"You make your choices and you live with them, and in the end you are those choices."
One of the major themes of the Pegasus episodes is choice-the tale of two battlestars, one led by Adama and Roslin, who chose to run and shepherd the remnants of humanity to a new home; one led by Helena Cain, who chose to destroy as much as she could before the enemy caught up with her, never understanding that that destruction began and ended with her own crew. Adama's not sure, at the end of "Razor," that he can entirely second-guess the choices Cain made, but I think Lee's point that she deliberately butchered civilians points to the larger problem with her choices, the fine distinction between taking men and equipment and leaving the ships to the mercy of the Cylons, as Cain did, and ordering the Olympic Carrier shot down, or jumping away from the civilian ships that didn't have FTL drives. Adama's choices were driven by a vision of a future based on survival and wholeness, grounded in the continuity of human values; Cain's choices were driven by expedience and by an underlying conviction that human feelings are a weakness and a vulnerability.
"Razor" makes clear that that wasn't something that happened after the destruction of the colonies; that was a characteristic she had from the beginning, in her discomfort with her XO's friendliness pushing past the boundaries she'd set, in Gina's wry observation that even Cain has needs, as if she was all too aware that Cain didn't like having them. It was chilling to see the way Cain took the attacks as an opportunity to jettison everything she regarded as a weakness, and to make sure that everyone else is with her-publicly demonstrating the costs of defying her by shooting her XO (a man who had also been her friend, back before she'd found the means to stop herself from needing others) and ordering others across the line, to shoot civilians and torture and rape a prisoner-with the conviction that she's kept her crew alive, and that any means justifies that end. Her crew has to agree, because to do otherwise would be to admit that there was no real justification for what they've done. Fisk and Kendra both explain to the hapless civilians they're about to shoot that they have orders, as if that makes all the difference in the world in what they're about to do. Cain tells Kendra that sometimes circumstances lead people to do things they never thought they were capable of, in order to show their will, and to survive-so that they'll have the luxury of becoming civilians again. She never understands the transformative power of those decisions; she probably never expected to live long enough to have to face what she'd become. Kendra seems to, finally, when she admits that you become the choices you make.
But on top of choice, one of the major themes of "Razor" is inheritance, and it is fundamentally the story of four dead women-Cain, Gina, Kara, and Kendra-and the connections between them, and the inheritances they received and bequeathed.
There are obvious parallels between Kara and Kendra. Both had mothers who loomed large in their lives (it is implied that Kendra's mother was politically well-connected, or possibly in a top position in the Colonial Fleet) and who died of cancer. Both found, in Cain, someone who filled a hole and encouraged them to use anger to counteract fear, to take risks and be smart. Kendra tells Lee that she's Cain's legacy, she and the rest of the crew, because they're still alive; but she's also Cain's legacy because on the Pegasus she became someone she struggled to live with, used drugs to escape from temporarily, ultimately welcomed the chance to end. It's a remarkable mirroring of Kara's own suicide (or whatever you want to call it considering she isn't really dead) after the alcohol has stopped blotting out the dreams and memories; Kara just fails to get herself killed in action, and has to make the deliberate final act. Of course they didn't get along; they were too much alike.
But Helena Cain also wanted death, I think; when it came for her, she welcomed it, she goaded Gina into shooting her. And Gina wanted oblivion: suicide where no resurrection ship could retrieve her consciousness, a final end. She took a third of the fleet with her, and the explosion told the Cylons where New Caprica was, and the inheritance of pain and destruction that began in the first Cylon war and continued into the attack on the Twelve Colonies, that passed to her with what she went through on the Pegasus, she in turn passed on to the rest of humanity with the occupation, and to Kara in that parody of a home with Leoben, in one long unbroken chain of misery and death. "War is our inheritance," Cain tells her crew, before promising them a future of vengeance. It's not a future at all, for anyone; it's the cycle that has destroyed them all before and will destroy them all again, human and Cylon alike.
I actually think Kara's role will be to break that cycle, since she was somehow reborn or transformed after her suicide. I think that's what the Cylon hybrid meant when he warned Kendra: "Kara Thrace will lead the human race to its end. She is the herald of the apocalypse, the harbinger of death." If the Cylons and humans alike believe that all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again, a break in the cycle is an end, a form of apocalypse, a kind of death.
