Post brought up by comment
I left a comment on kick_galvanic's lj (she wrote a refreshing Leoben/Hybrid fanfiction here), and was thinking while typing then. I kept thinking of the subject after I left said comment so I need to expand my thoughts into an actual post of mine. When the thoughts want out, the fingers have to be typing!
First off, here is what I said about Leoben and Kara on BSG:
"Oh it is very complicated! L/K was very BDSM since the torture episode ("Flesh and Blood") from season 1, but I think that Leoben's feelings were genuine, and even Katee Sackhoff thought that Kara loved him too (Starbuck and her men!)and was frustrated that the writers left their relationship a bit unresolved after their scene on Earth. And the pairing was hot (hence Kara's eros/thanatos fantasy with the paint sex and the dying Socrata just before she blew herself up).
My take on Kara Thrace's storyline is that she was a woman but she became Aurora after "Maëlstrom", not an angel then, but a goddess made woman, one of the Lords of Kobol. She had her own Passion, Christ-like, but polytheism style. It was a way for the writers to balance things out between the two faiths, although the role of the Head!Six and Head!Gaius in the finale and all the God-talk on Time Square seemed to have favoured the monotheistic view (which I found annoying at first).
Of course, intuitive Leoben felt that something had changed about Kara when he saw her again on the Demetrius, and being a monotheist, he called her an angel(and so did Baltar later when he outed her)while still behaving with her as she was "his Kara" (the way he touched her, something that Sam picked up immediately btw).
Yet his freaking out on Earth was very significant. He did not understand what happened to her, he had no answers and he ran away.
So in my book, Leoben is not Charon but perhaps a sort of reversed Maria de Magdalena, and Kara had her last temptation when she pictured her guide to death under his guise!"
I wrote about Kara being Aurora before, when I reviewed the finale, but I hadn't thought about what it meant to other characters until now. Fortunately Ron Moore left the issue open enough (to many fans' distress!) to allow some musing.
Kara's resurrection was very Christ-like, as I said above, but it was, mostly, like Aurora's renewal, and she fulfilled her role as Aurora leading the fleet to a new home, Earth 2.0 in "Day Break" (the title says it itself!) Part II. So the job being done, she could go. The character's journey was nothing but an allegory.
The last scene with Lee for instance, was of course an echo to that bird in the flashbacks, the pigeon that was trapped in his house, after he almost had sex with Kara while his brother was passed out on the couch.
Aurora was the goddess of dawn. She was supposed to renew herself every morning and fly across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun. Having Kara vanishing, like a bird who would have flown away in the sky, on the dawn of humanity on Earth 2.0 is quite fitting of course.
But what does it mean to Lee?
It means that he's free, and that he can move on. He was talking about exploring the planet after all. Lee who used to be Apollo, Greek god of light and sun, was no longer a pilot and had plans, earthly plans, while Kara has always been about flying. She belonged to the sky, while he was happy on the surface. In an earlier scene, Lee and Kara bid their farewell to Papadama and Mama Prez, as the sibling pilots they were from day one. The scene was very family-like, Zeus/Adama and his wife leaving the kids behind, that is Starbuck and Apollo. In Roman mythology Aurora had two siblings, Sol and Moon.
As for Leoben...he was quite a solar character himself. Flamboyant - almost as charismatic as Roy Batty the character Rutger Hauer played in Blade Runner (I used to think that Callum Keith Rennie was the poor man's Rutger Hauer but he won me over)-, and all Oracle-like. Leoben means son of Leo. In the zodiac, leo is a fire sign, ruled by the Sun.
So Leoben was supposed to be a seer, even though he sometimes lied, until he could no longer see anything, and it's an injured Sam, the man whom Kara married, who became an oracle after he was turned into a hybrid. And it is also fitting that, as Aurora's husband, Sam's last journey was to lead the fleet into the sun.
So Kara's three loves were avatars of the god of Sun and prophecies.
After the destruction of the hub, skinjobs were no longer immortal. At the end of the series the Leobens chose to settle in, joining the colonials on the new Earth, until permanent death would happen or in his words until they would be taken into God's hands. So now I realised that Leoben's journey was no longer about Kara/Aurora since he'd given up on resurrection, like all the other models. "It happened before and it will happen again" could no longer be his motto, he could no longer echo Kara's destiny. They had to part ways.
Aurora also had many mortal lovers, which fits in Kara's screwing around, even sleeping with Gaius Baltar. I don't know how Zack fits in, but Zack was never a big player in the story. Still I recall that Zacharie means "God remembers", or something like that, in Hebrew. And Zack was mostly a memory througout the series, remembered by his father, his brother and Kara; we saw him through flashbacks, mostly through Kara's eyes. And Lee's last words to an already vanished Kara was "you won't be forgotten".
And it all brings me back to Blade Runner, that was such a big inspiration for the BSG writers, and to Roy Batty's final scene, the famous "tears in rain" speech, as he's mourning the lost memories of his incredible experiences when he finally dies. And then he releases the dove that flies away in the sky. Like the pigeon in the flashbacks, like Kara.
