'Middleman' commentary by bop_radar
Title: Middleman
Vidder: bop_radar
Link to vid: here
Warning: tl;dr ramblings and emoness from an obsessive Lee fan
I much prefer written commentaries, personally, but daybreak777 wanted to hear my voice so this is for her. I apologise for the dodgy audio and how insufferably long it is. I did edit it down a LOT. Sheesh, it takes a lot longer to say things than to write them! This is why I stick to the written word! Now YOU TOO will see why. LOL, I envy you not at all.
Having duly warned you off the audio (srsly!), here's the transcript...
Transcript
Hi, this is Boppy, recording a commentary for Middleman. I warn you in advance that this commentary will be long as I have a lot to say about the vid, so if you get bored, just turn it off, I really don't mind, you don't have to listen to it!
There was a time when Battlestar Galactica was my favourite show, and I wrote a LOT of words about Lee. I think all the writing I did about him was the groundwork for this vid. Middleman ended up being a place where I could show people what I meant in my written meta. I felt Lee fans would recognise what I was saying and I hoped that there would be some people willing to open their minds a bit to the character and who might see something new about him in the vid, something that was hard to convey in words alone because the visual proof is more emotionally powerful.
My aim with this vid was to create an unflinching character study of Lee. I do come from a position of love and understanding of Lee but he is a flawed character and I didn't want to whitewash him.
I rely a lot on Lee's facial expressions throughout the vid, largely because that's principally where my reading of the character comes from. Jamie brings a lot to his performance that isn't necessarily in the script and I wanted to showcase the moments that were important for me in reading his character.
This track has a very long instrumental intro. For those of you that find the intro too long in the final vid, it's about double the length in the original track. I'm sure it's still too long and boring for some people, but too bad! I really like it because it sets the tone emotionally, the music is very powerful and the notes that we hear match the emotional tone of Lee's internal landscape. The first time I heard the track I found myself entering Lee's headspace automatically, instinctively.
In this opening sequence I cut back and forth from Lee in the miniseries reacting to Adama's speech announcing that they are going to go and find Earth. Lee's facial expression is quite complex here and I don't necessarily want to say what my personal reading of it is as I like people to think about it themselves, but I think it's obvious that he is experiencing conflicting emotions. That inner conflict is what I focus on in this character study so that's why I felt it was an invaluable character establishment shot. It's also significant that Lee is alone in a crowd of people.
The shots I cut to each establish one of Lee's principle relationships. The first is of him with Kara--I chose a shot of them at their closest as friends and colleagues, which was more important to me than a shippy shot. I feel that Lee's sense of connection with Kara is fundamental to him. In contrast, for the shot establishing Lee's relationship with his father I chose a shot of him looking away with a wry expression on his face--there's clearly deep emotion there between them but there's a struggle going on as well. Roslin is also significant in Lee's internal landscape--apart from the personal relationship which unfortunately the show dialed back on, she stands for his political beliefs and principles. The shot of Dee is significant because we don't actually see her face and instead see Lee's conflicted facial expression. Kara gets to appear again for a double purpose--firstly we didn't really see her face before so here we get to see it, and also she's mirroring Lee's reaction--it's another moment where they are in synch professionally. Finally we see the Pegasus--I feel the relationship of Lee with that ship, while brief, is also of paramount importance to him.
The introduction helps establish that Lee often acts while still partially in a state of conflicted emotion. He often gets to a point where he thinks 'yup, this action is better than this other action or no action at all' but he's still aware of the arguments on the other side, and that's because he thinks deeply about things. So when we see Lee pull a gun on Tigh and mutiny on behalf of Roslin against his father, we know that he's already aware of the emotional price he'll pay for this. He anticipates his father's reaction, and I think most Lee fans would agree with me in saying that the shot of Adama turning his head away from him is a very powerful emotional moment.
Jamie can do a lot with his cheek muscles. I really like that!
