Helo and Sharon through 2.07...
I apologize for the length of this post - it kinda got away from me and I don’t think I’m done with it, even now, since my thoughts on these characters are constantly evolving. In fact, I express myself a helluva lot better in writing fic as to how I truly see them, but I just had to get this off my chest. I’d love for you guys to post your thoughts and feelings in response, because the discussion this can spark will help me in later characterizations in my fic. :)
Helo is a simple and straightforward guy, a true boyscout, as far as the way he treats others is concerned. Sharon tells the others at one point that “he’s a good man; he always does the right thing.”
Helo isn’t perfect. He drinks, he gambles, and, based on a comment from Boomer in the mini (“What girl don’t you know?”), the ain’t no virgin. He likes to have fun. And yet, when he is presented with a situation in which others are depending on him for their lives, he calmly assess what needs to be done and he does it, no matter the cost to himself.
Helo’s biggest flaw, as I see it (your mileage may vary), is his simplicity of view. He is more likely to take people at face value, to trust them until he is given a reason not to, and even then he’s capable of forgiveness.
His simplistic worldview and trusting nature are likely to be his downfall. He has seen his Sharon do things over and over again to help and to help Kara, but he has mistaken her actions as loyalty (?) to humanity, but I think it’s much more likely that her actions are based on loyalty to Helo and Kara.
He knows now that the Cylons like humans, but the only bio-Cylon with whom he’s had any meaningful interaction is Sharon. He loves her and, more importantly, he is in love with her. A man in love, no matter how competent or intelligent, can do some amazingly stupid things. Such as trusting implicitly a woman who he knows intellectually is the enemy, but who has, by her actions, proven herself to be his friend.
He hasn’t seen what the others have seen. He hasn’t seen the acts of sabotage or attempted murder perpetrated by Boomer. He hasn’t seen the fear and chaos Leoben caused, or the suicide bombing by Doral.
Helo is acting on the information he has, but he doesn’t have all the information, even now.
He and Sharon are back on Galactica. Helo is no longer isolated and no longer in a situation of pure, black-and-white survival. More and more, he is going to see what the other bio-Cylons have wrought and his unshakeable trust in Sharon is going to be severely tested. He’s going to be seen, at least by some, as a Cylon sympathizer, a collaborator, even a traitor.
His support of Sharon so far has been beautiful, once he got past the OMG-you’re-a-toaster-and-must-die thing, but it’s going to get harder and harder in the face of his and Sharon’s new reality. Everyone else around him, from Adama to Zarek (get it? A to Z? :P Sorry.) is showing their distrust of Sharon, which seems to be making Helo more obstinate in his overt trust of her, but how long can he keep the blinders on?
And this brings me to Sharon (the Caprica version only). Sharon is a Cylon. She isn’t human, hasn’t been raised as a human, but Helo is still in a place where he can’t quite grasp that. I think he’s starting to see it. He’s starting to accept her on her terms and reconcile himself to her… Cylon-ness?
As a Cylon, she doesn’t see humans in the same way that Helo or any other human sees them, but I don’t think she sees them in quite the same way, after prolonged exposure to Helo, as the other bio-Cylons do (with the possible exception of Number Six, but that is for another day).
Before Helo, Sharon saw humans in black-and-white terms, just as before Sharon, Helo saw Cylons in black-and-white terms. (Of course, until very recently, he only saw them in chrome terms.) Exposure to Helo brought Sharon to the realization that humans can’t be truly evil or how could they have produced this man she has fallen in love with? Helo has showed her what true caring on both a personal level (Helo/Sharon) and a more esoteric level (Helo/humanity) and it wasn’t what she was lead to believe by Six and the others. And I see that as the beginning of Sharon’s break from the Cylon collective.
That break was furthered by her contact with Kara and the resistance. She still doesn’t see that the Cylon farms are all that bad, if the men and women come to them voluntarily, because that just isn’t a part of her mindset. But she is seeing different levels of caring in the humans around her and that Helo isn’t the only one who can truly care for total strangers to the point of risking his life for a man he’s never met and doesn’t really know all that much about.
As each new human comes into Sharon’s life, her perspective changes a little and there are more shades of gray for her. I think she finds humans fascinating and utterly compelling, and while part of that may be the underlying programming of the basic Sharon model, I think more of that has to do with her own free will and her ability to think for herself and come to her own conclusions outside of what the Cylon agenda tells her those conclusions should be.
