Oh, reading everyone's comments I feel sad again, too :(
Being a shipper myself, I am of course disappointed that they separated Lee and Kara right after she got back and kept them separated for most of the time thereafter. If I were in charge of the show, it wouldn't have happened that way. But since every time they're together it is so lovely and great and beautiful, I still enjoy this a lot more than their Season Three quadrangle angst-o-rama.
As I said above, I think it's possible to find good reasons for Lee to feel like he's needed on Colonial One, and to think that he's supporting Kara as well as the wider fleet by getting in position to influence the political decision-making about their journey to Earth. I don't think it's an abandonment of Kara or an unjustifiable character decision. It turns out to put him in the right place at the right time to give her the support she needs -- her word decides his policy, and his policy decides the fate of the fleet in Revelations.
However, I do think his political storyline turned out to be pretty undramatic as played until we got to Revelations. I liked the Lee-Laura relationship in Season One/Two, but for the next few episodes here it seems to me to consist of her being bitter and cold and him being combative and smug. The debate they are having about the nature of democracy is mildly interesting, but it's hampered by the fact that watching the Quorum is about as interesting as watching paint dry. (It reminds me of an MST3K joke about the Star Wars prequels: "I can't wait to get to the procedural senate votes! Give sanctions more time!" Sigh.)
And I think we're all puzzled at how to deal with the odd ambiguity in the Lee/Kara relationship throughout this season. It's odd in that every time they're together they are loving and supportive and totally comfortable with each other in a way beyond anything they'd reached before. It's like the writers, knowing among themselves that they have an external way to break up the relationship in the end (Kara's secretly dead), have finally stopped having to manufacture any other convoluted, phony obstacles to the Kara/Lee relationship. They can just relax and let the characters behave naturally with each other, which results in sheer awesomeness every time they're in the same room. But to the audience it seems weird because there doesn't seem to be any good reason for them not to be pursuing a relationship -- in fact, it looks a lot like they're already in one, what with the mutual support and lack of angst and kissing like there's no tomorrow, etc. So we're left with the question, "What are they waiting for?" The only answer that I can think of is the same as Pythia's, namely that they both subconsciously know that she's dead and therefore they can't build any kind of personal future together (which I think is half-way plausible BUT it's terribly frustrating because the writers not only fail to establish this, but they tend to spend half their time establishing the exact opposite -- the Kara/Sam stuff makes it seem like Kara can build personal relationships, both physically and emotionally, despite her being dead, and the Islanded scene implies that Lee is still living in hope).
I think much of the audience viewed the Kara/Lee stuff this season as a slow romantic build, which is part of why they felt so betrayed in the end.
But does Kara have a relationship with Sam in season 4 in any meaningful way? She uses him for sex to try to feel that her body is a real thing. She seems ready to shoot him to protect her destiny without a second thought in Faith. It's Lee she goes to after she finds her body. And when she stops to take care of him in the mutiny it plays given the way Kara works as a character through the mutiny as her reaching for her Starbuck persona as a crux for dealing with her crisis coming to a crashing halt with an imperative to help someone live rather than to kill. Then she realises that Sam holds some answers to her destiny and she realises she feels tenderness for this man whom she has wronged in some way. I know KS plays the last part of this very hard as if it is more than that and then did the ad lib but I don't think that is supported by text, theme or structure. In the last podcast Mrs Ron is waxing lyrical about the last K-S scene but it is very clear that that is not RDM's take. I don't think he wanted to say much at all about K-S in the scene. It was just farewell of the story to Sam.
Generally I think that Lee-Kara makes a lot more sense this season if K-S is put in its place. I just don't believe RDM was interested in Kara finding love with Sam. Kara had her destiny tied into various myths. He was saying what he wanted to say in the way he had constructed the L-K and A-R dichotomy and Sam mattered only as part of the path Kara had to ride to that destiny.
From everything that I can see, and based on Katee's comments, she knew that L/K were not going to be together in the end and that is how she played it. Her attitude towards Sam changes for me when he gets shot. There's a depth of emotion about Sam that I had not seen and frankly found to be very strange. There's all sort of romantic overtones to her scenes with Sam when he's getting the surgery, sliding into the goo, and finally steering the fleet into the sun. I can't stand to watch it, but it is plainly there. For whatever RDM was *trying* to accomplish, he did give them something that looked like a relationship to me. I hate it, but I think it's there.
