beccatoria (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccatoria) wrote2009-03-30 12:12 am
beccatoria) wrote2009-03-30 12:12 am
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BSG: The Finale, having thought about it.
In my original post about the finale, I said I didn't know if I liked it or not. Well now I know. I don't like it. I was...unwilling, at the time, to make such sweeping statements when there were a lot of pretty images I liked, and an end idea I felt ought to mollify me more than it did.
It's been obvious for most of this week to anyone reading this journal that I didn't like it and am taking, um, extreme measures, to not let the distaste the finale left me with permanently affect my enjoyment of a show that was, more often than not, entirely excellent.
But I do feel, now, that I can talk a little more coherently about my issues with the thing.
Or rather, I can quote someone else's far more eloquent summation of the underlying issues with this sucker, and then comment on that.
This is Jacob from TWoP. Believe me; I'm as shocked to find myself agreeing with him again as you are. I really thought we'd gotten divorced too.
So what's the problem? Few things, but big ones. Two things particularly, which line up with the odd conclusion in a particularly gruesome way. They both have to do with imagination, unfettered imagination, creation. The things you've created, and your responsibility toward them.
The show has been sketched out a year at a time, brilliantly; it is a living breathing thing, which lends it all the power it has. The problem, for me, is when that stops being true. When the plot isn't left alone to figure itself out, because an endpoint has been decided, and nobody feels like doing the work at the end of the season to tie all the threads together.
Fanboys, sometimes they hate the fact that stories work this way. They want it all stitched up ahead of time, with a plan on the books. I don't really understand why, but I know that there's not a show on television, or a novel ever written, that works that way. Things change, stories evolve and grow up, or the people creating them change, or lose interest. But fanboys, sometimes they are loud. So the showrunner has to say, "I know what the last thing is." The last image, or the last word of dialogue, or who's left standing. Maybe it's true, maybe it's a bluff.
It would be better if it were a bluff. Because you can't have it both ways. You can't say that the story tells itself, pat your back egregiously for the "artistic" details you've chucked in for no clear artistic reason, while also reassuring the fans -- whose opinions don't really matter anyway, because all you owe them is a story, including me, which is why I feel comfortable writing about this -- that there's an endpoint, a reason for it all, a final mystery. That all will be revealed.
Trust the story, and it will be. I think what I reacted so violently to, this finale and the last one, was the exceedingly inorganic, forced nature of the revelations, at the last second. Not organically developing out of the story told over the preceding nineteen episodes, and the threads of deeper meaning and juxtaposition that they afford, but a determined weeding out of tools and images that didn't fit the finale, when it was time to write the finale. That's distinctly irreverent, toward the material, toward the story itself, and to your writers. I think what happened here was less a issue of forethought and planning, and more a loss of nutsack at a crucial moment. A dedication to reaching ideas long plotted out, working against the grain of the story itself, to arrive at treasured endpoints that no longer signify.
Not that the finale wasn't intuitively written. Which is the second issue, because while it's a fine story, it turns against the preceding flow of the narrative in some pretty stark ways that, assembled, seem pretty revealing.
Let's start with Tory, not because I love her so much or anything, because what is there to love beyond the gifted Rekha Sharma? Not a lot. She was the mystery ingredient in the Final Four, the "most exciting" open-ended character, who in the end got the least interesting, most cardboard-villainous story of all. Thinking back to the balance of the Final Five, above, let's think about her for a second. Tory Foster is not Slytherin, she's Ravenclaw -- Ellen's Slytherin -- Tory is Air, Mind, the Invisible Girl, Thinking, taunted and haunted by dark emotions she can't see directly or ever explain, shooting out dark roots into Intuition and Sensation in order to stabilize herself against these shadow emotions and fears. (Compare Buffy's Willow Rosenberg, for an easy example.) The Final Five have lost their Thinker; it's no surprise that soon after, they give up even the touchstone of transcendence, shooting Sam into the sun as an artifact of technology, and become the Final Three.
What's troubling is that these Final Three, eventually, will agree that this is okay, even appropriate. Laudable, even. The show claps Galen on the back for severing the group's ties with the infinite, breaking a peace accord through murder, and eventually damning all but three Cylon models to death. Which, whatever, that's fine.
Only at the same time, Lee is warning us about our science outstripping our souls. Just after sending Simon the doctor and Cavil the atheist genius into a black hole, and a little while before the Smartest Man in the Twelve Colonies decides to become a farmer. Because courage, not intelligence, is what earns you love, and the right to exist. And right about this time the Fleet is giving up all intellectual progress they've ever made, and lying down in the grass and praising themselves for it, because technology and intellect and progress and mental strength are not "the best part of ourselves," any more than Tory Foster deserved to live. Human progress is typified in the glorious decadence of Caprica City, where if they're not fucking they're puking on themselves: "Commercialism, decadence, technology run amok" are inscribed as natural human endpoints, and the Hybrid and Lee agree, at different points, that cities and civilization are the root cause of all evil. And even though I personally found the characters' resolutions -- yes, including Kara's, and the angels' -- completely satisfying, that can go on the list too. The story steps up to the brink spiritually on at least three fronts, and then tosses up its hands, saying those lynchpins of the series no longer signify. Not for the lack of answers, but for suggesting that the questions themselves aren't worth asking.
