Interesting thoughts as ever, Pythia, though I think I will wind up approaching this storyline with a different perspective (I'm sure you're shocked! :) Hee!) I didn't find it particularly dramatic the first time around, but I'm happy to give it another chance and try to find the fun things about it as we delve further into it.
It's interesting that you think Lee is dismissive of the Quorum's experience in that he asks Jacob to yield the floor to him so he can rebut/upstage Roslin. I actually find Roslin far more dismissive of the Quorum than Lee is. A big part of Lee's argument over this season is that she is being too secretive and making too many decisions for the Quorum rather than giving them the information and responsibility they deserve and that they need in order to make decisions democratically. He also suggests that she has lost touch with their experiences as human beings -- particularly their experiences of fear and uncertainty -- and that in refusing to explain herself or her thinking to them, she is alienating them and losing the support she will need for key initiatives like the Cylon alliance. Roslin says to Lee that she doesn't have time to humor "a group of perpetually needy" representatives -- she talks about them as if they are children, at least in the conversations we see this season.
I agree that Zarek is pushing his own agenda in his interactions with Lee, but I don't see it as a struggle over the legal succession. I think it's been clear to Zarek for a long time that Adama would never accept him as Roslin's replacement. In Sine Qua Non he surrenders his legal right to take over the Presidency practically without a struggle. I think he is plotting an *illegal* seizure of power, which he eventually attempts in the mutiny storyline, and that one of his goals in nominating Lee for the Quorum was to give Roslin's ire a new focus so that she would focus less attention and energy on Zarek's own extralegal intrafleet maneuvering. I think his embarrassment in this scene is because Lee raises the issue bluntly and openly in such a way that it's clear where he got his information, so that Zarek gets a share of Roslin's anger and distrust rather than getting it displaced onto Lee.
I'm also not sure that I agree with your sense that Lee constructs self-flattering narratives about other people and events more than other characters do. Everyone constructs their own interpretation of themselves and the people around them, that's what we mean when we say people have their own points of view. It seems to me that Lee's point of view is incorrect in some areas -- primarily he underestimates Zarek. But I agree even less with the narrative Laura constructs for herself, in which she (the realist) has to keep Lee and the Quorum (the idealists/needy children) from bungling into trouble because in their naivete they don't understand how dangerous Baltar is or why he is a "special case" whose rights cannot be respected.
Of course, part of my problem is also that I feel the Baltar cult storyline was incoherent and never went much of anywhere -- in the end Baltar just gets bored with the cult and they wander off under Paula's guidance, and at no point do they take any actions that are particularly important, so far as I recall. Now, I think that arming them and asking them to police themselves was a ridiculously bad late-breaking decision, but that doesn't mean I think Laura is right that Baltar is somehow planning to do horrible things with these women's devotion all along and that they should be forbidden the right to assemble out of pre-emptive suspicion.
Ah, Season Four. I can see we will have much to discuss!
I entirely agree Rachel that Laura is being dismissive Quorum. But the interesting thing to me is that in their different ways all of them are. Lee bypasses the Quorum to become President, entirely excluding the rest of them to find an acting President and then offering the Cylon amnesty without consulting them when he knows that they have been barely board on with the joint mission. I don't blame him at all for those decisions but the importance of the Quorum is something he uses as rhetoric to bash Laura rather than something he is committed to when he is either aspiring to executive power or has it himself. I quite like that as part of the story and I think it fits with the relationship between words and deeds that plays as a theme in this season all the way through to No Exit.
On the cult that the end of the story with the guns is hopelessly done and then peters out. The intention though was to have the cult turn violence and Baltar to have to get out from the monster he created and then guns were in because RDM was still hoping to do that that late, which seems to me a pretty bad calculation of what time he had left. As I have said before I think that had unfortunate consequences for their being a clear end to the issues set up between Laura and Lee in Escape Velocity.
I know this political stuff isn't everyone cup of tea. But I think if it hadn't got squeezed as much as it did in parts of the season, it would have given Lee significantly more season 4 time and a clearer journey through the season rather than this abrupt moment in Revelations and nothing really in the whole of 4.5 that decisively gets him character wise from that moment to the end: the bits we get either don't add up to a coherent whole or require a fair amount of work to turn them into one.