But sci-fi-shipper if Katee weren't playing it the way she were would you think the story was attaching any positive romantic weight to Kara-Sam and that it was saying Kara chose Sam over Lee. I can't see anything beyond what Katee is bringing to it that suggests that at all. I haven't read anything that RDM has said that suggests he wanted to invest some final meaning in Kara-Sam. The fact that Katee's explanation of her own performance has basically nothing to do with the story only strengthens my belief that it is not what the story is saying at all.
I get what you are saying, but as a viewer, it doesn't really matter to me what RDM and the writers "intended." I saw Kara getting very emotional over Sam well before I knew her intent as an actress. I DO think it was very strange that she would suddenly be feeling so much for this guy she was more than willing to toss aside. It didn't make sense and I hated it. (And I don't think I said it meant that Kara chose Sam over Lee.) But for me the intensity existed nonetheless. I haven't read any of RDM's comments, to be honest, because I think the story should stand on its own. I interpret what I saw and felt during the show and I saw something strong from Kara to Sam - that's all I'm saying. I appreciate the in-depth meta analysis of everything on this comm, but my interpretations tend to boil down to how I personally reacted to the show. *shrugs* There are a hundred different ways to interpret, and good for Ron that he intended something different. He also used a fat pigeon to represent Kara. :(
My one objection to this thread is that I now have to bleach my brain because I've defended a relationship between Kara and Sam in S4.5. Ugh. *dunks head*
Very sorry sci-fi-shipper. I really didn't want to drive you to that thought or feeling! I guess I just think that it helps making Lee-Kara something with a point in season 4 if Sam-Kara is put in its place.
i am also someone who watched the show in an odd way: seasons 1-4.0 pretty quickly on DVD and then 4.5 live whilst rewatching what had come before twice. Most of the time I don't have much memory of what my first reactions to many things in seasons 1-4.0 were at all. I do remember though when I was rewatching that I came to the conclusion that a lot of the way the story was told was through structure and particularly the repetition of scenes/events and the way that meaning is drawn from that. And structurally I can't see much weight going on to Kara-Sam.
Hee. It's okay. Thinking about Kara/Sam has a tendency to make me cranky. :)
Structurally, there was no reason for Kara and Sam to have any romantic connection after his shooting. He doesn't really help her with her memories of the song or the translation of the song into the coordinates. His function in the final mission seems clear and even clever, but her reaction to him is unnecessary and now I know, of course, driven by her own personal feelings towards Trucco, particularly after he'd had a very serious accident that might have left him paralyzed. *RAGE*
Anyway, it is sad to think, as Rachel pointed out, that Kara was intended to have no personal links to anyone in Season 4+. WHY? Why did they take a beloved character, who with her history and need for love and care, and kill her off and then bring her back terribly disconnected from everyone who loved her? And then to have things complicated incidentally by Katee playing the part of Sam's grieving widow. Agh. I agree with your arguments about the role of the relationship in the story (not needed, not substantial), but what was presented tells a slightly different story for me and I'm unable to disregard the emotional reactions in favor of the intellectual ones. I guess they have to live side-by-side and continue to make my brain hurt. :)
Hey there, Pythia. Sorry I wandered off for a while, but I appreciate your perspective here and I also understand sci_fi_shipper's point that a lot of this depends on what we as viewers see in the material and the way it strikes us both intellectually and emotionally.