I submit to you that coincidental or not -- and that's a pretty long list, to be a coincidence -- this is not only offensive and misguided, but vile. You have to look in the darkest, sweatiest ugliest places to find God, and the story here tells us that you're better off just pretending those places don't exist. Wrap your hands around the shadow's throat, or your enemy's throat, or around the blow-up dolls that Cylons are after all, and submerge the holiest part of yourself in forced amnesia and bitter denial, tell yourself that development forward leads inexorably to bisexual strip clubs and casual intercourse outside the bonds of marriage, and killer robots? All the cool kids are going agrarian? That's an old man's game, afraid and lost and tired, and the show is worthy of better than that.
Human development on the individual level is self-organizing: toward strength, wholeness and transformation. That's what a soul is: the natural desire to cross the line from here to there, to move and to progress. If not for a higher purpose, then at the least from of curiosity. Everything that rises, every single thing, must converge. I haven't seen a story this... hateful, this reductive and frightened and shrinking, in a really long time.
Why on Earth should anyone, anywhere, ever retrograde? If you don't like the thesis, generate the antithesis and pull it together with your hands: don't wipe the board. I don't think I've been more grossed out by any statement of this show's characters than the order not to "underestimate the desire for a clean slate." Anyone who honestly wants a clean slate wants to die. The question is, "When Will the Work Be Done?" And the only answer is: Never. You don't get to lay down your burdens, the rough spots are all you ever had. That's called life, and it's just as sweet and just as brutal as the angels, and the Gods. You can't tear pages out of your history. That's as weak as declaring bankruptcy, and morally reprehensible. It is profane.
You can't total out a human soul, can't ask for a factory recall, can't stalk your inner Tory and choke her to death, because she's not going anywhere. That just gives her more power over you, and you become uglier for it. You learn from her, you integrate, and you grow. Anything else is a warp in the design that you cause, out of your own cowardice, and laziness.
The future is always better than the past. Even Voltaire knew that, and he invented this trite shtick. If you can't believe that -- if you fear the future you're creating, for yourself -- you're done. Because there's no point: end it today, or stop bitching and apply yourself to making it better, because essentially the implication is that nobody knows how to save the world, but you, and nobody but yours will ever figure it out. That is dead. That is death.
I can't get around it, and I can't get past it. This is all me talking, I don't know anything about the people that brought this story to life, not really. And it's just an hour, or half an hour, out of something I will always love. It's not a dealbreaker. I'm already signed to do Caprica and The Plan for TWoP, because I do believe in this story. I love it. I love for its ambition, and its strength, and its excellence, and its hope. I love the people who have worked so hard to create something so beautiful, that has informed so much of my life for so many years. This is not a write-off. This is a personal problem with particular and personal conclusions that pushed personal buttons.
If any of the retrogressive themes in this episode were present, or even foreshadowed, in any other episode of the series, it would be lessened as a whole. But as the finale to a story, it's cool shit that doesn't mean much, other than telling us a lot about the mindset and the environment -- a given time, a given location -- in which it was produced. But no matter how hopeless it seems at this point in the story, the fact remains: We start every week in prayer: for more light, more wisdom, more strength. That will never change. Keep rising.
So, the things I don't agree with (other than Tory herself being an unsympathetic character; I find her vastly more sympathetic, loving and human than, say, the Chief these days, and the fact that he didn't like Crossroads, or the fact he doesn't think Caprica looks horrible) are confined to the final paragraphs.
When the dodgy half hour or hour is the last one; when it's the literal (awful) moral of the story, that does affect the whole in ways that no other hour would.
It doesn't have to. But preventing it from doing so requires choice and effort on my part, and the sorrow of divorcing myself from part of the canon that is responsible for a large part of my community here. It requires leaving a shared, common story behind, and in many ways, that loss is as sad to me as the fact that in the end, BSG did not tell me the story I thought it was going to.
The other point is foreshadowing. Because it was there. It has been there. My perception of Jacob's increasing willingness to make excuses for the fact that it was there, in varying degrees, throughout most of 4.5, along with my perception of an increasingly bitter attitude toward those who disagreed, was why we got divorced in the first place.
And really, we still are, but maybe now we're at the point where I can at least be friendly and proud when he done good.
So, where was the foreshadowing?
Of the religion, that's hard to say. Perhaps in Baltar's cult. Perhaps every time angels were mentioned. But I'll give it to Jacob that at the time there wasn't any way to tell that wasn't down the various literal/metaphorical/atheistic points of view that have always existed in the show.
Of the luddite message? Again, I can see why one would think that came out of leftfield with the wonderful Galactica as a hybrid subplot. But it's there too, in Nicky and in Liam. In the way biological procreation and the need to reproduce somehow is hammered home again, and again, and again all the way up to the freaking finale and at best is left completely hanging and unanswered and at worst is denied them because the only purpose of their entire race was to, once again but biologically this time, serve humanity by providing a single string of genetic code.
But the place I think it's most clear is the place that doesn't map exactly to Jacob's essay. Still, it's about putting things back in boxes. About forgetting what came before and the dark parts and the difficult parts - which are the parts of the story that make the characters grow, that give them grace, that gives the whole damn thing meaning - so that things aren't challenging. It's about putting people into places - into moments the writers want or perceive we want - and then suggesting that asking how they got there isn't something worth an answer.
I'm talking about the women.
This is...not easy for me. I know a lot of people started getting pissed about this in 4.0. I didn't. I'm still not. Not because I think it's unlikely you have a point but because...
