ok, bsg

So, Battlestar Galactica’s last run premiers this Friday. And, to be quite honest, I’m happy that it’s almost over because I can’t stand to follow such a disappointing show anymore. I was hoping to avoid having to watch altogether by reading spoilers, but there don’t seem to be very good ones online yet. But while reading through speculations on who the final Cylon could be, it struck me that people are perhaps mistaking Gricean violations for straight up lying.

(sort of spoilers ahead, but none of the upcoming season):

io9 has this list of possible final Cylons, but it’s all based on this observation:

Secondly, D’Anna Biers (Lucy Lawless) implied the final Cylon is not in the fleet, at the start of the most recent episode, “Revelations.” It seems unlikely that she’s lying. Actually, here’s what she says:

Leoben: We’ll rejoin your fleet within an hour.
Roslin: Then we will return the final five to you.
Biers: Four. There are four in your fleet.
Roslin: Four? Where’s the fifth?
Biers: I want the four in your fleet.

But D’Anna Biers wouldn’t be lying–she’d simply be failing to be as informative as possible! (see here for more on Gricean maxims) And we have evidence to suggest that Biers is linguistically savvy — at another point in the episode, when Roslin asks her about the final five, Biers responds “What, you didn’t know you were one of them?” (See projection of presuppositions here) Add in the fact that series writer Jane Espenson did her Ph.D. in linguistics at Berkeley (working with George Lakoff himself) and I think suddenly it’s not that implausible to suggest that maybe all five of the final Cylons *were* in the fleet.

Of course, there’s one more thing we have to consider. D’Anna’s demand that she wants “the four in your fleet”. The use of the definite article seems to presuppose that there are a distinct four–if there were five in the fleet, which four would be *the* four that she referred to?

And with that, this is hopefully the last I will ever blog about BSG ever again.