I think we all generally agree that the last Season had problems in the Lee and Kara/Lee and even Bill-Lee storylines, though everyone has their own take on what the main problems were. There are those who are willing to accept the overall tragic storyline and try to reinterpret it in a way that makes it seem worthwhile and not a denial of the characters' worth or relationships -- I tend to fall in that camp, but I do feel that it takes a lot of work on the viewer's part to get a satisfying conclusion out of the material we were given, though I think we were also given a lot of really beautiful stuff along the way and I wouldn't have wanted to miss 4.0/4.5, not even the finale. There are others who prefer to reject the ending as fundamentally misguided and interpret the preceding Season without that endgame in mind. I think that's just as legitimate, and probably less work :) I'm glad there are people out there who do both. There are certainly some scenes/plotpoints I can't reconcile myself to, so in some ways I play both sides of the fence, I guess :)
On the Kara/Sam storyline, I think it's open to interpretation. It was given a lot of time and attention and emotional depth in Season 4.5, which was a collaborative decision among actors and writers. I'm not interested in bashing any people over this decision, though I am disappointed that the little time we had left for the show concentrated so much on Kara realizing how much Sam meant to her. I do see an emotional journey there for Kara, though I don't think it means Sam rather than Lee was her one true love. To me, the storyline reflects very clearly something that Lee said to her years before: "You are fine, you are fine with the dead guys. It's the living ones you can't deal with." She treats Sam just as shabbily as ever until he's wounded, and once he's comatose he is very easy to love. But it's still fundamentally a safe and one-sided kind of love, not a living or equal relationship. I'm not surprised that Kara's guilt drove her deeply into it or that she drew a lot of comfort from it. I also think there is something admirable in showing love and compassion toward a person who is suffering from a terrible injury -- Sam deserved her respect and care. I'm only sorry that the last of her life and time was absorbed by that, because I cared more about her challenging, equal, living relationship with Lee.
I do listen to RDM's commentary, and in general I enjoy it, but when it comes to the finale it saddens me very much (though it's actually Michael Rymer's comments that I find most depressing). I don't think RDM (or KS for that matter) intended Kara to end up with anyone. But I think that in juxtaposing the Kara/Sam farewell to the Kara/Lee one, most viewers would come away with the sense that the real emotion lay in the former rather than the latter, which I feel is a real shame.
In conclusion, I will just say that KS gave an interview right around the beginning of Season 4.5 in Chicago in which she said that she thought Kara had come back as a ghost in order to accomplish an important all-consuming mission and that individual, personal love no longer had much to do with her journey. I could accept that character logic if they had kept it consistent, but I feel that her character arc in Season 4.5 had a lot less to do with her higher mission and a lot more to do with her personal relationships, which makes the Kara/Lee ambiguous limbo harder for me to understand.
I entirely agree with you Rachel that as Kara-Sam can come over at times in 4.5 the line 'you're fine with the dead guys' screams out at it. But then that again just reinforces my view that the relationship has the appearance of more weight than it really has. Kara's journey is to fulfil her destiny by reaching as an individual a position of psychic health: symbolically she journeys into the mandala, which represents wholeness. She begins by saying farewell to her mother and she allows herself to remember her father and the gift he gave her, which together leave her childhood behind, and in doing so she accepts her mortality and a purpose beyond herself that is connected to the force of nature of the universe. I think that her offering Sam her love and care in the mutiny, and effectively rejecting the Starbuck persona in doing do, fits pretty well into that journey, because to do all this she must leave Starbuck behind. But holding up romantic relationships with the dead guys is psychic unhealth, not health. For me it's not just that I don't see it in the story itself, I think it would actually compromise the story in a quite damaging way if it were there because it dilutes Kara's growth. Sam for me serves two ends for Kara in 4.5: she needs to try to save him and care for him because enjoying killing people really isn't the solution (and I say that as someone who very much enjoys her and Lee running through Galactica shooting people) and he has knowledge that can help her fulfil her destiny.
I also agree that there's obvious emotion in the Kara-Sam final scene where the Lee-Kara one is more cerebral but when I watch now I find that the Kara-Sam one leaves me almost entirely cold and the Lee-Kara one quite deeply moves me. I think that is always frustrating when moments that one feels are huge emotional moments don't entirely work that way on first viewing, especially when they are on screen with very obviously heart-tugging moments. I remember the first time I watched the Doctor Who season four finale and the two Doctor-Rose scene on Bad Wolf Bay just didn't work for me at all whilst the end of Donna was emotionally shattering. Now, again I wish the dialogue was a little different in places, I see the point and it really moves me. I think it is easy watching shows sometimes to think that what the writers are making important depends on how any of us personally and emotionally react to it, but I think that can also lead us away from what they were actually wanting to say. I've been thinking recently about how peculiar the whole serialised TV story-telling is as medium. There's something in the way that it combines emotional visceralness with all this opportunity for thinking for the viewer and the way at the same time that the story-tellers themselves are dependent on others and then have to make all these compromises with people telling them what the audience want (when there are always multiple audiences wanting pretty different things) that produces something so complicated that the stories are as much mysteries as anything else.
Yes, I think television and film and theatre are all tremendously collaborative mediums, both between the different members of the artistic team and also between those artists and their audience. I don't think there is any one set meaning to these stories -- as you say there is a lot of room for interpretation, and different stages of interpretation are occuring at different levels of production and consumption.