This is one of those moments that is probably lost on people that don't know the show well--Lee is ejecting the tape because he's refusing to speak out publicly to the fleet against his father, refusing to become the figurehead of revolt. He has already mutinied against Adama, but this is one line he's unprepared to cross. Zarek's reaction shot is important in framing this--to Zarek Lee's this annoying spineless twerp that won't follow through on his actions. I view Lee as being far more admirable than Zarek but even if you don't this moment is important in showing how Lee frustrates those around him because they can't always play him.
In the final sequence of the instrumental intro we see Lee receive some significant talismans. The first is his grandfather's lighter. His grandfather, a lawyer, is someone who Lee admires and whose memory he wants to live up to. In contrast, Roslin gives Lee a piece of paper with the name of Olympic Carrier on it. It's central to Lee that he must never forget that they shot down a civilian ship and that he may have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds. From Romo, Lee gets a chance to actually follow more actively in his grandfather's footsteps. He believes in justice and the legal system and the right of everyone to a fair trial.
Finally there is Adama's note to Lee, which takes a moment to come into focus. I think this works really well because it makes the viewer think 'oh, what's it going to say?!' and then when they see it it says 'For that day when we all have the time'. Lee's reaction is powerful because he knows how ironic the sentence is--yeah when is THAT day going to ever come for people fighting a war? There's another layer here for me which is that he finds it so typical of Adama to talk about some hypothetical future day, and to send a one line note, rather than actually spend time with his son NOW trying to understand him.
From here we launch into the real meat and bones of the story. We see Lee on the bridge of the Pegasus, taking over command. The crew looks to him for leadership and he is worried he won't be able to live up to the expectations. He also is well aware of the shoes he stands in. I reversed this shot of the watch so we see him laying it down rather than picking it up--that seemed to work better as a metaphor for Fisk's time being up. It also establishes that the life expectancy of a battlestar commander is pretty short.
This is one of my favourite sequences and one that came together very easily. It's the moment from Scar when Kara toasts the fallen pilots. This was a really significant moment for Lee. He stands up in solidarity with her and reflects back to her the emotion she is evoking. Lee's empathy for others is something he overlooks as an aspect of good leadership. He's not a Kara or Adama style leader, he leads by supporting rather than yelling or speechifying.
He's also very respectful of the protocols of the military and having seen the more intimate side of the losses they suffer, we now see him in his official role at the funeral.
The lyric here is 'every dream gets whittled down'. A lot of this vid is built on strong associations between lyric and image, so here we see Lee receiving his promotion from his father and then immediately see him handing in his wings after they, later, fall out. It's a very fast transition in the vid, but I think that helps the viewer grasp what sadness there must be to Lee, rather than focusing on his anger or what leads him to do so.
And of course it's followed by the other biggest punch in the gut of all time--Kara marrying Anders the morning after she's slept with Lee. Lee's shock here is palpable to anyone, I think, but I found that people read this expression from Kara very differently. I tried to put people in Lee's perspective in the vid and I think Lee reads it as 'well, what did you really expect, sucker?' though Kara fans tell me that from Kara's pov she means something else entirely. I hope this helps show them why Lee takes it a different way.
We then see Lee's rather emotionally barren relationship with Dee and the struggles they have. The lyric 'deprived of sunlight' is very powerful I believe, because that's half the problem with the Lee/Dee relationship. Lee does honestly appreciate the relationship but his love for her doesn't burn with the passion it does for Kara and his attention is focused elsewhere. He can't turn away from Kara even when she's in someone else's arms and he's got Dee. Dee's in the shade, her face once again buried. And yes, I do find this asshole-ish from Lee, I just really get where he's coming from. As I mentioned this is not an apology vid.
When Lee stares at the wedding ring, he is acknowledging that he hasn't been a good husband. I truly believe he wanted to give the marriage 100 per cent attention but he was in denial about how not out of his system Kara was.
We transition here to Lee in action as a lawyer. Gaius's trial and Romo's role bring out Lee's determination, and when Lee is determined, you shouldn't mess with him. Few people would represent Gaius who is by now viewed as a monster by the fleet. But Lee doesn't have to like Gaius to represent him, because his strength is being able to act despite conflicted emotions. There's a parallel here with Black Market when he was willing to shoot someone in cold blood in order to stand up for what he believed in. He is able to claim the 'grey' areas that other people won't stomach, that's the central premise here. He pays a HIGH emotional toll for doing so.
