BSG: No Exit
Feb. 15th, 2009 06:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaRight, proper long rambling review time. It's kinda odd since I've already been over this with most of y'all, but...habits are habits and I haven't said everything I want to say.
First off, I'm going to lay out what I THINK that giant great big retcon meant.
3,000ish years ago, there were twelve tribes of humans and one Cylon tribe on Kobol. They had resurrection technology (organic memory transfer). For reasons unknown, the twelve tribes went to the Colonies while the thirteenth tribe of the Cylon went to Earth.
The Cylon headed to Earth, stopping off on the Algae Planet and building the Temple of Hopes.
Once the Cylon were settled on Earth they began to reproduce biologically and resurrection technology faded from use, and indeed, the technology behind it was forgotten.
2,000ish years ago (so a thousand years after they arrived on Earth) there was some kind of nuclear war. The presence of centurions on the planet, and the Final Five's worry about warning the Colonials about the dangers of creativing artificial life indicates that perhaps their own Centurions rebelled against them. In any event, it seems to have wrought mutual extinction as no one survived.
(Note: some of the ruins on Kobol were dated to 2,000 years ago not 3,000 years ago suggesting that perhaps the exodus of the 12 tribes from Kobol to the Colonies occured a thousand years after the Cylon exodus? Or at least that some were left behind?)
The Final Five were somehow warned about this impending apocalypse, Sam's babbling is very suggestive of Head People being involved in that warning ("I saw a woman, Tory, you saw a man no one else could see, Galen thought he had a chip in his head..."). In preparation they worked to rebuild resurrection technology and were successful.
When the end came, they resurrected on a ship in orbit and travelled to the Colonies. This took two thousand years. But because they travelled at close to lightspeed but not using jump technology, time slowed for them and they experienced the journey in a much shorter period of time. (As far as I'm aware, this actually tallies with the way we believe travelling at light speed would work.) On the way back they stopped at the Temple of Hopes. Something Ellen herself doesn't understand occured and it became the Temple of the Five which revealed their identities to D'anna during the Supernova.
They got to the Colonies to discover the original Cylon War in full swing. The Centurions were attempting to create flesh bodies, but had only managed to get so far as the Hybrid. The Final Five made a deal that if they stopped the war they would help them build biological bodies for themselves.
They made eight models and gave them resurrection. It's not entirely clear whether the biological natures of the rest of Cylon technology were entirely the innovation of the FF or extrapolations that the Cylon made later. Ellen identifies belief in a single merciful God as a Centurion value, and Sam says that they kept this because they thought it would stop the cycle of violence.
John (Cavil) was the first model and helped them build the others. He poisoned the Sevens. He trapped the FF in a compartment and vented the oxygen, boxing them. Slowly, he resurrected them, implanted them with false memories and reinserted them into Colonial society to give them an up close and personal view of armageddon. Tigh was the first, and we know that happened over thirty years ago, and Cavil managed to delete his sleep subroutine about twenty years ago. So it's clear that the creation of the eight models occurred in the first ten years after the armastice.
Cavil also deleted the memories of the Five from the memories of his siblings, and pretended he didn't know anything either.
Which, I think, brings us up to date. PHEW.
RIGHT. MOVING ON.
I actually like most of this retcon. It doesn't remove the mysticism, it adds a good amount of coherency. And obviously I like the fact that the Final Five were involved in the creation of theSeven Eight in hopes of stopping the cycle of time violence because, well, I think that's the way the story has been hinting it needs to go for a long time. I'm not particularly creeped out that my broad-strokes theory on that has panned out because I really think it's strongly thematically outlined in the show. The CREEPY thing is Daniel, but more on that later.
I'll deal with the shortest plots first so that I can move on to the really crazy plotty thinky stuff in a minute.
LEE & LAURA. Oh, those two together talking politics makes my heart go all a-flutter.
On a serious note, I'm still struggling to get a handle on Laura and this hurts me in my soul.
I'm very, very relieved that her stepping back seemed more to do with her illness than her desire to stay home and cook, but metatextually I'm still a little irked by the timing.
She's still...giving up, apparently only coming out to reclaim her awesome yelling voice in order to rain down vengeance because her man is in trouble not because her people are.
