Question about "The Long Patrol"

[Hope It Is The Grog]

There are a couple of references in this episode to "pre-war" or "before the war." In particular, the steward on the Rising Star appears to have memories of this ill-defined "pre-war" period.

What could this possibly mean, if the Colonials have been at war with the Cylons for a thousand yahrens or so?

[GoldCylon]

The problem with Galactica it was thrown together so fast they really didn't have time to make a so called bible for the show, and to tell you the truth I don't even know if they did stuff back then anyway so every week a new writer would show up and not know the history show, and many many many of those type of conflict errors happened. Nice catch.

[Hope It Is The Grog]

Thanks... but it seemed confusing even in the context of the same episode, because the prisoners' ancestors had been making ambrosia for the war effort for centuries. Oh, well... maybe it was imagined to be an on-and-off war with times of relatively low hostilities being called post-war and pre-war for the sake of reckoning eras or something.

[137th Gebirg]

Either that, or the guy really was as old as the hills. It had long been established that Colonial life spans seem to be much longer than ours. Adama himself alluded to this in "Lost Planet of the Gods" when he was talking about being a hundred or couple hundred yahrens younger and going after someone like Serena. IIRC, the original SoaSW script gave mention to the battlestars which were hundreds (over 500) of yahrens old, constantly being patched over and rebuilt to maintain a press in the war effort. It's entirely possible that this person is 1000+. Remember, as a show heavily rooted in Biblical ties, there were strong references in Genesis to the descendants of Adam & Eve, their names and extremely long lifespans, being in direct correlation to their piety. The more holy you were, the longer you were allowed to live by God. That directly implies that Adama, by his stature in the Council and a direct line descendant of the Lords of Kobol and a religious leader, would be of a certain advanced age. The other guy may very well be even more pious than Adama, then. Which begs the question, why was he reminiscing about philandering with multiple women in his youth and bragging to Starbuck about it, at the same time congratulating him on his "efforts"? I guess perhaps God also has a sense of humor...

[Hope It Is The Grog]

^ Yes, good point, we don't really know how long their lifespans were supposed to be.

[Scott]

^ Yes, good point, we don't really know how long their lifespans were supposed to be.

Actually somewhere, maybe in War of The Gods, Adama says something like: "Cylons notwithstanding, our lifespan is 200 yarhens"

[Hope It Is The Grog]

^ Yes, good point, we don't really know how long their lifespans were supposed to be.

Actually somewhere, maybe in War of The Gods, Adama says something like: "Cylons notwithstanding, our lifespan is 200 yarhens"

Oh, that's right. So, back to square one...

In the "Second Coming" trailer it said "twenty yahrens had passed since the last great war," so maybe they do reckon the different eras of full-on conflict as separate wars.