A note on SPOILERS: I came across this line in an old Stanley Kauffman review the other day (he was writing about Easy Rider at the time of its release):
As for that ending, which I had better not reveal, it is a coup de theatre that tries to consummate the satisfaction of the two youths, but after the shock is over, it is seen as only a coup de theatre. Which is why I won't describe it. But when a critic can't describe an action for fear of spoiling it for a prospective viewer, that is a pretty fair index of the action's superficiality.
He's wrong -- there are a lot of pleasures to be had in first discovery, I think, that crucially help shape our reading of a film. (For instance, I've only seen every individual episode of "Battlestar" once, so much of my analysis is based on that "getting through the wilderness" experience of understanding it.) That last sentence is a handy aphorism to have to justify spoilers and smack down simplistic puzzle devices (and certainly one shouldn't approach Kauffman's criticism without expecting plots to be exhaustively spoiled) but the kernel of truth in it applies to BSG and Easy Rider specifically, not to criticism or movie/show-viewing generally. There is not a single device in this series, which I'll cover in my "Magic Arrows" section, that ever fundamentally adds to the social or emotional resonance of the series. Most are clunkily convenient, a few are inspired pieces of "puzzle film" mindfuckery, a few threaten to tear at the fabric of the series, though that's a resilient fucking fabric (like the ship itself), so maybe not. Point being, most of my discussions will only "ruin" the gimmicks, which in themselves are probably the least satisfying aspects of the show. However, it will also "ruin" the discoveries of relationships, character arcs, etc., that are powerful to watch for the first time cold.
Still, there are a ton of spoilers below. I'm going to be talking about the entire series, every plot twist (I can remember), every character relationship (I care to write about), every theme (I interpret or invent). Since I encourage anyone who can read, and anyone who can't, to see this show, take that as your only warning. Nothing is off-limits, though I'll start with enough generalizing that you'll probably stop reading by the time I get to the Arrows.
Cut for spoilers: Age After Bush and Character Issues
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The Wonky Space-Time Continuum in the Age of Obama
First things first: Battlestar Galactica is, like the new Star Trek movie, a parallel universe vision, but in a more serendipitous way (appropriate for the series) than the Smallville Enterprise. Instead, BSG, which began life in 2003 as a miniseries, is the only television work I can think of that has essentially sound-, vision-, and concept-tracked the Age of Obama before it happened. By Age of Obama, I really mean Age After Bush -- with the kind of defeated-but-hopeful, pragmatic-dabbling-in-mystical, progressive-yearning-to-"go-back" energy that anyone who even casually supported the Kerry campaign (or at least voted for him) understood on election night 2004.
Starting with such a specific political reference may seem to do a disservice to some of the more universal and longstanding political themes that come up in BSG, but in all of its (many) warts and all of its (many) triumphs, the exhilarated feeling that often followed a particularly good one-two punch of episodes over the course of the past few months (never three -- we did it once and it was like watching Tarkovsky) resembled nothing so much as the jumbled state of high hopes and cold realism and distaste for melodramatic manipulation and joy in at least feeling something that accompanied this period of time in my life.
BSG presages many issues that wouldn't be given a mainstream platform until after-the-fact, but were happening concurrently. In Season 3, BSG dealt with occupation, torture, and anti-colonial resistance not only better than every half-assed gesture toward these issues in post-apocalyptic movies like Children of Men, which might be the antithesis on BSG (more on that later, I hope); it dealt with it in one of the only sustained, politically relevant, and politically/dramatically satisfying ways I've ever seen, recalling Battle of Algiers more than Children of Men. Watch President Roslin recommend the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (most likely modeled on South Africa, not U.S.-sanctioned torture, but the situation on New Caprica is arguably more evocative of the latter) -- and then watch the Truth Commission never actually happen, not intentionally but simply because there were more important things to worry about(!) (to be fair, Baltar's trial addresses many of these issues more efficiently, if somewhat reductively) -- and try not to think of the show's relevance. BSG not only got the broad strokes right, it got the mess right. And that's in keeping with its value -- oftentimes its messes, occurring naturally from lack of foresight on the part of the writers and the sheer inability to juggle so many things at once, more accurately REFLECT life-as-it-is even as its idealism -- its PREDICTIVE streak -- argues the opposite or something else entirely.
Case in point: In Season 4, it even got breast cancer right, after seeming to botch it the first time around (see Magic Arrows). (Like many things BSG, the series is strong enough to prop up its weaknesses and, in this case, actually transforms a weakness into a retroactive strength.) The recurrence of the president's cancer leads to a debilitating, prolonged fight with the disease that as far as I know is unprecedented in any television show. Breast cancer, of course, could only be dealt with adequately in a longer format; half of the pain of the disease is in the watching, the waiting, the inexplicable improvements and devastating, sometimes sudden, setbacks. I'm usually hyper-conscious of how cancer survivor imagery is used in media only because I experienced it firsthand, too young to fully understand it but old enough for it to have a profound emotional and intellectual impact on my life. The show eventually gets it all right, in part simply by dint of doing it for so long. The dual purpose of prolonging the disease in the show -- to fulfill a (by Season 4 weirdly begrudging and obligatory) bit of mystical prophecy and to keep Laura Roslin alive until the final episode -- combines to really get at the actual dual purpose (not to be too presumptuous, this was my experience of it) of surviving in the first place; a desire to believe in magical things (that the disease might be miraculously cured) and a necessarily arbitrary goal (I just want to make it to Thanksgiving. I just want to make it to Christmas. I just want to make it to the new year.) It gives special resonance, for me, to the conclusion of the series, which I'll talk about more later.
So the sociopolitical lens through which to look at Battlestar is broken into two lenses mentioned above. The REFLECTIVE lens, though eerily prescient, places it within a complex web of political realities -- in its inclusions and its omissions -- that, though often weaknesses of the series, indelibly and powerfully mark it in time. Its omissions, in areas like feminism and a more enlightened view of human sexuality, are a product of its time, perhaps, but also remind us that BSG isn't "Star Trek" -- society as a whole is not more enlightened in BSG than we are (even at our best); if the political and legal policy messages are largely liberal/progressive, there are plenty of conservative, even reactionary, social messages. When the president of our own country can't bring himself to recognize gay marriage in his rhetoric (even if this doesn't reflect his politics or policies), the uncertain question of the role of gays in the military and Colony society is at least reflective, if not ideal by a long shot.
The PREDICTIVE lens almost invariably falls in the realm of policy. Orders, blanket pardons, bills we never read (dealing with abortion, "interracial" mixing), legal trial outcomes. And in this realm the show is firmly on the side of a modest progressive voice. Let's not forget that, e.g., prosecuting torture has only become (comparatively) a radical progressive measure in recent times, and that this is largely due to the further erosion of the two-party system at the hands of extremists in one party. The goal of a progressive torture policy is simply to return to a pre-Bush Geneva Convention standard of it that recognizes torture as illegal, period, with no significant semantic debate on what constitutes torture (an understanding that in matters of torture, the spirit trumps the letter). An 00s'-era progressive nostalgia, different from more longstanding conservative nostalgia, locates a return to more reasonable policies (a Reagan or pre-Reagan tax on the wealthy, a pre-Bush contraction of the powers of the president, etc.) both before (in the case of torture) and concurrent with (in the case of dealing with the economy) progressive change happening in the future.
BSG's politics are nearly identical. The short-term ideal is a status quo that existed -- even with its deep-seated problems -- just before the attack on the Colonies. And the show never gives up, until its dying breath, of the power of that system, since life without it is not a life worth living (according to our protagonists). The long-term ideals are generally progressive -- erasing hatred between the Colonies' ethnicities (dealt with clumsily but effectively in "The Woman King"), healing the wounds of economic colonization between Colonies (the tylium refinery; the prison episodes; the early role of Tom Zarek), and -- in a symbolic, touching gesture -- trying to rewrite the rules of law from essentially nothing save a few precious law books. This moment, when Lee Adama decides to aid the defense of Gaius Baltar, reminds us that laws are not an oral tradition, and the destruction of the literal stuff of law is its (potential) undoing (shades of the memory tubes in 1984, though for the most part BSG avoids easy post-Orwellian dystopianism in favor of an American liberal pragmatism). The poltically avoided ideals are largely social -- the roles of women in meaningful relationships (h/t girlboymusic), the roles of non-heterosexuals. The show has trickily erased most racial difference and instead posited a world in which location rather than phenotype causes inequality. To the extent to which we accept this somewhat similar (but fundamentally different from, e.g., historical U.S. conception of race in white/non-white binary) world of racial difference, there aren't many significant issues of "BSG race" (excluding Cylons as "race") that aren't at least perfunctorily addressed (e.g. the clumsy overt racism in "The Woman King").
The elephant in the room in terms of a sociopolitical argument is the Cylons. I constantly asked myself what political role they served in the show at any given point, and the most adequate answer I can think of is that they serve a political role when it's convenient and a narrative (plot-centered) role most of the rest of the time. Though well-acted, all of the "original" Cylons (no word on the Final 5 until later) except for Grace Park as Boomer/Athena (#8) and maybe Tricia Helfer as Caprica/Maoist (#6) primarily function as an easily externalized inhuman threat. Issues of humanity for all Cylons, not just ones with whom we've become accustomed as "human" characters, only happens when there is no reincarnation device, when death is death. And even then we still want the majority of the Cylons (the diabolical priest Cavil, the "mystic"-as-advanced-script-reader Leoben, Lenny and Carl, aka "the anonymous black and white duo" Cylons, mixed bag and before long moot point Lucy Lawless) to die and never come back (I mean maybe some of you like Leoben or something, but he doesn't serve any important role after his creepy housewife fantasy on New Caprica falls through). I'll mention the Cylons-as-humans-too stuff as the post goes on, but for the most part this doesn't interest me, and even in the show the cohabitation of Cylons and humans is treated as a bit of a footnote in the bizarre final post-script. Except in a few cases, most of the politics is with the humans reacting to external forces, and that is to a large degree my interest in the show's politics -- not what the Cylons represent, but what the humans do about it.
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The Bad, the Ugly, and the Disappointing: Characters
One of BSG's strengths is the way it deals with individual character psychology. Yet the show is surprisingly uneven with relationships between characters. Conversely, the seasons can differ wildly, from the promise:disappointment ratio of first half of season one with second half of one, and the assuredness:WTFness ratio of Season 3 versus Season 2 (all respectively). Season 3 absolutely towers over the others in terms of its depth, its consideration of bigger issues, and in some ways its character development. So here's a focus on characters with an eye for season arcs (not so much series arc, which will be later), divided into three categories: Ugly, Bad, Disappointing. I'm starting with weaknesses (1) because I'm reading Stanley Kauffman, whose reviews are fairly formulaic -- spoilers-problems-qualified praise-general assessment -- and (2) because in many ways the weaknesses, some of them very weak indeed, are important in considering why, as a whole, the show works as well as it does.
The Ugly: Stuttering, Puttering, and Planning in Season 2
Season 2 feels like pieces being put into place mixed with general casting about for an arc. It's a sophomore slump, not as bad as Mad Men's desperate search for a story, but a slump nonetheless. The deus ex machina-style jump-start of the series at the end of season 2 would, for any other series, probably derail things, but after the faltering of the second season we're, along with the shock, somewhat relieved to see ONE. YEAR. LATER. The founding of New Caprica is in itself the closest the writers themselves get to a Magic Arrow miracle, an inspired re-tooling that, given the unevenness of what precedes it, doesn't feel like cheating (or if it does, doesn't feel like a compromise) and wonderfully opens up the universe, along with effectively saving several characters. But let's start with the weakest characters, then episodes, then themes, many of which appear in Season 2.
