and i am watching your chest rise and fall
oh look, it is Lee Adama crazy-talk o'clock. If y'all had told me five months ago that he was going to be my boy I would have lol'd and lol'd and lol'd some more.
I have been listening to Living in Clip over and over again and it has made me decide to prove that I CAN ALIENATE ANYBODY. EXCEPT PROBABLY ever_neutral . series spoilers, obviously.
the story of how hard we tried: a defense of Lee/Dee
BECAUSE APPARANTLY I HATE HAVING FRIENDS.
[Disclaimer on all of this: I’m not sure I’m willing to argue that the story was definitely, consciously planned. You can complain about the narrative inconsistencies until the space cows come home and go all uber-Amish (I LOL BECAUSE I HAVE TOTALLY COME TO TERMS! SNARK IS THE SIXTH STAGE! IT CAN’T HURT ME! LALALALA!) and that’s perfectly reasonable. Nobody has to tell me all about how I’m seeing things. The point is that I think it’s there enough to warrant some examination, and it makes a lovely, if painful, type of sense. Moreover, I haven’t seen most of the deleted scenes, except for the extended version of Unfinished Business, and I stay away from interviews/panels that don’t involve MM and her awesome progressive feminism. This is my interpretation of the finished product.]
At some point, probably as I was watching the last season, I think I started watching BSG as kind of a choose-your-own-adventure story. It works a lot better that way for me. So frequently with the show, there’s a huge gulf between what we’re shown and what we’re told, so much so that it feels as if there are two different stories going on. So, as we all do in life as in fiction, I go with the story I like best, or at the least, the story I can understand. It’s terribly apt, because Dee/Lee is all about self-deception. Not about lies, but about a conscious decision that what we think we should feel is in fact actually what we feel. That you can try, and try, and try, but sometimes that won’t be enough.
I am walking out in the rain
and I am listening to the low moan of the dial tone again
and I am getting nowhere with you
and I can't let it go, and I can't get through
This is a fascinating story about a terrible relationship. Petty and embarrassing in its realness, perhaps, is the root of its unpopularity; maybe it’s just too jarring and dysfunctional for folks whose chosen adventure fits more along with the surface presentation of the story. (Which is completely legit, obviously, not like, YOU SHOULD ALL WATCH THE SHOW RIGHT LIKE ME.) (EXCEPT ABOUT LAURA BUT THAT’S O/T.) I would argue that Dee/Lee is in fact a legitimate storytelling choice in keeping with these two characters that moves their stories forward. Obviously it’s deeply problematic: Dee effacing herself until she becomes yet another victim of the Lee Adama Dick of Death is too much, too far, for one of the few WOC-coded characters played by a WOC (I think she’s the only one, in fact; the other women who are explicitly from the maligned worlds are played by white-appearing actresses) to stuff herself into a fridge is appalling.
But taken on their own, they’re an everyday choice for acceptable happiness, which would be reasonable, but they’re two romantic perfectionists who desperately want to convince themselves that they have something special. The illusion and the reality can’t meet, no matter how badly they want the illusion to be an extension of the reality. They were friends, back before it all, when Dee was in sweet puppy love with Billy. They train together, they hang out, it’s how you think these things are supposed to happen. It’s how people fall in love. And if there’s one thing about Dee and Lee, it’s that the rules matter deeply to them.
Even when they break the rules with the jailbreak, it’s in idealistic devotion to superceding rules, and ready faith that they prioritize their principles in the same way, and at this moment in the story, that’s everything to both of them. It’s a huge experience, involving an incredible amount of trust, which all told they give bizarrely easily for people who have been hanging out socially for a few months, even in extreme circumstances. I care most about Laura and Lee there, but the importance of the experience for Dee and Lee deserves mention too.
