THE WORST
This week’s Sorkinitis post and the subsequent discussion of Man Pain, which is my single favorite conversation that has ever happened on my journal and is still happening because I LOVE EVERYONE IN THIS BAR (except, ironically, Ted Mosby), kind of spawned the I HATE BILL post which was going to have to happen sometime. I am trying to be more positive, for real. But sometimes a BURNING HATRED CATCHES UP WITH MY SOUL and I have to deal with it. And I swear, I had every intention of getting it out of my system, putting it on my external hard drive, and forgetting about it. Then I remembered that venting richly-earned anger, along with the gratuitous overuse of italics, is a time-honored treatment for debilitating cramps. So here we are. (series spoilers, obviously)
I can’t even deal with Bill. He’s the worst. And I’m supposed to think he’s a hero and he just makes me GAAAAAAAAAAAG. I hate that we hear stupid Bill’s stupid voice on the voiceovers for all the big episodes like it’s HIS story when he is the single most dickish, static, derivative character on the show. Actually, I think he is the single most dickish, static, and derivative character I have ever seen but that might be the Bill Nausea clouding up my brain. (Seriously. I have a sick headache finishing this post. Though that might be the anguished hormonal implosion.) There's so much awesome on this show! Why am I supposed to give a crap about him, exactly? I AM COUNTING THE FINALE AS TEXT FOR THIS ENTRY, BECAUSE BILL AND DAYBREAK? THEY DESERVE EACH OTHER.
He is such a withholding douche to Laura. And I mean, she is clearly his superior in every way imaginable, so I am trying to sympathize with a little insecurity there, but the way he manipulatively pulls back from affection towards her no matter how upfront she is with him makes me nauseous. His sweetest moments concerning his feelings about their relationship are never in front of her. They’re about her. I mean, we never hear him say he loves her. We hear “it’s about time,” because obviously she should put aside all her issues about the SAVING THE WORLD and the MAKING THE DECISIONS HE WON’T and the DYING OF CANCER AGAIN to coo over his enormous ego. He never answers her about the cabin, you know, he stumbles around what-ifs while Laura is straightforward and honest about her feelings.
Aside from the general grossness of the corpse bride thing, dude, check that out. The man kept on a visible symbol of his ex-wife - the woman who he LEFT without so much as a by-your-leave, didn’t even know enough to remember her properly, and oh yes, he only consciously thinks about once a year - the entire time we were supposed to believe they were in TWOO WUV, and didn’t give it up until Laura was DEAD and therefore did not have a chance of reacting in a way that did not please him. What the fuck, why not just propose to a Real Doll? That’s just throwing a non-existent commitment in her face to remind her that she doesn’t come first.
And, this is less relationship-based and more TREASON-based, but he does he even apologize for the ARMED KINDAPPING OF THE PRESIDENT IN AN ACT OF WAR AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT DURING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY? He starts off with “I forgive you.” OH, HE’S A GODDAMN PRINCE. Bill behaves so fucking badly there and the show tries to create some equivalence, but there’s just not. Roslin is the president, Roslin is the commander-in-chief, Roslin can send the goddamn raider on a coffee run if she wants. (SHE CAN SEND STARBUCK TO STARBUCKS, HAHAHA.) All that military/political split bullshit in the miniseries was her having to humor him to get him to DO HIS FRAKKING JOB. If they live in any system besides a military dictatorship, at bottom, the military serves the people.
But then shit gets real, and he lets her be the one to make the hardest decisions so he can pat himself on the back about having been all sanctimonious at her, and justify doing what he knows needs doing as “just following orders.” He always goes along with it. Cain. Bill is the most reprehensible character in AMoS, as far as that manipulative garbage counts for anything. Everyone else acts based on their convictions - and you can agree or disagree with any or all of them, but Helo’s, Sharon’s, Lee’s, and Laura’s decisions are consistent with convictions that are genuinely held and rooted in some (admittedly selective) angles on reality - but Bill thinks what they’re doing is genocide, and goes along with it anyway, because he’s just following orders.
