the razor
So after my Cain post a while back I gave in and re-watched Razor. Because I do not even have the attention span to pretend I do serious re-watches. Some day Netflix is going to send me a notification like YOU KNOW THE NUMBERS GO IN ORDER, RIGHT? And naturally I had thoughts. About Lee, because apparently that is what I do now.
I was too pissed to pay too much attention to Lee the first time I watched Razor (not that I can give legal advice in your jurisdiction, but as a purely academic point of interest, JUST SAY NO TO TEMPER TANTRUMS WHILE UNDER OATH), which maybe explains why I didn’t realize just how much the whole Cain/Kendra story is just as much about him as them. Razor gets to the heart of what it is, exactly, that he is so afraid of inside of himself.
Because Lee Adama has always been a razor.
He has no one thing to blame it on. There was nothing external that made him this way, no Cain drawing out the rage within, no logical progression from fresh-faced Classics student to cold-blooded killer. It certainly wasn’t the war; he cracked to without even knowing the extent of the catastrophe. Maybe it was his awful parents, maybe it was losing Zak, maybe some of us are just born that way, with something alien and cold and lethal in hand. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it isn’t a reaction to their cruel daily grind, but a part of Lee himself, before he ever knew Cain existed.
Cain: Sometimes, we have to leave people behind, so that we can go on.
Lee: I hate to make this a numbers game, but we’re talking about the survival of our race. (Miniseries)
Cain: So that we can continue to fight.
Lee: We’re heading toward the gunfire. (Valley of Darkness)
Cain: Sometimes, we have to do things that we never thought we were capable of, if only to show the enemy our will.
Tigh: This is mutiny, you know that? Lee: I do, and you can tell my father I’m listening to my instincts. (KLG)
Cain: Yesterday, you showed me that you were capable of setting aside your fear, setting aside your hesitation, and even your revulsion -- every natural inhibition that during battle can mean the difference between life and death.
Lee: If we’re going to do this, let’s just do it. (33)
Cain: When you can be this for as long as you have to be, then you're a razor. This war is forcing us all to become razors because if we don't, we don't survive. And then we don't have the luxury of becoming simply human again.
So what does it mean for him, that he didn’t need to grow this piece of himself that wasn’t quite human? Is he even human entirely? Was he ever? Is that why he can’t connect, quite, why he can’t quite put himself in anyone else’s shoes no matter how much compassion he has for them? Why he can step back and give the awful orders with only a few months of hell behind him, when his father who has served for entire lifetimes can’t? (And he can’t. Bill steps in and gives the order not to launch the nuke because he wants to be the one that saves the team. But when he knows someone has to be left behind, he punts responsibility for the order over to Lee.) Why he can list an attempt to protect the government and its leader, the finest moment of his young life up to that point, as one of his sins, but never bats an eye during or since his argument for annihilation of the Cylons, completely unfazed by Helo’s claim that it’s a “crime against humanity”? Maybe he thinks on some level that those rules don’t apply to him any more than they protect the Cylons, both beyond them and undeserving of them all at once.
Tyrol: I thought the Cylons were the enemy.
Lee: Yeah. Now it’s us.
Maybe “us” doesn’t actually include Lee any more than Tyrol.
And that’s why so many of his major conflicts have to be against other humans, rather than the Cylons. He’s learning what it is to be human, because there’s a tiny piece of him that sets him apart. He has to find it and understand it. He has to figure out what the rules are, because if there’s this strange thing inside him, he has to govern it, and he has to do it right. He has to know what right is. It freezes him when he has to make his own choices; it makes him both brilliant and deadly when the captain’s hand flips him open and uses him as a weapon.
Do it.
