One of these things is not like the others
BSG 4.18 - "Islanded in a Stream of Stars"
I'm not even sure how to frame a discussion of this episode. A lot of it was a big goodbye; the rest was moving the characters into place for whatever's happening at the end. In a lot of ways, as we approach the end of the season, the problem of the characters serving the larger plot has accelerated; it was certainly hard to pick out more than a couple of small, telling character moments in this episode; but in a lot of ways, I find that my tolerance for that lack of focus is higher now that the story is winding up to its final denouement.
So everybody goes through the five stages of grief and gets to acceptance over the death of the Galactica, with more or less sobbing and paint-smearing (BILL ADAMA). It happens fast; they were all set to make the ship half-Cylon to repair it last week; this week the blowout kills a precious few more irreplaceable lives, both Cylon and human; after the initial shocking topic of picking the Galactica's bones comes up, even the people most emotionally invested in the ship (BILL ADAMA) can see that it's time to let go, and that the only thing they have a choice in is the manner of the parting.
And, on a parallel track, Kara says goodbye to herself, and then says goodbye to Sam; she accepts that they're both gone, and what's here now is something different, and that that's what she has to work with. I loved the scene between Kara and Lee in the corridor for the obvious reason that it was adorable (and called back, in some ways, to the scene in the locker room in "Home"--Lee's heartfelt acceptance, her unspoken reassurance), but more than that because Kara looked happy and sure for the first time in forever, standing there next to the pictures of her fallen friends and her former life, and Lee's former life, and their shared past, and, finally, her own photo, in pilot's clothing, with the dogtags she doesn't wear anymore shining on her chest. She'd been carrying the weight of all of those dead pilots around with her; they'd almost pulled her under. She's finally weightless enough to do what she needs to do now. Instead of running when the hybrid tells her she'll bring the end, she plugs Sam back in, to find out what she needs to know.
I thought Laura's conversation with Bill was a lovely summation of what home has meant over the course of the show: first the colonies, then the ships, then the hope of Earth. Now, they don't know what it is, but they know what it isn't--clinging to those old ideas of home, like clinging to the Galactica, is going to get them killed. They've fractured beyond repair. The fleet needs to move on.
I'm not surprised to learn that Boomer's house was a real place in her mind; I don't think it would have been so convincing to Tyrol if she hadn't been basing her projections on something that, deep down inside, she'd once wanted. And because of that, I wasn't surprised that she connected to Hera, not just as a helpless child, but as someone who was very like someone who would have been part of that fantasy life. I also think there's something symbolically significant about Hera playing with the ship toys at the beginning of the episode, and the cut to the fleet; she seems to connect them all somehow.
And, finally, I thought Baltar had several interesting conversations in this episode, though I'm not quite sure what to make of any of them. He's finally able to talk to Caprica in the flesh--the woman who tricked him into helping her destroy the Colonies. His sympathy seems half-sincere, half same old Baltar; she seems to think he hasn't changed, and she definitely has. But then Kara comes to him with the mystery of what she is, and reminds him that he used to be a scientist. So on the one hand, he seems to have gotten out the old lab equipment again; but on the other, he takes the opportunity of the shared funerals to point to her as an example of the angels walking among them that he's been preaching about, and betrays her secret to everyone. (Including Lee, who once again had to find out something about Kara from Baltar.) So maybe the problem is that he has changed in some ways, and hasn't in others.
* * * * *
TSCC 2.17 - "Ourselves Alone"
"Ourselves alone," it turns out, is a common mistranslation of Sinn Fein, which started out as an identity movement before it became an overtly political party. I have no idea what that has to do with anything, beyond the overall theme of self-determination.
I think there were two interesting parallels going on in this episode: one between Cameron and Riley, and one between Cameron and Jessie.
Cameron and Riley are both from the future; and they're both damaged. Cameron cuts her wrist open to see how Riley might have thought that might have fixed her. Is it a matter of tinkering with the parts? And what both seem to want, on some level, is for John to fix them. Riley wants to lose herself in the fantasy, and be what John thinks she is. Cameron isn't sure of her own self-repair; and some of it is probably a matter of her having cannily figured out that getting John to fix her might help him too, but part of it comes from the fact that she seems to trust his judgment more than her own now. After all, she's not supposed to be able to make the decisions she's making now. She's not supposed to be trying to figure out whether she needs to kill Riley--it's not usually a decision at all. And since none of his other repairs have helped, she gives him the ultimate power to fix her: the stopwatch with the trigger to the bomb in her head. (And here, the parallel hits another parallel that's been running for some time, between Cameron and John Henry. Catherine Weaver brings Ellison in to teach John Henry right from wrong; Cameron is actually trying to figure it out for herself. She's seen the need, where John Henry hasn't.)