But my homegirl Laura is a big girl and can take care of herself and is clearly fine with emotionally detached relationships with inferior men (Adar, the guy in Daybreak, Zarek) , and the way he treats her does not even hold a candle to the way he treats Lee. I’ve looked at this from Lee’s perspective already, but because I was focusing on my bratty little mope-machine, I’m not sure I clarified how Bill was a terrible parent WAY before he left. Oh, the abandonment compounded all the issues, because that can only happen to a kid for so long before the kid internalizes the idea that they deserve whatever the parent dishes out, so Lee really believed Bill leaving was about him being bad somehow. I don’t mean to minimize that in the least, it would have been bad enough on its own, but this in combination with the most likely reading of the subtext there is so selfish and cruel. Then he boo-hoos to Lee about how he might not have been a good father. Oh, you think?
I think the show clearly started with the idea of Bill having been an absent father, having hurt Lee in this way that made him certainly avoidant, and a terrible father, but a way that also romanticized his hypermasculine rakish fighter persona, because he was OFF FIGHTING THE CYLONS! He didn’t have time for KIDS! and a WIFE! and probably a damn DOG! And then having tried to make up for it - because he started feeling bad after the kids were adults and couldn’t demand anything from him - in this way that could be painted as understandable would end horribly in this thing that wasn’t actually any one person’s fault, but giving Lee a focal point for his anger. But then, how many times do we see him physically attack the (much smaller, even strong swaggery Starbuck) girls who he claims as his daughters? Three that I can remember off the top of my head, and at none of those times were they a threat to him by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t know how much clearer it could be anyway, but Lee mentions more than once having been habitually scared of Bill. Scared. Those implications are fucking ugly.
And you know, I make fun of all the crying because you do with what you have, but it’s not the big giant displays of emotion that bother me. When he’s upset about something that’s actually about him, I’m fine with it. Of course, it only happens for about forty-five seconds in the entire run, but still. His mourning of his marriage and ex-wife, as awful as the whole ordeal revealed him to be, is of course completely natural. It’s the way he uses those emotions to display his presumed superiority over everyone around him. He doesn’t try to control his temper. He openly revels in losing it. He goes out of his way to be in situations where he’ll go nuts at people (ie sparring). Not just in front of people. At people. To remind them that HIS ANGER IS SO MASSIVE AND CONSTANT, WHICH PROVES ITS RIGHTNESS. Again I point to Caprica to clarify that Taurons are culturally Italians, and submit to you that if your uncles were basically The Situation on Medicare you would not be impressed with his volatile overdramatic bullshit either. (As much as the Unfinished Business fight is a shocking abuse of his authority to manipulate one of his crewmembers into an impossible situation and vent his Man Pain in a showy violent way, it is kind of funny on the level that if Tyrol were not dead to me forever I would say that he is such a bitter ex-Catholic Italian Jersey boy.)
But he doesn’t allow other people to have their feelings. What is the episode, where there’s the explosion on the deck? And he basically tells the troops not to cry - people are watching, remember your self-respect, blah blah. AS IF HE’S ONE TO TALK. Let’s compare: crying at a funeral is a thing so fucking shameful it cannot be named. Crawling around Caprica City puking all over himself in display of the utter misery he feels at being subject to security screenings same as anyone else upon being considered for a government job, however, IS PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE. Because his feelings are that much bigger than everyone else’s, even when it’s life or death for everyone else and a goddamn made-up slight for him.
(You know, for all Lee’s feelings, I don’t think we see him cry more than once. Why? Because he has learned that no matter what he’s going through, being as openly hurt by it as Bill is by a broken shoelace makes him a whiny titty-baby. That one time it does happen, in Taking a Break, I don’t think it’s an accident that he’s acting just like Bill in an EJO episode, and I know I am a broken record on the treasure that is Jamie Bamber, but I totally admire him for letting that be as uncomfortable and sorry as it actually was rather than trying to dial into any genuine pathos, not least because I consequently did feel for Lee more there than I ever felt for Bill when he mourned the decay of the Galactica by gnawing what was left of it to pieces for what felt like forty-seven years.)
And let’s deal with that government screening, shall we? He clearly thinks he’s too good to be given a lie detector test, that he’s presumptively above suspicion, BECAUSE HE’S BILL ADAMA, THAT’S WHY. But he is SO FUCKING UNTRUSTWORTHY. He is EXACTLY the kind of person you give a lie detector test to weed out! The Earth lie. (Nice, how everyone was furious with and disappointed in Laura for honestly believing in what was an actual roadmap to Earth, however disappointing, but nobody except Kara gives a flying fuck that Bill Adama actually used a funeral as a platform from which to lie to EVERYONE IN THE UNIVERSE, MY GOD. Those ingrates.) The coup. The indefinite detention of the vice-president on fabricated charges. HE IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.
