During the episode of Battlestar Galactica titled “No Exit”, we learned of a cylon model whose number was 7 and name was Daniel. Ellen mentions that he was a sensitive artistic type. As quickly as this astonishing reveal came, it went, for we learned that Cavil had tampered with the amniotic fluid meant for the Daniel copies and corrupted the genetic material. Since his mentioning, who Daniel was has become a hot topic for speculation among the fandom of Battlestar Galactica. Here we will set some facts straight.

Ron Moore helped to both clarify and confuse us by providing some insight to this episode in the No Exit podcast. He first dispels the idea that scraps of Battlestar Galactica are being left for Caprica at the 30:01 mark:

“You can see we’re laying out pretty much the whole backstory of the cylons. I’ve always said that we weren’t going to leave hanging mysteries for Caprica. The intent of Galactica is always to sort of wrap up it’s own mysteries and it’s own backstory and let Caprica develop on it’s own. So we went out of our way not to try to leave looming holes to wonder how that happened for Caprica. We’re pretty much laying it all out here.”

Further on at the 34:51 mark he elaborated specifically on how the 7th cylon came into the story:

“And this little mystery that we were able to mine out the the numbering system. I mean the numbers of the 12 models – we’ve always said that there were 12 cylon models – but then we realized at some point that we had deposited Sharon as a #8! That was before we came up with the idea of the final 5 and so 5 + 8 does not = 12. So it became a question of how that could have been – doesn’t that make 13? What were the implications of that? We kind of put a pin in the idea of the 13th cylon for a long time because I didn’t really want to go there – I didn’t want to make it yet another, “Who’s the final cylon?,” I didn’t want to raise false mysteries on that front. But what it did was it gave us a chance to talk about a piece of back story that became really interesting about Cavil and about Cavil wiping out an entire model that he was jealous of as sort of the Cain and Able moment of this myth. There were certain themes of Genesis in the show right from the miniseries dating back really to the original series of creation and exodus and all those grand biblical themes and there was something great about this sort of Cain vs. Able idea of slipping that in here to really understand Cavil’s character a little bit more clearly – to understand him as a person more strongly.”

Although he clearly lays out that in this episode Daniel functioned as a piece of character development for Cavil, true to his fashion Ron Moore never explicitly tells us about who Daniel was or wasn’t. There was no other discussion of Daniel or Caprica in this podcast or in the subsequent episodes.

The most likely case is that the 7th cylon was introduced to fix the gap in model numbers and was worked to help give us perspective on Cavil’s inhumanity. The choice of the name Daniel is very curious, however, and it would not surprise me if this was left open purposely for our imaginations to speculate over.

UPDATE: Daniel Graystone is the 7th Cylon

Tags: Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, Cylons, Daniel Graystone

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 5:38 am and is filed under Caprica Speculation, Season 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.