We're all part of one ecosystem
I guess LJ went kablooey yesterday? I suspected there would be badness when I saw the announcement that they'd be doing power maintenance at the data center. We all remember what happened the last time there were power issues at the data center, right? Still, I suppose the hamster that powers the service needs to climb down off the wheel and take a break every now and then. (Seriously, though, it's ops 101 to have failovers and backups for critical servers, and I really wonder what they're doing with their system.)
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Sometimes, this show is an exercise in being careful what you wish for. Two things I had, in my naivete and optimism, been looking forward to were Kara and Tigh finding common ground and Kara and Lee interacting again, but after all of the intervening time and the experience of living through the occupation of New Caprica, the pieces are jagged and don't fit together the way they used to.
It was awful to watch Kara and Tigh bonding over their suffering and hate and inability to let go of a war the rest of the Galactica crew experienced at a much greater distance. I don't want to denigrate the sacrifices the Galactica crew made to rescue the humans down on the planet, but I do think there is a significant difference between enduring the day-to-day miseries and hard choices of the Cylon occupation firsthand and planning for and fighting one single battle. If nothing else, the former was something that brought out the worst in a lot of people, while the latter was something that brought out the best, and it's infinitely harder to watch the former play out in the people you care about and depend on. So I both get Kat's annoyance at Kara and Tigh's attitude, which was really pretty unbearable, and think that she's completely off-base in trying to draw equivalence between the experiences of the Galactica crew and the people on the ground during the occupation. But it's not like Kat is unique in failing to understand the depth of Kara and Tigh's trauma, which is why I also had mixed feelings about Adama in this episode. On the one hand, he did exactly what needed to be done-called Kara and Tigh out on their poisonous behavior and made it plain that they could not continue to be part of the crew unless they changed their attitudes-and I think he had reason, based on past experience, to believe that the tough love approach would be effective. Certainly, Kara has responded positively in the past when confronted with the possibility of losing the things most important to her-not her life, but her flying, or relationships with people she cared about. Adama played the daughter card, and it worked-at least to some extent. But these are really damaged people, and ordering them to get over themselves is an inadequate response. Even Tyrol, the everyman, and probably the most functional of the regulars who survived the occupation, wanders through his days looking haunted. Kara may have cut her hair and reached out to Kacey, but that doesn't erase the fact that she spent four months trapped in Leoben Conroy's domestic fantasy mindfuck. Adama's intervention worked because there was still some tiny bit of her that cared, about her flying, about Adama, about reconnecting with the human race. And Tigh doesn't care at all. Adama's expectation that they (and by extension, everybody else who survived the occupation) will just pull themselves together and pick up where they left off seems unwise and unrealistic. Tigh tells Adama bluntly that the man he'd served with for 30 years doesn't exist anymore.
Because Kara does have that tiny part that cares, I think she'll pull through this, but I am seriously afraid for Tigh, because I think he's right, and that there is no place in human society for what he's become. He twisted himself to achieve a goal, putting aside love and sympathy and empathy in favor of using suicide bombs as a tactic and killing his own wife because it was the only outcome of the rules he himself created, and turned himself into something in the service of war that has no use once the war is over.
It also seemed to me like Kara and Lee had had professional interactions, but hadn't actually talked since her return (which would not surprise me given Kara's state of mind, on top of their previous estrangement). But he does know a death wish when he sees it, which is a nice little dollop of characterization. Hopefully the weigh-in was the absolute last we'll hear of the Fat Lee storyline, and it was nice seeing him and Helo be so friendly, because I can believe that Helo is only slightly less excellent a friend than boyfriend/husband.
It was nice to see the bitterness and damage in Kara and Tigh counterbalanced by Gaeta, who was also drastically marked by his time on New Caprica, but in a better way-seeing Baltar for what he really is seems to have allowed Gaeta to step out from under his shadows and become more confident of his own considerable abilities, just as it pushed him to level of courage and action, in supplying the resistance with information, that he probably would never otherwise have known he possessed. It was lovely to see Adama and Roslin consulting with him, using the work he'd done, trusting his conclusions.