I know I have talked before about the vaguely obscured sexism of the world in general and the character particularly, and somewhat related to his masculinity issues is what looks to me like not a little bit of homophobia. I know we have a sample size of ONE for this, but look pre-snap Gaeta. The man was never addressed by his title, and never in all the time we knew him got a promotion. Not after being the only trustworthy scientist left in the UNIVERSE, or being THE single most important factor on-world in the success of the Exodus and almost airlocked by a couple of Cylons for his trouble - the fucking DOG got to live on Colonial One, while Gaeta gets the pleasure of going back to work with the people/robots who tried to MURDER him; he’s a fucking SAINT for taking as long as he did to lose his shit, say I - not after losing a leg to friendly fire in the line of duty. Now obviously if we had more gay characters (besides the dead lesbian, the dead lying bisexual, and the one survivor we basically met in the finale) that might be less of an issue, but we don’t, so we have to go with how for the vast majority of the run, Bill treats 100% of the gay people on his crew like shit.
Fine, authorial oversight, could possibly be wanked out of the character, though it shouldn’t be excused. But the language I remember from in the mutiny arc - which, okay, he’s a little peeved at the whole about-to-be-murdered situation, NOW YOU KNOW HOW HE FEELS, YOU SHIT - is violently sexualized, in a way we generally don’t hear him use. Up your ass. Down your throat. I mean, leave it to Horrible Bill to use rape imagery anyway, but again, Gaeta being the one gay man we know* at this point in the series makes it nauseating. I know I am not much more reasonable about Gaeta than I am about Roslin, but REALLY, THOUGH. (I can't find a transcript to verify these lines, though they feel branded into my brain; let me know if I'm exaggerating.)
THE WORST. (If you are noticing a correlation between how much a show expects me to validate the self-centeredness, temper, controlling behavior, Man Pain, and tendency to try to get everyone killed whenever they get cranky of a character by subsuming everyone else’s stories into his, and how hot burns my endless hatred, YOU ARE CLEARLY IMAGINING THINGS.)
*Yes, yes, if you watched the webisodes you know of Hoshi, but he doesn’t get any characterization until he decides to pick up the slack and be the only loveable thing about the finale, because he is clearly a stealth gay superhero with a thing for hopeless cases; I bet he is secretly doing Lee. His adorable FACE that tells you he is actually someone who is going to take the protection of the people seriously; why did we not get more of him? Oh, right, because with about six lines of dialogue he put everyone else we knew to shame.
I can’t even deal with Bill. He’s the worst. And I’m supposed to think he’s a hero and he just makes me GAAAAAAAAAAAG. I hate that we hear stupid Bill’s stupid voice on the voiceovers for all the big episodes like it’s HIS story when he is the single most dickish, static, derivative character on the show. Actually, I think he is the single most dickish, static, and derivative character I have ever seen but that might be the Bill Nausea clouding up my brain. (Seriously. I have a sick headache finishing this post. Though that might be the anguished hormonal implosion.) There's so much awesome on this show! Why am I supposed to give a crap about him, exactly? I AM COUNTING THE FINALE AS TEXT FOR THIS ENTRY, BECAUSE BILL AND DAYBREAK? THEY DESERVE EACH OTHER.
He is such a withholding douche to Laura. And I mean, she is clearly his superior in every way imaginable, so I am trying to sympathize with a little insecurity there, but the way he manipulatively pulls back from affection towards her no matter how upfront she is with him makes me nauseous. His sweetest moments concerning his feelings about their relationship are never in front of her. They’re about her. I mean, we never hear him say he loves her. We hear “it’s about time,” because obviously she should put aside all her issues about the SAVING THE WORLD and the MAKING THE DECISIONS HE WON’T and the DYING OF CANCER AGAIN to coo over his enormous ego. He never answers her about the cabin, you know, he stumbles around what-ifs while Laura is straightforward and honest about her feelings.
Aside from the general grossness of the corpse bride thing, dude, check that out. The man kept on a visible symbol of his ex-wife - the woman who he LEFT without so much as a by-your-leave, didn’t even know enough to remember her properly, and oh yes, he only consciously thinks about once a year - the entire time we were supposed to believe they were in TWOO WUV, and didn’t give it up until Laura was DEAD and therefore did not have a chance of reacting in a way that did not please him. What the fuck, why not just propose to a Real Doll? That’s just throwing a non-existent commitment in her face to remind her that she doesn’t come first.
