The time marks in "Downloaded" prompted me to start this topic. Not the all too common time jumping within the episode, but the timeline since the attack on Caprica. Battlestar Wiki is a good source for information, except when the sheer volume of hits makes its servers hurt.

So, if you think the Resistance attack on the cafe took place a few weeks before Maya adopted little Hera, post your thoughts here. If you're wondering whether the elections Lee wanted "in seven months" have actually been delayed, here's the topic.

For me, placing Cally's Jack Ruby impression (tm Jacob) ten weeks before Hera's birth threw me. It now seems like Gal.Boomer died after "Epiphanies" (set six months post-attack), rather than before. Am I missing something here?

Hera also seemed really premature for being maybe a month early, but that's for another thread.

GalBoomer was shot 10 weeks before CapSharon gave birth. CapSharon was still on Caprica at that time, didn't show up until maybe 1-2 weeks later. CapSix's resurrection was at exactly 9 months, lets guess from that:

Day 0 - Nuclear war, 50,000 humans take off on ships, Helo gets left on Caprica
Day 2 - CapSharon hooks up with Helo
Day 14 - CapSharon and Helo do the deed (if I remember the date stamp from that long ago)
Day 4? - GalBoomer plugs Adama, Starbuck meets CapSharon (now 6 weeks pregnant)
Day 6? - Cally plugs Galboomer (CapSharon now almost 9 weeks pregnant)
Day 135 - Hera born - puts Sharon around 20 weeks, which the baby looked close to. I would actually have put her at 24 weeks from the looks.

If Hera is a 24-week-baby, that places it at Day-182...approximately Month-6 or Month-7....which just seems too-soon. Yet Pegasus didn't join the RTFF till Month-6 or so....they were out-there "alone" for half-a-year I thought.

Then there must be a time-jump between Downloaded and Captain's Hand since I figure it needs to be atleast Month-9 or Month-10 till Lee Adama took command of the Pegasus. Fiske was in command for atleast a month, they were mining for a month, and Lee was recovering from being shot for a month. I think that while Boomer and Helo meet-up on Day-14...the baby wasn't till later-on, and I think the baby might have been 8-month-or-so developed....so we're into Month-9?...and Downloaded shoud have been aired BEFORE Captain's Hand in chronological order. I don't remember Boomer or the not-born-yet baby being being mentioned in Captain's Hand.

Yeah, the Wiki site is currently offline pending a server change. I checked the date stamps on the Caprica material and came up with a different timeline of events.

Day 6 - Helo is still on the run from the Cylons when Sharon shows up.
Day 14/15 - Sharon's kidnapping is staged. Helo finds her the next day.
Day 23 - The first time they had sex - We don't actually know when she conceived though seems probable since ten days later the timeline has her doing the upchuck for the cameras (universal sign of pregnancy on TV).
Day 24 on Caprica Helo and Sharon take off running together and it was listed as day 46 when Sharon's cover was blown. She then told Helo she was pregnant.

I checked both my UK release and US release DVDs and either way I think they fudged a timeline there for the sake of simplicity. Sharon nearly lost the baby already once though. It seems feasible that even if Hera wasn't extremely premature she was underveloped. Plus, she was doing things like getting tossed around by Adama, nearly raped, nearly aborted.

The timelines don't match but I think it's safe to say that Sharon's pregnancy was under the "fetal distress" category several times.

What I can't get to match up is Boomer's being shot by Cally.

IIRC, Epiphanies was at 189 Days after the attack.

I mentioned in the episode thread that a simple explanation (if wank) might be that the "nine months ago" and "ten weeks ago" were referring only to events on Caprica -- that Boomer had been freaking out in her apartment for ten weeks before the final showdown with D'Anna and Six in the cafe.

That would mean that the Six/Boomer movement had been going on for awhile when the baby was prematurely born on Galactica -- but would line up with the "several weeks ago" reference to "The Farm."

