sunday evening battlestar blog
He Ain't Got a Leg to Stand On
I would like to start this entry by relating an anecdote for you. It's about bean dip. So. Half the fun of Frak Parties, besides the other half of watching Battlestar Galactica with a bunch of other freaks, is the food. Emily and I have taken great pride in feeding our guest various delectables: homemade pie (with crust!), fancy drinks, non-fancy drinks, fresh cookies, popcorn, Cylon cake, hot chocolate, brownies, blondies, and as of last night, bean dip. Emily found the recipe online. In this recipe is like a pound of beans, a stick of cream cheese, a bag and a half of cheese, taco mix, and a crap-ton of sour cream. The instructions noted that this recipe was too much food for fifteen people. Last night there were six of us, and we ate the entire thing in thirty minutes flat. (Lindsay: "Should my heart hurt?")
(SPOILERS!)
"Oh, yeah. I did bathe and wash them. Made their meals. I loved the enemy."
Admiral William Adama
I sit here before you with snot in my nose, mucous in my throat, and a temperature of 101 degrees, and if that doesn't make you feel sorry for me then you are mean and heartless. What else makes you mean and heartless? Not dying a little on the inside from watching "Blood on the Scales." I mean, seriously, this episode was nuts, right?
Let's start with Roslin: what a scary-ass motherfrakker. When she screamed out "I'M COMING FOR ALL OF YOU!", I got weird goosebumps, on like, my liver or something. But, seriously, can you blame her? Roslin doesn't really play that big of a role in the action of this episode in terms of screen-time, but the role she does play -- the scariest woman ever scorned -- is just phenomenal. She storms onto that baseship like she owns it and bosses those Cylons around like she owns them, too. After I got over the initial trauma of this episode, I re-watched it again, and all I kept thinking about was how, whether she knew it or not, Roslin was treating these Cylons (who were her enemy just a month or so ago, and whom she hated beyond almost all reason) as equals. Without thought. WE must give the Admiral a chance. WE must be patient. WE will be the ones he remembers when he takes back that ship. You and me and our Cylon family. It's hilarious, but it's also kind of beautiful, if you stop to think about it. It's also remarkable in its own right that not only did she turn to them at her bleakest hour, but that they responded in kind. Her voice, in both this episode and in "The Oath" (and her lack of voice in "Sometimes a Great Notion" and "A Disquiet Follows My Soul") is extremely important. She is the voice of justice, of what is normal and constant, and right. She may have lost her confidence for a while there, but people in the fleet still look up to and respect her. Her voice was the only one to give true meaning to those words. In the same way that children need a mother, the fleet needs Laura Roslin.
If Roslin is the mommy, Adama is the daddy. And daddy's pretty pissed. He spends half the episode going "fuck you" to everyone he comes into contact with, and the other half just being a complete bad-ass in every way possible. But here's the part that I think is really important. Throughout this whole thing, Adama has not lost his moral compass. Not once. Even last week when he took that marine guy prisoner instead of killing him, Adama was showing his colors. What's the point of winning, of surviving this mutiny, if you become a scum-sucking bastard in the process? There were two scenes that really stood out to me. First, there's the "trial" with Romo, Gaeta and Zarek. He never once lets Gaeta and Zarek see any sort of regret, mostly because he doesn't have any where they're concerned, but also because that's not how you win. It's pretty telling to me that Adama mostly ignores Zarek. He's never liked our old Mr. VP, but Gaeta, Gaeta was family. I'll hit on this more later, but the fuel that lights Gaeta's fire is righteousness. He has love inside of him, and a desire to do good things, and the remains of a very strong love and respect for Adama himself. And that's where Adama hits him: right in the daddy-complex. First he undermines the "trial" by calling it a joke, and then questions who has the right to charge him with treason. Then he hits Gaeta with love. Yes, Mr. Gaeta I did what you accuse me of, and I did it with joy in my heart: "I loved the enemy."