She has made some very conscious decisions over the course of this second season, where a lot of what she did in the first season strikes me now as running on instinct.
She chose to leave Kara and Helo, taking Kara’s raider, knowing that it would further Kara’s distrust of her and possibly further damage her relationship with Helo. I don’t think this had anything to do with programming, but rather with self-preservation and the idea that it would be easier for Helo with Kara if Sharon wasn’t around, in Kara’s face, so to speak. He wouldn’t have to keep stepping between Kara and herself with the danger of Kara putting a bullet into him.
She chose to follow Helo and Kara for several days without revealing herself. Heck, if things hadn’t gone the way they had when the two of them met up with Anders and the rest, Sharon may have revealed herself then in order to keep them from being killed. We don’t know, and we’ll never know.
We do know is that she chose to reveal her presence when Kara was in danger, and that it was a very opportune time for her to do so if she wanted to get herself into the good graces of the humans and redeem herself in Helo’s eyes. She could have revealed herself during the firefight, but what good would that have done? It wouldn’t have saved Kara. The Cylon party was clearly big enough and well enough placed that they were able to drive away a relatively large party of surprised humans. What difference could one bio-Cylon have made?
Instead, she took the calculated risk of revealing herself when there was a good chance that she wouldn’t be killed out of hand and when she could offer something tangible to the resistance while at the same time reuniting with Helo - the father of her child and the man she doesn’t want to lose. She could have probably bluffed her way into that farm and gotten Kara out on her own, if she’d wanted to, given Simon’s sympathy toward Kara. But if she had done that, the reality of the farm might not have hit the resistance members and they might not have decided that these farms needed to be wiped out, might not have seen the very real danger of the farms to the entire human race and the passive destruction thereof, rather than the more overt destruction of the nuclear attacks.
Yes, Kara could have told them about the farms, but then again, Kara herself might not have discovered what was going on in that facility, if Sharon had taken her out of it by subterfuge. I’m not saying Sharon did what she did for any reasons other than purely selfish, but the possibility is there and shouldn’t be completely discounted.
Sharon chose to go back to the fleet with Helo and Kara, knowing full well what her reception with the humans would be (after all, didn’t Helo himself shoot her during that initial panicked reaction to learning that she was a Cylon?), when it would have been safer for both herself and the baby for her to stay on Caprica. At that point, she could have gone back to the Cylons. She could probably have convinced them that her apparent defection was only to lull Helo’s suspicions, to take the time to make sure she was pregnant and that she couldn’t do that by going to the little cabin in the woods with him because he would never have accepted staying there. They might not have trusted her entirely, not right away, but she wasn’t anywhere near the point of no turning back. Not then.
She’s there now, though. Arrived at that point, really, the moment she wiped out a Cylon outpost to steal a heavy raider and then leave Caprica with a pair of humans in that same raider. There is now no way she can go back to the Cylons. They might keep her alive long enough to take her baby, but that’s about it.
Sharon is much more pragmatic than Helo and she doesn’t have the blinders that he has in regard to their situation. She knows that the humans could kill her at any moment, but she has consciously gambled that they won’t. She is consciously doing everything she can to prove to the humans that she is their ally, if only for the sake of Helo and the baby - her family.
This new idea of family for her is being reinforced by the humans around her, in particular Helo, Kara, and the Adamas. She had none of that with the Cylons, she was merely a part of the machine, never an individual. With the humans, she can be more. She was designed to be the most human of the Cylon models, but that is a double-edged sword. She has the most potential of being allowed to remain with Helo and her baby if she stays with the humans, even if that means giving up her newfound freedom for the rest of her life.
Again, she isn’t human. I don’t think she sees it as a bad thing that she would be kept under lock and key forever, always monitored, always watched and guarded, anymore than she saw the baby farms as a bad thing, except through the filter of the humans around her. If having what she wants - Helo, the baby - means giving up something as intangible to her as freedom, I don’t think it’ll be a problem for her. Not where she is now in her journey to becoming human.
Just as Helo has been blinded by his love for her into seeing everyone else through rose-colored glasses, Sharon has been blinded by her love for Helo into not seeing how untenable her captivity will become over time, especially since Helo isn’t being held with her and can only visit her for a few minutes at a time with glass and bars and a telephone between them.
