![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakAlas, the weather changed - deep clouds, which makes for lousy sight and only three and a half hours of skiing, which doesn't mean more time online but does mean more time with my trusty laptop (and in the nice hotel), so you get some thoughts I've been pondering for a while. Also a link to some great new Battlestar Galactica icons I saw the last time I was online. Now for my babblings....
A few months back,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
merrymaia watched the Firefly episode War Stories for the first time, and disliked it immensely. As I always was rather fond of it myself, I was curious about her objections. As far as I recall, she saw the episode as justifying the view that Simon in the teaser rejects as “purple prose by a sadist”, i.e. that torture brings out the real self, and as using this to glorify Mal. Now I still think she’s on the wrong track as far as Mal is concerned. War Stories is primarily about Wash and Zoe, their marriage, and how Zoe’s strong relationship with Mal figures into it. It’s secondary plot concerns River; this is the first episode showcasing how incredibly dangerous she can be if she wants to be. Mal not being broken by torture is incidental – he’s a tertiary character in this episode - , and it’s not like the show wants to imply Mal can’t be broken; I’d argue he gets broken as early as the opening sequence of the pilot. (When he watches the Independents withdraw, and his previous belief system shatters. This is a man being broken.)
But her objection to the use of torture in general is something worth pondering. It’s something basically every show does to its characters sooner or later. And the purpose, quite often, is to showcase something about them. Which can be a naked chest (classic Star Trek, I’m looking at you – in episodes like the ghastly Patterns of Force, you had Kirk and Spock being tortured without flinching, and even by massive fanwanking about superior Vulcan physiology this isn’t realistic), or, indeed, internal strength. When Giles is tortured by Angelus in the BtVS season 2 finale, Becoming, it certainly happens to showcase Giles’ courage in a desperate situation (and to increase the pressure on Buffy to rescue him), but Giles doesn’t come across as superhuman; the scene ends, after all, not with him being triumphant and defiant, but with him giving the crucial information and being broken, not through the physical torture but through the psychological manipulation of Drusilla. It’s the tragic counterpoint, I’d argue, that makes the torture non-gratitious and infinitely more affecting than various villainous efforts inflicted on Kirk and Spock.
The later Star Trek shows handled the torture issue somewhat differently then the original series had done. (Or as, say, Star Wars does it. If people like Leia or Han Solo get tortured, we never wonder whether they will be broken. In fanfic, maybe; but on screen, they’re protected by the iron law of being the heroes of the story. The torture – implied, not shown onscreen – happens to emphasize the villainy of their opponents.) They, and indeed Babylon 5 plus various other genre shows, went what you could call the 1984 route. Meaning they took a page or two or a whole chapter from George Orwell’s novel, specifically from the last third during which Winston Smith is interrogated and ultimately broken by O’Brien.
Now interestingly, TNG and DS9 did this in a somewhat darker fashion than Babylon 5 with Intersections in Real Time, a fourth season episode. Which would be the torture episode of all torture episodes what I, personally, have a problem is. Like the TNG and DS9 examples of whom I’ll speak in a moment, it’s Orwellian, and by itself, it is very well written indeed, capturing the numbing horror and routine of modern torture. In marked difference to the torture dealt out to G’Kar earlier in the same season which takes its imagery from religious motifs and indeed biblical epics, the torture the show’s hero, John Sheridan, is subjected to is scientifically clean, which enhances the horror and connects to the audience’s reality in a way the goings-on under a mad alien Emperor do not. Bruce Boxleitner, a solid actor though by far not the best of the show, rises to the occasion here. So what’s my problem? It’s basically the onemerrymaia had with War Stories. Sheridan - who is the unquestioned focus of the episode, as opposed to Mal in War Stories - doesn’t break. One can use some show continuity to justify this – Sheridan was tortured before, by Jack the Ripper, no less, or: his carrying a part of the Vorlon Kosh with him for so long and Lorien’s lifesaving energy has changed him physically – but to me, it still grates in a way which G’Kar not breaking earlier the season until his final scream does not.
