More Thoughts on the BSG Series Finale
Behind a cut, because they're totally spoilery.
So this morning when I woke up in the middle of a very strange dream that involved me going to the beach and setting up chairs on a grassy hillside overlooking a bunch of LA County lifeguards yelling at dumb swimmers while I tried to immobilize a Yorkshire terrier who had hurt its back (yeah, I really don't know either. That's pretty much par for the course with my dreams.)
And the very next thing my brain forked over, which at least made sense, unlike my dream, was that none of the human women had survived and made it to Earth 2.0.
Let's look at the list, shall we:
Laura Roslin, President of the Remainder of Humanity, Formerly Sec of Ed: dead of cancer within the first few weeks on Earth 2.0
Kara Starbuck Thrace: poofs out of existence in the middle of Lee reliving his Horatio Hornblower days
Anastasia Dualla: dies of suicide before the final arc
Cally: Spaced by Tory
The rest of the women: all Cylons.
This is mostly problematic for me because the series seems to be using the Cylon/human conflict as an analogy for our fear of the Other. Most often, the Cylons get coded as--well, there isn't really a most often because one of the problems with the series was that as it wound on, the analogies tended more towards the fast and loose than the consistent. But for the bulk of the series, the Cylons played the analogy role of the religiously fundamentalist, sleep terrorist cells in our midst (when they weren't serving as fodder for a chance to critique the US government, no?)
Either way, I'm really uncomfortable with the fact that those women are the ones who carry the future of humanity along.
And yet, of the top tier male human characters:
Bill Adama, Lee Adama, Gauis Baltar, Karl Agathon, and even Doc Cottle all make it. (We did lose Gaeta and Billy and Zarek, but compare and contrast that with the fact that we have to get down to the crew of Viper pilots before we find a single human woman who lives.)
Now, look, I'm down with the whole "we must work together to live" message that he series is trying to send. I get that. I totally do, but working together sort of means that some representatives of both genders of your population need to live to get to the working together part, and the fact that none of the human women live and nearly all the human men do, kind of a problem.
And do not get me started on the body count for characters of color. I'm so afraid that if I think about it too long my only response to Athena getting to live is that there is some totally horrible shit playing around the model minority crap going on there. But I've used up my allotted recreation time today, and my allotted portion of outrage. So I'll just toddle along now.
So this morning when I woke up in the middle of a very strange dream that involved me going to the beach and setting up chairs on a grassy hillside overlooking a bunch of LA County lifeguards yelling at dumb swimmers while I tried to immobilize a Yorkshire terrier who had hurt its back (yeah, I really don't know either. That's pretty much par for the course with my dreams.)
And the very next thing my brain forked over, which at least made sense, unlike my dream, was that none of the human women had survived and made it to Earth 2.0.
Let's look at the list, shall we:
Laura Roslin, President of the Remainder of Humanity, Formerly Sec of Ed: dead of cancer within the first few weeks on Earth 2.0
Kara Starbuck Thrace: poofs out of existence in the middle of Lee reliving his Horatio Hornblower days
Anastasia Dualla: dies of suicide before the final arc
Cally: Spaced by Tory
The rest of the women: all Cylons.
This is mostly problematic for me because the series seems to be using the Cylon/human conflict as an analogy for our fear of the Other. Most often, the Cylons get coded as--well, there isn't really a most often because one of the problems with the series was that as it wound on, the analogies tended more towards the fast and loose than the consistent. But for the bulk of the series, the Cylons played the analogy role of the religiously fundamentalist, sleep terrorist cells in our midst (when they weren't serving as fodder for a chance to critique the US government, no?)
Either way, I'm really uncomfortable with the fact that those women are the ones who carry the future of humanity along.
And yet, of the top tier male human characters:
Bill Adama, Lee Adama, Gauis Baltar, Karl Agathon, and even Doc Cottle all make it. (We did lose Gaeta and Billy and Zarek, but compare and contrast that with the fact that we have to get down to the crew of Viper pilots before we find a single human woman who lives.)
Now, look, I'm down with the whole "we must work together to live" message that he series is trying to send. I get that. I totally do, but working together sort of means that some representatives of both genders of your population need to live to get to the working together part, and the fact that none of the human women live and nearly all the human men do, kind of a problem.
And do not get me started on the body count for characters of color. I'm so afraid that if I think about it too long my only response to Athena getting to live is that there is some totally horrible shit playing around the model minority crap going on there. But I've used up my allotted recreation time today, and my allotted portion of outrage. So I'll just toddle along now.