BSG: Sine Qua Non (With Slightly More Coherence)
So. Lots happened this week, and I went and tried to do my usual thing of rambling on vaguely related points, but instead I wrote a list. At points it is a very jumbled and thinky list. After the list are my thoughts on the Final Five and what exactly they are.
- Adama killed democracy; a humorous turnabout considering this situation would never occured had he not tried to save it last time.
- Adama & Tigh demonstrate that if you beat on each other badly enough, you forget why you were mad.
- Caprica is in another shitty relationship, but this time it's physically and mentally abusive not just neglectfully and selfishly so. Though I suppose at least this time both participants hallucinate their other Great Loves...
- What fascinates me most about the Tigh/Caprica scene is the way she speaks to him. Calls him "Saul," and asks if he loves her. It's tragic, because I'm inclined to believe that Tigh is always as manically ambivalent around her as he is now. Her desperate search for love - what defines and dooms Caprica...sometimes all Sixes, is, well, tragic and painful. And why she remains in such an awful relationship; why she always does and always has. Baltar - thrice in three different bodies with two different minds, Caine, Tigh, a threesome with D'Anna and Baltar she never wanted. Have we ever seen a Six loved?
- Tigh may have stopped drinking so he can concentrate on going INSANE, but that's okay, because Adama is picking up the slack. I hope he took his liquor with him on that Raptor cus otherwise I fear the shaking may set in.
- No episode of BSG should ever be utterly without Laura Roslin (although, given my suspicion that she will die before the final episode - no spoilers, just a hunch - I'd better get used to it).
- Romo Lampkin makes no sense, though I suppose I can forgive him since he raised interesting questions. Like how a good size of the fleet probably survived because they put themselves first. But that hallucinatory cat thing took a while to twig and his behaviour was still utterly confusing. So I will just chalk it up as INSANITY.
- Joke: Romo Lampkin's cat has no nose. How does it smell? Awful, you'd think, but APPARENTLY NOT SINCE HE'S BEEN CARRYING ITS DECOMPOSING CORPSE AROUND IN A SUITCASE FOR MONTHS AND NO ONE NOTICED.
- You know, it's a good thing that Adama wasn't angry because he needed more than loyalty from Tigh, he needed competence and judgment. Because if that were the case, one might actually worry about putting him in charge of a Battlestar and the remnants of humanity. O U NOCKED UP UR CYLON GURLFRIEND? Y/Y? U CAN HAS PROMOSHUN NAO! As I noted in my previous entry, this is even better than the time he welcomed him back to active duty despite having, hours ago, relieved him because he was hearing cylon music in the walls of the ship. But I forgot - they had a fistfight, so everything Adama said before that is magically forgotten.
- LELAND. That was amusing. The name isn't inherently crappy, although it is a little dorky. It's just that 1) it reminds me Leland Chee which makes me think of the current Mess Afflicting Star Wars Continuity - GRR, and 2) I really liked Lee. It was simple. It fit. I'm kind of sad his real name is now Leland. Or Leeland. I guess we don't know how they spelled it.
- It was kind of obvious from the moment Lee started looking for new people to be the President that the job was his. That does not make it less cool. I wonder what will happen when Laura returns?
- A/R? Blergh. Boring. HOWEVER, it didn't piss me off this episode because I've never really had a problem with Adama having fallen in love with her. I just always got the feeling that after, say, sometime in season one, her attitude towards him was more than slightly calculated. It will be easier and good for the Fleet if I have a good relationship with this man. Hmm...he has a crush on me? Well, that's useful. And I guess he's not bad-looking... (Well, okay, in my L/L or really, L/ANYONE EXCEPT ADAMA SNR head, she doesn't think he's good-looking, but I'm trying to be respectful of canon here!)
- Kara seems to be the CAG again. I guess they've decided to just pretend to forget that whole "back from the dead" thing. Maybe they had a fist-fight about it?
- I still want to know what happened to Anders for shooting Gaeta in the leg, if anything...
