Yes, I think that's a very interesting distinction to explore. I actually think that Lee considered himself to be an active participant in both decisions. He obviously was active in the miniseries choice, but even when he received the Olympic Carrier order, he had to decide whether or not obeying it was the right thing to do. I think his last scene in the episode is very revealing, where his father says "I gave the order. It's my responsibility," and Lee answers, "I pulled the trigger. That's mine."
In other words, I think Lee feels that he is responsible for his actions, even actions he takes under orders. If he can't live with those actions, then he either disobeys orders (like when he mutinies to try to prevent the coup at the end of Season One), or he tries to argue the higher authorities into changing their minds (like when he questions his father about the Cain assassination order in "Resurrection Ship").
I think in the case of the Olympic Carrier, he decided that following orders was necessary, because the ship really was a danger to the fleet. But he found it hard to live with. I wonder whether Kara would have made the same choice if she'd been in command of the mission? She certainly seemed ready to defy orders until she saw Lee open fire. At that point, the ship was going to blow up anyway, so she decided not to leave the dirty work to Lee alone. But if she'd been the senior pilot in that situation, I don't know whether she would ever have opened fire.
In other words, I think Lee feels that he is responsible for his actions, even actions he takes under orders. If he can't live with those actions, then he either disobeys orders (like when he mutinies to try to prevent the coup at the end of Season One), or he tries to argue the higher authorities into changing their minds (like when he questions his father about the Cain assassination order in "Resurrection Ship").
I agree that Lee takes responsibility for his actions even if they're orders, but I wonder if the Olympic Carrier wasn't the first time he ever truly questioned an order. Making it easier later for him to mutiny and question the assassination of Cain.
I wonder whether Kara would have made the same choice if she'd been in command of the mission? She certainly seemed ready to defy orders until she saw Lee open fire. At that point, the ship was going to blow up anyway, so she decided not to leave the dirty work to Lee alone. But if she'd been the senior pilot in that situation, I don't know whether she would ever have opened fire.
This is a great question. It's easier for Kara to question and disobey orders so it's entirely possible that she would haven't fired a all. I will have to try to do more thinking about this since I don't have a great answer at this time.
I agree that Lee takes responsibility for his actions even if they're orders, but I wonder if the Olympic Carrier wasn't the first time he ever truly questioned an order. Making it easier later for him to mutiny and question the assassination of Cain.
I think this is a very plausible idea, and probably helps explain the huge emotional impact this incident had on him. I think Lee always had a questioning side to his character, and was always capable of standing up to authority figures like his father, but having to make a decision like this one is a far cry from reading banned books in school and the other small ways he used to question authority. I think that the Olympic Carrier definitely became a symbol in Lee's mind of the need to question military decisions, both his own and his commanding officers'.
Thanks for chatting with me, by the way, I'm enjoying your thoughts very much!
Not only did Lee always have to ability to stand up to authority figures, he really wanted to do rebel, but he didn't really have reason to go beyond quiet acts like banned books, etc.
Thank you for providing an excuse not to fold laundry. I have really enjoyed this too.
I've been reading your conversation with kdbleu and I can't help but butt in.So here are my thoughts.
As for the differences in the way he reacted to leaving ships behind on the mini and to actually destroying the OC, I have to agree with Kdbleu in that in the mini there was nothing else they could have done. You pointed out that he said they needed to cut their losses and couldn't risk the safety of the other ships by continuing to transfer passengers and that it actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise that the Cylons started their attack in the last seconds before the fleet jumped away. I think the decision to leave was the only rational, reasonable one at the time and the fact that the cylons started attacking just as they were jumping was not a "blessing in disguise" at all. They had been transfering passengers but Boomer had just spotted a cylons raider which had jumped in the middle of the gathered ships, scanned the area and jumped away with the information on the location of those ships. As a military officer, Lee knew it was a matter of minutes before the cylons returned in great numbers after having located so many survivors. The captain's suggestion that they continue the transfers till the cylons actually arrived was based on emotion and wishful thinking and not on reason. As for Doral, knowing that he was really a cylon, he obviously wanted them to stay so that the cylons could destroy more ships. Thankfully the president had already come to her senses after the close call they had had before. In fact, her decision to stay with the ships they had found and not jump when the cylons found them before was also not logical and reasonable at all. They had no weapons and could not defend themselves nor anybody else. They only survived because of sheer luck (or fate - heehee). I believe Lee only obeyed that order because he had already seen the equipement from Galactica and he quickly formed an alternative strategy that had at least some chance of working. But there was no other strategy available to them when the cylons found them again. As it was, they were lucky to have had enough time to jump themselves.