I agree, Pythia, that it takes a lot of work to pull these storylines into something coherent for Lee or for Baltar -- I personally think they just don't hold together, and that to have Lee bouncing from championing the Quorum to threatening to jail them and back again to expanding their power makes no sense for the character. I look upon it as poor writing rather than interesting character ambiguity, but happily of course it's open to more positive interpretations :)
As for Lee bypassing the Quorum in Sine Qua Non, it's unclear to me how much he does. I find that episode as a whole poorly written from the Lee-story POV, but he starts out by saying that they have to form a committee to choose an interim President. The fact that the actual search for a candidate who might win the support of the Quorum and the fleet is apparently undertaken by Lee and Romo (who is not a member of government) by themselves (!?!) and that they propose Lee himself as apparently their only recommendation (!!??!!!?!) looks pretty frakking bad to me. But presumably their "committee," such as it is, reports to the Quorum, and the Quorum votes on their recommendation. In short, Lee would not have gotten the interim Presidency if the rest of the Quorum hadn't voluntarily rallied behind him. So I don't think he actually cut them out of the decision, though the "search committee" turned out to be a pretty bad joke :(
As for his actions to end the hostage crisis in "Revelations," that is one of the situations in which it makes perfect sense for an executive to act independently -- I wouldn't expect any executive to require parliamentary consultation during his hostage negotiations, though he can expect the results of those negotiations to be reviewed afterwards. Lee's already put a lot of work in with the Quorum trying to persuade them to support the Cylon alliance, and he continues to do so even after the disaster of Old Earth. So I guess I don't equate Lee's using his legal executive power to pardon with Laura's attempts to deny legal and civil rights to a person she hates and fears. I think Lee actually has a better record than Roslin on the democratic issues under discussion in Season 4.0. I think this falls apart in Season 4.5 with almost no examination on Lee's part, which is part of why I have problems with the storyline. But we'll see how it goes as we get further along, I may well change my mind again! :)
I do agree Rachel that from what we see the Quorum must sign off on Lee's presidency in SQN. But I don't think that changes the fact that Lee is as dismissive of it in getting to that point as Laura has been. They both react against what they see as the Qurorum's propensity to start from their own emotions. Laura complains that they are perpetually needy and Lee that they are breathing in fear and exhaling anger. I also think that there is some pay off for both sides of the Quurom versus Lee and Laura. The Quorum do let themselves be manipulated by Zarek because they are not good at thinking things through. But both Laura and Lee are wrong in relation to them too and their combined failings in relation to the Quorom contribute to the tragedy of the Quorum: Laura knows what is required and won't do it and Lee doesn't see that if he turns Jacob he can keep them onside.
On Baltar again I think the story is giving each of them something and saying each of them is wrong. Laura's feelings about Baltar are influencing her judgement and the story calls her on her desire for vengeance. But the last Lee-Baltar exchange has Lee reverse his position from EV: Baltar presses his button about the right thing about rights and Lee responds that no the fact you are Gaius Baltar cancels that out which is exactly Laura's argument in EV.
I think the other lens of interpretation here is the show's overall examination of democracy under the conditions of war. I think the story is pretty sceptical about democracy - the way it ultimately endorses the argument for stealing the election and legitimises Adama and Roslin's post New Caprica coup seems to me the strongest argument for that - whilst clearly showing the price that is paid for diluting and indeed abandoning democracy. In the same way the story critiques idealism and what happens when it leads to disappointment in Felix. I think that if Lee is then shoehorned into being the great defender of democracy that puts him into an awkward position in relation to that theme. I do think that in part Lee's idealism is being critiqued: he accepts smart over right when he tells Laura he'll try to be wronger and in that last exchange with Baltar, and Zak spells out that there is a certain cynicism under his idealistic rhetoric. But Lee is also clearly not Felix because he adapts to circumstances and doesn't get stuck in simplifying explanations that deny complexity or his own psycho-drama. I see Lee as the idealist who learns about the world and it being a bigger place than his own preoccupations, who in part does that because he is less idealist than he seems, and Felix as the idealist who is broken by it because he has no psychological resources beyond it and so is blinded by it and can't adjust to its failure and that inability blinds him again and is his tragedy.
