acts of war
Let it be known that I wrote the AMoS thoughts a full day before I watched Hero. So perfectly set up. So beautifully. Bill Adama, I read you like an egocentric Italian Tauron book. Don’t even front with me, because you can’t.
A Measure of Salvation
I kind of got some giggles out of the scenes dealing with the mission to the abandoned Cylon ship. Helo cracks my shit up in that first scene. Approach with extreme caution! OH, YOU THINK? Shoot them if they make any threatening moves! GOOD IDEA, WE WERE THINKING ABOUT NOT DOING THAT. VERILY YOU ARE A GENIUS STRATEGIST. And then HOLY FRAK, THEY’RE ALIVE! IT’S ALIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE! How did Baltar miss that the Cylons there were still alive? And how does the Six he strangled get up and walk around? This leads to one conclusion and one conclusion only, which is: ROBOT ZOMBIES IN SPACE. Also, Lee congratulating them on a “nice job” being naturally immune to the virus they’re exposed to is kinda funny. GOOD JOB CHOOSING THE RIGHT GENETIC CODE, here is your blender.
I was very very worried about Athena! Nobody even stops to talk to Sharon except Helo. Why does he stay on the other side of the curtain though? Surely if he is immune he can go stand with her and be with her? I guess it is more fun to lecture Cottle about having helped a dozen people with one identical problem before one person with another. I do wonder how Hera’s Placenta of the Righteous manages to cure every ailment that has ever existed but whatever. It does tend to undercut Helo’s claim that any Cylon could be like Sharon if only they got a chance, because she isn’t actually all Cylon any more. (Indirectly because of the interference of the Mighty Human Jizz, no less.) Grace Park sells the shit out of “I have to prove it every day.” So much power in her lower registers.
“This is the most profound misunderstanding.” He is so smarmy. I don’t think he even knows why he didn’t tell them about the beacon, and I certainly don’t know why. I’d hazard a guess that this is his way of trying to stay neutral because he just can’t pick a side. Not a question of not knowing who is right or wrong, but just being so unable to deal with his attachments in either camp because he’s never really acknowledged attachments before. And he’s unsure how to deal with having to share information. He’s been keeping critical things to himself this whole time, since he started up with the Cylon detector. It’s really the only power he has.
Baltar’s Six is almost entirely different from Caprica Six. It’s Three who talks to him, who suggests (seemingly genuinely) that she wants him to live. Gaius being tortured goes to the beach with head!Six, who helps him out. pain and pleasure probably are just neural impoulses that can be controlled to some extent by Cylons who haven’t had extensive human interaction (the ones who are exposed to humans for a while seem to start to feel enough that they can’t control their emotions or projections).
Three’s crisis of faith is played on with Baltar here. And while it’s head!Six that tells him what to do, it’s actually Three who cuts off the torture. She also seems to be a little baffled and a little happy with Baltar’s confession of love to head!Six. Meanwhile Gaius’ impression of Six is the one who talks him through the torture, while Caprica Six is willing to let him be tortured and die, emphasizing the split between the Sixes and the way they’ve changed.
Intrigued that Lee comes up with the “kill one of them and get infected.” You know their world is upside-down when Lee is the rational, hard-nosed pragmatist on the team. I know it’s supposed to be a sign that he is all fallen and morally compromised and shit, but that is his job. Someone should wonder why they are keeping the Cylons alive. “Is there any reason to keep them alive?” Someone should figure out and posit a way to turn the event to their advantage. (Should I be worried about myself that I thought of it right away?) I feel like a season ago Lee would have been the one making idealistic, vague, ultimately unsupportable arguments about souls; to see him arguing against Helo here instead of making Helo’s arguments is a sign of change in he character.
It does chill me that he laughs when he comes up with it. It’s not a funny laugh, it’s not a joyful laugh, it’s scary. He’s even joyless in his laughter. It’s a quick change from his mention of executing the Cylon prisoners, where he mentions that it’s “the ugly question.” This is a situation where most shows would say that the character is morally gray, but honestly, I think Lee’s mental state here is more a result of his black-and-white moral thinking than anything else. He’s decided that he’s contaminated, that he’s wrong, therefore it doesn’t matter what he does because there’s no good there anyway. And that’s crap. That’s a cop-out. He’s relying on his all-or-nothing stance towards morality and ethics to decide that he’s nothing, so it doesn’t matter. Self-flagellation doesn’t count. Stepping back, looking rationally at your situation, and weighing the amount of good you’re able to do counts.