Something’s wildly off with these two from the beginning. When we cut away from Lee in Sacrifice, just after Billy dies trying to save Lee, he’s lying down in bed; when he sits up, Dee is in bed with him. Neither of them ever mentions Billy again. Maybe it’s a bizarre leap outside both characters as we knew them. Maybe it’s a conscious commentary on what happens when knowledge of their emotions will fracture them with misery.
the old woman behind the pink curtains
and the closed door
on the first floor
she's listening through the air shaft
to see how long our swan song can last
It explains, and makes me a bit more tolerant of, Dee’s picking at Lee. Why she calls out his drinking over her own open bottle of wine in Taking a Break - because it’s not that he’s drinking, it’s that he’s going to the bar with the boys and making a scene. Her willingness to comment on his weight gain in the beginning of S3 - it’s one thing to notice and care, but quite another to gossip with That Man Bill about it- is focus on a symptom of an underlying problem (specifically, that Lee is not exactly flying with a full tank and never has been) in service of ignoring the problem itself. She’s not getting on his case just to do it. Appearances are the lynchpin of their relationship.
Their marriage isn’t over because of Kara, it’s because Lee’s coming to terms with himself, and that irreparably changes their relationship. But it has to happen, because you can’t do it all the time. You shouldn’t do it all the time. You can’t sleep in your uniform - which we actually see him do - every night. If nothing else, you have to wash it sometime. If you don’t, people will start to notice. It certainly explains Lee’s weird protectiveness of/disgust toward Baltar, the king of self-deception. It’s jealousy and regret all at once, a wave of emotions he tries his damndest not to understand.
Dee, though. Dee succeeds in self-deception almost as long as he does, far more thoroughly, and shows it in that powerful moment when it finally all cracks. This isn’t a marriage, Lee. This is a lie. She says it as if it’s a revelation they both need to hear aloud, but it always was a lie. And the lie itself, the attempt to be something they weren’t for each other, that effort became something that leant substance to their marriage. The lies, ultimately, made themselves into something real, a shell built out of genuine attraction and care. It's simultaneously not enough and more than either of them ever expected.
and both hands, now use both hands
oh, no don't close your eyes
I am writing graffiti on your body
I am drawing the story of how hard we tried
The enormous effort that goes into this strained relationship is quite necessary for the main plot. How would you even have Lee/Kara without Lee/Dee? How else do you convince Lee - so sensitive and fiercely protective of his sore spots, so justifiably afraid of abandonment, so certain that love is inescapably conditional, so torn between his head and his heart - to consider signing on with Tropical Storm Kara? Who knows all those sore spots, who can’t stay in one place for even a moment, who doesn’t know how to express love? You have to convince him that his head alone won’t cut it.
The converse is true as well, of course. It contrasts perfectly with Kara and Sam, who are all present-tense emotion, almost completely without thought. Kara can’t deal with difficult - that’s not a criticism of her, there’s just only so much one person can take on - and Sam. Well. We were made to be perfect. Until Kara, anything that wasn’t easy for Sam probably rolled off of him effortlessly. They’re a story of how love can be deep and real and easy like Sunday morning, and still not enough.
Kara and Sam are all id, where Lee and Dee are all superego. About what they think they should want; about punching out a tiny air bubble in all of space, trying desperately to patch up the holes before they suffocate. They believe that life is worthwhile, but only under certain conditions, and so they try to create those conditions.
I am watching your chest rise and fall
like the tides of my life, and the rest of it all
It’s tough to write this part because of how we never saw it, but there’s quite a bit of space to read Dee as someone who’s covering. Covering, if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing the gospel according to Yoshino, is the obscuring and downplaying of difference to avoid penalty for an unavoidably apparent identity. Female but not feminine, black but not too black, gay behind locked and bolted doors. In short, as Helo sarcastically snaps in The Woman King, “one of the good ones.” Dee doesn’t pretend not to be Saggitaron, but she bolted for the military when she was young indeed, and is a fiercer critic of Zarek than even Roslin. Her marriage to an Adama, then, is the apex of her escape from Saggitaron stigma; for her to be the one to walk away from it is not just emotional, but deeply political.