Please show. Please. This is me actually begging you, don't take away Laura. Don't do that to me. I love her too much for you to do that to me. Reassure me that you'll address that she's quitting. Perhaps quitting for better reasons. Perhaps even necessary health-related reasons. But you can't say that she isn't still reacting out of a belief that she's a fraud, which is affecting her belief in her leadership abilities in general.
That said, things I loved about this included, seeing Lee as Lee and the tone of her grief for the Quorum. That, at least, was something I believed was pure Laura. That quiet conviction and understanding of her own grief and guilt. Not buttoned up and drunken like Adama. Not numb, like Kara. More like Lee, quietly removing one digit from the white board.
I enjoyed Lee's comment about a new kind of order. At least something's changing in the wake of the devastating mutiny. Ironic Zarek never got to see Lee begin governmental change he probably wouldn't have approved of anyway even though all his politics about moving on and accepting we're no longer bankers or lawyers or gardeners should demand that he love it.
The symbolism about Galactica herself becoming a Cylon hybrid was WAY heavy-handed but...perfect. I love it. Cylon ceiling wax will save us all!
Adama is still drunk and addicted to some kind of pill. I find myself not really caring and just being grateful he didn't share any screen time with Laura. Also, that crack in his quarters is CLEARLY the result of his addiction to CHEWING ON THE SCENERY. Honestly, Adama, your manpain has ruined the ship. I HOPE THE CYLON CEILING WAX STICKS TO YOUR MOLARS NEXT TIME YOU TRY IT.
I really thought there was, like, some kind of mutiny last week? With threats of rape and murder and that kind of thing?
I know they'd be short on pilots if they executed them all or threw them in the brig. I know that Washington dealt with a mutiny by executing the ringleaders and letting the others continue to serve.
Doesn't answer my questions: how will Adama address people's fears other than stoic insistence that they do what he wants? How will he prevent this from happening again? Should we forget how strongly Narcho feels? How the hell are Skulls and Starbuck going to fly together? How the hell is Athena supposed to forget threats of rape? Where does "ringleader" become "minor follower"?
They dodged that question this episode by focusing very closely on very few people. Starbuck I buy just not even thinking about the rest of it because she's so worried about Sam. And we didn't see that many of the deck gang involved in the mutiny so maybe that explains why Tyrol can get on with stuff. But...I want to know what happened and what measures were taken on both issues.
Ignoring them all seems...dangerous. If they do that, I'll want these issues to rise again before the end of the series. The mutineers might be feeling beaten and lucky to be given passes right now but damn that's one bitter ship.
Now. What this episode was REALLY about.
Oh SAMMY. Please don't be forever brain dead. That would suck like a sucky thing. I'm telling myself that's such an undramatic way to go forever they wouldn't choose it. *hopes*
Maybe Ellen can fix him?
I loved his hybrid-like babbling in the early parts. I loved how scared Kara was for him. I'm surprised by how attached I've grown to that relationship; indeed by how much I've come to love Sam Anders. I really think they did a great job of moving Kara from a place of fear and confusion at Sam's cylonicity to a place where it's just such a nonissue. As a result of her own terror at her situation; a place where she now considers even being a Cylon as better than being nothing at all. And as a result of him being, well, almost dead.
Anyway, I really bought their interactions here and I felt so bad for Kara with her terrified apology about being "greedy" because she wanted to be the seven because it would be better than being nothing at all. *flails a little* Sweetheart.
Sam somehow still felt like Sam to me, even during the whole science-babble thing.
I was a little disappointed that it was Tory and Galen who were madly in love not Sam and Tory because that would fit in nicely with their being drawn together during the song, and Tory's insinuation that she was the woman he loved that he wrote the song for (and also BOO, I wanted him to be a ROCK STAR not a LAB PERSON: in my head he was both).
Mainly just cus Galen/Tory is the least interesting of all possible couples that could come out of a Galen/Sam/Tory love triangle. :(
BUT on the other hand it does hilariously keep the Chief in the habit of loving the women who murder the other women that he loves. So...that's a keeper.
I had a horrible realisation during this episode. I'm no longer all that stressed about the Return ofGazelle Ellen Gazellen. I started getting a little convinced that they could handle that in a way that wouldn't equal instant dumpsville for Caprica.
Which of course made me wonder what OTHER doom they could be plotting that would require a scene of such domestic bliss and oddly non-alcoholic and child-friendly Tigh. AND THEN THEY BROUGHT BACK UNSYMPATHETIC ISHAY THE TERROR NURSE.