I know Helo is supposed to be the voice of moral philosophy in this story, but he just fails too hard at thinking things through for me to give what he says any persuasive weight, even if I have some sympathy for his ultimate conclusion. He’s portrayed pretty clearly as basing his objection to Cylon genocide on his love for Sharon. And while he’s absolutely wonderful when he says “you were a person before I ever fell in love with you,” I deeply doubt he would have had any idea of this whole line of thought if he wasn’t personally in love with Athena. And that’s kind of a mess, to pin his opinion on an entire group based on the boneability of the one he has the most exposure to.
Helo’s suggestion about interrogating them clearly isn’t thought-through. What, they’re just going to give up information? Laura has a way to manipulate them thought right through. The show stacks the deck as hard as possible against Helo’s argument, showing the humans dangling a carrot in front of a Cylon who we know is a rapist against Three torturing Baltar. The interrogation of the doctor itself is a little bit shocking. I think the Cylon doctor is interesting and I think he is a good actor who deserves more face time but I have to admit to not being wild about the image of a black guy being dragged in bondage to answer to mostly white folks. I know it’s not about that in their world, but it sure as hell is in ours.
Same with Helo’s mention of New Caprica to Roslin as a point in the Cylons’ favor. Roslin’s smackdown of him is satisfying enough, since he really doesn’t know what the hell he was talking about, and could only have come to that conclusion through willful ignorance of what the New Caprica survivors have been saying for the last few weeks. Also, though they don’t know it, the Cylons’ government on New Caprica is representative of the least bloodthirsty, most conciliatory group of Cylons, and it was still a vicious, barren wasteland. Which just ends up proving Lee’s point, if that was the Cylons being peaceful and their idea of living with humanity. It’s also to Roslin’s credit that she doesn’t throw in his face the fact that those Cylons who tried to live with the humans on New Caprica attempted to murder her personally just to make a point, though you can tell she’s thinking it.
And also, what the fuck. They have no issue killing the Cylons that don’t look like people. Helo doesn’t get on the phone and tell them that it is cruel to shoot the flying Cylons. The mythology of the show is just messed up or the morality of the characters is more fucked up than any of them want to admit. Really, for all the concern about not being biased against beings based on their biological design, that’s exactly what they do when they decide that the plane-design Cylons should be shot out of the sky but the ones that look human up close are worth dying for. Scar had a consciousness too. What’s the diff, except that Scar didn’t look human? I think that’s a lot more messed-up than making a determination based on whether or not they actually are human.
Eventually, Helo will take things into his own hands, probably for the first time since he joined the military. And can he live with that, if it was a mistake? Because it’s not just, did I do the wrong thing disobeying orders. If he is wrong and most if not all of the Cylons are definitely violent enemies, it’ll result in the completion of the human genocide, and he’ll have knowingly aided and abetted that.
How much do I LOVE seeing Laura call Bill out, FINALLY SOMEONE DOES IT IS ABOUT TIME. “That means you’re passing the buck.” He likes to make these sweeping moral pronouncements when he doesn’t have to make the call. When he does decide to make a call, he flies off the handle and is unprincipled, uncontrolled, and irrational. When he’s the authority, he doesn’t even pay attention to letter of the rules. When someone else is the authority, it’s the spirit of the law that matters. For all Bill’s “a man makes choices” nonsense, he really doesn’t like to take rational stock of a situation or responsibility for the actions following it. It seems that a woman makes choices; a man sits around and pontificates about ideals he has no intentions of following on. Oh, he can, but he’d really rather not, and if there’s someone else around to get on, he’ll do that instead. I herein withdraw any reservations I had about Lee being Bill’s bio-kid. This is not a compliment to either of them.
And you know, he’s always talked into it. He goes with it no matter what she proposes. He isn’t so convinced that Helo is right that he goes ahead and takes a stand and does what Helo does. He just wants to salve his own conscience by saying that he tried not to do it but his hands were tied and puts what he perceives as his sins on Laura. Bill, meanwhile, always talks Laura into idealistic choices with overwhelmingly negative consequences: the abortion law (well, he seems to think deciding what a traumatized kid does with her V-spot is idealistic, I beg to differ) and the election.