They both have a lot to learn and I think their blinders will be torn away over the next few episodes. Doomed love? Yes, I think it is, at least right now. But I have hope, or I have nothing.
Cross-posted to hidden_elysium and bsg_creative.
Helo is a simple and straightforward guy, a true boyscout, as far as the way he treats others is concerned. Sharon tells the others at one point that “he’s a good man; he always does the right thing.”
Helo isn’t perfect. He drinks, he gambles, and, based on a comment from Boomer in the mini (“What girl don’t you know?”), the ain’t no virgin. He likes to have fun. And yet, when he is presented with a situation in which others are depending on him for their lives, he calmly assess what needs to be done and he does it, no matter the cost to himself.
Helo’s biggest flaw, as I see it (your mileage may vary), is his simplicity of view. He is more likely to take people at face value, to trust them until he is given a reason not to, and even then he’s capable of forgiveness.
His simplistic worldview and trusting nature are likely to be his downfall. He has seen his Sharon do things over and over again to help and to help Kara, but he has mistaken her actions as loyalty (?) to humanity, but I think it’s much more likely that her actions are based on loyalty to Helo and Kara.
He knows now that the Cylons like humans, but the only bio-Cylon with whom he’s had any meaningful interaction is Sharon. He loves her and, more importantly, he is in love with her. A man in love, no matter how competent or intelligent, can do some amazingly stupid things. Such as trusting implicitly a woman who he knows intellectually is the enemy, but who has, by her actions, proven herself to be his friend.
He hasn’t seen what the others have seen. He hasn’t seen the acts of sabotage or attempted murder perpetrated by Boomer. He hasn’t seen the fear and chaos Leoben caused, or the suicide bombing by Doral.
Helo is acting on the information he has, but he doesn’t have all the information, even now.
He and Sharon are back on Galactica. Helo is no longer isolated and no longer in a situation of pure, black-and-white survival. More and more, he is going to see what the other bio-Cylons have wrought and his unshakeable trust in Sharon is going to be severely tested. He’s going to be seen, at least by some, as a Cylon sympathizer, a collaborator, even a traitor.
His support of Sharon so far has been beautiful, once he got past the OMG-you’re-a-toaster-and-must-die thing, but it’s going to get harder and harder in the face of his and Sharon’s new reality. Everyone else around him, from Adama to Zarek (get it? A to Z? :P Sorry.) is showing their distrust of Sharon, which seems to be making Helo more obstinate in his overt trust of her, but how long can he keep the blinders on?
And this brings me to Sharon (the Caprica version only). Sharon is a Cylon. She isn’t human, hasn’t been raised as a human, but Helo is still in a place where he can’t quite grasp that. I think he’s starting to see it. He’s starting to accept her on her terms and reconcile himself to her… Cylon-ness?
As a Cylon, she doesn’t see humans in the same way that Helo or any other human sees them, but I don’t think she sees them in quite the same way, after prolonged exposure to Helo, as the other bio-Cylons do (with the possible exception of Number Six, but that is for another day).
Before Helo, Sharon saw humans in black-and-white terms, just as before Sharon, Helo saw Cylons in black-and-white terms. (Of course, until very recently, he only saw them in chrome terms.) Exposure to Helo brought Sharon to the realization that humans can’t be truly evil or how could they have produced this man she has fallen in love with? Helo has showed her what true caring on both a personal level (Helo/Sharon) and a more esoteric level (Helo/humanity) and it wasn’t what she was lead to believe by Six and the others. And I see that as the beginning of Sharon’s break from the Cylon collective.
That break was furthered by her contact with Kara and the resistance. She still doesn’t see that the Cylon farms are all that bad, if the men and women come to them voluntarily, because that just isn’t a part of her mindset. But she is seeing different levels of caring in the humans around her and that Helo isn’t the only one who can truly care for total strangers to the point of risking his life for a man he’s never met and doesn’t really know all that much about.
As each new human comes into Sharon’s life, her perspective changes a little and there are more shades of gray for her. I think she finds humans fascinating and utterly compelling, and while part of that may be the underlying programming of the basic Sharon model, I think more of that has to do with her own free will and her ability to think for herself and come to her own conclusions outside of what the Cylon agenda tells her those conclusions should be.
She has made some very conscious decisions over the course of this second season, where a lot of what she did in the first season strikes me now as running on instinct.