Dudes. If they kill Flipper, I will...cry. Even if the stupid writers made him a boy.
Caprica Six continues the trend of having at least one really distracting piece of wardrobe in every scene she's in. Last time it was the stilettos. This time it was the GODSAWFUL WEAVE. Seriously, I know they can't just bleach her hair, but does her wig have to get progressively more....Marlene Dietrich on a bad day? Currently I'm trying to blame bed-head but the trailer for next week looks just as bad and she out in public then.
Also, as a shameless (well, okay, I'm a little ashamed) supporter of the mutant flipper family, I am ashamed to admit that I found happy, smiling Tigh really frakking creepy. Like...adorable. But creepy. Acreepable.
Finally I will leave you with this. I had to pause the episode during my rewatch (I actually rewatched it before doing my write-up! I nearly never do that!) to get the phone and came back to find THIS freeze frame. It needed some kind of caption.
Mostly you all know what this is about already because of previous posts, but obviously I need to mention it here too, to be complete.
I don't even need to call that Daniel will turn out to be Kara's father because I kind of already wrote a whole story called The Body is a Myth which had, as a major plotline, the fact that Kara's father was a) Cylon number 7 (although in my version he was just one of the final five) and b) named Daniel (which no, I did not get from any canon source.
I feel a bit odd about being all, "OOOH LOOK AT ME!" about that, but for real, it's kind of creepy even if Daniel doesn't end up being Kara's father and I think I'm allowed a bit of a flipout about it. Because it's kinda creepy.
EVEN MORE creepy is the fact that I went to see my friend today and told him this story and he said that he was also creeped out because when he watched the episode, he kept forgetting Cavil's 'real' name (John) and somehow got it into his head that it was Daniel. So when Anders said, "Daniel," he got really, really confused, and stayed confused until the conversation between "John" and Ellen about what he did to Daniel.
So yeah. Daniels are floating around in the ether, it seems.
For a more realistic view of things, I'm trying to manage my expectations on this front for a few reasons:
1) It would make the need to retcon Nicky Tyrol as Not A Hybrid EVEN MORE ridiculous.
2) Kara didn't react to the name like you'd expect if it was her father's. I mean, I know she was hoping for her own name, and I know Daniel's pretty common, but since she's actively looking for a connection, I'd think she'd've been a little more surprised? Or something? Though I suppose he could have had an assumed name during his time as Mr Thrace. Although the Final Five kept their original names.
There is, of course, a way around that. I blame![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
prolix_allie for planting the idea in my head in her comments. Remember how I was so attached to Kara being half cylon that I was desperately scrabbling for ways to make Ellen Tigh, of all people, her Mom?
What if Kara is a mutant flipper baby JUST LIKE FLIPPER? If Daniel is her father and Ellen is her mother. Ellen was "very close" to Daniel in a way that made John so jealous he murdered his entire line, and we know that John extracted vengeance on Ellen by, well, frakking her. It's all very twisted, and I'm only suggesting this half seriously, but I think it could work. If, to save the original Daniel, Ellen faked his death, and parcelled him off with her daughter into the Colonies with new memories and he ended up married to Socrata Thrace? (Though I don't seriously want her to not be Kara's real mother because I also think that would, in some ways, be too easy.)
And now we get to the BEST BITS OF THE WHOLE EPISODE.
New!Ellen is kind of awesome. She's not really Old!Ellen and I miss Old!Ellen and am also convinced that Old!Ellen saying all the same things but being drunk and flighty would have been hilarious, but...I can deal.
I also really, really felt for her when she first woke up and was kind of sad when she got it together. I don't think we'll ever see Ellen's drunken vulnerability again.
And finally, I have to be honest in the early scenes I wasn't really feeling Kate Vernon's performance (though it was very difficult material). By the end, though, I was sold. The later scenes are great.
CAVIL. I never thought I'd be so interested in him. He was always entertaining and theoretically interesting as the atheist machine. But I never thought they'd so wholly sell me on him being fascinating.
Dean Stockwell was brilliant. I'd never appreciated him before; he'd never had a chance to be this awesome.
I just completely bought him as this rageful, petulant, veangeful, angry child, and everything that I might otherwise have been disappointed with, thematically, disappeared behind the conviction of that.