The way I operate is this, and I admit, it's not always the best way to operate and probably lets more things slide that it should. I admit that I operate this way more about things that oppress me directly (like sexism) than things that don't (like racism) where I'm more likely to err on the side of caution because I'm not in a position to know. But I also don't think that just because I'm a woman I can't possibly spout forth sexist statements.
But, the way I operate is this -
If I make every excuse I can think of, and it still looks dodgy, then I feel I have a safe conviction.
So seasons one through three might have taken Elosha and Gina and Cain and Kat, but they also took Crashdown and Socinus and Jammer and Billy and Fisk and Garner.
Season 4.0 might have killed a lot of women, but it's not just about death and numbers and I always - I still get when thinking about it without the context of later crap - the feeling that 4.0 is just so overwhelmingly about women, while the men (Lee, Adama, even Baltar) are left behind. Chasing Laura as she slides from the quorum, or getting drunk alone because "nobody's going anywhere," or stuck, just as isolated, in a Dogsville cult of crazies while the real agents of change - Laura and Kara and Athena and Natalie - remake the world.
A lot of women died in 4.0. I kind of felt that reflected the fact there were more minor 3rd tier female characters left, and the fact that women were just doing everything.
We get to 4.5 and I'm even willing to forgive Dee and D'Anna. Because in isolation - as a story point, Dee works brilliantly. So the same way I totally see the criticisms of Cain and Gina; I can put on my earlier attitude - the one where this show was so good at women so much of the time, I didn't mind when it did things that might be construed as sexist in service to a really interesting storyline. I can do that for Dee. Even though I think there's a good chance I'm wrong.
I can remember that D'Anna left because of the actress' commitments.
And because D'Anna and Dee are balanced out by Gaeta and Zarek to an extent.
But.
Here's where it falls down and I just want to start crying.
From A Disquiet that Follows my Soul onwards. It's not just about the deaths, though it's about them too.
I know it was never Ron's intention, but fuck that. Because, "It wasn't my intention to be sexist/racist/colonialist/a mean jerk, so you're horrible for saying I was," is the worst excuse ever because it isn't one. It's okay to be upset if someone says that to you and you genuinely didn't mean it that way. It's not okay to refuse to believe it could possibly be true.
Others have already said this better than me, but Laura. Laura in 4.5 hurts my soul. For all those reasons I'm sure you're already aware of whether you agree or not. The way she quits on responsibility for TWU WUV. The way we slowly get all of her motivations and decisions retconned away. She never had a home until Bill. A shoehorned eleventh hour family tragedy, which would only be eyerolly because of its melodrama if not for the fact that it was used to further reimagine the cold, practical, political Laura as "not the real one" and, more offensively, as separate to the compassionate, loving Laura.
We knew she never wanted to get into politics. But the fact that she did and stayed there; the fact that as the show went on she came to fear losing that power because of who might take over: in Pegasus she says, "And yet..." when talking about Adar - if he came back, to take over. These were interesting things.
The scene with the younger guy was smoking hot, but I still don't quite understand the point. Another example of how she only ever chose this path because of tragedy? Because she was broken and Bill fixed her?
I do not believe in a Laura Roslin who is capable of being more fulfilled, even on her damn death bed, by relinquishing her duties to her people. And I resent the way it was framed as an either-or question. Because the show did frame it that way. It was fully able to have continued having her as an active political force while also maintaining a relationship with Adama. And if it wanted to show her giving up on that power then a) we should have seen some of that shit from her own damn perspective and b) much like colonialist shit actually inspired by Cortes without irony, consider the fucking crap you're evoking by going down this route.
What it comes down to is, Laura Roslin spends season 4.5 stepping back from every single reason she had to exist for three and a half season and after the scene where she throws her pills into the wastebasket, we basically stop seeing this from her perspective. She is one of the main theological pillars of the entire frakking show and she spend eleven episodes doing literally nothing but dying. And once yelling about her boyfriend. Apparently her huge role in the endgame was to grab Hera for two seconds and then watch some Gazelles.
I do not care if she is dying, or that is realistic, or what. It is a giant narrative fuck up that could have been rectified really, really easily. They managed to have her dying yet full of agency and terrifyingness in season two, why not now?
And it's Caprica Six.
What the hell was the point of her storyline?
I loved Caprica and Tigh in 4.0. They were so strange and broken. Her beating the shit out of him in an arguably very sexist attempt to Save A Man while doing it in such a violent, unfeminine way was amazing. So was the completely surreal yet oddly perfect match between the two of them.
But in 4.5...where the hell did it go? What was the point? Was it always to introduce Liam as some bizarre tease about Cylon reproduction, then kill him as if that answered anything? Was it always to get Tigh and Ellen back together? Did no one realise how insanely unsympathetic that made them as a couple? There was such heartbreaking stuff in Deadlock but looking back on it, what the hell? Because when Caprica gets wheeled out after Liam dies, that is literally, I think, the last time we ever see those two in the same frame of film.
Tigh gets episodes of grieving. Tigh gets hugs from Bill, from Ellen. Tigh gets a mini subplot where he starts to realise that all of the Cylon are his children.
Caprica? Gets completely fucking forgotten until an episode and a half later where we get one scene with Baltar. It was admittedly a completely heartbreaking scene, but it doesn't change the fact that a) it was completely from Baltar's perspective and b) Baltar doesn't know what her situation is, and, guess what, neither do we. And we never find out.