Lee doesn't always act so definitively though. When Adama went back to New Caprica, Lee initially argued against it, feeling it was a suicide mission, and he opted instead to go on to Earth, because the survival of mankind in some form at least is the ultimate goal that Lee never loses sight of. So Lee is the 'absentee' here (as the lyric says) but it's also a 'disguise' since he actually ends up coming back, unable to leave his father alone to die. Of course there's another little nuance going on here with my rather tongue in cheek vidding of fatsuit!Lee to the words 'beautiful disguise'. Lee's overeating problem was another aspect I didn't want to flinch away from as I think it is another sign of inner conflict, for better or worse part of his character journey. Returning and sacrificing the Pegasus is a key way in which Lee pulled out of this slump which although I don't think it was particularly well explored on the show had partly to do with Lee losing his purpose within the military. He questioned what it was all for and when he started arguing with his father and making his own decisions again, he regains his own power. He also makes a HUGE personal sacrifice in giving up the ship and you can see what it means to him to lose this ship in the moment he says goodbye to her here.
Kara is Lee's beacon, she has a symbolic power for him that goes beyond the multiple strands of their relationship. She's friend, colleague, sister, lover and she also symbolises everything he fights for--she dances bright in his mind and he keeps a light in his heart for her. But this is juxtaposed with Lee at his most nihilistic, in the midst of a serious depression, which reaches suicidal tendencies when he realises that death could be a release from all the conflict--not just the conflict of the war, but the internal conflict, which I hope by now I've shown.
I know people struggled to understand what this part of the plot was all about but I found it completely convincing that by this stage in the war someone like Lee would be suffering, basically, post traumatic stress disorder with resulting episodes of depression. Even Kara, who is so close to him doesn't understand him, and I love the lyric suggestion of it being too 'crowded'--the implication I wanted to come through here, and quite honestly it probably doesn't, it's very oblique, is that Lee's head is too crowded with painful thoughts and problems and that in that state it's hard for him to be around anyone, especially to feel intimate with them.
Part of the private struggle that Lee carries with him is his relationship with Shevon and his discovery of the enslaved children. The shot of him reaching for the shard of glass is very powerful to me as a metaphor for him trying to reach to strike back but doing so will also hurt him. This is a journey he shares with neither Adama nor Kara. They shut him out in another way in making a plot to assassinate Cain, and this has never been textualised on the show but another pain leading into Lee's emotional spiral is the fact that Adama never talked to Lee directly about it, and the fact that he put Kara up to the task instead of Lee. That has two levels--one that he would do that to Kara, and one that he chose her over Lee for the job. Lee doesn't even want to look at either of those too closely to see what that would reveal.
Lee also carries with him the memory of those that have died: his mother and Zak and also Gianne, his girlfriend before the attacks. In contrast to the mortality of these humans stand the Cylons and here I'm trying to get at some of the terror that must come at how invincible they are. When Lee finds them all 'dead' he's frustrated because he knows they've downloaded into new bodies. He runs out of bullets long before the Cylons give up the fight. They're a terrifying enemy.
The next sequence shows the altering relationships between Adama, Roslin and Lee, three people with power within the fleet who all know what it is to compromise in order to survive. They all do so in different ways and sometimes they align, at other times they play out against one another, as we see in the court case.
The montage in this bridge section shows some of the people that populate this complicated world Lee lives in. We see Adama staring at his medal of honour and Lee digesting the fact that his father may have been responsible for starting the war, Zarek lecturing Lee, Romo silently demanding a response, Dee dancing joyously, Lee rationalising with himself, conflict with Taylor the CAG of the Pegasus and Kara's outrage at Taylor's dickiness which Lee quietly agrees with. All of these contrasting images kind of pile up on top of each other and I hope show people how much Lee has to deal with.