Having said that, I totally agree with you that there was a moral difference between leaving behind people who could not be saved, and actually killing them himself. This is one of the reasons the OC affected him so much. Also, I find it really interesting that when he tried to talk to Adama about it, his father gave him a speech about how soldiers/leaders don't second guess their decision, they live with them and move on. I think this weighed heavily on Lee. He of course believed that you have to live with the consequences of your decisions but whereas his father seemed to consider that second guessing was a weakness, something that might make you flinch when you should be acting, Lee believed they should always second guess their decisions because they needed to learn from them.
I liked that he tried to be really sure there was no alternative before actually shooting. And the fact that the cylons stopped coming after the ship was destroyed should have been evidence enough that the decision was a sound one. The fact that it bothered him anyway, to me, is a testament to his character and his sensitivity, more than anything else.
What I really, absolutely loved about the whole thing was his final talk with Adama. As you put it : Lee quietly rejects his father's effort to excuse him from responsibility. He doesn't believe in the "I was just following orders" idea -- the chain of command doesn't exempt individual soldiers from the responsibility to evaluate their actions in light of their own moral judgment. This. This is one the reasons I love Lee so much. At the end of the day, we are always responsible for the choices we make. It is easy to hide behind hierarchy or society or anything else. I think Adama was privately proud of Lee's reaction, although he was pained that he couldn't make his son feel better. They were still tiptoeing around each other. And getting to know each other.
This is one the reasons I love Lee so much. At the end of the day, we are always responsible for the choices we make. It is easy to hide behind hierarchy or society or anything else.
Yeah, there is balance, sure. Of course. Most certainly, yeah, right. And it is not swayed by his looks, his eyes, arms, smile, hip dents or anything. Always a perfect balance. I'm sure you know what I mean. ;)
Hello! So glad to hear your analysis. You may well be right that the OC was more of a tough call than the sublight ships in the miniseries, but I'll play devil's advocate on that, anyway :)
As a military officer, Lee knew it was a matter of minutes before the cylons returned in great numbers after having located so many survivors. The captain's suggestion that they continue the transfers till the cylons actually arrived was based on emotion and wishful thinking and not on reason.
Well, I agree that Lee's assumption that they only had minutes before the Cylons returned was a reasonable one, and the only responsible one to make. But I'm not sure his military training or anyone else's really could have given him grounds for certainty about that. I think one of the points of the miniseries (and early Season One) was that no one in the military had a good idea of what the Cylons' capabilities were. How long would it take a Raider recon mission to return with an attacking force -- how could anyone be sure? Lee didn't know much about Cylon capabilities -- he didn't know that his Viper's antiquated systems were his best protection, and he says that his electromagnetic pulse idea was a desperate gamble, one that had failed in every military training simulation he had worked on in college. He had no reasonable grounds to expect its success, either.
I guess I'm just saying that I don't think his military training could have given him much concrete, trustworthy information about Cylon capabilities, and that he couldn't really be sure whether they could expect a Cylon assault in five minutes or thirty-three minutes or when exactly from the moment that recon ship jumped away. And given that thousands of lives were at stake, I think some decision-makers would have decided to risk staying a few extra minutes if it looked like they could rescue more people that way. I think Roslin seriously considered staying, and if she hadn't already almost gotten them all killed earlier making this very mistake, she might not have been able to accept Lee's advice here. And I'm not confident that Lee would have defied her authority if she made the wrong choice here -- he might have, but he might not have. He certainly addressed her in this crisis as if it were her choice to make, and he had obeyed her before, even though he thought the magnetic pulse plan was a pretty long shot. His military training should have convinced him that the only reasonable option was to jump the ship away then, too, but he deferred to the President.
