Battlestar Galactica, Post 2

Once again, there are TONS AND TONS AND TONS of spoilers ahead. Look away! You have been warned!

Re: webisodes -- I haven't seen any of them. I'll probably watch them at some point, but apparently they're where it becomes clear that Gaeta is gay (which is a nice touch, since I assumed it anyway) and a few things on New Caprica are elaborated. Not sure how many other webisodes there even are. But honestly knowing there are more gay characters erases the lingering issues I had with Cain's sexuality -- there are so many more important factors in that situation that sexuality is actually the least provocative thing going on, which in itself is a sort of statement, I guess. The issue with hetero dominance in the show, more later, isn't literal, anyway, it's really more about the power dynamics within given (usually hetero but not just BECAUSE they're hetero) relationships.

Be sure to continue reading the comments in the previous thread for more talk about Gaeta, the prez/Adama, Dee, and especially CAIN and her role in the series. (There's a bunch of excellent counterpoint to the original post down there from Girlboymusic and Alex.)

Anyway, onward to some of the good stuff, some of the bad stuff (ARROWS!!!!) and more disagreement (hopefully).

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Cut for Spoilers: Ch-ch-ch-changes and Magic Arrows!

Before/After Changes and Why They Work

Most characters in the show split into easy before/after binaries that are nonetheless pretty complex. The revelation of the Final Five is a big one, but actually not the most interesting one (I except one character from that) -- also interesting are changes in main characters whose roles either change significantly (Lee) or whose characters themselves seem to change significantly (Adama).

Ellen Tigh: Had a long convo with Emily about this last night, and one thing that I think we agreed on is the fact that Ellen's comeback as a mastermind works, both in explaining a personality that seems to be at odds with just about everything else about the show through much of its run, and also in giving us a credible link to an important narrative element in the finale (the role of the Five). Her return on the base ship and convo with Cavil is interesting, in that almost the entire episode consists of nothing but exposition, yet it's riveting, not just because we're filling in lots of little gaps in understanding. We're literally rebooting a character, as though we're watching a progress bar and anticipating what happens when we get to 100% -- nu-Ellen is also kind of "filling in" her old character, helping to explain what the hell was going on there. New Ellen makes sense because we've been following Old Ellen, and Old Ellen makes more sense in retrospect when we know about New Ellen. In a way, Ellen is the only one of the five who really works -- the others seem either arbitrary or regrettable (just when Tigh's pirate character is getting his sea legs...)

Gaeta: I really like Gaeta. I said in the comments, in response to Nia's discussion of Dee (see those for a more sympathetic and symbolic view of her role than I give) that Gaeta is like a spine for the ship (utterly "professional," seems to know everything when other characters don't, as opposed to Dee who herself brings not her own knowledge support but a kind of facilitator role to the proceedings) but is himself spineless. Which isn't strictly true -- he's feeding the resistance info from the inside on New Caprica, sure, but what I mean is that he seems to have a certain sanctimoniousness, or maybe more reductively brattiness, that doesn't quite undercut his actions, but undercuts perception of him as a noble nerd. So that even though I buy his transformation into a sort of freedom-fighter vigilante/pompous Latin American dictator figure (discussion of the role of Latino characters versus echos of Latin American politics later) (Emily didn't like the transformation so much) I also suspect that it has as much to do with sour grapes about the leg and his general lot as it does with his actual beliefs.

And in a way, he's a good representative figure for crew morale at that point: personal bitterness conflated with pseudo-philosophy about how things should be. This points to an interesting facet of one of the show's own foremost principles, which is that personal bitterness leads to bad decision-making (the Cain Principle), and the bitterness itself tends to destroy the validity of the underlying philosophy justifying the philosophy (echos of anti-civil rights rhetoric abound once we accept the Cylons as near-human, or near enough not to matter). Which isn't strictly true -- bitterness can breed OK policy; policy is policy regardless of how you get there. Emotionally, that is -- it makes a huge difference if you decide you need to kill half the military to achieve your goals; most of the final coup is tainted philosophically from the fact that everyone turns into a fucking maniac halfway through...and hey, let's kill ALL OF THE DIPLOMATS just in case you had any lingering suspicion anyone was getting out of this one. Subtle! The important thing, though, is that shit gets done within what I'll call an imperfect but reasonable democratic framework (which is an aspect of the show I'll talk about in a bit).