She chose to leave Kara and Helo, taking Kara’s raider, knowing that it would further Kara’s distrust of her and possibly further damage her relationship with Helo. I don’t think this had anything to do with programming, but rather with self-preservation and the idea that it would be easier for Helo with Kara if Sharon wasn’t around, in Kara’s face, so to speak. He wouldn’t have to keep stepping between Kara and herself with the danger of Kara putting a bullet into him.
She chose to follow Helo and Kara for several days without revealing herself. Heck, if things hadn’t gone the way they had when the two of them met up with Anders and the rest, Sharon may have revealed herself then in order to keep them from being killed. We don’t know, and we’ll never know.
We do know is that she chose to reveal her presence when Kara was in danger, and that it was a very opportune time for her to do so if she wanted to get herself into the good graces of the humans and redeem herself in Helo’s eyes. She could have revealed herself during the firefight, but what good would that have done? It wouldn’t have saved Kara. The Cylon party was clearly big enough and well enough placed that they were able to drive away a relatively large party of surprised humans. What difference could one bio-Cylon have made?
Instead, she took the calculated risk of revealing herself when there was a good chance that she wouldn’t be killed out of hand and when she could offer something tangible to the resistance while at the same time reuniting with Helo - the father of her child and the man she doesn’t want to lose. She could have probably bluffed her way into that farm and gotten Kara out on her own, if she’d wanted to, given Simon’s sympathy toward Kara. But if she had done that, the reality of the farm might not have hit the resistance members and they might not have decided that these farms needed to be wiped out, might not have seen the very real danger of the farms to the entire human race and the passive destruction thereof, rather than the more overt destruction of the nuclear attacks.
Yes, Kara could have told them about the farms, but then again, Kara herself might not have discovered what was going on in that facility, if Sharon had taken her out of it by subterfuge. I’m not saying Sharon did what she did for any reasons other than purely selfish, but the possibility is there and shouldn’t be completely discounted.
Sharon chose to go back to the fleet with Helo and Kara, knowing full well what her reception with the humans would be (after all, didn’t Helo himself shoot her during that initial panicked reaction to learning that she was a Cylon?), when it would have been safer for both herself and the baby for her to stay on Caprica. At that point, she could have gone back to the Cylons. She could probably have convinced them that her apparent defection was only to lull Helo’s suspicions, to take the time to make sure she was pregnant and that she couldn’t do that by going to the little cabin in the woods with him because he would never have accepted staying there. They might not have trusted her entirely, not right away, but she wasn’t anywhere near the point of no turning back. Not then.
She’s there now, though. Arrived at that point, really, the moment she wiped out a Cylon outpost to steal a heavy raider and then leave Caprica with a pair of humans in that same raider. There is now no way she can go back to the Cylons. They might keep her alive long enough to take her baby, but that’s about it.
Sharon is much more pragmatic than Helo and she doesn’t have the blinders that he has in regard to their situation. She knows that the humans could kill her at any moment, but she has consciously gambled that they won’t. She is consciously doing everything she can to prove to the humans that she is their ally, if only for the sake of Helo and the baby - her family.
This new idea of family for her is being reinforced by the humans around her, in particular Helo, Kara, and the Adamas. She had none of that with the Cylons, she was merely a part of the machine, never an individual. With the humans, she can be more. She was designed to be the most human of the Cylon models, but that is a double-edged sword. She has the most potential of being allowed to remain with Helo and her baby if she stays with the humans, even if that means giving up her newfound freedom for the rest of her life.
Again, she isn’t human. I don’t think she sees it as a bad thing that she would be kept under lock and key forever, always monitored, always watched and guarded, anymore than she saw the baby farms as a bad thing, except through the filter of the humans around her. If having what she wants - Helo, the baby - means giving up something as intangible to her as freedom, I don’t think it’ll be a problem for her. Not where she is now in her journey to becoming human.
Just as Helo has been blinded by his love for her into seeing everyone else through rose-colored glasses, Sharon has been blinded by her love for Helo into not seeing how untenable her captivity will become over time, especially since Helo isn’t being held with her and can only visit her for a few minutes at a time with glass and bars and a telephone between them.
They both have a lot to learn and I think their blinders will be torn away over the next few episodes. Doomed love? Yes, I think it is, at least right now. But I have hope, or I have nothing.
Cross-posted to hidden_elysium and bsg_creative.