- I feel I should say something about how ludicrous Adama's actions were in risking the Fleet for Laura, and how realising that, after-the-fact, and being all stoic and romantic about it, does not actually make his decision to likely go commit suicide with a book and one of a dwindling supply of irreplaceable Raptors, while leaving the entire Fleet under the command of someone he knows is a security risk, heroic. But I lack the energy. And oddly, while this moved slightly more towards me feeling the show was saying, "Look at how HEROIC Adama is," rather than the refreshing feeling I've had this season that it was saying, "Look how ALONE AND LONELY AND UNABLE TO COPE WITH CHANGE Adama is,", it wasn't like...all guns blazing Adama-Awesomeness. Cus Tigh called him out on it and such and he was shown to be wrong. So I will just sit here thinking that he went and did something very silly (even though we all know it'll work out because he's the lead actor), and just assume that, like other moments in the series, it's all about how he's a man who survived too long and doesn't understand how to live in this world.
ETA!
- One day I am going to make a music video all about Saul Tigh's Left Eye. I have great respect for Michael Hogan as an actor, but every since he lost his other eye, every time they want to show EMOTION, they zoom in on Saul Tigh's Left Eye going wide and wiggling about. They shouldn't be nominating Michael Hogan, they should be nominating Michael Hogan's Left Eye since clearly that's where they think his acting talent lies... o.O
- I always forget how short Adama is... I mean, I know he's probably still taller than me, but he has such gravitas and due to the way they shoot the show it's easy to forget he really isn't that tall. We so often see him with either Lee who is also short of Laura who is...also short. In this episode he has to get up in the grill of both Athena and Tigh and...he's barely as tall as she is and he's shorter than Tigh and it's...amusing in my head.
- Tigh, proving that he can follow Bill's instructions as the new Military Leader of Humanity, gives Athena back her daughter. Which is sweet and all, but I do have to wonder why he decided the best way to reunite them was to put a toddler in a prison cell with no amenities rather than putting Sharon under House Arrest...
- And mostly importantly: NOOOO! NOT NATALIE YOU BASTARDS! NOOOOOOO! I really can't believe I originally forgot to put that on my list. Her death scene was really quite beautiful and heartbreaking. I suppose, of all the Sixes, she wanted love from the final five, from the people she led, rather than from a single person. But again, she was denied. The moment where Cottle held her hand, and she saw trees, was...gorgeous. But dammit, I loved her, and now she's dead.
And now - thoughts on the Final Five!
The Final Five are practically cyborgs, not machines. They can age, we now know they can reproduce (it seems) with Cylons the way humans can. We start having to ask, in what ways are they not like humans? Well, we saw Anders eye-flash thing. Tory has demonstrated superhuman strength. They all heard the music. I'd contend that basically, they're clones with extremely sophisticated machine-integration that makes them stronger, perhaps smarter, allows for machine-human interfacing (I'm still not sure how that works: sticking wires in your arm, but basically it's magical science and I am not going to question it more than the literal data streams we see on the Basestars), and replecates what I, in my head, refer to as the "overclocked brain" thing. The way Leoben sees the patterns preceding every moment. The same quasi-mystical functioning that allows such sophisticated hallucinations (projections) and even programming.
Essentially they are organic machines. Same as us, but...built with more care and directed intelligence than evolution can provide. An evolutionary step that includes the fact that machines are now part of our environment. Essentially they seem identical to the Significant Seven except that they are more human.
My theory has been for a while now - since someone very smart noted the prominent resistance roles they all had on New Caprica - that the Five are on humanity's side, and are actually cylon from the last time all this happened - the time of Pythia. But now, knowing that the Significant Seven half know about them but being programmed not to think about them? I'm wondering if the Final Five assisted in the creation of the Significant Seven, raising their numbers to that magical twelve again but removing themselves from their creations' consciousnesses and disappearing among the humans. It makes me wonder if what the Final Five are really doing is ensuring that the cycle continues. Making sure the Cylon are created, and making sure the humans survive? Ooooh, speculation. Basically I have no idea, and I'm just trying to make it so my head doesn't explode. For instance, how the aging thing works, I have no idea. Did they start as babies? Can they reset their own aging? Did they box themselves at the end of the Pythian-era to be unboxed and grow up at the start of the next great war? ARGH!