I'm pretty sure that's the most important line of the episode. It's the oldest religious tenet in the book, in all the books, really, but it's also the one that everyone has the most trouble with. Forgive. Love. Forgive your enemy, and then love him like he never betrayed you. He is your brother. If you think about it, it's actually the central conflict of the series (and of humanity): even before the Cylons blew up the twelve colonies, they were busy fighting with and hating each other. It was only with the destruction of everything they knew that they could become one people. (And every time the Cylons disappear, it all seems to go to Hell real fast.) They had a common enemy, and now they are once again asked to accept former enemies into their midst, and they're finding it impossible. So yes, Adama is loving and forgiving (not without a struggle, I might add), and he's basically like Jesus with a gun. The second scene is in the same vein: as Lee and company rescue him from the firing squad, he stops Tigh from shooting that jackass Narcho (what kind of a name is Noel "Narcho" Allison -- he totally deserves to be punched just from that) right in the head. Narcho has more guts than I would have. He tells Adama that he's always respected him, but he hates the Cylons, and he won't serve under someone who refuses to fight them. I believe it was Laura in one of her broadcasts who said that war is all they've ever known, and she's right. This is a people, a race, who doesn't know how to live in peace. In war, hating the enemy is necessary, both because it gives people someone to blame for the horrors of their lives, and also because how could we go on living if we truly understood what killing really meant. What would it do to our psyches to love the enemy, to try and understand where they're coming from? Would we go mad from it? This is some hard shit they're making us think about. The Admiral won't let Tigh kill Narcho because he knows that no amount of bullets will weed this hatred out of his people, and that Narcho's hatred is grounded more in fear than anything else. Fear both of the past, and of the future. He won't let Tigh, his Cylon brother, shed any more blood.
Which brings me to Gaeta. I talked last week about my hatred for Zarek, and I would like to reiterate that. Some people feel that Zarek was justified in his actions, but I don't believe it. Zarek is what happens when good intentions rest in someone's head who believes with every fiber of his being that the ends justify the means. Gaeta is what happens when good people become so disillusioned that bad people like Zarek become saviors. And, this episode is what happens when formerly good people realize that what they've done is not what they've meant to do. I don't believe that Gaeta truly understood what he was starting. He was too much of an idealist. The mutiny crumbles under his feet; it can't hold the weight of all the blood and the guilt. Good people died -- on both sides -- for nothing. There is blood staining the scales of justice; Gaeta's righteousness is permanently tainted by the deaths of the Quorum, of Jaffee, and -- eventually -- the Admiral and the President and all those he once considered family. You can see it in his face more and more as time passes; this isn't how he meant it to be. Gaeta didn't want to admit that these kinds of things, these revolutions, require payment in blood, which automatically taints any form of idealism or romanticism that he may have had. But Zarek knew; he knew there would be blood. But it's not only the blood of the dead that is on the scales, it's the blood in Gaeta's heart, the love he holds deep down under all the anger. He loves the Admiral. He loved his job. Once upon a time, he even loved Gaius Baltar. He even loved a Cylon.
Some final thoughts. The new six, Lida, is just beautiful. When she came on screen I just blurted out, "Wow, she is so pretty," and then Lindsay goes, "You just like her hair." And then everybody laughed at me, because it's true. But seriously, prettiest Six ever. I was also very proud of Baltar this episode; he was almost frighteningly honest about his cult, and about his customary cowardice. The affection he feels for Gaeta also endears him to me; I loved their last scene together, mostly because Gaeta was so very angry at Baltar (remember that time he stabbed Gaius with a pen? -- that was awesome) for such a very long time, and only now can he understand how someone could do such horrible things without even meaning to. He did them, too. When Zarek told Gaeta that the truth is told by whoever is left standing, I wanted to karate chop him. What a fucking cliche. Grow a brain. Oh, wait, you can't. You dead. Sam and Kara: when it comes down to it, like the Admiral, she loves him. It doesn't matter if he's a Cylon, he's her Sammy. Also on the Kara front, I love her guerilla pee-pee attack on that dude, and I also love that Kara's the one doing the attacking, not Lee.
Another random bad-ass moment of the night goes to Romo Lampkin for stabbing the marine with the pen (and then going back for his shades), which was both a cheesy metaphor for writing and also a nifty callback to that whole Gaeta stabbing Gaius thing. Chief was pretty awesome for the whole episode as well. I loved him crawling around the walls of the ship, and then getting stuck like Winnie-the-Pooh and getting a gun shoved into his face by the guy who blew up Baltar's first lawyer. Aaron Kelly is his name, and he's been having doubts. I thought that bringing back this character was a really effective choice on Michael Angeli's part. His turn from being a traitor back to a loyalist perfectly encapsulates the violence and the terror and the guilt of the whole situation. When faced with Chief, an old friend, alone in a room, he can't bring himself to kill. He can't condone the murders of an entire governing body, and he isn't afraid to ask for forgiveness. And lastly, I love that Chief was the only one to think of disabling the ship with his bare hands. Gaeta and the revolutionaries are so caught up in their war of ideas that they don't think about the heart of the matter. The Chief is literally crawling around in the body of the ship, seeing the damage. He crawls through shit and blood, cuts his hands up ripping apart the FTL. He's always been the practical one, steady. And speaking of the Chief some more, how about those three huge gashes in the bulkhead of Galactica? The old girl doesn't have much time left, does she?
