BSG: Maelstrom

[beccatoria]

So this is the episode which will, ultimately, tell us if god(s) exists.

Because this is either the episode where Starbuck goes insane and commits suicide, or this is the episode where she commits suicide under a divine directive and is mystically returned as is wont to happen in religious tales.


If she never shows up again, it's the first one, if she does, the second.

(A tangent; she could, I suppose, survive through some freak combination of probabilities - i.e. there really was a raider and she really did eject. But that would fall under the being insane and committing suicide definition, because...well, if there wasn't anything divine going on here, then she went insane and at least tried to commit suicide).

I'll be up front about my belief - she's not dead. I was spoiled months ago for the possibility of her dying. What I knew was, there's some kind of crashing badness going on with her ship - you know, of deathlike preportions. But I still didn't really believe she was going to die. Though I kind of hoped she was. Partly. Sort of.

So what I'm going to do is, examine the episode from the "she went insane and killed herself," point of view, and also the "divine intervention," point of view.


She went insane and killed herself.

So, this is tragic. But also a worthy story. If I were less lazy, I'd drag up the link to the posts I made early in the season when both Starbuck and Tigh were destroying themselves. I said at the time, I wanted Tigh to crash utterly. I wanted to see the story of someone who broke themselves too much to fix. Because that's not a story that's often told, and it's a story that fits in very well with BSG's ongoing themes of nihilism, apocalypse, brutal decisions that defy morality, and so on.

I didn't get that. But fortunately, I seem to have been slightly more on the money with Starbuck. Who has taken up this mantle. It's not quite someone who broke themselves for the greater cause, more someone who was just broken. But the point is, Starbuck never got better. She got worse and worse until she snapped and went completely mad, and no one stepped in to stop it. Maybe it was no one's job to. Doesn't change the fact that in the end, the person who could have best staged an intervention was probably Leoben, and that, my friends, is fucked up.

There's something to her fear of death, I think. Though I'm not sure I'd tie it as directly with her mother's. Still, the fact that she finally found the strength to stay away and make a stand, and doing so meant sacrificing her chance to ever reconcile or understand her parent, must have been a headfuck. The idea of death as a barrier to truth or to peace might well have become rooted in there. I'd also figure that some of it must have to do with her religious terror. Because death's the point where the really bad shit might start (and no way do I buy that Kara believes she's going to get to go to heave the Elysian Fields).

After Adama's reinforcement of everything her mother said to her in "Torn" she snaps into shape again because this is something familiar. So she slides back into all her old patterns in an attempt to cover up the huge cleft New Caprica left in her already cloven psyche.

At this point, she's managed to alienate or get disowned by Adama, Lee (twice) and Sam (one and a half times) and leave herself with, effectively, no one to notice her complete and utter breakdown. Sam's not around enough and Kara will no longer let him in. Perhaps Helo? Except I think he tries, but has problems of his own, like being stationed as Mayor of Dogsville instead of with the rest of the pilots; or dealing with the fact that his half-cylon daughter has been passed between caregivers so frequently she can't sleep through the night.

So I'm really glad Kara goes mad in this episode (and she does go mad, whether or not the gods are speaking to her). Because I never thought she was anywhere near recovering from what had happened. To me, a breakdown is the logical, if not inevitable, conclusion to her journey. Which has been a life full of harrowing experiences, usually met by a profound lack of sympathy from those closest to her (and yes, frequently that's her fault for not sharing or deliberately alienating them or actually having done something horrible).

Frankly, it's a miracle more of the main characters aren't insane - and I thought it was a wonderful comment in this episode that if it were peace time, hell if it were any time other than "these-are-literally-all-the-pilots-we-have," time, they'd all be grounded. But for Kara, who was screwed even before the apocalypse, and with the specific things that have happened to her since; yeah. She was a gonner.

I said earlier I believed that her posing was something of a cover and she was genuinely scared of death. I'm still willing to believe that. It makes her desperate attempts to simultaneously make death unscary and force her mother to accept her that much more creepy and tragic.


I've seen various people comment that they're not sure if the episode works inasmuch as they felt no real sympathy for Kara's mother; no sense that Kara ever should have gone back.

I agree with that - Kara didn't need to go back. In what may be a reading counter to the writers' intentions (much like my disgust with Adama's disowning her in Torn) I would like to point out that none of what we saw actually happened.

Obvious, yes. But the point is, Kara's been desperate for her mother's approval her whole life. And look, wonder of wonders, in her oxygen-deprived Leoben-guided fantasy that's supposed to make her calm enough to plunge to her death, her mother offers her just that.