None of this contradicts your material point, which is that Lee was thinking rationally and he saw no rational alternative to his choice. I think you're right. But I also think that if the whole fleet had jumped away and left all those people to be killed and *never known* how long it actually took the Cylons to show up and attack, that decision probably would have weighed on Lee's mind more than it did, because it would have carried elements of doubt and uncertainty. That's the only sense in which I thought the Cylon's arrival was a 'blessing in disguise' -- obviously it was horrible for everyone involved, but at least Lee and the other survivors didn't have to spend their nights wondering whether they might have had time to save a few hundred or a few thousand more people if they'd waited a little longer before jumping away.
Now I get what you meant by "blessing in disguise" and it makes perfect sense. It's a confirmation that the decision to leave was the right one.
But, because bouncing ideas back and forth with you is so much fun, I'll try to defend my case. :)
You're right to say that they didn't know a lot about the cylons capabilites. They were certainly caught by surprise and they had no way of predicting that old ships and technology would be their best defense. But, at that time, they knew enough to expect the worst at all times. The cylons had somehow managed to destroy 12 planets, kill billions of people, incapacitate dozens (?) of fully armed, trained, state of the art battlestars, all that in one single, perfectly orchestrated attack. That meant that, whatever the especifics of their capabilities were, they had a phenomenal war machine and the odds were clearly against them. By that time he already knew that the more modern ships had been easily destroyed and that the cylons had won with hardly no resistance whatsoever and had logically suffered very few losses. Therefore, it is only reasonable to expect their attack after detection to be imminent - they had belic power and didn't seem to be engaged in fighting colonial ships (which had already been defeated) so their raiders were probably trying to locate and destroy survivors.
And I'm not confident that Lee would have defied her authority if she made the wrong choice here
I don't think he would have done it either. After all, his suggestion was the most logical one (and it turned out to be only good one) but the cylons hadn't arrived yet, so, there was still room for wishful thinking. The decision to stay then would have been unwise but not absurd. Unlike the first decision to stay. The cylons were already there. They had nukes while they had no weapons. I have no idea what went through Roslin's mind when she decided to stay. It was suicide, really. And that would have been the perfect moment for Lee to decide to disobey her orders no matter how much he supported democracy and all. I think the writers wanted to create suspense and angst (Adama thought Lee had died...). The only explanation I find for Lee's easy acceptance of that order was the fact that he believed that despite the fact the strategy he used hadn't worked in war college simulations, it still seemed doable to him (after all, the simulations were created by colonial experts who knew nothing of cylon capabilities or strategies themselves. Perhaps it was simple and not technologically advanced enough to have a chance at working when, unlike they would have believed before the war, more advanced technology had failed.
But, at that time, they knew enough to expect the worst at all times.
Yes, I think you've hit the nail on the head, there. And that was basically Lee's argument, as I recall. We can't afford to assume that we have room to risk delay, because if we lose, we lose everything. Exactly. It's kind of amazing to me to think that it was that decision which saved the entire fleet which constitutes the human race for the rest of the series. I believe the only survivors were the ones that made that jump. Well, they found a few more scattered survivors later, like the Pegasus crew and the resistance fighters on Caprica, but for all practical purposes the FTL ships Lee and Roslin saved in that moment became the whole human race. Thank you, Lee, for winning that argument!
And I'm in complete agreement with you about the suicidal craziness of Roslin's initial decision when the first Raiders were approaching Colonial One. I guess I understand what she thought the gesture meant -- sort of like the British royals who refused to leave Buckingham Palace during the bombing raids on London during the World Wars, she wanted to stand or fall with her people -- but honestly, it was a hopeless and therefore unjustifiable sacrifice, and she was going to take the whole ship down with her. Thank you again, Lee, for coming up with an impossible save, there! I agree that the writers designed the situation based on angst more than logic (such a surprise!), but I think your explanation of Lee's perspective -- that he at least thought he had a doable strategy -- makes as much sense as can be made of it.
