beccatoria (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccatoria) wrote2008-05-15 06:18 pm
beccatoria) wrote2008-05-15 06:18 pm
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BSG: Faith
Well, I didn't get around to this last weekend cus of being quasi-unconscious through most of it, and then it sort of slipped away from me, but there's NEW BSG tomorrow and I don't want to not do a reaction as, well, it's BSG, and I liked it, and I'm wordy.
SO!
I'll start with the one thing I really didn't like - the last scene. It wasn't that it was saccharine. It wasn't that it was a blatant A/R scene when I don't really like A/R anymore; I've long since realised that the show ships A/R even if I...really really don't. I can even enjoy those scenes!
I just hated this one. It was bland. It was boring. It felt really by-the-numbers, let's put in a scene so Adama isn't totally absent, wrap the whole thing up in a quasi-"moving" fashion with some lazy writing and some babble about Earth and Staying Together.
It had me sort of interested for a moment when I saw Adama finally facing and thinking about how his world kept changing and falling apart and he couldn't just tell it to stop and have it listen but then...that ended and we were back to...lazy writing.
And dammit, I nearly never accuse this show of that!
Plus there was the Other Terrible Thing. Laura giving Baltar any amount of credence. ANY. I could wrangle some sort of sense into this, but I lack the patience. It was a shitty scene and did nothing to quell my fears that I'm supposed to be taking Baltar seriously - or rather, that I'm supposed to find him a tolerable candidate for Jesushood.
Moving on to the rest of Laura's storyline, I basically find I don't have much to say. It's going to sound horribly blunt, but I don't think it was that original, and I don't think it was that interesting. It felt like it was done to say, "Look! Look at the story we're doing. Look how gritty."
Partly it was saved by the acting. Nana Visitor is a good actress. I imagine everyone already knows my feelings about Mary McDonnell's acting talent and I did love her speech about her mother. Because, I think, it was about her mother, and not her. And that's a bit unusual, and because Mary McDonnell did such an ace job of loosing it and being really, really upset at the memory, and because it was one of the better ways that the episode addressed faith in this storyline.
Laura's faith in her mother was shaken, and by extension, her faith in her mother's ideology; in the justice of her mother's ideology. And there's another issue: how far can faith carry Laura when the situation she needs carrying through is the same situation that so brutally refused to conform to anything other than practical reality at the end of her mother's life?
Good questions to which the show offers a pat, simple answer: Laura has a dream, sees her mom is okay, and decides she doesn't want to die yet.
Now - I have no problem with Laura deciding she isn't ready to die, or with a dream as a mechanism for that realisation. It just...it doesn't have much to do with the issues I thought she was struggling with. And if it did, then I can only understand it in the simple terms: I am afraid to die the way my mother did/I will have faith it's not my time yet.
But when the possibility of faith in such trying circumstances, and the options of what to have faith in, and how to find it, and how it was lost, and whether it's even any good to you at all, when all these questions are so interesting and non-binary, the answer being, "I'll just have faith it's not my time because my moving weekly guest-star Opened My Eyes," is...unworthy of a show this complex and intelligent.
Also, I saw Emily finding comfort in Baltar's sermons after a dream that Laura correctly identifies as a common occurance among the terminally ill, to be...not a ringing endorsement for their validity as actual Truth. I thought in Emily's case, it didn't matter: she had found something that gave her strength and that was what was important. But in the context of Laura as a fervant Baltar-Denier, in the context of my own views on him, I took the message that "sometimes you need to have faith in something," as not mutually exclusive of, "I have chosen to have faith in this because I am desperate and afraid, not because it is True."
I saw a scared, dying woman, clinging to something that validated a dream she found soothing. While I would never dream of taking away something that offered so much comfort to someone in that situation, I also found her attachment to it oddly uncomfortable: desperate. Sad.
Emily has Baltar's river. Laura's mother had Aphrodite. Laura doesn't know what she has, and this episode should have been about finding out what that was. Earth, probably. But that's never mentioned until that last awful scene.
