Battlestar Galactica links and thoughts
Apr. 2nd, 2005 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThere is an interesting interview with BSG scriptwriters Bradley Thompson and David Weddle here. No real spoilers for season 2, though you can make some guesses from the tone of their replies. Since speculation is fun, I give you the parts that were most intriguing to me:
Question: Can you give us any indication as to who ends up in control of the fleet as the new season begins -- President Roslin or the military (Adama or perhaps another officer)?
Weddle: No, I can't. But how do you think the civilian population will react to a military overthrow of their president? What actions if any will the Quorum of 12 take? And what can Laura Roslin do to save their democratic form of government from her jail cell? We will be examining these issues.
Thompson: The season begins where the last one ended -- Adama's shot. Following military chain of command, that leaves Tigh the man on the spot, especially since President Roslin is in jail and VP Baltar is stranded on Kobol. So the immediate fleet boss is clear. But how will the Quorum react?
Question: How about Apollo -- will he end up in the brig for all of Season 2?
Weddle: Can't tell you. But what does he do now? Does he help Roslin fight to save the government, or has the shooting of his father so traumatized him that he seeks forgiveness for his actions and abandons Roslin? Galactica needs him, he's one of their best pilots and they don't have many. Yet
he refused to obey orders and held a gun to Tigh's head. So what does Tigh do with him? These will not be easy conflicts for our characters to
resolve.
Thompson: He's one of our best pilots, and we don't have many. Maybe Col. Tigh will need him in a Viper more than [Tigh needs him to be
in jail] next to that traitor, Roslin. But then again, maybe not.
Question: How much will we learn in the first couple of episodes of Season 2 about the Cylons and their relationship with, or mission from, God?
Weddle: Baltar's spirituality and relationship with the Cylon God will continue to evolve. As it does, we will learn more. But the more we learn, the more questions we will have. It won't all be laid out in one nice, neat, easy-to-comprehend synopsis. Baltar's journey will reflect the spiritual struggles many of us go through over the course of our lives. He will have epiphanies, achieve a deeper understanding of Cylon theology, but also have crises of faith and be tempted to reject his role in God's plan.
Thompson: God reveals his plans in his own time.
Question: David Eick hinted in the TV Guide article of a major battle on Kobol. Will that happen early in Season 2?
Weddle: Can't answer that. But think about it. We have people stranded on Kobol. If Kara [Starbuck] can return from Caprica with the Arrow of Apollo, Laura will be determined to get to Kobol and open the Tomb of Athena. Does the military try to stop her? Do they cooperate? Do the Cylons give chase? Do they know about the Tomb? Or is this inside knowledge that will give us an advantage over them? Anyway you look at it, one thing's for sure: all roads lead to Kobol.
Question: Will Tom Zarek be a major character in Season 2? Have you heard whether any other veterans of the first "BSG" be have guest roles in
Season 2?
Weddle: Tom Zarek will definitely be back. He's a political force to be reckoned with. A secular humanist, he won't be enamored with Laura's newfound spirituality. But he's adamantly opposed to a military dictatorship. The new field of play will give this savvy political operative many opportunities. Expect him to do everything he can to exploit them. Yes, some other faces from the old series may show up. Then again, they may not.
Thompson: Haven't heard that anyone else wants to come aboard. Tom Zarek has a ship of his own and he's the representative of Saggitaron to the Quorum of 12. He's adamantly against the military dictatorship, so you can bet he'll have something to do next season.
Okay. Here's what these replies lead me to believe:
- Lee will first out of guilt abandon Roslin and get out of jail due to his pilot status. But he then will reconsider, especially if things go increasingly to hell without a functioning civilian government. This time, it won't be a spontanous action like his gun pulling, though; it will be an organized resistance.
- Zarek, as everybody and their dog has speculated already, will use the opportunity just given to him for what it's worth, and rally the civilians against the military, but then again he might use the opportunity in a way nobody has (yet) expected him to - by suggesting a temporary alliance to Roslin, with the intention to shoot her down (figuratively) later, using her "newfound spirituality" as an argument to discredit her to the people
- which would pose a great and intriguing dilemma for Roslin - would she ally herself with Zarek against Tigh? (I'm assuming Adama will be out of action for at least the first three or four episodes, judging by how long it took on the show for Kara's knee to heal.) To get out of jail and restore the government, even with the knowledge he's going to try and backstab her later? Or would she try to convince Tigh to let her out? One thing is for sure, I can't see her sitting idly in the brig.
