human doesn't mean just being: becoming lee adama
I want this fucking kid out of my brain. I think I need a treatment. This was going to be the post about when Lee completely hooked me, but I’m still not actually sure. So I accidentally wrote another 4K words about Lee Adama and his messed-up mind. (And, probably, my own messed-up mind. I think this is one of those posts that says more about me than it does about the character.)
Even months after having finished the show, I still walk around with Lee in my head a lot. (Well, this week, not so much “walk” as “lay around on the floor sucking down anything in reach with pain-killing potential,” which probably explains my recent verbosity.) He just clamped down my attention sometime in 2.5 and hasn’t let go since. I can tell when the show wants me to love Lee, or at least admire and agree with him, and I can tell when I’m not supposed to like him or when he’s not really supposed to be all that important. But I love him the best when I’m not supposed to. Which is right, I think, because Lee is all about not-being, and then becoming.
[shit, sorry I forgot about this: contains discussion of Dee's suicide, Lee's suicide attempt, and recurring depressive/suicidal thought loops. obviously below the cut because spoiler.]
It’s odd, really, because the stories that are big LEE MOMENTS either don’t work for me as stories (Black Market, the present-day of Razor, Sine Qua Non) or make me furious with him when they are clearly intended to make me admire him (Bastille Day, Crossroads). It’s not that I want less Lee time, but his finest moments are as part of the whole story, or even the tiny background moments to someone else’s. The miniseries, 33, KLG, the Pegasus, the mutiny are about Laura everyone. He’s up there with Gaeta as the hero of the exodus, though the focus was on STUPID BILL and his STUPID SELFISH DEATH WISH. He’s completely perfect in…whatever the S4 episode was with the Sons of Ares attacking Baltar’s cult, even though that episode was about the seismic shifts in Baltar and Roslin.
He annoyed me a lot in that first season too, running around saying things that were painfully completely obvious like they were deep truths. But. In retrospect, it’s perfect, though I’m not sure if it was intentional, or just that the character hadn’t been fully developed on the creative end just yet. The poor kid, such a good boy, but so far in over his messed-up head, reaching for adulthood like it’s some kind of solution to any of his problems. Oh sweetheart: it is not. Give up now. Really, Lee is hanging on by a thread when everything goes to hell. When I re-watched the miniseries, he struck me as made of thick glass, so dense and strong but so incredibly brittle, unable to give a fraction of an inch anywhere without cracking.
Then there’s 33, where the great collision between active and passive blows to pieces in front of his face. That moment completely changes him. He did a horrible thing there, yes, but I don’t think he ever internalizes the way the other characters do that not doing it would have been way more horrible. Oh, he knows that, he just doesn’t get it. His constant Hamletesque deliberating and chronic contrarianism are one of the reasonable outcomes of his cold, hard recognition that choices have consequences. I don’t think he ever consciously lets himself understand in the way Laura does that passivity, not acting, has consequences as well, though at least at the beginning that’s probably for the best, as it would turn into yet another tool with which to beat himself senseless and still. I love Starbuck so hard in that last minute of 33. So hard. Because, Lee hit the liner with that first shot. She only fires so he can think “we did this thing” instead of “I did this thing.” She does it for the sake of being complicit, so he doesn’t have to be alone in his guilt. Laura, too, joins him in his grief over it, making a point to show him her own desk drawer. These women, they love him so much, and he just can’t understand that.
I wonder if it wasn’t that first massive depressive episode that got me, in retrospect. This was one of those times where he really aggravated me. Because he damned well knew Laura well enough to recognize that she had a good fucking reason for everything she did, and the Cain plot was big enough that there had to be something he didn’t know, even if he couldn’t possibly have guessed about the Scilla. (Tangentially, because that is how I roll, this is also my issue with EVERYONE BUT MY BB in S3 of AtS; what, he was suddenly all MUAHAHAHA! BEHOLD MY SUDDEN BUT INEVITABLE BETRAYAL?! And if so, wouldn’t he do it for something better than a fucking kid? What the fuck does he want a kid for? Come on, AI, most of y’all ain’t that slow. Worst. Point is, motive not only matters, but can be fairly reliably deduced most of the time, particularly within a context of rational and ethical behavior, and it pisses me off when characters don’t even try.) And yet, if I can put myself in Lee’s head there - SCARY FUCKING PLACE TO BE but okay - I can see what’s going on with the collapse of his idealization of Roslin and horror at what he’s been asked to do.
Probably more importantly, it’s quite clear that some sort of breakdown was completely inevitable, and the shift in worldview brought on by the Pegasus was just the thing that would have triggered it anyway. Because after all, if a fucking battlestar that’s been seeking out the opponent all this time can pop up on their radar, there are probably helpless solitary civilian vessels everywhere; the desperate vertigo of that thought alone would’ve driven home the futility of the whole protection exercise and upset the détente in his unbalanced mind. I’ll never forgive Bill for setting it off by deflecting onto Laura rather than explaining, but all the same, the kid was going to snap at some point anyway.