Instead we got a bizarre amalgamation of Emily's river, her mother and...Laura somehow deciding this might mean Baltar was onto something.
We end with Laura falling for the same deathdream as Emily. Without even the perspecacity to realise that even if she agrees with Emily and that was a real dream, it doesn't mean Baltar was doing anything other than drawing on ancient metaphorical imagery with his Great River.
Are we looking for Truth or Faith here?
If we're looking for Faith, I'm disappointed that the importance of Emily having faith that brought her comfort is being conflated with the fact that it was faith in Baltar.
If we're looking for Truth, I'm not sure there's any to be found in this storyline, and if anything it gets more frightening as we are forced to consider whether the show is telling us what Baltar believes is true.
The storyline doesn't commit to either. We don't get an examination of Laura's faith at all. Emily's faith is never examined with any degree of complexity. We don't get an examination of why faith is important, or how. Whether or not something is true is a core tenet of faith, it absolutely informs all aspects of faith, but again, we seem to have a wishy-washy, "as long as you believe something," generic approach, which I wouldn't mind if I felt that the belief itself was getting an interesting treatment.
*sigh*
I feel mean. This is probably the most negative review I've written so far this season, which seems very unfair to the episode. Which I liked. I just...I hated the last scene and while I enjoyed the acting, I had some thematic issues with the B-plot because this show is usually better than this. If I'm tearing it to shreds, I'm not doing so because I think it's an example of awful television or insulting storytelling, but just because...usually it doesn't give me this ammunition.
Regarding the A-plot, I have surprisingly little to say.
Sam was REALLY stupid to shoot Gaeta. He's very messy at the moment, half loyal to Kara, half desperate to get on that Baseship, and really not behaving much like he's in the military, and I feel so bad for him. I didn't realise Barolay was the red-haired chick from Downloaded until he started calling her Jean and being really upset. That was harsh. And that was a good death: so...abrupt.
The whole scene with him desperate to shoot the Six who killed Barolay, and desperate not to: just like her - unable to let it go.
He's really messy right now, acting on instinct and unable to control his emotions or behaviour. Someone just needs to give that boy a hug.
And, of course, the Hybrid.
I love her!
So of course, I loved her prophecy. Especially the bit about the dying leader knowing the truth of the Opera House. Even if, sadly, that suggests Roslin is not the final Cylon as she is referred to separately from the final five in the prophecy. HOWEVER, I can still hope.
"You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace. You will lead them all to their end."
This may well be my favourite line ever uttered on this show. Combined with the Hybrid's innocent, fascinated look - as though this is some wonderful secret truth, and Katee Sackhoff hitting it out of the part with her incomprehending, drowning, and electrically alive expression, it was just magic.
A lot of people have noted that "end" may not mean death, but rather the end of a journey. I don't disagree. But "Harbinger of death," is pretty damn specific. While it could just be for a single person (I hope Baltar!) or a metaphorical death of something ideological, there's certainly death involved and Kara's going to be bringing it. (I sound like I'm announcing for WWE!)
Personally I'm hoping it's not metaphorical and she really is just the Harbinger of Death, but you know, I'm...like that.
I do also find it fascinating that everyone starts getting excited about the prospect of finding Earth and how they have to get D'Anna to tell them who the Five are so they can take them to Earth, yadda yadda yadda, and NO ONE MENTIONS THE DEATH PART. Like no one. Not once.
No one's like, "Hmm, we get to Earth, but if we do it following her we're kinda frakked. I wonder what's up with this death shit..."
Yeah.
Gotta wonder about that... I mean, I don't think the show will forget. But it'd be like, the FIRST thing I asked her.
Or maybe not. Maybe they're all scared of her, like, shooting them or something. She was pretty scary back on the Demetrius. "So Kara about that Harbinger of...kittens thing. That's what she said, right? Harbinger of kittens?"
Hmm!
SO!
I'll start with the one thing I really didn't like - the last scene. It wasn't that it was saccharine. It wasn't that it was a blatant A/R scene when I don't really like A/R anymore; I've long since realised that the show ships A/R even if I...really really don't. I can even enjoy those scenes!