He still consciously thinks power is the blunt-force instrument wielded by his father, Tigh, and Starbuck. It’s another exploration of gender-bent power. The other razors (Cain, Kendra, and Roslin) are women. But he still thinks his path is to be a man (I think he’s better than realizing that in so many words the way his father does, but still), and so he’s gotten fairly adept at grasping the knife by the blade and landing blow after blow with the hilt. But you do that enough, you’ll lose your whole hand. It’s killing him. But he knows the blade is what makes him terribly, terribly dangerous when he does let loose. You don’t have to swing a knife like that to do massive damage. He doesn’t lose control for a damn good reason.
I don’t think it’s that he’s cold inside, that he’s missing some essential emotional piece of his humanity. But I do think this is why he works so hard to keep his head and heart separate. He reaches for the razor on instinct in a crisis and then comes to, eyes dry, cheeks wet with blood, and wonders what have I done. Over and over again. He can’t make himself put all of his power in one place, take the skill and strength he has forced himself to learn to live in his world of men and put it behind the lethal weapon in his soul. But there is no destroying it and living, any more than he could remove his lungs or heart.
For him, it isn’t just a question of facing the things they’ve all done. That would be too easy, that would make too much sense and skate right over the problem all at once. Because there is a difference between defensive maneuvers and offensive ones, between tactically sound and philosophically rational, between protection and destruction. That doesn’t excuse or justify everything, but there is a difference. It’s a question of how in their rough-edged, free-floating hell he was able to do such things; more importantly, how to control it, because it’s not going anywhere.
His fear of himself is massive and paralyzing, and completely warranted. Like all of his other neuroses - the knowledge that his father doesn’t actually care about him for himself; the dread that he is as mentally volatile as his mother; the certainty that he and Kara will swallow each other whole and the dysfunction within him that lets him want that - he is not, in any way, misrepresenting reality to himself. He really is that fucking dangerous. He can’t convince himself to let it go, because his mind is twisted but it’s powerful, and it won’t let him ignore the truth. But the cold, sucking fear spiral keeps him from figuring out what to do and how to change or at least contain himself; it just tears him down away from reason and all of his other better instincts until he freezes and becomes completely passive, or until the terror becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s why he’s both drawn to and repelled by Laura. Because she has that hard, cold edge too, but she can wield it voluntarily. She doesn’t hate it the way he does. She embraces it without being owned by it. And he wants to learn how to do that - and eventually in the final season he does - but the idea of validating the inner danger with conscious action terrifies him, and when it becomes something other than a ceremonial dagger, he bolts. For lots of reasons, but one of them is the undeniable reminder that he’ll never be able to leave it behind. If it’s a part of him, it’s a piece of everything he does, even if it’s folded away in his back pocket. It jumped out at me during the re-watch that Roslin is the one who starts to tell Lee about the Scylla. I wonder if that isn't the first step toward reconciliation between those two after that first falling-out, once Lee can come to understand (and does he ever) what he was asked to do.
He needs distance to protect himself, to protect others, to contain his terror of the danger within. On the Pegasus, it’s why he chooses Kendra as his right hand. He sees himself in her, and knows she has just a little less to live for than he does, a little less willingness to beat it back, and she can give sound to the voice within that would normally drown out everything else. They don’t complement each other in the way he and Kara do, two halves of a whole. Kendra is a razor too, glossy and reflective, and she’s the only way he can get perspective on himself.
It’s why he’s at his strongest only after he leaves the military, stepping up in SQN and being the hero of the hostage crisis in Revelations. If everyone else is at arm’s length, he can’t cut them to pieces. He incorporates that piece of himself into the rest of him, and it's the thing that finally lets him grow. But first he had to fucking face it.
Lee: This case, this case is built on emotion, on anger, bitterness, but most of all it's built on shame. It's about the shame of what we did to ourselves back on that planet. It's about the guilt of those of us who ran away, who ran away. And we are trying to dump all of that guilt and all that shame onto one man, and then flush him out the airlock, and just hope that that gets rid of it all. So that we can live with ourselves. But that won't work. That won't work. That's not justice, not to me. Not to me. (Crossroads)
Or if you’d prefer:
Kendra: You're born, you live and you die. There are no do-overs, no second chances to make things right if you frak 'em up the first time. Not in this life anyway. [...] Like I said, you make your choices and you live with them. And in end you are those choices.