They’re a great study in morals and ethics. Laura has an ethos geared toward always doing what is necessary to protect the rest of humanity. That is paramount, that comes first. Right or wrong is dependent on the measurable outcome of her decision - did as many humans as possible survive? It’s an acceptance that she cannot control everything in the universe on the one hand - humans will die, sometimes many of them, no matter what she decides, but she fights on anyway and so in her own way she’s an idealist. And yet it’s a seizure of control in that it’s a comprehensive ideological framework that can be consciously understood, into which future choices will usually fit. “Those are the stakes, Bill. Those have always been the stakes.” This is the choice she would have made two years ago, and the choice I think she would make until the day they find Earth. Save humanity. Those are always the stakes. That’s where my deep respect for Laura comes from, I think, that she is honest with herself about her goals and the underpinnings of her philosophy and is overwhelmingly rationally consistent with them.
By contrast, Bill does not accept that he is not in control of his moral universe. He can make the morally right choice, or he can make the morally wrong choice, and that is the rubric by which he weighs his actions. In that way, Bill’s moral code is a seizure of control. And yet, because he doesn’t have a framework by which to predict actions in future situations, because the context matters and so you never know precisely what the moral choice will be, he’s flying by the seat of his pants and at the whims of fate. It’s an abdication of what actual control he has within a situation for the illusion of total control over it.
The difference in viewpoints makes them a great team, because they have to challenge each other philosophically in a lot of situations, and as long as nobody gets all gun-happy they can have a productive examination of a suggested course of action. When they do eventually agree on something, they can act with a little more confidence because they have some assurance that they’ve given it adequate consideration, and that’s not nothing. It’s a great gender inversion as well in some ways, that she gets to be the head and he gets to be the heart in a way that doesn’t erase either of them as gendered - and ultimately decent, which is often a huge issue with gender inversions - people.
That said, Laura and Bill do get a little bit of a pass every time they make a really disturbing call. They didn’t actually kill Cain either, Six did when Baltar let her loose, but it worked out okay for them anyway. So they didn’t really have to go through with it. Same here, Helo takes the decision out of their hands so even though they have every intent to do it their hands are clean despite their conscious efforts. Since the Olympic carrier, which was a defensive risk-management situation rather than an offensive maneuver, they haven’t had to live with the depths of their shared darkness. Yet.
Ultimately, Laura cares about results, while Bill cares about morality, which is why he’s so willing to “[close] the book on this” - he’s letting Helo get away with directly disobeying orders. No wonder Laura is a little annoyed with him at that, because of the whole military coup thing when she went over his head with a military decision, and she’s not a subordinate officer. I suppose he’s grown as a person?
Again, the show takes me to some really uncomfortable places with who I feel for in this episode. Because from the outside it is easy to be with Helo and Bill, but if I was in Laura’s place, I think ultimately I would give the order too. I don’t know, maybe I’m not made of chilled steel the way she is. Ultimately, all she has reason to know is that they are all enemy forces and it is kill or be killed because they struck first. I don’t think anyone was wrong to question the decision - though you know, if you can’t do better than WHAT ABOUT OUR SOULZ and THEY ONLY SHOT SOME OF US ON NEW CAPRICA, not particularly convincing - but she owes more to the humans who would be killed by the Cylons who are pursuing them than she does to the Cylons. I get it.
And then again. The Cylons are not actually human beings, and they don’t think they are any of the human races either. So does this episode recognize the capability of genocide within humanity once we’ve convinced ourselves our intentions are good? Or does it serve to merely reinforce the idea that genocide victims are actually less than in some way, are an actual threat, are not human? I know what the show was going for but I think the actual episode is kind of mixed in execution.
Hero
The “in the beginning” intercuts Adama with: Six. Gaeta. Tyrol. Saul. Six is of course Six and two of those last three I’ve actually wondered about, and then the episode will be careful to feature them to no particular narrative effect in the first few moments, so, hmm. I suppose the wondering continues.