Yeah. This week was weird.
- Adama killed democracy; a humorous turnabout considering this situation would never occured had he not tried to save it last time.
- Adama & Tigh demonstrate that if you beat on each other badly enough, you forget why you were mad.
- Caprica is in another shitty relationship, but this time it's physically and mentally abusive not just neglectfully and selfishly so. Though I suppose at least this time both participants hallucinate their other Great Loves...
- What fascinates me most about the Tigh/Caprica scene is the way she speaks to him. Calls him "Saul," and asks if he loves her. It's tragic, because I'm inclined to believe that Tigh is always as manically ambivalent around her as he is now. Her desperate search for love - what defines and dooms Caprica...sometimes all Sixes, is, well, tragic and painful. And why she remains in such an awful relationship; why she always does and always has. Baltar - thrice in three different bodies with two different minds, Caine, Tigh, a threesome with D'Anna and Baltar she never wanted. Have we ever seen a Six loved?
- Tigh may have stopped drinking so he can concentrate on going INSANE, but that's okay, because Adama is picking up the slack. I hope he took his liquor with him on that Raptor cus otherwise I fear the shaking may set in.
- No episode of BSG should ever be utterly without Laura Roslin (although, given my suspicion that she will die before the final episode - no spoilers, just a hunch - I'd better get used to it).
- Romo Lampkin makes no sense, though I suppose I can forgive him since he raised interesting questions. Like how a good size of the fleet probably survived because they put themselves first. But that hallucinatory cat thing took a while to twig and his behaviour was still utterly confusing. So I will just chalk it up as INSANITY.
- Joke: Romo Lampkin's cat has no nose. How does it smell? Awful, you'd think, but APPARENTLY NOT SINCE HE'S BEEN CARRYING ITS DECOMPOSING CORPSE AROUND IN A SUITCASE FOR MONTHS AND NO ONE NOTICED.
- You know, it's a good thing that Adama wasn't angry because he needed more than loyalty from Tigh, he needed competence and judgment. Because if that were the case, one might actually worry about putting him in charge of a Battlestar and the remnants of humanity. O U NOCKED UP UR CYLON GURLFRIEND? Y/Y? U CAN HAS PROMOSHUN NAO! As I noted in my previous entry, this is even better than the time he welcomed him back to active duty despite having, hours ago, relieved him because he was hearing cylon music in the walls of the ship. But I forgot - they had a fistfight, so everything Adama said before that is magically forgotten.
- LELAND. That was amusing. The name isn't inherently crappy, although it is a little dorky. It's just that 1) it reminds me Leland Chee which makes me think of the current Mess Afflicting Star Wars Continuity - GRR, and 2) I really liked Lee. It was simple. It fit. I'm kind of sad his real name is now Leland. Or Leeland. I guess we don't know how they spelled it.
- It was kind of obvious from the moment Lee started looking for new people to be the President that the job was his. That does not make it less cool. I wonder what will happen when Laura returns?
- A/R? Blergh. Boring. HOWEVER, it didn't piss me off this episode because I've never really had a problem with Adama having fallen in love with her. I just always got the feeling that after, say, sometime in season one, her attitude towards him was more than slightly calculated. It will be easier and good for the Fleet if I have a good relationship with this man. Hmm...he has a crush on me? Well, that's useful. And I guess he's not bad-looking... (Well, okay, in my L/L or really, L/ANYONE EXCEPT ADAMA SNR head, she doesn't think he's good-looking, but I'm trying to be respectful of canon here!)
- Kara seems to be the CAG again. I guess they've decided to just pretend to forget that whole "back from the dead" thing. Maybe they had a fist-fight about it?
- I still want to know what happened to Anders for shooting Gaeta in the leg, if anything...