(Those other things being: that the argument against the only method of the Cylon becoming "better" and "good" is to make them be more human is coming from a "bad" character; that the atheist is the one ultimately responsible for armageddon potentially uncomplexifying the role of a loving God in a religious war; that so much of the evolution of the humanoid Cylon comes from external sources.)
This episode was so full of quiet, undermining moments and themes, that everything I could rail against is kind of...on feeble ground anyway.
(Thos undermining aspects being: that Cavil's arguments make for such damn good TV and that he makes a sympathetic villain with a point far better than Zarek in the last few weeks and that Ellen treats the Centurions with such respect and displays such a lack of appreciation for human norms regarding age and parental roles; that that God still was the main motivator for much of that war regardless of Cavil's feelings and that Cavil clearly doesn't control as much of the Cylon nation as he perceives as evidenced by their vote-abiding structures, decision to follow Boomer and Caprica, etc.; that those external sources were still robots and that they are following values from the centurions and were, in fact, created in hoardes and as something quite other than human.)
I can't even begin to get into the world of awesome that is the Cavil-Ellen relationship in all its fucked up iterations.
It's perfectly in keeping with Greek myth but I also can't help but be a little shocked that the network let the show go there so blatantly.
John is modeled on Ellen's father. Ellen is his mother. He knowingly frakked her to get revenge.
The layers in that...I'm not sure I can begin to cut through. How dark that is in terms of his motivations. How much of that must have been out of his constant desire to prove that he's a machine; these things don't matter. When really, if they didn't matter, he wouldn't care about doing them in the first place to prove they don't matter.
I love the way his physical appearance is at odds with his status as the young boy in this.
I love the way Ellen accepts him and loves him even though he's like...totally evil.
I love that moment where Ellen tries the Oprah moment and wants to hug him, and he just spews forth rage.
I love everything about those two and their back-and-forths in this episode and I can't even begin to unpick the complexities of it.
It's weird to admit, since I still think Laura Roslin as the fifth would have been the better choice, but in some ways, these scenes wouldn't have worked with her, just because...she would have succeeded too well in her new life for Cavil to bear.
- Boomer was involved with Cavil and found out about Ellen from at least two months before the Algae Planet storyline. She knew about Ellen and was under Cavil's influence when she told Athena about Hera, and, more interestingly, when she threatened to kill Hera. I think this makes her actions a lot more interesting and makes me wonder if half of the reasons she was so cold and bitter to the child and her opinions of Human-Cylon interaction wasn't just down to the disaster of New Caprica but Cavil's constant insistence that she try to be just a machine. Anyway, it's interesting that he "got" to her so early.
- I want to know who the other seven models were modelled from! I just hope we don't get a horrifying reveal like Caprica being modelled on Saul Tigh's younger sister or something. o_O
- When Ellen's sketching Saul, Boomer notes that it must be hard knowing he hates her for what she's done. This may indicate that Boomer doesn't know who the other four are. Which seems strange since I don't see why Ellen would hide it, unless Boomer bought into Cavil's crap so much she thought she didn't want to know? It could just indicate that she knew Tigh was oblivious to his own Cylon nature and thus would hate Ellen as a human would for betraying the Resistance? I don't know, but I feel she might respond differently if she knew during most of this episode that Tyrol was one of the Five (though if Ellen told her at the end, in the raptor, I have no clue.)
- Yes. Yes, Cavil. Your body is absurd. We are all absurd. We exist in an absurd universe.
- If Gaius Baltar is Daniel, I will THROW THINGS.
- I'm still completely unsure how I respond to Grace Park's acting. On the one hand, she has the same ability as Tricia Helfer - to let me know which copy of her model she's playing just by the way she holds herself and what she does with her face, and it was very clear here when she was definitely, absolutely, Boomer and not Athena. On the other hand, I still find myself just...not connecting with her performance a lot of the time.
- I loved the fact that apparently loving and keeping your artificial life doesn't prevent it from turning against you and murdering you, as evidenced by John and the Final Five. Not entirely sure what that means thematically, but I did love that they still screwed it up.
- I love that the hybrid, the metatron, is totally a creation of the Centurions.
- Clearly, Cylon-oriented episodes in which Boomer is struggling with her identity, in opposition to a manipulative Cylon authority figure who wants her to shut up and be a good little machine, but ultimately sees her choose to run off with a sexy blonde to turn humanity's world upside down, are WIN, even if I wish they had less ham-handed dialogue. This episode was like the anti-Downloaded.