Anyway, that episode. I remember watching RS so annoyed at what I thought was going to be a fake-out to make us afraid Lee was going to die (AS IF) and then when it became obvious what it was actually setting up….my heart just fell out. I think the passivity of the suicide attempt is what gets me the most, because it means we never know if the death wish is resolved. In fact, we know it isn’t; it’s just completely opportunistic. He completely chilled me - as angry as I was with him in this episode! - just after Dee’s suicide. He doesn’t ever acknowledge that he awful circumstances they’re in could drive someone to suicide, taking stock of the situation in the way he usually would. Neither does he blame himself or anyone else. But he doesn’t wonder what would drive someone to that either; he doesn’t distance himself from it emotionally in any way. It just doesn’t add up for him. It could add up, even under normal circumstances. It just doesn’t, here and now. A miscalculation. Post-finale, it’s even harder to recall, because there’s no way it won’t start making all too much sense to him again sooner or later, and probably sooner.
Lee never really went back and pulled himself together after his spacewalk, I don’t think. He got a new focus on the basic necessities of survival with being shot, and while he was even more acquiescent than usual he found a new coping mechanism in the form of Dee. Then came the enormous validation/project/distraction of the Pegasus, which gave him respite from thinking of his life as his own to take. It’s understandable, not to want to take the risk of dealing with it, not to have the time, not to have the ability to trust anyone to help him through any of it (particularly because he’s right, he has no one he can trust since he alienated Roslin, which is of course a piece of why he did it, as he doesn’t know how to have that type of relationship). But that comes at a terrible price - a piece of him will always be out there, watching the last of his oxygen blow into the void. He’s never whole again.
Other people are terribly real but terribly abstract to Lee, I think. Most notably, this is a huge issue for me with the expressed politics of the character. If Helo is the authorial philosophical mouthpiece, Lee is the authorial political mouthpiece, and as the authorial politics are largely a self-congratulatory exercise in unexamined privilege, there are major unexamined (if also unintended) privilege issues with Lee. With completely abstract government issues, yes, he’s quite brilliant, he’s more egalitarian than almost any other character in his own individual relationships, but with structural social/political issues, he is completely clueless. Also, realizing in retrospect just how bad the Sagittarons had it, straight-up racist. “You’re people. Sort of.” WHAT. It’s certainly not how he conceptualizes individuals he knows - outside of Kara, basically the only people we ever see him get close to are Dee and Tyrol, from the eleventh and twelfth worlds - but he doesn’t account for bias overall. He’s oversold on the rhetoric that people make their own choices - true! - but, as is common among children of privilege, consistently forgets that people don’t create their own options, which in terms of consequences is almost always the important factor.
He’s the best of all the characters with using the active voice when describing something bad: It’s all we’ve got./It’s all they’ve left us. He doesn’t let it stop him from doing what needs to be done with the Cylons, but he has a complete, consistent perspective. So when he refers to the cold-blooded, pre-meditated honor killing of Ellen Tigh as “what happened to [Saul’s] wife,” it’s a terrible statement that he doesn’t consider the murder of women to be all that bad when the issue at hand is the loyalty of men to each other. And though I prefer my grayer, more muddled interpretation of the character to the mostly-white knight the show wants me to buy, I still find this mindset to be beyond the pale.
On a more personal level, early all of his dealings with people are learned intellectual reactions, not an emotionally present reaction to circumstances. This is at its saddest and most destructive in his dealings with Kara, where he’s always a step behind whatever’s going on with her. He always does his homework, prowls around the situation and stares at it from every angle and then thinks about his reaction, then thinks through how it will play out, and is always shocked when she doesn’t go along. Kara is inexorably of the moment; Lee is of any moment but this one. One of their many tragedies is that by the time he decides what to do and gears himself up to do it, the chaotic whirlwind that is Kara has moved on to another catastrophe, another mental crisis, another set of circumstances he doesn’t yet understand. Kara, meanwhile, is such a fierce, present-tense rush of emotion that she overwhelms his sensitive emotional core and the icy wall of rationality around it; he digs in his heels because she’s just too much within and without.
As much as my feelings on Kara/Lee are, in sum, decidedly mixed (still and probably forever fascinated intellectually, but emotionally as out of patience, empathy, and enthusiasm for their bullshit as I was back in S1), really, all of Lee’s romantic relationships are bizarrely familial, even more so than they’d necessarily be in their grotesquely close-knit world. Kara is essentially his sister-in-law, and they did have that relationship emotionally. Both of their Zak Issues are part and parcel of what makes their dynamic what it is; indeed, they’re not happening in spite of Zak but in part because of him. Sam is really the axis where all this spins - sweet and loving and open and uncomplicated without being bland, even big and dark like Zak. (I SEE YOU, SAM/LEE SHIPPERS. There is way more to the dynamic between those two characters than LOOK BOYZ.)
The situation with Dee isn’t as much better on this front as he seems to think it is; indeed, it’s probably worse. The two of them do have quite a bit of chemistry sexually, but emotionally, Dee is enchanted with Bill, and her projection of him onto Lee. I’m not sure when Lee figures this out - certainly not consciously until Crossroads, but viscerally I think it happens quite a while before that - but it’s simultaneously part of the attraction for him and what dooms them as a couple. Like joining the military, it’s part of his desperate need to prove to himself that he could be Bill if he wanted to be; the fact that Dee can project onto him in this way means that at least some of the raw material is there. And of course, he’s been reborn twice into this world where there is really nothing above him but his parental figures, and he’s not mature enough to try to be Laura just yet; part of his attraction to her really is about his halfhearted reach for the Bill-ness he doesn’t want but thinks he should have.
He wants so desperately to be seen and found worthy, I think, and this is why he’s genuinely torn between Dee and Kara for the second half of S3. Dee fawns over him and supports his achievements, but she doesn’t see him. She loves being with the person she thinks he is. Kara sees him, he’s never had any doubt about that, but over and over she acts in ways that lead him to believe she finds him unworthy (when it’s just as much that as thinking she doesn’t deserve him).