Which I think comes down to the what these two different tortures accomplish within the show. Sheridan’s torture has no result whatsoever. Other than, well, showcasing Sheridan’s heroism and the villainy of the Clark regime. If Sheridan had been rescued five minutes after being captured, without getting tortured at all, the show would still have continued in exactly the same way. Certainly Sheridan personally shows no effect afterwards from what the torture did to him, neither on a psychological or physiological level. G’Kar’s torture, on the other hand, while also showcasing his endurance, affects the plot decisively. Watching G’Kar getting tortured by Cartagia is as important for Londo’s path to redemption as beating up and mindraping Londo was the ironic galvanizing event for G’Kar’s epiphany a season earlier. You can’t take G’Kar’s suffering out of the early season 4 episodes without changing the nature of the relationship between Londo and G’Kar which develops further from there.
Star Trek for the longest time didn’t do arcs; TNG because this was pre-B5, though TNG deserves a lot more credit than it’s given for coming up with some character continuity and episodes like Family after the famous Borg two-parter Best of Both Worlds which gave its characters a chance to reflect and work through what had been done to, and by them. Today, it might look like nothing much when compared to later shows like Farscape, but back then, it was new and experimental (for ST). The George Orwell episode of TNG, however, wasn’t any of the Borg episodes but the second part of the season 6 two-parter Chain of Command, in which Captain Picard is tortured by a Cardassian officer. As opposed to the Borg episodes, this had no later impact on the show (though the Cardassian in question probably influenced some of the later DS9 Cardassians), alas, but it is still a remarkable episode, not just because Patrick Stewart is amazing, or the Orwellian methods of torture followed faithfully, but because this episode does something the B5 does not.
The Orwellcopy homage includes the use of what is probably the best-remembered part of the 1984 torture scenes. While free, Winston Smith wrote in his journal “freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four”. O’Brien (definitely the model of all the state tortures in genre tv, meaning he’s not depicted as a moustache-stroking villain or insane sadist but as a man who with a calm, gentle voice says the most horrifying things as reason itself) during the interrogation holds up four fingers and asks Winston how many fingers he sees. The correct answer being that they are as many as the party wants them to be. If O’Brien, as representative of the party, says they are five, then they are five. It’s not enough for Winston to lie to spare himself pain and claim he sees five, though. The torture sessions go on until he really, for a moment, sees five.
Now, in Chain of Command, the question is changed to “how many lights are behind me”. When it is asked for the last time, Picard doesn’t reply. He’s on the verge of finally saying something when the torture gets interrupted by the arrival of the rescue squad (or rather, the news that he’s to be released). This news galvanizes him into saying “there are four lights”, and if the show had left it at that I would have written the episode off, but instead, we get an epilogue in which Picard confides to Deanna Troi that he didn’t see four lights anymore. For a moment, he did indeed see five, and if they hadn’t been interrupted, that was what he would have said. (True, it would have been even more impressive if the script had let Picard make this statement to the Cardassian before he gets rescued but as I said – TNG was a forerunner of things to come, and pioneers never do the whole work.)
On DS9, which had B5 to compete with, arcs ultimately did happen; it also was the darkest of the Treks. The two most memorable “torture episodes” (but by far not the only ones) DS9 came up with were, to me, The Die is Cast and Hard Time. In The Die is Cast, a lot of other things are going on as well, and the torture is just a subplot, but it’s one that affects the future of the show in various ways, so I hold its torture scenes to be of greater significance than the Mal-and-Wash-torture in War Stories. What makes this particular torture remarkable is, first of all, that the producers changed the rule on us. In all previous examples, we had one or more of the respective show’s heroes tortured by villains. In The Die is Cast, one of the show’s heroes, Odo, is the torture victim, true enough, but the torturer isn’t villain X but a recurring character the audience previously (and subsequently, and indeed during this episode) has been encouraged to like, the enigmatic Garak. Having Garak torture Odo creates an emotional division in a way the previous episodes did not. The question here isn’t just how Odo reacts, but also how far Garak will go, and whether he indeed is able to go through with the torture.
As it turns out, Garak, despite being clearly affected and not wishing to cause Odo pain, does go through with it. And Odo does break. We learn something about him which we – as new watchers – did not know before, and which has to be kept in mind for all of Odo’s subsequent dealings with his people, at this point not yet but pretty soon the show’s main antagonists. Previously, we had seen Odo, upon discovering that his people were the tyrants of the Gamma Quadrant, turn his back on them, which in the Star Trek course of things was pretty predictable, Odo being a regular and a good guy. In The Die is Cast, a tortured Odo finally tells Garak that he still longs to join his people, despite knowing exactly what they are, that the desire to be one with the Great Link is something he just can’t forget, and that “home” for him is not the station but said Great Link. This admission also greats a bond between Garak and Odo, btw, both being exiles passionately in love with what exiled them, but as far as long-term consequences are concerned, the crucial thing is about Odo’s feelings for the other Changelings.