That was just one set of layers and parallels; I thought the narrative structure, the layers of flashback, were a really effective way of telling all of the stories and connecting the moving parts: Adama reluctantly leaving the captured civilians in the Cylon facility in the past, and witnessing the birth of the next war without realizing what he was seeing at the time; the Pegasus setting down the terrible path that eventually leads it to the rest of the fleet, making its own set of hard choices; Lee in the present having to make the call to destroy the Cylon facility with Kara and other men in it. The third piece, the rescue operation in the present, felt a bit plot device-y, but I thought the connection to the old Cylon hybrid program filled in some important holes in what the Cylons were up to before the attack, and what they're trying to achieve, and as asta77 pointed out, it explained nicely why Adama was so quickly able to put together that there were human-looking Cylons in the miniseries. Plus, I got a nice tingle of nostalgia seeing old skool Centurions say "by your command."
I liked the character of Kendra Shaw, and was really impressed by Stephanie Jacobsen (who, IMDB informs me, was Nurse Froy in Farscape's "Incubator"). Kendra had just the right combination of technical competence, youth, and, in the end, a sort of quiet, dignified seething and hopelessness over the choices she'd made. Michelle Ryan, please takes notes on how to hold your own in a scene with Katee Sackhoff.
Really, I only thought there was one off note in the entire two hours, and that was the choice to make Admiral Cain a lesbian. I understood perfectly well what the writers were trying to achieve: by making Gina and Cain lovers, they were painting the revelation that Gina was a Cylon as a terribly personal betrayal for Cain, and giving an even more terrible context to the way Cain basically orders Thorne to rape Gina. It really never was about getting information; it was always and only about revenge. And if there were lesbian characters of all stripes, good, bad, and ugly, crowded around the television landscape, that would be one thing. But there aren't, and Helena Cain started out in charge, unafraid of issuing orders, aggressive and unfeeling, in ways that are clearly marked as signs of a deeply flawed personality, and she ended up a monster, and making her a lesbian is, in that context, deeply problematic, no matter how many GLAAD ads you run at the end of the show.
Speaking of ads, since I was watching live I actually saw them, and it appears that Quizno's actually sponsored plot points. I don't know how else to interpret "Admiral Cain and Gina were revealed to be lovers. Brought to you by Quizno's." Dear SciFi Channel, WHAT ARE YOU DOING? That goes double for telling us the new season premieres in March now when before you said April.
* * * * *
I haven't been online much since Wednesday. Among other things, I have been struggling with epic insomnia since last Monday; last night I was able to get some sleep, but I've been walking around in a fog, and my reading comprehension and ability to communicate with other human beings-among other things-are not so stellar right now. I look forward to re-reading this post tomorrow and discovering all the typos. Some other things I wanted to write this weekend are just going to have to wait. I'm looking at a really huge workweek too, so that should be fun.
I did watch some more due South, mostly at four and five in the morning, and I haven't written it up--of course--but I was under the distinct impression that they switched Rays at the beginning of Season 4, not Season 3, but then again my version of the DVDs only has a Season 3, and on top of the new Diefenbaker and the new theme song and all the harmonicas and Thatcher's short hair and the fact that Callum Keith Rennie wasn't an evil Cylon, I was VERY CONFUSED. Did I mention that it was 4am?
I did have a really good Thanksgiving, though, despite some awkwardness around my friends trying to set me up with this guy in the most painfully obvious way possible despite my assessment after about five seconds that he is Not My Type. The line of dishes ran for ten feet: turkey (slow-cooked on the grill, which turned out really well), two legs of lamb, a ham, kielbasa, dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes, chipotle sweet potatoes, spinach salad, brussels sprouts, homemade yeast rolls, and three kinds of pierogies--mushroom cabbage, potato cheese, and plum. Over the years, M. has been farming out more and more of the meal to the guests, and this year, she and J. just made the meat, and that worked out well too because she was able to actually relax and enjoy her guests, and because everybody's contributions were delicious.
I made these brussels sprouts--three pounds of them-and all but a cup were gone by the end of the meal. I'll have to make them again; they were delicious. I also made this trifle with roasted pears and apples and pumpkin caramel sauce and it was EPIC. The vanilla bourbon custard was so good that I actually licked the bowl when I was putting the trifle together. If I make it again (and I think I will, because it was so good, although it makes enough to feed an army) I think I'll try to get the trifle assembled so that it has more time to ooze together and meld; I gave it the recommended minimum six hours, but I don't think that was quite enough.
The littlest D. has the finest red-gold eyebrows and desperately wants to walk. She can get five or six steps, arms stretched out in front of her, legs completely stiff and straight, like Frankenstein's monster. She's got the falling down to a science, which mostly works well, unless she's on the edge of the couch. D.'s reflexes are lightning fast at this point.
I hope the other Americans on my flist had good holidays, and that everybody else is not yet too sick of hearing about it. Okay, off to catch up on the flist.
