BSG: Escape Velocity
Two episode ago I went on a long rambling ramble about how everyone was moving sideways. This week, I'm struck by the episode title. Escape velocity. Not just the fact that they're escaping, but the pressures and angles and circumstances and speeds they need to achieve in order to escape.
I figured it out. This season is going to make me uncomfortable and confuse me because
1) it's not going to follow standard television formula and,
2) it's not going to do what I'd do if I were in charge.
That might seem...obvious, and one might well ask where the frak I've been for the last three seasons, but what I mean is this: at times I think BSG has succumbed to formulaic television. Not of the Stargate type, but of the HBO type. The type that puts characters through the wringer and has angst and character development of a sort, but that usually manages to restore the status quo, or introduce a more popular status quo. What I mean is, programs like Lost and Desperate Housewives and Buffy have all broken out of the Star Trek or Stargate episodics, or manic and overwritten soap operatic screechings. But they trap themselves in their own sets of cliches and formulas. An infinitely preferable set, and sometimes a set new enough I don't even notice them, until a run of episodes confuses me and I realise why:
I have no frame of reference to parse this.
It is surprising me.
And I don't just mean "Wow what a shock death!" or "Wow, what a shocking plot twist!" I mean on a fundamental, thematic level, this show is surprising me and confusing me and causing me to ask questions.
I have no idea if the rest of the season will continue on this "escape velocity." I'm almost afraid it will because these characters are sliding away from me; are becoming unrecognisable though intriguing; are becoming almost upsetting in that I've bought into them and chosen to love them and now they're changing and turning and I cannot punch through my screen to save them. But this is not an effect of bad writing. This is simply the writers being braver than me. It's rare that when I recoil or feel uncomfortable my response is to question whether the failure is in me.
(For clarity: this impulse is small and subsumed by the fact that I am very much enjoying this show right now. But it's there and I'm intrigued by it.)
As a comparison, I will try to explain why I didn't have this reaction to the start of season three. That was daring storytelling and a sequence of episodes I loved almost unreservedly (the reservations being a) Lee's plotline and b) that I think BSG does better when its comparisons aren't so explicit and they shouldn't have tried to make it an Iraq parallel when even RDM admitted it should be Vichy France).
But everyone got up in the sky again. And Kacey wasn't a toaster and Hera was obviously in a season-arc and would show up again, and Baltar came back to Galactica and D'Anna got boxed, and Roslin was president again and Adama was everyone's Daddy and so say we all. And none of this is bad: none of this made me unexcited. I never rolled my eyes. I threw myself into Kara's emotional journey, and Tigh's. And I think both are paying off beautifully. But maybe that's the problem. Quite aside from never being sure if my reading of Kara's emotional state was with or against the text, I was certain of my opinions.
Now I feel I'm standing on sand.
It's everywhere. Like entropy. Everyone's breaking apart, and embarking on their own escape velocities.
I think it's in the acting choices, a lot of it.
Take Roslin for instance. Okay, so she states explicitly that which has been obvious to us: she's dying and so she doesn't feel the need to play by the rules anymore. It happened to her a little last time, even more this time because she's been here before and she's more comfortable with power. In itself, for this show, this is not brave. They've been playing the Roslin-as-potential-tyrannical-dictator card for a looooong time.
What's great and unsettling is the breadth Mary McDonnell give it. The way she brings her light touch and fragility and open emotion to the task of being a tyrant as easily as she brought it to being a scared, dying woman who never wanted this power. In my ludicrously long ramble, I said that something about her seemed free.
It still does and I still can't name it but consider: the sincerity with which she approached Baltar in his cell. The simplicity. None of the screaming or the threats she's previously employed. She confused the shit out of Baltar before she spun it around on him. She confused me too. I knew she had a game plan. I knew she wanted something from him. But her quiet, friendly demeanor was so convincing, I started wondering if she was ever going to flip it around on him or if she'd just gotten so exhausted and free she could get what she wanted from him without ever issuing a threat.