In response we see him willingly walk up and put a gun barrel to his chest. Lee's courage, which he grossly underestimates, comes in part from how little he values his own life. He's willing to put himself directly in the line of fire if that bears a possibility of a better outcome.
Emotionally this works as a metaphor for his conscious decision to return to Dee after confronting how hollow their marriage has been to date. Lee doesn't view conflicting emotions as a reason not to act--he chooses the more admirable course of action despite his love for Kara, which he pushes down out of fear that she will betray him again and out of denial that she has so much emotional power over him. Cheating on Dee was a 'grey area' for Lee that was unsustainable for him because it went against his core values. I know most Kara fans couldn't see then why when Kara said she would leave Anders, Lee coudn't immediately commit. I honestly believe that if Kara had stayed a little longer in the room, allowed Lee a moment of catharsis about how massively she screwed him over in the first place, then he would have been able to trust her. Also if she'd actually said a little more about her feelings for him--yeah, it's Kara and she doesn't deal well with talking about her emotions but Lee has so little to go on here and he needs to hear 'I love you, I will never betray you again'. He doesn't hear that and instead he offers those same words to Dee. Subconsciously I believe he's saying 'I can be this person, I can choose to commit, why can't you, Kara?' It's very sick, very fucked up, but we're talking about very damaged characters here.
I do believe that Lee remains eternally in tension with Kara (symbolised in their very physical boxing match, which ends up with them embracing). Even when they are enemies it's like there's a cord between their bodies, and Dee can see it, she knows it is still there when she turns and looks at Kara across the bar.
Lee himself is in confusion here, it's one of the places where the viewer can see more than Lee can because it's Lee's subconscious at work for once, not his conscious mind. When Kara walks out after proposing he immediately wants her back but he can't even say why because rationally it makes no sense to want to enter back into that war with her. It's similar to the way Gianne fled from him because his initial reaction to hearing they were going to have a child was fear. His true reaction was more complicated than that but neither woman sticks around long enough to see it and then, the tragedy is, it's too late for either of them. Both of them die before Lee's able to show them his true love. Maelstrom will always be absolutely gutting to me because Lee was trying so desperately to telegraph his love to Kara, his faith in her, her central importance to him, even if the sexual relationship was too dangerous and too challenging to his identity to risk again ... wah, sorry, got all teared up!
The overwhelming loss he feels is compounded by the way everyone, eventually, leaves him. That's a central truth that Lee feels about his life. Even if it's not true, it FEELS true, and he remembers them leaving more than he remembers the moments they had together. So we see Shevon turn away from him after he tried to rescue her, she doesn't want a hero and protector and the intimacy he tries to have with her is rejected, Adama turns away in disappointment, as does Romo, and most gutting of all is Sam turning away because his wife is dead and he can't bear to see that reflected in the eyes of the other man who loved her.
Is it any wonder that Lee reacts in rage at times with all of this going on inside him? I play with Lee in physical conflict here in this final section to show both that it can be an outlet for him and it can also symbolise what's going on with him in his relationships--he is, perhaps unexpectedly, floored by Dee, and he spars with his father. But he also takes part in real conflicts. This end section is fast flowing and kinetic to match the frenzied crescendo of the music and to show that despite all his inner conflict, Lee has a soldier's instincts in physical combat.
I went for the shot of Lee punching Kara out in anger because it's Lee at his most ungentlemanly and to show that its Kara who can break through all his conditioning and self control. Dee shakes her head as she watches them fight because she can see what's going on, see the power Kara has over him even while he fights her.
I end on a shot of Lee about to act again, about to take up his pilot wings and return to the skies, Lee poised on the point of action despite everything. In part that was because it was the point he was at when I made the vid, at the end of Season 3, but it's also because I wanted to show that this is the ultimate paradox of Leland, serial contrarian, Adama--he WILL act despite everything.
Wow, these credits are really shitty aren't they? But I wouldn't actually change any of the emotional content of this vid, in any significant way. I consider it to be one of my best vids regardless of the fact that it has a smaller audience that some of my other vids. If I could make more vids like this I'd be happy, but I don't know if there will ever again be a character I love and understand as much as I do Lee. Thank you for listening, bye.
