After the revelation of four of the "Final Five" in Battlestar Galactica's third season finale, two major questions were asked: "Who is the Fifth?" and "Are they actually Cylons!?"

After re-imagined series developer Ronald D. Moore assured fans in interviews that Chief Galen Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), Colonel Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), Samuel Anders (Michael Trucco) and Tory Foster (Rekha Sharma) were members of the Final Five, the next logical set of question sprang to being.

Just who is the last Cylon? Have we already seen them? 

For what it's worth, none of the Final Five have been "boxed": a process of putting Cylon consciousness into cold storage, which is what happened to Lucy Lawless' character in the middle of season three.

In addition, an earlier pre-Five interview (circa 2005) with Moore asserts that "the idea was that these models of Cylon were sort of developed out of their own study of us. The Cylons on some level looked at humanity and said 'You know what? There's really only 12 of you.' If these are the 12, and sort of if you look at them they each represent different archetypes of what humanity is."

Now what of Kara "Starbuck" Thrace's wondrous return from the dead? It's not because she's a Cylon, or so says Sackhoff in an interview with the recent issue of Geek Monthly, claiming that "no way would [Moore and Eick] let that happen."

So now that they have been "activated", where's the final Cylon? More importantly, why didn't they show themselves during "Crossroads"?

The Role of the Final Five

Before any further reveal, it is important to identify the "fundamental differences" between the Five and the Seven. Center to the Final Five in this "third act in the three-act structure" is their role. Dream sequences shared by Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), Caprica-Six (Tricia Helfer) and Sharon "Athena" Agathon (Grace Park) tend to indicate that the Five are adversarial to the Significant Seven. As mentioned in "Torn", Caprica-Six informs Gaius Baltar (James Callis) that the Seven don't talk about the Five; the implication is that the topic is verboten, particularly in lieu of the Seven's drastic decision to box the Threes in "Rapture".

As laid down in "Crossroads, Part II", the particular focus is the Five's apparent threat to Hera, who symbolizes the Seven's plans to create a new hybrid race with humanity. In response to the dream sequence in, Caprica-Six tells Agathon and Roslin that she felt the need to protect Hera with her life.

In a way, people have conjectured that the Five are protectors of humanity. Of course, this may turn out not to be the case, however there is some compelling evidence for this conjecture.

In discussions on the Battlestar Forum, a poster on the forum named "Jay" noted an interesting connection to me and other members to support the theory. (In fact, he is responsible for planting the seed from which this article sprung.) He noted that the known Final Five have not only an association with key members of the Fleet but also have had key roles during the series' run.

Starting with Colonel Saul Tigh, he is the executive officer of Galactica, friend to William Adama (Edward James Olmos), and leader of the resistance effort on New Caprica.

Next we have Chief Galen Tyrol, who is the lead deck chief on Galactica, responsible for spearheading the creation of a stealth spacecraft called the "Blackbird" which is instrumental in helping to destroy the Cylon's Resurrection Ship, and responsible for the formation of the resistance effort on New Caprica. He is also the father of a second (known) human-Cylon hybrid, Nicholas, which may be equal and opposite of the Significant Seven's hybrid child.

Next we have two characters introduced to us from season two. The first is Samuel Anders, who was the leader of the resistance efforts on both Caprica and New Caprica, and one of the few people to leave Caprica alive after the exodus, despite overwhelming odds.

Finally, we have Tory Foster, the aide to President Laura Roslin who is essentially her right hand, replacing Billy Keikeya (Paul Campbell). With Tigh, she attempts to rig the election in "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II" so that Baltar doesn't get the presidency, which fails.

The prominence here is just a bit too uncanny to ignore. Granted, it is likely borne from a creative stretch to obtain the emotional buy-in of the viewer. Regardless, there is a pattern give here that shouldn't be ignored.

Therefore, given the fact that there is an association of importance here, I will provide my thoughts on who the last, masked Cylon is.

The Candidates for the Last Cylon

As you can imagine, there are multiple candidates to choose from. From Moore's and Thompson's comments, the character has already been introduced to us as early as season one. Aside from eliminating guest stars and characters with little value to the viewer, a good bulk of characters have been removed from suspicion.