But really, the most interesting things in this episode happened aboard the Cylon basestars. In the last episode, Baltar told Caprica Six that she was much more than a machine; it seems all Cylons are, from the Raiders to the human models to the basestars themselves, driven by a consciousness that has both interconnected and individual parts. The idea that all the human models navigate through life by projecting is fascinating, not only because it seems to be exactly what Baltar was doing with the Six in his head but because it's an area of individual differentiation-every Cylon seems to have different projections. It seems that Caprica Six was never aware of the presence of Chip Six, and while Chip Six often advocates for the Cylon perspective, she's not necessarily on the side of the Cylons; she's on the side of Gaius Baltar. I was struck by the similarities between the way she got Baltar to volunteer to explore the infected basestar here-to ingratiate himself with the Cylons, to gather information he might be able to keep private and use-and the way she coached him to influence the outcome of the Tyllium raid in "The Hand of God." Neither were things that Baltar would have done on his own; both may work to his advantage. Withholding information about the infectious beacon seemed like his way of siding with humanity against the Cylons, or at least of keeping a card up his sleeve; the question is whether Caprica Six, who saw the beacon too, will cover for him.
And now for the wild theorizing portion of today's post. This episode left me with two very big questions about the Cylons.
1. Why, indeed, have we only seen seven of the models? Three says they don't talk about the others. There seems to have been some sort of split. This connects to some things about the occupation that seemed decidedly odd, specifically the way it was run with apparently limited resources by a small group of human models. And the Cylon occupation of New Caprica and retreat from the destroyed Twelve Colonies was, it seemed, the product of a Cylon movement to reach out to humans, borne from the conclusion that the original attack on the colonies was a mistake, that originated with Caprica Six and Galactica Boomer. So, was this New Caprica project something that only one group of models wanted to do? Or, as sdwolfpup wondered, was the original attack on the colonies something some of the human models wanted to do and others didn't agree with? If this particular group of human models, with their occupation of New Caprica and, now, their determination to absorb the human quest for Earth and make it their own, has set itself apart from the rest of the Cylon, that not only speaks of further individuation but makes them into something of a rag tag fleet, trying to bounce back from a defeat and looking for Earth, and the lines blur even more. Which brings me to the next question...
2. The dying Six on the infected basestar believes the beacon was left by the Thirteenth Tribe-a reasonable assumption, considering the scrolls point to the location as the start of the path to Earth-but she also accuses the Thirteenth Tribe of leaving it there to kill Cylons. Why would she think that? The Cylons, we've been told, were a fairly recent invention of man, and the Thirteenth Tribe passed through a couple of thousand years ago. There's the obvious explanation-that she's very ill, and that the beacon happens to carry an agent that happens to be deadly to Cylons. The alternative is that all of this has happened before. Wouldn't that be interesting? After the debacle of Season 2.5, I'm a little nervous of placing trust in Moore to have a real plan for where this could be going, but it would be nice if he did.
Whew, that was long. And I didn't even get into how much I admired the soundtrack, which is consistently excellent on this show but really hit some new peaks of greatness with the piano music in the basestar scenes, or how much I don't like Sharon Agathon's new callsign, mostly because it seems like using the names of gods was an exception rather than common practice, which gave Lee's callsign some significance that I feel has now been undermined.
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I spent the day in the East Bay yesterday with some old college friends, and am kind of frightened by how long it's been since I spent any time in Berkeley and North Oakland, considering I lived within a 2-mile radius of the UCB campus for nine years of my life. And while the city has many wonderful things, it does not have Zachary's pizza.
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Mrs. D.'s baby shower was last weekend, and in addition to giving them refills for the eco-friendly gDiapers they plan to use, I knit them some stuff.
Magnits baby bee hat and booties knit with Knitpicks Swish--1 skein black and ½ skein sunshine on the recommended needle sizes. The hat was my second experience with DPNs, and I discovered that metal DPNs are evil and that wooden ones are much easier to work with, and I managed to avoid any laddering, so I think I did pretty well with them. The tie for the hat didn't work at all the way the pattern described; I improvised, and am not completely happy with the results.
Pinwheel baby blanket knit with Knitpicks Swish--6 skeins in aloe for an approximately 3' diameter blanket on US7 DPNs, 16" circulars, and 29" circulars. I used this technique to get started, which helped a lot since this was my third experience with DPNs and with five stitches to begin with, there were needles flopping all over the place. I used a picot bind-off to make the edge a little more interesting.