We don't know what the hell her opinion is on that entire thing, and Ellen and Tigh - a couple I used to really like - now seem like callous jackasses disinterested in helping someone they both profess to love - either as an actual lover or a child - through what is probably the saddest thing that's ever happened to her.
At best, this material was cut, but even so, apparently this material was cuttable, while the six billionth shot of Adama mourning over his women, was not. Neither was this material interesting enough to warrant mention in interviews or podcasts as RDM has frequently mentioned with other cut plotlines.
The way I wasn't against Laura having a crisis of faith and stepping away from government, or even having a relationship with Adama (well okay, I was against that, but I was prepared to accept it), I'm not against giving Caprica a storyline that's all about a baby. But I am, VEHEMENTLY, against turning her into a completely nonexistant character, and making that storyline all about Tigh. Which is basically what happened. The same way Laura's storyline became all about Bill.
And ultimately, while the Baltar/Caprica stuff was hands down the best stuff in the finale, and pretty much the only stuff I thought was poignant and nuanced in the way I expect from this show, we can talk about that too. Because she essentially gets shunted from one man to the next. I'm not sure exactly how much I can criticise this since an actual integral part of Caprica's arc was the search for love and family (which is why I didn't conceptually mind the baby storyline either), and it's actively what I wanted for her. And at least Baltar chased her a bit. But really. It's...still there.
So let's get to the finale. Where all this shit explodes.
I know Laura was going to die. I know she was always going to die.
But so does Kara.
So does Boomer.
So does Tory.
So does Racetrack.
What guys die?
Skulls?
A Cavil?
Others have already posted these lists. But the fact remains, the women left standing amount to Caprica, Athena and Ellen. I don't care that they're Cylons, that's fine. I don't even care that they've died along the way because while one could point out something about violence and women there (and I'm not sure I'd agree because in some ways the way women are extraordinarily violent in addition to having violence directed at them is something I often enjoyed about the show), but killing them and instantly resurrecting them is different to killing them flat out. It's a different narrative decision because really, they're not deciding to write them out. Arguably you could get Ellen though, since she was originally supposed to stay dead.
I think the far more interesting point is that all three of those women are massively defined by their significant others and familial relationships. I'm not against that when there's variety.
Still, who else? Seelix, maybe? Ishay, maybe? We didn't see either of them.
Of the guys, Adama, Lee, Baltar, Tigh, Tyrol, Helo, Cottle, Hoshi, Hot Dog, Romo Lampkin.
The few surviving girls go off with their menfolk to be domestic.
The guys, basically all of whom survive, are much more varied. Sure, Baltar, Tigh and Helo are also defined by their familial ties, but Romo is in a leadership position, Lee, likewise is seen forging ahead to make a new life independently. Even Adama is off somewhere building a freaking cabin for his corpse bride. Tyrol gets an ending that is at least on his terms even if one couldn't exactly call it "happy" and he certainly doesn't seem to be getting much condmenation.
I think what bugs me most - as you know - is Tory. But also Boomer. Less because her death itself was gross, more because Tory and Boomer die on the altar of personal vengeance, while Tyrol and Baltar get the endings the characters "want".
Not that I want Tyrol or Baltar to die (though I would have liked them not to destroy the Chief's character). I just...I didn't want any of them to die. Well okay, maybe Boomer. But more in an "I REGRET NOTHING, BITCHES!" kind of way and I concede that's highly personal.
However you slice it, you get five boys in the grass deciding the future of the human race while the women who assured it die and disappear in fields while no one notices.
And the thing that always mollified me - the women die, but they're so damn significant - even that's taken away.
Because what do they do in the finale? They carry Hera around for a bit so that Gaius frakking Baltar can make some nonsensical speech. So that Tigh can create a truce that Tyrol destroys.
I'll close out on Jacob again, because he manages to capture perfectly why the Opera House, while gorgeous, was a massive frakking let down, and, for the first time I can remember in a long time, agrees it was not just a letdown, but sexist too.
(Except, hold up. I can handle the fighting and whatever, because Lee's hair looks fantastic and Caprica with a gun pushes buttons I didn't know I had, but let's review. The visions that have been appearing regularly for over half the series, that have provided meaning and context for half the characters on the show, that have provided what little female-female bonding and connection the show affords us, the visions that got Natalie killed... Amount to what, exactly? A dress rehearsal of a déjà vu, in which two women walk down a hallway and a third woman picks up a child and walks, conservatively, six yards, with zero danger anywhere nearby. This is the prosaic destiny that enfolds Caprica, Athena, Laura and Hera? And Gaius? To go down a hallway. Chip's Challenge indeed, motherfucker. It takes five people, Cylon projection, two Angels, two to four Moms, and a hallucinogenic folk remedy to bring this miraculous vision to bear? That is some weak sauce. It's basic storytelling to fulfill something this large and trumped-up with something worthwhile. If that's the shit God really needs you to know, then God is pretty much retarded.
"I'm sending you a vision. Disobey it at your peril. One day years from now, you are going to go downstairs, open the mailbox, and take out an Entertainment Weekly. On the cover will be Paul Rudd. You will think, based on a caplet review, that you should probably just give in and watch one episode of The Closer, because you love Saving Grace so much, and Trust Me is growing on you. But by the time you get back upstairs to the TiVo, you will be thinking about lunch, and will die without ever seeing that show. However, a few weeks before that happens, you will look out your window and see a pretty blonde woman reaching into that mailbox, and you will go nuts and shoot her just for standing near your mailbox. This is the Shape of Mail To Come.")