Vidder: bop_radar
Link to vid: here
Warning: tl;dr ramblings and emoness from an obsessive Lee fan
I much prefer written commentaries, personally, but daybreak777 wanted to hear my voice so this is for her. I apologise for the dodgy audio and how insufferably long it is. I did edit it down a LOT. Sheesh, it takes a lot longer to say things than to write them! This is why I stick to the written word! Now YOU TOO will see why. LOL, I envy you not at all.
Having duly warned you off the audio (srsly!), here's the transcript...
Transcript
Hi, this is Boppy, recording a commentary for Middleman. I warn you in advance that this commentary will be long as I have a lot to say about the vid, so if you get bored, just turn it off, I really don't mind, you don't have to listen to it!
There was a time when Battlestar Galactica was my favourite show, and I wrote a LOT of words about Lee. I think all the writing I did about him was the groundwork for this vid. Middleman ended up being a place where I could show people what I meant in my written meta. I felt Lee fans would recognise what I was saying and I hoped that there would be some people willing to open their minds a bit to the character and who might see something new about him in the vid, something that was hard to convey in words alone because the visual proof is more emotionally powerful.
My aim with this vid was to create an unflinching character study of Lee. I do come from a position of love and understanding of Lee but he is a flawed character and I didn't want to whitewash him.
I rely a lot on Lee's facial expressions throughout the vid, largely because that's principally where my reading of the character comes from. Jamie brings a lot to his performance that isn't necessarily in the script and I wanted to showcase the moments that were important for me in reading his character.
This track has a very long instrumental intro. For those of you that find the intro too long in the final vid, it's about double the length in the original track. I'm sure it's still too long and boring for some people, but too bad! I really like it because it sets the tone emotionally, the music is very powerful and the notes that we hear match the emotional tone of Lee's internal landscape. The first time I heard the track I found myself entering Lee's headspace automatically, instinctively.
In this opening sequence I cut back and forth from Lee in the miniseries reacting to Adama's speech announcing that they are going to go and find Earth. Lee's facial expression is quite complex here and I don't necessarily want to say what my personal reading of it is as I like people to think about it themselves, but I think it's obvious that he is experiencing conflicting emotions. That inner conflict is what I focus on in this character study so that's why I felt it was an invaluable character establishment shot. It's also significant that Lee is alone in a crowd of people.
The shots I cut to each establish one of Lee's principle relationships. The first is of him with Kara--I chose a shot of them at their closest as friends and colleagues, which was more important to me than a shippy shot. I feel that Lee's sense of connection with Kara is fundamental to him. In contrast, for the shot establishing Lee's relationship with his father I chose a shot of him looking away with a wry expression on his face--there's clearly deep emotion there between them but there's a struggle going on as well. Roslin is also significant in Lee's internal landscape--apart from the personal relationship which unfortunately the show dialed back on, she stands for his political beliefs and principles. The shot of Dee is significant because we don't actually see her face and instead see Lee's conflicted facial expression. Kara gets to appear again for a double purpose--firstly we didn't really see her face before so here we get to see it, and also she's mirroring Lee's reaction--it's another moment where they are in synch professionally. Finally we see the Pegasus--I feel the relationship of Lee with that ship, while brief, is also of paramount importance to him.
The introduction helps establish that Lee often acts while still partially in a state of conflicted emotion. He often gets to a point where he thinks 'yup, this action is better than this other action or no action at all' but he's still aware of the arguments on the other side, and that's because he thinks deeply about things. So when we see Lee pull a gun on Tigh and mutiny on behalf of Roslin against his father, we know that he's already aware of the emotional price he'll pay for this. He anticipates his father's reaction, and I think most Lee fans would agree with me in saying that the shot of Adama turning his head away from him is a very powerful emotional moment.
Jamie can do a lot with his cheek muscles. I really like that!