Like sci_fi_shipper, I respond first and foremost to the story as it plays as drama, and the way it strikes my feelings and the meaning I see in it are the weightiest experiences for me. I always enjoy going back and learning more about the writer's intent, and the actor's intent, because that helps me see the different things they were going for and often it shows me things in the scenes that I hadn't noticed on my own. Sometimes I don't think the artists achieved what they wanted to achieve, and sometimes I don't agree with the message they were intending to send. But I can forgive a fair amount of poor execution if the idea behind it moves me (and what moves you is a very personal thing -- I am odd in shipperdom in that the idea behind Kara's ultimate sacrifice moves me, whereas I find the drunk-on-a-table flashback harder to accept; I see nobility in the former that I find very lacking in the latter, and RDM's comment that Lee and Kara "never got off that table" is one of the things that makes me and other fans upset).
With Season Four, and especially the finale, the actors and writers express different intentions and interpretations of their own work, and with all of them there are ideas that move me and also ideas that disappoint me. So I develop my own interpretation that makes things most satisfying to me, and if that means ignoring some of the stated creative intent, I'm fine with that :)
I personally find it harder than you do to give the writers the benefit of the doubt on their over-arching structure, given that they repeatedly said they had no long-term plan, and in particular RDM has said that Lee was the most difficult character for him to figure out how to use and that he went down a lot of blind alleys with the character. But certainly I think it's possible and fun for fans to connect the dots in a way the show didn't always manage.
I don't think RDM was intending to give Lee an unhappy ending, I think he thought he gave him a hopeful one. And I can respect the intent, but as we've discussed I personally think that there are some misguided ideas about the meaning of self-fulfillment wrapped up in that. I think Lee's loss of all the people he loved was a sacrifice and a tragedy, not an opportunity he needed in order to 'be his own man.' One of the repeated themes throughout the show was "In order for children to come into their own, their parents [and lovers?] have to die." I disagree strongly with this sentiment (never listen to Leoben, guys!). I don't think self-fulfillment depends on standing alone at the top, self-sufficient and free from the need to love and argue and work with those closest to you in daily life. And I don't think that aging parents are an obstacle to their children; part of maturity is finding your own balance, sharing the joys and sufferings of life with your family and your loved ones in a way that enhances rather than diminishes your own individuality, self-expression, and achievements. It's true that Lee is left alone with a chance to start all over and maybe find those things at some future point with someone who is a stranger to us; but I didn't want him to have to start over, and I didn't want those joys and sufferings to be shared with strangers instead of with the people I'd invested in for years. I can accept it, because BSG is in many ways a tragedy and I see something noble in the personal price Lee and Kara pay for humanity's future, but it saddens me very much (all the more so because it's played as if it's primarily hopeful).
But again, I don't think my reading of the ending is at all definitive. And when the ending gets me down I head over to listen to JB at the Jules Verne festival and remember how good the intentions were and see the beauty the actor found in the scene and then I feel a lot better :)
I guess I am a bit different in at least one respect Rachel and sc-fi-shipper. I think that I am very much a writers' intent kind of person in television and other story-telling. It doesn't mean that I won't be pretty critical but I always try to start with what I think the story is saying, or the different possible interpretations it seems itself to put out. If I don't like something, I'll go back first to try to think about what is trying to be said. Basically, I want to go where the story takes me, whatever that is. With Battlestar that really saved me with Kara's storyline because when I first realised where they were going with that then it pushed what had been various buttons for me in a negative way, and I pretty much forced myself to try to think my way through it and then when Daybreak came I actually just liked her ending which would have been unconceivable if I had known about it a month before. It's very interesting seeing how different people approach things very differently and how sometimes it leads to such very different conclusions!
I also think that there's a difference Rachel between RDM not knowing where the details of the plot were going, which he obviously didn't on his own admission, and not knowing where the big picture and themes were going, which I think he did: at the big narrative level and thematically pretty much all the ending is in place by Epiphanies. I do agree though that leaves open the question of how much he had thought about where Lee was to end up. I think that the endings for the other four of the principal five can be seen by that point but for Lee probably not.
