BSG: Razor (& Extended Edition) **STRIKETHROUGH FIXED**
Sooo, finally getting around to posting about Razor, which I liked. But be warned, spoilers for the whole thing (and the extended edition) follow. And it's really really really long. Sorry. I just started typing and found it hard to stop even though I think I've repeated myself loads. I guess I'm getting back into the swing of this slowly
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Her conversations with Kara when they dance around the point; both of them sneaking down to abuse substances and threaten each other and be just the same kind of person, separated by a razor-edge. It tells us enough. We don't need Kendra to start trying to talk about Cain to Kara, or Kara to bring up her mother. It belittles the weight of both of those women's relationships with...those other dead women.
I agree. I’m about half way through the DVD commentary and it sounds as if in early drafts of the script there would have been even more Kara/Kendra conversations. I think this is a perfect case of it’s better to show us then tell us and hasn’t the series, in Kara’s case at least, shown us enough?
Likewise I didn't think that Cain's backstory was necessary. Okay, it gives us one more reason she is how she is. But...I don't want one more reason. It's not enough to explain why, forty years later, she makes the choices she makes…..The bravery of telling the story of a girl abandoning her sister is somewhat lost by the fact I feel the story was trying to hard to give us reasons we didn't need.
The backstory scene didn’t change my opinion of Cain one bit. Sure, that experience might have hardened her and perhaps made her have zero tolerance for weakness, but, as you said, it was not enough to explain why she was the person she was. One of the strengths of BSG is that we learn a lot about characters from their interactions with others. I get Lee Adama from experiencing how he acts and reacts to Kara, Adama, Laura, etc. It’s why I didn’t suddenly need Dead Pregnant Girlfriend to help explain his depression or an abusive mother to clarify his desire for acceptance and love. If we couldn’t have a season to get to know Helena Cain and why she was, in simplistic terms, a cold hearted murdering bitch, then it was best to leave why she was that way up to our imaginations rather than giving us a clichéd childhood trauma which, yes, thousands of children probably experienced and didn’t turn out like her.
But in this instance, I feel the power is in the madness. The power and the horror is in the fact that she just did it.
You know what would have been fascinating? If we discovered that Helena Cain grew up with her family, that they were still alive at the time of the attacks, and yet she made the choices we saw her make. Then we would be left to wonder if she was just born that way or perhaps her parents or military shaped her to be that way.
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