Even absent the political reading, Dee is all about appearances, not just for herself but for the story. I know I said Laura was O/T but I am sure you all knew that was a ridiculous lie. Aside from a few major similarities in characterization - Dee is the only character whose compartmentalization skills come even close to Roslin’s - their stories parallel each other. The partners of sweet, brave, Billy, whose quest for goodness leads him to abandon them again and again; the two women who see Lee’s sharp, raw potential. In the end, being the Admiral’s daughter is not enough for Dee; being Pythia’s daughter is not enough for Laura to save humanity. Dee, because all we ever see of her is a construct, is what Roslin looks like from the outside. The construct is so desperately important to her, and the marriage so necessary to the construct, that it has to become a part of her.
and your bones have been my bedframe and your flesh has been my pillow
and I am waiting for sleep to offer up the deep with both hands
They are the self-destructive characters. Kara’s death by mindfuck is written over as fate; the futile sacrifice of self and others by Adama and Cain due to their military training to click into battle when there is nothing else left; Roslin’s refusal of diloxin comes after two brutal fights with cancer; but Lee and Dee are suicidal.
More than that, they’re completely self-effacing. They don’t just want to die, they want to live without having to face themselves. Dee constructs herself entirely as her job. She’s the voice that tells them to come home. Completely anonymous, without agency or responsibility, without even a face to go with it. Lee, despite his song and dance about forgiveness and process and blah blah whatever, never says a fucking word before, during, or after the non-judicial execution of Zarek, but stands there and watches as his father blows his shadow self to pieces. Who’s Captain Apollo? He’s just a nickname. A title and a call sign, replaceable and unreal.
They gravitate together and try to pull each other back from the brink, because they are each other’s chances to convince themselves that they are worth saving. And it does not work. So they try to lose themselves in each other, before it’s all over.
and in each other’s shadows we grew less and less tall
and eventually our theories couldn’t explain it all
This pulls in my less-than-flattering minority opinion of Bill, in a crucial way. Dee’s enchantment is with Bill entirely. That’s a giant part of the façade, Lee as the Adama heir and thus necessarily like Bill. Because you’re an Adama. That’s why I married you. If you’re into Bill and think Lee should aspire to be like him, it looks like encouragement. Cool. If you think Lee is enough like Bill that becoming his father is self-actualization for him, it probably reads like a rallying show of support. Fair enough.
But what if you take all that out of the equation? If Lee is mama’s boy (and oh, he is, no matter how hard he stomps away from Laura) and better off that way? Lee has some of the same flaws as his father, it’s true, but he’s done more to fight them even this early in the story than Bill ever has or will, and Dee inadvertently but completely invalidates all of that effort when he’s more vulnerable than she seems to ever entirely understand. You’re an Adama, you’re like him, and the best I expect from you is to hollow yourself out and be less than what you are. Their joint attempt to turn Lee into his father renders her a helpmeet, and him someone who needs help, along this journey they shouldn’t be on in the first place.
I’m recording our history now on the bedroom wall
and when we leave the landlord will come and paint over it all
And in Crossroads, she walks off with his last tie to Galactica. But he left her just as surely, when he shattered her illusion and showed the world that he is not an empty uniform, but a man, both good and flawed. That type of honesty wasn’t what either of them signed on for. They both abandoned ship, and they stand next to each other like strangers during the hostage crisis.
and I am walking out in the rain
and I am listening to the low moan of the dial tone again
and I am getting nowhere with you
and I can't let it go, and I can't get though
They’re fighting so desperately against the inevitable, because they see it all too clearly and can’t tolerate it. They’re painful to watch because we all do it to some extent. All of it has happened before and all of it will happen again, but we all run out and make the call, because if you make yourself feel the rain on your face you might forget the flood, because if you’re listening to the dial tone you don’t hear the absence of a voice, because for the moment you say ‘til death do us part you might be able to drown out the conscious certainty that another calamity is just around the corner.
So now both hands, please use both hands
oh no, don’t close your eyes
God, the desperate hiding of the even more furious desperation to be seen and loved. They kill me.
and I am writing graffiti on your body
For all that, do they ever take off their rings? Something so weightless, so indefinite, so illusory. And yet, an illusion must be visible. They want to have been changed somehow by this failed experiment in creating love. It’s not what they were looking for, and it’s not what any of us wants. And isn’t that the whole point? Isn’t that the whole story with the Cylons? How deep can you make your illusions, before they take on a life of their own and destroy you completely? When does the illusion itself become a work of art, worth recognition for its own sake, even if it must be destroyed?