I think that the 'for children to come into their own their parents have to die' plays pretty ambiguously and is at least in part critique. After all it is said by a Cylon and is a way the Cylons justify the genocide. The one time that it is used directly in relation to Lee when Kara says it to him, she draws out the implication that they will walk the temple of Aurora together, and Lee responds 'pretty to think so' ie fanciful, not real, to think so, and said temple has been reduced to wreckage by the end of the episode. Obviously Lee is on his own at the end, and neither Adama nor Roslin have a place in the new world, but I don't think that means that the story is taking Leoben's position as a definitive line on this. If the Cylons used it to justify killing their 'parents' both in the genocide and it plays in Cavil's personal motivation, Lee stands in a rather different relationship to it. Yes, he has a new journey ahead of him in which he won't be defining himself in relation to those parental relationships but he does so having chosen loving them over rejecting them.
Some of what you say makes me wonder why they chose to show Kara's growth through her caring about two dying people: her mother in Maelstrom and Sam in S4.5. I think your quote by Lee "You are fine, you are fine with the dead guys. It's the living ones you can't deal with," does give me some insight into how they encapsulated Kara's ability to connect to people in general. I would have so loved for Kara to grow emotionally enough to have a *real* relationship with Lee. Everyone feels bad for the guy in the vegetative state - is that all they were willing to give her? And previously, to make her connect to her dead mother only through her mother's death AND in a hallucination? Why wasn't she allowed to connect in a real and loving way to others in her real non-angel(!) life? It's dehumanizing for Kara and like much of Seasons 4+, the writers seemed to put all the humanity into the cylons and left little for the rest of the humans (save Baltar). This is an overstatement, of sorts, but I think my point seems clear. Kara deserved more. :(
I think sci-fi-shipper that what you are talking about here is precisely where the sheer scale of the show's ambition created difficulties for itself. It is trying to quite a lot of different things. One of those is a mythological story of human origins in which Kara is crucial. In doing that they decided to invest her with quite a range of our own mythological stories from different traditions and put it in the whole Jungian perspective that ran through a fair bit of not only the symbolism in the show, but the whole concept of the divine and the relationship of myth to it. I do think her relationship with Lee was some part of that: the whole Artemis aspect to her played off his Apollo. But it was only one part. At the same time they were doing the stuff about time and in particular the whole journey v this has all happened before and it will all happen again theme, and the Lee-Kara relationship was very much part of that. On its own terms they could have chosen to use Lee-Kara as ultimately a journey that transcended the repetition trap, but they chose to keep it on the cyclical side and have the transcending the cycle being a moment of separation rather than union. I do think part of that was just what RDM wanted to do, but the whole mythological side of things pertaining to Kara pretty much requires it. I quite understand that doesn't make it any less frustrating!
:) Please call me Heather. We've spoken so much, it seems fitting.
I agree that the show set out to do so much more than it was capable of achieving. In my immediate reactions to the show in S4+ the first time I watched, I did not feel wholly unsatisfied with the story until the last twenty minutes when they tore the whole thing down. I appreciate what RDM was trying to achieve, but upon multiple rewatches, leaving the human elements in favor of the cylons will never sit well with me. For three seasons, I felt the show was a human journey. As a huge sci-fi fan, I prefer the dystopic ending over the clean resolution. I am disappointed that they found earth, the they resolved everything through a cross-pollination of species. I felt hit over the head with the robot montage and the "everything will happen again" message. I didn't need the global messages that were forced upon me. I wanted to see how human beings survived and flourished after the destruction of their worlds. I didn't need peace and love at the end. That is not real. I wanted to see how the humans came to their end without love for cylons. They obliterated their lives and I can find no peace in their integration. It didn't work for me.
I very much look forward to discussing this more as we go through S4+ and I am happy that you have become part of our discussions. :)
Being a shipper myself, I am of course disappointed that they separated Lee and Kara right after she got back and kept them separated for most of the time thereafter. If I were in charge of the show, it wouldn't have happened that way. But since every time they're together it is so lovely and great and beautiful, I still enjoy this a lot more than their Season Three quadrangle angst-o-rama.
As I said above, I think it's possible to find good reasons for Lee to feel like he's needed on Colonial One, and to think that he's supporting Kara as well as the wider fleet by getting in position to influence the political decision-making about their journey to Earth. I don't think it's an abandonment of Kara or an unjustifiable character decision. It turns out to put him in the right place at the right time to give her the support she needs -- her word decides his policy, and his policy decides the fate of the fleet in Revelations.