I'm actually not so sure the show ultimately endorses Roslin's undemocratic actions and points of view; I must admit that I usually do not do so, as a viewer, and I think that the themes of the overall series are ambiguous enough to leave the debate open and to let viewers take sides and/or pick a middle road between Roslin or Lee's positions in these arguments, while of course recognizing the flaws and consequences of both.
I wouldn't say that the overall storyline is trying to say that Lee and Roslin ultimately arrive at the same realpolitik point of view about how individual rights and democracy are expendable. I think that's quite a lot to hang on that last Lee-Baltar scene, in which Baltar is basically asking Lee to reorganize the way the new ship-by-ship Quorum is elected so that his personal non-ship-based constituency can be taken into account, which Lee has neither the legal nor the moral obligation to do, IMO. Baltar is not asking for a right, he's asking for a favor, namely for Lee to extralegally give him a Quorum seat and/or to totally overhaul the brand new election system because even though he and his cult are a minority on their ship (Galactica), Baltar has many off-ship supporters and so can claim to speak for a larger constituency than the new system accounts for.
Lee has no obligation to do any of this, and he is perfectly happy to tell Baltar not to expect any favors from him and to reiterate that he still regards Baltar as pond scum with no ounce of integrity. Lee has always regarded Baltar that way, but he has defended his legal rights anyway, and I think he was largely correct to do so, and I don't think he violates any of Baltar's legal rights in Daybreak. No individual citizen has a right to demand that elections be organized in the way that will give them the most votes, and many democratic systems today have the "you must live in your district" requirement that I see as equivalent to "your representative must live on your ship" system set up here. I don't see Lee making the same argument in Daybreak that Laura made in EV, and if Baltar *had* actually won an election and Lee then refused to seat him on the Quorum because he thought Baltar lacked integrity, I would be disappointed in Lee for that decision. I just don't think that's what was going on here, though. I think the point of the scene was to force Baltar to confront his own dissatisfaction with himself and to push him to decide to pull away from these people whose views he privately scorned even while claiming to represent them and instead take his own honest stand in defending the hybrid child. That's just my take on it, of course, although I suspect we will be thinking all this through more thoroughly soon! :)
Sorry if I'm being tiresome in delving into so much detail -- I think my larger point is just to say that for myself, I've never seen Lee as an idealist who has to learn the ways of the real world, and I think the series gives him a genuinely different perspective than Roslin in order to foster debate over these questions rather than in order to establish an overall theme of smart over right. I agree that Lee is never defined by a simple "right over smart" opposition to Roslin; both are willing to consider compromising democracy in times of need and danger, and also in moments of ambition, but I think Lee generally approaches such compromises more cautiously than Roslin does and I think he argues for salvaging a lot more of the democratic system than she does. I understand and respect those who endorse Roslin's approach to governance, but I remain in disagreement with many of Roslin's "smart, wrong" decisions (and some of Lee's).
But, as ever, I will have to think more about these ideas as we go along, and I'm very glad you are so lovely about pointing out the many challenges and ambiguities that are waiting to be explored in this story!
It's interesting that you think Lee is dismissive of the Quorum's experience in that he asks Jacob to yield the floor to him so he can rebut/upstage Roslin. I actually find Roslin far more dismissive of the Quorum than Lee is. A big part of Lee's argument over this season is that she is being too secretive and making too many decisions for the Quorum rather than giving them the information and responsibility they deserve and that they need in order to make decisions democratically. He also suggests that she has lost touch with their experiences as human beings -- particularly their experiences of fear and uncertainty -- and that in refusing to explain herself or her thinking to them, she is alienating them and losing the support she will need for key initiatives like the Cylon alliance. Roslin says to Lee that she doesn't have time to humor "a group of perpetually needy" representatives -- she talks about them as if they are children, at least in the conversations we see this season.