I've tried to reconcile the timeline myself and I'm not sure it can be done. For Season One it's easy because the episodes were time-stamped. Colonial Day was Day 47 IIRC and Starbuck wakes up with Baltar the next morning, still wearing the dress from the party. Day 48. I believe that means Adama was shot Day 51, I could be off by a couple days in either direction.

Which means Season 2 begins on day 51.

Deanna Biers says Tigh was in sole command of the fleet for "a week and a half." Adama regains consciousness in "Resistance" which places that episode 10 to 12 days after the shooting. Day 62.

Cally shoots Boomer the same day or the next day (same act of the episode). Cally spends 30 days in the brig, and is released at the beginning of FOTP. Day 92.

They build a whole fighter in FOTP. This has to take a couple weeks minimum.

Then a lot of time passes and they don't show us anything. This is the real gap between Season One and Season Two, conceptually anyway.

Pegasus. Cain says it's been "six months" since the attack, but she's clearly eggagerating. Epiphanies takes place on Day 189. At least 90 days have passed since FOTP.

Three more months pass in the ensuing episodes, each of which is said to be "several weeks" after the last. The baby can't be more than 6 weeks preemie!

So it all sort of fits together, except for the 10 weeks shown on the title card. Three possibilities:

1. The title card is just wrong.

2. The Caprica events on "Downloaded" take place earlier than the Galactica event, and are set roughly at the same time as "Pegasus," as Jacob suggests.
(This has to be true to some extent, since a lot of time seems to pass on Galactica while the Cylons are trapped in the parking garage. Are we to believe they were down there for days? So we are not flipping back and forth between the two plots in real time anyway.)

3. Boomer was not re-incarnated immediately after death, and was only downloaded 10 weeks ago. In the intervening months, she was "boxed." Or maybe they checked the Free Super Saver Shipping box when sending her back from the Resurrecton ship, and they held her back at the warehouse until the Season 2.0 DVDs came out?

This isn't perfect but it's the best that I can fanwank. There are possibly other things in the show that I missed that contradict this timeline, but overall it helps me make sense of the show. YMMV.

I suspect that Moore and Eick maybe don't have the whole thing mapped out, and in fact they are trying to fudge it a bit, soap opera style. Season One episodes were just a few days apart, but if they kept doing it that way, Sharon would be pregnant well into Season 5, which is not what they wanted to to. That more than anything probably explains the time jumps.

Jacob, I don't have my tape here to check, but I'm pretty sure the scenes in the tree park in Downloaded are prefaced by a 'Present-Day Caprica' tag, so I assume they mean the events later in the episode, the Unholy 3 in the garage with Anders et al, are happening simultaneously with what's happening now on Galactica. Your explanation is much more sensible, but I'm not sure it's what they meant to convey.

Yeah, writing the recap I noticed they also say "Present Day Galactica" on the sickbay scenes, which blows the whole (better) thing out of the water.

I was writing quickly before and didn't look at the numbers. Just using "Downloaded" for a time stamp and stillshimpys times:

9 months ago - nuclear bombs (9X4X7 = 252 days)
Day 23 - Sharon gets her bun (252 - 23 = 229)
Hera is 51 days premature

Thanks for figuring this out. It was making my brain hurt :)

This makes Hera approximately a 33 week baby, which is believable. No way was she a 24 weeker, unless we're going with the "cybrids mature more rapidly than humans" thing.

From the Downloaded thread:

If 40 dead cylons create a queue 36 hours long to be resurrected, how long would the queue be for several thousand? For that matter, if the signals from the dead Cylons had to travel at light speed to the HMS Ernestine, the process could have taken weeks or months. So now I think it has been a lot more than 10 weeks since Boomer was shot. It's been 10 weeks since Boomer resurrected. She spent the rest of the time on hold. Goddam phone company.

Timeline restored.

I am willing to accept the backlog theory, since a bunch of Cylons had died in the previous episodes, and that Sharon had to travel a longer distance and perhaps even through an intermediary ship to get downloaded in Caprica.