Kat: The worst character in the series by a country mile; the writers just have no frakking clue what to do with Kat. She was even shaky in her marginal role (along with at least one other later quasi-incompetent but still grandfathered-in first season rookie, Hot Dog) as the shaky civilian recruited in an emergency to fill the pilot ranks. But she's far worse when her one-note acting is asked to stretch beyond resentment of being second-best; we're actually asked to believe that she has improved as a character, become stronger, when that note is just as grating as it's ever been. The writers see it, obviously, but they just can't bring themselves to off her in true BSG fashion -- an episode that starts giving us odd personal details of minor characters, which almost inevitably = DEATH, SORRY -- until far too late in the series. Whenever she's on screen, I'm completely ripped out of the series for basic reasons -- she's clearly out of her league actingwise, not only a weak presence in the company of strong character actors, but she's miscast. The only believable character trait that Kat has is that she sucks as a pilot but is the best that the military can do given the circumstances. This is a marginal role that could have used some developing -- how far can an incompetent person get before they're even incompetent by desperate standards? -- but instead they actually pit her head to head against Starbuck. This is like seeing someone sucker punch a bully at a local high school and putting her straight into a boxing ring. She is utterly slaughtered, the connection between her and Starbuck 100% false and her ending particularly ungraceful. (Remember what I said about getting cancer imagery right? Reverse that and condense into one episode.)
Poor casting is probably the number one sore spot in the series, even given all of its Magic Arrows and convenient wrap-ups and deus ex machina moments, as its the only thing that rots the series from the inside out. To continue the metaphor, the BSG series is very much like the ship itself -- largely decorative exterior (essentially a cross between a war movie, a special effects space movie, and a soap opera) is somehow stable and reliable when it's really in action, and getting to know the insides of it more intimately (and the people who run it) makes the disconnect all the more powerful. When we're reminded in the final season that they've essentially been flying around the universe in a mock-up of a battlestar (this is hinted at in the Pegasus subplot, which I'll get to in a second) some of the early themes stemming from the miniseries that we've forgotten about are reiterated. Everyone in power is there accidentally. It's an oddly affirming reminder; these people, past their prime or far FROM their prime, are doing their best and moderately succeeding just in surviving. (For all its mysticism, there aren't too many Star Wars-like "one shot destroys the Death Star" moments in BSG.)
Anyway, when the people inside that structure are rotten, it's the one thing that seems to significantly damage viewer morale, as it were. We want to want to spend time with these characters, the stock characters, the "deep" characters, the central characters, the minor characters. And the show is smart enough to know when a character isn't working, either retooling him/her or offing him/her. The latter is unpleasant but satisfying, like spring cleaning, and the show seems vaguely aware of its own machinations in cleaning house: "ah, yes, Billy just proposed to Dee! They're gonna kill him!"
Billy: Actually not as weak a character in retrospect, and one who had a lot of room for improvement and development. I do wonder whether or not he just wanted out. But I can imagine him getting much darker and more pessimistic as the series continued; his inclusion in "ugly" is for the typical gracelessness with which they disposed of him. Not as egregiously tacky as Kat's swift radiation-induced leukemia (it's almost like the writers resented Kat, and wanted her to go in the most gruesome possible way, as a -- shock! -- druggie who eventually, for her own hubris, is pretty much melted away in graphic detail), the stand-off that eventually takes care of Billy is arbitrary and false. The relationship between Billy and Dee hasn't had enough time to develop, and his impromptu proposal deserved a more lighthearted deflection. This also sets off the relationship between Dee and Lee, which doesn't work for a variety of reasons (some of which the show deals with with characteristic frankness) but also doesn't work for performance reasons. The actors just don't really work together very well, so we don't care to see them together. It holds none of the underlying tension of seeing, e.g., Chief and Cali or Kara and Sam together. As a catalyst, almost nothing good comes from Billy's death -- Dee/Lee, an unresolved civilian conflict, a lapse in the shows thoughtfulness in dealing with internal politics (we don't care enough about the faction civilians who end up killing Billy to care whether or not they live or die, which is rare in the series even for civilians who have done worse). And of course there's...
Tory: Tory worked well as a background character, and it was nice that she reflected a change in Roslin's personality in Season 2 rather than seeming to be the impetus for that change. Politics got dirtier, so did Roslin, so did Roslin's assistant. But there are cracks even in these early points: Tory seems to have far too much control; even if she were flat-out evil (as she becomes in a cheap attempt to deepen her character later) nothing is hidden from Laura Roslin. That's part of the genius of the president character -- she is always completely in control of everything, a political wheeler and dealer whose personality traits were forged dealing with kindergartners and whipping poor high school writing into something at least marginally competent (we presume). As a subordinate, Tory works just fine, but in keeping with the Russian roulette that helps decide which minor characters are going to be killed and which will be promoted to Major Characters, the show makes the terrible decision to give Tory more presence and more of a role in the direct development of the series to its conclusion. It doesn't work. Tory has no backstory, has no particularly interesting characteristics aside from assisting in dirty politics. Every character turn they give her is false to the character and, frankly, the actress can't handle them. She is self-satisfied and empowered after her Big Change. False -- she's a crony, she can't play self-satisfied from this character; this character is fundamentally a weasel. She is a reluctant temptress sent to cajole info out of Baltar. False -- of her many tricks, turning them isn't one of them, and aside from just functionally not being able to sell sex appeal (especially when there's a Six on the show) it feels shallow. Momentary hand-wringing about it doesn't alleviate the bitter aftertaste of the questionable plot convenience of this change. She slowly becomes pure evil. Totally false -- again, there is nothing "pure" in a weasel character. This would be like letting Baltar himself start to buy into his own messianic rhetoric completely -- indeed, his occasional buying-in and occasional buying-out is totally in line with his character: what else is a Messiah than someone who really buys his own hype?
Hot Dog and others: Oh, the pilots. So many bad (actor) pilots! And for the most part most of them are set dressing. Sometimes people die and you aren't even sure you've met them before. Which is fine -- I mean this is part snazzy effects war movie after all. I still don't remember who the main character in Black Hawk Down was (it was supposed to be Josh Hartnett, bu they ALL looked like Josh Hartnett). I won't get into nepotism of the younger Olmos having this role through the entire series, but suffice it to say that I didn't buy his magical, "natural" transition into ace fighter pilot (he scans "fresh meat" through the entire series). I didn't want to see him be the person to fly out when we're supposed to understand that no one important is going to die in a battle. When Starbuck or Lee went out in Season 1, you could cheer at the effective "invincibility shield" that their presence signalled. Not true of Hot Dog, and they have a few misplaced real-character attributes pegged to him in Seasons 3 and 4 that don't change that perception, though I do like the thought of him and Cali getting together for a tryst and winning each other over with dopey platitudes. "It's like, when I look at you, I just feel like I know you, y'know?" "Yes. I know exactly what you mean. It's like we were together in another life."
The Bad: Four Years of Mixed Bags
For the most part, bad characters are merely not as strong as other main characters but forced onto the same stage. They usually don't flounder (that would be for the ugly category) but they also peck away at credibility. Some of these pecks are resolved at some point in the series and resemble charming dents from a previous battle, some are good ideas gone awry, some are strong characters who lose their footing as the story sweeps them aside or into places they don't belong.
Ellen Tigh: When Ellen was introduced, there's a brief delight in the thought that she might be a Cylon (the episode, "Tigh Me Up Tigh Me Down," directed by Edward James Olmos, is incongruously delightful, like a particularly quirky X-Files monster-of-the-week). Then there's brief delight later when you realize she's not a Cylon and that yes, this is just a crazy trampy wifey character we're going to have to live with. And then that gets old.
...And then it gets older.
...Etc. Ellen never really worked in the series even conceptually -- Tigh doesn't make sense with his maneating wife in tow. She's largely responsible for a deterioration of his character, save for a fascinating Cheneyesque stint as commander, throughout the second season (he suggests what Cheney would look like as Obama's vice president or something). And of course there are obvious reasons Tigh gets his groove back -- loses Ellen, loses eyeball. Sea captain is a great look for Tigh through Season 3 and the first part of Season 4.
Also, there's no way to define Ellen outside of her relationship with Tigh. Sometimes this is almost comically awkward, as you wonder what the fuck it is she does on the Battlestar all day in his tiny room (aside from drink), and why they couldn't just let her live on one of the many civilian ships with better amenities. They could still fly her in at crucial superego moments but she wouldn't have to coexist with the daily routine of the ship. The acting itself is insubstantial -- I don't buy her as a seducer/manipulator, even if I do buy her as a tramp -- and even for a closet jelly-legged coward like Tigh I don't buy the power that she has over him. Ever. The "eternal romance" reveal is particularly phony: I find it really hard to believe that they weren't divorced before the attack on Caprica. In fact, their being divorced then reunited on the ship to deal with all the problems that led to the divorce could have been far, far more convincing.
Admiral Cain: Here we get into some issues of sexuality when it comes time for Razor, but suffice it to say for now that the real problem with Cain is that the actress isn't tough as nails. She plays Cain as a bitch, not as a brutal, hardened survivor; the Razor backstory is somewhat helpful in this regard, but ultimately she strikes more as a power-hungry businesswoman than a power-hungry military officer. I buy her at the head of a corporation, not a battlestar. Why couldn't they have cast an older woman whose role in the military was more of a mirror inverse of Adama -- someone for whom gender is somewhat beside the point, so that philosophy, not personality, was the driving antagonism? Cain, as played by Michelle Forbes, presents a brief inconvenience: how can we quickly dispose of her? As opposed to the harder realities of military command, which can't be so easily circumvented. The writing here is lazy and too easy. She's not just a woman commander, she's also significantly younger than the other commanders; we assume some kind of "unnatural" ascension to the top of the chain of command (not that we mind this when Lee Adama does it). She's not just "hard," she's SADISTIC, and so is her crew. When we're introduced to the chilling possibility that Cylon pain is as "human" as human pain, and that there are comparable psychological traumas (in the form of the Six that I call the Maoist, for her transformation into a Godardian heroine after being freed from the Pegasus), we get about as much subtlety in the sadism of Six's torturers as we do in Full Metal Jacket, or maybe Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.
All of these "special case" scenarios -- a commander who doesn't necessarily deserve the power she has and has a record of outright brutality (Adama at one point in Razor claims he might have made her decision to strip a civilian ship of its supplies. This is possibly the most bullshit thing his character says in the entire series, all to try to paper over the mistakes in conceiving of the Cain character this way in the first place -- Razor reads largely as an apologia for the ill-thought-out resolution of the Pegasus storyline). Her officers are either sadists (the torturer) or buffoons (her new Executive Officer, who has a central role in the hands-down worst episode of the series, "Black Market"). Her crew consists almost entirely of characters out of Starship Troopers. There is a big fat strawman moral imperative for Adama to make decisions that he never should have made in ordering her assassination (yeah right). Ultimately backing down from it doesn't fix the problem -- it's the decision that counts for Adama, not the execution, and to put Starbuck in that situation (essentially sending her to her probable death after committing the assassination) is doubly untrue to his character.