Lee: The first thing I noticed about Jamie Bamber in the miniseries was that he was obviously a British person doing an American accent (IMDB corroborated my suspicion). At first I thought it was going to ruin the series for me, but it actually (very quickly) became a nice touch in his character (his accent got better as he went along, too). Lee is a pretty boy, someone who is naturally gifted but is (also) handed everything he's ever gotten. But of course we don't object to this on principle, generally speaking, on the show or for plenty of us in life -- he's basically a Kennedy. Actually, he's a bit of an amalgam of Kennedy intellectual aristocracy (his grandfather the defense lawyer) and military aristocracy, not sure what the comparison point would be. His tight-lipped, throaty American English (in a few years he could be a more foppish Hugh Laurie) is evocative of the giant pole (silver spoon?) he has up his butt at all times, one that he was born with.

This makes him a good foil for Kara because it never allows them to fall into Prince Charming mode: even if they made overtures to a sort of pseudo-empowered version of Prince Charming, it wouldn't work. Lee isn't really a man's man -- he's more of a boy's man (or a "girl's man" in the boyband sense), oddly unthreatening, no great alpha male and not even really a beta male (what comes after beta?). One reason I think he starts to find new roles on and off the ship, particularly in Season 4 (when he gives up the military altogether) but hinted at as early as becoming Roslin's military advisor, is, aside from the more obvious family drama stuff (get back at dad!!!!) because Helo is back from Old Caprica and around to fill the role Lee seemed to want to play in Season 1: the clean-cut all-American benevolent military presence. Also the guy who might conceivably fix the sink.

But there's something gentle, maybe even prissy, about Lee's general demeanor (I suspect that Kara likes him for having distinctively feminine traits while still being super-masculine, i.e. reminds her of herself) and he becomes somewhat superfluous as a military figure, or even as a meaningful authority. (He's not ready for the presidency at the time he has to inherit it, but luckily the presidency is...dissolved, I guess? I'll talk about the ending last, obvs.) Knocking him out of a uniform altogether late in the series is a huge risk that, I think, pays off from a writing perspective: it keeps his character fresh, puts him slightly out of his league, and continues a bizarre trajectory of being handed high positions almost by default without us, or the fleet, seeming to care that much. This is fairly true to the reflective nature of the show -- despite not coming from an aristocratic background (Lee claims he joined the military to put himself through college) after the attack he becomes one of the few truly aristocratic characters on the show -- that is, a class of people for whom great things are destined rather than earned, and not in a Magic Arrow sorta way.

Athena/Boomer and Six: Grace Park might be the best young(ish) actress on the whole show -- she's able to give shades of character that are fully-formed without resorting to various caricatured traits. Boomer and Athena are both our entry points into understanding the human qualities of the Cylons. And in a way, the 8 is the only character who can make the Cylon/human conflict have a tangible philosophical relevance early enough for it to really stick (though the Pegasus episode adds a new dimension to it by introducing a startling level of physical and sexual violence, a major shift from bloodless killing and the occasional ineffectual waterboarding) -- you don't ask questions about "what makes us human" etc. with any of the other Cylons, excepting a few models of Six (still, her dual [tri? quadra? quint?] role as guardian angel remains a mystery through the series, and of course she's introduced as the ultimate femme fatale robot slash random baby-killer. Though we recognize later that this was a mercy kill, or something).

I was impressed with just how different Mao/Gina Six is from Caprica, though -- when Gaius tries to sleep with Gina, I want to throttle him -- "THEY'RE NOT ALL THE SAME!" (An important moment in the show for me.) Generally the Cylon stories are given short shrift, and it's never totally clear how the Cylons work -- they can download each other's memories and effectively become the exact same as a different Cylon, but they possess some element of free will in making their own decisions and identities. They all vote in unison, except for the one time one 8 votes against the others (is it still majority rule, or does this "extra" 8 count as a whole new category of votes? My guess is the latter). Boomer/Caprica are leaders of some kinda peace movement until New Caprica, at which point they basically forget about it and enslave the human race (er, colonize; we've moved beyond mere slavery as the fulcrum of action, I guess? Does that count as progress?). Oh, and then Boomer joins up with Cavil on the Dark Side and fights to wipe everyone out again. (Wait, what?) It's messy. But the performances of our two Humany-Cylons through the whole thing is strong enough to support the flimsy exposition. I recognize, e.g., some of the original Boomer even in Evil Boomer, and the schamltzy suburban fantasy she and Chief have is genuinely affecting -- I didn't care so much about her motives for going all Superevil.