And, okay. I feel a lot less weird about seeing the Laura-and-Lee sparks now that I have just accepted that Bill is dead to me, but obviously it is still super-strange. And yet, not. Because he works out his Zak issues romantically, and his Bill issues romantically, and Laura is the focal point for his mommy issues. The amount of Laura/Lee we were initially going to get makes a lot of sense; actually, more sense than not getting it. But! Textually, it’s dealt with in Black Market. THE EPISODE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE BEST AND WAS INSTEAD THE WORST. Because the way he treats and thinks about Shevon isn’t about his Starbuck issues in the least. He fetishizes her role as victimized mother, and relishes and over-exaggerates his role as her protector. He projects his huge desire for something perfect and pure to fight for onto her, and his whole world is shattered when she turns out to be a person beyond that. He thinks of Shevon exactly the same way he thinks about Laura. Which is all there even in that woeful plot because JAMIE BAMBER IS A FUCKING CHAMP.
Then at the beginning of S3, he has another very different kind of depressive episode, but a depressive episode nonetheless. This was the one that made me realize, I know you. He externally has everything he thinks he should want - he’s as advanced as he could have ever expected to be career-wise, they’ve had a break from the war, a peaceful marriage and perfectly comfortable home with a lady who’s lovely both inside and out - but emotionally, he has nothing. It’s just this passive, slightly resentful deadness. Unfinished Business, though plot-wise it’s the episode that explains where Lee and Kara are where they are, is hugely revealing about Lee’s mental SOP. That comparative up when an episode has really receded, just being normal feels like euphoria, and it’s unthinkably sad to see that he and the people around him are so surprised and so delighted that he’s able to have fun at a party. It’s all so awful, even before the Terrible Mistake. And then calamity strikes, when he’s finally let himself start to take down the walls. Back when I watched this episode the first time, ever_neutral made the lovely observation that “ when Kara smiles, the world is okay.” The equal and opposite reaction there must always be with these two is that when Lee smiles, all it does is hurt, because the world is about to come crashing down.
We don’t know of anyone he was actually close to in the year or so before the fall, not really. He and Kara clearly know each other well, but they haven’t seen each other in ages. He can’t even have been that close to his girlfriend (she’s so not real to me I keep wanting to say “the girlfriend”) if she couldn’t see that he absolutely wasn’t in a place to be a parent at the time. Maybe his mother, maybe; he seems to have made peace with her by the time of Zak’s death, then again, he never mentions her after the attacks until Bill pries it out of him in ADitL.
And of course, there’s the relationship with Bill. Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t owe that son of a bitch shit. I don’t think distancing himself from Bill was a wrong decision; it was probably the healthiest thing he could have done for himself as a young adult. But! You don’t cut someone out so rigorously if they don’t have power over you. And it is and isn’t all about Zak. Zak is the bricks and mortar Lee uses when he has to try to compartmentalize (usually he just does it instinctively). You are the worst, Bill Adama. Go stand in the corner to think about what you did, and don’t come out until you are ready to apologize to your child, who has never done anything to you except jump for the approval you dangle over his head just to watch him dance. I want to STAGE AN INTERVENTION where we all sit around and approve of Lee until he gets over it. It might take a few weeks, but THINK OF ALL THE SULKING THAT COULD BE PREVENTED. (Also, think of how hard it was for me to make that not sound dirty. IT GOES AGAINST EVERYTHING IN MY WOEFULLY IMMATURE NATURE BUT I PERSEVERE.)
I kind of wonder what exactly Lee had in mind for the rest of his life. Because…he pretty much didn’t. He didn’t want to be in the military in any positive way, but he doesn’t seem to have had any other plans, either. Obviously the joining for tuition was a bullshit post-hoc justification - seriously, there is no way the kid didn’t have a college fund - but I don’t think so much that he wanted it as he wanted to prove to himself that he could do it, that he wasn’t adverse to it because he was weak but because he really didn’t want it. Reactive and based in self-doubt, not any kind of desire or ambition. I wonder if he wouldn’t have just married his girlfriend, stayed in the military to provide for them, and ended up essentially in the marriage with Dee a few years earlier. He’s in a holding pattern, waiting for the universe to force him to do something; it would have screwed him if he were out in the world normally, but it is why he can snap to when everything does go to shit. He’s someone who’s always as braced as he can be for the worst-case scenario, so when the absolute worst-case scenario presents itself, he reacts differently from almost everyone else. All that passion and power, coiled tense and still, until something forceful aims it and cuts it loose.
Lee is very vulnerable to a kind of emotional inertia. Things don’t change for him inside his head, and he can’t change them himself. When he’s down he stays down until the reason for being down is just that he’s down. When he’s up and clicking mentally, though, he can work through just about anything external that gets thrown at him. It’s one of the many huge things that are a tiny fraction of why the partnership with Kara is so very productive at its best and destructive at its worst. She can’t not throw things into chaos, and once in a long while she does it forcefully enough that she pushes him to choose some way, any way. About each other, though, they are an unstoppable force and an immovable object; perfect and impossible all at once.