And then there's the gay thing. Cain is half-openly gay, in that the entire ship seems to know that she's in a relationship with Maoist Six in the Razor film but it's given an oddly sinister tone in how it's presented: sideways glances, an air of conspiracy. It's complicated: I mean, we know who Six is, and we know who Cain is, and they don't know the other yet. And Cain is a commanding officer carrying on an affair with one of her crew. In a show that openly dealt with sexuality, this wouldn't present a problem -- it's no different than if Adama carried on an affair with one of his crew. But it is different, because she is the only explicitly homosexual character in the entire series. Not one other homosexual relationship. IN A MILITARY SOAP OPERA. I mean come ON. The show isn't a fraction of the amount of dumb it would need to be to obviously present us with a character whose cruelty or conflict stems from the "problem" of his or her homo- or non-heterosexuality, but it doesn't really excuse the hush-hush way the show deals with non-heterosexuality in general -- presumably Cylons are inherently bisexual, to the extent that the "bi" part even matters to them, but this isn't very well explored since, e.g., Gaius is featured as the main subject of a Baltar-Caprica-Lucy Lawless love triangle -- it's more "I Kissed a Girl" (Perry) than "I Kissed a Girl" (Sobule). The relationships are uber-hetero, not just man-on-woman but REAL MEN on REAL WOMEN. Which perhaps is as it should be on the REAL MEN side (I mean jeez, they're in the military) but why aren't the women allowed to be the "men" in their relationships without consequence? Kara (I'll get to her in a moment) is continually punished in weirdly domestic and invasive ways for what appear (reductively) to be her masculine characteristics (don't want a strictly monogamous relationship? See how you like being a HOUSEWIFE SLAVE!). The one gay character coincidentally (and in this case I do allow for the chance that it was a narrative coincidence, since I'm charitable to the show) is both a Controlling Lesbian Boss and a Deeply Conflicted Single Character. (For you see, she has no time for a family, because she is a woman in a man's world. Which is actually statistically true in many fields -- just read some research on women artists [PDF] by the NEA that suggests that women are far less likely to have children than men in various artistic fields, though this is partially the result of women generally being much younger than men.)
Cali: Cali is the rare character who starts off weak and is given the most possible development within her weakness. She succeeds where Kat and Tory both fail (pretty miserably), and where Ellen, say, might have been stronger. The show seems to understand pretty well that Cali is stupid, a dim bulb. In a show that's reluctant to show dim bulbs in a non-threatening -- and perhaps even useful within the military -- way, this is a nice development. Cali is never made to appear secretly savvy about anything; she's not even a particularly good mother. She's just a below-average gal in an extraordinary situation. This isn't a possibility they allow for, e.g., Helo, whose brittle dumbness that is evident in Season 1 is turned into a kind of hardheaded moral righteousness in later seasons. I like Helo, his character works, but part of me wishes they would just let him be a little bit dumber. Other dullards are either misguided (Gaius's cult) or threatening (the Marxist Baltar supporters, the Sons of Aries) or Politically Relevant (the thinly-veiled Christian Scientist Sagittarons, the un-unionized tylium proles). But what about the good-hearted meatheads? The jocks? The peabrains? The dolts? Even Anders is given a veneer of sophistication that his character's life and series development doesn't really bear out.
But Cali deserves more pedestrian strength, like the first wife character, Arabella, in Jude the Obscure, who may not be bright but is at least "man enough" to slaughter a pig (one of the more memorable sequences I think I've ever read, actually). In this metaphor, Chief is Jude and Boomer is the unattainable (eventually attained but still remote) second wife, Sue. But Cali's weakness is weak in almost all respects; she's too forgiving, too weepy (for an actress who doesn't weep very naturally), too damn miserable. I appreciate the startling revelation that Chief makes to Adama that (IIRC) includes an outburst that Cali's breath is like cauliflower and her eyes are dead. This felt right, but it felt right from the eyes of writers shaking their heads about not being able to get rid of Cali sooner. It's unfortunate, because I like Cali's role as a plain person in an extraordinary situation: it was much like Chief's Season 1-3 arc, but...y'know, dumber.
The Defense Lawyer Guy: What was the point of this character? Played with oily charm, sure, but I half expected a Fight Club-style reveal that HE WAS ACTUALLY LEE'S BAD SIDE or something. He was good as a cartoon for one or two episodes (Baltar's trial) but he keeps coming back, they keep trying to psychologize his amorality. This is a mistake -- not everything in this series needs to be psychologized, which is perhaps one of the most annoying offshoots of the New Age of Complexity in "series-arc" shows, the obsessive need to explain everything psychologically, like the awful psychiatric explanation at the end of Psycho. Now that pseudo-psychological impulse has been so deeply ingrained into television arcs that it's getting harder to find appealing character acting (many of the Bad and Ugly candidates fall into the category of "interesting bit role trying to hold its own on the main stage"), which would greatly benefit some of the clunkier relationships and characters in the show. The Defense Lawyer Guy is the perfect example: instead of a bittersweet Usual Suspects-esque kiss farewell, he hangs around for appearances for the rest of the series as we learn about his wife who died and his cat who died and his blah blah blah. I DON'T CARE. The guy is a snake oil salesman -- I don't need to know that he was driven into the business by an overbearing patriarch or something.
Dee: A tough one, because I like Dee. Funnily enough, her suicide was the first BSG moment I ever saw, from a Youtube meme. It reiterates the idea above of superficiality in coup de theatre, but again, it's not the mere existence of coup de theatre that inherently makes it superficial -- but I knew of Dee's death the entire time I watched the series and it didn't fundamentally change my view of her throughout. Her presence in the show is too slight to merit the major character development they attempt in Season 3, and she can't really hold attention when onscreen with Lee, though the show deals with this directly. She knows the relationship is doomed and that they're essentially just having a good time (more on the counter-intuitively progressive role of marriage in the series later). At the same time, though, she seems to be telegraphing her character's weaknesses in the series itself -- "I know I'm just a bit player, but it's nice that I get to share the stage with the Starbucks and Adamas and Roslins, even for such an implausible and obviously temporary reason." Dee's problem is just that she was a good supporting character that wasn't given much to do. Even her role in the CIC seemed somewhat superfluous, and given that they could make up shit for her to do, her sitting quietly in various long shots of the action didn't give us a great opportunity to see her do much. On the Pegasus with Lee she seemed to turn into a kind of Ellen Tigh "wife pet" whose job it was to appear next to her hubby. And they essentially lose Dee long before we see her suicide "tell" -- finding the jacks on Earth.
But you know what, the suicide isn't true to her character at all. Since when is Dee all about the fantasy of settling on Earth? Is it because she's a lapsed Sagittarion and this directly contradicts her religious hopes and beliefs? (And suicide doesn't?) This is a woman who knowingly entered a temporary marriage for the hell of it, whose most salient characteristics in the show were her ability to fade into the background and diligently do whatever it is her job was (communications or something?) or to kind of roll with the narrative punches. She was pretty good at rolling with those punches, but they didn't give her enough punches. It seems more like the writers realized she was serving no useful role, aside from an almost throwaway shot-reverse glance from Gaeta that for about 10 seconds in the entire series suggests that there's a potential for a romance there (which is a shame, because otherwise I'd be more confident that Gaeta was gay).
The Disappointments: Less-Baggy Mixed Bags
Anders: What a dope. I mean, he's good as a dope. I like that Kara understands from the start that their marriage is a farce. But the show tries to have it both ways -- we want them not to be together, but we're expected to believe that Kara kinda sorta needs him. This would be a nice, and perhaps true to a messy marriage, if it were dealt with more consistently. But they keep trying to fold Sam back into the action. Most interesting development was when Kara was basically "done" with Anders but wouldn't divorce him, so he just stayed on another ship until Kara got horny. For a brief period, they gave Anders the role that Ellen Tight could have had for the bulk of the series. But once again they try to pile on Big Revelations and Big Emotional Moments. Thing is, Anders is better as a jock than he is as a "misunderstood brainy jock." He doesn't acclimate to the New Caprica revolutionary unionist storyline like Tigh or Chief; he certainly doesn't acclimate to the Big Reveal (in fact, he appears essentially unchanged, even superficially a la Tory, afterward). He doesn't even acclimate to baldness particularly well. His final send-off, about wanting to achieve "perfection" as a Pyramid player, is a last-ditch effort to slather some profoundness on his backstory, but I don't believe it. I bet he was thrilled to win a championship ring or whatever. In fact, he should have had some kind of fixation on his championship ring -- it is about winning at all costs for him; that was how we were introduced to him, wanting to take out as many Cylons as he possibly could.
Kara Thrace: No, I'm not saying Kara's a bad character. That would result in my being pretty much killed. But she's the biggest waste in the whole series, a tragic waste, and the place where the show's underlying sexism starts to show in an ugly way. Kara is developed in a high school angst protagonist role, a loner who lives for herself first and is good at whatever she does. She's from the same cloth as Princess Leia, with a bit of Ashlee Simpson folded in. But some of the abuses she goes through in this show are worthy of Kill Bill, including a hospital scene that's disturbingly reminiscent of that film's rock-bottom worst scene. BSG is smarter than Kill Bill and usually the show knows how to hedge its bets to avoid some of Tarantino's more embarrassing pitfalls, but the sentiment is there: child abuse, medical abuse, emotional abuse, domestic abuse. She gets to suffer the gamut of "woman's pain," the result of existing sexism taken to sadistic extremes. And her perseverance through these tests makes her, in many ways, the strongest character on the show. Lee can't even handle floating in outer space for a few hours without turning into a wuss with an existential crisis -- Kara's crises seem to emanate from her at all times, sometimes overpowering her ability to function but usually not. I didn't believe that she was "evenly matched" with Lee in the boxing episode (an excellent one-off that makes exposition seem fresh and has some beautifully photographed boxing scenes); interesting thing about Lee is that he's a pretty boy. He'd get his ass knocked out.
And even these weirdly psychosexual abuses I could forgive in the face of that strength, in the steady, stubborn performance of Katee Sackhoff, who seems to be unable to make herself laugh or cry on command but in a way that is suggestive of her character (Kara's laughter and tears are forced, too). But the show abandons her, just like Starbuck's dad abandoned her. She's left adrift in a convoluted series of plot machinations and they never really figure out how to bring her back. And even this is self-consciously alluded to in the failure to resolve the mystery of her crash-landing on earth, but self-consciousness doesn't ameliorate flaws, it just recognizes them. They're still flaws (as Starbuck could probably tell you). Kara's faith is compelling, but she doesn't work as a divinely inspired nutcase. Kara's return is mysterious, and I don't mind the loose ends of it, but she's not a fucking angel. She has DNA. They ran blood tests. Her ship has stuff programmed into its frequencies. You can't just let that go and pretend that Season 4 Kara just "doesn't count." But it doesn't really count -- her actions feel convenient to the churning of the plot, which was one of the nice things about Starbuck generally before then -- she always stood slightly outside the plot, even when the plot was ostensibly about her. We're never worried about whether or not she'll die, we just want to know how she'll escape. One problem is that as the show goes on, we know how to "read" a character being written out of the show, as if (as in a standard soap opera) there was a particular strain of music that might tell us in the opening sequence that a particular character was about to disappear for awhile. That gives ALL major characters Starbuck's invulnerability to suddenly disappearing. (When Starbuck does suddenly disappear, and her name is erased from the following episode's credits, it feels almost like a hoax, which it essentially is, and the other characters' grief feels put-on since we know pretty well she's coming back. Were she not to come back, it would be even more disappointing, since the "death" is so sudden and so stupid.)