- as opposed to many a fan, the writers of this show consider neither Baltar nor Roslin mad and fanatic respectively for (in quite different ways) having found religion; furthermore, Baltar in season 2 will be save from the degeneration into cackling one dimensional villainy plaguing certain characters on certain other shows which shall remain unnamed.
One thing I love about BSG is that all the characters screw up at one point, and all do things right and make mistakes. Fans being what they are - and I don't except myself - mistakes by favourites are easier excused than mistakes made by non-favourite characters, etc. Now I already wrote my big Laura Roslin defense post; she remains the most intriguing character of the show to me. (Not that I don't love the rest of the bunch as well.) So I was glad to find some excellent fanfic vignettes about her, set in the later episodes, this one and that one.
Some thoughts about the entire first season:
33, the very first episode, sets up various things which play out throughout the season. Six' mixture of sex, scare and mindmess tactics with Baltar in order to make him a believer in the Cylon God. Note that she says "I want us to have a child, Gaius", among other things. Now one could ask why, if this is so important to the Cylons, did she never try during the two years they were involved on Caprica? I think the answer is found in the importance the Cylons place on the idea of love. Six asks Baltar if he loves her in the miniseries, and he can't reply. Later, after Caprica!Boomer and Helo had sex, Six asks her "does he love you?", and Six and Doral both speculate about the feelings between Helo and Boomer. The hybrid child the Cylons are after has to be created through love, not just sex - that is the "next step" in Cylon evolution both Six and Boomer mention the season finale. And that is why Six during her two years with Baltar never got pregnant herself; she knew he was not in love with her, and she wanted to make him love her first. But Chip!Six wants to make him love God even more. Of course she has to utterly break him in the process, but hey. That is one of the traditional methods of conversion.
33 and its successor, Water, also shows the developing relationship between Roslin and both Adamas from where we left off in the miniseries. Roslin and the older Adama start to develop respect and a certain amount of trust for each other, but it's also clear that this is largely depending on them agreeing with their respective overall goals. Note that even when Laura is touched by the gesture of presenting her with a book, she doesn't tell Adama about her illness, presumably because informing him she only has a life expectancy of months would put her in a weaker position from the start, and she's very aware that as the military leader, he is holding the more powerful tools. (Hence her bluntly asking "are you going to stage a military coup?" in the mini.)
She does tell Lee, though, an episode after he showed his own vulnerability, the guilt he feels about destroying the Atlantic Carrier, to her. Lee Adama and Laura Roslin started to bond in the miniseries, and it's interesting that he never has a problem with her as an authority figure. Not that he follows her blindly; Bastille Day showcases Lee making a choice which isn't about taking sides with Adama or Roslin but about the principle of the law. And Roslin tells him she admires him for it. I don't think she's lying. He's valuable to her as an ally her and her "advisor on the military", no doubt, but beyond that I think she sees him as a possible successor in the long term. Because Laura Roslin is a long-term and big picture thinker (which plays into her later conflict with the older Adama), and very aware of her own mortality. And she just likes him. It's Lee pulling a gun on Tigh that makes her order a surrender in Kobol's Last Gleaming, because that changes the equation. It puts Lee in a situation where he has to kill his superior officer and his father's best friend (because you can bet Tigh wouldn't have ordered his men to surrender) and possibly later to actively fight against his father, it makes a "who blinks first" competition of wills into a bloodbath, and that's where she draws the line. As Lee represents the idealism which Laura has to mix with ruthlessness and pragmatism, it couldn't have been any other way. It's interesting to recall her line to Adama from Colonial Day, when he jokes about politics being as exciting as war: "Though in war, you only die once. In politics, you die again and again."
Which I think is a key to Roslin's viewpoint as a political creature, as opposed to Adama's military viewpoint, and a consistent trait of hers from the miniseries (when she rejects the glorious last stand scenario in favour of running away) onwards till the last episode of season 1. Any victory you gain is just tempory, but conversely, so is any defeat. If there is no other option or the price is too high to pay, you surrender, and plan for another day.