It is a lie, a tall tale exquisite in its ordinariness, a story within a story. It is the utterly heartwrenching story of how hard they tried.
title and poetry obviously the IP of one mr. difranco
I have been listening to Living in Clip over and over again and it has made me decide to prove that I CAN ALIENATE ANYBODY. EXCEPT PROBABLY ever_neutral . series spoilers, obviously.
the story of how hard we tried: a defense of Lee/Dee
BECAUSE APPARANTLY I HATE HAVING FRIENDS.
[Disclaimer on all of this: I’m not sure I’m willing to argue that the story was definitely, consciously planned. You can complain about the narrative inconsistencies until the space cows come home and go all uber-Amish (I LOL BECAUSE I HAVE TOTALLY COME TO TERMS! SNARK IS THE SIXTH STAGE! IT CAN’T HURT ME! LALALALA!) and that’s perfectly reasonable. Nobody has to tell me all about how I’m seeing things. The point is that I think it’s there enough to warrant some examination, and it makes a lovely, if painful, type of sense. Moreover, I haven’t seen most of the deleted scenes, except for the extended version of Unfinished Business, and I stay away from interviews/panels that don’t involve MM and her awesome progressive feminism. This is my interpretation of the finished product.]
At some point, probably as I was watching the last season, I think I started watching BSG as kind of a choose-your-own-adventure story. It works a lot better that way for me. So frequently with the show, there’s a huge gulf between what we’re shown and what we’re told, so much so that it feels as if there are two different stories going on. So, as we all do in life as in fiction, I go with the story I like best, or at the least, the story I can understand. It’s terribly apt, because Dee/Lee is all about self-deception. Not about lies, but about a conscious decision that what we think we should feel is in fact actually what we feel. That you can try, and try, and try, but sometimes that won’t be enough.
I am walking out in the rain
and I am listening to the low moan of the dial tone again
and I am getting nowhere with you
and I can't let it go, and I can't get through
This is a fascinating story about a terrible relationship. Petty and embarrassing in its realness, perhaps, is the root of its unpopularity; maybe it’s just too jarring and dysfunctional for folks whose chosen adventure fits more along with the surface presentation of the story. (Which is completely legit, obviously, not like, YOU SHOULD ALL WATCH THE SHOW RIGHT LIKE ME.) (EXCEPT ABOUT LAURA BUT THAT’S O/T.) I would argue that Dee/Lee is in fact a legitimate storytelling choice in keeping with these two characters that moves their stories forward. Obviously it’s deeply problematic: Dee effacing herself until she becomes yet another victim of the Lee Adama Dick of Death is too much, too far, for one of the few WOC-coded characters played by a WOC (I think she’s the only one, in fact; the other women who are explicitly from the maligned worlds are played by white-appearing actresses) to stuff herself into a fridge is appalling.
But taken on their own, they’re an everyday choice for acceptable happiness, which would be reasonable, but they’re two romantic perfectionists who desperately want to convince themselves that they have something special. The illusion and the reality can’t meet, no matter how badly they want the illusion to be an extension of the reality. They were friends, back before it all, when Dee was in sweet puppy love with Billy. They train together, they hang out, it’s how you think these things are supposed to happen. It’s how people fall in love. And if there’s one thing about Dee and Lee, it’s that the rules matter deeply to them.
Even when they break the rules with the jailbreak, it’s in idealistic devotion to superceding rules, and ready faith that they prioritize their principles in the same way, and at this moment in the story, that’s everything to both of them. It’s a huge experience, involving an incredible amount of trust, which all told they give bizarrely easily for people who have been hanging out socially for a few months, even in extreme circumstances. I care most about Laura and Lee there, but the importance of the experience for Dee and Lee deserves mention too.
Something’s wildly off with these two from the beginning. When we cut away from Lee in Sacrifice, just after Billy dies trying to save Lee, he’s lying down in bed; when he sits up, Dee is in bed with him. Neither of them ever mentions Billy again. Maybe it’s a bizarre leap outside both characters as we knew them. Maybe it’s a conscious commentary on what happens when knowledge of their emotions will fracture them with misery.
the old woman behind the pink curtains
and the closed door
on the first floor
she's listening through the air shaft
to see how long our swan song can last
It explains, and makes me a bit more tolerant of, Dee’s picking at Lee. Why she calls out his drinking over her own open bottle of wine in Taking a Break - because it’s not that he’s drinking, it’s that he’s going to the bar with the boys and making a scene. Her willingness to comment on his weight gain in the beginning of S3 - it’s one thing to notice and care, but quite another to gossip with That Man Bill about it- is focus on a symptom of an underlying problem (specifically, that Lee is not exactly flying with a full tank and never has been) in service of ignoring the problem itself. She’s not getting on his case just to do it. Appearances are the lynchpin of their relationship.