It makes me suspicious of her other interactions which are all sweetness and light and tired plainness. Not because I think they're all sekritly ev0l acts on her part, but because I don't think that the first half of her Baltar scene was an act. Or rather, it was, but she genuinely felt it to, and that's...more scary? That there isn't even a difference anymore?
Something inside Laura Roslin snapped, and she doesn't give a shit anymore. Something inside everyone has snapped, except for Adama. Who I continue to actually like as a character now that I understand everyone around him is falling to pieces and he's incapable of understanding why, "Nobody's going anywhere," isn't working for him any more.
Something inside me snapped this episode, too. I don't give a shit about A/R any more. Obviously, I still prefer L/L. I'm even still...disapproving of A/R. I started this show actually liking A/R more than L/L but that quickly shifted during the latter half of the first season and early second (before I even had an LJ I think) and after that I gradually became actively hostile to A/R. I haven't lost any of that dislike. I just...don't care. Something snapped and that's the way the show is going and having had my epiphany that this show is going to drag me through hell and break my characters in ways I don't understand: not in noble angstilicious ways but in surprising, confusing ways, this is just...one more sign that something is Rotten in the State of Galactica.
That nausea that seemed to permeate that awesome cover version of "All Along the Watchtower" in the season finale? That feeling is this season.
...never did I think I would compare something to nausea in a good way.
Others who are escaping:
Tyrol. OH MY GODS CONTINUITY! He confronted the Admiral about wanting to have Cally shot! SQUEE. And Adama's confusion over how to deal with Tyrol, resorting to demoting him because again, he can't understand a world where "Nobody's going anywhere," doesn't work because he's the Old Man and people obey him. If they don't, he can't be the Daddy, and he can't keep them safe. Even death is supposed to stop for him. He saved his son from the Apocalypse, didn't he? His daughter found her way back to him? Even Sharon Valerii got a strange second chance because the Old Man wouldn't give up on her. Even Laura Roslin before New Caprica. So why the hell isn't it working now?
And wow, yeah. THIS IS NOT MY LIFE! I SETTLED! WE ALL SETTLED! The Chief's speech was awesome. Because the people we want to love are dead or turned out to be Cylons. One thing this episode did really well was that double-edged vocal trick. Both here and with Tigh.
Speaking of -
Tigh. Oh lord. Tigh and Six. Those scenes slayed me. I was so tense that Tigh was gonna frak up, betray himself to the marines, kiss her in front of them or something. The way he was desperate for something from this cylon, and she kept explaining just enough to him that he thought she understood only to come crashing down when he realised they were talking at cross-purposes after all.
This is what I was trying to explain above. Rewind to the mini series. Explain to me that that woman is going to end up kissing Tigh and that it will make perfect sense.
It's something I couldn't have predicted even last week. It's brave and they went there with conviction. And I believe it. And it's sick.
It's nauseating and glorious.
What's that phrase from that song? I see it on a lot of icons. It epitomises our modern TV culture where we want our heroes broken but pretty. Messed up but only enough that they have angst and we can still believe someone will swoop in and save them?
"There's beauty in the breakdown," I think that's it? Or maybe, "Beautiful messed up boy."
I'm not trying to belittle these concepts. There's something Romantic and transcendent about character growth, healing, salvation. There's something fascinating about damaged people.
But for me, this is stranger and braver. There's beauty in this breakdown too, but it's not physical, it's not mental, it's not even philosophical. I think applying either of those phrases to this situation would change the commonly used and instinctive understanding of the phrase. Because the breakdown is also ugly, and terrifying and confusing. As it should be to a mind that's not on the brink of collapse, like Tigh's, or perhaps Caprica's.
Speaking of and speaking of acting choices, Tricia Helfer was using the same trick as Mary McDonnell, sort of. The contrast of wild joy on her face as she pummelled Tigh. And her willingness to accept Tigh's quest on faith even when he didn't understand it himself. Playing against expectations. An escape velocity.