Kara's a tough character to develop, since one her most salient traits is that she doesn't really "develop." She's too hard, too set in her ways, too sure of herself. The paradox is that any tampering with her feels like an act of God(s), and any major personality shift feels more like a plot device than a character development. They use Kara for plot purposes almost exclusively in Season 4, which along with the other abuses basically makes her a site for unfortunate shit to happen to. This usually works in-story (how's Kara going to get out of this one?) but extra-story (i.e. in setting up the rest of the narrative) it's destructive. They shoehorn in her "dad" (after absurdly introducing an eighth Cylon like ONE EPISODE before we're supposed to vaguely make the connection that her father is the boxed "Daniel" model...or something) and the ensuing, tacked-on (but well handled considering) piano lessons are used as a Magic Arrow. It feels like pounding in a puzzle piece until it fits instead of finding the right one. But hey, you've got like three episodes left and you can't just start making new puzzle pieces. One downfall of the puzzle structure -- you have to finish the puzzle.
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The Wonky Space-Time Continuum in the Age of Obama
First things first: Battlestar Galactica is, like the new Star Trek movie, a parallel universe vision, but in a more serendipitous way (appropriate for the series) than the Smallville Enterprise. Instead, BSG, which began life in 2003 as a miniseries, is the only television work I can think of that has essentially sound-, vision-, and concept-tracked the Age of Obama before it happened. By Age of Obama, I really mean Age After Bush -- with the kind of defeated-but-hopeful, pragmatic-dabbling-in-mystical, progressive-yearning-to-"go-back" energy that anyone who even casually supported the Kerry campaign (or at least voted for him) understood on election night 2004.
Starting with such a specific political reference may seem to do a disservice to some of the more universal and longstanding political themes that come up in BSG, but in all of its (many) warts and all of its (many) triumphs, the exhilarated feeling that often followed a particularly good one-two punch of episodes over the course of the past few months (never three -- we did it once and it was like watching Tarkovsky) resembled nothing so much as the jumbled state of high hopes and cold realism and distaste for melodramatic manipulation and joy in at least feeling something that accompanied this period of time in my life.
BSG presages many issues that wouldn't be given a mainstream platform until after-the-fact, but were happening concurrently. In Season 3, BSG dealt with occupation, torture, and anti-colonial resistance not only better than every half-assed gesture toward these issues in post-apocalyptic movies like Children of Men, which might be the antithesis on BSG (more on that later, I hope); it dealt with it in one of the only sustained, politically relevant, and politically/dramatically satisfying ways I've ever seen, recalling Battle of Algiers more than Children of Men. Watch President Roslin recommend the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (most likely modeled on South Africa, not U.S.-sanctioned torture, but the situation on New Caprica is arguably more evocative of the latter) -- and then watch the Truth Commission never actually happen, not intentionally but simply because there were more important things to worry about(!) (to be fair, Baltar's trial addresses many of these issues more efficiently, if somewhat reductively) -- and try not to think of the show's relevance. BSG not only got the broad strokes right, it got the mess right. And that's in keeping with its value -- oftentimes its messes, occurring naturally from lack of foresight on the part of the writers and the sheer inability to juggle so many things at once, more accurately REFLECT life-as-it-is even as its idealism -- its PREDICTIVE streak -- argues the opposite or something else entirely.
Case in point: In Season 4, it even got breast cancer right, after seeming to botch it the first time around (see Magic Arrows). (Like many things BSG, the series is strong enough to prop up its weaknesses and, in this case, actually transforms a weakness into a retroactive strength.) The recurrence of the president's cancer leads to a debilitating, prolonged fight with the disease that as far as I know is unprecedented in any television show. Breast cancer, of course, could only be dealt with adequately in a longer format; half of the pain of the disease is in the watching, the waiting, the inexplicable improvements and devastating, sometimes sudden, setbacks. I'm usually hyper-conscious of how cancer survivor imagery is used in media only because I experienced it firsthand, too young to fully understand it but old enough for it to have a profound emotional and intellectual impact on my life. The show eventually gets it all right, in part simply by dint of doing it for so long. The dual purpose of prolonging the disease in the show -- to fulfill a (by Season 4 weirdly begrudging and obligatory) bit of mystical prophecy and to keep Laura Roslin alive until the final episode -- combines to really get at the actual dual purpose (not to be too presumptuous, this was my experience of it) of surviving in the first place; a desire to believe in magical things (that the disease might be miraculously cured) and a necessarily arbitrary goal (I just want to make it to Thanksgiving. I just want to make it to Christmas. I just want to make it to the new year.) It gives special resonance, for me, to the conclusion of the series, which I'll talk about more later.
So the sociopolitical lens through which to look at Battlestar is broken into two lenses mentioned above. The REFLECTIVE lens, though eerily prescient, places it within a complex web of political realities -- in its inclusions and its omissions -- that, though often weaknesses of the series, indelibly and powerfully mark it in time. Its omissions, in areas like feminism and a more enlightened view of human sexuality, are a product of its time, perhaps, but also remind us that BSG isn't "Star Trek" -- society as a whole is not more enlightened in BSG than we are (even at our best); if the political and legal policy messages are largely liberal/progressive, there are plenty of conservative, even reactionary, social messages. When the president of our own country can't bring himself to recognize gay marriage in his rhetoric (even if this doesn't reflect his politics or policies), the uncertain question of the role of gays in the military and Colony society is at least reflective, if not ideal by a long shot.
The PREDICTIVE lens almost invariably falls in the realm of policy. Orders, blanket pardons, bills we never read (dealing with abortion, "interracial" mixing), legal trial outcomes. And in this realm the show is firmly on the side of a modest progressive voice. Let's not forget that, e.g., prosecuting torture has only become (comparatively) a radical progressive measure in recent times, and that this is largely due to the further erosion of the two-party system at the hands of extremists in one party. The goal of a progressive torture policy is simply to return to a pre-Bush Geneva Convention standard of it that recognizes torture as illegal, period, with no significant semantic debate on what constitutes torture (an understanding that in matters of torture, the spirit trumps the letter). An 00s'-era progressive nostalgia, different from more longstanding conservative nostalgia, locates a return to more reasonable policies (a Reagan or pre-Reagan tax on the wealthy, a pre-Bush contraction of the powers of the president, etc.) both before (in the case of torture) and concurrent with (in the case of dealing with the economy) progressive change happening in the future.
BSG's politics are nearly identical. The short-term ideal is a status quo that existed -- even with its deep-seated problems -- just before the attack on the Colonies. And the show never gives up, until its dying breath, of the power of that system, since life without it is not a life worth living (according to our protagonists). The long-term ideals are generally progressive -- erasing hatred between the Colonies' ethnicities (dealt with clumsily but effectively in "The Woman King"), healing the wounds of economic colonization between Colonies (the tylium refinery; the prison episodes; the early role of Tom Zarek), and -- in a symbolic, touching gesture -- trying to rewrite the rules of law from essentially nothing save a few precious law books. This moment, when Lee Adama decides to aid the defense of Gaius Baltar, reminds us that laws are not an oral tradition, and the destruction of the literal stuff of law is its (potential) undoing (shades of the memory tubes in 1984, though for the most part BSG avoids easy post-Orwellian dystopianism in favor of an American liberal pragmatism). The poltically avoided ideals are largely social -- the roles of women in meaningful relationships (h/t girlboymusic), the roles of non-heterosexuals. The show has trickily erased most racial difference and instead posited a world in which location rather than phenotype causes inequality. To the extent to which we accept this somewhat similar (but fundamentally different from, e.g., historical U.S. conception of race in white/non-white binary) world of racial difference, there aren't many significant issues of "BSG race" (excluding Cylons as "race") that aren't at least perfunctorily addressed (e.g. the clumsy overt racism in "The Woman King").
The elephant in the room in terms of a sociopolitical argument is the Cylons. I constantly asked myself what political role they served in the show at any given point, and the most adequate answer I can think of is that they serve a political role when it's convenient and a narrative (plot-centered) role most of the rest of the time. Though well-acted, all of the "original" Cylons (no word on the Final 5 until later) except for Grace Park as Boomer/Athena (#8) and maybe Tricia Helfer as Caprica/Maoist (#6) primarily function as an easily externalized inhuman threat. Issues of humanity for all Cylons, not just ones with whom we've become accustomed as "human" characters, only happens when there is no reincarnation device, when death is death. And even then we still want the majority of the Cylons (the diabolical priest Cavil, the "mystic"-as-advanced-script-reader Leoben, Lenny and Carl, aka "the anonymous black and white duo" Cylons, mixed bag and before long moot point Lucy Lawless) to die and never come back (I mean maybe some of you like Leoben or something, but he doesn't serve any important role after his creepy housewife fantasy on New Caprica falls through). I'll mention the Cylons-as-humans-too stuff as the post goes on, but for the most part this doesn't interest me, and even in the show the cohabitation of Cylons and humans is treated as a bit of a footnote in the bizarre final post-script. Except in a few cases, most of the politics is with the humans reacting to external forces, and that is to a large degree my interest in the show's politics -- not what the Cylons represent, but what the humans do about it.
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The Bad, the Ugly, and the Disappointing: Characters
One of BSG's strengths is the way it deals with individual character psychology. Yet the show is surprisingly uneven with relationships between characters. Conversely, the seasons can differ wildly, from the promise:disappointment ratio of first half of season one with second half of one, and the assuredness:WTFness ratio of Season 3 versus Season 2 (all respectively). Season 3 absolutely towers over the others in terms of its depth, its consideration of bigger issues, and in some ways its character development. So here's a focus on characters with an eye for season arcs (not so much series arc, which will be later), divided into three categories: Ugly, Bad, Disappointing. I'm starting with weaknesses (1) because I'm reading Stanley Kauffman, whose reviews are fairly formulaic -- spoilers-problems-qualified praise-general assessment -- and (2) because in many ways the weaknesses, some of them very weak indeed, are important in considering why, as a whole, the show works as well as it does.
The Ugly: Stuttering, Puttering, and Planning in Season 2
Season 2 feels like pieces being put into place mixed with general casting about for an arc. It's a sophomore slump, not as bad as Mad Men's desperate search for a story, but a slump nonetheless. The deus ex machina-style jump-start of the series at the end of season 2 would, for any other series, probably derail things, but after the faltering of the second season we're, along with the shock, somewhat relieved to see ONE. YEAR. LATER. The founding of New Caprica is in itself the closest the writers themselves get to a Magic Arrow miracle, an inspired re-tooling that, given the unevenness of what precedes it, doesn't feel like cheating (or if it does, doesn't feel like a compromise) and wonderfully opens up the universe, along with effectively saving several characters. But let's start with the weakest characters, then episodes, then themes, many of which appear in Season 2.