I actually wondered about Gaeta only very early on (I think in S2.0? The episode where the ship got the virus; there were just too many things he could have messed with that kept getting them into trouble) and then promptly forgot about it, though it would add a whole new set of dimensions to his actions on New Caprica, making him a sleeper agent who was consciously subverting the collaborating government and an unintentional triple agent. Or a double agent twice over? I don’t watch enough Bond movies for this one. He’d be his own man more than anyone we’ve ever seen on this show. Oh, tasty, I hope the show goes there but I’m not going to let myself get too excited just yet.
Saul has been such a ridiculous asshole throughout the show except for one scene in this episode and one scene during the occupation, I would actually just be disappointed if he was a Cylon because then he would be entirely a villain to me without a serious turn-around. As it were he’s an asshole with some very very human weaknesses. Then again I am clearly not supposed to have my DNW reaction to Tigh so that probably doesn’t count as any kind of clue either way.
LAURA ROSLIN APPRECIATION SOCIETY ITEM 3-7-1: How cute is Laura in the work shirt? I BET IT IS BILL’S. She only brought three suits with her! IT CAME FROM SOMEWHERE. Less happily, it’s Billy’s, and she couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it. That would be so like her to keep something for sentimental value but put it to practical use; a nice echo of the dossier he made for her on Adama. Either way, it means she wears her heart on her sleeve and nobody is any the wiser.
Bulldog is kind of great. If they introduced him to be a one-off disposable Black guy, I’m going to be sorely disappointed, so I really hope we see more of him in some capacity. As it were, there’s no way he could or should be expected to stay on Galactica and take orders from Adama. Unless we see him again I am going to assume Tori found some of his family, though it’s of course a long shot.
I do wonder why Cottle is so trusting of Baltar’s Cylon detection machine, to be honest, and how it is now running quickly and easily again. Gaeta? Then again. Hm indeed. And have they gone through and tested the crew, or just decided that they trust everyone there? Of course, it’s not about trust; Athena could easily tell them (and at this point I do believe she has) that some of the Cylons are sleeper agents and don’t even know they are Cylons. They wouldn’t even have to get rid of the Cylon crew members necessarily, Athena gets along with them just fine for the most part, but they need. to. know.
Oh man I could tell there was a little tension with Gaius and Three, but three-ways? Yikes. That’s seriously fucked up. Six, though I don’t doubt that there is love between them, is still willing to airlock him. Three has been torturing him. He’s their prisoner. This is a serious questionable consent issue. Overall, though, I have to admit that I love how they’re playing with fantasy life for Baltar. It would be awesome to be the president! Except not really. It would be awesome to live in a great apartment and have three-ways with hot blonde chicks! Except he’s a prisoner. His internal fantasy is always going to be better; the reality is never going to live up to it.
Three herself is getting fascinating. Six, especially the Caprica Six incarnation, is slightly detached from the Cylon mission because of Baltar. Three is just having a crisis of faith and doesn’t have anything in particular to turn to. I actually don’t think she’s quite sure why she let Danny escape. Could she really have predicted that Saul would know what happened before the attack and would give up the truth so easily to Danny? I don’t think so. She might somehow through Cylon intelligence have known it was possible, but depended on it enough to think it was a viable plan to eliminate Admiral Adama is a different story. I think she’s just lashing out. She keeps denying, repressing, and eventually even going so far as to get rid of some of her own memories. We get to see a little bit of the moment between life and death and life again for Cylons. It’s not necessarily that insightful, since Cylon psychology is based on projection, we might just be seeing some insight into Three that she doesn’t know who she is any more or what angle she wants to look at the world from, but it’s a little more detail as to how Cylons function which is neat.
“Sit down. It’s time for us to talk.” WHEN A MAN AND TWO HOT CYLONS LOVE EACH OTHER VERY VERY MUCH, SON….oh shit no wait. In seriousness, it’s a huge huge huge step in a really positive direction that Bill talks to Lee and comes clean. Not even as an equal, but someone to whom he’s confessing; whose moral and intellectual reaction is somehow important to him. Lee is emotionally pretty great here. Intellectually, he doesn’t have the ability to step back and assess the whole situation the way Roslin does to eventually talk Adama out of wussing out of his job, but he is commendably with it enough to point out that Adama was there because of systemic military issues and not because he was a belligerent warmonger.
