How the Final Five Ended Battlestar Galactica's First Cylon War Without the Colonies Knowing

Here's my argument. Five people ended the first Cylon War from the Cylon side, and the Colonials never found out. They spent 40 years building a military around a war they'd misread, and the deal that ended the first war built the weapon for the second.

Last time, we looked at why Galactica survived when the rest of the fleet didn't. This is the war that made that fleet blind. So let's talk about how the Final Five ended the First Cylon War and why the colonies never knew.

The Armistice station officer gets the Colonial Military's first look in 40 years, and dies with it

Every year for more than 40 years, the 12 colonies sent one officer to a station in the middle of nowhere to wait for the Cylons, who stood the colonies up for that same amount of time. Picture this year's officer at the table with a folder of old drawings and spec sheets. That folder holds the Colonial Military's entire understanding of its enemies, which comes down to metal bodies and red eyes.

Then the door opens and a woman walks in. "Are you alive?" she asks. He says yes, and she tells him to prove it and kisses him, which I'm fairly sure isn't in the Armistice protocol. All of this is happening while a Cylon ship lines up outside, with pictures of, I'm assuming, his family on his desk.

As the station comes apart, he watches the Colonial files on the Cylons lift off the table and blow away one sheet at a time. The Colonial Military finally gets its first look in 40 years at what Cylons have become, and he dies before he can tell anyone.

The official story of the first war left out why it ended

Start with the version every Colonial kid presumably memorized for a test, the one in the miniseries opening text. The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled, an armistice was declared, and they left for another world. As far as the colonies are concerned, that's the whole story: over a decade of war, then a line in space and a station where both sides agreed to meet once a year. The colonies held up their end. The Cylons famously did not.

If you lived through it, that would be enough. The toasters left and the peace held, and at some point the armistice stopped feeling like a pause and started feeling like the natural order of things. Nobody asks why a war ended once it's on a commemorative plate, and that's where the blindness starts.

A stalemate can't explain 40 years of Cylon silence

Many fans will say the war ended in a stalemate. Both sides were exhausted, neither could finish the other off, so they called it. Real wars end that way all the time, and I'll grant the standstill. What a standstill can't explain is the next 40 years.

Exhausted enemies sign a ceasefire and then spend decades glaring at each other, rebuilding and probing the border. The Cylons did none of that. A machine army that had fought humanity to a draw packed up, went silent and skipped the one meeting a year it had agreed to, with nothing else on its calendar. For an army, that's strange behavior. For a people busy turning into something else, it makes a lot more sense.

And there's a witness. On the war's last day, a young Viper pilot named William Adama ends up inside a Cylon installation. He finds human captives the Cylons have been experimenting on, along with the first hybrid, part machine and part flesh. You don't build one of those if your plan is to go home and stay a toaster. On the day the war ended, the Cylons were already working out how to become something closer to us.

Adama saw it with his own eyes, and nothing on screen suggests anyone in the colonies ever asked what it meant. When an enemy walks away from a war it hasn't lost, the first question should be why. The colonies decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Samuel Anders remembers the deal in No Exit

The answer waits until season 4, and it comes from a man the fleet thought was one of its own. In No Exit, Samuel Anders gets his memory back, all of it, and what he remembers rewrites the first Cylon War. While the war was still being fought, five strangers turned up on the Cylon side. They came from Earth, retracing their ancestors' path toward the colonies.

Yes, that Earth: a lovely beach, terrible reviews. It's the radioactive ruin the fleet eventually finds, where Tigh stands on the shore and remembers being with Ellen. The five walked into the middle of somebody else's war and made the Centurions an offer. The pitch amounted to this: you stop the war and we'll help you.

It's a hard offer to refuse when it ends the dying in this war and the dying in general. Help meant resurrection, and it meant bodies that looked human. The Cylons took the deal, and the war stopped. The five got to work, and the first model Ellen created was the one we'd come to know as Cavil. Remember him, because Cavil is the reason nobody on the Colonial side ever heard any of this.

The colonies' blindness came in four layers

Since the deal itself is no secret by now, the part worth your time is how completely the colonies missed it. By the colonies, I mean the 12 colonies as a civilization before the fall. Their blindness came in four layers, and you can see each one on screen.