I just hated this one. It was bland. It was boring. It felt really by-the-numbers, let's put in a scene so Adama isn't totally absent, wrap the whole thing up in a quasi-"moving" fashion with some lazy writing and some babble about Earth and Staying Together.
It had me sort of interested for a moment when I saw Adama finally facing and thinking about how his world kept changing and falling apart and he couldn't just tell it to stop and have it listen but then...that ended and we were back to...lazy writing.
And dammit, I nearly never accuse this show of that!
Plus there was the Other Terrible Thing. Laura giving Baltar any amount of credence. ANY. I could wrangle some sort of sense into this, but I lack the patience. It was a shitty scene and did nothing to quell my fears that I'm supposed to be taking Baltar seriously - or rather, that I'm supposed to find him a tolerable candidate for Jesushood.
Moving on to the rest of Laura's storyline, I basically find I don't have much to say. It's going to sound horribly blunt, but I don't think it was that original, and I don't think it was that interesting. It felt like it was done to say, "Look! Look at the story we're doing. Look how gritty."
Partly it was saved by the acting. Nana Visitor is a good actress. I imagine everyone already knows my feelings about Mary McDonnell's acting talent and I did love her speech about her mother. Because, I think, it was about her mother, and not her. And that's a bit unusual, and because Mary McDonnell did such an ace job of loosing it and being really, really upset at the memory, and because it was one of the better ways that the episode addressed faith in this storyline.
Laura's faith in her mother was shaken, and by extension, her faith in her mother's ideology; in the justice of her mother's ideology. And there's another issue: how far can faith carry Laura when the situation she needs carrying through is the same situation that so brutally refused to conform to anything other than practical reality at the end of her mother's life?
Good questions to which the show offers a pat, simple answer: Laura has a dream, sees her mom is okay, and decides she doesn't want to die yet.
Now - I have no problem with Laura deciding she isn't ready to die, or with a dream as a mechanism for that realisation. It just...it doesn't have much to do with the issues I thought she was struggling with. And if it did, then I can only understand it in the simple terms: I am afraid to die the way my mother did/I will have faith it's not my time yet.
But when the possibility of faith in such trying circumstances, and the options of what to have faith in, and how to find it, and how it was lost, and whether it's even any good to you at all, when all these questions are so interesting and non-binary, the answer being, "I'll just have faith it's not my time because my moving weekly guest-star Opened My Eyes," is...unworthy of a show this complex and intelligent.
Also, I saw Emily finding comfort in Baltar's sermons after a dream that Laura correctly identifies as a common occurance among the terminally ill, to be...not a ringing endorsement for their validity as actual Truth. I thought in Emily's case, it didn't matter: she had found something that gave her strength and that was what was important. But in the context of Laura as a fervant Baltar-Denier, in the context of my own views on him, I took the message that "sometimes you need to have faith in something," as not mutually exclusive of, "I have chosen to have faith in this because I am desperate and afraid, not because it is True."
I saw a scared, dying woman, clinging to something that validated a dream she found soothing. While I would never dream of taking away something that offered so much comfort to someone in that situation, I also found her attachment to it oddly uncomfortable: desperate. Sad.
Emily has Baltar's river. Laura's mother had Aphrodite. Laura doesn't know what she has, and this episode should have been about finding out what that was. Earth, probably. But that's never mentioned until that last awful scene.
Instead we got a bizarre amalgamation of Emily's river, her mother and...Laura somehow deciding this might mean Baltar was onto something.
We end with Laura falling for the same deathdream as Emily. Without even the perspecacity to realise that even if she agrees with Emily and that was a real dream, it doesn't mean Baltar was doing anything other than drawing on ancient metaphorical imagery with his Great River.
Are we looking for Truth or Faith here?
If we're looking for Faith, I'm disappointed that the importance of Emily having faith that brought her comfort is being conflated with the fact that it was faith in Baltar.
If we're looking for Truth, I'm not sure there's any to be found in this storyline, and if anything it gets more frightening as we are forced to consider whether the show is telling us what Baltar believes is true.
