Thirty Days of TV: Day Thirty

[selenak]

Day 30 - Saddest character death.And we conclude with a horrible dilemma of a question, given that the media I consume offers really a lot of death scenes, now that I think of it. However, let me specify in order to narrow the criteria: "saddest death" is absolutely not the same as "most shocking" or "most surprising". And of course, one viewer's

Comments

[falafel_musings]

when Adama & Co. show up to arrest Gaeta & Zarek, Zarek says to Adama he ought to give Felix a medal because Gaeta was the only reason Adama was still alive.

I wish they had kept that line in! It adds a lot to my Bill Adama hate that Felix agonized over killing him and was desperately stalling and searching for a reason not to do it. And when the roles were reversed Adama didn't think twice about executing Gaeta or show a flicker of emotion over killing one of his "kids", the cold self-righteous bastard (this reminds me, I forgot to respond to your Adama post earlier this week).

Part of me really wishes Gaeta's life had been spared after the mutiny, out of consideration for his previous acts of heroism and devoted service (and the fact that he was suffering from about seven forms of PTSD at the time of the mutiny). Gaeta could have been locked in the Brig for several episodes and then when the fleet separated for the Galactica's final mission Bill could have made Felix the new admiral, finally acknowledging that Felix put the survival of the people first when he chose to end the mutiny. But that would have meant Bill realising that someone opposing him actually had some good in them and that was never gonna happen.

Ultimately Gaeta's death was worth it just for that last scene with Baltar which was about as perfect as a scene can be. I love that the final Baltar & Caprica scene was a callback to it.

Thanks for the link! I did briefly consider Ellen for the mothers poll but I've always struggled to wrap my head around the concept of THE FIVE being parents to THE SEVEN. Especially as it would mean Tigh and Chief both had sex with their daughters and Ellen had sex with her son.

[selenak]

Given that humans and Cylons were constantly coded as parents & children, the question of incest had to arise sooner or later. (Though in this case out of Cylon & Cylon combinations.) Though of course Cavil is the only one who went for that deliberately - Chief and Tigh didn't know (well, Tigh knew he was a Cylon at that point, but not that the Five had created the Six). I think Ellen when she got her memories back saw it as one of many things Cavil had done, and not the worst (hard to compete with full scale genocide and torture), but she also didn't forget it for a moment. And it's telling that when she finds out about Tigh & Caprica, the first thing she says "but we made them". On my recent rewatch, I paid attention to how Tigh reacts when Sam gets his memories back and reveals that bit of news (the creators/creations aspect). His immediate reaction (and he's the only one of the Five to do so) is to wonder whether that makes the entire genocide their fault). But there is a scene two episodes later when a dying Eight at sickbay talks to him and finds his presence comforting as her creator, and you can see that Tigh is both deeply uncomfortable and still struggling against the thought, but also, for the first time, trying to accept it (in another capacity than guilt-wrestling) and to respond. I had forgotten about this scene until the rewatch, and it corresponds the one between another Eight and Sam in Faith, where Sam (who shares Tigh's problem not only a life time of seeing himself as human but of having defined himself partly by his fight against Cylons) also for the first time responds in this way.

Now Ellen is the only one of the Five who regains her complete memories and isn't incapacitated afterwards, and so it makes sense that she's the only one who actually behaves parental to the younger Cylons throughout afterwards, and her scenes with Cavil in particular are this mixture of mythic tragedy and biting Albee play. One of the ways Ellen stays the same both as her human and Cylon self is her sharp tongue, and when he tries to humiliate her by alluding to New Caprica and them having had sex via saying "it's nothing I haven't seen before" re: her nudity, she ignores it and later humiliates him far more efficiently by responding to one of his speeches about he's teaching Boomer how to be a machine, not a lowly human, by asking Boomer "did you teach you the swirl yet" whereupon an enraged Cavil sends Boomer out. (Note: do not try a battle of sexual insults with Ellen Tigh, no matter which state she's in.) But as I said, the incest aspect is just a part, and not even the worst, of what Cavil has done as part of his pay-back-Ellen-for-creating-him, creating-him-flawed-and-daring-to-love-others campaign. It's parent-child issues taking such a horrible gigantic scale that makes it fascinating to me.

I also find it interesting that when Cavil says to Ellen that if he's a sadist, if he's hopelessly evil, whose fault is that since she created him (trying the age old tactic of blaming the parents), she says she doesn't believe he's irredeemable, that he could change, but he has to be the one to do it. Because I always wanted someone to give such an answer when a villain (or fandom) held a "you made me" speech. And incidentally, to return to our original subject, Ellen has plenty of flaws (both with and without her memories), but she is responding here to someone who put her and Saul through hell far better and with more understanding than Adama does to not "only" Gaeta but just about anyone, including his own son.