beccatoria (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccatoria) wrote2007-03-06 06:24 pm
beccatoria) wrote2007-03-06 06:24 pm
Entry tags:
BSG: Maelstrom
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 toheave 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!
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
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!
Re: Kara and her many parents.
M'Lady you're the one with the awesome reviews and thoughts that make me wanna take notes everytime I watch an episode. It's like that one super awesome university lecture that you totally wanted to pay attention to.
I'd really recommend it - the character has balls aplenty in those episodes.
Yes yes I know. Where do you download your episodes from I should get to watching on the computer.
(awesome! Zoolander!)
Funerals will never be the same.
(which the network insisted be added, I believe - they were worried she wasn't evil enough to assassinate)
O.o Well they were right! I am shocked that the networks were the ones to make this call. Without the civilian deaths, she most certainly was NOT worthy of assassination, but she was totally within her rights to terminate Adama's command. Well, not to kill him, but to remove him. Because frankly, he was all "You stole my players and I want them back and if you don't give 'em back, you don't get to play with my baseball anymore!" *runs off baseball diamond to sulk*
True, but that gets to the interesting part that the only way she could have done that was to decimiate the democratic civilian system. As you note, she would have had to surrender power to civilian leadership - and her story arc is all about what happens when you have military dictatorships.
And there is the incredible reality comparison: Pakistan had a military coup and the UN, particularly the US demanded that the military leader remove himself from presidency (they didn't seem to disapprove of the coup itself). Only, he never left. As far as I know, he's still there and is accepted.
REmove the crazy assassinating/abandoning civilians part, and I truly see nothing wrong with Cain (crazy? no not at all), save that she would never have shown compassion to the Cylons in any form. Not even one who swears her allegiance. I don't think she would have relinquishes military command re: New Caprica without confirmation that the Cylons were destroyed, but I'm not sure she would have done worse than Gaius. And more importantly, they would have butted heads, but I bet you she would have gotten along with Roslin. She respected people who got what they wanted. Roslin was just coming at it from a different angle (civilian). And now, we clearly see how alike their thinking is.
Meanwhile Adama? He's really not that wonderful a leader. But I still love him and await his redemption.
In the original series, my brother told me that the conflict between the two was that Cain wanted to attack a massive Cylon strong hold, which was basically suicidal, but it could have gone better with Galactica along side. Adama wouldn't risk the civilians by risking Galactica. Cain went alone and Pegasus was destroyed.
Re: Kara and her many parents.
Aaah! *blushes and is shy* ;) I'm really glad you enjoy reading my crazy drivel though :)
Yes yes I know. Where do you download your episodes from I should get to watching on the computer.
Nowhere special. Usually www.demonoid.com (though you have to be a member) or I just use www.isohunt.com
REmove the crazy assassinating/abandoning civilians part, and I truly see nothing wrong with Cain (crazy? no not at all), save that she would never have shown compassion to the Cylons in any form. Not even one who swears her allegiance.
Yes, and I think that's the point. Although I also think that she would have dismantled the civilian fleet first chance she got, and taken out a bunch of cylons along with her. But the human race would have died, abandoned and defenseless in the depths of space waiting for the cylons to come kill or capture them. She was a good military leader, but I think an excellent example of a poor overall leader in terms of the health of the species. Still, your point about the similarities between her and Roslin are well-taken and fascinating... *thinks about this some more*
Re: Kara and her many parents.
Re: Kara and her many parents.
Re: Kara and her many parents.
Anyway, we first noticed that, when Riddick escaped, *everyone* was ready to take up arms to *kill* him. Not simply apprehend him. Of particular note was the priest, supposedly a person of peace, who (and I think this was only in the DC), made a comment about "we all must do our part" as he took hold of the weapon...
In comparison, the movie kept trying to convince us that Riddick was a cold hearted killer, which he was, but we did not believe he was merely a serial killer who enjoyed death. We believed he killed in order to survive. The further movies kind of confirmed this.
This thought was at the base of our reasoning as to why he went back with Fry to rescue Jack and Imam. We don't think he really cared about those two. But he did care about Fry in that he respected her will to live; to survive. He initially did not kill her when he learned that she'd been willing to sacrifice the passengers to save herself and the ship.
I've summoned Simon to add more to this, but my thought on Roslin and Cain somehow being able to compromise somewhere along the way, made me think of this. Both, as we know, valued survival, but each has a different idea of what that means.
Re: Kara and her many parents.
Re: Kara and her many parents.
All of the above are willing to compromise their morality or out outright amorally in order to achieve their goals. In the case of Pitch Black the primary goal for which the characters are willing to become amoral is personal survival, mitigated by Fry's slightly more moral stance that if they can save the rest, they should.
In the case of BSG, Roslin is focused on the survival of the human race and will do anything to ensure that goal. Cain is focused on hurting the Cylon and will do anything to ensure that goal. The reason I would classify Roslin as more moral in this instance is that while destroying the enemy is just another (and ultimately more effective) way of protecting the species, Cain had no interest in that outcome and ultimately wouldn't have succeeded because, well, she had one Battlestar and that's it. So, reducing the situation down to survival as the ultimate baseline, Roslin was behaving more morally than Cain. Which is not to say either is inherently better than the other; it just shows that in this instance, Roslin was taking the long view.
An interesting comparison would be Roslin's very amoral theft of the election in aid of her very moral goal of ensuring humanity stayed safe from the Cylon. Or the fact that Cain probably would have kept the fleet safer in some ways (if she hadn't ditched the civilians) even though their safety would have been secondary to the amount of damage she could inflict, in her mind.
Aaah! Moral and ethical dilemmas! :)
Re: Kara and her many parents.
Anyway, at the simple comparison, it works, but in the grander scheme of things, Riddick showed more compasion than Cain did and was possibly capable of. Cain would not have allowed Fry to convince her to go back for people who were most likely dead and were clearly a burden anyway. In the subsequent movies, Riddick certainly showed concern over Jack/Keira and her welfare.
Hmmm...actually... in Chronicles, he left Jack because being with him was too dangerous. Certainly the same argument would hold for Cain. A military fleet is severely handicapped if it always has to protect the civilians towing along. Riddick didn't exactly leave Jack helpless though, the way Cain did (supposedly) with the stripped ships.
Roslin .. a moral person who understands and accepts the burden of immoral decisions to ensure the survival of the species?
Cain ... a military person to the letter, determined to exact vengeance upon the Cylons. Does she consider this survival of the species at all? Or is she only about hurting the enemy?
Adama .. bag of donuts.
Overall, I'd really have loved to see the scene where Lee figures out the genocide plan played with Cain and Roslin present. Can you imagine the look on their faces?