons for taking the Bible as it presents itself, as God's word, and it follows from that that it's more likely that there is a solution even if I don't know what it is than that there isn't. So I'm going to take the less-plausible-sounding accounts as less certain, but I'm going to be more likely to think that one of them is probably true.

That's one difference with fictional worlds. I don't believe there even are Daleks or Time Lords, never mind that the entire Doctor Who canon is consistent. (I think it certainly isn't coherent when it comes to fundamental questions of time travel, for example.) But someone who thinks God is real and is basically the way God is presented in the Bible is going to place a higher prior probability on there being some resolution to a proposed contradiction than someone who has no prior trust in those documents. And I would argue that someone doing this is right to do so if the prior probability is based on a good epistemic state to begin with. And that makes accepting truth in texts that are hard to fit together much easier to do (and not in a way that undermines rationality, assuming the prior probability itself has a rational grounding.
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That assumption of prior probability, of course, is one of the fundamental disputes to begin with, but you can't just assume at the outset that someone who is more willing to trust a set of scriptures is wrong in doing so, and pointing to potential contradictions isn't necessarily going to turn the tide of the conversation unless you first undermine the prior probability. Supposed but not actual contradictions, even if they are difficult to put together, are therefore very weak evidence against the coherence of a worldview when the person who holds that worldview is more sure of it than they are of the irresolvability of the supposed contradiction. That makes for people coming from very different standpoints evaluating the supposed contradictions very differently, and from within their world view each seems to themselves to be right in how they do that. That's something that I think not enough people on either side of such debates can see.

Apparently a new book is out (or perhaps is about to come out), analyzing Doctor Who and race, and it has angered someone at the BBC enough that they've come out with a response to the charge that the show is "thunderously racist". The article gives no further information about the book, but a quick Google search turns up this site that seems to be intended to promote the book. This seems to be the call for papers, giving a sense of what the publisher or editor wanted the articles to be like before any of them were written.

I have two thoughts. One is that the pushback from the scifi blogs and from the BBC, pointing out ways Doctor Who is racially forward, seem to me to be generally accurate. Consider the contemporary show especially. Martha Jones was by far the most intelligent of all the recent companions, and she's black. She was a medical student, even, and she eventually became a doctor. The other recent companions have mostly been working-class women with much less education. They dealt with the inter-racial relationship of Mickey and Rose as if that were perfectly normal. There have been plenty of guest starts, and those of non-white races have not seemed to me to be remotely racially stereotypical in most cases.

There might be racially insensitive moments of the original series, reflecting those times (meaning that it's not any more racially-insensitive than anything else in those days). The show started in the 1960s, after all. There were several early serials where the reality of the available actors in the UK at the time required that they use white actors to play Aztecs or the soldiers of Genghis Khan. If you did something like that now, you'd better do it right.

Some say the SNL portrayal of President Obama by a white actor was much more successful at this than most instances of blackface. It remains to be seen whether Johnny Depp will get away with his Tonto in the Lone Ranger later this year. But in the 1960s, when the actors you had available were all or mostly white, you had to make do with what you have, and the issue is mainly not who's playing the characters but whether they act in a way that furthers harmful stereotypes. In my judgment, most such instances on Doctor Who do not, at least where I am in the series now, which is 1971, with a smattering of episodes throughout the later Doctors and then the new series through the early sixth season.

As for the claim that primitive cultures are portrayed as savages, all you need to do is look to the second serial, The Daleks, where the Thals, who had gone primitive after centuries of post-apocalyptic avoidance of technology, were anything but savage. It was The Doctor who convinced them to overcome their pacifism and fight back against the Daleks. There was even the serial called The Savages, where the idea that they were savages was held by the dominant technological society in that world but turned out to be false, and at the end they have to learn to live together in harmony. And those examples were both in the 60s.

