'Battlestar Galactica': Kate Vernon reveals a Cylonic secret

Like a veteran of the witness protection program, actress Kate Vernon picked a secluded corner table of a very public restaurant for the meeting. She studied the tape recorder sitting next to her teacup on the table and then glanced around the Studio City bistro to see if anyone was eavesdropping. "Forgive me if I'm a little awkward talking about it," Vernon said during an interview earlier this week. "It's been two years that I've been sitting on this secret, and after that long it's kind of hard to just start talking . . . "

Vernon, you see, is the final Cylon, a fact revealed Friday night on the acclaimed Sci Fi television series "Battlestar Galactica." That makes her the solution to a mystery that has played out like some latter-day science fiction version of the "Who shot J.R.?" saga, but, unlike that old "Dallas" plotline, this one unfolded in an Internet Age and with a rabid-fan audience clawing for clues.

"People have been asking me and accusing me for months and months, but I played it off pretty good," said Vernon, who portrays the shrewish Ellen Tigh, a sort of Lady Macbeth in space whom some fans have dubbed a "cosmic cougar." Now her character has abruptly gained new dimensions as a riddle redefined, not unlike Keyser Soze in the final jolting moments of "The Usual Suspects."

For the uninitiated, despite its clunky name, "Galactica" is revered by its loyal viewers as a television landmark in sophisticated sci-fi storytelling and is now in its fourth and final season. This is no Buck Rogers serial -- nuanced and wrenching, it's a bleak opera about politics, religion and war in what may be the final days of the human race, which is being exterminated by sentient machines called Cylons. The show's themes of identity, faith, duty and betrayal are all made slippery by the fact that the humans have been living with 12 secret Cylons among them who all look, act and think like humans, a dozen synthetic "Manchurian Candidates" waiting for activation. Their identities have been slowly revealed, and, on Friday night, to the shock of viewers, the last sleeper turned out to be Vernon's Ellen, the wife of Col. Saul Tigh, the raging, one-eyed career soldier who is still coming to grips with the fact that he is a Cylon. It's a complicated universe.

All of this was a tremendous surprise considering Ellen was poisoned to death in Season 3, but with the Cylons, the usual rules of mortality don't apply. Vernon is thrilled to be back. Her character was originally written for a four-episode arc, but she endured and became a key character -- until she was murdered by her on-screen husband.