Mrs. D. cried, which I assume must be from the hormones, because while I'm pleased with the way these came out, they're not the most super-awesome thing anybody's ever knit or anything.
* * * * *
Sometimes, this show is an exercise in being careful what you wish for. Two things I had, in my naivete and optimism, been looking forward to were Kara and Tigh finding common ground and Kara and Lee interacting again, but after all of the intervening time and the experience of living through the occupation of New Caprica, the pieces are jagged and don't fit together the way they used to.
It was awful to watch Kara and Tigh bonding over their suffering and hate and inability to let go of a war the rest of the Galactica crew experienced at a much greater distance. I don't want to denigrate the sacrifices the Galactica crew made to rescue the humans down on the planet, but I do think there is a significant difference between enduring the day-to-day miseries and hard choices of the Cylon occupation firsthand and planning for and fighting one single battle. If nothing else, the former was something that brought out the worst in a lot of people, while the latter was something that brought out the best, and it's infinitely harder to watch the former play out in the people you care about and depend on. So I both get Kat's annoyance at Kara and Tigh's attitude, which was really pretty unbearable, and think that she's completely off-base in trying to draw equivalence between the experiences of the Galactica crew and the people on the ground during the occupation. But it's not like Kat is unique in failing to understand the depth of Kara and Tigh's trauma, which is why I also had mixed feelings about Adama in this episode. On the one hand, he did exactly what needed to be done-called Kara and Tigh out on their poisonous behavior and made it plain that they could not continue to be part of the crew unless they changed their attitudes-and I think he had reason, based on past experience, to believe that the tough love approach would be effective. Certainly, Kara has responded positively in the past when confronted with the possibility of losing the things most important to her-not her life, but her flying, or relationships with people she cared about. Adama played the daughter card, and it worked-at least to some extent. But these are really damaged people, and ordering them to get over themselves is an inadequate response. Even Tyrol, the everyman, and probably the most functional of the regulars who survived the occupation, wanders through his days looking haunted. Kara may have cut her hair and reached out to Kacey, but that doesn't erase the fact that she spent four months trapped in Leoben Conroy's domestic fantasy mindfuck. Adama's intervention worked because there was still some tiny bit of her that cared, about her flying, about Adama, about reconnecting with the human race. And Tigh doesn't care at all. Adama's expectation that they (and by extension, everybody else who survived the occupation) will just pull themselves together and pick up where they left off seems unwise and unrealistic. Tigh tells Adama bluntly that the man he'd served with for 30 years doesn't exist anymore.
Because Kara does have that tiny part that cares, I think she'll pull through this, but I am seriously afraid for Tigh, because I think he's right, and that there is no place in human society for what he's become. He twisted himself to achieve a goal, putting aside love and sympathy and empathy in favor of using suicide bombs as a tactic and killing his own wife because it was the only outcome of the rules he himself created, and turned himself into something in the service of war that has no use once the war is over.
It also seemed to me like Kara and Lee had had professional interactions, but hadn't actually talked since her return (which would not surprise me given Kara's state of mind, on top of their previous estrangement). But he does know a death wish when he sees it, which is a nice little dollop of characterization. Hopefully the weigh-in was the absolute last we'll hear of the Fat Lee storyline, and it was nice seeing him and Helo be so friendly, because I can believe that Helo is only slightly less excellent a friend than boyfriend/husband.
It was nice to see the bitterness and damage in Kara and Tigh counterbalanced by Gaeta, who was also drastically marked by his time on New Caprica, but in a better way-seeing Baltar for what he really is seems to have allowed Gaeta to step out from under his shadows and become more confident of his own considerable abilities, just as it pushed him to level of courage and action, in supplying the resistance with information, that he probably would never otherwise have known he possessed. It was lovely to see Adama and Roslin consulting with him, using the work he'd done, trusting his conclusions.