Adama: At first it seemed wrong to get to know Adama more intimately -- I think the first thing we see after the first Earth fiasco is him getting dressed and brushing his teeth, the only non-symbolic (i.e. not facial hair related) personal routine we see of him in the entire show. As we get to know him as a person, we start to lose sight of him as a Great Man: he drinks too much, he's kind of a softie, he makes a ton of small bad decisions when he's not in the CIC proclaiming "difficult but fair" decisions. But y'know what I'll talk about Adama later. Too big of a fish to fry, along with Roslin and Gaius and Tigh/Chief/Helo/everyone-else-I-missed.

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TOP TEN SEVEN MAGIC ARROWS!

The Magic Arrows began with an actual magic arrow -- the one that takes all of the characters to an enchanted planetarium, in which they will have to commit to memory a series of constellations that they can map into their nav systems and find a course that will lead them to the home of the original tribe of blah blah blah blah. This gets complicated.

But it's also largely a contrivance to keep the ship MOVING, to keep it going toward something resembling a Big Plot Point. Ultimately I think the Magic Arrows are the closest the show ever gets to narrative collapse, but luckily for the show the creators are (1) smart enough to know how to pick and choose their arrows sparingly (X-Files had by far more arrows for fewer mythology episodes per monster-of-the-week one-offs) and (2) they seem to have a general exit strategy, whether or not they thought so at the time. And more importantly than just having enough narrative glue to make up for the occasional ugly staple or stitch of a Magic Arrow (or Baby Blood or Warp Tune or etc. etc.), they have characters who are more important than the narrative -- in the sense that they aren't subservient to it -- but who don't also break down the usefulness of that narrative in bringing us through their journey, which would result in a kind of self-parody. But useful isn't the same as good, and I'll just say up front that there are NO GOOD MAGIC ARROWS. They always spell doom for a story line, occasionally for a character (either temporarily or in some cases permanently via DEATH SORRY), and once or twice for a season or half-season. Whatever the that 2.5 crap is all about. DAMN YOU DVD AGE.

Presented in the order I remember them. Their general worth(lessness?) isn't really calcuable (am I measuring in immediate badness or lasting impact badness?) so go to commentary for the signifance.

1. THE MAGIC ARROW (Season 1)

This one's a doozy, and kicked off the metaphor, which I inconveniently kept in my head the whole series. I've tried to keep myself from listing certain deus ex machina as Arrows (uncharacteristic character choices, convenient plot wrap-ups, etc.), since arrows are special, one-time-only Get Out of Writer's Block Free cards that allow things to move on to completely different, if not better, things.

Backstory: In a museum on Caprica there's an arrow that will do something or other according to some interpretation of scripture or something. And what with kamala turning the prez all loopy, she thinks this is a good idea, plus Starbuck is itching to get out of there right about now and test drive her cool Raider (plus she's a little religious herself, plus she's kinda guilty having left Caprica behind what with her paintings and her music and all). Sooooo go get the arrow and it will point the way to Earth!

And it does. It's stupid, but it's not too bad considering it's our first understanding of the show's mysticism-as-puzzle-film-clues. Its significance is tied in what seems to be a halfway point my and Nia's interpretation of Roslin's religious enlightenment, between what I hurriedly claimed was a temporary mystical bent of the president and what Nia more accurately claims as a major Roslin character shift -- letting her policies be driven by religious prophecy.

But the show handles this fall-out of the arrow pretty well, and they don't cheat politically -- Roslin certainly, unlike Gaius's messianic dabblings, believes in religion wholeheartedly at this point (it gives her imminent death an in-the-moment righteousness that foreseeable death from illness doesn't usually allow), but the fleet is pretty starkly split on the issue, along already-religious lines. We recognize that the prophecy stuff is good for the plot (God knows how to read ahead, I guess), but we also recognize (along with Adama, who maybe overplays his hand too quickly but hey, it's the season finale, right?) that you can't be ruled by a religious demagogue. Even one who is demonstrably calculating her potential for electoral success because of the RELIGIOUS NUTJOB VOTE (I see no contemporary parallel). This superficially makes Roslin part Bush goofball and part Rove tactician, but she's still balanced with a healthy dose of liberal pragmatis. She still wants there to be a functioning constitutional democracy and doesn't grant herself special presidential powers -- she does keep church and state separate in the rule of law. And frankly her religious visions are harmless as far as religious visions go (don't forget we had an acting president whose visions told him to wage a crusade on the Middle East). The visions just kind of point the fleet in a direction, which they would have chosen arbitrary anyway -- she's not ordering anyone to re-populate Caprica and claim it as the new Holy Land to incite the Rapture, say.