I was too pissed to pay too much attention to Lee the first time I watched Razor (not that I can give legal advice in your jurisdiction, but as a purely academic point of interest, JUST SAY NO TO TEMPER TANTRUMS WHILE UNDER OATH), which maybe explains why I didn’t realize just how much the whole Cain/Kendra story is just as much about him as them. Razor gets to the heart of what it is, exactly, that he is so afraid of inside of himself.
Because Lee Adama has always been a razor.
He has no one thing to blame it on. There was nothing external that made him this way, no Cain drawing out the rage within, no logical progression from fresh-faced Classics student to cold-blooded killer. It certainly wasn’t the war; he cracked to without even knowing the extent of the catastrophe. Maybe it was his awful parents, maybe it was losing Zak, maybe some of us are just born that way, with something alien and cold and lethal in hand. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that it isn’t a reaction to their cruel daily grind, but a part of Lee himself, before he ever knew Cain existed.
Cain: Sometimes, we have to leave people behind, so that we can go on.
Lee: I hate to make this a numbers game, but we’re talking about the survival of our race. (Miniseries)
Cain: So that we can continue to fight.
Lee: We’re heading toward the gunfire. (Valley of Darkness)
Cain: Sometimes, we have to do things that we never thought we were capable of, if only to show the enemy our will.
Tigh: This is mutiny, you know that? Lee: I do, and you can tell my father I’m listening to my instincts. (KLG)
Cain: Yesterday, you showed me that you were capable of setting aside your fear, setting aside your hesitation, and even your revulsion -- every natural inhibition that during battle can mean the difference between life and death.
Lee: If we’re going to do this, let’s just do it. (33)
Cain: When you can be this for as long as you have to be, then you're a razor. This war is forcing us all to become razors because if we don't, we don't survive. And then we don't have the luxury of becoming simply human again.
So what does it mean for him, that he didn’t need to grow this piece of himself that wasn’t quite human? Is he even human entirely? Was he ever? Is that why he can’t connect, quite, why he can’t quite put himself in anyone else’s shoes no matter how much compassion he has for them? Why he can step back and give the awful orders with only a few months of hell behind him, when his father who has served for entire lifetimes can’t? (And he can’t. Bill steps in and gives the order not to launch the nuke because he wants to be the one that saves the team. But when he knows someone has to be left behind, he punts responsibility for the order over to Lee.) Why he can list an attempt to protect the government and its leader, the finest moment of his young life up to that point, as one of his sins, but never bats an eye during or since his argument for annihilation of the Cylons, completely unfazed by Helo’s claim that it’s a “crime against humanity”? Maybe he thinks on some level that those rules don’t apply to him any more than they protect the Cylons, both beyond them and undeserving of them all at once.
Tyrol: I thought the Cylons were the enemy.
Lee: Yeah. Now it’s us.
Maybe “us” doesn’t actually include Lee any more than Tyrol.
And that’s why so many of his major conflicts have to be against other humans, rather than the Cylons. He’s learning what it is to be human, because there’s a tiny piece of him that sets him apart. He has to find it and understand it. He has to figure out what the rules are, because if there’s this strange thing inside him, he has to govern it, and he has to do it right. He has to know what right is. It freezes him when he has to make his own choices; it makes him both brilliant and deadly when the captain’s hand flips him open and uses him as a weapon.
Do it.
He still consciously thinks power is the blunt-force instrument wielded by his father, Tigh, and Starbuck. It’s another exploration of gender-bent power. The other razors (Cain, Kendra, and Roslin) are women. But he still thinks his path is to be a man (I think he’s better than realizing that in so many words the way his father does, but still), and so he’s gotten fairly adept at grasping the knife by the blade and landing blow after blow with the hilt. But you do that enough, you’ll lose your whole hand. It’s killing him. But he knows the blade is what makes him terribly, terribly dangerous when he does let loose. You don’t have to swing a knife like that to do massive damage. He doesn’t lose control for a damn good reason.