Finally I'm confused by Baltar. I was raised as a Unitarian with strongly pantheistic leanings, by hippy parents involved in at least one hippytastic lifestyle movement. As such, my understanding of God and the true nature of people is profoundly similar to Baltar's final speech.
The concept that something loves you, in your entirety and what's more you are worthy of that love no matter what you've done; without recanting anything or converting to anything, you are just an innately, incredibly, inherently good person and you deserve to be loved - that idea is what I was raised believing. Explicitly. I mean, my parents literally taught me that. Along with the notion "I choose to call this God," is a valid concept for worship, and that the notion that there is something is more important than the definition of what it is.
But then you have Tory's terrifying escape velocity smirking in the corner. The cancerous undercurrent that being worthy of being loved means you can do no wrong as long as you say sorry. Like Catholicism without the guilt. Tory ignoring the fact that while you may be inherently worthy of love, and while you may be born inherently good and awesome, this does not negate the world's ability to hurt you and screw you up and turn you into a thing that hurts other people and screws them up.
And the fact that what's possibly the closest to me seeing a discussion of something approximating my religion (for lack of a better word, though I don't consider myself religious) on TV and it's casting it in the place of this fascistic monotheism - Christianity in ancient Rome. And from a historical perspective and a personal one, and meaning no disrespect to anyone of any religious affiliation, I'm not interested in that story. I can't get on board with it as anything other than a tragedy.
But here we are, with the Sons of Aries as the bad guys, and Baltar teaching things my mother used to say to me and...I feel terribly confused and uncomfortable.
I desperately don't want Baltar to be Jesus.
I think his notions of "perfection" ignore the way our world shapes us. Why do we have to choose? Why can't it be miraculous that something out there loves every one of us, and thinks every one of us is perfect, at the same time we hear the Chief saying, "We all settled because the people that we love are dead." At the same time we hear Kara saying, "Those people are my family, and none of us belong here."
I'm not even making sense anymore, see. This show broke my brain...
So I'll end with a quick thought about Lee:
He's soooooo going to bust Tory to Laura about being one of Baltar's "girlie groupie sex whatevertheyares." Hur hur hur...
I figured it out. This season is going to make me uncomfortable and confuse me because
1) it's not going to follow standard television formula and,
2) it's not going to do what I'd do if I were in charge.
That might seem...obvious, and one might well ask where the frak I've been for the last three seasons, but what I mean is this: at times I think BSG has succumbed to formulaic television. Not of the Stargate type, but of the HBO type. The type that puts characters through the wringer and has angst and character development of a sort, but that usually manages to restore the status quo, or introduce a more popular status quo. What I mean is, programs like Lost and Desperate Housewives and Buffy have all broken out of the Star Trek or Stargate episodics, or manic and overwritten soap operatic screechings. But they trap themselves in their own sets of cliches and formulas. An infinitely preferable set, and sometimes a set new enough I don't even notice them, until a run of episodes confuses me and I realise why:
I have no frame of reference to parse this.
It is surprising me.
And I don't just mean "Wow what a shock death!" or "Wow, what a shocking plot twist!" I mean on a fundamental, thematic level, this show is surprising me and confusing me and causing me to ask questions.
I have no idea if the rest of the season will continue on this "escape velocity." I'm almost afraid it will because these characters are sliding away from me; are becoming unrecognisable though intriguing; are becoming almost upsetting in that I've bought into them and chosen to love them and now they're changing and turning and I cannot punch through my screen to save them. But this is not an effect of bad writing. This is simply the writers being braver than me. It's rare that when I recoil or feel uncomfortable my response is to question whether the failure is in me.
(For clarity: this impulse is small and subsumed by the fact that I am very much enjoying this show right now. But it's there and I'm intrigued by it.)
As a comparison, I will try to explain why I didn't have this reaction to the start of season three. That was daring storytelling and a sequence of episodes I loved almost unreservedly (the reservations being a) Lee's plotline and b) that I think BSG does better when its comparisons aren't so explicit and they shouldn't have tried to make it an Iraq parallel when even RDM admitted it should be Vichy France).