Their marriage isn’t over because of Kara, it’s because Lee’s coming to terms with himself, and that irreparably changes their relationship. But it has to happen, because you can’t do it all the time. You shouldn’t do it all the time. You can’t sleep in your uniform - which we actually see him do - every night. If nothing else, you have to wash it sometime. If you don’t, people will start to notice. It certainly explains Lee’s weird protectiveness of/disgust toward Baltar, the king of self-deception. It’s jealousy and regret all at once, a wave of emotions he tries his damndest not to understand.
Dee, though. Dee succeeds in self-deception almost as long as he does, far more thoroughly, and shows it in that powerful moment when it finally all cracks. This isn’t a marriage, Lee. This is a lie. She says it as if it’s a revelation they both need to hear aloud, but it always was a lie. And the lie itself, the attempt to be something they weren’t for each other, that effort became something that leant substance to their marriage. The lies, ultimately, made themselves into something real, a shell built out of genuine attraction and care. It's simultaneously not enough and more than either of them ever expected.
and both hands, now use both hands
oh, no don't close your eyes
I am writing graffiti on your body
I am drawing the story of how hard we tried
The enormous effort that goes into this strained relationship is quite necessary for the main plot. How would you even have Lee/Kara without Lee/Dee? How else do you convince Lee - so sensitive and fiercely protective of his sore spots, so justifiably afraid of abandonment, so certain that love is inescapably conditional, so torn between his head and his heart - to consider signing on with Tropical Storm Kara? Who knows all those sore spots, who can’t stay in one place for even a moment, who doesn’t know how to express love? You have to convince him that his head alone won’t cut it.
The converse is true as well, of course. It contrasts perfectly with Kara and Sam, who are all present-tense emotion, almost completely without thought. Kara can’t deal with difficult - that’s not a criticism of her, there’s just only so much one person can take on - and Sam. Well. We were made to be perfect. Until Kara, anything that wasn’t easy for Sam probably rolled off of him effortlessly. They’re a story of how love can be deep and real and easy like Sunday morning, and still not enough.
Kara and Sam are all id, where Lee and Dee are all superego. About what they think they should want; about punching out a tiny air bubble in all of space, trying desperately to patch up the holes before they suffocate. They believe that life is worthwhile, but only under certain conditions, and so they try to create those conditions.
I am watching your chest rise and fall
like the tides of my life, and the rest of it all
It’s tough to write this part because of how we never saw it, but there’s quite a bit of space to read Dee as someone who’s covering. Covering, if I may take the liberty of paraphrasing the gospel according to Yoshino, is the obscuring and downplaying of difference to avoid penalty for an unavoidably apparent identity. Female but not feminine, black but not too black, gay behind locked and bolted doors. In short, as Helo sarcastically snaps in The Woman King, “one of the good ones.” Dee doesn’t pretend not to be Saggitaron, but she bolted for the military when she was young indeed, and is a fiercer critic of Zarek than even Roslin. Her marriage to an Adama, then, is the apex of her escape from Saggitaron stigma; for her to be the one to walk away from it is not just emotional, but deeply political.
Even absent the political reading, Dee is all about appearances, not just for herself but for the story. I know I said Laura was O/T but I am sure you all knew that was a ridiculous lie. Aside from a few major similarities in characterization - Dee is the only character whose compartmentalization skills come even close to Roslin’s - their stories parallel each other. The partners of sweet, brave, Billy, whose quest for goodness leads him to abandon them again and again; the two women who see Lee’s sharp, raw potential. In the end, being the Admiral’s daughter is not enough for Dee; being Pythia’s daughter is not enough for Laura to save humanity. Dee, because all we ever see of her is a construct, is what Roslin looks like from the outside. The construct is so desperately important to her, and the marriage so necessary to the construct, that it has to become a part of her.
and your bones have been my bedframe and your flesh has been my pillow
and I am waiting for sleep to offer up the deep with both hands
They are the self-destructive characters. Kara’s death by mindfuck is written over as fate; the futile sacrifice of self and others by Adama and Cain due to their military training to click into battle when there is nothing else left; Roslin’s refusal of diloxin comes after two brutal fights with cancer; but Lee and Dee are suicidal.