- I feel I should say something about how ludicrous Adama's actions were in risking the Fleet for Laura, and how realising that, after-the-fact, and being all stoic and romantic about it, does not actually make his decision to likely go commit suicide with a book and one of a dwindling supply of irreplaceable Raptors, while leaving the entire Fleet under the command of someone he knows is a security risk, heroic. But I lack the energy. And oddly, while this moved slightly more towards me feeling the show was saying, "Look at how HEROIC Adama is," rather than the refreshing feeling I've had this season that it was saying, "Look how ALONE AND LONELY AND UNABLE TO COPE WITH CHANGE Adama is,", it wasn't like...all guns blazing Adama-Awesomeness. Cus Tigh called him out on it and such and he was shown to be wrong. So I will just sit here thinking that he went and did something very silly (even though we all know it'll work out because he's the lead actor), and just assume that, like other moments in the series, it's all about how he's a man who survived too long and doesn't understand how to live in this world.
ETA!
- One day I am going to make a music video all about Saul Tigh's Left Eye. I have great respect for Michael Hogan as an actor, but every since he lost his other eye, every time they want to show EMOTION, they zoom in on Saul Tigh's Left Eye going wide and wiggling about. They shouldn't be nominating Michael Hogan, they should be nominating Michael Hogan's Left Eye since clearly that's where they think his acting talent lies... o.O
- I always forget how short Adama is... I mean, I know he's probably still taller than me, but he has such gravitas and due to the way they shoot the show it's easy to forget he really isn't that tall. We so often see him with either Lee who is also short of Laura who is...also short. In this episode he has to get up in the grill of both Athena and Tigh and...he's barely as tall as she is and he's shorter than Tigh and it's...amusing in my head.
- Tigh, proving that he can follow Bill's instructions as the new Military Leader of Humanity, gives Athena back her daughter. Which is sweet and all, but I do have to wonder why he decided the best way to reunite them was to put a toddler in a prison cell with no amenities rather than putting Sharon under House Arrest...
- And mostly importantly: NOOOO! NOT NATALIE YOU BASTARDS! NOOOOOOO! I really can't believe I originally forgot to put that on my list. Her death scene was really quite beautiful and heartbreaking. I suppose, of all the Sixes, she wanted love from the final five, from the people she led, rather than from a single person. But again, she was denied. The moment where Cottle held her hand, and she saw trees, was...gorgeous. But dammit, I loved her, and now she's dead.
And now - thoughts on the Final Five!
The Final Five are practically cyborgs, not machines. They can age, we now know they can reproduce (it seems) with Cylons the way humans can. We start having to ask, in what ways are they not like humans? Well, we saw Anders eye-flash thing. Tory has demonstrated superhuman strength. They all heard the music. I'd contend that basically, they're clones with extremely sophisticated machine-integration that makes them stronger, perhaps smarter, allows for machine-human interfacing (I'm still not sure how that works: sticking wires in your arm, but basically it's magical science and I am not going to question it more than the literal data streams we see on the Basestars), and replecates what I, in my head, refer to as the "overclocked brain" thing. The way Leoben sees the patterns preceding every moment. The same quasi-mystical functioning that allows such sophisticated hallucinations (projections) and even programming.
Essentially they are organic machines. Same as us, but...built with more care and directed intelligence than evolution can provide. An evolutionary step that includes the fact that machines are now part of our environment. Essentially they seem identical to the Significant Seven except that they are more human.
My theory has been for a while now - since someone very smart noted the prominent resistance roles they all had on New Caprica - that the Five are on humanity's side, and are actually cylon from the last time all this happened - the time of Pythia. But now, knowing that the Significant Seven half know about them but being programmed not to think about them? I'm wondering if the Final Five assisted in the creation of the Significant Seven, raising their numbers to that magical twelve again but removing themselves from their creations' consciousnesses and disappearing among the humans. It makes me wonder if what the Final Five are really doing is ensuring that the cycle continues. Making sure the Cylon are created, and making sure the humans survive? Ooooh, speculation. Basically I have no idea, and I'm just trying to make it so my head doesn't explode. For instance, how the aging thing works, I have no idea. Did they start as babies? Can they reset their own aging? Did they box themselves at the end of the Pythian-era to be unboxed and grow up at the start of the next great war? ARGH!
Yeah. This week was weird.