This is the first time we’ve seen Lee pick up on and react appropriately to someone else’s emotional state in a while (except unintentionally closing himself off with Dee, which I think is appropriate given my opinion of the relationship). He’s still thinking in terms of good people and bad people - it wasn’t Bill’s fault that he was there - rather than recognizing contextual issues for what they are, but he might get there. He can’t unconsciously intellectualize an emotional situation any more. He’s been through too much, he’s been wrong too many times. But I don’t think we’ve seen him reach for that insight in a positive fashion for some time.
Of course, it’s still a little bit dismissive given that Bill was clearly never going to listen to Lee unless Lee said what he wanted to hear, and in keeping with the rest of their relationship, I don’t think Bill knew what he really wanted to hear, so it was never going to be good enough. The sins of the father cannot be absolved by the son. The context understood, the burden lessened, the results forgiven, but the sins themselves, never absolved. Maybe he expected and wanted Lee to rage and yell and lecture, to see if he could either get himself to offer a defense they would both believe, or to feel adequately punished, or maybe both. He’s turning to the person Lee was two years ago, not the person he is now. But still to Lee, and that means something to both of them, I think.
An act of war. I am absolutely shocked at how this is turning everything on its head. Shocked. In a good way, don’t get me wrong, but shocked. This casts every one of Adama’s actions, since the very beginning, in such a whole new light that I think maybe this is almost a retcon. But a fucking brilliant one, to the extent that Bill-centric episodes would be like watching a whole new set of storylines on re-watch. (Anyone know if they were always planning to turn Adama inside-out like this, or if they just seized the opportunity? Either way it works, and it’s execution that matters more than intent, but I’m curious.)
It very much puts a new spin on Bill’s bullheaded attitude that what he feels is right is more important than what pragmatically needs to be done, because this glaring incident of what needed to be done is in his mind so deeply associated with something that was catastrophic in result. But honestly, I don’t think it’s caused by the disaster, I think he accepted the blame for the disaster because he did something he thought was terribly wrong because it was what he needed to do. A brutal self-flagellating kind of moral control, but still moral control.
“They put you there”/”It only takes one.” He’s been blaming it all on himself, as if to some extent he sees the world like Tigh where there’s no choice but to repay bad acts with worse bad acts. But there’s nothing the human military could have done, no way they could have precipitated the murder of millions during a period of relative peace, and of course we know the Cylon attack was well planned before Adama’s black ops mission.
This is the emotional side of Bill’s need to claim control over everything he touches rather than looking at the whole picture, as opposed to the philosophical side that shows up in the last episode. The philosophical grab for control isn’t really a whole lot more than a cover for his emotional desperation to tell himself that he did what he could, and his determination to never let something he can blame himself for so brutally happen again. And Laura sees straight through it and calls him on it, almost in those exact words because clearly we are soul sisters. “Simple explanations make us feel like we have control and we don’t…it wasn’t any one thing…a thousand things good and bad every day for 40 years.”
I really love that they eventually made Adama Tauron, even if that doesn’t actually matter until Caprica. Because every time he’s come up against his darkest issues, it’s been himself in a lot of ways, and his cultural home planet is used to make the point explicitly. Cain was Tauron, and she drove him to confront the fact that he was willing to wage war on other humans. And now this, the mission he’s been castigating himself over being sold to the public and ostensibly to Adama himself as a Tauron national thing. His most comforting lies. His darkest truths. They all come from home. I don’t know if that was a happy accident and they went with it for the prequel, or if it was always in his backstory and they never got a chance to use it on BSG, but either way it works out wonderfully.
We get to see Starbuck come back to herself and Tigh come back to who I suppose he was supposed to be before we met him in the same episode, in part thanks to Adama’s brutal confrontation with them a couple of episodes ago. Kara is great here, getting to work as a team with Kat, especially since Kat is so much like Starbuck herself but with less trauma - if Kara can stand to be around her it’s a positive sign. She’s also using her skills as a military strategist again, to the point that she’s the one who realizes the Cylons let Danny go. Her “don’t know, don’t care” to Kat is old-school ragey Starbuck in the cockpit, but she clearly does care, to the point that she takes the time to sit down and watch the tapes to figure out what happened. And her newfound alliance with Tigh works to her advantage, as he is finally willing to accept her insight.
