BSG: Hero, Holidays and Such.
Nov. 28th, 2006 11:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaI am back from my vacation, horribly jetlagged (still, because I suck at readjusting my body clock) and have to go to work tomorrow. Grr! At least the trip went well.
I actually got to watch BSG when it aired! I was staying with someone who was a fan, so we watched it, though I had to rewatch bits when I got home as we spoke over some of it.
Really, there were two bits to this, so I'll comment on the basestar subplot and then the BullDixon plot.
I'm starting to get irritated at the jumps in time in this plot. I love it, and find it so fascinating, and sometimes I'm down with jumping, dreamy, sketchy storytelling, but not here. How did this threesome come to be? I find the dynamics of it fascinating, especially the apparent lack of competition (or at least strong suppression of it) between Three and Six, a dynamic that might make total sense for the Cylon but is very unusual for humans. Especially given Caprica Six's established feelings for Baltar.
Where is Hera? That's starting to bug me. I know that filming with very young children is a logistical nightmare but couldn't they have at least made a passing reference to her once? Like, "Oh, yeah, Hera, that unimportant brat we picked up on New Caprica? She's, like, chillin' with Boomer I think." Because that would also explain the lack of Boomer.
I continue to be fascinated by Three but totally unable to get a handle on her. The shot of her getting the Centurion to shoot her in the head was visually stunning. This is a very interesting direction. Still not sure how to interpret the character though. But perhaps that's the point. I read an interview with Lucy Lawless in SFX yesterday where she said she wanted the character to be one of those people who does all the right things and says all the right things but leaves you cold and creeped out because there's something soulless about her, something a little sociopathic. Three's clearly not totally sociopathic, but yeah, the idea that she acts in all the ways she thinks she should but it's not quite sticking...that has potential.
My current breakthrough in interpreting her character comes in the form of this song:
http://www.yousendit.com/download/BUjbBtZBkY95TA%3D%3D
It's "The Future," by Leonard Cohen and it's one of the most no-holds-barred brutal songs I've ever heard. I'm not sure why I associate it so strongly with Three. Maybe, it's that I think this is the voice of her subconscious. The one she suppresses as best she can but drives her anyway. Like, there's this anger at the world for being flawed and the solution, to the singer, is to seize chokehold control.
Anyway, nine times out of ten, I hate Leonard Cohen. One time out of ten, I just bloody love him. This is one of the one times. Also it's irritating because I don't need another vid bunny and I'd have to significantly cut down the song and I'm not sure how to do that...
Final thought, I've always been at peace with the idea that Head!Six doesn't tell Gaius anything he can't work out with his a) genius intellect, b) years of experience of Caprica!Six's personality - she didn't seem shy about talking about parts of her religion to him and c) continuing to observe the cylon and work with both Athena and Gina. Though it's also always been possible that Head!Six is something else.
Three seeing the same opera chamber as Gaius during her vision - the one he saw in Kobol's Last Gleaming with the mysterious baby - is the first thing I've seen that suggests Gaius' visions are something else.
I loved Roslin's hair at the start of this episode. That is all.
BullDixon was fun because I loved the first two seasons of Alias and that dude was awesome. So he had nostalgia value. I also enjoyed that his character had a fair bit of humour injected, and I got the sense of him even though he wasn't around much and had been handed the difficult task of being the "nuts redshirt who tries to off Kirk."
I was very nervous about the revelation that "the whole genocide thing was really Adama's fault." I thought that smacked of retconning that just wouldn't work. Actually it worked surprisingly well. It's the sort of thing a military might well do and on a basic level it doesn't make Adama culpable because he was obeying the orders of superiors and even if he wasn't, as Roslin points out, one thing among millions. Perhaps it's a mistake to go into the neutral territory, perhaps that provoked the attack, perhaps if that was the only provocation, massacring billions is an overreaction and mistake as much/more than violating the armistice zone thing. Perhaps all they did was interrupt preparations for an attack that would have carried on regardless. And on and on and on. Point is, I was happy it was a plausible military decision that doesn't suddenly, literally make it all Adama's fault.
That said, his personal history and continuity is now totally shot to shit. Like unsaveable. Even ignoring the voice in my head that's telling me he commanded Galactica for several years, even assuming all the people who'd served with him a long time travelled with him from the Valkyrie to the Galactica (like Tigh), even assuming Kara served on the Valkyrie but didn't recognise Bulldog's callsign, even assuming Bulldog was flown in from outside and not a lot of people on the battlestar knew the true mission, even assuming I was wrong that Adama was only old enough to sign up for the end of the cylon war and that he's about 61 not 63-65 as he must be to have 45 years of service racked up, EVEN ASSUMING ALL THESE THINGS:
HOW CAN HE HAVE SPENT YEARS DRIFTING AFTER BEING DISCHARGED, DESPERATE TO GET BACK INTO THE FLEET AND STILL HAVE RACKED UP 45 YEARS OF SERVICE?! Was he 12 when he signed up? Is he older than 65 (I have trouble believing that and it'd make Saul older still). ARGH. Minor screw-ups I can cope with. Major and repeated ones just make me cross.