I would like to start this entry by relating an anecdote for you. It's about bean dip. So. Half the fun of Frak Parties, besides the other half of watching Battlestar Galactica with a bunch of other freaks, is the food. Emily and I have taken great pride in feeding our guest various delectables: homemade pie (with crust!), fancy drinks, non-fancy drinks, fresh cookies, popcorn, Cylon cake, hot chocolate, brownies, blondies, and as of last night, bean dip. Emily found the recipe online. In this recipe is like a pound of beans, a stick of cream cheese, a bag and a half of cheese, taco mix, and a crap-ton of sour cream. The instructions noted that this recipe was too much food for fifteen people. Last night there were six of us, and we ate the entire thing in thirty minutes flat. (Lindsay: "Should my heart hurt?")
(SPOILERS!)
"Oh, yeah. I did bathe and wash them. Made their meals. I loved the enemy."
Admiral William Adama
I sit here before you with snot in my nose, mucous in my throat, and a temperature of 101 degrees, and if that doesn't make you feel sorry for me then you are mean and heartless. What else makes you mean and heartless? Not dying a little on the inside from watching "Blood on the Scales." I mean, seriously, this episode was nuts, right?
Let's start with Roslin: what a scary-ass motherfrakker. When she screamed out "I'M COMING FOR ALL OF YOU!", I got weird goosebumps, on like, my liver or something. But, seriously, can you blame her? Roslin doesn't really play that big of a role in the action of this episode in terms of screen-time, but the role she does play -- the scariest woman ever scorned -- is just phenomenal. She storms onto that baseship like she owns it and bosses those Cylons around like she owns them, too. After I got over the initial trauma of this episode, I re-watched it again, and all I kept thinking about was how, whether she knew it or not, Roslin was treating these Cylons (who were her enemy just a month or so ago, and whom she hated beyond almost all reason) as equals. Without thought. WE must give the Admiral a chance. WE must be patient. WE will be the ones he remembers when he takes back that ship. You and me and our Cylon family. It's hilarious, but it's also kind of beautiful, if you stop to think about it. It's also remarkable in its own right that not only did she turn to them at her bleakest hour, but that they responded in kind. Her voice, in both this episode and in "The Oath" (and her lack of voice in "Sometimes a Great Notion" and "A Disquiet Follows My Soul") is extremely important. She is the voice of justice, of what is normal and constant, and right. She may have lost her confidence for a while there, but people in the fleet still look up to and respect her. Her voice was the only one to give true meaning to those words. In the same way that children need a mother, the fleet needs Laura Roslin.
If Roslin is the mommy, Adama is the daddy. And daddy's pretty pissed. He spends half the episode going "fuck you" to everyone he comes into contact with, and the other half just being a complete bad-ass in every way possible. But here's the part that I think is really important. Throughout this whole thing, Adama has not lost his moral compass. Not once. Even last week when he took that marine guy prisoner instead of killing him, Adama was showing his colors. What's the point of winning, of surviving this mutiny, if you become a scum-sucking bastard in the process? There were two scenes that really stood out to me. First, there's the "trial" with Romo, Gaeta and Zarek. He never once lets Gaeta and Zarek see any sort of regret, mostly because he doesn't have any where they're concerned, but also because that's not how you win. It's pretty telling to me that Adama mostly ignores Zarek. He's never liked our old Mr. VP, but Gaeta, Gaeta was family. I'll hit on this more later, but the fuel that lights Gaeta's fire is righteousness. He has love inside of him, and a desire to do good things, and the remains of a very strong love and respect for Adama himself. And that's where Adama hits him: right in the daddy-complex. First he undermines the "trial" by calling it a joke, and then questions who has the right to charge him with treason. Then he hits Gaeta with love. Yes, Mr. Gaeta I did what you accuse me of, and I did it with joy in my heart: "I loved the enemy."