However, I do think his political storyline turned out to be pretty undramatic as played until we got to Revelations. I liked the Lee-Laura relationship in Season One/Two, but for the next few episodes here it seems to me to consist of her being bitter and cold and him being combative and smug. The debate they are having about the nature of democracy is mildly interesting, but it's hampered by the fact that watching the Quorum is about as interesting as watching paint dry. (It reminds me of an MST3K joke about the Star Wars prequels: "I can't wait to get to the procedural senate votes! Give sanctions more time!" Sigh.)
And I think we're all puzzled at how to deal with the odd ambiguity in the Lee/Kara relationship throughout this season. It's odd in that every time they're together they are loving and supportive and totally comfortable with each other in a way beyond anything they'd reached before. It's like the writers, knowing among themselves that they have an external way to break up the relationship in the end (Kara's secretly dead), have finally stopped having to manufacture any other convoluted, phony obstacles to the Kara/Lee relationship. They can just relax and let the characters behave naturally with each other, which results in sheer awesomeness every time they're in the same room. But to the audience it seems weird because there doesn't seem to be any good reason for them not to be pursuing a relationship -- in fact, it looks a lot like they're already in one, what with the mutual support and lack of angst and kissing like there's no tomorrow, etc. So we're left with the question, "What are they waiting for?" The only answer that I can think of is the same as Pythia's, namely that they both subconsciously know that she's dead and therefore they can't build any kind of personal future together (which I think is half-way plausible BUT it's terribly frustrating because the writers not only fail to establish this, but they tend to spend half their time establishing the exact opposite -- the Kara/Sam stuff makes it seem like Kara can build personal relationships, both physically and emotionally, despite her being dead, and the Islanded scene implies that Lee is still living in hope).
I think much of the audience viewed the Kara/Lee stuff this season as a slow romantic build, which is part of why they felt so betrayed in the end.
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Generally I think that Lee-Kara makes a lot more sense this season if K-S is put in its place. I just don't believe RDM was interested in Kara finding love with Sam. Kara had her destiny tied into various myths. He was saying what he wanted to say in the way he had constructed the L-K and A-R dichotomy and Sam mattered only as part of the path Kara had to ride to that destiny.
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*cries in a corner*
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My one objection to this thread is that I now have to bleach my brain because I've defended a relationship between Kara and Sam in S4.5. Ugh. *dunks head*
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i am also someone who watched the show in an odd way: seasons 1-4.0 pretty quickly on DVD and then 4.5 live whilst rewatching what had come before twice. Most of the time I don't have much memory of what my first reactions to many things in seasons 1-4.0 were at all. I do remember though when I was rewatching that I came to the conclusion that a lot of the way the story was told was through structure and particularly the repetition of scenes/events and the way that meaning is drawn from that. And structurally I can't see much weight going on to Kara-Sam.
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Structurally, there was no reason for Kara and Sam to have any romantic connection after his shooting. He doesn't really help her with her memories of the song or the translation of the song into the coordinates. His function in the final mission seems clear and even clever, but her reaction to him is unnecessary and now I know, of course, driven by her own personal feelings towards Trucco, particularly after he'd had a very serious accident that might have left him paralyzed. *RAGE*
Anyway, it is sad to think, as Rachel pointed out, that Kara was intended to have no personal links to anyone in Season 4+. WHY? Why did they take a beloved character, who with her history and need for love and care, and kill her off and then bring her back terribly disconnected from everyone who loved her? And then to have things complicated incidentally by Katee playing the part of Sam's grieving widow. Agh. I agree with your arguments about the role of the relationship in the story (not needed, not substantial), but what was presented tells a slightly different story for me and I'm unable to disregard the emotional reactions in favor of the intellectual ones. I guess they have to live side-by-side and continue to make my brain hurt. :)
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I think we all generally agree that the last Season had problems in the Lee and Kara/Lee and even Bill-Lee storylines, though everyone has their own take on what the main problems were. There are those who are willing to accept the overall tragic storyline and try to reinterpret it in a way that makes it seem worthwhile and not a denial of the characters' worth or relationships -- I tend to fall in that camp, but I do feel that it takes a lot of work on the viewer's part to get a satisfying conclusion out of the material we were given, though I think we were also given a lot of really beautiful stuff along the way and I wouldn't have wanted to miss 4.0/4.5, not even the finale. There are others who prefer to reject the ending as fundamentally misguided and interpret the preceding Season without that endgame in mind. I think that's just as legitimate, and probably less work :) I'm glad there are people out there who do both. There are certainly some scenes/plotpoints I can't reconcile myself to, so in some ways I play both sides of the fence, I guess :)
