Natalie Faust: the Six who led the Cylon rebellion and died on Galactica

Natalie Faust was a Number Six copy who led the rebel faction of Cylons that wanted the Final Five found, on the belief that the missing models held the answers about where the Cylons came from and what they were for. Her argument split her own species, and it killed her inside a year.

Who was Natalie Faust?#

She was the Six who decided the Cylons could not answer any question about themselves until they found the five models nobody was allowed to discuss, and who was prepared to break the Cylon decision-making process to force the issue.

Her first move was procedural. She took a Two and an Eight to Cavil and put the case that the Final Five were with the humans in the refugee fleet. Cavil rejected it and redirected the conversation to the Raiders, who had extended their own programming and stopped obeying orders to attack the fleet. His remedy was a surgical procedure to cut away part of their free will.

Faust lost that vote, and lost it partly to Sharon Valerii, who voted against her own model to back Cavil. An Eight siding with the Ones over a Six was not a routine result. It meant the balance the Cylons ran on had already gone.

The Centurions in the conference room#

When the last attempt to stop the lobotomies failed, Faust ordered two Centurions into the room and told the assembled One, Four and Five copies what her faction had done to them.

The telencephalic inhibitors were gone. Those implants had kept the Centurions from using their higher cognitive functions, and without them the machines were free to decide who they served. They opened fire and killed everyone in the room who supported Cavil. That is the moment the Cylon civil war stopped being a disagreement.

The truce that was a trap#

Faust met the resurrected Cavil with two Eights to negotiate. He agreed to stop the lobotomies and to put her proposal to unbox the Number Three line before the others, and later reported that the terms had been accepted and the fleet would jump to the nearest server to learn what the Threes knew.

The Resurrection Ship never arrived at the rendezvous. Cavil's baseships opened fire instead and tore her fleet apart, and only Faust's own basestar came out of it, with its FTL drive damaged past repair.

What she did next she did as the leader of a crippled ship with no way home. She was reluctant to take Thrace to the Hybrid and agreed anyway, because she needed the Colonials. When a Six killed Jean Barolay in revenge for a drowning on New Caprica, Faust shot the Six herself to give the Colonials their justice and stop the thing escalating. She knew the dead Six could not resurrect. Then she heard the Hybrid tell Thrace that only the Threes knew the faces of the Final Five, and the case she had been making for a year became the only case worth making.

How did Natalie Faust die?#

Sharon Agathon shot her in a corridor aboard Galactica, after finding her standing near Hera.

Faust had come to tell the truth. She had already spoken to Adama and President Roslin about the rebellion and the Resurrection Hub, addressed the Quorum to calm them about the alliance, and then admitted to herself that the deception her own people were running, a plan to take hostages once the Hub was destroyed, had to be exposed. The other Cylons sent her to Adama to stall while a Two tried to stop the Centurions.

Agathon, frightened by the Opera House visions and by Hera's fixation on the Sixes, fired before any of that could be said. Faust died in Galactica's infirmary with Doctor Sherman Cottle holding her hand, seeing a sunlit forest, and then his masked face going white. The name in the production scripts is Faust, from the Latin for lucky.