Kat: The worst character in the series by a country mile; the writers just have no frakking clue what to do with Kat. She was even shaky in her marginal role (along with at least one other later quasi-incompetent but still grandfathered-in first season rookie, Hot Dog) as the shaky civilian recruited in an emergency to fill the pilot ranks. But she's far worse when her one-note acting is asked to stretch beyond resentment of being second-best; we're actually asked to believe that she has improved as a character, become stronger, when that note is just as grating as it's ever been. The writers see it, obviously, but they just can't bring themselves to off her in true BSG fashion -- an episode that starts giving us odd personal details of minor characters, which almost inevitably = DEATH, SORRY -- until far too late in the series. Whenever she's on screen, I'm completely ripped out of the series for basic reasons -- she's clearly out of her league actingwise, not only a weak presence in the company of strong character actors, but she's miscast. The only believable character trait that Kat has is that she sucks as a pilot but is the best that the military can do given the circumstances. This is a marginal role that could have used some developing -- how far can an incompetent person get before they're even incompetent by desperate standards? -- but instead they actually pit her head to head against Starbuck. This is like seeing someone sucker punch a bully at a local high school and putting her straight into a boxing ring. She is utterly slaughtered, the connection between her and Starbuck 100% false and her ending particularly ungraceful. (Remember what I said about getting cancer imagery right? Reverse that and condense into one episode.)
Poor casting is probably the number one sore spot in the series, even given all of its Magic Arrows and convenient wrap-ups and deus ex machina moments, as its the only thing that rots the series from the inside out. To continue the metaphor, the BSG series is very much like the ship itself -- largely decorative exterior (essentially a cross between a war movie, a special effects space movie, and a soap opera) is somehow stable and reliable when it's really in action, and getting to know the insides of it more intimately (and the people who run it) makes the disconnect all the more powerful. When we're reminded in the final season that they've essentially been flying around the universe in a mock-up of a battlestar (this is hinted at in the Pegasus subplot, which I'll get to in a second) some of the early themes stemming from the miniseries that we've forgotten about are reiterated. Everyone in power is there accidentally. It's an oddly affirming reminder; these people, past their prime or far FROM their prime, are doing their best and moderately succeeding just in surviving. (For all its mysticism, there aren't too many Star Wars-like "one shot destroys the Death Star" moments in BSG.)
Anyway, when the people inside that structure are rotten, it's the one thing that seems to significantly damage viewer morale, as it were. We want to want to spend time with these characters, the stock characters, the "deep" characters, the central characters, the minor characters. And the show is smart enough to know when a character isn't working, either retooling him/her or offing him/her. The latter is unpleasant but satisfying, like spring cleaning, and the show seems vaguely aware of its own machinations in cleaning house: "ah, yes, Billy just proposed to Dee! They're gonna kill him!"
Billy: Actually not as weak a character in retrospect, and one who had a lot of room for improvement and development. I do wonder whether or not he just wanted out. But I can imagine him getting much darker and more pessimistic as the series continued; his inclusion in "ugly" is for the typical gracelessness with which they disposed of him. Not as egregiously tacky as Kat's swift radiation-induced leukemia (it's almost like the writers resented Kat, and wanted her to go in the most gruesome possible way, as a -- shock! -- druggie who eventually, for her own hubris, is pretty much melted away in graphic detail), the stand-off that eventually takes care of Billy is arbitrary and false. The relationship between Billy and Dee hasn't had enough time to develop, and his impromptu proposal deserved a more lighthearted deflection. This also sets off the relationship between Dee and Lee, which doesn't work for a variety of reasons (some of which the show deals with with characteristic frankness) but also doesn't work for performance reasons. The actors just don't really work together very well, so we don't care to see them together. It holds none of the underlying tension of seeing, e.g., Chief and Cali or Kara and Sam together. As a catalyst, almost nothing good comes from Billy's death -- Dee/Lee, an unresolved civilian conflict, a lapse in the shows thoughtfulness in dealing with internal politics (we don't care enough about the faction civilians who end up killing Billy to care whether or not they live or die, which is rare in the series even for civilians who have done worse). And of course there's...
Tory: Tory worked well as a background character, and it was nice that she reflected a change in Roslin's personality in Season 2 rather than seeming to be the impetus for that change. Politics got dirtier, so did Roslin, so did Roslin's assistant. But there are cracks even in these early points: Tory seems to have far too much control; even if she were flat-out evil (as she becomes in a cheap attempt to deepen her character later) nothing is hidden from Laura Roslin. That's part of the genius of the president character -- she is always completely in control of everything, a political wheeler and dealer whose personality traits were forged dealing with kindergartners and whipping poor high school writing into something at least marginally competent (we presume). As a subordinate, Tory works just fine, but in keeping with the Russian roulette that helps decide which minor characters are going to be killed and which will be promoted to Major Characters, the show makes the terrible decision to give Tory more presence and more of a role in the direct development of the series to its conclusion. It doesn't work. Tory has no backstory, has no particularly interesting characteristics aside from assisting in dirty politics. Every character turn they give her is false to the character and, frankly, the actress can't handle them. She is self-satisfied and empowered after her Big Change. False -- she's a crony, she can't play self-satisfied from this character; this character is fundamentally a weasel. She is a reluctant temptress sent to cajole info out of Baltar. False -- of her many tricks, turning them isn't one of them, and aside from just functionally not being able to sell sex appeal (especially when there's a Six on the show) it feels shallow. Momentary hand-wringing about it doesn't alleviate the bitter aftertaste of the questionable plot convenience of this change. She slowly becomes pure evil. Totally false -- again, there is nothing "pure" in a weasel character. This would be like letting Baltar himself start to buy into his own messianic rhetoric completely -- indeed, his occasional buying-in and occasional buying-out is totally in line with his character: what else is a Messiah than someone who really buys his own hype?
Hot Dog and others: Oh, the pilots. So many bad (actor) pilots! And for the most part most of them are set dressing. Sometimes people die and you aren't even sure you've met them before. Which is fine -- I mean this is part snazzy effects war movie after all. I still don't remember who the main character in Black Hawk Down was (it was supposed to be Josh Hartnett, bu they ALL looked like Josh Hartnett). I won't get into nepotism of the younger Olmos having this role through the entire series, but suffice it to say that I didn't buy his magical, "natural" transition into ace fighter pilot (he scans "fresh meat" through the entire series). I didn't want to see him be the person to fly out when we're supposed to understand that no one important is going to die in a battle. When Starbuck or Lee went out in Season 1, you could cheer at the effective "invincibility shield" that their presence signalled. Not true of Hot Dog, and they have a few misplaced real-character attributes pegged to him in Seasons 3 and 4 that don't change that perception, though I do like the thought of him and Cali getting together for a tryst and winning each other over with dopey platitudes. "It's like, when I look at you, I just feel like I know you, y'know?" "Yes. I know exactly what you mean. It's like we were together in another life."
The Bad: Four Years of Mixed Bags
For the most part, bad characters are merely not as strong as other main characters but forced onto the same stage. They usually don't flounder (that would be for the ugly category) but they also peck away at credibility. Some of these pecks are resolved at some point in the series and resemble charming dents from a previous battle, some are good ideas gone awry, some are strong characters who lose their footing as the story sweeps them aside or into places they don't belong.
Ellen Tigh: When Ellen was introduced, there's a brief delight in the thought that she might be a Cylon (the episode, "Tigh Me Up Tigh Me Down," directed by Edward James Olmos, is incongruously delightful, like a particularly quirky X-Files monster-of-the-week). Then there's brief delight later when you realize she's not a Cylon and that yes, this is just a crazy trampy wifey character we're going to have to live with. And then that gets old.
...And then it gets older.
...Etc. Ellen never really worked in the series even conceptually -- Tigh doesn't make sense with his maneating wife in tow. She's largely responsible for a deterioration of his character, save for a fascinating Cheneyesque stint as commander, throughout the second season (he suggests what Cheney would look like as Obama's vice president or something). And of course there are obvious reasons Tigh gets his groove back -- loses Ellen, loses eyeball. Sea captain is a great look for Tigh through Season 3 and the first part of Season 4.
Also, there's no way to define Ellen outside of her relationship with Tigh. Sometimes this is almost comically awkward, as you wonder what the fuck it is she does on the Battlestar all day in his tiny room (aside from drink), and why they couldn't just let her live on one of the many civilian ships with better amenities. They could still fly her in at crucial superego moments but she wouldn't have to coexist with the daily routine of the ship. The acting itself is insubstantial -- I don't buy her as a seducer/manipulator, even if I do buy her as a tramp -- and even for a closet jelly-legged coward like Tigh I don't buy the power that she has over him. Ever. The "eternal romance" reveal is particularly phony: I find it really hard to believe that they weren't divorced before the attack on Caprica. In fact, their being divorced then reunited on the ship to deal with all the problems that led to the divorce could have been far, far more convincing.
Admiral Cain: Here we get into some issues of sexuality when it comes time for Razor, but suffice it to say for now that the real problem with Cain is that the actress isn't tough as nails. She plays Cain as a bitch, not as a brutal, hardened survivor; the Razor backstory is somewhat helpful in this regard, but ultimately she strikes more as a power-hungry businesswoman than a power-hungry military officer. I buy her at the head of a corporation, not a battlestar. Why couldn't they have cast an older woman whose role in the military was more of a mirror inverse of Adama -- someone for whom gender is somewhat beside the point, so that philosophy, not personality, was the driving antagonism? Cain, as played by Michelle Forbes, presents a brief inconvenience: how can we quickly dispose of her? As opposed to the harder realities of military command, which can't be so easily circumvented. The writing here is lazy and too easy. She's not just a woman commander, she's also significantly younger than the other commanders; we assume some kind of "unnatural" ascension to the top of the chain of command (not that we mind this when Lee Adama does it). She's not just "hard," she's SADISTIC, and so is her crew. When we're introduced to the chilling possibility that Cylon pain is as "human" as human pain, and that there are comparable psychological traumas (in the form of the Six that I call the Maoist, for her transformation into a Godardian heroine after being freed from the Pegasus), we get about as much subtlety in the sadism of Six's torturers as we do in Full Metal Jacket, or maybe Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.
All of these "special case" scenarios -- a commander who doesn't necessarily deserve the power she has and has a record of outright brutality (Adama at one point in Razor claims he might have made her decision to strip a civilian ship of its supplies. This is possibly the most bullshit thing his character says in the entire series, all to try to paper over the mistakes in conceiving of the Cain character this way in the first place -- Razor reads largely as an apologia for the ill-thought-out resolution of the Pegasus storyline). Her officers are either sadists (the torturer) or buffoons (her new Executive Officer, who has a central role in the hands-down worst episode of the series, "Black Market"). Her crew consists almost entirely of characters out of Starship Troopers. There is a big fat strawman moral imperative for Adama to make decisions that he never should have made in ordering her assassination (yeah right). Ultimately backing down from it doesn't fix the problem -- it's the decision that counts for Adama, not the execution, and to put Starbuck in that situation (essentially sending her to her probable death after committing the assassination) is doubly untrue to his character.
