The old man and the battlestar
BSG 3.18 - "The Son Also Rises"
This was certainly an aptly titled episode, since in so many ways it was about the relationship between fathers and sons and the baggage they engender. Adama didn't want to see Lee sitting at the defendant's table, like his father Joseph had, taking the other side in the family argument. Lee, I think, partly wanted to sit at the defendant's table because it was a way of stepping out of his father's shadow, of being an Adama without being the dutiful son of William Adama. I liked that part of their conflict; it felt true, and rooted in who they are. And Adama, at the end of the day, let Lee go, chose not to use his military rank to enforce his vision of what Lee should be on him, knew that it would only end badly, and that felt like a little bit of progress. Lee's end of the conflict felt a little more stuck in time, with his bizarre one-upsmanship with his father about who suffered the greater loss from Kara's death, and the way, in his stubbornness and idealism, he put himself in Lampkin's hands to become a piece in a labyrinthine game he barely understands exists. I thought it was interesting that Lampkin tapped into not only Lee's complicated relationship with his father and their military heritage but also his sense of entitled grief, telling him he would have stolen Kara's photo if Lee hadn't had so much stolen from him already.
The episode opened with three different people mourning for Kara: Adama alone, going over her file, the commendations and disciplinary notices and the irreverant but very affectionate birthday card; Lee, tryng to hold his grief inside and watching helplessly as it spilled out through the cracks, the exhaustion and the paleness and the slips of the tongue; Anders falling apart as outwardly and messily as Kara would have in his place. Lee's defensiveness with his father was nowhere present with Anders; there was a lovely sense of shared loss between the two men, of understanding that after all the soap opera of the quadrangle pull and tug of the past few months, they each were looking at the only other man in the world who understood what they felt, and that they were related, tied together, in some way, by Kara. I don't for a moment believe Kara's gone for good, Sackhoff's disappearance from the credits notwithstanding (interesting that her place in the credits is still there, just blank), but I think it's terribly important that these three men, and everyone else, accept the loss and work through their grief, because it is my entirely unspoiled speculation that whatever form Kara returns in, she will be in some way a new person, somehow reborn, and they can't know her again without having said goodbye to the person she was.
I will say that a lot of the conversations in this episode bugged me, although they were often well and convincingly acted. There was a lot of ponderous discussion of Issues that just didn't sound like the way real people talked. I think the worst was the scene were Cally explains to the other deck hands that a fair trial is important because otherwise they're tearing at each other and falling into the Cylons' hands. While this is true, it is (a) something the audience can figure out from context, if the writer trusts the audience to do so, and the writers on this show did so at one point, and (b) something I can't for a minute imagine Cally, of all people, saying, as if she spends a lot of times pondering the principles of democracy and the rule of law and has completely forgotten that Baltar signed a warrant for her execution, rather than being a rather young and shortsighted and emotional person most of the time. Also: "I feel like part of our world just fell down"?!? I understand that Laura was acknowledging the weight of the moment, the fact that Caprica can make or break Baltar at trial and they are so dependant on the relationship between a Cylon on a human for that, but when you have Mary freaking McDonnell to work with, you don't need a heavy, cryptic statement to convey that, since she can do it with the twitch of an eyelash, and once again it displays a complete lack of trust in the audience to get the point. We get the point. We're still watching this show, which means we're invested in complex issues and nuances, even when we're not thrilled with the execution.
That said, Lampkin (BADGER!) was a striking character who imposed himself on the situation through sheer force of personality, and the actor has great chemistry with the cast; he and Bamber were especially good together. I buy this guy as someone with plans within plans, hidden motivations, and the ability to exert his will on a situation, and they sold it to me in 40 minutes. Which is good, because I still need to see why this trial is going to tear the fleet apart, and I believe that Lampkin, and Lee by his side-especially with the cover of Lee, who really believes in the principles he espouses-can pull off some legal tricks that actually will cause murkiness and chaos.
As a side note, I'm glad to see that people are keeping pets in the fleet, because of all the things to worry about after the escape from New Caprica, at the top of my list has been the unknown fate of Tyrol and Cally's poor dog. Now I can pretend he went to live on a farm in the country was adopted by some nice family on another ship. Yes.
Also, I guess there were bombs. In all honesty, it made very little sense for military personnel to be bombing their own ships like that, when the danger of unintentionally harming their comrades was so high. But since it was just a plot piece and not the focal point of the episode, I'm just going to shrug my shoulders. It demonstrated that some people are willing to act on their belief that Baltar doesn't deserve a trial, and that Lee and some others still don't fully trust Sharon.
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I had the very great pleasure of hanging out with some local and visiting fans this weekend--makesmewannadie, laurashapiro, heresluck, cofax7, fallzalot, morgandawn, and oyceter. laurashapiro and heresluck made a wonderful dinner with their farmer's market haul-cream of asparagus soup, frittata with mushroom cream sauce over baby greens, roast pork with rosemary, and ice cream with caramel sauce. And then we watched vids! I have an incredibly word-based brain. I think of everything in terms of words and text and themes expressed in words. It's always absolutely fascinating to hear people who are much more tapped into the nuances of visuals and tones talk about how they see these things.
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Things I wish I had known before the tile guy ripped out two walls of my downstairs bathroom:
1.That when we originally discussed the Saturday/Sunday timeframe for repairs, that was only for patching one walls. When we moved on to discuss retiling the whole thing, it would have been ever so lovely for him to mention that it would take another 8 hours of work.
2.That he is doing this work in addition to his regular weekday work (I was possibly too excited about the fact that he was fine with working weekends to dig deeper on this), and that those extra 8 hours would start after 5pm this week.
3.That he is in EMT training classes Monday and Wednesday evenings, and won't be finishing the work until THURSDAY.
Ironically, I had been really proud of myself for catching several other major misunderstandings by summarizing and repeating back to him, since his English isn't bad but his accent is very heavy. And obviously, this is more inconvenient for my tenants, who have to use my shower or shower at their gym until Friday morning, than it is for me. And he's doing really thorough, nice work. STILL. I can't wait until this work is done because it has been nothing but hassle for the last two months.
Contractors, man. At least he's not like the guy who moved the window downstairs, who spent about four hours telling me about his ex-wife, who ripped him off for alimony and took his house, that bitch. Dude, for putting up with you, it was probably the least she deserved. I'm still bitter that I was handing you a check when I had to hear about it.