Starting with characters shown from season one, we have the major characters of William Adama and Laura Roslin. With William Adama, Moore himself doesn't consider him to be a Cylon per his Frak Party podcast for "Crossroads, Part II". In regard to Laura Roslin, who is dying from a cancer initially staved off by Hera's stem cells, she reasserts her (alleged) role as the dying leader prophesied in the Sacred Scrolls. While she seems to have the ability to "project" -- a form of daydreaming Cylons do, as introduced by Caprica-Six to Gaius Baltar in "Torn" -- as exemplified by her illusion of snakes on the podium in "The Hand of God", she seems to be able to do this only as a result of a drug named chamalla. As chamalla is known to have hallucinogenic properties in humans, and used by both religious leaders and followers in the series, Occam's razor stipulates that this is a human reaction, not a Cylon one. Also, these illusions come at random and thus are uncontrolled. Additionally, Cylons tend to have robust immune systems that are resistance to most common human diseases and ailments, including cancer. Although this does not give them total immunity, as demonstrated by "Torn" and "A Measure of Salvation".

Now there's Gaius Baltar, whose involvement with the Cylons has been his association with the Significant Seven and their plans to destroy and, later, subjugate humanity. It was the human weakness of his arrogance, coupled by his fait accompli for female conquests, that lead to the fall of the Colonies. Essentially, he has more or less been an unwitting accomplice to the Seven's plans, and is apparently central to them and their quest for the hybrid. Making him a Cylon would, therefore, lose this aspect of an otherwise narcissistic human being who works with the enemy only out of self-preservation.

Then there's the miraculous resurrection of Kara "Starbuck" Thrace at the end of season three to consider. Thrace has been surrounded by a destiny that, while correlative with the Final Five, implies that she is somehow outside of the Five, thus being something else entirely. As mentioned in the promotional materials in the show, her return is believed to be Cylon-related -- thus an easy red-herring. In addition, Sackhoff has repeatedly denied that she is the last Cylon.

For the recurring characters of Felix Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani) and Tom Zarek (Richard Hatch). The case for or against Gaeta being a Cylon is weak. Admittedly, he has been involved with key events in the series: from the the creation of the Cylon detector, to the unmasking of the election rigging efforts of Saul Tigh and Tory Foster, and to funneling information to the New Caprica resistance, Gaeta has been a fairly pivotal character. Despite that, Gaeta was spared death by the hands of The Circle in "Collaborators" and is simply too agreeable to be anything other than a red-herring for those looking for any evidence of him being the last Cylon.

On the other hand, Tom Zarek, a popular character dating back from the third episode of season one, is considered a terrorist by the leaders of the Fleet. As tempting as it is to make the charismatic Zarek a Cylon, his personality has already been mirrored by no more than three Cylons: Doral (Matthew Bennett) who posed as a terrorist bomber in "Litmus", more extremists views have been taken by Cavil (Dean Stockwell), and the charismatic nature is echoed by the more religious model, Leoben Conoy (Callum Keith Rennie).

Now moving on to two final recurring characters who have been with the show since season one, namely Karl Agathon (Tahmoh Penikett) and Cally Tyrol (Nicki Clyne), who are the human parents of two Cylon offspring, being Hear and Nichloas respectfully. Since it's already been established that the Cylons can't successfully breed with other Cylons, the fact of associating with two known Cylons has removed them from contention. As for Callly, Moore has also commented that she is human in the Frak Party podcast for "Crossroads, Part II".

Then, of course, there's the fan favorite character introduced to us in season three, Romo Lampkin (Mark A. Sheppard). Aside from his mysterious, eccentric, self-absorbed complex nature, revealing Lampkin to be a Cylon would be detrimental to an otherwise deeply human character -- who is incredibly brilliant, yet flawed person. Additionally, Thompson's comment regarding the Final Cylon being known as far back as season one effectively removes him from contention.

Unmasking the Last Cylon

For the purposes of the story, the last Cylon needs to be important -- far more important than the reveal provided in "Crossroads", particularly since the series will come to a close in only 20 episodes.

Frankly, the only person that comes to mind is Lee "Apollo" Adama (Jamie Bamber).

Indeed, if the twelve Cylons are representative of how they view humanity, and provided that Ron Moore hasn't reneged on his belief, not one among them is as whiny, pretentious and so unsure of themselves as Lee Adama. Actually, not one of them is whiny at all -- or even a serial contrition! All the models to date have been pretty much self-assured, varying only by belief systems and attitude towards their race, humanity, the universe and everything.