And then there's the gay thing. Cain is half-openly gay, in that the entire ship seems to know that she's in a relationship with Maoist Six in the Razor film but it's given an oddly sinister tone in how it's presented: sideways glances, an air of conspiracy. It's complicated: I mean, we know who Six is, and we know who Cain is, and they don't know the other yet. And Cain is a commanding officer carrying on an affair with one of her crew. In a show that openly dealt with sexuality, this wouldn't present a problem -- it's no different than if Adama carried on an affair with one of his crew. But it is different, because she is the only explicitly homosexual character in the entire series. Not one other homosexual relationship. IN A MILITARY SOAP OPERA. I mean come ON. The show isn't a fraction of the amount of dumb it would need to be to obviously present us with a character whose cruelty or conflict stems from the "problem" of his or her homo- or non-heterosexuality, but it doesn't really excuse the hush-hush way the show deals with non-heterosexuality in general -- presumably Cylons are inherently bisexual, to the extent that the "bi" part even matters to them, but this isn't very well explored since, e.g., Gaius is featured as the main subject of a Baltar-Caprica-Lucy Lawless love triangle -- it's more "I Kissed a Girl" (Perry) than "I Kissed a Girl" (Sobule). The relationships are uber-hetero, not just man-on-woman but REAL MEN on REAL WOMEN. Which perhaps is as it should be on the REAL MEN side (I mean jeez, they're in the military) but why aren't the women allowed to be the "men" in their relationships without consequence? Kara (I'll get to her in a moment) is continually punished in weirdly domestic and invasive ways for what appear (reductively) to be her masculine characteristics (don't want a strictly monogamous relationship? See how you like being a HOUSEWIFE SLAVE!). The one gay character coincidentally (and in this case I do allow for the chance that it was a narrative coincidence, since I'm charitable to the show) is both a Controlling Lesbian Boss and a Deeply Conflicted Single Character. (For you see, she has no time for a family, because she is a woman in a man's world. Which is actually statistically true in many fields -- just read some research on women artists [PDF] by the NEA that suggests that women are far less likely to have children than men in various artistic fields, though this is partially the result of women generally being much younger than men.)
Cali: Cali is the rare character who starts off weak and is given the most possible development within her weakness. She succeeds where Kat and Tory both fail (pretty miserably), and where Ellen, say, might have been stronger. The show seems to understand pretty well that Cali is stupid, a dim bulb. In a show that's reluctant to show dim bulbs in a non-threatening -- and perhaps even useful within the military -- way, this is a nice development. Cali is never made to appear secretly savvy about anything; she's not even a particularly good mother. She's just a below-average gal in an extraordinary situation. This isn't a possibility they allow for, e.g., Helo, whose brittle dumbness that is evident in Season 1 is turned into a kind of hardheaded moral righteousness in later seasons. I like Helo, his character works, but part of me wishes they would just let him be a little bit dumber. Other dullards are either misguided (Gaius's cult) or threatening (the Marxist Baltar supporters, the Sons of Aries) or Politically Relevant (the thinly-veiled Christian Scientist Sagittarons, the un-unionized tylium proles). But what about the good-hearted meatheads? The jocks? The peabrains? The dolts? Even Anders is given a veneer of sophistication that his character's life and series development doesn't really bear out.
But Cali deserves more pedestrian strength, like the first wife character, Arabella, in Jude the Obscure, who may not be bright but is at least "man enough" to slaughter a pig (one of the more memorable sequences I think I've ever read, actually). In this metaphor, Chief is Jude and Boomer is the unattainable (eventually attained but still remote) second wife, Sue. But Cali's weakness is weak in almost all respects; she's too forgiving, too weepy (for an actress who doesn't weep very naturally), too damn miserable. I appreciate the startling revelation that Chief makes to Adama that (IIRC) includes an outburst that Cali's breath is like cauliflower and her eyes are dead. This felt right, but it felt right from the eyes of writers shaking their heads about not being able to get rid of Cali sooner. It's unfortunate, because I like Cali's role as a plain person in an extraordinary situation: it was much like Chief's Season 1-3 arc, but...y'know, dumber.
The Defense Lawyer Guy: What was the point of this character? Played with oily charm, sure, but I half expected a Fight Club-style reveal that HE WAS ACTUALLY LEE'S BAD SIDE or something. He was good as a cartoon for one or two episodes (Baltar's trial) but he keeps coming back, they keep trying to psychologize his amorality. This is a mistake -- not everything in this series needs to be psychologized, which is perhaps one of the most annoying offshoots of the New Age of Complexity in "series-arc" shows, the obsessive need to explain everything psychologically, like the awful psychiatric explanation at the end of Psycho. Now that pseudo-psychological impulse has been so deeply ingrained into television arcs that it's getting harder to find appealing character acting (many of the Bad and Ugly candidates fall into the category of "interesting bit role trying to hold its own on the main stage"), which would greatly benefit some of the clunkier relationships and characters in the show. The Defense Lawyer Guy is the perfect example: instead of a bittersweet Usual Suspects-esque kiss farewell, he hangs around for appearances for the rest of the series as we learn about his wife who died and his cat who died and his blah blah blah. I DON'T CARE. The guy is a snake oil salesman -- I don't need to know that he was driven into the business by an overbearing patriarch or something.
Dee: A tough one, because I like Dee. Funnily enough, her suicide was the first BSG moment I ever saw, from a Youtube meme. It reiterates the idea above of superficiality in coup de theatre, but again, it's not the mere existence of coup de theatre that inherently makes it superficial -- but I knew of Dee's death the entire time I watched the series and it didn't fundamentally change my view of her throughout. Her presence in the show is too slight to merit the major character development they attempt in Season 3, and she can't really hold attention when onscreen with Lee, though the show deals with this directly. She knows the relationship is doomed and that they're essentially just having a good time (more on the counter-intuitively progressive role of marriage in the series later). At the same time, though, she seems to be telegraphing her character's weaknesses in the series itself -- "I know I'm just a bit player, but it's nice that I get to share the stage with the Starbucks and Adamas and Roslins, even for such an implausible and obviously temporary reason." Dee's problem is just that she was a good supporting character that wasn't given much to do. Even her role in the CIC seemed somewhat superfluous, and given that they could make up shit for her to do, her sitting quietly in various long shots of the action didn't give us a great opportunity to see her do much. On the Pegasus with Lee she seemed to turn into a kind of Ellen Tigh "wife pet" whose job it was to appear next to her hubby. And they essentially lose Dee long before we see her suicide "tell" -- finding the jacks on Earth.
But you know what, the suicide isn't true to her character at all. Since when is Dee all about the fantasy of settling on Earth? Is it because she's a lapsed Sagittarion and this directly contradicts her religious hopes and beliefs? (And suicide doesn't?) This is a woman who knowingly entered a temporary marriage for the hell of it, whose most salient characteristics in the show were her ability to fade into the background and diligently do whatever it is her job was (communications or something?) or to kind of roll with the narrative punches. She was pretty good at rolling with those punches, but they didn't give her enough punches. It seems more like the writers realized she was serving no useful role, aside from an almost throwaway shot-reverse glance from Gaeta that for about 10 seconds in the entire series suggests that there's a potential for a romance there (which is a shame, because otherwise I'd be more confident that Gaeta was gay).
The Disappointments: Less-Baggy Mixed Bags
Anders: What a dope. I mean, he's good as a dope. I like that Kara understands from the start that their marriage is a farce. But the show tries to have it both ways -- we want them not to be together, but we're expected to believe that Kara kinda sorta needs him. This would be a nice, and perhaps true to a messy marriage, if it were dealt with more consistently. But they keep trying to fold Sam back into the action. Most interesting development was when Kara was basically "done" with Anders but wouldn't divorce him, so he just stayed on another ship until Kara got horny. For a brief period, they gave Anders the role that Ellen Tight could have had for the bulk of the series. But once again they try to pile on Big Revelations and Big Emotional Moments. Thing is, Anders is better as a jock than he is as a "misunderstood brainy jock." He doesn't acclimate to the New Caprica revolutionary unionist storyline like Tigh or Chief; he certainly doesn't acclimate to the Big Reveal (in fact, he appears essentially unchanged, even superficially a la Tory, afterward). He doesn't even acclimate to baldness particularly well. His final send-off, about wanting to achieve "perfection" as a Pyramid player, is a last-ditch effort to slather some profoundness on his backstory, but I don't believe it. I bet he was thrilled to win a championship ring or whatever. In fact, he should have had some kind of fixation on his championship ring -- it is about winning at all costs for him; that was how we were introduced to him, wanting to take out as many Cylons as he possibly could.
Kara Thrace: No, I'm not saying Kara's a bad character. That would result in my being pretty much killed. But she's the biggest waste in the whole series, a tragic waste, and the place where the show's underlying sexism starts to show in an ugly way. Kara is developed in a high school angst protagonist role, a loner who lives for herself first and is good at whatever she does. She's from the same cloth as Princess Leia, with a bit of Ashlee Simpson folded in. But some of the abuses she goes through in this show are worthy of Kill Bill, including a hospital scene that's disturbingly reminiscent of that film's rock-bottom worst scene. BSG is smarter than Kill Bill and usually the show knows how to hedge its bets to avoid some of Tarantino's more embarrassing pitfalls, but the sentiment is there: child abuse, medical abuse, emotional abuse, domestic abuse. She gets to suffer the gamut of "woman's pain," the result of existing sexism taken to sadistic extremes. And her perseverance through these tests makes her, in many ways, the strongest character on the show. Lee can't even handle floating in outer space for a few hours without turning into a wuss with an existential crisis -- Kara's crises seem to emanate from her at all times, sometimes overpowering her ability to function but usually not. I didn't believe that she was "evenly matched" with Lee in the boxing episode (an excellent one-off that makes exposition seem fresh and has some beautifully photographed boxing scenes); interesting thing about Lee is that he's a pretty boy. He'd get his ass knocked out.
And even these weirdly psychosexual abuses I could forgive in the face of that strength, in the steady, stubborn performance of Katee Sackhoff, who seems to be unable to make herself laugh or cry on command but in a way that is suggestive of her character (Kara's laughter and tears are forced, too). But the show abandons her, just like Starbuck's dad abandoned her. She's left adrift in a convoluted series of plot machinations and they never really figure out how to bring her back. And even this is self-consciously alluded to in the failure to resolve the mystery of her crash-landing on earth, but self-consciousness doesn't ameliorate flaws, it just recognizes them. They're still flaws (as Starbuck could probably tell you). Kara's faith is compelling, but she doesn't work as a divinely inspired nutcase. Kara's return is mysterious, and I don't mind the loose ends of it, but she's not a fucking angel. She has DNA. They ran blood tests. Her ship has stuff programmed into its frequencies. You can't just let that go and pretend that Season 4 Kara just "doesn't count." But it doesn't really count -- her actions feel convenient to the churning of the plot, which was one of the nice things about Starbuck generally before then -- she always stood slightly outside the plot, even when the plot was ostensibly about her. We're never worried about whether or not she'll die, we just want to know how she'll escape. One problem is that as the show goes on, we know how to "read" a character being written out of the show, as if (as in a standard soap opera) there was a particular strain of music that might tell us in the opening sequence that a particular character was about to disappear for awhile. That gives ALL major characters Starbuck's invulnerability to suddenly disappearing. (When Starbuck does suddenly disappear, and her name is erased from the following episode's credits, it feels almost like a hoax, which it essentially is, and the other characters' grief feels put-on since we know pretty well she's coming back. Were she not to come back, it would be even more disappointing, since the "death" is so sudden and so stupid.)
Kara's a tough character to develop, since one her most salient traits is that she doesn't really "develop." She's too hard, too set in her ways, too sure of herself. The paradox is that any tampering with her feels like an act of God(s), and any major personality shift feels more like a plot device than a character development. They use Kara for plot purposes almost exclusively in Season 4, which along with the other abuses basically makes her a site for unfortunate shit to happen to. This usually works in-story (how's Kara going to get out of this one?) but extra-story (i.e. in setting up the rest of the narrative) it's destructive. They shoehorn in her "dad" (after absurdly introducing an eighth Cylon like ONE EPISODE before we're supposed to vaguely make the connection that her father is the boxed "Daniel" model...or something) and the ensuing, tacked-on (but well handled considering) piano lessons are used as a Magic Arrow. It feels like pounding in a puzzle piece until it fits instead of finding the right one. But hey, you've got like three episodes left and you can't just start making new puzzle pieces. One downfall of the puzzle structure -- you have to finish the puzzle.