From a source I trust:

[Person in Production] told [source] that because of A) the fan outcry and B) the Battlestar Wiki timeline, they've decided that the DVD's (and overseas broadcasts, moving forward) will change "10 weeks ago" to "10 weeks AFTER," as in after the scene preceding it (Day Zero, "get down," the bomb that killed Natasi).

Wow. Actual studio approved Retcon (retroactive continuity).

That would probably make more sense, with less wankroom. Perhaps RDM may say something about it in the next podcast.

Perhaps producers or whoever creates the timelines for any television show should deliberately avoid timeline specifities whenever possible to allow for such wiggleroom, since they inevitably mess up at some point.

What's even better is that it's not really retcon - it's correcting a retcon. It's retretcon.

Jacob, you have sources? Neat! Are we going to get any interviews any time soon? :)

Just posting to bring this back up... I guess we could use this topic to discuss the Chronology of BSG. When did things happen when? When did people leave Kobol? How long has the beacon been hanging around, waiting to lead everyone toward earth? How old is the Temple of Five?

I'm so lost.

Using the Fall of the Twelve Colonies as a reference point (BF = Before Fall), here are some noteworthy dates (gleened from various mentions in the show):

The 13th tribe leaves Kobol roughly 4,000 BF.
At some point after this, the 13th tribe leaves behind a beacon near the Lion's Head nebula.
At some point after this, the 13th tribe settles briefly on the Algae Planet and builds the Temple of Five (parallels to the Fleet settling New Caprica briefly?)
A strain of lymphocytic encephalitis is recorded on Kobol sometime around this time.
Pythia begins receiving her visions around 3,600 BF.
The 12 tribes flee Kobol roughly 2,000 BF.
Humanity rediscovers Kobol in 1 AF.
A beacon infected with a Kobolian strain of lymphocytic encephalitis is discovered in 2 AF.

You can also check out the Colonial History: As Recorded in Octagonal Textbooks thread.

Wow, thanks, jcin617, how helpful!

I didn't realize how poorly I understood the mythology until I read that.

There's also some pretty big discrepancies that haven't been addressed in the show.

In "Kobol's Last Gleaming" Elosha says the Thirteen Tribes left Kobol two thousand years before the present day. Then in "Home" Athena confirms that all Thirteen Tribes left at the same time (aboard one giant ship, believe it or not).

But then in "A Measure of Salvation" they say the probe left behind by the Thirteenth Tribe is three thousand years old.

Finally, in "The Eye of Jupiter" they say the Temple of Five is four thousand years old, which matches up with when the Thirteenth Tribe left Kobol.

So IMO, it's either a big ass continuity screw up that the writers are choosing not to address (which has happened before re: Athena's pregnancy vs. the Presidential election), or it's purposeful that the various artifacts are getting older the closer the Fleet gets to Earth. I'm hoping it's the latter.

Right, I was going by the date of the Temple, since that was the most recent discussion and tried to work the dates from there, but yeah, some discrepancies. And, like you said, Athena also mentions that the Galleon took the "13 tribes to their destinies", yet in the mini Elosha confirms that the sacred scrolls speak of a "13th tribe of man that left Kobol in the early days" which would imply they left first, which the dates of the temple/beacon support. There's also the fact that there didn't appear to be any icon or cairn in the Tomb of Athena which represented the 13th tribe, although I suppose you could argue that's what the map was about.

Plus, while I can see how one ship could bring the 12 to their destinies, I'm not sure how it would have worked if the 13th were aboard as well, hitching a ride.

I've come to express a critical eye continuity-wise to episodes written by David Eick. First there's the thing about the Galleon in "Home" which, as you pointed out, doesn't really make sense. Then in "Hero" the timeline of how long Adama commanded Galactica and how long certain people knew each other got all fracked up. Not to mention Adama's "No computer networks on this ship!" attitude, even though just a year before he felt fine commanding a modern, networked Battlestar.