I'm pretty sure that's the most important line of the episode. It's the oldest religious tenet in the book, in all the books, really, but it's also the one that everyone has the most trouble with. Forgive. Love. Forgive your enemy, and then love him like he never betrayed you. He is your brother. If you think about it, it's actually the central conflict of the series (and of humanity): even before the Cylons blew up the twelve colonies, they were busy fighting with and hating each other. It was only with the destruction of everything they knew that they could become one people. (And every time the Cylons disappear, it all seems to go to Hell real fast.) They had a common enemy, and now they are once again asked to accept former enemies into their midst, and they're finding it impossible. So yes, Adama is loving and forgiving (not without a struggle, I might add), and he's basically like Jesus with a gun. The second scene is in the same vein: as Lee and company rescue him from the firing squad, he stops Tigh from shooting that jackass Narcho (what kind of a name is Noel "Narcho" Allison -- he totally deserves to be punched just from that) right in the head. Narcho has more guts than I would have. He tells Adama that he's always respected him, but he hates the Cylons, and he won't serve under someone who refuses to fight them. I believe it was Laura in one of her broadcasts who said that war is all they've ever known, and she's right. This is a people, a race, who doesn't know how to live in peace. In war, hating the enemy is necessary, both because it gives people someone to blame for the horrors of their lives, and also because how could we go on living if we truly understood what killing really meant. What would it do to our psyches to love the enemy, to try and understand where they're coming from? Would we go mad from it? This is some hard shit they're making us think about. The Admiral won't let Tigh kill Narcho because he knows that no amount of bullets will weed this hatred out of his people, and that Narcho's hatred is grounded more in fear than anything else. Fear both of the past, and of the future. He won't let Tigh, his Cylon brother, shed any more blood.
Which brings me to Gaeta. I talked last week about my hatred for Zarek, and I would like to reiterate that. Some people feel that Zarek was justified in his actions, but I don't believe it. Zarek is what happens when good intentions rest in someone's head who believes with every fiber of his being that the ends justify the means. Gaeta is what happens when good people become so disillusioned that bad people like Zarek become saviors. And, this episode is what happens when formerly good people realize that what they've done is not what they've meant to do. I don't believe that Gaeta truly understood what he was starting. He was too much of an idealist. The mutiny crumbles under his feet; it can't hold the weight of all the blood and the guilt. Good people died -- on both sides -- for nothing. There is blood staining the scales of justice; Gaeta's righteousness is permanently tainted by the deaths of the Quorum, of Jaffee, and -- eventually -- the Admiral and the President and all those he once considered family. You can see it in his face more and more as time passes; this isn't how he meant it to be. Gaeta didn't want to admit that these kinds of things, these revolutions, require payment in blood, which automatically taints any form of idealism or romanticism that he may have had. But Zarek knew; he knew there would be blood. But it's not only the blood of the dead that is on the scales, it's the blood in Gaeta's heart, the love he holds deep down under all the anger. He loves the Admiral. He loved his job. Once upon a time, he even loved Gaius Baltar. He even loved a Cylon.
Some final thoughts. The new six, Lida, is just beautiful. When she came on screen I just blurted out, "Wow, she is so pretty," and then Lindsay goes, "You just like her hair." And then everybody laughed at me, because it's true. But seriously, prettiest Six ever. I was also very proud of Baltar this episode; he was almost frighteningly honest about his cult, and about his customary cowardice. The affection he feels for Gaeta also endears him to me; I loved their last scene together, mostly because Gaeta was so very angry at Baltar (remember that time he stabbed Gaius with a pen? -- that was awesome) for such a very long time, and only now can he understand how someone could do such horrible things without even meaning to. He did them, too. When Zarek told Gaeta that the truth is told by whoever is left standing, I wanted to karate chop him. What a fucking cliche. Grow a brain. Oh, wait, you can't. You dead. Sam and Kara: when it comes down to it, like the Admiral, she loves him. It doesn't matter if he's a Cylon, he's her Sammy. Also on the Kara front, I love her guerilla pee-pee attack on that dude, and I also love that Kara's the one doing the attacking, not Lee.
Another random bad-ass moment of the night goes to Romo Lampkin for stabbing the marine with the pen (and then going back for his shades), which was both a cheesy metaphor for writing and also a nifty callback to that whole Gaeta stabbing Gaius thing. Chief was pretty awesome for the whole episode as well. I loved him crawling around the walls of the ship, and then getting stuck like Winnie-the-Pooh and getting a gun shoved into his face by the guy who blew up Baltar's first lawyer. Aaron Kelly is his name, and he's been having doubts. I thought that bringing back this character was a really effective choice on Michael Angeli's part. His turn from being a traitor back to a loyalist perfectly encapsulates the violence and the terror and the guilt of the whole situation. When faced with Chief, an old friend, alone in a room, he can't bring himself to kill. He can't condone the murders of an entire governing body, and he isn't afraid to ask for forgiveness. And lastly, I love that Chief was the only one to think of disabling the ship with his bare hands. Gaeta and the revolutionaries are so caught up in their war of ideas that they don't think about the heart of the matter. The Chief is literally crawling around in the body of the ship, seeing the damage. He crawls through shit and blood, cuts his hands up ripping apart the FTL. He's always been the practical one, steady. And speaking of the Chief some more, how about those three huge gashes in the bulkhead of Galactica? The old girl doesn't have much time left, does she?