The Lee story seems to be one of those serendipitous storytelling events where the Doylist reason behind the storytelling - in this case, that the writers apparently didn’t understand Lee or quite know what to do with him - turned into an integral piece of the character. Lee bounces around the way he does because there isn’t anything he wants to do with his life. He joined the military because it was a path laid out for him, one where he didn’t have to make these decisions or, really, any decisions at all; he didn’t ask to be a potential father; he certainly never asked to be the CAG or the commander of the Pegasus; Laura, Bill, and Lampkin all but beat him over the head with the Caprican Criminal Code; Zarek recruited him to join the Quorum; even Dee and Kara were tied to him as family before anything happened with either of them. The universe throws us all in directions we never expected, but Lee never once seems to exert any force of will of his own to oppose it.
He defines himself in a negative, reactive way. He’s not a bad person. He’s not cut out to be a soldier. But who the fuck is he? He doesn’t know. He’s afraid to think about it. What Lee wants is entirely negative, I think - he wants not to be wrong in the way he is so convinced that he is. But because that insufficiency is a figment of his imagination, he’s in an endless and futile search. Our spirits all have contours. Lee thinks his are gaping holes.
In the miniseries and first season, it’s a major asset to him. He’s the CAG, and as far as he can rationally tell that’s going to be his job until he dies. He doesn’t have to face up to those personal decisions he’s incapable of making. Tactical, intellectual decisions, sure; retaining executive function over his spinning rubic’s cube of a mind, along with the emotional compartmentalizing that comes as easy as breathing to him (sometimes even more easily) means that his mind is exactly that of an officer (or, of course, a politician). Lee is still in his holding pattern, but now it’s filled with adrenaline and the room full of Zaks he can sometimes protect and the best relationship he’s ever had with his father or Kara. He’s still strung too taunt from too many angles to move particularly far, but so is everyone else, there’s support and purpose on a scale he’s never imagined (and how could he, when he’s had neither of those things in his life?) so, nuclear holocaust aside, he’s actually doing quite well.
Being the CAG turns out to be an important (and all told, quite heartwarming) step for him as well. It’s a strange kind of position of heavily delineated authority, where he’s unequivocally told to exercise some power over others. It makes him deal with others, which is something he very much wants - that’s clearly part of the draw of being a bartender, that people would talk to him and he wouldn’t have to make any decisions about it - but in a way that gives him rules and constraints and necessitates some distance. (Less importantly, it’s also why I like how he likes to play cards. It’s nice to see he has friends; he can do that because there are rules to the card games and a purpose behind the relationships.)
He’s so consistently distracted and thoroughly compartmentalized, in fact, that we never see or hear him grieve for his mother. Of course, we don’t hear most of them grieve for their families (until Final Cut, which is at a different emotional stage for him), but Lee’s one of the odd few on Galactica who hasn’t lost everything but has lost something. Most of them lost their whole families, but characters like Kara, Bill, and (as far as she knows) Boomer haven’t lost any of the people they loved the most. He just displaces all those feelings (ALL THE FEELINGS!!!) onto Laura and never mentions Carolanne.
That’d be okay, for a while, I think, except Lee is someone who is going to have depressive episodes no matter what, so having no reason in particular to go on would’ve led to…not purposeful self-destruction like Kara or Dee, but just increased carelessness, suicide by low effort and high stakes.
Fortunately, there’s Laura. As with everything else in his life, he hasn’t taken any initiative in the relationship. He just so happens to be her ship’s escort during the attack, and the partnership starts off with this particular trial by fire. She takes him under her wing, maybe picking up on his natural talent for politics or maybe just thinking he makes the place look pretty, but she takes an active interest in him, continuing to trust him even after his terrible behavior in Bastille Day, to the point where he’s counting himself as part of her political team in Colonial Day. She pulls him into something new, into something he has probably never even let himself dream of before; with her insistence on calling him “Captain Apollo” she’s emphasizing his earned and chosen identities, completely separate from being an Adama. They think the same way - the scene where they plan the jailbreak is just amazing. It’s not that they’ve both been thinking they want to get out which is remarkable, but the extent to which they’ve thought through the same list of problems with getting off the ship and come up with complimentary sets of answers.
Because he needs something to fight for, and because it’s doubtful anyone has been able to communicate effectively this interest in and respect for him, he idolizes her just as much as the men who kneel for her blessing, but in a different way, I think. He doesn’t strike me as a believer in any way - I read Lee as agnostic, but I can’t remember any textual evidence for that - but he still doesn’t ever seem to have even questioned the trip to Kobol, which is a huge leap of faith. Belief in another person is just as unusual, and just as powerful, to Lee as belief in the gods, so much so that it influences his choices in the same way as finding religion would. I think she is a minor god, some kind of muse, to him in some ways throughout 2.0, a thing pure and potent and precious.
But that turns out to be as wrong as anything, and he eventually must face her humanity - murder is mankind’s one true art - and it’s a crisis of faith in the most traditional sense for him, really. She’s the last positive thing he fights for; everything else is about resisting until almost the very end. Lee has some beautifully heroic moments through the series, we never see the most heroic thing Lee, on his own, does. The fleet was in utter chaos after the revelation of Earth. The Quorum could have removed the president, dissolved the government, taken their ships and given up. Lee convinced them to stay together. All he did was buy them a little more time, but that little more time gave them the chance to save everything. HE SAVED THE WORLD WITH HIS MOUTH, YOU GUYS. And we never saw it! We heard him tell Dee about it later, a bit tipsy, a bit jazzed, words spilling out inconsequentially to a dead woman walking. Once he’s finally collected some center of gravity, it’s buried so deep we never see it.