I agree that Zarek is pushing his own agenda in his interactions with Lee, but I don't see it as a struggle over the legal succession. I think it's been clear to Zarek for a long time that Adama would never accept him as Roslin's replacement. In Sine Qua Non he surrenders his legal right to take over the Presidency practically without a struggle. I think he is plotting an *illegal* seizure of power, which he eventually attempts in the mutiny storyline, and that one of his goals in nominating Lee for the Quorum was to give Roslin's ire a new focus so that she would focus less attention and energy on Zarek's own extralegal intrafleet maneuvering. I think his embarrassment in this scene is because Lee raises the issue bluntly and openly in such a way that it's clear where he got his information, so that Zarek gets a share of Roslin's anger and distrust rather than getting it displaced onto Lee.
I'm also not sure that I agree with your sense that Lee constructs self-flattering narratives about other people and events more than other characters do. Everyone constructs their own interpretation of themselves and the people around them, that's what we mean when we say people have their own points of view. It seems to me that Lee's point of view is incorrect in some areas -- primarily he underestimates Zarek. But I agree even less with the narrative Laura constructs for herself, in which she (the realist) has to keep Lee and the Quorum (the idealists/needy children) from bungling into trouble because in their naivete they don't understand how dangerous Baltar is or why he is a "special case" whose rights cannot be respected.
Of course, part of my problem is also that I feel the Baltar cult storyline was incoherent and never went much of anywhere -- in the end Baltar just gets bored with the cult and they wander off under Paula's guidance, and at no point do they take any actions that are particularly important, so far as I recall. Now, I think that arming them and asking them to police themselves was a ridiculously bad late-breaking decision, but that doesn't mean I think Laura is right that Baltar is somehow planning to do horrible things with these women's devotion all along and that they should be forbidden the right to assemble out of pre-emptive suspicion.
Ah, Season Four. I can see we will have much to discuss!
Reply
On the cult that the end of the story with the guns is hopelessly done and then peters out. The intention though was to have the cult turn violence and Baltar to have to get out from the monster he created and then guns were in because RDM was still hoping to do that that late, which seems to me a pretty bad calculation of what time he had left. As I have said before I think that had unfortunate consequences for their being a clear end to the issues set up between Laura and Lee in Escape Velocity.
I know this political stuff isn't everyone cup of tea. But I think if it hadn't got squeezed as much as it did in parts of the season, it would have given Lee significantly more season 4 time and a clearer journey through the season rather than this abrupt moment in Revelations and nothing really in the whole of 4.5 that decisively gets him character wise from that moment to the end: the bits we get either don't add up to a coherent whole or require a fair amount of work to turn them
into one.
Reply
As for Lee bypassing the Quorum in Sine Qua Non, it's unclear to me how much he does. I find that episode as a whole poorly written from the Lee-story POV, but he starts out by saying that they have to form a committee to choose an interim President. The fact that the actual search for a candidate who might win the support of the Quorum and the fleet is apparently undertaken by Lee and Romo (who is not a member of government) by themselves (!?!) and that they propose Lee himself as apparently their only recommendation (!!??!!!?!) looks pretty frakking bad to me. But presumably their "committee," such as it is, reports to the Quorum, and the Quorum votes on their recommendation. In short, Lee would not have gotten the interim Presidency if the rest of the Quorum hadn't voluntarily rallied behind him. So I don't think he actually cut them out of the decision, though the "search committee" turned out to be a pretty bad joke :(
As for his actions to end the hostage crisis in "Revelations," that is one of the situations in which it makes perfect sense for an executive to act independently -- I wouldn't expect any executive to require parliamentary consultation during his hostage negotiations, though he can expect the results of those negotiations to be reviewed afterwards. Lee's already put a lot of work in with the Quorum trying to persuade them to support the Cylon alliance, and he continues to do so even after the disaster of Old Earth. So I guess I don't equate Lee's using his legal executive power to pardon with Laura's attempts to deny legal and civil rights to a person she hates and fears. I think Lee actually has a better record than Roslin on the democratic issues under discussion in Season 4.0. I think this falls apart in Season 4.5 with almost no examination on Lee's part, which is part of why I have problems with the storyline. But we'll see how it goes as we get further along, I may well change my mind again! :)
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On Baltar again I think the story is giving each of them something and saying each of them is wrong. Laura's feelings about Baltar are influencing her judgement and the story calls her on her desire for vengeance. But the last Lee-Baltar exchange has Lee reverse his position from EV: Baltar presses his button about the right thing about rights and Lee responds that no the fact you are Gaius Baltar cancels that out which is exactly Laura's argument in EV.