This is one of those moments that is probably lost on people that don't know the show well--Lee is ejecting the tape because he's refusing to speak out publicly to the fleet against his father, refusing to become the figurehead of revolt. He has already mutinied against Adama, but this is one line he's unprepared to cross. Zarek's reaction shot is important in framing this--to Zarek Lee's this annoying spineless twerp that won't follow through on his actions. I view Lee as being far more admirable than Zarek but even if you don't this moment is important in showing how Lee frustrates those around him because they can't always play him.
In the final sequence of the instrumental intro we see Lee receive some significant talismans. The first is his grandfather's lighter. His grandfather, a lawyer, is someone who Lee admires and whose memory he wants to live up to. In contrast, Roslin gives Lee a piece of paper with the name of Olympic Carrier on it. It's central to Lee that he must never forget that they shot down a civilian ship and that he may have been responsible for the deaths of hundreds. From Romo, Lee gets a chance to actually follow more actively in his grandfather's footsteps. He believes in justice and the legal system and the right of everyone to a fair trial.
Finally there is Adama's note to Lee, which takes a moment to come into focus. I think this works really well because it makes the viewer think 'oh, what's it going to say?!' and then when they see it it says 'For that day when we all have the time'. Lee's reaction is powerful because he knows how ironic the sentence is--yeah when is THAT day going to ever come for people fighting a war? There's another layer here for me which is that he finds it so typical of Adama to talk about some hypothetical future day, and to send a one line note, rather than actually spend time with his son NOW trying to understand him.
From here we launch into the real meat and bones of the story. We see Lee on the bridge of the Pegasus, taking over command. The crew looks to him for leadership and he is worried he won't be able to live up to the expectations. He also is well aware of the shoes he stands in. I reversed this shot of the watch so we see him laying it down rather than picking it up--that seemed to work better as a metaphor for Fisk's time being up. It also establishes that the life expectancy of a battlestar commander is pretty short.
This is one of my favourite sequences and one that came together very easily. It's the moment from Scar when Kara toasts the fallen pilots. This was a really significant moment for Lee. He stands up in solidarity with her and reflects back to her the emotion she is evoking. Lee's empathy for others is something he overlooks as an aspect of good leadership. He's not a Kara or Adama style leader, he leads by supporting rather than yelling or speechifying.
He's also very respectful of the protocols of the military and having seen the more intimate side of the losses they suffer, we now see him in his official role at the funeral.
The lyric here is 'every dream gets whittled down'. A lot of this vid is built on strong associations between lyric and image, so here we see Lee receiving his promotion from his father and then immediately see him handing in his wings after they, later, fall out. It's a very fast transition in the vid, but I think that helps the viewer grasp what sadness there must be to Lee, rather than focusing on his anger or what leads him to do so.
And of course it's followed by the other biggest punch in the gut of all time--Kara marrying Anders the morning after she's slept with Lee. Lee's shock here is palpable to anyone, I think, but I found that people read this expression from Kara very differently. I tried to put people in Lee's perspective in the vid and I think Lee reads it as 'well, what did you really expect, sucker?' though Kara fans tell me that from Kara's pov she means something else entirely. I hope this helps show them why Lee takes it a different way.
We then see Lee's rather emotionally barren relationship with Dee and the struggles they have. The lyric 'deprived of sunlight' is very powerful I believe, because that's half the problem with the Lee/Dee relationship. Lee does honestly appreciate the relationship but his love for her doesn't burn with the passion it does for Kara and his attention is focused elsewhere. He can't turn away from Kara even when she's in someone else's arms and he's got Dee. Dee's in the shade, her face once again buried. And yes, I do find this asshole-ish from Lee, I just really get where he's coming from. As I mentioned this is not an apology vid.
When Lee stares at the wedding ring, he is acknowledging that he hasn't been a good husband. I truly believe he wanted to give the marriage 100 per cent attention but he was in denial about how not out of his system Kara was.
We transition here to Lee in action as a lawyer. Gaius's trial and Romo's role bring out Lee's determination, and when Lee is determined, you shouldn't mess with him. Few people would represent Gaius who is by now viewed as a monster by the fleet. But Lee doesn't have to like Gaius to represent him, because his strength is being able to act despite conflicted emotions. There's a parallel here with Black Market when he was willing to shoot someone in cold blood in order to stand up for what he believed in. He is able to claim the 'grey' areas that other people won't stomach, that's the central premise here. He pays a HIGH emotional toll for doing so.
