"Downloaded": Battlestar Galactica season 2 episode 18 explained

"Downloaded" is the season 2 episode that turns the camera round and spends most of its time with the Cylons on occupied Caprica. It follows the Number Six who seduced Baltar and Sharon Valerii, Boomer, after both have died and woken up in new bodies. Hailed as heroes, they find they no longer believe in what the Cylons did. Back in the fleet, Hera is born and immediately hidden. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

Plot#

Two rebirths. The episode opened nine months earlier, on the day of the attack, with Six shielding Gaius Baltar as his house was blown apart. She woke in a resurrection tank surrounded by other Cylons, and at the edge of the tank stood Baltar. He told her he wasn't really there, that only she could see him, and that she shouldn't tell anyone. Ten weeks later in the flashbacks, Cally shot Boomer dead on Galactica, and Boomer woke in a tank of her own. When she saw another copy of herself, she screamed. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded"; Battlestar Galactica (miniseries); Battlestar Galactica, "Resistance")

Heroes of the Cylon. In the present, the Cylons were rebuilding the city of Delphi for themselves. A Number Three told Six that she was a hero, the agent who got the access that crippled the Colonial fleet, and that she was now known as Caprica. The Three asked her to visit another hero who was struggling: Boomer, who still called herself Sharon Valerii and was living in an apartment as if she were human. If she couldn't be fixed, the Three said, there was talk of boxing her, storing her mind without a body. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

Boomer wanted nothing to do with the Cylon God. The only love she'd known, she said, was with the crew of Galactica, and she was eaten up by guilt over shooting Adama. When Six said she'd loved a man too, Baltar, Boomer told her he wasn't dead. He was vice president of the Colonies. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded"; Battlestar Galactica, "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II")

Six hadn't known. Talking it through with her imaginary Baltar, she worked out what the Three was doing: putting two Cylons with strong ties to humans together and waiting for them to crack, so both could be boxed. When the Three turned up at the café, Six lied that Boomer was ready to move out and rejoin Cylon life. Boomer played along. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

The bomb. Anders and the Caprica resistance had planted explosives in the building's car park. Anders knew Cylons came back, but he'd heard that they remembered dying, and he wanted them to feel unsafe anywhere on Caprica. A Centurion caught him setting the charge, he shot at it, and the bomb went off early. The building came down. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

The three Cylons survived in the stairwell. Six was pinned under rubble with a dislocated knee. The Three offered to kill her so she could be reborn, and Six, sure it was a trick to get her boxed, refused. Then they found Anders alive under the debris. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

The Three wanted him dead. Boomer objected, and Six backed her, saying he should be kept for questioning. Boomer spotted Kara Thrace's dog tags round his neck. The Three taunted Anders, then turned on Boomer, calling her a broken machine and a murderer. Six saw it clearly then. The slaughter of humanity couldn't be what a loving God wanted, and the Three wanted the two of them gone because their status as heroes meant other Cylons might listen to them. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded"; Battlestar Galactica, "The Farm")

Anders grabbed his gun and fired at the Three. Boomer knocked it away, the Three picked it up, and Six smashed her over the head with a lump of stone and killed her. Six gave Anders back the dog tags, Boomer gave him back his gun, and he ran. With the Three dead, it would be at least 36 hours before she downloaded and told the others. The two heroes agreed to use that time to start something new among the Cylons. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

Hera. On Galactica, Sharon Agathon collapsed in labour and Dr. Cottle delivered the baby by surgery. She was premature, a girl, and Sharon and Karl Agathon named her Hera. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

Laura Roslin, William Adama, Saul Tigh and Baltar argued over what to do. Adama could see the Cylons wanted the child and that any agents still hiding in the fleet would come for her. Roslin acted alone. Cottle told Sharon and Helo their daughter had died. Sharon went for Cottle's throat, then broke down. Hera was given to Maya, a woman who had lost her own baby in the attack and believed this one was the orphan of a Pegasus officer. Helo and Galen Tyrol scattered the ashes they thought were Hera's from a Raptor. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

Head Six was furious with Baltar. Their child, she said, was meant to lead the next generation of God's children, and humanity would suffer God's vengeance for letting her die. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

What it reveals#

The Cylons aren't one mind. Until "Downloaded", the show mostly saw them as agents, each copy working the plan. Here they have a city, a culture that prizes sameness, and a punishment, boxing, for copies that think differently. The Three isn't evil. She's the voice of the consensus, and Six and Boomer are a threat to it. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

Caprica Six gets a Baltar in her head the same way Baltar has a Six in his. The episode never says what either figure is, but the symmetry suggests the two of them are tied together by something bigger than a love affair. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

It also introduces the idea that matters most for the finale. Two Cylons who lived as humans now think the genocide was a sin, and as heroes they have the standing to say so. The next time the fleet hears from the Cylons, the war has changed because of them. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded"; Battlestar Galactica, "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II")

On Galactica, Roslin's choice is one of her coldest. She lies to two parents about their daughter's death to keep a half-Cylon child away from both the Cylons and her Cylon mother. (Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

Characters#

• Number Six: Caprica Six, the Cylon hero who turns against the attack.
• Sharon Valerii: Boomer, reborn on Caprica and refusing to be a Cylon.
• Number Three: the copy who wants both heroes boxed.
• Gaius Baltar: the imagined Baltar in Six's head, and the real one, vice president, on Galactica.
• Samuel Anders: resistance leader trapped with the three Cylons.
• Sharon Agathon: Athena, who gives birth to Hera.
• Karl Agathon: Helo, Hera's father.
• Laura Roslin: hides the baby.
• Hera Agathon: the first child of a human and a Cylon.
• Galen Tyrol: helps Helo scatter the ashes.
• Head Six: Baltar's Six, enraged at the child's "death".

(Battlestar Galactica, "Downloaded")

Continuity#

• Boomer's death in this episode's flashback is Cally's shot in "Resistance", after Boomer shot Adama in "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II". (Battlestar Galactica, "Resistance"; Battlestar Galactica, "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II")
• The dog tags Anders wears are Kara's. She gave them to him as a promise to come back when she left Caprica. (Battlestar Galactica, "The Farm")
• In the season finale, a Cavil brings the fleet a message: two Cylon heroes have convinced the others that the attack and the pursuit were mistakes. (Battlestar Galactica, "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II")
• Hera's secret comes out on New Caprica, where Sharon is told her daughter is alive, and the Cylons end up with her during the escape. See "Exodus". (Battlestar Galactica, "Exodus, Part I"; Battlestar Galactica, "Exodus, Part II")
• The opening flashback replays the moment from the miniseries when Six shielded Baltar from the blast. (Battlestar Galactica (miniseries))