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Soon after the Cylon attack and the Galactica's escape from the destruction of the Twelve Colonies, Gaius Baltar says he can build a Cylon detector and works on it for several episodes. However, it is never completed (it's also never clear if he could really build one or if Six was just conning him into thinking he could) and, after a while, Adama and others stop asking him about it.

What happened? Was there a reason the interest in the detector just died off? Did Baltar admit he couldn't make one? Or did they decide that it wasn't worth sacrificing another nuclear warhead to make one?

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  • 2
    I've always been bothered by the cylon detector problem. IIRC, in the last mini-series episode, Adama fights hand-to-hand and defeats a cylon because it has been weakened by (and appears physically ill due to) some quality of that region of space the station occupies. When Adama wanted to detect cylons on the ship, why didn't he simply park it in that region of space again?
    – mghicks
    Dec 14, 2012 at 6:54
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    Because he'd have to go back to that region, and there were lots of Cylon ships around it. Plus, the fleet was moving away from that area in the search for a home away from the Cylon threat.
    – Tango
    Dec 16, 2012 at 6:06

1 Answer 1

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Baltar built the cylon detector based on Six's instructions. It worked correctly and detected

Sharon as a cylon, which Baltar covers up out of fear of what she might do.

After that incident, Baltar changes the detector to return "non-cylon" for all tests. When

Sharon attacks Adama after previously being "okayed",

the detector is dismissed as broken.

Source

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    adding a summary of the link to your answer would improve the answer by at least <-----THIS-----> much.
    – Xantec
    Jan 18, 2012 at 4:12
  • I appreciate your taking the time to answer this, but I do find that explanation to have a hole in the center. Certainly he lied to Boomer out of self-preservation; however, as soon as she left his lab he could have informed Adama. I don't see how keeping quiet profited him or helped ensure the silence of the remaining Cylons in the fleet.
    – apraetor
    Sep 20, 2020 at 4:09

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