Lee doesn't always act so definitively though. When Adama went back to New Caprica, Lee initially argued against it, feeling it was a suicide mission, and he opted instead to go on to Earth, because the survival of mankind in some form at least is the ultimate goal that Lee never loses sight of. So Lee is the 'absentee' here (as the lyric says) but it's also a 'disguise' since he actually ends up coming back, unable to leave his father alone to die. Of course there's another little nuance going on here with my rather tongue in cheek vidding of fatsuit!Lee to the words 'beautiful disguise'. Lee's overeating problem was another aspect I didn't want to flinch away from as I think it is another sign of inner conflict, for better or worse part of his character journey. Returning and sacrificing the Pegasus is a key way in which Lee pulled out of this slump which although I don't think it was particularly well explored on the show had partly to do with Lee losing his purpose within the military. He questioned what it was all for and when he started arguing with his father and making his own decisions again, he regains his own power. He also makes a HUGE personal sacrifice in giving up the ship and you can see what it means to him to lose this ship in the moment he says goodbye to her here.
Kara is Lee's beacon, she has a symbolic power for him that goes beyond the multiple strands of their relationship. She's friend, colleague, sister, lover and she also symbolises everything he fights for--she dances bright in his mind and he keeps a light in his heart for her. But this is juxtaposed with Lee at his most nihilistic, in the midst of a serious depression, which reaches suicidal tendencies when he realises that death could be a release from all the conflict--not just the conflict of the war, but the internal conflict, which I hope by now I've shown.
I know people struggled to understand what this part of the plot was all about but I found it completely convincing that by this stage in the war someone like Lee would be suffering, basically, post traumatic stress disorder with resulting episodes of depression. Even Kara, who is so close to him doesn't understand him, and I love the lyric suggestion of it being too 'crowded'--the implication I wanted to come through here, and quite honestly it probably doesn't, it's very oblique, is that Lee's head is too crowded with painful thoughts and problems and that in that state it's hard for him to be around anyone, especially to feel intimate with them.
Part of the private struggle that Lee carries with him is his relationship with Shevon and his discovery of the enslaved children. The shot of him reaching for the shard of glass is very powerful to me as a metaphor for him trying to reach to strike back but doing so will also hurt him. This is a journey he shares with neither Adama nor Kara. They shut him out in another way in making a plot to assassinate Cain, and this has never been textualised on the show but another pain leading into Lee's emotional spiral is the fact that Adama never talked to Lee directly about it, and the fact that he put Kara up to the task instead of Lee. That has two levels--one that he would do that to Kara, and one that he chose her over Lee for the job. Lee doesn't even want to look at either of those too closely to see what that would reveal.
Lee also carries with him the memory of those that have died: his mother and Zak and also Gianne, his girlfriend before the attacks. In contrast to the mortality of these humans stand the Cylons and here I'm trying to get at some of the terror that must come at how invincible they are. When Lee finds them all 'dead' he's frustrated because he knows they've downloaded into new bodies. He runs out of bullets long before the Cylons give up the fight. They're a terrifying enemy.
The next sequence shows the altering relationships between Adama, Roslin and Lee, three people with power within the fleet who all know what it is to compromise in order to survive. They all do so in different ways and sometimes they align, at other times they play out against one another, as we see in the court case.
The montage in this bridge section shows some of the people that populate this complicated world Lee lives in. We see Adama staring at his medal of honour and Lee digesting the fact that his father may have been responsible for starting the war, Zarek lecturing Lee, Romo silently demanding a response, Dee dancing joyously, Lee rationalising with himself, conflict with Taylor the CAG of the Pegasus and Kara's outrage at Taylor's dickiness which Lee quietly agrees with. All of these contrasting images kind of pile up on top of each other and I hope show people how much Lee has to deal with.
In response we see him willingly walk up and put a gun barrel to his chest. Lee's courage, which he grossly underestimates, comes in part from how little he values his own life. He's willing to put himself directly in the line of fire if that bears a possibility of a better outcome.