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In the next post, I'll discuss the season arcs versus the series arc generally and I'll get to those pesky Magic Arrows. At some point I'll talk a bit more about some of the (somewhat conservative but also counter-intuitively progressive) social politics and try to go more into depth about what makes the politics, and the show's general -- and unique -- apocalypse allegory work (hint hint: it's because it's not actually about the apocalypse).
I never saw BSG as an Age of Obama thing, probably because Obama (as a political symbol) didn't exist yet -- for me (and for most other people, judging by the reviews of the show as it aired) it was strictly post-9/11. Because you have to remember BSG wasn't paralleling the way we'd deal with issues of occupation, torture, etc. after Bush left office -- it was directly reacting to those issues as they first came up in the news. And if you're going to talk about it as a political artifact, I think you do it a real disservice by talking about it in light of Obama but not in light of 9/11. (Also, it's interesting that the show sort of lost its way and started drifting off into weird mysticism when things started looking up, politically, in the U.S.)
ReplyDeleteThere was too another homosexual relationship: Gaeta/Hoshi. (With some strong hinting at Gaeta/Gaius.)
Dee didn't live for the dream of settling on Earth, no, but she was a literal guide throughout the series -- the same way she was the voice that guided the pilots back to Galactica and made sure everyone was present and accounted for during the first few seasons, she was also the voice that guided everyone else down their proper paths throughout the series: Commander, you need to keep the Fleet together; yeah, okay, let's steal this election; buck up, Lee, you're a fucking Adama. Her killing herself wasn't about her personal disappointment in Earth being a wasteland, it was about the fact that they were completely fucking lost. I think her suicide was true to her both as a symbol and a character -- and it was true to her as a character precisely because of her ability to fade into the background, to accept a temporary marriage, to do whatever it was she had to do.
Dee never really believed in anything on her own. She enlisted because she wanted to believe in something, but in every situation, she could see both sides -- she had to, because both sides spoke through her. (She was the Communications Officer, btw, she made it possible for people to talk to each other.) Which is why she could help Roslin and Lee rebel against Adama, then sit in Adama's quarters and help him deal with it, or fight for democracy and the unity of the Fleet by fixing the Presidential election. She believed in other people believing. She married Lee because she wanted to be an Adama. So when there was nothing left to believe in, when there was no place left to guide people to, Dee was done.
Re: Kara suffering "woman's pain:" I need to find something I wrote ages and ages ago about how female characters are an audience analog, and that is why they are always vulnerable and abused. I think it applies to Starbuck, but I can't remember what my actual theory was.
I liked Kat, and I loved Cain, but I can't actually defend them at the moment -- it's interesting reading your reactions to this, because I'm coming from a femslash fandom place, and for me canon and fanon are so intertwined that every time I try to say something about Kat or Cain, I have to stop myself and ask if what I'm about to say is actually true, or if it's something I made up so I could write a fanfic.
Okay, preliminary defense of Cain: Razor wasn't an apologia, Razor was a warning to Roslin and Adama. Part of what made it so satisfying for fandom was that we predicted it -- like, I specifically remember sitting on the subway with a friend, post-"Pegasus," and coming up with this whole story about how the reason Cain raped Gina (via her crew) was because they had had a relationship, and Cain felt betrayed, and she felt embarrassed, and she decided it was a mistake to trust, or care, and she wanted to hurt Gina bad. Which was essentially what we found out in Razor. Cain let her personal shit dictate her political shit, and that corrupted the Pegasus from the top down, and that was why the Pegasus was doomed to an unsustainable future of fighting and running. And it was important that we, the viewers, see that -- because it showed just what was at stake for Roslin and Adama, who had always had trouble separating their personal shit from their political shit, in the coming seasons. It would have been easy if Cain were just the sadistic, power-hungry, demonized character you make her out to be -- we could have dismissed her as just a villain, just a hurdle for Our Heroes to overcome. But really, she was what Our Heroes could become. She wasn't so unlike them after all.
ReplyDelete"But really, she was what Our Heroes could become. She wasn't so unlike them after all."
ReplyDeleteThis is key. It's also why we couldn't see Razor until we'd lived through season three. At the time of Pegasus, Cain and her crew were monsters, a lesson to the audience to help us make the jump from them to us and embrace Cylons and humans as essentially the same. (Can you rape a toaster? etc.) Understanding and having compassion for the crew of the Pegasus wasn't something one could envision until we'd seen Tigh order suicide bombings in the marketplace, and Kara kill Leoben over and over, only to wipe her bloodied hands and resume eating dinner.
New Caprica was, as much as it was about anything, our main characters becoming Razors in order to survive long enough for Adama to rescue them. The only difference is that, for the most part, they were able to come back from the edge. This turns Cain tragic, because her belief in her imperative and the actions she "must" take are not inherently damning, but her sense of duty/guilt/whatever won't let her step back towards being human.
I'll get to Gaeta in the next post, I think, but he's interesting, in that he definitely codes homosexual but is used in the series as a spineless spine, if that makes any sense. He has no real backbone, but he IS a backbone, a kind of point of continuity through the series (a bit like what you're claiming of Dee as communication -- a point which I certainly take, but never really FELT, because to me Dee was always more background than facilitating actor, though your specific points are right and mine is coming as a Big Picture feeling).
ReplyDeleteYou're also right that Razor isn't an apologia -- for one thing, it's quite GOOD as a sort of one-off episode describing a backstory that was sorely lacking the first time through. But Cain didn't magically transform into a monster when she was screwed over by Mao Six, she was a dormant monster whose abuses just weren't quite as egregious beforehand.
And how could personal choices that Adama/Roslin make them become more vulnerable to a Cain-like downfall? Was there a personal choice that they made in late Season 3 or Season 4 that was in any way comparable to the monstrous things Cain had done? She personally murdered her XO when he disagreed with her, authorized the rape of a former girlfriend, and ordered her military to fire on innocent civilians so she could loot them and then leave them to die. I just don't buy Adama/Roslin ever getting anywhere near those kinds of actions.
I don't think Cain is fully the demonized power-hungry character she might seem in the way I've put it, but she's a lot closer to it than some logical "end point" of letting personal feelings get in the way of political decision-making. (And anyway, it's ultimately the super-personal decision to go on the -- admittedly volunteer -- vigilante mission that allows everyone to find the Real Earth, in Magic Arrow fashion.)
What seems to corrupt the Galactica, by contrast, is the basic lack of hope after the disillusionment of Eart 1. It has nothing to do with personal or politics, really, it has to do with a dream smashed. But continuing that search was (personally, letting Kara do her thang, and politically, justifying it to the fleet) their most reasonable option after the New Caprica fiasco.
The only difference is that, for the most part, they were able to come back from the edge.
ReplyDeleteBut none of this applies to Adam or Roslin. Roslin turned into a pot-smoking free spirit on New Caprica; Adama grew a moustache and stayed on the ship.
As for the others, I thought the civil war within the ship among the resistance leaders and those who cooperated was great, but their "edge" had nothing to do with Cain's "edge." Cain's edge was inhuman; the resistance's edge was an extreme of a reasonable political spectrum -- i.e. we are given the option of actually sympathizing with a SUICIDE BOMBER on New Caprica. There is a moral gray area in terms of how the plot unfolds. Ultimately I don't think any sane person can support an action like that, but it tries to give you a glimpse into a desperate (insane?) mindset.
Cain isn't "temporarily insane" or something. She is deliberately sadistic and hurtful. She goes out of her way to inflict cruelty -- killing her officer (as opposed to, say, jailing him), ordering the families of civilians to be shot to coerce them into her bidding as opposed to, say, shooting dissidents. There is absolutely no moral gray area whatsoever, and I would argue that her stakes are LOWER than those of the suicide bomber.
Re: Age of Obama vs. 9/11, I dunno, I want to be clear that what I'm identifying has nothing to do with Obama as a figure (that couldn't be predicted at ALL in, e.g., 2004, when he was little more than a galvanizing media presence after speaking at the DNC). What I mean is the energy around getting Bush the fuck out of office in that time period, the feeling that something deeply disturbing was happening. What BSG did consistently was uphold the sanctity of existing law and the constitution, which was the key issue through Iraq, Gitmo, torture, etc. The trampling of traditional understanding of constitutional limitations on the presidency. The Age After Bush merely means undoing what Bush did and then starting over again. And in that sense, I think it has a lot more to do with the state of the nation during Bush c. 2004 and the election (in terms of its general feeling and moderate liberal sentiment in policy) than some grasping for post-9/11 significance of a terrorist attack.
ReplyDeleteThe main thrust of Battlestar is not, for me, "never again" or "we will not be kowtowed by terrorists" (since BOTH of these questions are repeatedly thrown into question the more a few Cylons are humanized) but "we will not allow this attack to destroy the fabric of our democracy or our constitution." That's not (just) an argument against the terrorists, it's an argument against those who WOULD use the event as an excuse to destroy many of the foundations of our democracy -- illegal grabs at power, placing themselves above the law, ignoring historical law due to "extenuating circumstances." THIS is what Adama/Roslin will not do, use the event as an excuse to pretend that they get to do whatever the hell they want.
Woops, I meant "cowed," not "kowtowed."
ReplyDeleteEhhhhh, I don't mean to say Gaeta has no backbone. He does.
ReplyDeleteBut that, rather, he acts in a certain personal interest while rationalizing it in the name of order (or something) -- the sense that you get that at least half of his revolutionary turn is just sour grapes for having lost his damn leg.
Um, wait, did I miss a Hoshi/Gaeta relationship? When I watched these episodes I don't remember that relationship at all, but apparently there is innernet chatter about it.
Ah, the webisodes:
"The 10 webisodes, entitled "The Face of the Enemy," tell a story that takes place between seasons 4.0 and 4.5 of Battlestar and follow Lt. Gaeta when he is sent off in a Raptor with a handful of strangers and one of them mysteriously dies."
Are these important to the series arc? I missed all of them (the New Caprica ones and these, which I had no idea even existed).
You don't need to watch the webisodes to watch the series (obviously, since you managed it) but they do add a lot.
ReplyDeleteI got back from a night out faced with Dave's very intelligent criticisms to try and drunkenly respond to, but you seem to have run interference for me. Not much to add to those few posts except for WORD.
ReplyDeleteAll good points! And yeah, I remembered why Cain shot the families this morning as I was waking up. (I've been thinking over this stuff quite a bit.)
ReplyDeleteIt's funny, I was going to talk about fallibility in another post, the idea that Adama and Roslin are extremely questionable leaders whom we for some reason (for narrative reasons) expect to "do the right thing."
I'm admittedly basing my Cain stuff on the same speculation that exists about her prior to when we meet her -- it's intimated that there was some "other reason" that she rose up the ranks and recognize that she has little experience as a commander because of her age. But a lot of that speculation is probably rooted in jealousy among top brass like Adama, who is essentially a retired (and ambiguously disgraced) general who runs a museum prior to the attack.