Cameron and Jessie both have a mission to protect John; Cameron's comes from John himself, while Jessie's a self-appointed operator. And she's a fanatic, trapped in her own nihilism--she's there to end the war, not make sure it never happens; she just wants to grab a few moments of pleasure in an unbroken world before it all goes to hell, and she can't understand why Riley doesn't appreciate the gift she's given her, of those few moments; she doesn't understand how anybody could look for something more. In other words, Jessie is in some ways more focused on and limited by her mission parameters than Cameron is. She's able to adjust to specific circumstances--to kill Riley herself rather than manipulating Cameron into doing it--but she isn't able to shift the overall plan to adjust to the currents and undertows in the people around her.
In the end, I think Cameron had a hard time making a decision about killing Riley because she's starting to understand how complicated and unpredictable humans are. John's close to Riley now. Killing her might remove an overt threat, but it might also set another chain of emotions and events off, one that's equally dangerous and entirely unforseen. Sometimes it's nice to be needed, and John needs Riley; she does something for him. Cameron can see that. Jessie, on the other hand, doesn't understand any of the nuances, even though she's human and Cameron is a robot. She's setting the pieces up in a line to create a mechanical outcome: Riley's dead, John will get rid of Cameron, all of the logical outcomes should follow. Cameron seems to know more about self-determination than Jessie does at this point.
I'm not sure how that plays into the show's overall conceit--that people from the future can come back and change the past, that they have done so multiple times, that each act creates another permutation. But I thought it was interesting that Derek identified what they were doing, in an episode that was so much about self-determination, by asking Jessie when her judgment day is, knowing that it's different from his own.
* * * * *
The Office 5.16 - "Blood Drive"
It seems like NBC is usually a little more timely with the airing of the holiday tie-in episodes?
Anyway, Michael is always at his best and most appalling when he's trying to live out a fairytale, though I'm not quite sure how he managed to juggle the roles of cupid and Cinderella's fairytale prince. (And I sort of wish they hadn't called out the Cinderella parallel, because I was enjoying it as an unspoken element.) But he's a man who needs hope, and that includes hope for other people; and here, it turned out that the rest of the office actually needed hope as much as he did, even if it meant hope that the blood drive glove lady might come to their mixer.
I liked the contrast between Kevin's stuttering awkwardness and Dwight's predatory salesmanship. (I swear, Rainn Wilson has shark eyes.) And I think Kevin might have gotten lucky, because if the sweaty palms line didn't put her off--and in context, it was oddly sweet--he might have found the right woman.
Bob Vance and Phyllis in the restaurant bathroom was pretty predictable (also gross--restaurant bathroom!), and overall, although there were a couple of nice character moments (aw, Kelly, getting so excited about the secret valentine and discovering it was a dental appointment reminder!), this was not exactly a standout episode.
I'm not even sure how to frame a discussion of this episode. A lot of it was a big goodbye; the rest was moving the characters into place for whatever's happening at the end. In a lot of ways, as we approach the end of the season, the problem of the characters serving the larger plot has accelerated; it was certainly hard to pick out more than a couple of small, telling character moments in this episode; but in a lot of ways, I find that my tolerance for that lack of focus is higher now that the story is winding up to its final denouement.
So everybody goes through the five stages of grief and gets to acceptance over the death of the Galactica, with more or less sobbing and paint-smearing (BILL ADAMA). It happens fast; they were all set to make the ship half-Cylon to repair it last week; this week the blowout kills a precious few more irreplaceable lives, both Cylon and human; after the initial shocking topic of picking the Galactica's bones comes up, even the people most emotionally invested in the ship (BILL ADAMA) can see that it's time to let go, and that the only thing they have a choice in is the manner of the parting.
And, on a parallel track, Kara says goodbye to herself, and then says goodbye to Sam; she accepts that they're both gone, and what's here now is something different, and that that's what she has to work with. I loved the scene between Kara and Lee in the corridor for the obvious reason that it was adorable (and called back, in some ways, to the scene in the locker room in "Home"--Lee's heartfelt acceptance, her unspoken reassurance), but more than that because Kara looked happy and sure for the first time in forever, standing there next to the pictures of her fallen friends and her former life, and Lee's former life, and their shared past, and, finally, her own photo, in pilot's clothing, with the dogtags she doesn't wear anymore shining on her chest. She'd been carrying the weight of all of those dead pilots around with her; they'd almost pulled her under. She's finally weightless enough to do what she needs to do now. Instead of running when the hybrid tells her she'll bring the end, she plugs Sam back in, to find out what she needs to know.
I thought Laura's conversation with Bill was a lovely summation of what home has meant over the course of the show: first the colonies, then the ships, then the hope of Earth. Now, they don't know what it is, but they know what it isn't--clinging to those old ideas of home, like clinging to the Galactica, is going to get them killed. They've fractured beyond repair. The fleet needs to move on.
I'm not surprised to learn that Boomer's house was a real place in her mind; I don't think it would have been so convincing to Tyrol if she hadn't been basing her projections on something that, deep down inside, she'd once wanted. And because of that, I wasn't surprised that she connected to Hera, not just as a helpless child, but as someone who was very like someone who would have been part of that fantasy life. I also think there's something symbolically significant about Hera playing with the ship toys at the beginning of the episode, and the cut to the fleet; she seems to connect them all somehow.