<Hard Time, on the other hand, while concentrating exclusively on Miles O’Brien and the torture he goes through (psychological more than physical, in his case), sadly remains without long-term consequences. (Indeed, given that O’Brien, the likeable Everyman of the series, gets put through hell at least once a season, you have to wonder the man isn’t a complete basket case by the end of the show.) But as far as depictions of torture and its immediate consequences go, it’s unflinching. O’Brien gets freed from what was to him 20 years of prison (but what was in effect a cruel simulation which can’t be removed from his memories) at the beginning of the episode; we get told the crucial events of this captivity in flashbacks, interjected with a present-day action in which O’Brien can’t adjust to his old reality on DS9 and at the end is ready to commit suicide because of what captivity did to him. It brought him to the point where he was ready to kill his fellow inmate for some food (and indeed did kill him). Again, what makes the audience suffer with O’Brien so much isn’t just the knowledge that he is, as Bashir puts it, a good man, but that his being driven to this point is handled in terms that makes one convinced one would have done exactly the same. The insidiousness of torture: in 1984, it ultimately drives Winston to do the one thing which not just breaks him but robs him of any belief in his own humanity. And, like O’Brien killing his mate, it’s not something that was asked of him (as the four/five fingers thing was); he has to go there on his own. Because the torture has become so unbearable, he at last screams out the wish that it should be done to Julia instead, to the woman he loves. “Do it to Julia” symbolizes the point where all emotional ties save the naked will to survive have broken down.
Of course, torture doesn’t just change the victim. It does the same to the torturer. Given that the new Battlestar Galactica is a very conscious post-9/11 show, and that the torture and abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanomo made extensive headlines during the last years, it’s probably not surprising that TNG and DS9 veteran Ron Moore, its executive producer, should add yet another rule-changing twist to BSG’s first “torture episode”, Flesh and Bone. Instead of one of the show’s heroes getting interrogated and tortured by a villain, we get one of the show’s antagonists, a Cylon, getting interrogated and tortured by one of the show’s heroes, the likeable Kara “Starbuck” Thrace. It’s important here that the Cylon in question isn’t one of the unwitting Cylons the show has encouraged the viewer to like, as Boomer, or that we get an easy way out by having him presented as nice and sympathetic. This particular Cylon, played excellently by Callum Keith Rennie, is absolutely unrepentant of the genocide the Cylon inflicted on humanity.
(This reminds me of the film Dead Man Walking, where it is also important that the point about the death penalty isn’t made by presenting the death candidate in question as a likeable or innocent man. He did commit one of the murders he’s punished for. As opposed to his victim, for whom we see her parents grieve viscerally and who is described as a friendly young woman ready to embrace the world, he’s presented as a racist. This is what makes the film a great drama instead of a melodrama.)
But when at one point Starbuck loses it, accuses him of it and ends with “this is evil – you are evil!” he touches the blood on his face her treatment has evoked, and smears it on the desk. The gesture says it all. Kara starts out the interrogation thinking of him as a machine, a toaster. Anything you do to a machine in order to gain information vital to your people can be justified. He’s not sentient, not feeling the way she is. She ends the episode praying to her gods for his soul. The interrogation/torture did not reveal anything it was supposed to, but it did reveal several things about her, and in the end changed one of her basic convictions.
Thinking of all these examples, I wonder whether the shows in question could have accomplished what they tried to accomplish without using torture as a narrative instrument. Firefly probably could have by putting Wash and Mal together in another kind of danger; B5 couldn’t have in the case of G’Kar but could have in the case of Sheridan; TNG could have (we already saw Picard broken in Best of Both Worlds and Family); DS9 couldn’t have, but in one case didn’t follow up on it; BSG – well, I suppose that depends on the next time we see Kara interact for a longer time knowingly with a Cylon. It could have been her Duet, to use a DS9 comparison, with the Cylons being to her what the Cardassians were to Kira (DS9 rule: you can’t go wrong if you pair Kira up with a Cardassian character as an episode’s leads). But we don’t know that yet.