Aside from Galen Tyrol-who didn't believe in the religious teachings of his parents and didn't care to follow the religious route they took-no other model to date has epitomized wanting to leave their father's (or creator's) shadow, or to blow away the expectations of others so resoundingly as Lee.

Now how is Lee important? 

He's the "new kid" on the block at the start of the series. We don't know much about him, other than what is defined through his relationship with his father. The same can be said about the Cylons: we know about them through only to their relationship with the Colonials.

At the beginning, much of his relationship with his father mirrors the relationship the Cylons had with their creators. Both have a loathing that always boiled to the surface in the presence of their progenitor, and both parents attempt to reconcile with their children.

As we see in the Miniseries, the Colonials create an Armistice Station, sending an officer every year for the past forty years. The Cylons send no one-they don't want to talk and have been silent up until the time they decided to attack the Colonies. The same can be said for Lee. When Bill tried to talk to his son, who only came aboard Galactica for the decommissioning ceremony, Lee didn't care to talk.

When pressed into doing so, Lee makes it clear that he blames his father for the death of Zak and for him not being involved with his own youth. Along those same lines, the Cylons blame the humans for their enslavement and other so-called atrocities, which haven't been wholly revealed as yet. Both Lee and the Cylons have been slighted by their parents.

As with the relationship between the Cylons and the humans, Lee's relationship with his father becomes better developed and more complex. At times, Lee is willing to back his father, other times he has proven that he will stand up and fight against things he sees are wrong. From helping Laura Roslin understand his father and the military, to his act of mutiny on Colonial One,and back to being in intense anguish over Valerii's attempt to kill his father-all within just the first season-it is a pendulum that swings back and forth from one extreme to the next. 

The Cylons are the same way. To start, they begin a war with humanity, whereby they are expelled from the Colonies. Like children with little frame of reference, they mirror their development after what they know: their parents. So they develop themselves very much in their parents' image, selecting twelve basic archetypes for humans. Why shouldn't these archetypes directly mirror themselves? After all, human children have been known to have the same attitude of their parents that the Cylons have. Some children have even gone on to kill their parents, much like the Cylons would later do, but only on a grander scale.

Thus after a time, the Cylons decide to decimate humanity and attack the Twelve Colonies, then follow up by tracking down survivors to experiment in creating children the way their parents do. All the while they try to annihilate Galactica and her rag-tag, fugitive fleet. (Up until the point that they discover that Sharon Agathon, pregnant with Hera at the time, is amongst the Fleet.)

On some level, there is a determination for the Cylons to be better than their parents, to outshine them, although there are doubters among the Cylons regarding this. The Cylons, or Aaron Doral/Number Five in particular, believe that in order for children to come into their own, their parents must die. On the other hand, cynicism from the Cylons -- practically in the form of Cavil -- doubts that the Cylons should have anything to do with the humans. He is particularly relieved when the Cylons leave the Colonies behind and strike out to their own destiny.

Indeed, Lee Adama has an oddly similar drive and doubts. Prior to a battle to take an important, fuel-rich asteroid, Lee offers his doubts that Kara Thrace would be better than he at undertaking the mission. While Lee pulls off the attack, he grows more brazen and eventually goes against his father-who tries to wrest Laura Roslin's presidency away from her-believing it to be a blow against the democratic way of life.

As to be expected, Lee and Bill reconciled. However, Lee's further doubts and self-reflective loathing recur after his near death experience during the attack on the Cylon's Resurrection Ship. He later goes on to side with his father over the black market and confides with him his relationship with a prostitute; on the bright side, the elder Adama entrusts Lee with command of Pegasus, the second battlestar known to have survived the destruction of the Colonies. 

Although after another change, the relationship between father and son changes again after the fall of New Caprica to the Cylons, where he doubts his father's plan to go back and rescue the people under the Cylon occupation force. Conversations between him and Lee intensify when Bill notes that his son has grown soft and tells Lee to get off his "fat ass".

Despite Lee's actions at New Caprica and his miraculous return as "beefcake Lee", Lee ends up siding with Baltar-and successfully defends Baltar from being found guilty by the kangaroo court Roslin assembled.