But everyone got up in the sky again. And Kacey wasn't a toaster and Hera was obviously in a season-arc and would show up again, and Baltar came back to Galactica and D'Anna got boxed, and Roslin was president again and Adama was everyone's Daddy and so say we all. And none of this is bad: none of this made me unexcited. I never rolled my eyes. I threw myself into Kara's emotional journey, and Tigh's. And I think both are paying off beautifully. But maybe that's the problem. Quite aside from never being sure if my reading of Kara's emotional state was with or against the text, I was certain of my opinions.
Now I feel I'm standing on sand.
It's everywhere. Like entropy. Everyone's breaking apart, and embarking on their own escape velocities.
I think it's in the acting choices, a lot of it.
Take Roslin for instance. Okay, so she states explicitly that which has been obvious to us: she's dying and so she doesn't feel the need to play by the rules anymore. It happened to her a little last time, even more this time because she's been here before and she's more comfortable with power. In itself, for this show, this is not brave. They've been playing the Roslin-as-potential-tyrannical-dictator card for a looooong time.
What's great and unsettling is the breadth Mary McDonnell give it. The way she brings her light touch and fragility and open emotion to the task of being a tyrant as easily as she brought it to being a scared, dying woman who never wanted this power. In my ludicrously long ramble, I said that something about her seemed free.
It still does and I still can't name it but consider: the sincerity with which she approached Baltar in his cell. The simplicity. None of the screaming or the threats she's previously employed. She confused the shit out of Baltar before she spun it around on him. She confused me too. I knew she had a game plan. I knew she wanted something from him. But her quiet, friendly demeanor was so convincing, I started wondering if she was ever going to flip it around on him or if she'd just gotten so exhausted and free she could get what she wanted from him without ever issuing a threat.
It makes me suspicious of her other interactions which are all sweetness and light and tired plainness. Not because I think they're all sekritly ev0l acts on her part, but because I don't think that the first half of her Baltar scene was an act. Or rather, it was, but she genuinely felt it to, and that's...more scary? That there isn't even a difference anymore?
Something inside Laura Roslin snapped, and she doesn't give a shit anymore. Something inside everyone has snapped, except for Adama. Who I continue to actually like as a character now that I understand everyone around him is falling to pieces and he's incapable of understanding why, "Nobody's going anywhere," isn't working for him any more.
Something inside me snapped this episode, too. I don't give a shit about A/R any more. Obviously, I still prefer L/L. I'm even still...disapproving of A/R. I started this show actually liking A/R more than L/L but that quickly shifted during the latter half of the first season and early second (before I even had an LJ I think) and after that I gradually became actively hostile to A/R. I haven't lost any of that dislike. I just...don't care. Something snapped and that's the way the show is going and having had my epiphany that this show is going to drag me through hell and break my characters in ways I don't understand: not in noble angstilicious ways but in surprising, confusing ways, this is just...one more sign that something is Rotten in the State of Galactica.
That nausea that seemed to permeate that awesome cover version of "All Along the Watchtower" in the season finale? That feeling is this season.
...never did I think I would compare something to nausea in a good way.
Others who are escaping:
Tyrol. OH MY GODS CONTINUITY! He confronted the Admiral about wanting to have Cally shot! SQUEE. And Adama's confusion over how to deal with Tyrol, resorting to demoting him because again, he can't understand a world where "Nobody's going anywhere," doesn't work because he's the Old Man and people obey him. If they don't, he can't be the Daddy, and he can't keep them safe. Even death is supposed to stop for him. He saved his son from the Apocalypse, didn't he? His daughter found her way back to him? Even Sharon Valerii got a strange second chance because the Old Man wouldn't give up on her. Even Laura Roslin before New Caprica. So why the hell isn't it working now?