Still: I wouldn’t wish any of these episodes away. Including Intersections in Real Time. Which probably ties with my inner sadist. Or maybe just with what Aristotle called the effect great drama has on us: pity and fear.
A few months back,
merrymaia watched the Firefly episode War Stories for the first time, and disliked it immensely. As I always was rather fond of it myself, I was curious about her objections. As far as I recall, she saw the episode as justifying the view that Simon in the teaser rejects as “purple prose by a sadist”, i.e. that torture brings out the real self, and as using this to glorify Mal. Now I still think she’s on the wrong track as far as Mal is concerned. War Stories is primarily about Wash and Zoe, their marriage, and how Zoe’s strong relationship with Mal figures into it. It’s secondary plot concerns River; this is the first episode showcasing how incredibly dangerous she can be if she wants to be. Mal not being broken by torture is incidental – he’s a tertiary character in this episode - , and it’s not like the show wants to imply Mal can’t be broken; I’d argue he gets broken as early as the opening sequence of the pilot. (When he watches the Independents withdraw, and his previous belief system shatters. This is a man being broken.)But her objection to the use of torture in general is something worth pondering. It’s something basically every show does to its characters sooner or later. And the purpose, quite often, is to showcase something about them. Which can be a naked chest (classic Star Trek, I’m looking at you – in episodes like the ghastly Patterns of Force, you had Kirk and Spock being tortured without flinching, and even by massive fanwanking about superior Vulcan physiology this isn’t realistic), or, indeed, internal strength. When Giles is tortured by Angelus in the BtVS season 2 finale, Becoming, it certainly happens to showcase Giles’ courage in a desperate situation (and to increase the pressure on Buffy to rescue him), but Giles doesn’t come across as superhuman; the scene ends, after all, not with him being triumphant and defiant, but with him giving the crucial information and being broken, not through the physical torture but through the psychological manipulation of Drusilla. It’s the tragic counterpoint, I’d argue, that makes the torture non-gratitious and infinitely more affecting than various villainous efforts inflicted on Kirk and Spock.
The later Star Trek shows handled the torture issue somewhat differently then the original series had done. (Or as, say, Star Wars does it. If people like Leia or Han Solo get tortured, we never wonder whether they will be broken. In fanfic, maybe; but on screen, they’re protected by the iron law of being the heroes of the story. The torture – implied, not shown onscreen – happens to emphasize the villainy of their opponents.) They, and indeed Babylon 5 plus various other genre shows, went what you could call the 1984 route. Meaning they took a page or two or a whole chapter from George Orwell’s novel, specifically from the last third during which Winston Smith is interrogated and ultimately broken by O’Brien.
Now interestingly, TNG and DS9 did this in a somewhat darker fashion than Babylon 5 with Intersections in Real Time, a fourth season episode. Which would be the torture episode of all torture episodes what I, personally, have a problem is. Like the TNG and DS9 examples of whom I’ll speak in a moment, it’s Orwellian, and by itself, it is very well written indeed, capturing the numbing horror and routine of modern torture. In marked difference to the torture dealt out to G’Kar earlier in the same season which takes its imagery from religious motifs and indeed biblical epics, the torture the show’s hero, John Sheridan, is subjected to is scientifically clean, which enhances the horror and connects to the audience’s reality in a way the goings-on under a mad alien Emperor do not. Bruce Boxleitner, a solid actor though by far not the best of the show, rises to the occasion here. So what’s my problem? It’s basically the one
merrymaia had with War Stories. Sheridan - who is the unquestioned focus of the episode, as opposed to Mal in War Stories - doesn’t break. One can use some show continuity to justify this – Sheridan was tortured before, by Jack the Ripper, no less, or: his carrying a part of the Vorlon Kosh with him for so long and Lorien’s lifesaving energy has changed him physically – but to me, it still grates in a way which G’Kar not breaking earlier the season until his final scream does not. Which I think comes down to the what these two different tortures accomplish within the show. Sheridan’s torture has no result whatsoever. Other than, well, showcasing Sheridan’s heroism and the villainy of the Clark regime. If Sheridan had been rescued five minutes after being captured, without getting tortured at all, the show would still have continued in exactly the same way. Certainly Sheridan personally shows no effect afterwards from what the torture did to him, neither on a psychological or physiological level. G’Kar’s torture, on the other hand, while also showcasing his endurance, affects the plot decisively. Watching G’Kar getting tortured by Cartagia is as important for Londo’s path to redemption as beating up and mindraping Londo was the ironic galvanizing event for G’Kar’s epiphany a season earlier. You can’t take G’Kar’s suffering out of the early season 4 episodes without changing the nature of the relationship between Londo and G’Kar which develops further from there.