And, this is less relationship-based and more TREASON-based, but he does he even apologize for the ARMED KINDAPPING OF THE PRESIDENT IN AN ACT OF WAR AGAINST THE GOVERNMENT DURING A NATIONAL EMERGENCY? He starts off with “I forgive you.” OH, HE’S A GODDAMN PRINCE. Bill behaves so fucking badly there and the show tries to create some equivalence, but there’s just not. Roslin is the president, Roslin is the commander-in-chief, Roslin can send the goddamn raider on a coffee run if she wants. (SHE CAN SEND STARBUCK TO STARBUCKS, HAHAHA.) All that military/political split bullshit in the miniseries was her having to humor him to get him to DO HIS FRAKKING JOB. If they live in any system besides a military dictatorship, at bottom, the military serves the people.
But then shit gets real, and he lets her be the one to make the hardest decisions so he can pat himself on the back about having been all sanctimonious at her, and justify doing what he knows needs doing as “just following orders.” He always goes along with it. Cain. Bill is the most reprehensible character in AMoS, as far as that manipulative garbage counts for anything. Everyone else acts based on their convictions - and you can agree or disagree with any or all of them, but Helo’s, Sharon’s, Lee’s, and Laura’s decisions are consistent with convictions that are genuinely held and rooted in some (admittedly selective) angles on reality - but Bill thinks what they’re doing is genocide, and goes along with it anyway, because he’s just following orders.
But my homegirl Laura is a big girl and can take care of herself and is clearly fine with emotionally detached relationships with inferior men (Adar, the guy in Daybreak, Zarek) , and the way he treats her does not even hold a candle to the way he treats Lee. I’ve looked at this from Lee’s perspective already, but because I was focusing on my bratty little mope-machine, I’m not sure I clarified how Bill was a terrible parent WAY before he left. Oh, the abandonment compounded all the issues, because that can only happen to a kid for so long before the kid internalizes the idea that they deserve whatever the parent dishes out, so Lee really believed Bill leaving was about him being bad somehow. I don’t mean to minimize that in the least, it would have been bad enough on its own, but this in combination with the most likely reading of the subtext there is so selfish and cruel. Then he boo-hoos to Lee about how he might not have been a good father. Oh, you think?
I think the show clearly started with the idea of Bill having been an absent father, having hurt Lee in this way that made him certainly avoidant, and a terrible father, but a way that also romanticized his hypermasculine rakish fighter persona, because he was OFF FIGHTING THE CYLONS! He didn’t have time for KIDS! and a WIFE! and probably a damn DOG! And then having tried to make up for it - because he started feeling bad after the kids were adults and couldn’t demand anything from him - in this way that could be painted as understandable would end horribly in this thing that wasn’t actually any one person’s fault, but giving Lee a focal point for his anger. But then, how many times do we see him physically attack the (much smaller, even strong swaggery Starbuck) girls who he claims as his daughters? Three that I can remember off the top of my head, and at none of those times were they a threat to him by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t know how much clearer it could be anyway, but Lee mentions more than once having been habitually scared of Bill. Scared. Those implications are fucking ugly.
And you know, I make fun of all the crying because you do with what you have, but it’s not the big giant displays of emotion that bother me. When he’s upset about something that’s actually about him, I’m fine with it. Of course, it only happens for about forty-five seconds in the entire run, but still. His mourning of his marriage and ex-wife, as awful as the whole ordeal revealed him to be, is of course completely natural. It’s the way he uses those emotions to display his presumed superiority over everyone around him. He doesn’t try to control his temper. He openly revels in losing it. He goes out of his way to be in situations where he’ll go nuts at people (ie sparring). Not just in front of people. At people. To remind them that HIS ANGER IS SO MASSIVE AND CONSTANT, WHICH PROVES ITS RIGHTNESS. Again I point to Caprica to clarify that Taurons are culturally Italians, and submit to you that if your uncles were basically The Situation on Medicare you would not be impressed with his volatile overdramatic bullshit either. (As much as the Unfinished Business fight is a shocking abuse of his authority to manipulate one of his crewmembers into an impossible situation and vent his Man Pain in a showy violent way, it is kind of funny on the level that if Tyrol were not dead to me forever I would say that he is such a bitter ex-Catholic Italian Jersey boy.)