So the arrow itself is a functional little compass that, though clumsy, is almost entirely useful in simply nudging the ship in a direction. It's like the lame "encyclopedia" that explains the process of transferring consciousness in Being John Malkovich -- we don't ask too many questions of the device because we appreciate the map.

MAGIC ARROWNESS (i.e. immediate convenience to head-smack dumbness ratio): 90%
THREAT TO THE SHOW'S SPACE-TIME CONTINUUM (i.e. lasting impact): 50%

I place the threat to the basic narrative cohesion of the show at about half because the Arrow (1) sets up a really shaky second season that now has to deal with many mystical loose ends that are secondary to what we're primarily interested in (the human drama) and (2) it really really really doesn't make any sense. What was up with that planetarium?

2. BABY BLOOD! (Season 2)

Holy shit, the baby blood. THE BABY BLOOD. Backstory: Roslin's about to die of cancer. Battlestar is renewed for two seasons (I assume). Creators decide to inject her with FETAL HALF-BREED BABY BLOOD to fix what ails her. It works! ...Until they decide to throw in the towel in Season 4 and introduce the cancer again before that season gets going.

What the fuck were they thinking with the baby blood. Seriously. I mean, if they had found a magical pill floating around Planet X6432F3 in the Mixolydian Nebula that could cure cancer but could only be consumed ONCE by ONE PERSON because it was left there 2000 years ago by a now-defunct model rebel Cylon called Pookie it would make more sense.

The problem with the BABY BLOOD is that it's not something that, like a magic arrow, goes away after you use it. The baby is still there. Presumably she still has BABY BLOOD. Why the fuck couldn't they keep a vial handy for everyone else who might ever get cancer? BSG: YOU JUST CURED CANCER. Like, you found the cure. For. Cancer. And you used it one time to make sure the prez didn't die and then expected us to just forget about it?

Shoddy, shoddy planning, BSG. Here's the thing: retroactively, the baby blood almost works as a metaphor for a struggle with cancer. Cancer often does its damage for years and years, with all kinds of strange ups and downs -- regression and attack -- and in bringing Roslin back to full health from her death bed you actually strike on something deeply true about this disease (and lots of chronic and cancerous diseases), that even when the end is near it's probably not quite as near as you think. But you did it with BABY BLOOD. Cancer already has a baby blood. It's called "I don't know why, but thank the gods I'm doing a lot better this week than I was last week." SO FUCK YOU FOR USING BABY BLOOD.

This really does start to rip open a lot of stupid, avoidable holes. Like: why weren't you people doing some fucking bloodwork to figure out how to isolate whatever the hell it was that was curing the cancer? Don't you have a single scientist besides Baltar? And didn't Baltar actually figure it out -- that the shape of the red blood cells were kinda slanted or something, and that this cures cancer?

And hey, OK, maybe the fetal blood for medical gains issue is a hot topic on your planet, too. But surely you could take some blood -- like for routine purposes -- and keep it in a super-secret emergency stash, so that we'll get something like that scene in Angels in America where the guy takes all of the extra prototype AIDS meds that Al Pacino's been hoarding uselessly (except in this case it will be angry patients taking it out of Roslin's fridge). And I mean for gods' sake it's not like Roslin even needed a full infusion of baby blood -- a drop seems to cure most ailments. I bet sniffing it will clear your sinuses.

MAGIC ARROWNESS: 100%
THREAT TO SHOW: 70%

3. CHAMPAGNE SUPERNOVA (Season 3)

Oh man, backstory: Ummmmm. Fuck. I don't even remember this one (do I even have the season right?). Except there's a temple and there's a supernova and Kara already drew it and maybe Hera already drew it and....oh hey, their names rhyme. Huh. And the 13th Tribe built a temple in its honor, under the guidance of the Final Five, who...documented a similar supernova happening 2000 years before it, so it will signal the supernova that will get them to look in the right place for the right nebula which will set off the right bells in the right "people" to find the ship that has the frequency that blah blah blah blah.