Star Trek for the longest time didn’t do arcs; TNG because this was pre-B5, though TNG deserves a lot more credit than it’s given for coming up with some character continuity and episodes like Family after the famous Borg two-parter Best of Both Worlds which gave its characters a chance to reflect and work through what had been done to, and by them. Today, it might look like nothing much when compared to later shows like Farscape, but back then, it was new and experimental (for ST). The George Orwell episode of TNG, however, wasn’t any of the Borg episodes but the second part of the season 6 two-parter Chain of Command, in which Captain Picard is tortured by a Cardassian officer. As opposed to the Borg episodes, this had no later impact on the show (though the Cardassian in question probably influenced some of the later DS9 Cardassians), alas, but it is still a remarkable episode, not just because Patrick Stewart is amazing, or the Orwellian methods of torture followed faithfully, but because this episode does something the B5 does not.
The Orwell
Now, in Chain of Command, the question is changed to “how many lights are behind me”. When it is asked for the last time, Picard doesn’t reply. He’s on the verge of finally saying something when the torture gets interrupted by the arrival of the rescue squad (or rather, the news that he’s to be released). This news galvanizes him into saying “there are four lights”, and if the show had left it at that I would have written the episode off, but instead, we get an epilogue in which Picard confides to Deanna Troi that he didn’t see four lights anymore. For a moment, he did indeed see five, and if they hadn’t been interrupted, that was what he would have said. (True, it would have been even more impressive if the script had let Picard make this statement to the Cardassian before he gets rescued but as I said – TNG was a forerunner of things to come, and pioneers never do the whole work.)
On DS9, which had B5 to compete with, arcs ultimately did happen; it also was the darkest of the Treks. The two most memorable “torture episodes” (but by far not the only ones) DS9 came up with were, to me, The Die is Cast and Hard Time. In The Die is Cast, a lot of other things are going on as well, and the torture is just a subplot, but it’s one that affects the future of the show in various ways, so I hold its torture scenes to be of greater significance than the Mal-and-Wash-torture in War Stories. What makes this particular torture remarkable is, first of all, that the producers changed the rule on us. In all previous examples, we had one or more of the respective show’s heroes tortured by villains. In The Die is Cast, one of the show’s heroes, Odo, is the torture victim, true enough, but the torturer isn’t villain X but a recurring character the audience previously (and subsequently, and indeed during this episode) has been encouraged to like, the enigmatic Garak. Having Garak torture Odo creates an emotional division in a way the previous episodes did not. The question here isn’t just how Odo reacts, but also how far Garak will go, and whether he indeed is able to go through with the torture.
As it turns out, Garak, despite being clearly affected and not wishing to cause Odo pain, does go through with it. And Odo does break. We learn something about him which we – as new watchers – did not know before, and which has to be kept in mind for all of Odo’s subsequent dealings with his people, at this point not yet but pretty soon the show’s main antagonists. Previously, we had seen Odo, upon discovering that his people were the tyrants of the Gamma Quadrant, turn his back on them, which in the Star Trek course of things was pretty predictable, Odo being a regular and a good guy. In The Die is Cast, a tortured Odo finally tells Garak that he still longs to join his people, despite knowing exactly what they are, that the desire to be one with the Great Link is something he just can’t forget, and that “home” for him is not the station but said Great Link. This admission also greats a bond between Garak and Odo, btw, both being exiles passionately in love with what exiled them, but as far as long-term consequences are concerned, the crucial thing is about Odo’s feelings for the other Changelings.