Okay, raging over with, I did find something very interesting.
Usually I'm all liberal and on the side of "peace, love & understanding," and being willing to acknowledge that attacking your enemy without trying to understand why they hate you is counterproductive. However, Battlestar Galactica seems to bring out the opposite in me. In that I totally love the cylons, but I find Adama's endless harping on about how we "have to be worthy of surviving," very...vague. I want answers such as, "Why?" "How does one measure worthy?" and "Who are you to decide these things?" It's not that I disagree precisely, it's more that adhering to that personal code is a luxury that I'm not sure he can afford (so yeah, I loved Roslin's smackdown here). Adhering to is (as Helo did last episode) costs the lives of the people he is sworn to protect, and I don't feel he really acknowledges this. He gets all morally superior, but without acknowledging the real cost of that moral integrity.
Anyway, I'm babbling (as usual). The point is, when he says, basically, "This is our fault because we're so militarily minded. If we hadn't behaved this way, this wouldn't have happened," it would be very easy for me to take the opinion described above. To point out that he doesn't know it for sure and it was unjustified anyway and he should stop whining.
Except he's right. It doesn't change my opinion of anything I've said above, but he's right. Maybe the military espionage idea was a great one, maybe it was crap. Maybe the alternative was to wait and get attacked and be even worse prepared. That it could have been the best option available doesn't negate the fact that the espionage almost certainly didn't help the situation and was a direct result of the suspicious nature often found in our militaries.
Without going into the guilty emo side of things, his basic point is: We did this. And if we had been different, and done something different, things would be different. Maybe we wouldn't be here, like this.
His point is, if the Cylon were willing to leave us be, we blew it. Maybe understandably, considering everything. Maybe by the standards we'd developed, the standards that had served us well for a long time, we would have been reckless to simply trust them. By those standards we were obligated to check up on things. Either way, we made an agreement, we broke it, we lost our chance to find out. We used standards that seemed infintely reasonable but which were, in the end, borne out of a suspicious and war-prone society.
His point is, we acted like they were going to attack us.
Um. Hmm, yup, all I got to say on that.
Finally, in honour of Laura Roslin's Awesome Hair and Chiwetel Ejiofor (because I might have watched Inside Man to drool over him and mourn his lack of close-up shots yet again on the airplane home...) I present a mini picspam of awesome:
I swear, the Operative...guh. I swear, if President Roslin showed up in the Firefly universe and had an affair with the Operative. My god, my head would explode more than if she actually finally jumped Lee's bones.
Okay. Picspam over. Nuttin' more to see here...
I actually got to watch BSG when it aired! I was staying with someone who was a fan, so we watched it, though I had to rewatch bits when I got home as we spoke over some of it.
Really, there were two bits to this, so I'll comment on the basestar subplot and then the BullDixon plot.
I'm starting to get irritated at the jumps in time in this plot. I love it, and find it so fascinating, and sometimes I'm down with jumping, dreamy, sketchy storytelling, but not here. How did this threesome come to be? I find the dynamics of it fascinating, especially the apparent lack of competition (or at least strong suppression of it) between Three and Six, a dynamic that might make total sense for the Cylon but is very unusual for humans. Especially given Caprica Six's established feelings for Baltar.
Where is Hera? That's starting to bug me. I know that filming with very young children is a logistical nightmare but couldn't they have at least made a passing reference to her once? Like, "Oh, yeah, Hera, that unimportant brat we picked up on New Caprica? She's, like, chillin' with Boomer I think." Because that would also explain the lack of Boomer.
I continue to be fascinated by Three but totally unable to get a handle on her. The shot of her getting the Centurion to shoot her in the head was visually stunning. This is a very interesting direction. Still not sure how to interpret the character though. But perhaps that's the point. I read an interview with Lucy Lawless in SFX yesterday where she said she wanted the character to be one of those people who does all the right things and says all the right things but leaves you cold and creeped out because there's something soulless about her, something a little sociopathic. Three's clearly not totally sociopathic, but yeah, the idea that she acts in all the ways she thinks she should but it's not quite sticking...that has potential.
My current breakthrough in interpreting her character comes in the form of this song:
http://www.yousendit.com/download/BUjbBtZBkY95TA%3D%3D
It's "The Future," by Leonard Cohen and it's one of the most no-holds-barred brutal songs I've ever heard. I'm not sure why I associate it so strongly with Three. Maybe, it's that I think this is the voice of her subconscious. The one she suppresses as best she can but drives her anyway. Like, there's this anger at the world for being flawed and the solution, to the singer, is to seize chokehold control.
Anyway, nine times out of ten, I hate Leonard Cohen. One time out of ten, I just bloody love him. This is one of the one times. Also it's irritating because I don't need another vid bunny and I'd have to significantly cut down the song and I'm not sure how to do that...
Final thought, I've always been at peace with the idea that Head!Six doesn't tell Gaius anything he can't work out with his a) genius intellect, b) years of experience of Caprica!Six's personality - she didn't seem shy about talking about parts of her religion to him and c) continuing to observe the cylon and work with both Athena and Gina. Though it's also always been possible that Head!Six is something else.