Now that we see the pendulum consistently going from one extreme to the next, we have to deal with the issue of how Lee Adama could possibly be a Cylon, since he was born to parents. I will note that the same question could be asked of Galen Tyrol, or any of the other Final Five Cylons, since they had to be raised somehow and come from somewhere. Remember that they are fundamentally different and have been on the Colonies for longer than the Significant Seven in terms of decades. Their memories are real, according to Moore, and not false like Sharon "Boomer" Valerii's memories.

A theory to explain this would be that they could have all been switched at birth with nearly identical children. It's a minor detail, but believable and nothing the audience hasn't seen in the series before, particularly with the whole Hera storyline.

And then there's Leoben...

Also, there's still Leoben's claim to Laura Roslin made in "Flesh and Bone" way back in season one. If the more astute of us can recall, she is told that "Adama is a Cylon" before Leoben is jettisoned out an airlock. Noticeably, as did most of the audience, she believed that it was William Adama whom Leoben referred to. This was clearly a red-herring, but one which was followed up on in "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down". As the most discerning of us would expect, Leoben's comment seems to have never reared its head again; hell, if Bill isn't a Cylon, then Lee isn't right?

Of course, that was assuming that Lee was a direct biological child of William Adama. Per my previous point, Lee could very well not be a biological descendant of William Adama.

So how do we deal with the fact that Leoben tends to mix truths with lies?

To his credit, Leoben was, thus far, proven right about Kara Thrace having a destiny. His model may have misled Thrace on New Caprica with the whole Kacey mind-frak, but if that's the extent of his lie, then the act was one done by the writers to discredit Leoben's statements. 

So who's Lee protecting then?

As I've mentioned already, each of the revealed four have a role of key importance.

So who is Lee protecting? Well, he's protecting humanity.

Aside from his whining, Lee has a reputation of protecting humanity.

Starting out in the Miniseries, he protects Colonial One from the Cylons and aids in the defense of the Fleet as they jump away from Ragnar Anchorage. In "33", he protects the Fleet from being followed by the Cylons controlled by the Significant Seven by destroying the Olympic Carrier, an event that haunts him repeatedly throughout the series. In "Bastille Day", he protects Tom Zarek from being killed by Thrace. In "The Hand of God", he saves the Fleet from its fuel shortage by destroying the Cylon foothold on the tylium asteroid.

From "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II" through "Home, Part II", Lee is Laura Roslin's protector after her arrest and subsequent escape from Galactica. In the episode "Valley of Darkness", he also acts to protect Galactica during a Cylon boarding, preventing the Cylons from venting the ship's air into space and using Galactica's weapons against the Fleet.

After reunification of the Colonial Fleet, Lee is instrumental in enlisting Thrace's assistance to defuse the situation between Pegasus and Galactica, and for his work in destroying the FTL drives of the Resurrection Ship, thus permitting it to be destroyed by combined forces from both battlestars in the "Resurrection Ship" two-parter. In "Black Market", he saves the Fleet from having to deal with the unethical Phelan, who prostitutes children and kills with little regard for human life. While still maintaining a black market in the Fleet, because such a thing is inevitable, Lee is able to monitor the black market.

After the settlement of New Caprica, Lee orders Pegasus to jump to New Caprica in time to save Galactica from being destroyed by Cylon basestars in "Exodus, Part II", sacrificing Pegasus in the process.

Last but not least, in the two-part season finale "Crossroads", Lee successfully defends Gaius Baltar, believing that the Colonials were ashamed of what had happened on New Caprica and wanted to put that all out on Baltar.

Now that the above evidence has all been laid out, it becomes apparent to me that Lee Adama is, in fact, the Last Cylon yet unmasked.

As to why he hasn't been revealed yet... there's no real information for why it hasn't happened, and any hypothesis would be too weak to pursue at this point in time.

Ultimately, this doesn't and shouldn't come as a surprise, as the overall story deals with the relationship between siblings. Whether they be father versus son, or man versus machine, Battlestar Galactica has always been driven by this basic, timeless set of relationships.

In summation, there is no better mirror to how complex the Cylon relationship with humanity has become than Lee Adama's relationship to his father. For as Romo Lampkin said in "The Son Also Rises": "There's no greater ally, no force more powerful, no enemy more resolved than a son who chooses to step from his father's shadow."

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