Plus, he had just been insisting to his father that they had to recognize civilian leadership in the midst of war ("you're taking orders from a schoolteacher?!"), so I'm not all that surprised that he didn't execute a complete one-eighty and deny the principle he had just been defending. Maybe a bit of old-fashioned Adama stubbornness played into the way he handled that ethical dilemma as well, and made him more willing to take a chance on an untried strategy :) Plus, as kdbleu pointed out earlier, Lee was only beginning to be placed in situations where he had to seriously question orders; defying the person he regarded as the lawful authority would have come very hard for him this early in his development as a leader. Even when he does defy the President, in Bastille Day, he defies her with the law.
So, to sum up, yay Lee. Good thinking. Way to save the human race, my friend.
And, along with you and kdbleu, I've also noticed that he's kind of hawt. So really, what's not to love?
In other words, I think Lee feels that he is responsible for his actions, even actions he takes under orders. If he can't live with those actions, then he either disobeys orders (like when he mutinies to try to prevent the coup at the end of Season One), or he tries to argue the higher authorities into changing their minds (like when he questions his father about the Cain assassination order in "Resurrection Ship").
I think in the case of the Olympic Carrier, he decided that following orders was necessary, because the ship really was a danger to the fleet. But he found it hard to live with. I wonder whether Kara would have made the same choice if she'd been in command of the mission? She certainly seemed ready to defy orders until she saw Lee open fire. At that point, the ship was going to blow up anyway, so she decided not to leave the dirty work to Lee alone. But if she'd been the senior pilot in that situation, I don't know whether she would ever have opened fire.
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I agree that Lee takes responsibility for his actions even if they're orders, but I wonder if the Olympic Carrier wasn't the first time he ever truly questioned an order. Making it easier later for him to mutiny and question the assassination of Cain.
I wonder whether Kara would have made the same choice if she'd been in command of the mission? She certainly seemed ready to defy orders until she saw Lee open fire. At that point, the ship was going to blow up anyway, so she decided not to leave the dirty work to Lee alone. But if she'd been the senior pilot in that situation, I don't know whether she would ever have opened fire.
This is a great question. It's easier for Kara to question and disobey orders so it's entirely possible that she would haven't fired a all. I will have to try to do more thinking about this since I don't have a great answer at this time.
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I think this is a very plausible idea, and probably helps explain the huge emotional impact this incident had on him. I think Lee always had a questioning side to his character, and was always capable of standing up to authority figures like his father, but having to make a decision like this one is a far cry from reading banned books in school and the other small ways he used to question authority. I think that the Olympic Carrier definitely became a symbol in Lee's mind of the need to question military decisions, both his own and his commanding officers'.
Thanks for chatting with me, by the way, I'm enjoying your thoughts very much!
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Thank you for providing an excuse not to fold laundry. I have really enjoyed this too.
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As for the differences in the way he reacted to leaving ships behind on the mini and to actually destroying the OC, I have to agree with Kdbleu in that in the mini there was nothing else they could have done. You pointed out that he said they needed to cut their losses and couldn't risk the safety of the other ships by continuing to transfer passengers and that it actually turned out to be a blessing in disguise that the Cylons started their attack in the last seconds before the fleet jumped away. I think the decision to leave was the only rational, reasonable one at the time and the fact that the cylons started attacking just as they were jumping was not a "blessing in disguise" at all. They had been transfering passengers but Boomer had just spotted a cylons raider which had jumped in the middle of the gathered ships, scanned the area and jumped away with the information on the location of those ships. As a military officer, Lee knew it was a matter of minutes before the cylons returned in great numbers after having located so many survivors. The captain's suggestion that they continue the transfers till the cylons actually arrived was based on emotion and wishful thinking and not on reason. As for Doral, knowing that he was really a cylon, he obviously wanted them to stay so that the cylons could destroy more ships. Thankfully the president had already come to her senses after the close call they had had before. In fact, her decision to stay with the ships they had found and not jump when the cylons found them before was also not logical and reasonable at all. They had no weapons and could not defend themselves nor anybody else. They only survived because of sheer luck (or fate - heehee). I believe Lee only obeyed that order because he had already seen the equipement from Galactica and he quickly formed an alternative strategy that had at least some chance of working. But there was no other strategy available to them when the cylons found them again. As it was, they were lucky to have had enough time to jump themselves.