Redacted.
It's been obvious for most of this week to anyone reading this journal that I didn't like it and am taking, um, extreme measures, to not let the distaste the finale left me with permanently affect my enjoyment of a show that was, more often than not, entirely excellent.
But I do feel, now, that I can talk a little more coherently about my issues with the thing.
Or rather, I can quote someone else's far more eloquent summation of the underlying issues with this sucker, and then comment on that.
This is Jacob from TWoP. Believe me; I'm as shocked to find myself agreeing with him again as you are. I really thought we'd gotten divorced too.
So what's the problem? Few things, but big ones. Two things particularly, which line up with the odd conclusion in a particularly gruesome way. They both have to do with imagination, unfettered imagination, creation. The things you've created, and your responsibility toward them.
The show has been sketched out a year at a time, brilliantly; it is a living breathing thing, which lends it all the power it has. The problem, for me, is when that stops being true. When the plot isn't left alone to figure itself out, because an endpoint has been decided, and nobody feels like doing the work at the end of the season to tie all the threads together.
Fanboys, sometimes they hate the fact that stories work this way. They want it all stitched up ahead of time, with a plan on the books. I don't really understand why, but I know that there's not a show on television, or a novel ever written, that works that way. Things change, stories evolve and grow up, or the people creating them change, or lose interest. But fanboys, sometimes they are loud. So the showrunner has to say, "I know what the last thing is." The last image, or the last word of dialogue, or who's left standing. Maybe it's true, maybe it's a bluff.
It would be better if it were a bluff. Because you can't have it both ways. You can't say that the story tells itself, pat your back egregiously for the "artistic" details you've chucked in for no clear artistic reason, while also reassuring the fans -- whose opinions don't really matter anyway, because all you owe them is a story, including me, which is why I feel comfortable writing about this -- that there's an endpoint, a reason for it all, a final mystery. That all will be revealed.
Trust the story, and it will be. I think what I reacted so violently to, this finale and the last one, was the exceedingly inorganic, forced nature of the revelations, at the last second. Not organically developing out of the story told over the preceding nineteen episodes, and the threads of deeper meaning and juxtaposition that they afford, but a determined weeding out of tools and images that didn't fit the finale, when it was time to write the finale. That's distinctly irreverent, toward the material, toward the story itself, and to your writers. I think what happened here was less a issue of forethought and planning, and more a loss of nutsack at a crucial moment. A dedication to reaching ideas long plotted out, working against the grain of the story itself, to arrive at treasured endpoints that no longer signify.
Not that the finale wasn't intuitively written. Which is the second issue, because while it's a fine story, it turns against the preceding flow of the narrative in some pretty stark ways that, assembled, seem pretty revealing.
Let's start with Tory, not because I love her so much or anything, because what is there to love beyond the gifted Rekha Sharma? Not a lot. She was the mystery ingredient in the Final Four, the "most exciting" open-ended character, who in the end got the least interesting, most cardboard-villainous story of all. Thinking back to the balance of the Final Five, above, let's think about her for a second. Tory Foster is not Slytherin, she's Ravenclaw -- Ellen's Slytherin -- Tory is Air, Mind, the Invisible Girl, Thinking, taunted and haunted by dark emotions she can't see directly or ever explain, shooting out dark roots into Intuition and Sensation in order to stabilize herself against these shadow emotions and fears. (Compare Buffy's Willow Rosenberg, for an easy example.) The Final Five have lost their Thinker; it's no surprise that soon after, they give up even the touchstone of transcendence, shooting Sam into the sun as an artifact of technology, and become the Final Three.
What's troubling is that these Final Three, eventually, will agree that this is okay, even appropriate. Laudable, even. The show claps Galen on the back for severing the group's ties with the infinite, breaking a peace accord through murder, and eventually damning all but three Cylon models to death. Which, whatever, that's fine.
Only at the same time, Lee is warning us about our science outstripping our souls. Just after sending Simon the doctor and Cavil the atheist genius into a black hole, and a little while before the Smartest Man in the Twelve Colonies decides to become a farmer. Because courage, not intelligence, is what earns you love, and the right to exist. And right about this time the Fleet is giving up all intellectual progress they've ever made, and lying down in the grass and praising themselves for it, because technology and intellect and progress and mental strength are not "the best part of ourselves," any more than Tory Foster deserved to live. Human progress is typified in the glorious decadence of Caprica City, where if they're not fucking they're puking on themselves: "Commercialism, decadence, technology run amok" are inscribed as natural human endpoints, and the Hybrid and Lee agree, at different points, that cities and civilization are the root cause of all evil. And even though I personally found the characters' resolutions -- yes, including Kara's, and the angels' -- completely satisfying, that can go on the list too. The story steps up to the brink spiritually on at least three fronts, and then tosses up its hands, saying those lynchpins of the series no longer signify. Not for the lack of answers, but for suggesting that the questions themselves aren't worth asking.
