Yes, I've always found that last scene in the mini between them to be frustrating. You can see that the events meant a lot to Lee and that he, too, is grateful for his father to be alive. Yet, when he tries to communicate it, his father can't handle it. Bill runs the show whenever he can, and this is an instance where he's just too tired or weary or just can't handle the intimacy of his son wanting to say something - maybe even to apologize to him for his behavior earlier. It is an insightful cap to their relationship as it stood at the ends of the worlds (and probably before) that Adama offers something when he can, but he doesn't wait for Lee to come around as well. *sigh* It happened over and over again in the show.
I agree that both the scenes have a rather sad feel to them. I think in the second Lee is wanting either to apologise, given what he now knows from Kara, or at least modify what he has said, and I think, at least from the way EJO plays it, that Adama knows that, but it's just that what seemed to Bill like the most important thing in the world at the beginning of the day - if it is all supposed to take place over a day which I am not sure about particularly given Epiphanies - now seems something less after all these people are dead and Bill feels responsibility for the remainder of humanity.Bill goes from a man facing a lonely retirement wanting to reconcile with his son to a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. I think that its sadness is actually a great beginning to the new complexity of their relationship. Here they have a chance to rebuild their relationship but it is because of these just imaginably awful circumstances and their are going to be these two huge things that they will have to navigate around: they are
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I think it's interesting that Jamie's take here is that Lee didn't have other options than the military because it seems to me that the story doesn't actually support that interpretation and it makes Lee into less of his own person at the beginning of the story than I think he is. The story certainly suggests that Adama wanted his sons to be viper pilots but that's not the same thing at all as saying that Lee saw his life in such a passive way before the attacks that he could only think of fulfilling his father's expectations rather than trying to live life on his own terms. Indeed given the state of their relationship that would seem an odd assumption. Lee's whole speech in the argument is about 'one of us', the implication of which is that he's saying that Zak didn't belong in the military not him as well. In Final Cut it turns out he's a reservist rather than having committed to a career in the military. In ADITL Lee talks about the various careers he was choosing between. And in Daybreak he says he joined the military to pay
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This is a very interesting question to speculate on, made all the more complicated by the fact that Lee's backstory changed as the series went along. The "series bible" - the writers' initial ideas of the characters' backstories - says that Lee hero-worshipped his absent father and joined flight school enthusiastically, but then somewhere around college age he began to grow resentful of his father's neglect and their relationship deteriorated. Lee told Zak that it would be a mistake for him to enlist, and then it became a moot point because Zak actually failed to qualify for flight school. But Bill used his connections to pull strings and get his youngest son admitted anyway, which infuriated Lee and led to some of his later accusations about Bill being responsible for putting Zak in harm's way. Lee was unhappy in the service, but neither he nor anyone else could deny that he was talented at it - he was naturally well-suited to being a pilot. Zak was not suited to piloting, no matter how much he wanted to be. I think that's the
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I don't think that there's any doubt Rachel that Lee grew up with a strong sense that his father wanted him to be a viper pilot and that when he contemplated other careers that was part - but again only part (he did like reading Joseph's papers) - of his anger with Bill. And I think as well once he was in the military as a reservist he felt his father's expectations of being more than that. But I just can't quite get from that to Lee actually having made the choice of being a reservist because it was anything other than his own choice as a young man with a strong sense of who he thought he was. Is the Lee who wasn't speaking to his father even before Zak died and the Lee who was reading banned books at college, or who has a serious contrarian personality, who self-identifiers as a questioner and who in some sense rejects the weight of the past really someone who made the choice of being a reservist simply because it was what his rather absent father with whom he was pretty angry for having left him with his mother expected? He
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Oh, thank you for this, Pythia. It's a lovely analysis of Lee's character and contradictions - the pride and the insecurity, the contrarian independence and yet the underlying hunger to be loved for who he is. As for why he joined the reserves in the first place, we'll really never know, I suppose. The only answer we get in canon is "to pay for college," which doesn't really tell us much about what it meant for Lee in terms of his identity (he seems to be denying that it had anything to do with "following in [Bill's] footsteps," that's for sure, even though that's what his joining the military looks like on the surface, and I personally think he wanted Bill's attention, however loathe he was to admit that). I have less of a problem than you do with the idea that Lee, at the age of seventeen or so, hadn't figured out what he wanted to do with his life and - despite his anger and resentment and incohate questioning - went ahead with what had always been planned for him rather than striking out on his own. Lots of teenagers do this
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Given Lee talking about using his military duty to pay for school I'd say he was a reservist right from the start. I've always seen that as a way he was either trying to meet Bill halfway or more likely sticking it to his father. It's kind of like he was saying, "I'm going to take what I want of this" (namely the fun of flying) "but not give you what you want," (the whole career thing). I think that works with the "One of us..." position he took.
I know so little about military structures of authority and training, but may I ask, do you know whether it makes sense to place a reservist officer as CAG over career officers? Do reservists have considerably less training and experience than career officers, in general, or are they basically just as qualified as the full-timers?
Sorry, please don't feel like you need to answer that if you don't know, but I thought I'd ask.
My experience is US Navy but I'm fairly certain it's similar for the other services. I think what most people don't know is that a large portion of the officers on regular active duty are reservists. US Naval Academy grads get regular commissions, but almost no one else does. Most officer accession programs require an active duty commitment of four or more years. What you get the opportunity to do along the way, if you plan to stick around longer, is apply to augment, meaning get switched to regular status. Conversely those who leave active duty but stay in the reserves change back to reserve status. So I went from USNR to USN back to USNR and finally USNR-R (the final R signifying Retired). What I don't know though is the ratio of reservists to regulars who remain on active duty through a 20+ year career
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Sorry, please don't feel like you need to answer that if you don't know, but I thought I'd ask.
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