Having said that, I totally agree with you that there was a moral difference between leaving behind people who could not be saved, and actually killing them himself. This is one of the reasons the OC affected him so much. Also, I find it really interesting that when he tried to talk to Adama about it, his father gave him a speech about how soldiers/leaders don't second guess their decision, they live with them and move on. I think this weighed heavily on Lee. He of course believed that you have to live with the consequences of your decisions but whereas his father seemed to consider that second guessing was a weakness, something that might make you flinch when you should be acting, Lee believed they should always second guess their decisions because they needed to learn from them.
I liked that he tried to be really sure there was no alternative before actually shooting. And the fact that the cylons stopped coming after the ship was destroyed should have been evidence enough that the decision was a sound one. The fact that it bothered him anyway, to me, is a testament to his character and his sensitivity, more than anything else.
What I really, absolutely loved about the whole thing was his final talk with Adama. As you put it : Lee quietly rejects his father's effort to excuse him from responsibility. He doesn't believe in the "I was just following orders" idea -- the chain of command doesn't exempt individual soldiers from the responsibility to evaluate their actions in light of their own moral judgment. This. This is one the reasons I love Lee so much. At the end of the day, we are always responsible for the choices we make. It is easy to hide behind hierarchy or society or anything else. I think Adama was privately proud of Lee's reaction, although he was pained that he couldn't make his son feel better. They were still tiptoeing around each other. And getting to know each other.
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That and he's really, really hawt. ;)
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As a military officer, Lee knew it was a matter of minutes before the cylons returned in great numbers after having located so many survivors. The captain's suggestion that they continue the transfers till the cylons actually arrived was based on emotion and wishful thinking and not on reason.
Well, I agree that Lee's assumption that they only had minutes before the Cylons returned was a reasonable one, and the only responsible one to make. But I'm not sure his military training or anyone else's really could have given him grounds for certainty about that. I think one of the points of the miniseries (and early Season One) was that no one in the military had a good idea of what the Cylons' capabilities were. How long would it take a Raider recon mission to return with an attacking force -- how could anyone be sure? Lee didn't know much about Cylon capabilities -- he didn't know that his Viper's antiquated systems were his best protection, and he says that his electromagnetic pulse idea was a desperate gamble, one that had failed in every military training simulation he had worked on in college. He had no reasonable grounds to expect its success, either.
I guess I'm just saying that I don't think his military training could have given him much concrete, trustworthy information about Cylon capabilities, and that he couldn't really be sure whether they could expect a Cylon assault in five minutes or thirty-three minutes or when exactly from the moment that recon ship jumped away. And given that thousands of lives were at stake, I think some decision-makers would have decided to risk staying a few extra minutes if it looked like they could rescue more people that way. I think Roslin seriously considered staying, and if she hadn't already almost gotten them all killed earlier making this very mistake, she might not have been able to accept Lee's advice here. And I'm not confident that Lee would have defied her authority if she made the wrong choice here -- he might have, but he might not have. He certainly addressed her in this crisis as if it were her choice to make, and he had obeyed her before, even though he thought the magnetic pulse plan was a pretty long shot. His military training should have convinced him that the only reasonable option was to jump the ship away then, too, but he deferred to the President.
None of this contradicts your material point, which is that Lee was thinking rationally and he saw no rational alternative to his choice. I think you're right. But I also think that if the whole fleet had jumped away and left all those people to be killed and *never known* how long it actually took the Cylons to show up and attack, that decision probably would have weighed on Lee's mind more than it did, because it would have carried elements of doubt and uncertainty. That's the only sense in which I thought the Cylon's arrival was a 'blessing in disguise' -- obviously it was horrible for everyone involved, but at least Lee and the other survivors didn't have to spend their nights wondering whether they might have had time to save a few hundred or a few thousand more people if they'd waited a little longer before jumping away.