But he doesn’t allow other people to have their feelings. What is the episode, where there’s the explosion on the deck? And he basically tells the troops not to cry - people are watching, remember your self-respect, blah blah. AS IF HE’S ONE TO TALK. Let’s compare: crying at a funeral is a thing so fucking shameful it cannot be named. Crawling around Caprica City puking all over himself in display of the utter misery he feels at being subject to security screenings same as anyone else upon being considered for a government job, however, IS PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE. Because his feelings are that much bigger than everyone else’s, even when it’s life or death for everyone else and a goddamn made-up slight for him.
(You know, for all Lee’s feelings, I don’t think we see him cry more than once. Why? Because he has learned that no matter what he’s going through, being as openly hurt by it as Bill is by a broken shoelace makes him a whiny titty-baby. That one time it does happen, in Taking a Break, I don’t think it’s an accident that he’s acting just like Bill in an EJO episode, and I know I am a broken record on the treasure that is Jamie Bamber, but I totally admire him for letting that be as uncomfortable and sorry as it actually was rather than trying to dial into any genuine pathos, not least because I consequently did feel for Lee more there than I ever felt for Bill when he mourned the decay of the Galactica by gnawing what was left of it to pieces for what felt like forty-seven years.)
And let’s deal with that government screening, shall we? He clearly thinks he’s too good to be given a lie detector test, that he’s presumptively above suspicion, BECAUSE HE’S BILL ADAMA, THAT’S WHY. But he is SO FUCKING UNTRUSTWORTHY. He is EXACTLY the kind of person you give a lie detector test to weed out! The Earth lie. (Nice, how everyone was furious with and disappointed in Laura for honestly believing in what was an actual roadmap to Earth, however disappointing, but nobody except Kara gives a flying fuck that Bill Adama actually used a funeral as a platform from which to lie to EVERYONE IN THE UNIVERSE, MY GOD. Those ingrates.) The coup. The indefinite detention of the vice-president on fabricated charges. HE IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS.
I know I have talked before about the vaguely obscured sexism of the world in general and the character particularly, and somewhat related to his masculinity issues is what looks to me like not a little bit of homophobia. I know we have a sample size of ONE for this, but look pre-snap Gaeta. The man was never addressed by his title, and never in all the time we knew him got a promotion. Not after being the only trustworthy scientist left in the UNIVERSE, or being THE single most important factor on-world in the success of the Exodus and almost airlocked by a couple of Cylons for his trouble - the fucking DOG got to live on Colonial One, while Gaeta gets the pleasure of going back to work with the people/robots who tried to MURDER him; he’s a fucking SAINT for taking as long as he did to lose his shit, say I - not after losing a leg to friendly fire in the line of duty. Now obviously if we had more gay characters (besides the dead lesbian, the dead lying bisexual, and the one survivor we basically met in the finale) that might be less of an issue, but we don’t, so we have to go with how for the vast majority of the run, Bill treats 100% of the gay people on his crew like shit.
Fine, authorial oversight, could possibly be wanked out of the character, though it shouldn’t be excused. But the language I remember from in the mutiny arc - which, okay, he’s a little peeved at the whole about-to-be-murdered situation, NOW YOU KNOW HOW HE FEELS, YOU SHIT - is violently sexualized, in a way we generally don’t hear him use. Up your ass. Down your throat. I mean, leave it to Horrible Bill to use rape imagery anyway, but again, Gaeta being the one gay man we know* at this point in the series makes it nauseating. I know I am not much more reasonable about Gaeta than I am about Roslin, but REALLY, THOUGH. (I can't find a transcript to verify these lines, though they feel branded into my brain; let me know if I'm exaggerating.)
THE WORST. (If you are noticing a correlation between how much a show expects me to validate the self-centeredness, temper, controlling behavior, Man Pain, and tendency to try to get everyone killed whenever they get cranky of a character by subsuming everyone else’s stories into his, and how hot burns my endless hatred, YOU ARE CLEARLY IMAGINING THINGS.)
*Yes, yes, if you watched the webisodes you know of Hoshi, but he doesn’t get any characterization until he decides to pick up the slack and be the only loveable thing about the finale, because he is clearly a stealth gay superhero with a thing for hopeless cases; I bet he is secretly doing Lee. His adorable FACE that tells you he is actually someone who is going to take the protection of the people seriously; why did we not get more of him? Oh, right, because with about six lines of dialogue he put everyone else we knew to shame.