There are three main points in the season during which Roslin is at odds with Adama. One comes in You Can't Go Home Again, when he is willing to risk the entire fleet to save Starbuck and tries to justify this as "a military decision". This isn't just a mistake of his in the sense of him being irresponsible regarding the ca. 50.000 lives in the fleet but long-term wise for his relationship with Roslin. Because it makes his "this is a military decision" look like Adama's way of saying "this is what I want to do, and you don't get to protest". He also loses the argument, and bear in mind Tigh was willing to back Roslin up if she ordered Adama directly to stop the search. (Which she didn't; she shamed him into stopping it instead.)
The next point of disagreement comes after the Cylon Leoben has made his "Adama is a Cylon" accusation, which unfortunately coincides with Adama being all mysterious because he has found Tigh's wife Ellen and hopes to expose her as a Cylon. Roslin takes the accusation seriously enough to both immediately cause Leoben's death before he can spread it through the fleet and to allow for the chance it just might have been true nonetheless. (Though really, Billy = worst spy ever.) At this point, her medication also has started to produce the first side effects in the form of disquieting dreams. Note that in the first of Roslin's chamalla-induced dreams, she sees the military hunting for her. It expresses a remaining unease with the military and readiness to distrust which she consciously probably hadn't faced.
The third point comes of course in the big Kobol/Arrow of Apollo argument, about which I said quite a lot in the earlier mentioned post. It's the last, most serious, and most fateful point of contention, but it also builds on the earlier disagreements. To use the short version of my post: Roslin sees the long-term goal of reaching Earth, a safe haven, as justifying her decision to go around Adama when he won't agree to her plan about using the Raider, while Adama sees it as a personal betrayal. Because the irony is that Adama, who chastizes his son about having put "personal misgivings" first, is all about personal misgivings himself. His outraged argument to Tigh about why he's going to remove Roslin from power isn't "she acted irresponsibly" or "she discovered religion and therefore can't be trusted" (and keep in mind that Roslin never in her entire argument with Adama told him about the visions, or asked that he should listen to her because of them; he doesn't know about them, or about the chamalla, or about the cancer) - it's "she turned Starbuck against us" and therefore, she is dangerous. Well, sorry, Adama, but Kara is an adult woman. Who made a decision. And talked with you after talking to Roslin, at which point you could have come clean. Roslin didn't order or, or magically force her. And that probably hurts most of all.
Which brings me to Adama throughout the first season. Everything is personal to him, which makes him both likeable and frustrating. Whether it's the decomissioning of the Galactica in the mini (he definitely takes that personally), or the Kara versus the fleet scenario, Sergeant Hadrian and her investigation turning against him, or the two times when his son makes a very serious decision involving the law (Bastille Day and Kobol's Last Gleaming) - it is always a personal issue, rather than a political one. Not that he doesn't understand principles; of course he does. He has a very great respect for the law himself. It is Adama who brings up the danger of the military acting as police ("the people become the enemy"). But choosing long-term goals over people is not his natural instinct. Adama's solutions tend to be short term in nature. The people need a motivation and something to believe in? Tell them about Earth. Only he doesn't believe it exists and makes no serious efforts to find out, and probably hasn't considered in a year or two if there is still no Earth in sight and they're still running from the Cylons. The independent committee gets out of hand? Shut it down. (Which leaves the mystery of just who helped the Cylon agent unsolved, and boy does that ever come to bite Adama in the behind. ) The President breaks her promise to keep silent about Earth and convinces your adopted daughter to disobey you? Remove her from office, by force, if necessary. Never mind that the VP is someone you mistrust (and who's currently unavailable anyway), and the most likely person to win an election right now is someone you distrust even more because he's a former terrorist. And so on.
This, btw, shows why Adama and Roslin need each other; if either thinks they can do without the other, disaster follows. Never mind the reliability of visions question, the danger of someone always seeing the big picture like Roslin does is that they lose sight of the invidiual. Of individual relationships. The danger of someone only coming up with short-term fixings and always seeing everything in personal terms, like Adama does, is that it might very well get everyone killed in the long run. If Adama had been the sole voice of authority, humanity either would have perished in a glorious last stand back in the miniseries, or could have been wiped out by the Cylons while the Vipers were wrecked due to the Starbuck search. Otoh, Roslin isn't a military strategist; she couldn't have come up with something like the plan to take out the Cylon base in Hands of God, and she does need a voice (other than Billy's) questioning whether something like the retrieval of the Arrow of Apollo plan is worth the risk. Balance between them, like in episodes like 33 and Water, is to everyone's benefit. And we've seen where imbalance leads to.