This one's more weird than anything else, I guess. It basically just provides a backdrop for a new planet and a few character revelations -- notably from Lucy Lawless, whose sudden religious fervor is more convincing than Kara's in Season 4 and Chief who has a nice character development moment as he comes to grips with some of his strict religious upbringing (of course we figure out he has other obvious connections to the temple later) -- and a reason to get back Gaius after his tenure as a sex slave (the first time around) and a reason to get back Hera (I think). It's a standard magic arrow, a wobbly Jenga piece that doesn't threaten to tip over too badly. And, as always, we don't care as much about the Jenga game as we care about the people playing Jenga. (At the end of Season 2 the Jenga tower tips over completely, and it's the best thing that ever happened to the series.)

ARROWNESS: 60%
THREAT TO SHOW: 10% (I mean, not much of a threat, but it does beg the question how "everything has happened before and everything will happen again" when the frakkin' SUN EXPLODED. And yes, that was a joke, and I'm aware that everything won't happen again exactly the same way it happened the first time. More on that later, too. The real problem/"threat" to the show was in getting rid of Lucy Lawless for so long. She was fun and I enjoyed her openly Australian accent.)

4. THE THING WHERE KARA DIES. (Season 3)

Oof. Just awful. Backstory: Kara dies. In an explosion. And then they take her name out of the credits for an episode and you don't really believe it, and then she's back as a (wink) SPECIAL GUEST STAR. Oh, you rascals!

Problem is, the character does die. The new Kara has almost zero of her old personality, and frankly she's kind of a bore. We get a one-dimensional Close Encounters-like paranoia but little in the way of character development. And they just let the loose end hang out there. Which would be fine -- I mean, whatever -- but stop trying to cover your tracks so hard! "It is the necrotic flesh of Kara Thrace!" Thanks, doctor, for robbing us of any mystery that it was, like, someone else's corpse or something. "OMG SHE SAID SHE WAS AN ANGEL AND THEN SHE ACTUALLY DISAPPEARED!!" Sigh, so I guess she wasn't the daughter of the Lost Cylon or whatever the hell that last-minute escape hatch was.

Look, Kara has a body with blood (not even BABY BLOOD!) in it, and there's a ship with frequencies in it, not to mention metal and tylium ore and probably a stick shift or something. You can tap it with a wrench. In fact, you can take it apart and put it back together again, which they did. So that ship CAME FROM SOMEWHERE. I'll extend my disbelief pretty damn far for sci-fi mysticism, but an unexplained appearance of physical matter from nothingness isn't one of them. When Ellen and Cavil have their Bond villain moment, they could have at LEAST thrown us a frickin' bone. The only possible logical (in the show's logic anyway) explanation is that the Cavil Cylons constructed the new ship, sent an either captured or at-some-point-dead-then-resurrected Kara to Earth, killed her (possibly for the second time), had her resurrected -- since the only possible explanation for THAT is that she is half Cylon by way of the Lost Cylon Daniel Whom We're Introduced to For About Fifteen Seconds in One Exposition-Heavy Episode (which means that half Cylons can ressurect, I guess?) -- then Cavil erased her memories (which we accept he alone can do), and sent her back to the Galactica. OK, fine...but otherwise you're asking me to believe in angels with scientifically documented corporeal presence who also happen to have an exact replica of a Viper ship with them. NO! I REFUSE. To believe in something that loony would cause me to lose my already tenuous grip on reality. Plus it really did kill Kara, so this Magic Arrow can fuck right off.

ARROWNESS: 70% (not 100 because there were a ton of ways they could have dealt with all of this, so it doesn't have the same one-time-only dumbness of BABY BLOOD BABY BLOOD BABY BLOOD)
SPACE-TIME FUCKERY: 100% -- the only unresolved thing in the series that really, really irks me as, y'know, a screenwriting professor or something.

5. THE MAGIC WARP FLUTE (Season 4)

Backstory: There's this song, right, and only Cylons can hear it, see, or the Five Cylons, right, and so when Kara -- whose father is probably a Cylon or something -- plays this song into a computer keyboard, which I guess is "timelessly" designed to be identical with a sideways piano even though to me it looked like a non-standard keyboard (so what if you're using a Mac instead of a PC, or a laptop instead of an adding machine etc. etc.?) (and how do you know which note to start on?) it magically warps you not to Earth, but to a nice inhabitable planet that we might as well call Earth, since it is Earth -- OUR Earth, the "real" one. This is the same device used in such classic sci-fi series as Mario Brothers 3 (two gay men dress up like woodland creatures, play the flute) and Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time (one gay man dresses up like an elf, plays the flute).