And wow, yeah. THIS IS NOT MY LIFE! I SETTLED! WE ALL SETTLED! The Chief's speech was awesome. Because the people we want to love are dead or turned out to be Cylons. One thing this episode did really well was that double-edged vocal trick. Both here and with Tigh.
Speaking of -
Tigh. Oh lord. Tigh and Six. Those scenes slayed me. I was so tense that Tigh was gonna frak up, betray himself to the marines, kiss her in front of them or something. The way he was desperate for something from this cylon, and she kept explaining just enough to him that he thought she understood only to come crashing down when he realised they were talking at cross-purposes after all.
This is what I was trying to explain above. Rewind to the mini series. Explain to me that that woman is going to end up kissing Tigh and that it will make perfect sense.
It's something I couldn't have predicted even last week. It's brave and they went there with conviction. And I believe it. And it's sick.
It's nauseating and glorious.
What's that phrase from that song? I see it on a lot of icons. It epitomises our modern TV culture where we want our heroes broken but pretty. Messed up but only enough that they have angst and we can still believe someone will swoop in and save them?
"There's beauty in the breakdown," I think that's it? Or maybe, "Beautiful messed up boy."
I'm not trying to belittle these concepts. There's something Romantic and transcendent about character growth, healing, salvation. There's something fascinating about damaged people.
But for me, this is stranger and braver. There's beauty in this breakdown too, but it's not physical, it's not mental, it's not even philosophical. I think applying either of those phrases to this situation would change the commonly used and instinctive understanding of the phrase. Because the breakdown is also ugly, and terrifying and confusing. As it should be to a mind that's not on the brink of collapse, like Tigh's, or perhaps Caprica's.
Speaking of and speaking of acting choices, Tricia Helfer was using the same trick as Mary McDonnell, sort of. The contrast of wild joy on her face as she pummelled Tigh. And her willingness to accept Tigh's quest on faith even when he didn't understand it himself. Playing against expectations. An escape velocity.
Finally I'm confused by Baltar. I was raised as a Unitarian with strongly pantheistic leanings, by hippy parents involved in at least one hippytastic lifestyle movement. As such, my understanding of God and the true nature of people is profoundly similar to Baltar's final speech.
The concept that something loves you, in your entirety and what's more you are worthy of that love no matter what you've done; without recanting anything or converting to anything, you are just an innately, incredibly, inherently good person and you deserve to be loved - that idea is what I was raised believing. Explicitly. I mean, my parents literally taught me that. Along with the notion "I choose to call this God," is a valid concept for worship, and that the notion that there is something is more important than the definition of what it is.
But then you have Tory's terrifying escape velocity smirking in the corner. The cancerous undercurrent that being worthy of being loved means you can do no wrong as long as you say sorry. Like Catholicism without the guilt. Tory ignoring the fact that while you may be inherently worthy of love, and while you may be born inherently good and awesome, this does not negate the world's ability to hurt you and screw you up and turn you into a thing that hurts other people and screws them up.
And the fact that what's possibly the closest to me seeing a discussion of something approximating my religion (for lack of a better word, though I don't consider myself religious) on TV and it's casting it in the place of this fascistic monotheism - Christianity in ancient Rome. And from a historical perspective and a personal one, and meaning no disrespect to anyone of any religious affiliation, I'm not interested in that story. I can't get on board with it as anything other than a tragedy.
But here we are, with the Sons of Aries as the bad guys, and Baltar teaching things my mother used to say to me and...I feel terribly confused and uncomfortable.
I desperately don't want Baltar to be Jesus.
I think his notions of "perfection" ignore the way our world shapes us. Why do we have to choose? Why can't it be miraculous that something out there loves every one of us, and thinks every one of us is perfect, at the same time we hear the Chief saying, "We all settled because the people that we love are dead." At the same time we hear Kara saying, "Those people are my family, and none of us belong here."
I'm not even making sense anymore, see. This show broke my brain...
So I'll end with a quick thought about Lee:
He's soooooo going to bust Tory to Laura about being one of Baltar's "girlie groupie sex whatevertheyares." Hur hur hur...