The storyline doesn't commit to either. We don't get an examination of Laura's faith at all. Emily's faith is never examined with any degree of complexity. We don't get an examination of why faith is important, or how. Whether or not something is true is a core tenet of faith, it absolutely informs all aspects of faith, but again, we seem to have a wishy-washy, "as long as you believe something," generic approach, which I wouldn't mind if I felt that the belief itself was getting an interesting treatment.
*sigh*
I feel mean. This is probably the most negative review I've written so far this season, which seems very unfair to the episode. Which I liked. I just...I hated the last scene and while I enjoyed the acting, I had some thematic issues with the B-plot because this show is usually better than this. If I'm tearing it to shreds, I'm not doing so because I think it's an example of awful television or insulting storytelling, but just because...usually it doesn't give me this ammunition.
Regarding the A-plot, I have surprisingly little to say.
Sam was REALLY stupid to shoot Gaeta. He's very messy at the moment, half loyal to Kara, half desperate to get on that Baseship, and really not behaving much like he's in the military, and I feel so bad for him. I didn't realise Barolay was the red-haired chick from Downloaded until he started calling her Jean and being really upset. That was harsh. And that was a good death: so...abrupt.
The whole scene with him desperate to shoot the Six who killed Barolay, and desperate not to: just like her - unable to let it go.
He's really messy right now, acting on instinct and unable to control his emotions or behaviour. Someone just needs to give that boy a hug.
And, of course, the Hybrid.
I love her!
So of course, I loved her prophecy. Especially the bit about the dying leader knowing the truth of the Opera House. Even if, sadly, that suggests Roslin is not the final Cylon as she is referred to separately from the final five in the prophecy. HOWEVER, I can still hope.
"You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace. You will lead them all to their end."
This may well be my favourite line ever uttered on this show. Combined with the Hybrid's innocent, fascinated look - as though this is some wonderful secret truth, and Katee Sackhoff hitting it out of the part with her incomprehending, drowning, and electrically alive expression, it was just magic.
A lot of people have noted that "end" may not mean death, but rather the end of a journey. I don't disagree. But "Harbinger of death," is pretty damn specific. While it could just be for a single person (I hope Baltar!) or a metaphorical death of something ideological, there's certainly death involved and Kara's going to be bringing it. (I sound like I'm announcing for WWE!)
Personally I'm hoping it's not metaphorical and she really is just the Harbinger of Death, but you know, I'm...like that.
I do also find it fascinating that everyone starts getting excited about the prospect of finding Earth and how they have to get D'Anna to tell them who the Five are so they can take them to Earth, yadda yadda yadda, and NO ONE MENTIONS THE DEATH PART. Like no one. Not once.
No one's like, "Hmm, we get to Earth, but if we do it following her we're kinda frakked. I wonder what's up with this death shit..."
Yeah.
Gotta wonder about that... I mean, I don't think the show will forget. But it'd be like, the FIRST thing I asked her.
Or maybe not. Maybe they're all scared of her, like, shooting them or something. She was pretty scary back on the Demetrius. "So Kara about that Harbinger of...kittens thing. That's what she said, right? Harbinger of kittens?"
Hmm!
no subject
Good point - that option hadn't even occured to me, but it would have been great.
Of course, Baltar's sex club kind of removes any seriousness from the entire One God concept ...
Yes. And this worries me because I fear the show may be expecting us to take it seriously... :/
Liking poor Sam, though someone really needs to take charge and put him on lock down. *looks pointedly at Helo*
You know I was waiting to see if he'd get put in the brig for shooting Gaeta or if it was considered acceptable action because there was a mutiny or what, but so far nothing. Also, I hadn't thought of having Helo take over and tell him to cool it, but that could be a great scene! Helo's such a rock, watching him try to knock some sense back into CrazySam could be awesome!
Hybrid love seconded, but also, adding Tricia Helfer love.
*slaps own wrist for ever forgetting the Tricia Helfer love!*
no subject