On the Kara/Sam storyline, I think it's open to interpretation. It was given a lot of time and attention and emotional depth in Season 4.5, which was a collaborative decision among actors and writers. I'm not interested in bashing any people over this decision, though I am disappointed that the little time we had left for the show concentrated so much on Kara realizing how much Sam meant to her. I do see an emotional journey there for Kara, though I don't think it means Sam rather than Lee was her one true love. To me, the storyline reflects very clearly something that Lee said to her years before: "You are fine, you are fine with the dead guys. It's the living ones you can't deal with." She treats Sam just as shabbily as ever until he's wounded, and once he's comatose he is very easy to love. But it's still fundamentally a safe and one-sided kind of love, not a living or equal relationship. I'm not surprised that Kara's guilt drove her deeply into it or that she drew a lot of comfort from it. I also think there is something admirable in showing love and compassion toward a person who is suffering from a terrible injury -- Sam deserved her respect and care. I'm only sorry that the last of her life and time was absorbed by that, because I cared more about her challenging, equal, living relationship with Lee.
I do listen to RDM's commentary, and in general I enjoy it, but when it comes to the finale it saddens me very much (though it's actually Michael Rymer's comments that I find most depressing). I don't think RDM (or KS for that matter) intended Kara to end up with anyone. But I think that in juxtaposing the Kara/Sam farewell to the Kara/Lee one, most viewers would come away with the sense that the real emotion lay in the former rather than the latter, which I feel is a real shame.
In conclusion, I will just say that KS gave an interview right around the beginning of Season 4.5 in Chicago in which she said that she thought Kara had come back as a ghost in order to accomplish an important all-consuming mission and that individual, personal love no longer had much to do with her journey. I could accept that character logic if they had kept it consistent, but I feel that her character arc in Season 4.5 had a lot less to do with her higher mission and a lot more to do with her personal relationships, which makes the Kara/Lee ambiguous limbo harder for me to understand.
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I also agree that there's obvious emotion in the Kara-Sam final scene where the Lee-Kara one is more cerebral but when I watch now I find that the Kara-Sam one leaves me almost entirely cold and the Lee-Kara one quite deeply moves me. I think that is always frustrating when moments that one feels are huge emotional moments don't entirely work that way on first viewing, especially when they are on screen with very obviously heart-tugging moments. I remember the first time I watched the Doctor Who season four finale and the two Doctor-Rose scene on Bad Wolf Bay just didn't work for me at all whilst the end of Donna was emotionally shattering. Now, again I wish the dialogue was a little different in places, I see the point and it really moves me. I think it is easy watching shows sometimes to think that what the writers are making important depends on how any of us personally and emotionally react to it, but I think that can also lead us away from what they were actually wanting to say. I've been thinking recently about how peculiar the whole serialised TV story-telling is as medium. There's something in the way that it combines emotional visceralness with all this opportunity for thinking for the viewer and the way at the same time that the story-tellers themselves are dependent on others and then have to make all these compromises with people telling them what the audience want (when there are always multiple audiences wanting pretty different things) that produces something so complicated that the stories are as much mysteries as anything else.
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Like sci_fi_shipper, I respond first and foremost to the story as it plays as drama, and the way it strikes my feelings and the meaning I see in it are the weightiest experiences for me. I always enjoy going back and learning more about the writer's intent, and the actor's intent, because that helps me see the different things they were going for and often it shows me things in the scenes that I hadn't noticed on my own. Sometimes I don't think the artists achieved what they wanted to achieve, and sometimes I don't agree with the message they were intending to send. But I can forgive a fair amount of poor execution if the idea behind it moves me (and what moves you is a very personal thing -- I am odd in shipperdom in that the idea behind Kara's ultimate sacrifice moves me, whereas I find the drunk-on-a-table flashback harder to accept; I see nobility in the former that I find very lacking in the latter, and RDM's comment that Lee and Kara "never got off that table" is one of the things that makes me and other fans upset).