I submit to you that coincidental or not -- and that's a pretty long list, to be a coincidence -- this is not only offensive and misguided, but vile. You have to look in the darkest, sweatiest ugliest places to find God, and the story here tells us that you're better off just pretending those places don't exist. Wrap your hands around the shadow's throat, or your enemy's throat, or around the blow-up dolls that Cylons are after all, and submerge the holiest part of yourself in forced amnesia and bitter denial, tell yourself that development forward leads inexorably to bisexual strip clubs and casual intercourse outside the bonds of marriage, and killer robots? All the cool kids are going agrarian? That's an old man's game, afraid and lost and tired, and the show is worthy of better than that.
Human development on the individual level is self-organizing: toward strength, wholeness and transformation. That's what a soul is: the natural desire to cross the line from here to there, to move and to progress. If not for a higher purpose, then at the least from of curiosity. Everything that rises, every single thing, must converge. I haven't seen a story this... hateful, this reductive and frightened and shrinking, in a really long time.
Why on Earth should anyone, anywhere, ever retrograde? If you don't like the thesis, generate the antithesis and pull it together with your hands: don't wipe the board. I don't think I've been more grossed out by any statement of this show's characters than the order not to "underestimate the desire for a clean slate." Anyone who honestly wants a clean slate wants to die. The question is, "When Will the Work Be Done?" And the only answer is: Never. You don't get to lay down your burdens, the rough spots are all you ever had. That's called life, and it's just as sweet and just as brutal as the angels, and the Gods. You can't tear pages out of your history. That's as weak as declaring bankruptcy, and morally reprehensible. It is profane.
You can't total out a human soul, can't ask for a factory recall, can't stalk your inner Tory and choke her to death, because she's not going anywhere. That just gives her more power over you, and you become uglier for it. You learn from her, you integrate, and you grow. Anything else is a warp in the design that you cause, out of your own cowardice, and laziness.
The future is always better than the past. Even Voltaire knew that, and he invented this trite shtick. If you can't believe that -- if you fear the future you're creating, for yourself -- you're done. Because there's no point: end it today, or stop bitching and apply yourself to making it better, because essentially the implication is that nobody knows how to save the world, but you, and nobody but yours will ever figure it out. That is dead. That is death.
I can't get around it, and I can't get past it. This is all me talking, I don't know anything about the people that brought this story to life, not really. And it's just an hour, or half an hour, out of something I will always love. It's not a dealbreaker. I'm already signed to do Caprica and The Plan for TWoP, because I do believe in this story. I love it. I love for its ambition, and its strength, and its excellence, and its hope. I love the people who have worked so hard to create something so beautiful, that has informed so much of my life for so many years. This is not a write-off. This is a personal problem with particular and personal conclusions that pushed personal buttons.
If any of the retrogressive themes in this episode were present, or even foreshadowed, in any other episode of the series, it would be lessened as a whole. But as the finale to a story, it's cool shit that doesn't mean much, other than telling us a lot about the mindset and the environment -- a given time, a given location -- in which it was produced. But no matter how hopeless it seems at this point in the story, the fact remains: We start every week in prayer: for more light, more wisdom, more strength. That will never change. Keep rising.
So, the things I don't agree with (other than Tory herself being an unsympathetic character; I find her vastly more sympathetic, loving and human than, say, the Chief these days, and the fact that he didn't like Crossroads, or the fact he doesn't think Caprica looks horrible) are confined to the final paragraphs.
When the dodgy half hour or hour is the last one; when it's the literal (awful) moral of the story, that does affect the whole in ways that no other hour would.
It doesn't have to. But preventing it from doing so requires choice and effort on my part, and the sorrow of divorcing myself from part of the canon that is responsible for a large part of my community here. It requires leaving a shared, common story behind, and in many ways, that loss is as sad to me as the fact that in the end, BSG did not tell me the story I thought it was going to.
The other point is foreshadowing. Because it was there. It has been there. My perception of Jacob's increasing willingness to make excuses for the fact that it was there, in varying degrees, throughout most of 4.5, along with my perception of an increasingly bitter attitude toward those who disagreed, was why we got divorced in the first place.
And really, we still are, but maybe now we're at the point where I can at least be friendly and proud when he done good.
So, where was the foreshadowing?
Of the religion, that's hard to say. Perhaps in Baltar's cult. Perhaps every time angels were mentioned. But I'll give it to Jacob that at the time there wasn't any way to tell that wasn't down the various literal/metaphorical/atheistic points of view that have always existed in the show.
Of the luddite message? Again, I can see why one would think that came out of leftfield with the wonderful Galactica as a hybrid subplot. But it's there too, in Nicky and in Liam. In the way biological procreation and the need to reproduce somehow is hammered home again, and again, and again all the way up to the freaking finale and at best is left completely hanging and unanswered and at worst is denied them because the only purpose of their entire race was to, once again but biologically this time, serve humanity by providing a single string of genetic code.
But the place I think it's most clear is the place that doesn't map exactly to Jacob's essay. Still, it's about putting things back in boxes. About forgetting what came before and the dark parts and the difficult parts - which are the parts of the story that make the characters grow, that give them grace, that gives the whole damn thing meaning - so that things aren't challenging. It's about putting people into places - into moments the writers want or perceive we want - and then suggesting that asking how they got there isn't something worth an answer.
I'm talking about the women.
This is...not easy for me. I know a lot of people started getting pissed about this in 4.0. I didn't. I'm still not. Not because I think it's unlikely you have a point but because...
The way I operate is this, and I admit, it's not always the best way to operate and probably lets more things slide that it should. I admit that I operate this way more about things that oppress me directly (like sexism) than things that don't (like racism) where I'm more likely to err on the side of caution because I'm not in a position to know. But I also don't think that just because I'm a woman I can't possibly spout forth sexist statements.