*DEEP HUGE BREATH*
Aaaaaand, I think I'm done.
First off, I'm going to lay out what I THINK that giant great big retcon meant.
3,000ish years ago, there were twelve tribes of humans and one Cylon tribe on Kobol. They had resurrection technology (organic memory transfer). For reasons unknown, the twelve tribes went to the Colonies while the thirteenth tribe of the Cylon went to Earth.
The Cylon headed to Earth, stopping off on the Algae Planet and building the Temple of Hopes.
Once the Cylon were settled on Earth they began to reproduce biologically and resurrection technology faded from use, and indeed, the technology behind it was forgotten.
2,000ish years ago (so a thousand years after they arrived on Earth) there was some kind of nuclear war. The presence of centurions on the planet, and the Final Five's worry about warning the Colonials about the dangers of creativing artificial life indicates that perhaps their own Centurions rebelled against them. In any event, it seems to have wrought mutual extinction as no one survived.
(Note: some of the ruins on Kobol were dated to 2,000 years ago not 3,000 years ago suggesting that perhaps the exodus of the 12 tribes from Kobol to the Colonies occured a thousand years after the Cylon exodus? Or at least that some were left behind?)
The Final Five were somehow warned about this impending apocalypse, Sam's babbling is very suggestive of Head People being involved in that warning ("I saw a woman, Tory, you saw a man no one else could see, Galen thought he had a chip in his head..."). In preparation they worked to rebuild resurrection technology and were successful.
When the end came, they resurrected on a ship in orbit and travelled to the Colonies. This took two thousand years. But because they travelled at close to lightspeed but not using jump technology, time slowed for them and they experienced the journey in a much shorter period of time. (As far as I'm aware, this actually tallies with the way we believe travelling at light speed would work.) On the way back they stopped at the Temple of Hopes. Something Ellen herself doesn't understand occured and it became the Temple of the Five which revealed their identities to D'anna during the Supernova.
They got to the Colonies to discover the original Cylon War in full swing. The Centurions were attempting to create flesh bodies, but had only managed to get so far as the Hybrid. The Final Five made a deal that if they stopped the war they would help them build biological bodies for themselves.
They made eight models and gave them resurrection. It's not entirely clear whether the biological natures of the rest of Cylon technology were entirely the innovation of the FF or extrapolations that the Cylon made later. Ellen identifies belief in a single merciful God as a Centurion value, and Sam says that they kept this because they thought it would stop the cycle of violence.
John (Cavil) was the first model and helped them build the others. He poisoned the Sevens. He trapped the FF in a compartment and vented the oxygen, boxing them. Slowly, he resurrected them, implanted them with false memories and reinserted them into Colonial society to give them an up close and personal view of armageddon. Tigh was the first, and we know that happened over thirty years ago, and Cavil managed to delete his sleep subroutine about twenty years ago. So it's clear that the creation of the eight models occurred in the first ten years after the armastice.
Cavil also deleted the memories of the Five from the memories of his siblings, and pretended he didn't know anything either.
Which, I think, brings us up to date. PHEW.
RIGHT. MOVING ON.
I actually like most of this retcon. It doesn't remove the mysticism, it adds a good amount of coherency. And obviously I like the fact that the Final Five were involved in the creation of the
I'll deal with the shortest plots first so that I can move on to the really crazy plotty thinky stuff in a minute.
LEE & LAURA. Oh, those two together talking politics makes my heart go all a-flutter.
On a serious note, I'm still struggling to get a handle on Laura and this hurts me in my soul.
I'm very, very relieved that her stepping back seemed more to do with her illness than her desire to stay home and cook, but metatextually I'm still a little irked by the timing.
She's still...giving up, apparently only coming out to reclaim her awesome yelling voice in order to rain down vengeance because her man is in trouble not because her people are.
Please show. Please. This is me actually begging you, don't take away Laura. Don't do that to me. I love her too much for you to do that to me. Reassure me that you'll address that she's quitting. Perhaps quitting for better reasons. Perhaps even necessary health-related reasons. But you can't say that she isn't still reacting out of a belief that she's a fraud, which is affecting her belief in her leadership abilities in general.
That said, things I loved about this included, seeing Lee as Lee and the tone of her grief for the Quorum. That, at least, was something I believed was pure Laura. That quiet conviction and understanding of her own grief and guilt. Not buttoned up and drunken like Adama. Not numb, like Kara. More like Lee, quietly removing one digit from the white board.
