day 27 is awesome!
I love Ellen. Ellen is fantastic right from her debut episode. Obviously I am a fan of anyone who calls out Bill Adama on his bullshit on principle, but Ellen did it in such a hugely entertaining way that it endeared her to me immediately. Kate Vernon somehow managed to make a tense horrible dinner which includes re-visiting of the tragedy of Zak, as well as the pounding paranoia caused by the humanoid Cylons, into a lovely comedic treat. (WHICH FACE IS BETTER: Laura’s “oh GOD HELP ME” face, or Lee’s FML face?) The dinner party is a splash of raw, petty normality in this utterly awful and bizarre world. If you got rid of all the references to Cylons, you could drop the scene right into a sitcom.
I remember wondering if she was a Cylon from almost the beginning of her time on the show - TMUTMD has a fairly strong suggestion that she is an enemy agent - but what the show ended up doing with her Cylon nature ended up being much more interesting. Because for all intents and purposes, Ellen isn’t an agent of the Cylons. Her petty, self-serving machinations are just that, silly self-centered human impulses. The wedge she attempts to shove between Saul and Bill isn’t tactical, it’s just jealousy.
Before the Awful Thing, I just adore her relationship with Tigh - for Mama and Papa Robot, it’s very human and compelling, with something truly beautiful beneath it. It’s the opposite of the Adama marriage, in a lot of ways. Bill and Carolanne married slightly more for social/professional reasons than love, though Bill needed Carolann a bit more than she needed him for that, and they tried to build a family out of that. Ellen and Saul clearly married for love, but they thought they could change each other into the social/professional partners they wanted. It’s unhealthy and destructive, but oh so very real. The relationship takes a turn for the better after the apocalypse, and the two of them are at their most loving during the horror of the occupation.
It’s never clear just how much control Cavil had over the Final Five, though there has to at least have been some for him to be able to remove their memories of who they were while apparently mostly preserving their personalities. Oh, they were definitely an ass-pull (one that worked beautifully, particularly in the case of Anders, but an ass-pull nonetheless, taken from the pool of “everyone but the four characters who can’t be Cylons”) and one with only a very shallow examination of the nature of memories, identity, and choice (I am clearly spoiled by Dollhouse but still), but Ellen was a fantastic choice for the final Cylon. I had actually given up hope on her because she seemed like a character who would be an anticlimactic choice, someone who wasn’t particularly important or layered, who didn’t have much of a storyline of her own, and made her into the keystone of the entire thing.
Maybe it’s just that she’s been resurrected and given back all her memories, but Ellen, of all the Final Five, is the one who seems to have actually been the idea person behind the whole project that kicked off the series. Ellen is completely responsible for all of this, but by the end, you never doubt for a moment that she truly did it out of love.
(The long part of this is really part 2, but it is separate because the Awesome Ladies celebration is all about the love, and the second part is kind of a buzzkill. So if you’re up for it, ONWARD.)