With Season Four, and especially the finale, the actors and writers express different intentions and interpretations of their own work, and with all of them there are ideas that move me and also ideas that disappoint me. So I develop my own interpretation that makes things most satisfying to me, and if that means ignoring some of the stated creative intent, I'm fine with that :)
I personally find it harder than you do to give the writers the benefit of the doubt on their over-arching structure, given that they repeatedly said they had no long-term plan, and in particular RDM has said that Lee was the most difficult character for him to figure out how to use and that he went down a lot of blind alleys with the character. But certainly I think it's possible and fun for fans to connect the dots in a way the show didn't always manage.
I don't think RDM was intending to give Lee an unhappy ending, I think he thought he gave him a hopeful one. And I can respect the intent, but as we've discussed I personally think that there are some misguided ideas about the meaning of self-fulfillment wrapped up in that. I think Lee's loss of all the people he loved was a sacrifice and a tragedy, not an opportunity he needed in order to 'be his own man.' One of the repeated themes throughout the show was "In order for children to come into their own, their parents [and lovers?] have to die." I disagree strongly with this sentiment (never listen to Leoben, guys!). I don't think self-fulfillment depends on standing alone at the top, self-sufficient and free from the need to love and argue and work with those closest to you in daily life. And I don't think that aging parents are an obstacle to their children; part of maturity is finding your own balance, sharing the joys and sufferings of life with your family and your loved ones in a way that enhances rather than diminishes your own individuality, self-expression, and achievements. It's true that Lee is left alone with a chance to start all over and maybe find those things at some future point with someone who is a stranger to us; but I didn't want him to have to start over, and I didn't want those joys and sufferings to be shared with strangers instead of with the people I'd invested in for years. I can accept it, because BSG is in many ways a tragedy and I see something noble in the personal price Lee and Kara pay for humanity's future, but it saddens me very much (all the more so because it's played as if it's primarily hopeful).
But again, I don't think my reading of the ending is at all definitive. And when the ending gets me down I head over to listen to JB at the Jules Verne festival and remember how good the intentions were and see the beauty the actor found in the scene and then I feel a lot better :)
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I also think that there's a difference Rachel between RDM not knowing where the details of the plot were going, which he obviously didn't on his own admission, and not knowing where the big picture and themes were going, which I think he did: at the big narrative level and thematically pretty much all the ending is in place by Epiphanies. I do agree though that leaves open the question of how much he had thought about where Lee was to end up. I think that the endings for the other four of the principal five can be seen by that point but for Lee probably not.
I think that the 'for children to come into their own their parents have to die' plays pretty ambiguously and is at least in part critique. After all it is said by a Cylon and is a way the Cylons justify the genocide. The one time that it is used directly in relation to Lee when Kara says it to him, she draws out the implication that they will walk the temple of Aurora together, and Lee responds 'pretty to think so' ie fanciful, not real, to think so, and said temple has been reduced to wreckage by the end of the episode. Obviously Lee is on his own at the end, and neither Adama nor Roslin have a place in the new world, but I don't think that means that the story is taking Leoben's position as a definitive line on this. If the Cylons used it to justify killing their 'parents' both in the genocide and it plays in Cavil's personal motivation, Lee stands in a rather different relationship to it. Yes, he has a new journey ahead of him in which he won't be defining himself in relation to those parental relationships but he does so having chosen loving them over rejecting them.
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I agree that the show set out to do so much more than it was capable of achieving. In my immediate reactions to the show in S4+ the first time I watched, I did not feel wholly unsatisfied with the story until the last twenty minutes when they tore the whole thing down. I appreciate what RDM was trying to achieve, but upon multiple rewatches, leaving the human elements in favor of the cylons will never sit well with me. For three seasons, I felt the show was a human journey. As a huge sci-fi fan, I prefer the dystopic ending over the clean resolution. I am disappointed that they found earth, the they resolved everything through a cross-pollination of species. I felt hit over the head with the robot montage and the "everything will happen again" message. I didn't need the global messages that were forced upon me. I wanted to see how human beings survived and flourished after the destruction of their worlds. I didn't need peace and love at the end. That is not real. I wanted to see how the humans came to their end without love for cylons. They obliterated their lives and I can find no peace in their integration. It didn't work for me.
I very much look forward to discussing this more as we go through S4+ and I am happy that you have become part of our discussions. :)
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