I enjoyed Lee's comment about a new kind of order. At least something's changing in the wake of the devastating mutiny. Ironic Zarek never got to see Lee begin governmental change he probably wouldn't have approved of anyway even though all his politics about moving on and accepting we're no longer bankers or lawyers or gardeners should demand that he love it.
The symbolism about Galactica herself becoming a Cylon hybrid was WAY heavy-handed but...perfect. I love it. Cylon ceiling wax will save us all!
Adama is still drunk and addicted to some kind of pill. I find myself not really caring and just being grateful he didn't share any screen time with Laura. Also, that crack in his quarters is CLEARLY the result of his addiction to CHEWING ON THE SCENERY. Honestly, Adama, your manpain has ruined the ship. I HOPE THE CYLON CEILING WAX STICKS TO YOUR MOLARS NEXT TIME YOU TRY IT.
I really thought there was, like, some kind of mutiny last week? With threats of rape and murder and that kind of thing?
I know they'd be short on pilots if they executed them all or threw them in the brig. I know that Washington dealt with a mutiny by executing the ringleaders and letting the others continue to serve.
Doesn't answer my questions: how will Adama address people's fears other than stoic insistence that they do what he wants? How will he prevent this from happening again? Should we forget how strongly Narcho feels? How the hell are Skulls and Starbuck going to fly together? How the hell is Athena supposed to forget threats of rape? Where does "ringleader" become "minor follower"?
They dodged that question this episode by focusing very closely on very few people. Starbuck I buy just not even thinking about the rest of it because she's so worried about Sam. And we didn't see that many of the deck gang involved in the mutiny so maybe that explains why Tyrol can get on with stuff. But...I want to know what happened and what measures were taken on both issues.
Ignoring them all seems...dangerous. If they do that, I'll want these issues to rise again before the end of the series. The mutineers might be feeling beaten and lucky to be given passes right now but damn that's one bitter ship.
Now. What this episode was REALLY about.
Oh SAMMY. Please don't be forever brain dead. That would suck like a sucky thing. I'm telling myself that's such an undramatic way to go forever they wouldn't choose it. *hopes*
Maybe Ellen can fix him?
I loved his hybrid-like babbling in the early parts. I loved how scared Kara was for him. I'm surprised by how attached I've grown to that relationship; indeed by how much I've come to love Sam Anders. I really think they did a great job of moving Kara from a place of fear and confusion at Sam's cylonicity to a place where it's just such a nonissue. As a result of her own terror at her situation; a place where she now considers even being a Cylon as better than being nothing at all. And as a result of him being, well, almost dead.
Anyway, I really bought their interactions here and I felt so bad for Kara with her terrified apology about being "greedy" because she wanted to be the seven because it would be better than being nothing at all. *flails a little* Sweetheart.
Sam somehow still felt like Sam to me, even during the whole science-babble thing.
I was a little disappointed that it was Tory and Galen who were madly in love not Sam and Tory because that would fit in nicely with their being drawn together during the song, and Tory's insinuation that she was the woman he loved that he wrote the song for (and also BOO, I wanted him to be a ROCK STAR not a LAB PERSON: in my head he was both).
Mainly just cus Galen/Tory is the least interesting of all possible couples that could come out of a Galen/Sam/Tory love triangle. :(
BUT on the other hand it does hilariously keep the Chief in the habit of loving the women who murder the other women that he loves. So...that's a keeper.
I had a horrible realisation during this episode. I'm no longer all that stressed about the Return of
Which of course made me wonder what OTHER doom they could be plotting that would require a scene of such domestic bliss and oddly non-alcoholic and child-friendly Tigh. AND THEN THEY BROUGHT BACK UNSYMPATHETIC ISHAY THE TERROR NURSE.
Dudes. If they kill Flipper, I will...cry. Even if the stupid writers made him a boy.
Caprica Six continues the trend of having at least one really distracting piece of wardrobe in every scene she's in. Last time it was the stilettos. This time it was the GODSAWFUL WEAVE. Seriously, I know they can't just bleach her hair, but does her wig have to get progressively more....Marlene Dietrich on a bad day? Currently I'm trying to blame bed-head but the trailer for next week looks just as bad and she out in public then.