The first is the empty chair. For 40 years, the only place the colonies could learn anything about their enemy was a room the enemy never entered, which made it less an intelligence program than a waiting room with a nice view. The second is that the Colonial military had no idea the Cylons looked human until the attack was over. It's like hearing about a house fire from your insurance adjuster. A Battlestar's XO learns the most important fact about his enemy after the enemy has already won.

Layer three runs deeper. Near the end of the miniseries, Six tells Baltar that some Cylons may not even know they're Cylons. In 2003, it's played like a creepy throwaway, and four seasons later, it was most of the plot. The fourth layer seals it, and Cavil deserves the credit here, or at least the credit you'd give a very good burglar. He wiped the Final Five's memories and placed them among the Colonials. The only people who could have explained why the war stopped were living inside the colonies with no idea they had anything to explain.

Now put yourself in the Colonial government's chair. Your enemy won't talk, and the evidence looks exactly like your own people. Some of the witnesses are in your fleet, possibly fixing your Vipers with no memory of what they did. A government could stay careful for 40 years and still never find out.

The Valkyrie mission in Hero shows the Cylons were watching

The blindness only ran one way. In Hero, we learn that years before the attack, Adama's Valkyrie ran a black ops mission across the armistice line. It violated the armistice, and the Cylons knew about it.

The show raises whether the mission provoked the attack and deliberately never answers, so I'll leave it open. What it does settle is who was watching whom. The colonies never knew who ended the war, while the Cylons knew about their classified missions.

The 40 years of peace were an incubation period, not deterrence

So what did 40 years of peace buy? Judging by how they behaved, the colonies read the armistice as deterrence, with the Cylons staying away because they didn't want round two. My read is that it was an incubation period. The Cylons spent those 40 years building what the five had promised them.

When it hatched, it came in as people. A Six got close to Gaius Baltar, which took no great effort, got access to the defense mainframe, and rewrote half the algorithms in the program protecting the Colonial Fleet. Sleeper agents sat inside the fleet in Colonial uniforms, and resurrection meant none of them had much reason to fear dying in the attempt. It's very hard to scare someone who has a backup.

The bill for the peace came due all at once. Forty years later, on a very bad day, every Cylon that looked human and walked through a Colonial defense network was a product of the deal that ended the first war. The humanoid models were the weapon, and resurrection made it fearless. Most militaries would kill for that kind of return on investment, since the Cylons won the second war with what they'd been given to stop fighting the first.

Adama was right for the wrong war

It's also the other half of why the fleet I looked at last time seems so complacent: it was preparing for an enemy that no longer existed. Colonial doctrine, I'd argue, was built for metal Centurions crossing a line.

Even Adama's refusal to network Galactica, the thing that saved his ship, was a first war lesson aimed at the first war's enemy. He was right for the wrong war. And the second one came through the front door wearing a human face.

Peace was offered twice in Battlestar Galactica, and both times it came with a price

I've been glib about the colonies for most of this, but the show gets quiet at the end, so I will too. Peace gets offered one more time. In Daybreak, the five try the same trade again: resurrection in exchange for an end to the fighting, and for a moment, it works. Then, in the middle of the transfer, Tyrol learns that Tory killed Cally, and the whole thing falls apart.

Twice in this story, peace was on the table, and both times it came with a price. The second time, one man's grief was enough to break it. The colonies spent 40 years grateful that the war had ended. They never once asked who ended it.

Go back to the day Galactica was decommissioned. Adama tells the crowd that sooner or later the day comes when you can't hide from the things you've done. Not long after, at Ragnar, Leoben throws the same words back at him. A machine repeating a human's warning to the man who gave it is the smartest thing the miniseries does.

In that same speech, Adama says what nobody in the room wanted to hear. Humanity built servants and fought them when they rebelled, and it never faced what it had made. "You cannot play God and wash your hands of the things that you've created," he says. The colonies never asked why their machines wanted to be free, and they never asked why the war stopped. Cavil, the first model the deal produced, had his own word for what humanity was owed: justice.