Changing the Cylons from none-too-bright robots into Blade-Runner style androids allowed BSG to use them not just as opponents but ongoing challengers of what "being human" actually means. This was largely accomplished through the two Boomers, Six, and the Cylon Leoben, all distinct individuals. Again, I dealt with the two Boomers in an earlier post, so, quick summary: Galactica!Boomer, who is the central character in the second episode, Water is essentially the Manchurian Candidate. A tragic character, fighting against the Cylon within and ultimately being defeated by her programming. Caprica!Boomer is a Bond Girl, but the fate of G!Boomer allows for the interesting speculation that despite C!Boomer believing she turned against the Cylons out of love for Helo from her own initiative, it might not matter in the long run. After Helo's discovery of her Cylon identity, C!Boomer gets to make some important points. She is sentient. She has feelings. Helo rejects her as "not Sharon", but she is who Sharon always was. G!Boomer's desperate "I'm Sharon Valerii" when confronted with the other Boomer models makes a similar human assumption; that identity is tied to humanity. Either Sharon has as much sentience and emotional life as the humans around them. Do they also have the same free will? Which would also mean, in the case of C!Boomer at last, the same moral responsibility a human would have for participating in a genocide. But then again, the humans believe in the "cycle of time". Predestination and free will are two clashing concepts, just as free will and programming. Leoben, being interrogated by Starbuck, told her he could see the future. Which might have been simply a way to mess with her mind, or might have been the truth (or both). Does prophecy allow for free will?
In the show Babylon 5, every prophecy tends to become true, but in the way the people familiar with it least expect. In one of the episodes, the question of a universe allowing for prophecies that imply predestination also allows for free will is touched upon: "Prophecy is just a guess that comes true. Otherwise, it is a metaphor." The BSG episode Hand of the Gods introduces a prophecy which gets two very different interpretations, one by Elosha, the human priestess, after Roslin confides in her about her vision, and one by Six, given to Baltar at the end of the episode. Which one, if either, is the right one? Or was it just one big coincidence?
Sidenote here: Roslin and Baltar are the two characters who experience visions/hallicunations and are told that they have a destiny by third parties, Baltar throughout the entire season, Roslin in the last four episodes. Neither Roslin nor Baltar come up with the interpretation by their own. (Something which gets overlooked by commentaries accusing Roslin of setting herself up as a religious authority - she does no such thing. Instead, she asks the only religious authority around, Elosha, just what the visions might mean.) Both are initially sceptic, then won over, though it takes much longer for Baltar. Both, however, are won over by a very different thing. Baltar by the ongoing bait and switch between threats to his life and miraculous savings. His life being saved repeatedly by incredible events make him come around to believing that yes, there is a God and he might be his instrument. Meanwhile, Roslin gets convinced by a) a prophecy that confirms to her what she already knows but tried to fight against, her imment death, and b) the promise of salvation for her people, not herself. In a clear Moses analogy, Elosha recites that the prophecied leader will die BEFORE the people reach safety and the promised land/haven. There is a more subtle play to her ego, too, if you like, Becket's last temptation - her death will have meaning, instead of being just the random result of illness. But it's still a very different motivation.
The question of faith is something that gets increasingly important in the first season. Both faith in the sense of having confidence in someone - Lee doesn't believe his father has faith in him, for example - and faith in the religious sense. Faith, ultimately, isn't rational. (Thomas Aquinas not withstanding.) It can be used to justify horrible things; the Cylons certainly see their faith as justification for what they did to the humans. But it also offers motivation, hope, salvation in desperate situations. Adama creates faith in the survivors by promising them Earth, even though he doesn't believe in it. Roslin finds it, and gambles on it helping her to save humanity. Which, you know, it just might do. This doesn't mean she didn't make a mistake by breaking faith with Adama; but if you ask me whether Roslin's visions will turn out to have been the result of an Evil Cylon Plot (tm), solely endangering everybody instead of helping them to find Earth? I don't think so. Because religion in the BSG universe is more complicated than that.
Now for season 2. I'm starting to count the days already...