Also, as a shameless (well, okay, I'm a little ashamed) supporter of the mutant flipper family, I am ashamed to admit that I found happy, smiling Tigh really frakking creepy. Like...adorable. But creepy. Acreepable.
Finally I will leave you with this. I had to pause the episode during my rewatch (I actually rewatched it before doing my write-up! I nearly never do that!) to get the phone and came back to find THIS freeze frame. It needed some kind of caption.
Mostly you all know what this is about already because of previous posts, but obviously I need to mention it here too, to be complete.
I don't even need to call that Daniel will turn out to be Kara's father because I kind of already wrote a whole story called The Body is a Myth which had, as a major plotline, the fact that Kara's father was a) Cylon number 7 (although in my version he was just one of the final five) and b) named Daniel (which no, I did not get from any canon source.
I feel a bit odd about being all, "OOOH LOOK AT ME!" about that, but for real, it's kind of creepy even if Daniel doesn't end up being Kara's father and I think I'm allowed a bit of a flipout about it. Because it's kinda creepy.
EVEN MORE creepy is the fact that I went to see my friend today and told him this story and he said that he was also creeped out because when he watched the episode, he kept forgetting Cavil's 'real' name (John) and somehow got it into his head that it was Daniel. So when Anders said, "Daniel," he got really, really confused, and stayed confused until the conversation between "John" and Ellen about what he did to Daniel.
So yeah. Daniels are floating around in the ether, it seems.
For a more realistic view of things, I'm trying to manage my expectations on this front for a few reasons:
1) It would make the need to retcon Nicky Tyrol as Not A Hybrid EVEN MORE ridiculous.
2) Kara didn't react to the name like you'd expect if it was her father's. I mean, I know she was hoping for her own name, and I know Daniel's pretty common, but since she's actively looking for a connection, I'd think she'd've been a little more surprised? Or something? Though I suppose he could have had an assumed name during his time as Mr Thrace. Although the Final Five kept their original names.
There is, of course, a way around that. I blame
prolix_allie for planting the idea in my head in her comments. Remember how I was so attached to Kara being half cylon that I was desperately scrabbling for ways to make Ellen Tigh, of all people, her Mom? What if Kara is a mutant flipper baby JUST LIKE FLIPPER? If Daniel is her father and Ellen is her mother. Ellen was "very close" to Daniel in a way that made John so jealous he murdered his entire line, and we know that John extracted vengeance on Ellen by, well, frakking her. It's all very twisted, and I'm only suggesting this half seriously, but I think it could work. If, to save the original Daniel, Ellen faked his death, and parcelled him off with her daughter into the Colonies with new memories and he ended up married to Socrata Thrace? (Though I don't seriously want her to not be Kara's real mother because I also think that would, in some ways, be too easy.)
And now we get to the BEST BITS OF THE WHOLE EPISODE.
New!Ellen is kind of awesome. She's not really Old!Ellen and I miss Old!Ellen and am also convinced that Old!Ellen saying all the same things but being drunk and flighty would have been hilarious, but...I can deal.
I also really, really felt for her when she first woke up and was kind of sad when she got it together. I don't think we'll ever see Ellen's drunken vulnerability again.
And finally, I have to be honest in the early scenes I wasn't really feeling Kate Vernon's performance (though it was very difficult material). By the end, though, I was sold. The later scenes are great.
CAVIL. I never thought I'd be so interested in him. He was always entertaining and theoretically interesting as the atheist machine. But I never thought they'd so wholly sell me on him being fascinating.
Dean Stockwell was brilliant. I'd never appreciated him before; he'd never had a chance to be this awesome.
I just completely bought him as this rageful, petulant, veangeful, angry child, and everything that I might otherwise have been disappointed with, thematically, disappeared behind the conviction of that.
(Those other things being: that the argument against the only method of the Cylon becoming "better" and "good" is to make them be more human is coming from a "bad" character; that the atheist is the one ultimately responsible for armageddon potentially uncomplexifying the role of a loving God in a religious war; that so much of the evolution of the humanoid Cylon comes from external sources.)
This episode was so full of quiet, undermining moments and themes, that everything I could rail against is kind of...on feeble ground anyway.