My boy. My sweet broken boy. He’s on the brink of the huge sucking vacuum at the end of everything, and all he wants is to be worth loving, and for someone to notice it.
Even months after having finished the show, I still walk around with Lee in my head a lot. (Well, this week, not so much “walk” as “lay around on the floor sucking down anything in reach with pain-killing potential,” which probably explains my recent verbosity.) He just clamped down my attention sometime in 2.5 and hasn’t let go since. I can tell when the show wants me to love Lee, or at least admire and agree with him, and I can tell when I’m not supposed to like him or when he’s not really supposed to be all that important. But I love him the best when I’m not supposed to. Which is right, I think, because Lee is all about not-being, and then becoming.
[shit, sorry I forgot about this: contains discussion of Dee's suicide, Lee's suicide attempt, and recurring depressive/suicidal thought loops. obviously below the cut because spoiler.]
It’s odd, really, because the stories that are big LEE MOMENTS either don’t work for me as stories (Black Market, the present-day of Razor, Sine Qua Non) or make me furious with him when they are clearly intended to make me admire him (Bastille Day, Crossroads). It’s not that I want less Lee time, but his finest moments are as part of the whole story, or even the tiny background moments to someone else’s. The miniseries, 33, KLG, the Pegasus, the mutiny are about Laura everyone. He’s up there with Gaeta as the hero of the exodus, though the focus was on STUPID BILL and his STUPID SELFISH DEATH WISH. He’s completely perfect in…whatever the S4 episode was with the Sons of Ares attacking Baltar’s cult, even though that episode was about the seismic shifts in Baltar and Roslin.
He annoyed me a lot in that first season too, running around saying things that were painfully completely obvious like they were deep truths. But. In retrospect, it’s perfect, though I’m not sure if it was intentional, or just that the character hadn’t been fully developed on the creative end just yet. The poor kid, such a good boy, but so far in over his messed-up head, reaching for adulthood like it’s some kind of solution to any of his problems. Oh sweetheart: it is not. Give up now. Really, Lee is hanging on by a thread when everything goes to hell. When I re-watched the miniseries, he struck me as made of thick glass, so dense and strong but so incredibly brittle, unable to give a fraction of an inch anywhere without cracking.
Then there’s 33, where the great collision between active and passive blows to pieces in front of his face. That moment completely changes him. He did a horrible thing there, yes, but I don’t think he ever internalizes the way the other characters do that not doing it would have been way more horrible. Oh, he knows that, he just doesn’t get it. His constant Hamletesque deliberating and chronic contrarianism are one of the reasonable outcomes of his cold, hard recognition that choices have consequences. I don’t think he ever consciously lets himself understand in the way Laura does that passivity, not acting, has consequences as well, though at least at the beginning that’s probably for the best, as it would turn into yet another tool with which to beat himself senseless and still. I love Starbuck so hard in that last minute of 33. So hard. Because, Lee hit the liner with that first shot. She only fires so he can think “we did this thing” instead of “I did this thing.” She does it for the sake of being complicit, so he doesn’t have to be alone in his guilt. Laura, too, joins him in his grief over it, making a point to show him her own desk drawer. These women, they love him so much, and he just can’t understand that.
I wonder if it wasn’t that first massive depressive episode that got me, in retrospect. This was one of those times where he really aggravated me. Because he damned well knew Laura well enough to recognize that she had a good fucking reason for everything she did, and the Cain plot was big enough that there had to be something he didn’t know, even if he couldn’t possibly have guessed about the Scilla. (Tangentially, because that is how I roll, this is also my issue with EVERYONE BUT MY BB in S3 of AtS; what, he was suddenly all MUAHAHAHA! BEHOLD MY SUDDEN BUT INEVITABLE BETRAYAL?! And if so, wouldn’t he do it for something better than a fucking kid? What the fuck does he want a kid for? Come on, AI, most of y’all ain’t that slow. Worst. Point is, motive not only matters, but can be fairly reliably deduced most of the time, particularly within a context of rational and ethical behavior, and it pisses me off when characters don’t even try.) And yet, if I can put myself in Lee’s head there - SCARY FUCKING PLACE TO BE but okay - I can see what’s going on with the collapse of his idealization of Roslin and horror at what he’s been asked to do.
Probably more importantly, it’s quite clear that some sort of breakdown was completely inevitable, and the shift in worldview brought on by the Pegasus was just the thing that would have triggered it anyway. Because after all, if a fucking battlestar that’s been seeking out the opponent all this time can pop up on their radar, there are probably helpless solitary civilian vessels everywhere; the desperate vertigo of that thought alone would’ve driven home the futility of the whole protection exercise and upset the détente in his unbalanced mind. I’ll never forgive Bill for setting it off by deflecting onto Laura rather than explaining, but all the same, the kid was going to snap at some point anyway.
Anyway, that episode. I remember watching RS so annoyed at what I thought was going to be a fake-out to make us afraid Lee was going to die (AS IF) and then when it became obvious what it was actually setting up….my heart just fell out. I think the passivity of the suicide attempt is what gets me the most, because it means we never know if the death wish is resolved. In fact, we know it isn’t; it’s just completely opportunistic. He completely chilled me - as angry as I was with him in this episode! - just after Dee’s suicide. He doesn’t ever acknowledge that he awful circumstances they’re in could drive someone to suicide, taking stock of the situation in the way he usually would. Neither does he blame himself or anyone else. But he doesn’t wonder what would drive someone to that either; he doesn’t distance himself from it emotionally in any way. It just doesn’t add up for him. It could add up, even under normal circumstances. It just doesn’t, here and now. A miscalculation. Post-finale, it’s even harder to recall, because there’s no way it won’t start making all too much sense to him again sooner or later, and probably sooner.