More than that, they’re completely self-effacing. They don’t just want to die, they want to live without having to face themselves. Dee constructs herself entirely as her job. She’s the voice that tells them to come home. Completely anonymous, without agency or responsibility, without even a face to go with it. Lee, despite his song and dance about forgiveness and process and blah blah whatever, never says a fucking word before, during, or after the non-judicial execution of Zarek, but stands there and watches as his father blows his shadow self to pieces. Who’s Captain Apollo? He’s just a nickname. A title and a call sign, replaceable and unreal.
They gravitate together and try to pull each other back from the brink, because they are each other’s chances to convince themselves that they are worth saving. And it does not work. So they try to lose themselves in each other, before it’s all over.
and in each other’s shadows we grew less and less tall
and eventually our theories couldn’t explain it all
This pulls in my less-than-flattering minority opinion of Bill, in a crucial way. Dee’s enchantment is with Bill entirely. That’s a giant part of the façade, Lee as the Adama heir and thus necessarily like Bill. Because you’re an Adama. That’s why I married you. If you’re into Bill and think Lee should aspire to be like him, it looks like encouragement. Cool. If you think Lee is enough like Bill that becoming his father is self-actualization for him, it probably reads like a rallying show of support. Fair enough.
But what if you take all that out of the equation? If Lee is mama’s boy (and oh, he is, no matter how hard he stomps away from Laura) and better off that way? Lee has some of the same flaws as his father, it’s true, but he’s done more to fight them even this early in the story than Bill ever has or will, and Dee inadvertently but completely invalidates all of that effort when he’s more vulnerable than she seems to ever entirely understand. You’re an Adama, you’re like him, and the best I expect from you is to hollow yourself out and be less than what you are. Their joint attempt to turn Lee into his father renders her a helpmeet, and him someone who needs help, along this journey they shouldn’t be on in the first place.
I’m recording our history now on the bedroom wall
and when we leave the landlord will come and paint over it all
And in Crossroads, she walks off with his last tie to Galactica. But he left her just as surely, when he shattered her illusion and showed the world that he is not an empty uniform, but a man, both good and flawed. That type of honesty wasn’t what either of them signed on for. They both abandoned ship, and they stand next to each other like strangers during the hostage crisis.
and I am walking out in the rain
and I am listening to the low moan of the dial tone again
and I am getting nowhere with you
and I can't let it go, and I can't get though
They’re fighting so desperately against the inevitable, because they see it all too clearly and can’t tolerate it. They’re painful to watch because we all do it to some extent. All of it has happened before and all of it will happen again, but we all run out and make the call, because if you make yourself feel the rain on your face you might forget the flood, because if you’re listening to the dial tone you don’t hear the absence of a voice, because for the moment you say ‘til death do us part you might be able to drown out the conscious certainty that another calamity is just around the corner.
So now both hands, please use both hands
oh no, don’t close your eyes
God, the desperate hiding of the even more furious desperation to be seen and loved. They kill me.
and I am writing graffiti on your body
For all that, do they ever take off their rings? Something so weightless, so indefinite, so illusory. And yet, an illusion must be visible. They want to have been changed somehow by this failed experiment in creating love. It’s not what they were looking for, and it’s not what any of us wants. And isn’t that the whole point? Isn’t that the whole story with the Cylons? How deep can you make your illusions, before they take on a life of their own and destroy you completely? When does the illusion itself become a work of art, worth recognition for its own sake, even if it must be destroyed?
It is a lie, a tall tale exquisite in its ordinariness, a story within a story. It is the utterly heartwrenching story of how hard they tried.
title and poetry obviously the IP of one mr. difranco