<Hard Time, on the other hand, while concentrating exclusively on Miles O’Brien and the torture he goes through (psychological more than physical, in his case), sadly remains without long-term consequences. (Indeed, given that O’Brien, the likeable Everyman of the series, gets put through hell at least once a season, you have to wonder the man isn’t a complete basket case by the end of the show.) But as far as depictions of torture and its immediate consequences go, it’s unflinching. O’Brien gets freed from what was to him 20 years of prison (but what was in effect a cruel simulation which can’t be removed from his memories) at the beginning of the episode; we get told the crucial events of this captivity in flashbacks, interjected with a present-day action in which O’Brien can’t adjust to his old reality on DS9 and at the end is ready to commit suicide because of what captivity did to him. It brought him to the point where he was ready to kill his fellow inmate for some food (and indeed did kill him). Again, what makes the audience suffer with O’Brien so much isn’t just the knowledge that he is, as Bashir puts it, a good man, but that his being driven to this point is handled in terms that makes one convinced one would have done exactly the same. The insidiousness of torture: in 1984, it ultimately drives Winston to do the one thing which not just breaks him but robs him of any belief in his own humanity. And, like O’Brien killing his mate, it’s not something that was asked of him (as the four/five fingers thing was); he has to go there on his own. Because the torture has become so unbearable, he at last screams out the wish that it should be done to Julia instead, to the woman he loves. “Do it to Julia” symbolizes the point where all emotional ties save the naked will to survive have broken down.
Of course, torture doesn’t just change the victim. It does the same to the torturer. Given that the new Battlestar Galactica is a very conscious post-9/11 show, and that the torture and abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and Guantanomo made extensive headlines during the last years, it’s probably not surprising that TNG and DS9 veteran Ron Moore, its executive producer, should add yet another rule-changing twist to BSG’s first “torture episode”, Flesh and Bone. Instead of one of the show’s heroes getting interrogated and tortured by a villain, we get one of the show’s antagonists, a Cylon, getting interrogated and tortured by one of the show’s heroes, the likeable Kara “Starbuck” Thrace. It’s important here that the Cylon in question isn’t one of the unwitting Cylons the show has encouraged the viewer to like, as Boomer, or that we get an easy way out by having him presented as nice and sympathetic. This particular Cylon, played excellently by Callum Keith Rennie, is absolutely unrepentant of the genocide the Cylon inflicted on humanity.
(This reminds me of the film Dead Man Walking, where it is also important that the point about the death penalty isn’t made by presenting the death candidate in question as a likeable or innocent man. He did commit one of the murders he’s punished for. As opposed to his victim, for whom we see her parents grieve viscerally and who is described as a friendly young woman ready to embrace the world, he’s presented as a racist. This is what makes the film a great drama instead of a melodrama.)
But when at one point Starbuck loses it, accuses him of it and ends with “this is evil – you are evil!” he touches the blood on his face her treatment has evoked, and smears it on the desk. The gesture says it all. Kara starts out the interrogation thinking of him as a machine, a toaster. Anything you do to a machine in order to gain information vital to your people can be justified. He’s not sentient, not feeling the way she is. She ends the episode praying to her gods for his soul. The interrogation/torture did not reveal anything it was supposed to, but it did reveal several things about her, and in the end changed one of her basic convictions.
Thinking of all these examples, I wonder whether the shows in question could have accomplished what they tried to accomplish without using torture as a narrative instrument. Firefly probably could have by putting Wash and Mal together in another kind of danger; B5 couldn’t have in the case of G’Kar but could have in the case of Sheridan; TNG could have (we already saw Picard broken in Best of Both Worlds and Family); DS9 couldn’t have, but in one case didn’t follow up on it; BSG – well, I suppose that depends on the next time we see Kara interact for a longer time knowingly with a Cylon. It could have been her Duet, to use a DS9 comparison, with the Cylons being to her what the Cardassians were to Kira (DS9 rule: you can’t go wrong if you pair Kira up with a Cardassian character as an episode’s leads). But we don’t know that yet.