Lee never really went back and pulled himself together after his spacewalk, I don’t think. He got a new focus on the basic necessities of survival with being shot, and while he was even more acquiescent than usual he found a new coping mechanism in the form of Dee. Then came the enormous validation/project/distraction of the Pegasus, which gave him respite from thinking of his life as his own to take. It’s understandable, not to want to take the risk of dealing with it, not to have the time, not to have the ability to trust anyone to help him through any of it (particularly because he’s right, he has no one he can trust since he alienated Roslin, which is of course a piece of why he did it, as he doesn’t know how to have that type of relationship). But that comes at a terrible price - a piece of him will always be out there, watching the last of his oxygen blow into the void. He’s never whole again.
Other people are terribly real but terribly abstract to Lee, I think. Most notably, this is a huge issue for me with the expressed politics of the character. If Helo is the authorial philosophical mouthpiece, Lee is the authorial political mouthpiece, and as the authorial politics are largely a self-congratulatory exercise in unexamined privilege, there are major unexamined (if also unintended) privilege issues with Lee. With completely abstract government issues, yes, he’s quite brilliant, he’s more egalitarian than almost any other character in his own individual relationships, but with structural social/political issues, he is completely clueless. Also, realizing in retrospect just how bad the Sagittarons had it, straight-up racist. “You’re people. Sort of.” WHAT. It’s certainly not how he conceptualizes individuals he knows - outside of Kara, basically the only people we ever see him get close to are Dee and Tyrol, from the eleventh and twelfth worlds - but he doesn’t account for bias overall. He’s oversold on the rhetoric that people make their own choices - true! - but, as is common among children of privilege, consistently forgets that people don’t create their own options, which in terms of consequences is almost always the important factor.
He’s the best of all the characters with using the active voice when describing something bad: It’s all we’ve got./It’s all they’ve left us. He doesn’t let it stop him from doing what needs to be done with the Cylons, but he has a complete, consistent perspective. So when he refers to the cold-blooded, pre-meditated honor killing of Ellen Tigh as “what happened to [Saul’s] wife,” it’s a terrible statement that he doesn’t consider the murder of women to be all that bad when the issue at hand is the loyalty of men to each other. And though I prefer my grayer, more muddled interpretation of the character to the mostly-white knight the show wants me to buy, I still find this mindset to be beyond the pale.
On a more personal level, early all of his dealings with people are learned intellectual reactions, not an emotionally present reaction to circumstances. This is at its saddest and most destructive in his dealings with Kara, where he’s always a step behind whatever’s going on with her. He always does his homework, prowls around the situation and stares at it from every angle and then thinks about his reaction, then thinks through how it will play out, and is always shocked when she doesn’t go along. Kara is inexorably of the moment; Lee is of any moment but this one. One of their many tragedies is that by the time he decides what to do and gears himself up to do it, the chaotic whirlwind that is Kara has moved on to another catastrophe, another mental crisis, another set of circumstances he doesn’t yet understand. Kara, meanwhile, is such a fierce, present-tense rush of emotion that she overwhelms his sensitive emotional core and the icy wall of rationality around it; he digs in his heels because she’s just too much within and without.
As much as my feelings on Kara/Lee are, in sum, decidedly mixed (still and probably forever fascinated intellectually, but emotionally as out of patience, empathy, and enthusiasm for their bullshit as I was back in S1), really, all of Lee’s romantic relationships are bizarrely familial, even more so than they’d necessarily be in their grotesquely close-knit world. Kara is essentially his sister-in-law, and they did have that relationship emotionally. Both of their Zak Issues are part and parcel of what makes their dynamic what it is; indeed, they’re not happening in spite of Zak but in part because of him. Sam is really the axis where all this spins - sweet and loving and open and uncomplicated without being bland, even big and dark like Zak. (I SEE YOU, SAM/LEE SHIPPERS. There is way more to the dynamic between those two characters than LOOK BOYZ.)
The situation with Dee isn’t as much better on this front as he seems to think it is; indeed, it’s probably worse. The two of them do have quite a bit of chemistry sexually, but emotionally, Dee is enchanted with Bill, and her projection of him onto Lee. I’m not sure when Lee figures this out - certainly not consciously until Crossroads, but viscerally I think it happens quite a while before that - but it’s simultaneously part of the attraction for him and what dooms them as a couple. Like joining the military, it’s part of his desperate need to prove to himself that he could be Bill if he wanted to be; the fact that Dee can project onto him in this way means that at least some of the raw material is there. And of course, he’s been reborn twice into this world where there is really nothing above him but his parental figures, and he’s not mature enough to try to be Laura just yet; part of his attraction to her really is about his halfhearted reach for the Bill-ness he doesn’t want but thinks he should have.
He wants so desperately to be seen and found worthy, I think, and this is why he’s genuinely torn between Dee and Kara for the second half of S3. Dee fawns over him and supports his achievements, but she doesn’t see him. She loves being with the person she thinks he is. Kara sees him, he’s never had any doubt about that, but over and over she acts in ways that lead him to believe she finds him unworthy (when it’s just as much that as thinking she doesn’t deserve him).