Emotionally this works as a metaphor for his conscious decision to return to Dee after confronting how hollow their marriage has been to date. Lee doesn't view conflicting emotions as a reason not to act--he chooses the more admirable course of action despite his love for Kara, which he pushes down out of fear that she will betray him again and out of denial that she has so much emotional power over him. Cheating on Dee was a 'grey area' for Lee that was unsustainable for him because it went against his core values. I know most Kara fans couldn't see then why when Kara said she would leave Anders, Lee coudn't immediately commit. I honestly believe that if Kara had stayed a little longer in the room, allowed Lee a moment of catharsis about how massively she screwed him over in the first place, then he would have been able to trust her. Also if she'd actually said a little more about her feelings for him--yeah, it's Kara and she doesn't deal well with talking about her emotions but Lee has so little to go on here and he needs to hear 'I love you, I will never betray you again'. He doesn't hear that and instead he offers those same words to Dee. Subconsciously I believe he's saying 'I can be this person, I can choose to commit, why can't you, Kara?' It's very sick, very fucked up, but we're talking about very damaged characters here.
I do believe that Lee remains eternally in tension with Kara (symbolised in their very physical boxing match, which ends up with them embracing). Even when they are enemies it's like there's a cord between their bodies, and Dee can see it, she knows it is still there when she turns and looks at Kara across the bar.
Lee himself is in confusion here, it's one of the places where the viewer can see more than Lee can because it's Lee's subconscious at work for once, not his conscious mind. When Kara walks out after proposing he immediately wants her back but he can't even say why because rationally it makes no sense to want to enter back into that war with her. It's similar to the way Gianne fled from him because his initial reaction to hearing they were going to have a child was fear. His true reaction was more complicated than that but neither woman sticks around long enough to see it and then, the tragedy is, it's too late for either of them. Both of them die before Lee's able to show them his true love. Maelstrom will always be absolutely gutting to me because Lee was trying so desperately to telegraph his love to Kara, his faith in her, her central importance to him, even if the sexual relationship was too dangerous and too challenging to his identity to risk again ... wah, sorry, got all teared up!
The overwhelming loss he feels is compounded by the way everyone, eventually, leaves him. That's a central truth that Lee feels about his life. Even if it's not true, it FEELS true, and he remembers them leaving more than he remembers the moments they had together. So we see Shevon turn away from him after he tried to rescue her, she doesn't want a hero and protector and the intimacy he tries to have with her is rejected, Adama turns away in disappointment, as does Romo, and most gutting of all is Sam turning away because his wife is dead and he can't bear to see that reflected in the eyes of the other man who loved her.
Is it any wonder that Lee reacts in rage at times with all of this going on inside him? I play with Lee in physical conflict here in this final section to show both that it can be an outlet for him and it can also symbolise what's going on with him in his relationships--he is, perhaps unexpectedly, floored by Dee, and he spars with his father. But he also takes part in real conflicts. This end section is fast flowing and kinetic to match the frenzied crescendo of the music and to show that despite all his inner conflict, Lee has a soldier's instincts in physical combat.
I went for the shot of Lee punching Kara out in anger because it's Lee at his most ungentlemanly and to show that its Kara who can break through all his conditioning and self control. Dee shakes her head as she watches them fight because she can see what's going on, see the power Kara has over him even while he fights her.
I end on a shot of Lee about to act again, about to take up his pilot wings and return to the skies, Lee poised on the point of action despite everything. In part that was because it was the point he was at when I made the vid, at the end of Season 3, but it's also because I wanted to show that this is the ultimate paradox of Leland, serial contrarian, Adama--he WILL act despite everything.
Wow, these credits are really shitty aren't they? But I wouldn't actually change any of the emotional content of this vid, in any significant way. I consider it to be one of my best vids regardless of the fact that it has a smaller audience that some of my other vids. If I could make more vids like this I'd be happy, but I don't know if there will ever again be a character I love and understand as much as I do Lee. Thank you for listening, bye.