Still: I wouldn’t wish any of these episodes away. Including Intersections in Real Time. Which probably ties with my inner sadist. Or maybe just with what Aristotle called the effect great drama has on us: pity and fear.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 03:41 pm (UTC)Only that does the best job of examining the issues of torture I've ever seen.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 01:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-05 10:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-05 10:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-05 03:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 04:03 pm (UTC)This is a great, great, post.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 04:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 01:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 01:04 pm (UTC)you couldn't babble if you tried
Date: 2005-03-03 07:08 pm (UTC)But, yes, I rather prefer the stories that don't create superhuman heroes who can withstand any sort of torture. . . I excuse War Stories because I think that the point is that Mal can't be broken because he was already broken by what happened in Serenity Valley. (and the deleted Zoe-Simon scene from Serenity makes it much clearer). And besides, Mal DOESN'T "win" the torture scene -- he dies, and he only comes back to life because Niska wants to keep punishing him. Plus, there's no "information" dynamic here -- Mal doesn't have anything to "give up," so he doesn't lose anything by being a smartass until the end. The one Jossverse scene that DOES seem to be the "he's such a badass you can't get anything out of him" scene is Glory/Spike in Intervention." But, hey, that's Spike-the-Masochist, and if he's not exactly unbreakable, he's at least perverse enough to want to keep the scenario going for a while.
Re: you couldn't babble if you tried
Date: 2005-03-04 01:11 pm (UTC)Oh yes. One of the reasons why I'm so furious with Fox about not broadcasting the pilot first. It's so essential to Mal's character.
Spike/Glory: quite, and besides the tag scene with Buffy-as-Buffybot points out how hollow the concept of "sexy wounds" is anyway.*g*
no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 07:25 pm (UTC)Haven't seen the BSG episode yet. We seem to be a week behind in the series here in Canada. Now I'm really looking forward to seeing it, with this in mind.
Thanks for giving me some things to ponder.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 09:25 pm (UTC)http://www.livejournal.com/users/chain_lightning/157174.html
no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 06:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 01:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 12:01 pm (UTC)Of course, I would swap all of these episodes just for the moment in The Die is Cast when Garak puts his head in his hands. Thus were a thousand fanfics born.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 01:15 pm (UTC)Most of which somehow concluded that because Garak didn't enjoy torturing Odo, he never enjoyed torturing anyone. (Conveniently ignoring that fond Dr.What's-his-name flashback and Tain's "one never had to tell Garak to do anything", though of course in the case of Odo he does.)
no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 01:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 04:03 pm (UTC)Really? I always got the impression that Garak thinks so much in terms of ends justifying means that he doesn't feel much guilt about what he does. I got the impression that he has trouble torturing Odo because he knows him rather than because of moral scruples.
But then - you know Garak a lot better than I do!
no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 05:11 pm (UTC)I really need to see that episode.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-05 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 02:05 pm (UTC)I was trying to fit in the 'torture her until she loves me again' quote in without it sounding gratuituous.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 04:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-05 03:33 pm (UTC)And hey, always a good quote.*g*
no subject
Date: 2005-03-04 07:59 pm (UTC)Well, it was a bit more complicated than that. What bothered me most was the way the scene was portrayed: the near-comedic tone of the scene seemed to me to be unconscionable.
This admission also greats a bond between Garak and Odo, btw, both being exiles passionately in love with what exiled them
IIRC, there is a very moving moment at the end of the episode, after they are back on DS9:
Odo asks Garak, "Would you like to have lunch with me sometime?"
Garak says, "I thought you didn't need to eat."
Odo replies, "I don't."
what makes the audience suffer with O’Brien so much isn’t just the knowledge that he is, as Bashir puts it, a good man, but that his being driven to this point is handled in terms that makes one convinced one would have done exactly the same.
Yes.
What a fascinating and insightful and thought-provoking essay.
Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-05 03:37 pm (UTC)And thank you, for the inspiration as well!
no subject
Date: 2005-03-26 06:25 am (UTC)I saw the banter in "War Stories" as pure defiance. Niska is deadly serious. By bantering, Mal keeps Wash going, keeps him in the moment and takes away some of Niska's power.
It's dancing on the trapdoor of the gallows while the hangman's fitting the noose.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-05 12:38 am (UTC)But I think they could have done a bit more with it anyway, without needing weeks or months. The setup with the Drazi looked like a really good way of getting to Sheridan - make him think he's saved someone, then make him think that his saving them got them killed, then make him realise that the situation only existed because his torturers created it. Plus, what they said about Sheridan already being willing to think what he's told to was pretty accurate - we never get to see him working through any anger with the Minbari like we do with Sinclair, he just accepts they're not the enemy any more. The torture having no real consequences fits with the way Sheridan copes with bad stuff by acting like it never happened, I suppose, but I do think there's room for a lot more than we saw.
no subject
Date: 2005-03-05 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-23 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-23 07:32 pm (UTC)