It's fun to parse and connect things, but sometimes everything just happens in the name of poetic licence.
First off, here is what I said about Leoben and Kara on BSG:
"Oh it is very complicated! L/K was very BDSM since the torture episode ("Flesh and Blood") from season 1, but I think that Leoben's feelings were genuine, and even Katee Sackhoff thought that Kara loved him too (Starbuck and her men!)and was frustrated that the writers left their relationship a bit unresolved after their scene on Earth. And the pairing was hot (hence Kara's eros/thanatos fantasy with the paint sex and the dying Socrata just before she blew herself up).
My take on Kara Thrace's storyline is that she was a woman but she became Aurora after "Maëlstrom", not an angel then, but a goddess made woman, one of the Lords of Kobol. She had her own Passion, Christ-like, but polytheism style. It was a way for the writers to balance things out between the two faiths, although the role of the Head!Six and Head!Gaius in the finale and all the God-talk on Time Square seemed to have favoured the monotheistic view (which I found annoying at first).
Of course, intuitive Leoben felt that something had changed about Kara when he saw her again on the Demetrius, and being a monotheist, he called her an angel(and so did Baltar later when he outed her)while still behaving with her as she was "his Kara" (the way he touched her, something that Sam picked up immediately btw).
Yet his freaking out on Earth was very significant. He did not understand what happened to her, he had no answers and he ran away.
So in my book, Leoben is not Charon but perhaps a sort of reversed Maria de Magdalena, and Kara had her last temptation when she pictured her guide to death under his guise!"
I wrote about Kara being Aurora before, when I reviewed the finale, but I hadn't thought about what it meant to other characters until now. Fortunately Ron Moore left the issue open enough (to many fans' distress!) to allow some musing.
Kara's resurrection was very Christ-like, as I said above, but it was, mostly, like Aurora's renewal, and she fulfilled her role as Aurora leading the fleet to a new home, Earth 2.0 in "Day Break" (the title says it itself!) Part II. So the job being done, she could go. The character's journey was nothing but an allegory.
The last scene with Lee for instance, was of course an echo to that bird in the flashbacks, the pigeon that was trapped in his house, after he almost had sex with Kara while his brother was passed out on the couch.
Aurora was the goddess of dawn. She was supposed to renew herself every morning and fly across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun. Having Kara vanishing, like a bird who would have flown away in the sky, on the dawn of humanity on Earth 2.0 is quite fitting of course.
But what does it mean to Lee?
It means that he's free, and that he can move on. He was talking about exploring the planet after all. Lee who used to be Apollo, Greek god of light and sun, was no longer a pilot and had plans, earthly plans, while Kara has always been about flying. She belonged to the sky, while he was happy on the surface. In an earlier scene, Lee and Kara bid their farewell to Papadama and Mama Prez, as the sibling pilots they were from day one. The scene was very family-like, Zeus/Adama and his wife leaving the kids behind, that is Starbuck and Apollo. In Roman mythology Aurora had two siblings, Sol and Moon.
As for Leoben...he was quite a solar character himself. Flamboyant - almost as charismatic as Roy Batty the character Rutger Hauer played in Blade Runner (I used to think that Callum Keith Rennie was the poor man's Rutger Hauer but he won me over)-, and all Oracle-like. Leoben means son of Leo. In the zodiac, leo is a fire sign, ruled by the Sun.
So Leoben was supposed to be a seer, even though he sometimes lied, until he could no longer see anything, and it's an injured Sam, the man whom Kara married, who became an oracle after he was turned into a hybrid. And it is also fitting that, as Aurora's husband, Sam's last journey was to lead the fleet into the sun.
So Kara's three loves were avatars of the god of Sun and prophecies.
After the destruction of the hub, skinjobs were no longer immortal. At the end of the series the Leobens chose to settle in, joining the colonials on the new Earth, until permanent death would happen or in his words until they would be taken into God's hands. So now I realised that Leoben's journey was no longer about Kara/Aurora since he'd given up on resurrection, like all the other models. "It happened before and it will happen again" could no longer be his motto, he could no longer echo Kara's destiny. They had to part ways.
Aurora also had many mortal lovers, which fits in Kara's screwing around, even sleeping with Gaius Baltar. I don't know how Zack fits in, but Zack was never a big player in the story. Still I recall that Zacharie means "God remembers", or something like that, in Hebrew. And Zack was mostly a memory througout the series, remembered by his father, his brother and Kara; we saw him through flashbacks, mostly through Kara's eyes. And Lee's last words to an already vanished Kara was "you won't be forgotten".
And it all brings me back to Blade Runner, that was such a big inspiration for the BSG writers, and to Roy Batty's final scene, the famous "tears in rain" speech, as he's mourning the lost memories of his incredible experiences when he finally dies. And then he releases the dove that flies away in the sky. Like the pigeon in the flashbacks, like Kara.
Click to viewIt's fun to parse and connect things, but sometimes everything just happens in the name of poetic licence.