Three seeing the same opera chamber as Gaius during her vision - the one he saw in Kobol's Last Gleaming with the mysterious baby - is the first thing I've seen that suggests Gaius' visions are something else.
I loved Roslin's hair at the start of this episode. That is all.
BullDixon was fun because I loved the first two seasons of Alias and that dude was awesome. So he had nostalgia value. I also enjoyed that his character had a fair bit of humour injected, and I got the sense of him even though he wasn't around much and had been handed the difficult task of being the "nuts redshirt who tries to off Kirk."
I was very nervous about the revelation that "the whole genocide thing was really Adama's fault." I thought that smacked of retconning that just wouldn't work. Actually it worked surprisingly well. It's the sort of thing a military might well do and on a basic level it doesn't make Adama culpable because he was obeying the orders of superiors and even if he wasn't, as Roslin points out, one thing among millions. Perhaps it's a mistake to go into the neutral territory, perhaps that provoked the attack, perhaps if that was the only provocation, massacring billions is an overreaction and mistake as much/more than violating the armistice zone thing. Perhaps all they did was interrupt preparations for an attack that would have carried on regardless. And on and on and on. Point is, I was happy it was a plausible military decision that doesn't suddenly, literally make it all Adama's fault.
That said, his personal history and continuity is now totally shot to shit. Like unsaveable. Even ignoring the voice in my head that's telling me he commanded Galactica for several years, even assuming all the people who'd served with him a long time travelled with him from the Valkyrie to the Galactica (like Tigh), even assuming Kara served on the Valkyrie but didn't recognise Bulldog's callsign, even assuming Bulldog was flown in from outside and not a lot of people on the battlestar knew the true mission, even assuming I was wrong that Adama was only old enough to sign up for the end of the cylon war and that he's about 61 not 63-65 as he must be to have 45 years of service racked up, EVEN ASSUMING ALL THESE THINGS:
HOW CAN HE HAVE SPENT YEARS DRIFTING AFTER BEING DISCHARGED, DESPERATE TO GET BACK INTO THE FLEET AND STILL HAVE RACKED UP 45 YEARS OF SERVICE?! Was he 12 when he signed up? Is he older than 65 (I have trouble believing that and it'd make Saul older still). ARGH. Minor screw-ups I can cope with. Major and repeated ones just make me cross.
Okay, raging over with, I did find something very interesting.
Usually I'm all liberal and on the side of "peace, love & understanding," and being willing to acknowledge that attacking your enemy without trying to understand why they hate you is counterproductive. However, Battlestar Galactica seems to bring out the opposite in me. In that I totally love the cylons, but I find Adama's endless harping on about how we "have to be worthy of surviving," very...vague. I want answers such as, "Why?" "How does one measure worthy?" and "Who are you to decide these things?" It's not that I disagree precisely, it's more that adhering to that personal code is a luxury that I'm not sure he can afford (so yeah, I loved Roslin's smackdown here). Adhering to is (as Helo did last episode) costs the lives of the people he is sworn to protect, and I don't feel he really acknowledges this. He gets all morally superior, but without acknowledging the real cost of that moral integrity.
Anyway, I'm babbling (as usual). The point is, when he says, basically, "This is our fault because we're so militarily minded. If we hadn't behaved this way, this wouldn't have happened," it would be very easy for me to take the opinion described above. To point out that he doesn't know it for sure and it was unjustified anyway and he should stop whining.
Except he's right. It doesn't change my opinion of anything I've said above, but he's right. Maybe the military espionage idea was a great one, maybe it was crap. Maybe the alternative was to wait and get attacked and be even worse prepared. That it could have been the best option available doesn't negate the fact that the espionage almost certainly didn't help the situation and was a direct result of the suspicious nature often found in our militaries.
Without going into the guilty emo side of things, his basic point is: We did this. And if we had been different, and done something different, things would be different. Maybe we wouldn't be here, like this.
His point is, if the Cylon were willing to leave us be, we blew it. Maybe understandably, considering everything. Maybe by the standards we'd developed, the standards that had served us well for a long time, we would have been reckless to simply trust them. By those standards we were obligated to check up on things. Either way, we made an agreement, we broke it, we lost our chance to find out. We used standards that seemed infintely reasonable but which were, in the end, borne out of a suspicious and war-prone society.
His point is, we acted like they were going to attack us.
Um. Hmm, yup, all I got to say on that.
Finally, in honour of Laura Roslin's Awesome Hair and Chiwetel Ejiofor (because I might have watched Inside Man to drool over him and mourn his lack of close-up shots yet again on the airplane home...) I present a mini picspam of awesome:
I swear, the Operative...guh. I swear, if President Roslin showed up in the Firefly universe and had an affair with the Operative. My god, my head would explode more than if she actually finally jumped Lee's bones.
Okay. Picspam over. Nuttin' more to see here...
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Date: 2007-01-30 10:29 pm (UTC)