But, the way I operate is this -
If I make every excuse I can think of, and it still looks dodgy, then I feel I have a safe conviction.
So seasons one through three might have taken Elosha and Gina and Cain and Kat, but they also took Crashdown and Socinus and Jammer and Billy and Fisk and Garner.
Season 4.0 might have killed a lot of women, but it's not just about death and numbers and I always - I still get when thinking about it without the context of later crap - the feeling that 4.0 is just so overwhelmingly about women, while the men (Lee, Adama, even Baltar) are left behind. Chasing Laura as she slides from the quorum, or getting drunk alone because "nobody's going anywhere," or stuck, just as isolated, in a Dogsville cult of crazies while the real agents of change - Laura and Kara and Athena and Natalie - remake the world.
A lot of women died in 4.0. I kind of felt that reflected the fact there were more minor 3rd tier female characters left, and the fact that women were just doing everything.
We get to 4.5 and I'm even willing to forgive Dee and D'Anna. Because in isolation - as a story point, Dee works brilliantly. So the same way I totally see the criticisms of Cain and Gina; I can put on my earlier attitude - the one where this show was so good at women so much of the time, I didn't mind when it did things that might be construed as sexist in service to a really interesting storyline. I can do that for Dee. Even though I think there's a good chance I'm wrong.
I can remember that D'Anna left because of the actress' commitments.
And because D'Anna and Dee are balanced out by Gaeta and Zarek to an extent.
But.
Here's where it falls down and I just want to start crying.
From A Disquiet that Follows my Soul onwards. It's not just about the deaths, though it's about them too.
I know it was never Ron's intention, but fuck that. Because, "It wasn't my intention to be sexist/racist/colonialist/a mean jerk, so you're horrible for saying I was," is the worst excuse ever because it isn't one. It's okay to be upset if someone says that to you and you genuinely didn't mean it that way. It's not okay to refuse to believe it could possibly be true.
Others have already said this better than me, but Laura. Laura in 4.5 hurts my soul. For all those reasons I'm sure you're already aware of whether you agree or not. The way she quits on responsibility for TWU WUV. The way we slowly get all of her motivations and decisions retconned away. She never had a home until Bill. A shoehorned eleventh hour family tragedy, which would only be eyerolly because of its melodrama if not for the fact that it was used to further reimagine the cold, practical, political Laura as "not the real one" and, more offensively, as separate to the compassionate, loving Laura.
We knew she never wanted to get into politics. But the fact that she did and stayed there; the fact that as the show went on she came to fear losing that power because of who might take over: in Pegasus she says, "And yet..." when talking about Adar - if he came back, to take over. These were interesting things.
The scene with the younger guy was smoking hot, but I still don't quite understand the point. Another example of how she only ever chose this path because of tragedy? Because she was broken and Bill fixed her?
I do not believe in a Laura Roslin who is capable of being more fulfilled, even on her damn death bed, by relinquishing her duties to her people. And I resent the way it was framed as an either-or question. Because the show did frame it that way. It was fully able to have continued having her as an active political force while also maintaining a relationship with Adama. And if it wanted to show her giving up on that power then a) we should have seen some of that shit from her own damn perspective and b) much like colonialist shit actually inspired by Cortes without irony, consider the fucking crap you're evoking by going down this route.
What it comes down to is, Laura Roslin spends season 4.5 stepping back from every single reason she had to exist for three and a half season and after the scene where she throws her pills into the wastebasket, we basically stop seeing this from her perspective. She is one of the main theological pillars of the entire frakking show and she spend eleven episodes doing literally nothing but dying. And once yelling about her boyfriend. Apparently her huge role in the endgame was to grab Hera for two seconds and then watch some Gazelles.
I do not care if she is dying, or that is realistic, or what. It is a giant narrative fuck up that could have been rectified really, really easily. They managed to have her dying yet full of agency and terrifyingness in season two, why not now?
And it's Caprica Six.
What the hell was the point of her storyline?
I loved Caprica and Tigh in 4.0. They were so strange and broken. Her beating the shit out of him in an arguably very sexist attempt to Save A Man while doing it in such a violent, unfeminine way was amazing. So was the completely surreal yet oddly perfect match between the two of them.
But in 4.5...where the hell did it go? What was the point? Was it always to introduce Liam as some bizarre tease about Cylon reproduction, then kill him as if that answered anything? Was it always to get Tigh and Ellen back together? Did no one realise how insanely unsympathetic that made them as a couple? There was such heartbreaking stuff in Deadlock but looking back on it, what the hell? Because when Caprica gets wheeled out after Liam dies, that is literally, I think, the last time we ever see those two in the same frame of film.
Tigh gets episodes of grieving. Tigh gets hugs from Bill, from Ellen. Tigh gets a mini subplot where he starts to realise that all of the Cylon are his children.
Caprica? Gets completely fucking forgotten until an episode and a half later where we get one scene with Baltar. It was admittedly a completely heartbreaking scene, but it doesn't change the fact that a) it was completely from Baltar's perspective and b) Baltar doesn't know what her situation is, and, guess what, neither do we. And we never find out.
We don't know what the hell her opinion is on that entire thing, and Ellen and Tigh - a couple I used to really like - now seem like callous jackasses disinterested in helping someone they both profess to love - either as an actual lover or a child - through what is probably the saddest thing that's ever happened to her.