And, finally, I thought Baltar had several interesting conversations in this episode, though I'm not quite sure what to make of any of them. He's finally able to talk to Caprica in the flesh--the woman who tricked him into helping her destroy the Colonies. His sympathy seems half-sincere, half same old Baltar; she seems to think he hasn't changed, and she definitely has. But then Kara comes to him with the mystery of what she is, and reminds him that he used to be a scientist. So on the one hand, he seems to have gotten out the old lab equipment again; but on the other, he takes the opportunity of the shared funerals to point to her as an example of the angels walking among them that he's been preaching about, and betrays her secret to everyone. (Including Lee, who once again had to find out something about Kara from Baltar.) So maybe the problem is that he has changed in some ways, and hasn't in others.
* * * * *
TSCC 2.17 - "Ourselves Alone"
"Ourselves alone," it turns out, is a common mistranslation of Sinn Fein, which started out as an identity movement before it became an overtly political party. I have no idea what that has to do with anything, beyond the overall theme of self-determination.
I think there were two interesting parallels going on in this episode: one between Cameron and Riley, and one between Cameron and Jessie.
Cameron and Riley are both from the future; and they're both damaged. Cameron cuts her wrist open to see how Riley might have thought that might have fixed her. Is it a matter of tinkering with the parts? And what both seem to want, on some level, is for John to fix them. Riley wants to lose herself in the fantasy, and be what John thinks she is. Cameron isn't sure of her own self-repair; and some of it is probably a matter of her having cannily figured out that getting John to fix her might help him too, but part of it comes from the fact that she seems to trust his judgment more than her own now. After all, she's not supposed to be able to make the decisions she's making now. She's not supposed to be trying to figure out whether she needs to kill Riley--it's not usually a decision at all. And since none of his other repairs have helped, she gives him the ultimate power to fix her: the stopwatch with the trigger to the bomb in her head. (And here, the parallel hits another parallel that's been running for some time, between Cameron and John Henry. Catherine Weaver brings Ellison in to teach John Henry right from wrong; Cameron is actually trying to figure it out for herself. She's seen the need, where John Henry hasn't.)
Cameron and Jessie both have a mission to protect John; Cameron's comes from John himself, while Jessie's a self-appointed operator. And she's a fanatic, trapped in her own nihilism--she's there to end the war, not make sure it never happens; she just wants to grab a few moments of pleasure in an unbroken world before it all goes to hell, and she can't understand why Riley doesn't appreciate the gift she's given her, of those few moments; she doesn't understand how anybody could look for something more. In other words, Jessie is in some ways more focused on and limited by her mission parameters than Cameron is. She's able to adjust to specific circumstances--to kill Riley herself rather than manipulating Cameron into doing it--but she isn't able to shift the overall plan to adjust to the currents and undertows in the people around her.
In the end, I think Cameron had a hard time making a decision about killing Riley because she's starting to understand how complicated and unpredictable humans are. John's close to Riley now. Killing her might remove an overt threat, but it might also set another chain of emotions and events off, one that's equally dangerous and entirely unforseen. Sometimes it's nice to be needed, and John needs Riley; she does something for him. Cameron can see that. Jessie, on the other hand, doesn't understand any of the nuances, even though she's human and Cameron is a robot. She's setting the pieces up in a line to create a mechanical outcome: Riley's dead, John will get rid of Cameron, all of the logical outcomes should follow. Cameron seems to know more about self-determination than Jessie does at this point.
I'm not sure how that plays into the show's overall conceit--that people from the future can come back and change the past, that they have done so multiple times, that each act creates another permutation. But I thought it was interesting that Derek identified what they were doing, in an episode that was so much about self-determination, by asking Jessie when her judgment day is, knowing that it's different from his own.
* * * * *
The Office 5.16 - "Blood Drive"
It seems like NBC is usually a little more timely with the airing of the holiday tie-in episodes?
Anyway, Michael is always at his best and most appalling when he's trying to live out a fairytale, though I'm not quite sure how he managed to juggle the roles of cupid and Cinderella's fairytale prince. (And I sort of wish they hadn't called out the Cinderella parallel, because I was enjoying it as an unspoken element.) But he's a man who needs hope, and that includes hope for other people; and here, it turned out that the rest of the office actually needed hope as much as he did, even if it meant hope that the blood drive glove lady might come to their mixer.
I liked the contrast between Kevin's stuttering awkwardness and Dwight's predatory salesmanship. (I swear, Rainn Wilson has shark eyes.) And I think Kevin might have gotten lucky, because if the sweaty palms line didn't put her off--and in context, it was oddly sweet--he might have found the right woman.
Bob Vance and Phyllis in the restaurant bathroom was pretty predictable (also gross--restaurant bathroom!), and overall, although there were a couple of nice character moments (aw, Kelly, getting so excited about the secret valentine and discovering it was a dental appointment reminder!), this was not exactly a standout episode.