The reality is that a long-running show like Doctor Who will eventually display the prejudices of its times, but it has many, many moments of breaking away from those, and it often has done so in creative and helpful ways, using alien races as analogies for human racial relations or for colonial or slave relations. It's perfectly legitimate to point out ways Doctor Who has assumed cultural superiority of certain groups and such, assuming it has done so in the particular cases. It's fine to point out ways the show has represented stereotypes when it has done so. But it does not do to make blanket statements based on a few individual cases about the show as a whole, especially if the current show is implicated in problems with past representations. And if you talk about Doctor Who now, it doesn't make any sense just to point to examples from decades ago.
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So that's my first thought. The reaction of Doctor Who fans and the BBC to the charge of racism seems to me to be largely correct. The show doesn't seem to deserve the label "thunderously racist". The criticism seems to me to be ill-informed.

But that brings me to my second thought, which is that the knee-jerk reaction doesn't strike me as very informed either. Take a look at the call for papers, and then go to the site promoting this new book to see what the various articles in the book are actually doing. Here is a list of the main points for each chapter

1. The Tenth Doctor period is racially-inclusive but nevertheless unconsciously portrays race in ways that that negatively affect people of color. (I'm sure there's probably some of this. I might disagree with a lot of the details or with the extent to which this is true, but I'd have to read it to see.)
2. This looks at two Martha Jones episodes involving time travel, where the writers ignore how a black character would have been perceived and treated in those times. (I imagine this criticism is probably fair, up to a point. I seem to remember that one of those episodes did, in fact, address that issue.)
3. The third argues that companions of color are treated consistently worse than other companions. (If we're talking about the new show, I'd say that's ludicrous, for reasons I gave above, but I'd be open to hearing the arguments.)
4. This chapter is about the Fifth Doctor's cricket uniform and the history of cricket and race. (I'd have to say I'm unqualified to say anything about this, because I know nothing about this history, but I have to wonder if this is a stretch. Is it true that merely wearing a cricket costume is racist? I'd have to see the reasoning, but I'm skeptical.)
5. Here we have what, from the description, seems like it might be judging the show as doing something racially positive. The Doctor is an outsider, and yet he's the moral compass of the show, allowing the show to engage in self-criticism about our own society. It involves role-flipping, with the outsider running the show. There's even a parallel with Obama in the White House. (Again, maybe there's somewhat of a stretch here, but this doesn't seem to be making any obvious claim of racism in the show. It seems the reverse.)
6. The assumption here is that the Doctor is a metaphor for changing British cultural identity. Given that, it's problematic that he's always been played by white dudes. (But isn't it a bit tendentious to assume that's the primary driving force behind what the Doctor represents to begin with? Hardly a strong basis on which to rest such a sweeping criticism of the show. That can be so even if it would be nice to have a non-white Doctor at some point.)
7. Here there's some attempt to point out that the interracial relationships of the Davies era are no longer prominent under Moffat. (This one strikes me as true, but keep in mind that Moffat had one couple as companions for most of his tenure and then only one further since, and Davies had three companions over four seasons, with a number of minor characters in the recurring cast, because of how he was doing the overall story arc, and Moffat hasn't had recurring cast members at all, at least in what I've seen, and the ones I know of from later in his tenure are aliens.)
8. Davies' characters of color are more fleshed-out than Moffat's. (That's because they're ongoing characters.)
9. Asians are somewhat underrepresented on the show and how to avoid problems in cases where they did appear in the past. (Maybe on the flagship show this is true, but Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures had main characters who were Asian, and they seemed to me to be good portrayals. I assume the past mistake that takes most prominence in this chapter is The Talons of Weng-Chiang, which I haven't seen.)
10. This compares a good instance and a bad instance on the original show. (I haven't seen either story.)
11. This is simply a criticism of the use of yellowface in The Talons of Weng-Chiang. (Which again I haven't seen.)
12. This looks at The Aztecs, from the 1960s, pointing to some stuff in Christopher Columbus and other historical records that contemporary scholars disagree with but that informed the show. (I can express only ignorance on the issues in question. I think there's a tendency in scholars to downplay the bad elements of cultures that were disturbed or wiped out by white colonists, such as the Aztecs' cannibalism and human sacrifice. I have no idea if this has to do with that, in which case I'd be strongly resistant to the criticism. But for all I know it's a legitimate improvement in our understanding of the Aztecs.)
