I'll be waiting right here just to show you

[gamerchick]

We started watching season 2.5 of Battlestar Galactica last night and it was pretty good. Some of the cliffhangers were resolved a lot faster than I thought they were going to be, and I'm still not entirely sure what I think of what happened to Roslin at the end of the third episode (and yes I'm being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers), but it'

Comments

[michael_b_lee]

I'm still not entirely sure what I think of what happened to Roslin at the end of the third episode

I wasn't happy with it, to be honest, but I'm hoping that there will be consquences of some kind on down the line. I can already think of some interesting twists they could take her character as a result.

I gotta say, though, much as I loved Cain, she was a monster.

[gamerchick]

I gotta say, though, much as I loved Cain, she was a monster.

I really don't agree, nor do I think that it was the writers' intent to portray her as such. I got a strong vibe of "there but for the grace of god go I" from everything they did with the character. I could rant for a really long time about this, and probably will later on, but the short version of my position is that because there was such a strong effort made to draw parallels between Cain and Adama, I felt that the writers were arguing that Adama and his crew would have ended up the same as the crew of the Pegasus had they chosen to fight the Cylons directly instead of focus on humanity's survival, as they almost did in the pilot episode. By nature, Cain wasn't morally inferior to Adama or anybody else on the show, nor was she a monster. She simply made the morally inferior decision at a crucial moment and it was all downhill from there. I think it's a severe oversimplification of an impressively complex issue to say "she was a monster" and leave it at that.

[michael_b_lee]

Okay, sorry, I wasn't being clear.

By virtue of the choices Cain made, she became a monster. She committed atrocities against her cylon prisoner and against her fellow humans in her pursuit of her personal war with the cylons.

I got the same "there but for the grace of God go I" vibe that you did, or at least that every human has the capacity to commit monstrous acts in pursuit of what they believe to be noble ends.

[gamerchick]

Then we totally agree. (c: Those episodes inspired quite a bit of debate amongst my friends and I. That's one of the things I really like about BSG - it's normally more thought-provoking than a lot of the stuff on TV.

[ziabandito555]

dang it!!! wish i was there for the debates i like debates! mrf...

so anyway I'll send alias eventually but i wanna hook Q on it first...

[gamerchick]

Actually Dan, I think I'll pass on Alias - I watched part of the first season and it just didn't grab me. Thanks for the offer though!

[ziabandito555]

mmm fair enough *grins*

[ziabandito555]

EXACTLY!!! thats my beleife too!!! she isn't evil per se she just didnt have the anchoring of protecting civilians that Adama and the Galactica did. Thus she and the Pegasus were drawn further down the path of unstable unthinking militerism as would happen with any extream

[squidheadjax]

I'm... rather less sympathetic to Caine

[gamerchick]

The core of the argument that I haven't got around to making yet is not that Cain's decisions were good ones, but rather that if Galactica had decided to go after the Cylon fleet as Adama was originally planning, it's possible that they would have made the exact same decisions. I don't condone much of what Cain did, but I understand the forces that drove her to make decisions, and that's why I pity her rather than despising her. And it's not like Adama exactly has the moral high ground in terms of certain decisions that Galactica made, either. For starters, I don't believe that Galactica is even remotely as serious about treating captured Cylons as respected prisoners of war as they claimed to Cain to be, but that's definitely a subject for the as-yet-unwritten rant.

FWIW, I do think that what's-his-name was stretching the truth about Cain shooting the original XO, but I have no evidence to support that claim.

[squidheadjax]

I'll wait until you make your argument, then.

[jinxgcp]

No, no, no. Caine's not a monster cuz of all that!

Caine's a monster for being the progenitor of all vampires!

;)

[gamerchick]

I was waiting for somebody to say that, and you were the first. (c:

[jinxgcp]

Woot!

It seemed obvious, but nobody made the silly joke, so I took up the slack in humor here. ;)