At best, this material was cut, but even so, apparently this material was cuttable, while the six billionth shot of Adama mourning over his women, was not. Neither was this material interesting enough to warrant mention in interviews or podcasts as RDM has frequently mentioned with other cut plotlines.
The way I wasn't against Laura having a crisis of faith and stepping away from government, or even having a relationship with Adama (well okay, I was against that, but I was prepared to accept it), I'm not against giving Caprica a storyline that's all about a baby. But I am, VEHEMENTLY, against turning her into a completely nonexistant character, and making that storyline all about Tigh. Which is basically what happened. The same way Laura's storyline became all about Bill.
And ultimately, while the Baltar/Caprica stuff was hands down the best stuff in the finale, and pretty much the only stuff I thought was poignant and nuanced in the way I expect from this show, we can talk about that too. Because she essentially gets shunted from one man to the next. I'm not sure exactly how much I can criticise this since an actual integral part of Caprica's arc was the search for love and family (which is why I didn't conceptually mind the baby storyline either), and it's actively what I wanted for her. And at least Baltar chased her a bit. But really. It's...still there.
So let's get to the finale. Where all this shit explodes.
I know Laura was going to die. I know she was always going to die.
But so does Kara.
So does Boomer.
So does Tory.
So does Racetrack.
What guys die?
Skulls?
A Cavil?
Others have already posted these lists. But the fact remains, the women left standing amount to Caprica, Athena and Ellen. I don't care that they're Cylons, that's fine. I don't even care that they've died along the way because while one could point out something about violence and women there (and I'm not sure I'd agree because in some ways the way women are extraordinarily violent in addition to having violence directed at them is something I often enjoyed about the show), but killing them and instantly resurrecting them is different to killing them flat out. It's a different narrative decision because really, they're not deciding to write them out. Arguably you could get Ellen though, since she was originally supposed to stay dead.
I think the far more interesting point is that all three of those women are massively defined by their significant others and familial relationships. I'm not against that when there's variety.
Still, who else? Seelix, maybe? Ishay, maybe? We didn't see either of them.
Of the guys, Adama, Lee, Baltar, Tigh, Tyrol, Helo, Cottle, Hoshi, Hot Dog, Romo Lampkin.
The few surviving girls go off with their menfolk to be domestic.
The guys, basically all of whom survive, are much more varied. Sure, Baltar, Tigh and Helo are also defined by their familial ties, but Romo is in a leadership position, Lee, likewise is seen forging ahead to make a new life independently. Even Adama is off somewhere building a freaking cabin for his corpse bride. Tyrol gets an ending that is at least on his terms even if one couldn't exactly call it "happy" and he certainly doesn't seem to be getting much condmenation.
I think what bugs me most - as you know - is Tory. But also Boomer. Less because her death itself was gross, more because Tory and Boomer die on the altar of personal vengeance, while Tyrol and Baltar get the endings the characters "want".
Not that I want Tyrol or Baltar to die (though I would have liked them not to destroy the Chief's character). I just...I didn't want any of them to die. Well okay, maybe Boomer. But more in an "I REGRET NOTHING, BITCHES!" kind of way and I concede that's highly personal.
However you slice it, you get five boys in the grass deciding the future of the human race while the women who assured it die and disappear in fields while no one notices.
And the thing that always mollified me - the women die, but they're so damn significant - even that's taken away.
Because what do they do in the finale? They carry Hera around for a bit so that Gaius frakking Baltar can make some nonsensical speech. So that Tigh can create a truce that Tyrol destroys.
I'll close out on Jacob again, because he manages to capture perfectly why the Opera House, while gorgeous, was a massive frakking let down, and, for the first time I can remember in a long time, agrees it was not just a letdown, but sexist too.
(Except, hold up. I can handle the fighting and whatever, because Lee's hair looks fantastic and Caprica with a gun pushes buttons I didn't know I had, but let's review. The visions that have been appearing regularly for over half the series, that have provided meaning and context for half the characters on the show, that have provided what little female-female bonding and connection the show affords us, the visions that got Natalie killed... Amount to what, exactly? A dress rehearsal of a déjà vu, in which two women walk down a hallway and a third woman picks up a child and walks, conservatively, six yards, with zero danger anywhere nearby. This is the prosaic destiny that enfolds Caprica, Athena, Laura and Hera? And Gaius? To go down a hallway. Chip's Challenge indeed, motherfucker. It takes five people, Cylon projection, two Angels, two to four Moms, and a hallucinogenic folk remedy to bring this miraculous vision to bear? That is some weak sauce. It's basic storytelling to fulfill something this large and trumped-up with something worthwhile. If that's the shit God really needs you to know, then God is pretty much retarded.
"I'm sending you a vision. Disobey it at your peril. One day years from now, you are going to go downstairs, open the mailbox, and take out an Entertainment Weekly. On the cover will be Paul Rudd. You will think, based on a caplet review, that you should probably just give in and watch one episode of The Closer, because you love Saving Grace so much, and Trust Me is growing on you. But by the time you get back upstairs to the TiVo, you will be thinking about lunch, and will die without ever seeing that show. However, a few weeks before that happens, you will look out your window and see a pretty blonde woman reaching into that mailbox, and you will go nuts and shoot her just for standing near your mailbox. This is the Shape of Mail To Come.")
Redacted.