13. The treatment of the Ood as slaves is of a piece with how humanity has behaved in our actual past, and there's even reason to think we'll continue to behave this way in the future. (The first claim seems right. The second might require more argument and information than we actually have, especially given that the tendencies that have led to colonization and slavery have largely been driven in other bad directions, which is much better even if still very bad.)
14. This chapter looks at four stories in the original series that dealt with colonization themes, immigration, and the fall of the British empire through analogical portrayals of other, similar, situations, arguing that the different stories reflect different (and inconsistent) attitudes about these issues. (I haven't seen any of these stories, but the idea that different themes in different directions are represented in stories from different writers at different times is certainly plausible.)
15. This seems to be a criticism of certain critiques of apparent stereotypes as ignoring the perspective of the post-colonized peoples of post-colonial societies. I think the idea here is that the debris left over after colonization is gone leave a more complex situation that analyses of stereotypes can give you, and it takes having such a perspective to see certain things. (I have seen the serial in question, but I'd have to see the details of the proposal to see if it seems right to me. But that serial seems to me to represent a common phenomenon identified by Miroslav Volf in his Exclusion and Embrace. The oppressed group manages to free themselves and then oppresses the oppressor. I'm not sure how the author of this chapter handles that theme or any other. I liked the serial and had a moderately positive impression of what it was doing as social commentary, so I'm curious whether the author is getting at something similar or something very different.)
16. This has to do with one season of Doctor Who and one season of Torchwood, arguing that certain views of race riots in the UK in summer 2011 (from right-wing media and from these seasons of these two shows) lead to the view that race is an illusion. (I have no basis on which to evaluate this, not having seen either season of either show and not being privy to the particular media commentary.)
17. This looks at the Nazi-Dalek analogy, arguing that the analogy has more been driven by entertainment values and a need for portraying the Daleks as the ultimate evil than any desire to get the Nazis right. (Terry Nation really did have fascism in mind with the Daleks, as I understand it, but I don't think he meant to portray the Nazis specifically. It's certainly true that over time other writers played fast and loose with the analogy, but I think Nation himself was interested in drawing the parallel between fascism in the Daleks more directly, even if it wasn't always his main concern. There's probably a lot of historical importance here, but it's only indirectly about race, I would guess, and I'm not in any position to guess about the details without reading it.)
18. This looks at English ethnicity and the Church of England as racial identities, pointing out ways a few stories challenged the notion of English identity. (I haven't seen these particular stories, so I can't comment on how accurate it is to them. The idea that English identity is particularly racial rather than ethnic seems to me to be a mistake, however, and is probably put that way to justify its inclusion in this book. I do note that this description seems to treat the show in a positive way.)
19. This chapter analyzes short fiction in the extended Doctor Who universe written by Australians about the Doctor in Australian locales to look at Australian identity. (This is not about the show at all, and I know little about the issues it deals with. But it doesn't seem to be clearly negative about the fiction it looks at.)
20, This looks at the Daleks and eugenics. (Nothing here negative about the show, judging by the description.)
21. A look at militarism, xenophobia, and other issues raised by the various Silurian episodes. (Seems to recognize what the author sees as forward thinking in the show. Again, nothing here critical of the show.)
22. A criticism of the notion of stages of progress from savagery to civilization, the notion that it's wrong for time travelers or interplanetary travelers to interrupt the natural evolution of this progress, and the role such ideas play in legitimizing the European Enlightenment and the assumptions of Western superiority today. (I imagine I'd agree with much of this, especially the parts that would apply to the Star Trek Prime Directive. Most of the moral grounds given to defend such a notion seem to me to be ludicrous, and a particular Enterprise episode stands out in my mind as just plain awful on that issue. In Doctor Who, however, often the reason not to interfere is because the past shouldn't be changed. In the early days, e.g. The Aztecs, it's more that it metaphysically cannot be changed, which is the right reason, although not a moral reason not to act, but simply a reason not to try to change what you know to be true about the past, but they quickly departed from that in later First Doctor episodes, only to return to it occasionally, e.g. in Blink, where the episode makes sense only if the past cannot be changed.)