And, okay. I feel a lot less weird about seeing the Laura-and-Lee sparks now that I have just accepted that Bill is dead to me, but obviously it is still super-strange. And yet, not. Because he works out his Zak issues romantically, and his Bill issues romantically, and Laura is the focal point for his mommy issues. The amount of Laura/Lee we were initially going to get makes a lot of sense; actually, more sense than not getting it. But! Textually, it’s dealt with in Black Market. THE EPISODE THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN THE BEST AND WAS INSTEAD THE WORST. Because the way he treats and thinks about Shevon isn’t about his Starbuck issues in the least. He fetishizes her role as victimized mother, and relishes and over-exaggerates his role as her protector. He projects his huge desire for something perfect and pure to fight for onto her, and his whole world is shattered when she turns out to be a person beyond that. He thinks of Shevon exactly the same way he thinks about Laura. Which is all there even in that woeful plot because JAMIE BAMBER IS A FUCKING CHAMP.
Then at the beginning of S3, he has another very different kind of depressive episode, but a depressive episode nonetheless. This was the one that made me realize, I know you. He externally has everything he thinks he should want - he’s as advanced as he could have ever expected to be career-wise, they’ve had a break from the war, a peaceful marriage and perfectly comfortable home with a lady who’s lovely both inside and out - but emotionally, he has nothing. It’s just this passive, slightly resentful deadness. Unfinished Business, though plot-wise it’s the episode that explains where Lee and Kara are where they are, is hugely revealing about Lee’s mental SOP. That comparative up when an episode has really receded, just being normal feels like euphoria, and it’s unthinkably sad to see that he and the people around him are so surprised and so delighted that he’s able to have fun at a party. It’s all so awful, even before the Terrible Mistake. And then calamity strikes, when he’s finally let himself start to take down the walls. Back when I watched this episode the first time, ever_neutral made the lovely observation that “ when Kara smiles, the world is okay.” The equal and opposite reaction there must always be with these two is that when Lee smiles, all it does is hurt, because the world is about to come crashing down.
We don’t know of anyone he was actually close to in the year or so before the fall, not really. He and Kara clearly know each other well, but they haven’t seen each other in ages. He can’t even have been that close to his girlfriend (she’s so not real to me I keep wanting to say “the girlfriend”) if she couldn’t see that he absolutely wasn’t in a place to be a parent at the time. Maybe his mother, maybe; he seems to have made peace with her by the time of Zak’s death, then again, he never mentions her after the attacks until Bill pries it out of him in ADitL.
And of course, there’s the relationship with Bill. Don’t get me wrong, he didn’t owe that son of a bitch shit. I don’t think distancing himself from Bill was a wrong decision; it was probably the healthiest thing he could have done for himself as a young adult. But! You don’t cut someone out so rigorously if they don’t have power over you. And it is and isn’t all about Zak. Zak is the bricks and mortar Lee uses when he has to try to compartmentalize (usually he just does it instinctively). You are the worst, Bill Adama. Go stand in the corner to think about what you did, and don’t come out until you are ready to apologize to your child, who has never done anything to you except jump for the approval you dangle over his head just to watch him dance. I want to STAGE AN INTERVENTION where we all sit around and approve of Lee until he gets over it. It might take a few weeks, but THINK OF ALL THE SULKING THAT COULD BE PREVENTED. (Also, think of how hard it was for me to make that not sound dirty. IT GOES AGAINST EVERYTHING IN MY WOEFULLY IMMATURE NATURE BUT I PERSEVERE.)
I kind of wonder what exactly Lee had in mind for the rest of his life. Because…he pretty much didn’t. He didn’t want to be in the military in any positive way, but he doesn’t seem to have had any other plans, either. Obviously the joining for tuition was a bullshit post-hoc justification - seriously, there is no way the kid didn’t have a college fund - but I don’t think so much that he wanted it as he wanted to prove to himself that he could do it, that he wasn’t adverse to it because he was weak but because he really didn’t want it. Reactive and based in self-doubt, not any kind of desire or ambition. I wonder if he wouldn’t have just married his girlfriend, stayed in the military to provide for them, and ended up essentially in the marriage with Dee a few years earlier. He’s in a holding pattern, waiting for the universe to force him to do something; it would have screwed him if he were out in the world normally, but it is why he can snap to when everything does go to shit. He’s someone who’s always as braced as he can be for the worst-case scenario, so when the absolute worst-case scenario presents itself, he reacts differently from almost everyone else. All that passion and power, coiled tense and still, until something forceful aims it and cuts it loose.
Lee is very vulnerable to a kind of emotional inertia. Things don’t change for him inside his head, and he can’t change them himself. When he’s down he stays down until the reason for being down is just that he’s down. When he’s up and clicking mentally, though, he can work through just about anything external that gets thrown at him. It’s one of the many huge things that are a tiny fraction of why the partnership with Kara is so very productive at its best and destructive at its worst. She can’t not throw things into chaos, and once in a long while she does it forcefully enough that she pushes him to choose some way, any way. About each other, though, they are an unstoppable force and an immovable object; perfect and impossible all at once.