If Kara really had gone back to her mother on her deathbed, would she actually have found a scrap book with all the stuff from her childhood, and her mother accepting her? Maybe. Maybe her mother would have behaved as she always had because Kara was falling right back into that pattern too. We won't know.

What I think I know is that Kara is six years old. And she forced her six-year-old fantasy of her mother finally demonstrating love, affection and pride into the only place it would still fit - the last five weeks of her life.

So yeah. There it is. Kara went insane, released the inner deathwish she's been carrying around for a while because she thinks she deserves it, because she'll never to anything but frak up, couched it in religion (to which she is susceptible), Leoben (the person who understood that side of her best, and to whom she is susceptible), and a fantasy of parental pride and acceptance - probably the thing she wants most in the universe, twisted into the rather nonsensical conclusion that death is nothing to fear. Thus, she killed herself.


Okay. The "She's dead," part done, let's get on to the "she's alive because religion is real," part.

Firstly, I loved the oracle. Great casting choice to make her young and not the old crone we might otherwise have expected. Her repetition of Leoben's words exactly is so far-fetched for someone to decide to fake for very little gain. How would the Oracle even know Kara was coming? It was creepy and I loved it. And it supports the "religion is real" thing.

That and things like "the space between life and death." Things like Aurora, goddess of renewal and the dawn. Things like this is your destiny, the genuine, - not temporarily insane Kara, - fact that she drew that Mandala even as a child and it has something to do with the way to earth. (Yes, okay, people die before they should in stories and if she really was crazy and seeing that Mandala everywhere she could have convinced herself as part of the "it's okay for you to kill yourself," spiel). The fact that religion/scriptures/oracles has proved to be right in showing the way to earth every other time on this show. All these facts convince me it's a fake out.

Except fake out isn't the right phrase. I'd be pissed off at a fake out. But a mystical return from Starbuck won't piss me off. Even though I think it's cheap to "kill" a character to generate drama.

Why not? I guess because it's so obvious to me that she isn't dead, it feels like just one more step on her mythic journey. Casting her in the mold of an ancient, mythic hero, there's always the journey through the lands of the dead, returning changed, with secret knowledge. There's always the absolute abandonment of everything the hero has ever known, being stripped totally bare of everything, even identity, and rebuilding the hero from the ground on up. There's the point at which the hero is thrown from everything she's ever known and must go on, without companions, into danger.

So if you're reading BSG as a myth - if the mystical aspects are as important as the grounded aircraft carrier reality - then Starbuck is clearly the most important mystical figure except perhaps Roslin. And Roslin is not the young impetuous hero; Roslin is an older figure, the one who prophecies and warns and is ignored, either that or she's the leader, the one who sends the young hero into danger to prove herself.

Either way, accepting that religion is real and a part of the BSG universe, and that Starbuck is the archetypal hero, makes this part of the story as inevitable as her mental breakdown.

And yes. While I think she let her ship explode under divine directive, I also think she was completely losing her mind.


Leoben said, to know the face of god is to know madness.

I offer this: to hear her destiny from the gods, Starbuck could not be sane. To act on that impulse; to follow through - she could not be sane. An act of utter faith requires abandoning logic, which is generally accepted to be the basis of sanity.

Knowing that, I believe everything I said above about her mother's death, her fantasies of it, her choice of Leoben as a spirit guide, her sex-scene with him calling back to her captivity on New Caprica where she really started to unravel big-time, her hallucinations of her younger self, I stand by it all.

She's going mad, absolutely raving, a state she had to achieve to do something as crazy as kill herself. The Oracle was right; she did learn the wrong lesson from her mother. But that lesson wasn't that there was nothing to fear from death - that was just Starbuck's mind learning to accept its fate. The lesson her mother taught her was madness, when she broke her daughter's ability to function correctly as surely as she broke her fingers. She laid the groundwork for her civilisation-saving breakdown and suicide.

Let's see what happens next.


Final thoughts - I wasn't too fond of all the overly-obvious callbacks. They were unnecessary and I really found the "nothing but the rain" part forced. Especially since I hadn't seen Adama and Starbuck really interact since he pushed her off her chair and disowned her. It was nice and unexpectedly right to have Lee and Kara interacting in a friendly way again. I continue to like Sam more than I ever thought I would when I first met him. Roslin continues not to have enough to do. I thought perhaps the first chase with the fake-raider was a little too long. I wish there'd been more Leoben.

That's all!