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decision to leave was the right one.
But, because bouncing ideas back and forth with you is so much fun, I'll try to defend my case. :)
You're right to say that they didn't know a lot about the cylons capabilites. They were certainly caught by surprise and they had no way of predicting that old ships and technology would be their best defense. But, at that time, they knew enough to expect the worst at all times. The cylons had somehow managed to destroy 12 planets, kill billions of people, incapacitate dozens (?) of fully armed, trained, state of the art battlestars, all that in one single, perfectly orchestrated attack. That meant that, whatever the especifics of their capabilities were, they had a phenomenal war machine and the odds were clearly against them. By that time he already knew that the more modern ships had been easily destroyed and that the cylons had won with hardly no resistance whatsoever and had logically suffered very few losses. Therefore, it is only reasonable to expect their attack after detection to be imminent - they had belic power and didn't seem to be engaged in fighting colonial ships (which had already been defeated) so their raiders were probably trying to locate and destroy survivors.
And I'm not confident that Lee would have defied her authority if she made the wrong choice here
I don't think he would have done it either. After all, his suggestion was the most logical one (and it turned out to be only good one) but the cylons hadn't arrived yet, so, there was still room for wishful thinking. The decision to stay then would have been unwise but not absurd. Unlike the first decision to stay. The cylons were already there. They had nukes while they had no weapons. I have no idea what went through Roslin's mind when she decided to stay. It was suicide, really. And that would have been the perfect moment for Lee to decide to disobey her orders no matter how much he supported democracy and all. I think the writers wanted to create suspense and angst (Adama thought Lee had died...). The only explanation I find for Lee's easy acceptance of that order was the fact that he believed that despite the fact the strategy he used hadn't worked in war college simulations, it still seemed doable to him (after all, the simulations were created by colonial experts who knew nothing of cylon capabilities or strategies themselves. Perhaps it was simple and not technologically advanced enough to have a chance at working when, unlike they would have believed before the war, more advanced technology had failed.
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Yes, I think you've hit the nail on the head, there. And that was basically Lee's argument, as I recall. We can't afford to assume that we have room to risk delay, because if we lose, we lose everything. Exactly. It's kind of amazing to me to think that it was that decision which saved the entire fleet which constitutes the human race for the rest of the series. I believe the only survivors were the ones that made that jump. Well, they found a few more scattered survivors later, like the Pegasus crew and the resistance fighters on Caprica, but for all practical purposes the FTL ships Lee and Roslin saved in that moment became the whole human race. Thank you, Lee, for winning that argument!
And I'm in complete agreement with you about the suicidal craziness of Roslin's initial decision when the first Raiders were approaching Colonial One. I guess I understand what she thought the gesture meant -- sort of like the British royals who refused to leave Buckingham Palace during the bombing raids on London during the World Wars, she wanted to stand or fall with her people -- but honestly, it was a hopeless and therefore unjustifiable sacrifice, and she was going to take the whole ship down with her. Thank you again, Lee, for coming up with an impossible save, there! I agree that the writers designed the situation based on angst more than logic (such a surprise!), but I think your explanation of Lee's perspective -- that he at least thought he had a doable strategy -- makes as much sense as can be made of it.
Plus, he had just been insisting to his father that they had to recognize civilian leadership in the midst of war ("you're taking orders from a schoolteacher?!"), so I'm not all that surprised that he didn't execute a complete one-eighty and deny the principle he had just been defending. Maybe a bit of old-fashioned Adama stubbornness played into the way he handled that ethical dilemma as well, and made him more willing to take a chance on an untried strategy :) Plus, as kdbleu pointed out earlier, Lee was only beginning to be placed in situations where he had to seriously question orders; defying the person he regarded as the lawful authority would have come very hard for him this early in his development as a leader. Even when he does defy the President, in Bastille Day, he defies her with the law.
So, to sum up, yay Lee. Good thinking. Way to save the human race, my friend.
And, along with you and kdbleu, I've also noticed that he's kind of hawt. So really, what's not to love?
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