Question: Can you give us any indication as to who ends up in control of the fleet as the new season begins -- President Roslin or the military (Adama or perhaps another officer)?
Weddle: No, I can't. But how do you think the civilian population will react to a military overthrow of their president? What actions if any will the Quorum of 12 take? And what can Laura Roslin do to save their democratic form of government from her jail cell? We will be examining these issues.
Thompson: The season begins where the last one ended -- Adama's shot. Following military chain of command, that leaves Tigh the man on the spot, especially since President Roslin is in jail and VP Baltar is stranded on Kobol. So the immediate fleet boss is clear. But how will the Quorum react?
Question: How about Apollo -- will he end up in the brig for all of Season 2?
Weddle: Can't tell you. But what does he do now? Does he help Roslin fight to save the government, or has the shooting of his father so traumatized him that he seeks forgiveness for his actions and abandons Roslin? Galactica needs him, he's one of their best pilots and they don't have many. Yet
he refused to obey orders and held a gun to Tigh's head. So what does Tigh do with him? These will not be easy conflicts for our characters to
resolve.
Thompson: He's one of our best pilots, and we don't have many. Maybe Col. Tigh will need him in a Viper more than [Tigh needs him to be
in jail] next to that traitor, Roslin. But then again, maybe not.
Question: How much will we learn in the first couple of episodes of Season 2 about the Cylons and their relationship with, or mission from, God?
Weddle: Baltar's spirituality and relationship with the Cylon God will continue to evolve. As it does, we will learn more. But the more we learn, the more questions we will have. It won't all be laid out in one nice, neat, easy-to-comprehend synopsis. Baltar's journey will reflect the spiritual struggles many of us go through over the course of our lives. He will have epiphanies, achieve a deeper understanding of Cylon theology, but also have crises of faith and be tempted to reject his role in God's plan.
Thompson: God reveals his plans in his own time.
Question: David Eick hinted in the TV Guide article of a major battle on Kobol. Will that happen early in Season 2?
Weddle: Can't answer that. But think about it. We have people stranded on Kobol. If Kara [Starbuck] can return from Caprica with the Arrow of Apollo, Laura will be determined to get to Kobol and open the Tomb of Athena. Does the military try to stop her? Do they cooperate? Do the Cylons give chase? Do they know about the Tomb? Or is this inside knowledge that will give us an advantage over them? Anyway you look at it, one thing's for sure: all roads lead to Kobol.
Question: Will Tom Zarek be a major character in Season 2? Have you heard whether any other veterans of the first "BSG" be have guest roles in
Season 2?
Weddle: Tom Zarek will definitely be back. He's a political force to be reckoned with. A secular humanist, he won't be enamored with Laura's newfound spirituality. But he's adamantly opposed to a military dictatorship. The new field of play will give this savvy political operative many opportunities. Expect him to do everything he can to exploit them. Yes, some other faces from the old series may show up. Then again, they may not.
Thompson: Haven't heard that anyone else wants to come aboard. Tom Zarek has a ship of his own and he's the representative of Saggitaron to the Quorum of 12. He's adamantly against the military dictatorship, so you can bet he'll have something to do next season.
Okay. Here's what these replies lead me to believe:
- Lee will first out of guilt abandon Roslin and get out of jail due to his pilot status. But he then will reconsider, especially if things go increasingly to hell without a functioning civilian government. This time, it won't be a spontanous action like his gun pulling, though; it will be an organized resistance.
- Zarek, as everybody and their dog has speculated already, will use the opportunity just given to him for what it's worth, and rally the civilians against the military, but then again he might use the opportunity in a way nobody has (yet) expected him to - by suggesting a temporary alliance to Roslin, with the intention to shoot her down (figuratively) later, using her "newfound spirituality" as an argument to discredit her to the people
- which would pose a great and intriguing dilemma for Roslin - would she ally herself with Zarek against Tigh? (I'm assuming Adama will be out of action for at least the first three or four episodes, judging by how long it took on the show for Kara's knee to heal.) To get out of jail and restore the government, even with the knowledge he's going to try and backstab her later? Or would she try to convince Tigh to let her out? One thing is for sure, I can't see her sitting idly in the brig.
- as opposed to many a fan, the writers of this show consider neither Baltar nor Roslin mad and fanatic respectively for (in quite different ways) having found religion; furthermore, Baltar in season 2 will be save from the degeneration into cackling one dimensional villainy plaguing certain characters on certain other shows which shall remain unnamed.