I mean, whatever. They need to find some kinda way out of there, said the joker to Chief, so in goes the cheat code, revealed to us in the previous episode, and away they go. Tidy way to get out of a nuclear explosion.

Conspiracy theory: before I even get to the significance of Real Earth in the finale, I would float the semi-crackpot theory that the entire ending of BSG is a Taxi Driver-esque ambiguous fantasy ending, a projection of viewers' desires to see the resolution we were hoping to see earlier in the season. It's OUR Earth! Yay! And they're going to give up technology and become...what, mountain men? Maybe vaguely feudal? Are we to assume they'll build a few pyramids before they give up tech for good?

Anyway, in this theory, the admiral makes one final stand against the Cylons doing what he thinks will be the Great Battle (Last Stand) he could have had to begin with. And then someone arms their nukes and accidentally blows everything to hell. Cue "We'll Meet Again." Instead, we have a warp whistle, so here's yr "proper" send-off.

I can't say that that's true, and the ending is too important, so I'll talk about that on its own.

ARROWNESS: 100%
CONTINUUM THINGY: 0% (who gives a shit at this point, I want my tearful farewells!)

6. DANIEL (Season 4)

Backstory: During a series of Big Reveals, Ellen casually discusses with Cavil a MISSING CYLON (male) whom I presume (in a logical interpretation of Kara's continued existence) to be Kara's father, the musician, who taught her the Magic Flue Warp Song. Unfortunately he's been "permanently boxed," so we don't know anything more about him than that he was sensitive and Ellen liked him.

This feels particularly spackle-like, realizing that there's at least one hole that a Missing Cylon might help fill in. Another one: Leoben tells Roslyn, "Adama is a Cylon." Which he assume by the end of the series he isn't, though he does get particularly upset when, at an interview for a gov't white-collar job he is asked if he's a Cylon to test the detector. But Adama doesn't gain anything by being a Cylon and anyway, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, so it makes more sense that Leoben was lying (even though this isn't exactly what Leoben is all about -- he's more about saying cryptic shit that turns out to be sort of true-ish).

Anyway, Daniel feels more like plot hole coverage than anything else, so his impact on the series is limited. It's annoying, though -- it makes a big difference if Kara is actually half Cylon! Not that I want to know, but I don't want it teasingly suggested and then not really committed to one way or the other. The specific post-death details I get of Kara are precisely the ones that I don't actually WANT: that that is, in fact, her flesh on the dog tag (so what? Like it's impossible to get some dead flesh on there?) and the angel stuff. Oh, and the mashed-potato-carving "something out there" homing device on Earth, which I'm just including as part of the Death Arrow generally.

MAGIC ARROWNESS: 99% (leaving 1% for the convoluted "logical" approach to Kara's disappearance)
THREAT TO SERIES: 5% for annoyance.

7. THE OPERA HOUSE (Seasons 2-4)

Y'know, this is never all that satisfying -- beautifully shot and a great little visual motif, but the resolution of it only services the plot. The significance of the "abduction" of Hera is that it leads them...to the CIC. Where everyone was headed anyway. So that Gaius can give a super-lame speech about how "what if GOD is just a word for NATURE, maaaaaan." The various prophecies are broken in several ways anyway, and they hold no real power over us in terms of narrative cohesion (after the reveal of the destruction of the first Earth) so the metaphorical weight of going into the opera house is pretty much rendered moot. Well done and edited and all that. I'm not sure what message we're supposed to take away from the opera house -- it seems to just kind of exist to give us a rug-pulling A-HA! moment at the end. But of all the loose ends they need to tie up, the significance of the opera house is probably the least interesting one. Like -- KARA. FIX HER.

MAGIC ARROWNESS: 20%, not actually used as a Magic Arrow for most of the series and an evocative little dream world we're continually spending some time in.
THREAT TO SERIES: negligible -- I mean, it was cool as an a-ha moment, it's just that the show undercuts its own faith in its mysticism before we get to this resolution, so we kind of stop caring to see how prophecies unfold. Again, prophecies are just the Jenga game -- we're invested in just watching them play it.

More Magic Arrows I'm missing here? Are some of these not really Magic Arrows as I've defined them? (Does how I've defined them make sense?)

More political resonances in the next post. This one's mostly for fangirlboyish plot geekery. (I don't have many people to chat about this stuff with.)