My larger point re: Cain (since regardless of what I think of her, she's really important to our understanding of the series) is that what we see her go through happens within one three-part episode arc, with some "fill in" from Razor (but no change in the timeline), whereas all of the stuff you describe Adama and Roslin doing happens over the course of the four seasons, and encompasses many of the flaws and virtues of the show -- some of those choices are little more than Magic Arrows (Roslin's religious zeal is extremely short-lived and for the most part a temporary narrative convenience, and I'll probably talk about it as its own Thing), some of them open up the possibility of personal life not necessarily interfering with policy if the policy remains unaffected. However much we might have hated the Bush administration as people, it only matters to what extent their personalities actually shaped policy. It's a mixed bag in BSG -- stealing the baby is a soap opera device but has little to do with how the government or the fleet is run. And some of the decisions just seem out of character. I didn't buy Roslin's suddenly (almost rabidly) anti-union stance in "Dirty Hands" at all, but the resolution presents another middle-ground progressive/liberal policy solution to a problem (as opposed to, say, the Gaius Marxist alternative).
Hm, re: "fill in," that's not quite right either. But I guess in watching Razor I still had the shock of the first reveal of these actions, when the XO tells Tigh about them, more than an adequately sympathetic new view with new information. I was still as shocked and disgusted to see it happen in flashback as I was to listen to the story, which isn't the case for Roslin/Adama's many many (many many) fuck ups and bad decisions.
ReplyDeleteBut...okay, Dave, that's a terrible explanation. "I didn't buy it"? Come on. You've essentially said, "Well, I think Roslin and Adama are nicer than Cain because I know them better than Cain, and also because I decided to close my eyes and not watch when they do bad things." Whether you bought it or not, Roslin was anti-union. Whether you bought it or not, she ran the government based on her personal religious beliefs. Whether you bought it or not, she stole a baby and told its parents it was dead, and it did have to do with how the government and the fleet were run -- and honestly, how is it that much different than raping Gina? (Actually, what I think I'm seeing in your comments is that you view Cain as worse because Cain is more violent -- she does physical damage, whereas the damage Roslin and Adama do is harder to see.)
ReplyDeleteAlso, it's interesting that you see Roslin's religious zeal as a short-lived narrative convenience -- as someone who watched the show in realtime, I still think of it as a BIG THING within the show as a whole, and one of Roslin's defining characteristics.
It's funny, I was going to talk about fallibility in another post, the idea that Adama and Roslin are extremely questionable leaders whom we for some reason (for narrative reasons) expect to "do the right thing."
ReplyDeleteNot only do we expect them to do the right thing, but we accept that whatever they do is the right thing, even when any sane person would be like "ZOMG THESE PEOPLE ARE EVIL WUT?"
And I liked the introduction of the existentialist Shaw as a flexibly moral center in Razor who guides us through the mess. It allows us to observe Cain in a less antagonistic way (and I did start to like Cain more through Razor than I did in that Pegasus arc) and wonder what we might do in her shoes.
ReplyDeleteTo get back to the killing of the XO point, though, one thing that I thought was interesting was the contrast between that incident and the Kobol situation in which an obviously crazed superior officer is ordering a suicide mission at gunpoint. The show uses yet another hedge (Gaius, the neutral third party, stepping in), but in this case there is no chance of us siding with the superior officer himself; we may understand, however, why the soliders refuse to ignore or disobey his orders. But there are other instances of mutiny (on the Demetrius, say) during which we sort of understand both sides (e.g., Sam is pretty clearly in the wrong for shooting Gaeta in the leg).
But let's think of the possible consequences here. If Cain is worried about a mutiny, then there must be wider-spread issues than this one individual (which there obviously are). If she's worried about this one individual, then there must be a way to take him out of power without resorting to killing him. Other officers will step up out of something other than fear of death because that's what they do, and when they call that into question, order collapses. But order also collapses (as Gaeta's coup suggests) when you start murdering people in uniform. She's unfit for command the second she makes that decision; there's no way we can see her as a moral guide after she does it. (I do think there's a way we can see Roslin as a moral guide after the baby-snatching: (1) people in command don't actually know Athena yet (IIRC she hasn't even been on the ship very long, and could easily be programmed to do something or other against her will, since this is their only experience of the 8 model at this point) and (2) it's a protection against the Cylons coming after the child specifically, something that they'll continue to do until they get the child and (3) it's first and foremost a protection for the child. The president (rightfully) assumes that when the Cylons get Hera, they'll take her and do terrible things to her -- which is exactly what they do. Would we question the right of the state to take a child from a home situation that directly endangered her life?
Didn't finish my XO thought, which was that (to use the Kobol example) we don't side with the commanding officer at all, we simply have sympathy for the soldiers facing a pointless suicide mission and doing it out of duty. We don't side with Sam when he shoots Gaeta and understand why Gaeta recognizes Helo (who is a much stronger moral center in the series than Kara) deciding to take command from Starbuck. We also don't side with Adama when, early on, he wants to leave the fleet behind. The moral center shifts according to the situation. But in the Pegasus situation, the one certainty is that we are against Cain, period. But further I'd still argue that we don't see the possibility of Adama/Roslin "becoming" Cain, any more than we could see the most conservative Democrat taking on far-right policies without "switching sides."
ReplyDeleteAnd I don't mean to say that switching sides is literally impossible, but (again speaking from a kind of liberal pragmatism) it's just not really within the realm of plausibility. Because despite the fact that everyone is a little "dirty" or corrupted or self-interested or whatever, there is still a categorical difference between certain groups, and Pegasus/Galactica is one of them. The progressive analogue goes: get rid of the right-wingers first, then rebuild a two-party system of sensible people. (This, coincidentally, is exactly what's happening -- an echo of Eisenhower-era Republicanism and full entrenchment of the New Deal on both sides that wouldn't be undone until Reagan -- and I wouldn't be surprised if in 20 years the Republican Party consists of people who are now conservative Democrats. It is unthinkable, though, to think that even an Evan Bayh or a Ben Nelson could become a far-right politician, even if they're not exactly "progressive," in the same way that it's unthinkable that Adama could become a Cain, even if he's not exactly morally infallible).
ReplyDeleteThis is why I didn't "buy" Roslin's anti-union stance from a basic writing/concept perspective: as someone who had been a teacher, active in a union herself, for so long, to be completely unwilling to open the possibility of unionization seemed extreme. It's not just that she was against it, but that she seemed to resent it even being an issue, despite her own history with it. I thought it crossed the line from "interesting, unexpected twist now that she's in a different position" to flat-out unbelievable.
ReplyDeleteBut...but...exactly! It is an abandoning of the pre-attack society, and it's justified by saying that we don't have the freedom now, post-attack, to give people the same rights we gave them pre-attack. Look, what I want to know is, why do you feel justified in saying that Cain is "a monster" and "insane" and that there is no moral gray area to her actions, when you won't take as harsh a stance on Roslin and Adama? I gave you a specific example of how Roslin's and Adama's actions are not just comparable to Cain's, but the same damn thing, and twice now your response has been, "Yeah, but when Roslin and Adama did it, I didn't believe it." Yeah, well, that's cheap. Why didn't you believe it? Why were you willing to not believe it about Roslin and Adama, but not about Cain?
You said that no one in the series used the attack "use[d] the event as an excuse to destroy many of the foundations of our democracy -- illegal grabs at power, placing themselves above the law, ignoring historical law due to 'extenuating circumstances.'" I'm bringing up the union situation to say that, yes, actually, they did. You can't just pretend it didn't happen, or it isn't as real as the other things that happened, just because you don't believe it.
[Cain]'s unfit for command the second she makes that decision; there's no way we can see her as a moral guide after she does it.
Eh. Agree to disagree on this one, I guess.
Well I will say that there's more room to interpret Roslin/Adama's actions against other actions than there is with Cain. Cain kind of got exactly the wrong amount of time for us to get to know her -- so many of her actions were moment-to-moment over philosophy (I remember disliking but essentially overlooking BOTH Cain and Adama's decision to kill one another to begin with) that it's hard to call her a paradigm of anything.
ReplyDeleteRoslin not only often stands up for the rights of the fleet generally, badgering Adama on humanitarian issues that Adama has little interest in etc., but we also know her backstory -- she was herself in a union and fought the president's reluctance to cave to their demands (this is part of the episode, IIRC). None of that backstory seemed to be reflected at all in her decision here.
Conversely, we really don't know anything about Cain, which is maybe why I jump to cast her as a more representative authoritarian figure. But, again, as bad as Roslin/Adama can get, they're still categorically not the same as Cain: Cain has decided that there's absolutely nothing that she has no authority to do. She is sole authority and exercises authority through force as the first resort, in every decision we are aware of her making. (If we were aware of her making other choices, if we stayed with her longer, maybe we could see if there were ones that seemed "in character" and "out of character," as I'm claiming of Roslin in the union's case, but we're not.)
I also don't see why you don't think "that was so out of character for her" is an invalid response to this episode. I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest that Roslin and Adama tend, most of the time, to at least communicate with another party. This is what I don't believe about Roslin's position here, that she wouldn't even talk to the factory workers, that she seemed angry that they even wanted to talk to her. She even opens up communication with the prisoners in "Bastille Day" to make sure they're not being sold into slavery.
What would have been more realistic is if Roslin opened up superficial communication but didn't actually take action, at which point Chief's moral decision would be tougher -- does he claim that the president needs to try harder, when she can rhetorically claim to have "tried" to negotiate? But she doesn't even try. So when she caves, the starker black and white of the issue gives way to a more obvious, and easier, moral victory -- Roslin admits her mistake and appoints Chief the union leader.
I can't see anything approaching this sort of flexibility happening for Cain. If Shaw stood up to Cain in when she ordered the murder of civilians, would Cain listen thoughtfully and eventually say, "you're right. It would be wrong to do that"? Why should we believe this when the first action we're made aware of, via the XO, is that she shot her XO the instant he disagreed with her?
"What would have been more realistic is if Roslin opened up superficial communication but didn't actually take action, at which point Chief's moral decision would be tougher -- does he claim that the president needs to try harder, when she can rhetorically claim to have "tried" to negotiate? But she doesn't even try. So when she caves, the starker black and white of the issue gives way to a more obvious, and easier, moral victory -- Roslin admits her mistake and appoints Chief the union leader."
ReplyDeleteOK, I'm completely misremembering the episode -- this is exactly what happens! The issue is just that all of the demands aren't being met, and the real resistance is from Adama, who pulls a Cain and threatens to kill Cally if Chief doesn't call off the strike.
It's actually Roslin who puts the union on the table, in their second meeting, to the surprise of Chief.
Anyway, the episode is more of a gray area to begin with than I was remembering. (And in fact it's Adama's actions that seem more out of character for him, though it seems like he's bluffing. I guess I have to watch that episode again.)
Gah, I'm misremembering in the OTHER direction. Here it is from the BSG wiki:
ReplyDeleteIn Act One: "Roslin acknowledges the hard work, but notes that work is equally hard on the algae processing, or munitions or waste processing teams. When Tyrol asks to cede to some labor demands to get things working again, Roslin objects, calling it extortion, and asks for the names of the leaders to put them under arrest, after which Tyrol reluctantly notes Cabott. Roslin curtly dismisses Tyrol when he tries to continue his pleas."
This is the part I don't really buy. I don't believe that she would call this extortion, when what he's clearly doing (and what she clearly later recognizes) is bargaining on behalf of the workers as representative of a non-existent union.