(Thos undermining aspects being: that Cavil's arguments make for such damn good TV and that he makes a sympathetic villain with a point far better than Zarek in the last few weeks and that Ellen treats the Centurions with such respect and displays such a lack of appreciation for human norms regarding age and parental roles; that that God still was the main motivator for much of that war regardless of Cavil's feelings and that Cavil clearly doesn't control as much of the Cylon nation as he perceives as evidenced by their vote-abiding structures, decision to follow Boomer and Caprica, etc.; that those external sources were still robots and that they are following values from the centurions and were, in fact, created in hoardes and as something quite other than human.)
I can't even begin to get into the world of awesome that is the Cavil-Ellen relationship in all its fucked up iterations.
It's perfectly in keeping with Greek myth but I also can't help but be a little shocked that the network let the show go there so blatantly.
John is modeled on Ellen's father. Ellen is his mother. He knowingly frakked her to get revenge.
The layers in that...I'm not sure I can begin to cut through. How dark that is in terms of his motivations. How much of that must have been out of his constant desire to prove that he's a machine; these things don't matter. When really, if they didn't matter, he wouldn't care about doing them in the first place to prove they don't matter.
I love the way his physical appearance is at odds with his status as the young boy in this.
I love the way Ellen accepts him and loves him even though he's like...totally evil.
I love that moment where Ellen tries the Oprah moment and wants to hug him, and he just spews forth rage.
I love everything about those two and their back-and-forths in this episode and I can't even begin to unpick the complexities of it.
It's weird to admit, since I still think Laura Roslin as the fifth would have been the better choice, but in some ways, these scenes wouldn't have worked with her, just because...she would have succeeded too well in her new life for Cavil to bear.
- Boomer was involved with Cavil and found out about Ellen from at least two months before the Algae Planet storyline. She knew about Ellen and was under Cavil's influence when she told Athena about Hera, and, more interestingly, when she threatened to kill Hera. I think this makes her actions a lot more interesting and makes me wonder if half of the reasons she was so cold and bitter to the child and her opinions of Human-Cylon interaction wasn't just down to the disaster of New Caprica but Cavil's constant insistence that she try to be just a machine. Anyway, it's interesting that he "got" to her so early.
- I want to know who the other seven models were modelled from! I just hope we don't get a horrifying reveal like Caprica being modelled on Saul Tigh's younger sister or something. o_O
- When Ellen's sketching Saul, Boomer notes that it must be hard knowing he hates her for what she's done. This may indicate that Boomer doesn't know who the other four are. Which seems strange since I don't see why Ellen would hide it, unless Boomer bought into Cavil's crap so much she thought she didn't want to know? It could just indicate that she knew Tigh was oblivious to his own Cylon nature and thus would hate Ellen as a human would for betraying the Resistance? I don't know, but I feel she might respond differently if she knew during most of this episode that Tyrol was one of the Five (though if Ellen told her at the end, in the raptor, I have no clue.)
- Yes. Yes, Cavil. Your body is absurd. We are all absurd. We exist in an absurd universe.
- If Gaius Baltar is Daniel, I will THROW THINGS.
- I'm still completely unsure how I respond to Grace Park's acting. On the one hand, she has the same ability as Tricia Helfer - to let me know which copy of her model she's playing just by the way she holds herself and what she does with her face, and it was very clear here when she was definitely, absolutely, Boomer and not Athena. On the other hand, I still find myself just...not connecting with her performance a lot of the time.
- I loved the fact that apparently loving and keeping your artificial life doesn't prevent it from turning against you and murdering you, as evidenced by John and the Final Five. Not entirely sure what that means thematically, but I did love that they still screwed it up.
- I love that the hybrid, the metatron, is totally a creation of the Centurions.
- Clearly, Cylon-oriented episodes in which Boomer is struggling with her identity, in opposition to a manipulative Cylon authority figure who wants her to shut up and be a good little machine, but ultimately sees her choose to run off with a sexy blonde to turn humanity's world upside down, are WIN, even if I wish they had less ham-handed dialogue. This episode was like the anti-Downloaded.
*DEEP HUGE BREATH*
Aaaaaand, I think I'm done.
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Date: 2009-02-20 09:41 am (UTC)I agree that someone needs to writh Ellen and Kara's Mom, (even though I also agree it would be a shame to stepmotherize Socrata) but alas, I have neither the time nor a story-hook. :(
I was quite happy to see in an interview that apparently the writers did see Laura's passing of the baton as having to do with her acknowledging her culpability in the mutiny, but I still would have liked to see more fallout.
And WORD to the point about getting Laura a Mytharc STAT.