I pretend to rationalize Adama's flip-flop on the networks two ways:

1) Adama JUST SAW the Cylons. Prior to seeing them in his last few weeks aboard the Valkyrie, he wasn't really worried about a Cylon virus. Then, when he came to Galactica, he had that threat and idea more firmly in his mind.

2) Adama may well have never trusted the Valkyrie's networks, but could do nothing about them due to logistics or regulations, or whatever. Or maybe he had extra firewalls/cut-points we don't know about.

And even if the exact timing on Adama's command of Galactica is off in Hero, it was "spiritually" right: Adama commanded Galactica for a long time as his final tour of duty.

My IT guy and I had a conversation. Here's the email that the IT guy (Marc) came up with as a result. It has to do with time and space:

Ancient Space Travellers

OK. The 13th colony of Earth was establish when the humans left Kobol 4000(?) years ago. What isn't discussed is whether or not this group of humans had FTL drives on their ships, or if they did have them if maybe the drives stopped working.

My theory is that at some point in their journey, their FTL drives stopped working. Since they left before the Cylons were built and if they were travelling at or close to the speed of light, then there would be considerable time dialation. Time dialation is the idea that as a person approaches the speed of light (or becomes removed from a large gravitational force) his clock will move faster than those well below relativistic speeds and/or large gravitational fields.

The "twin paradox" is an example of this. Imagine twins born on earth and one is put on a rocket ship going close to the speed light and is sent out for 5 years while the other lives on earth. When the space travelling twin returns, he will be 5 years older while the earth bound twin will be 10 years older. To each twin time will have passed as normal, but because of the space traveller's freedom from a large gravitational field as well as his near relativistic speeds, he will have only aged 1/2 as much as his brother.

To put things more simply, when you look up at the stars, you are not seeing them as they are. You're actually seeing them as they were millions of years ago. The distances in space are that vast. In the BSG episode, where the star went nova and exploded, if the nearest star system was 5 light years away, and the Galactica used its FTL (Faster Than Light) drives to jump to that system, they wouldn't see the star go Nova for 5 years.

Final 5 and what not

All this being said, maybe the Cylons learned about the 13th colony during the first war and used their FTL drives to catch up to the humans who had left Kobol all those many eons ago. Perhaps they worked in tandem with those humans to create the more human cylons. All the while, these humans had no idea about the war going on between their true bretheren and the cylons.

All this still doesn't explain why spacefaring civilizations wouldn't do a better job of chronicalizing their exploits. In other words, these people had rocket ships but they recorded everything they did with scrolls and crazy poetry? They didn't have video? The YouTube?

This might have been addressed in another thread - but this has been bugging me since last week's episode. It was mentioned that it had been five years since the destruction of the colonies - but hasn't it only been three years?

1st and 2nd season - about 9 months (if Sharon's pregnancy followed human pregnancies) until

Lay Your Burdens Down - which was one year later

Season three - four months of occupation, plus about six to eight months (roughly) until Kara's death. She's then dead for two months. (12 - 14 months)

Season four - Kara's mission to find earth lasted two months and it's probably been about a month or two since then. (3 - 4 months) Which adds up to slightly more than three years.

I usually only watch the show once or twice, though, so I might be missing something. Does anyone have a better guess for how long they've been on the run?

I'm sure someone can be a little more precise than this, but even knowing that Hera was born premature, there was a time lag (not very long, but still) between the attacks and when Athena got pregnant. And by "Lay Down Your Burdens" Hera is out of the incubator. So then there's the year in Baltar's hair, followed by the occupation. And then it gets a little fuzzy with the algae planet, but based on the size of baby Nicky (perhaps not an excellent gauge) it's been a little longer then you estimate. I'm not sure how long it was, for example, between Starbuck's return and the Demetrius' departure.

Ultimately I think it's about four years, which someone rounded to five years, the way we do.

And now I'm going to look through old recaps and see if I can come up with a better answer, because you've made me curious.