But really, the most interesting things in this episode happened aboard the Cylon basestars. In the last episode, Baltar told Caprica Six that she was much more than a machine; it seems all Cylons are, from the Raiders to the human models to the basestars themselves, driven by a consciousness that has both interconnected and individual parts. The idea that all the human models navigate through life by projecting is fascinating, not only because it seems to be exactly what Baltar was doing with the Six in his head but because it's an area of individual differentiation-every Cylon seems to have different projections. It seems that Caprica Six was never aware of the presence of Chip Six, and while Chip Six often advocates for the Cylon perspective, she's not necessarily on the side of the Cylons; she's on the side of Gaius Baltar. I was struck by the similarities between the way she got Baltar to volunteer to explore the infected basestar here-to ingratiate himself with the Cylons, to gather information he might be able to keep private and use-and the way she coached him to influence the outcome of the Tyllium raid in "The Hand of God." Neither were things that Baltar would have done on his own; both may work to his advantage. Withholding information about the infectious beacon seemed like his way of siding with humanity against the Cylons, or at least of keeping a card up his sleeve; the question is whether Caprica Six, who saw the beacon too, will cover for him.
And now for the wild theorizing portion of today's post. This episode left me with two very big questions about the Cylons.
1. Why, indeed, have we only seen seven of the models? Three says they don't talk about the others. There seems to have been some sort of split. This connects to some things about the occupation that seemed decidedly odd, specifically the way it was run with apparently limited resources by a small group of human models. And the Cylon occupation of New Caprica and retreat from the destroyed Twelve Colonies was, it seemed, the product of a Cylon movement to reach out to humans, borne from the conclusion that the original attack on the colonies was a mistake, that originated with Caprica Six and Galactica Boomer. So, was this New Caprica project something that only one group of models wanted to do? Or, as sdwolfpup wondered, was the original attack on the colonies something some of the human models wanted to do and others didn't agree with? If this particular group of human models, with their occupation of New Caprica and, now, their determination to absorb the human quest for Earth and make it their own, has set itself apart from the rest of the Cylon, that not only speaks of further individuation but makes them into something of a rag tag fleet, trying to bounce back from a defeat and looking for Earth, and the lines blur even more. Which brings me to the next question...
2. The dying Six on the infected basestar believes the beacon was left by the Thirteenth Tribe-a reasonable assumption, considering the scrolls point to the location as the start of the path to Earth-but she also accuses the Thirteenth Tribe of leaving it there to kill Cylons. Why would she think that? The Cylons, we've been told, were a fairly recent invention of man, and the Thirteenth Tribe passed through a couple of thousand years ago. There's the obvious explanation-that she's very ill, and that the beacon happens to carry an agent that happens to be deadly to Cylons. The alternative is that all of this has happened before. Wouldn't that be interesting? After the debacle of Season 2.5, I'm a little nervous of placing trust in Moore to have a real plan for where this could be going, but it would be nice if he did.
Whew, that was long. And I didn't even get into how much I admired the soundtrack, which is consistently excellent on this show but really hit some new peaks of greatness with the piano music in the basestar scenes, or how much I don't like Sharon Agathon's new callsign, mostly because it seems like using the names of gods was an exception rather than common practice, which gave Lee's callsign some significance that I feel has now been undermined.
* * * * *
I spent the day in the East Bay yesterday with some old college friends, and am kind of frightened by how long it's been since I spent any time in Berkeley and North Oakland, considering I lived within a 2-mile radius of the UCB campus for nine years of my life. And while the city has many wonderful things, it does not have Zachary's pizza.
* * * * *
Mrs. D.'s baby shower was last weekend, and in addition to giving them refills for the eco-friendly gDiapers they plan to use, I knit them some stuff.
Magnits baby bee hat and booties knit with Knitpicks Swish--1 skein black and ½ skein sunshine on the recommended needle sizes. The hat was my second experience with DPNs, and I discovered that metal DPNs are evil and that wooden ones are much easier to work with, and I managed to avoid any laddering, so I think I did pretty well with them. The tie for the hat didn't work at all the way the pattern described; I improvised, and am not completely happy with the results.
Pinwheel baby blanket knit with Knitpicks Swish--6 skeins in aloe for an approximately 3' diameter blanket on US7 DPNs, 16" circulars, and 29" circulars. I used this technique to get started, which helped a lot since this was my third experience with DPNs and with five stitches to begin with, there were needles flopping all over the place. I used a picot bind-off to make the edge a little more interesting.
Mrs. D. cried, which I assume must be from the hormones, because while I'm pleased with the way these came out, they're not the most super-awesome thing anybody's ever knit or anything.