I'm sure different people will evaluate the success of these various discussions of the show differently, depending on their views of race (and not just on their views of the show). But it seems to me to be wildly inaccurate to what the book is about to claim that the book accuses the show of being racist. Some chapters, indeed many chapters, point to problematic elements in the show, especially the original show. Some of these are serious criticisms. Others are much more minor. But most of them don't reach anything like the idea captured by "thunderously racist". Presumably one of the authors did use that expression, but it's as unfair to this book to attribute it to the book as a whole as it is to the show to attribute its most problematic racial elements over the years to the entirety of the show or to miss the complexity of all the good racial thinking the writers have done (and have promoted among viewers). The book seems to be a mix of different views on the show, some positive, some negative, and some mixed. As we should expect of critical race scholars, more is negative than positive, but much of the negative is nothing like how the media articles and blog posts I've seen have portrayed the book. So it's hard for me to express much outrage at this, even if I think some of the treatments are overstated or even outright wrong. It looks like a decent scholarly work, worth engaging with, worth considering, and at times worth critiquing.

One of the big secrets to be discovered in the last season of the new Battlestar Galactica show is who the final Cylon is. We knew in the original miniseries that there were twelve models, and seven of those were gradually revealed over the course of the first two seasons. Then we saw no other models, and it became a mystery who the other five models were. Even the seven models didn't seem to know. Eventually one found out and got put in cold storage, and one of them really surprised her. She even apologized when she found out. But at the end of season three, four characters we had assumed to have been human all along turne out to be Cylons. The way they discovered it is that they had all been hearing the same music that no one else was hearing, and it had led them all to the same room. The producers have said these four really are Cylons, and yet they're different from the rest. The prophetic hybrid has said that they've been to earth, which must be how they all have within them the tune to a Bob Dylan song.

But what about the last model? We now know the model numbers of the first seven models we knew of. First we learned 2, 5, 6, and 8. In a recent episode this season we found out the others are 1, 3, and 4. That means the final five are 7 and 9-12. Wouldn't it make sense that the four we know about are 9-12 (as a set), and the still-missing one happens to be the symbolic number 7? It's unclear to me why Sharon would be higher than one of the five but lower than the rest, but perhaps that will be revealed, and perhaps her greater connection with the humans has something to do with it.

Here's my theory. Models 9-12 are a set. We now have seen models 1, 4, and 5 become a set separate from models 2, 6, and 8. I suspect something will happen with 3 and 7. But who might 7 be? I'm sure it's someone we've seen before, and I think it's likely that whoever it is was not on board the Galactica when the others began hearing the music, or we would have seen all five. That means it's probably someone on another ship or someone whose model we have encountered before is dead. It's probably a major enough character that it will be significant when we discover who it is, but it doesn't have to be a primary character. It could just be someone who wasn't on board the ship. Only one character stands out as important enough to be the final Cylon who wasn't on board. That's Tom Zarek. Wouldn't it be funny if the original Apollo turned out to have been a Cylon all along? The only other one not on board is Starbuck. The hints for it to be her would be overkill if she really is one, though, and these writers aren't that obvious. It's got to be deliberate misdirection.

But it might be someone who we've seen die. It could be Billy. I don't think he was on the show long enough for him to be likely, though. There's always the chance that it could be Admiral Cain. I don't think so, though, because I think they wanted her brutality to be oh-so-human. I doubt the other Pegasus characters would be important enough to get such a role, especially if it's the final one who number 3 was apologizing to when she discovered who they were. (Of course, they said things like that about Tigh and Tyrol, too, so this isn't a sure argument.) My guess is Ellen Tigh if it's someone dead, because we know she's still available for filming. She's already been in her husband's dream sequences this season, and he sees her when he sees a Cylon. So my guess is either Tom Zarek or Ellen Tigh, probably Ellen.
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Of course, this is all undermined if the last five aren't a set and only the four we've seen. If that's so, then the fifth would be unrelated and thus might not have heard the music but have been there. Then it could be almost anyone.