I think the other lens of interpretation here is the show's overall examination of democracy under the conditions of war. I think the story is pretty sceptical about democracy - the way it ultimately endorses the argument for stealing the election and legitimises Adama and Roslin's post New Caprica coup seems to me the strongest argument for that - whilst clearly showing the price that is paid for diluting and indeed abandoning democracy. In the same way the story critiques idealism and what happens when it leads to disappointment in Felix. I think that if Lee is then shoehorned into being the great defender of democracy that puts him into an awkward position in relation to that theme. I do think that in part Lee's idealism is being critiqued: he accepts smart over right when he tells Laura he'll try to be wronger and in that last exchange with Baltar, and Zak spells out that there is a certain cynicism under his idealistic rhetoric. But Lee is also clearly not Felix because he adapts to circumstances and doesn't get stuck in simplifying explanations that deny complexity or his own psycho-drama. I see Lee as the idealist who learns about the world and it being a bigger place than his own preoccupations, who in part does that because he is less idealist than he seems, and Felix as the idealist who is broken by it because he has no psychological resources beyond it and so is blinded by it and can't adjust to its failure and that inability blinds him again and is his tragedy.
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I wouldn't say that the overall storyline is trying to say that Lee and Roslin ultimately arrive at the same realpolitik point of view about how individual rights and democracy are expendable. I think that's quite a lot to hang on that last Lee-Baltar scene, in which Baltar is basically asking Lee to reorganize the way the new ship-by-ship Quorum is elected so that his personal non-ship-based constituency can be taken into account, which Lee has neither the legal nor the moral obligation to do, IMO. Baltar is not asking for a right, he's asking for a favor, namely for Lee to extralegally give him a Quorum seat and/or to totally overhaul the brand new election system because even though he and his cult are a minority on their ship (Galactica), Baltar has many off-ship supporters and so can claim to speak for a larger constituency than the new system accounts for.
Lee has no obligation to do any of this, and he is perfectly happy to tell Baltar not to expect any favors from him and to reiterate that he still regards Baltar as pond scum with no ounce of integrity. Lee has always regarded Baltar that way, but he has defended his legal rights anyway, and I think he was largely correct to do so, and I don't think he violates any of Baltar's legal rights in Daybreak. No individual citizen has a right to demand that elections be organized in the way that will give them the most votes, and many democratic systems today have the "you must live in your district" requirement that I see as equivalent to "your representative must live on your ship" system set up here. I don't see Lee making the same argument in Daybreak that Laura made in EV, and if Baltar *had* actually won an election and Lee then refused to seat him on the Quorum because he thought Baltar lacked integrity, I would be disappointed in Lee for that decision. I just don't think that's what was going on here, though. I think the point of the scene was to force Baltar to confront his own dissatisfaction with himself and to push him to decide to pull away from these people whose views he privately scorned even while claiming to represent them and instead take his own honest stand in defending the hybrid child. That's just my take on it, of course, although I suspect we will be thinking all this through more thoroughly soon! :)
Sorry if I'm being tiresome in delving into so much detail -- I think my larger point is just to say that for myself, I've never seen Lee as an idealist who has to learn the ways of the real world, and I think the series gives him a genuinely different perspective than Roslin in order to foster debate over these questions rather than in order to establish an overall theme of smart over right. I agree that Lee is never defined by a simple "right over smart" opposition to Roslin; both are willing to consider compromising democracy in times of need and danger, and also in moments of ambition, but I think Lee generally approaches such compromises more cautiously than Roslin does and I think he argues for salvaging a lot more of the democratic system than she does. I understand and respect those who endorse Roslin's approach to governance, but I remain in disagreement with many of Roslin's "smart, wrong" decisions (and some of Lee's).
But, as ever, I will have to think more about these ideas as we go along, and I'm very glad you are so lovely about pointing out the many challenges and ambiguities that are waiting to be explored in this story!
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