The Lee story seems to be one of those serendipitous storytelling events where the Doylist reason behind the storytelling - in this case, that the writers apparently didn’t understand Lee or quite know what to do with him - turned into an integral piece of the character. Lee bounces around the way he does because there isn’t anything he wants to do with his life. He joined the military because it was a path laid out for him, one where he didn’t have to make these decisions or, really, any decisions at all; he didn’t ask to be a potential father; he certainly never asked to be the CAG or the commander of the Pegasus; Laura, Bill, and Lampkin all but beat him over the head with the Caprican Criminal Code; Zarek recruited him to join the Quorum; even Dee and Kara were tied to him as family before anything happened with either of them. The universe throws us all in directions we never expected, but Lee never once seems to exert any force of will of his own to oppose it.
He defines himself in a negative, reactive way. He’s not a bad person. He’s not cut out to be a soldier. But who the fuck is he? He doesn’t know. He’s afraid to think about it. What Lee wants is entirely negative, I think - he wants not to be wrong in the way he is so convinced that he is. But because that insufficiency is a figment of his imagination, he’s in an endless and futile search. Our spirits all have contours. Lee thinks his are gaping holes.
In the miniseries and first season, it’s a major asset to him. He’s the CAG, and as far as he can rationally tell that’s going to be his job until he dies. He doesn’t have to face up to those personal decisions he’s incapable of making. Tactical, intellectual decisions, sure; retaining executive function over his spinning rubic’s cube of a mind, along with the emotional compartmentalizing that comes as easy as breathing to him (sometimes even more easily) means that his mind is exactly that of an officer (or, of course, a politician). Lee is still in his holding pattern, but now it’s filled with adrenaline and the room full of Zaks he can sometimes protect and the best relationship he’s ever had with his father or Kara. He’s still strung too taunt from too many angles to move particularly far, but so is everyone else, there’s support and purpose on a scale he’s never imagined (and how could he, when he’s had neither of those things in his life?) so, nuclear holocaust aside, he’s actually doing quite well.
Being the CAG turns out to be an important (and all told, quite heartwarming) step for him as well. It’s a strange kind of position of heavily delineated authority, where he’s unequivocally told to exercise some power over others. It makes him deal with others, which is something he very much wants - that’s clearly part of the draw of being a bartender, that people would talk to him and he wouldn’t have to make any decisions about it - but in a way that gives him rules and constraints and necessitates some distance. (Less importantly, it’s also why I like how he likes to play cards. It’s nice to see he has friends; he can do that because there are rules to the card games and a purpose behind the relationships.)
He’s so consistently distracted and thoroughly compartmentalized, in fact, that we never see or hear him grieve for his mother. Of course, we don’t hear most of them grieve for their families (until Final Cut, which is at a different emotional stage for him), but Lee’s one of the odd few on Galactica who hasn’t lost everything but has lost something. Most of them lost their whole families, but characters like Kara, Bill, and (as far as she knows) Boomer haven’t lost any of the people they loved the most. He just displaces all those feelings (ALL THE FEELINGS!!!) onto Laura and never mentions Carolanne.
That’d be okay, for a while, I think, except Lee is someone who is going to have depressive episodes no matter what, so having no reason in particular to go on would’ve led to…not purposeful self-destruction like Kara or Dee, but just increased carelessness, suicide by low effort and high stakes.
Fortunately, there’s Laura. As with everything else in his life, he hasn’t taken any initiative in the relationship. He just so happens to be her ship’s escort during the attack, and the partnership starts off with this particular trial by fire. She takes him under her wing, maybe picking up on his natural talent for politics or maybe just thinking he makes the place look pretty, but she takes an active interest in him, continuing to trust him even after his terrible behavior in Bastille Day, to the point where he’s counting himself as part of her political team in Colonial Day. She pulls him into something new, into something he has probably never even let himself dream of before; with her insistence on calling him “Captain Apollo” she’s emphasizing his earned and chosen identities, completely separate from being an Adama. They think the same way - the scene where they plan the jailbreak is just amazing. It’s not that they’ve both been thinking they want to get out which is remarkable, but the extent to which they’ve thought through the same list of problems with getting off the ship and come up with complimentary sets of answers.
Because he needs something to fight for, and because it’s doubtful anyone has been able to communicate effectively this interest in and respect for him, he idolizes her just as much as the men who kneel for her blessing, but in a different way, I think. He doesn’t strike me as a believer in any way - I read Lee as agnostic, but I can’t remember any textual evidence for that - but he still doesn’t ever seem to have even questioned the trip to Kobol, which is a huge leap of faith. Belief in another person is just as unusual, and just as powerful, to Lee as belief in the gods, so much so that it influences his choices in the same way as finding religion would. I think she is a minor god, some kind of muse, to him in some ways throughout 2.0, a thing pure and potent and precious.
But that turns out to be as wrong as anything, and he eventually must face her humanity - murder is mankind’s one true art - and it’s a crisis of faith in the most traditional sense for him, really. She’s the last positive thing he fights for; everything else is about resisting until almost the very end. Lee has some beautifully heroic moments through the series, we never see the most heroic thing Lee, on his own, does. The fleet was in utter chaos after the revelation of Earth. The Quorum could have removed the president, dissolved the government, taken their ships and given up. Lee convinced them to stay together. All he did was buy them a little more time, but that little more time gave them the chance to save everything. HE SAVED THE WORLD WITH HIS MOUTH, YOU GUYS. And we never saw it! We heard him tell Dee about it later, a bit tipsy, a bit jazzed, words spilling out inconsequentially to a dead woman walking. Once he’s finally collected some center of gravity, it’s buried so deep we never see it.
My boy. My sweet broken boy. He’s on the brink of the huge sucking vacuum at the end of everything, and all he wants is to be worth loving, and for someone to notice it.