It is good to see Tigh get a chance to complicate the picture of Adama as good guy. And yet I don’t quite know why Tigh tells Danny about it. To help, really, or just because he is a vengeful drunk? But he comes through admirably at the end, and has a breakthrough moment of clarity while talking Danny down from attacking Bill, since Bill can’t fight back for himself. The bottle metaphor is a nice touch, but then it gets turned on its head again when Tigh visits Adama to talk really talk and asks for a drink, and we see the two of them sit down for scotch, but don’t hear them actually speak.
The scene at the end between Bill and Laura is so completely enjoyable and perfectly played. It has great resonance with Bill’s talk to Tyrol way way way back in the beginning of S1, when he tells Tyrol that his punishment is “to know that one of your men is in the brig” or something like that. Bill is quite familiar with the punishment for one’s actions being to live with oneself, but he isn’t quite ready to force himself to step up to it. “Something has to be done.” But Bill quitting and leaving the military in the hands of Lee or GOD FORBID Tigh isn’t doing anything. It’s the absence of doing. It’s sitting back and letting whatever he thinks he did become even worse. So he needs someone to give him a punishment, and for better or for worse - SEE WHAT I DID THERE? - Laura is the one who can mete it out. (I tried not to make that sound dirty. Really did.)
Roslin I think reads him perfectly and is worried about him personally but, as she’s always done, is keeping her eye on the prize and recognizing that they all need Bill to stay right where he is. Including Bill. Especially Bill. Because they understand each other, and because he knows her well enough by now to be able to recognize that she is right, she can tell him the unvarnished truth, and because she’s Laura, she can spin it in a way that gets him to do what she needs him to do. “I think you’re being naive.” She doesn’t actually need to know what happened in order to know that Bill couldn’t possibly be responsible in the manner he wants to be, and she doesn’t need to hear him speak to read his face.
Why he doesn’t tell her is a mystery, and I think it’s a combination of several factors, some distinctly not admirable and some deeply sympathetic. He clearly doesn’t want Laura to think any less of him, and he is terrified she will. He still doesn’t entirely realize that it’s all about the doing with Roslin, because he can’t quite live on that pragmatic level. He doesn’t trust her completely with the truth, and he doesn’t want his opinion of her tainted with whatever her reaction to it would have been. He can’t bring himself to say it twice; he could barely spit it out once. He doesn’t have the hold over Laura that he has over Lee, so it’s slightly less safe. And he wants ever so badly to be convinced to stay, and he’s afraid she won’t if she knows the truth. It’s Lee he went to with the truth, but it’s Laura who offers him a reasonable explanation of the universe, some penance to work towards, and some small hope of peace.
I still doubt that they will ever trust each other entirely, Bill because he doesn’t know how to trust without controlling and Laura because she doesn’t think she can ever afford to let her guard down entirely again, but they clearly need each other, and I just can’t see them any other way but loving each other.
other thoughts
- Probably not for nothing but Lee refers to the humanoid Cylons as “skin jobs” - the resistance movement from Caprica must be pretty integrated into the Galactica crew if the crew is picking up their slang.
- I like how Cottle is an expert in EVERY kind of medicine. He knows how to diagnose and treat ANY PATHOGEN IN THE UNIVERSE. Like, why is he able to identify a disease that humans have been immune to for generations?
- The cuteness of Roslin sitting all curled up in her chair in her bare feet somehow just makes me so happy. She is so relaxed ordering bio-warfare! I know I should hate it BUT I LOVE IT.
- Seriously two seconds of Kara in that first episode. Nice to see her getting a little of her joie de vivre back, even if it is about the shooting and killing and stuff.
- Speaking of Kara, I don’t know what took me so long to think of this, but months and months ago gabrielleabelle wrote a post which included something about wanting to see a Spikelike female character wear leather and pretend to be a hundred times tougher than she was and swagger around smoking and protecting little sisters and I was like, YES, WANT. And, DONE.
- I don’t quite have the framework to analyze acting technicalities, but EJO is amazing in Hero. Every tiny moment just oozes pain off the screen.