I don’t think it’s that he’s cold inside, that he’s missing some essential emotional piece of his humanity. But I do think this is why he works so hard to keep his head and heart separate. He reaches for the razor on instinct in a crisis and then comes to, eyes dry, cheeks wet with blood, and wonders what have I done. Over and over again. He can’t make himself put all of his power in one place, take the skill and strength he has forced himself to learn to live in his world of men and put it behind the lethal weapon in his soul. But there is no destroying it and living, any more than he could remove his lungs or heart.
For him, it isn’t just a question of facing the things they’ve all done. That would be too easy, that would make too much sense and skate right over the problem all at once. Because there is a difference between defensive maneuvers and offensive ones, between tactically sound and philosophically rational, between protection and destruction. That doesn’t excuse or justify everything, but there is a difference. It’s a question of how in their rough-edged, free-floating hell he was able to do such things; more importantly, how to control it, because it’s not going anywhere.
His fear of himself is massive and paralyzing, and completely warranted. Like all of his other neuroses - the knowledge that his father doesn’t actually care about him for himself; the dread that he is as mentally volatile as his mother; the certainty that he and Kara will swallow each other whole and the dysfunction within him that lets him want that - he is not, in any way, misrepresenting reality to himself. He really is that fucking dangerous. He can’t convince himself to let it go, because his mind is twisted but it’s powerful, and it won’t let him ignore the truth. But the cold, sucking fear spiral keeps him from figuring out what to do and how to change or at least contain himself; it just tears him down away from reason and all of his other better instincts until he freezes and becomes completely passive, or until the terror becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s why he’s both drawn to and repelled by Laura. Because she has that hard, cold edge too, but she can wield it voluntarily. She doesn’t hate it the way he does. She embraces it without being owned by it. And he wants to learn how to do that - and eventually in the final season he does - but the idea of validating the inner danger with conscious action terrifies him, and when it becomes something other than a ceremonial dagger, he bolts. For lots of reasons, but one of them is the undeniable reminder that he’ll never be able to leave it behind. If it’s a part of him, it’s a piece of everything he does, even if it’s folded away in his back pocket. It jumped out at me during the re-watch that Roslin is the one who starts to tell Lee about the Scylla. I wonder if that isn't the first step toward reconciliation between those two after that first falling-out, once Lee can come to understand (and does he ever) what he was asked to do.
He needs distance to protect himself, to protect others, to contain his terror of the danger within. On the Pegasus, it’s why he chooses Kendra as his right hand. He sees himself in her, and knows she has just a little less to live for than he does, a little less willingness to beat it back, and she can give sound to the voice within that would normally drown out everything else. They don’t complement each other in the way he and Kara do, two halves of a whole. Kendra is a razor too, glossy and reflective, and she’s the only way he can get perspective on himself.
It’s why he’s at his strongest only after he leaves the military, stepping up in SQN and being the hero of the hostage crisis in Revelations. If everyone else is at arm’s length, he can’t cut them to pieces. He incorporates that piece of himself into the rest of him, and it's the thing that finally lets him grow. But first he had to fucking face it.
Lee: This case, this case is built on emotion, on anger, bitterness, but most of all it's built on shame. It's about the shame of what we did to ourselves back on that planet. It's about the guilt of those of us who ran away, who ran away. And we are trying to dump all of that guilt and all that shame onto one man, and then flush him out the airlock, and just hope that that gets rid of it all. So that we can live with ourselves. But that won't work. That won't work. That's not justice, not to me. Not to me. (Crossroads)
Or if you’d prefer:
Kendra: You're born, you live and you die. There are no do-overs, no second chances to make things right if you frak 'em up the first time. Not in this life anyway. [...] Like I said, you make your choices and you live with them. And in end you are those choices.