One thing I love about BSG is that all the characters screw up at one point, and all do things right and make mistakes. Fans being what they are - and I don't except myself - mistakes by favourites are easier excused than mistakes made by non-favourite characters, etc. Now I already wrote my big Laura Roslin defense post; she remains the most intriguing character of the show to me. (Not that I don't love the rest of the bunch as well.) So I was glad to find some excellent fanfic vignettes about her, set in the later episodes, this one and that one.
Some thoughts about the entire first season:
33, the very first episode, sets up various things which play out throughout the season. Six' mixture of sex, scare and mindmess tactics with Baltar in order to make him a believer in the Cylon God. Note that she says "I want us to have a child, Gaius", among other things. Now one could ask why, if this is so important to the Cylons, did she never try during the two years they were involved on Caprica? I think the answer is found in the importance the Cylons place on the idea of love. Six asks Baltar if he loves her in the miniseries, and he can't reply. Later, after Caprica!Boomer and Helo had sex, Six asks her "does he love you?", and Six and Doral both speculate about the feelings between Helo and Boomer. The hybrid child the Cylons are after has to be created through love, not just sex - that is the "next step" in Cylon evolution both Six and Boomer mention the season finale. And that is why Six during her two years with Baltar never got pregnant herself; she knew he was not in love with her, and she wanted to make him love her first. But Chip!Six wants to make him love God even more. Of course she has to utterly break him in the process, but hey. That is one of the traditional methods of conversion.
33 and its successor, Water, also shows the developing relationship between Roslin and both Adamas from where we left off in the miniseries. Roslin and the older Adama start to develop respect and a certain amount of trust for each other, but it's also clear that this is largely depending on them agreeing with their respective overall goals. Note that even when Laura is touched by the gesture of presenting her with a book, she doesn't tell Adama about her illness, presumably because informing him she only has a life expectancy of months would put her in a weaker position from the start, and she's very aware that as the military leader, he is holding the more powerful tools. (Hence her bluntly asking "are you going to stage a military coup?" in the mini.)
She does tell Lee, though, an episode after he showed his own vulnerability, the guilt he feels about destroying the Atlantic Carrier, to her. Lee Adama and Laura Roslin started to bond in the miniseries, and it's interesting that he never has a problem with her as an authority figure. Not that he follows her blindly; Bastille Day showcases Lee making a choice which isn't about taking sides with Adama or Roslin but about the principle of the law. And Roslin tells him she admires him for it. I don't think she's lying. He's valuable to her as an ally her and her "advisor on the military", no doubt, but beyond that I think she sees him as a possible successor in the long term. Because Laura Roslin is a long-term and big picture thinker (which plays into her later conflict with the older Adama), and very aware of her own mortality. And she just likes him. It's Lee pulling a gun on Tigh that makes her order a surrender in Kobol's Last Gleaming, because that changes the equation. It puts Lee in a situation where he has to kill his superior officer and his father's best friend (because you can bet Tigh wouldn't have ordered his men to surrender) and possibly later to actively fight against his father, it makes a "who blinks first" competition of wills into a bloodbath, and that's where she draws the line. As Lee represents the idealism which Laura has to mix with ruthlessness and pragmatism, it couldn't have been any other way. It's interesting to recall her line to Adama from Colonial Day, when he jokes about politics being as exciting as war: "Though in war, you only die once. In politics, you die again and again."
Which I think is a key to Roslin's viewpoint as a political creature, as opposed to Adama's military viewpoint, and a consistent trait of hers from the miniseries (when she rejects the glorious last stand scenario in favour of running away) onwards till the last episode of season 1. Any victory you gain is just tempory, but conversely, so is any defeat. If there is no other option or the price is too high to pay, you surrender, and plan for another day.
There are three main points in the season during which Roslin is at odds with Adama. One comes in You Can't Go Home Again, when he is willing to risk the entire fleet to save Starbuck and tries to justify this as "a military decision". This isn't just a mistake of his in the sense of him being irresponsible regarding the ca. 50.000 lives in the fleet but long-term wise for his relationship with Roslin. Because it makes his "this is a military decision" look like Adama's way of saying "this is what I want to do, and you don't get to protest". He also loses the argument, and bear in mind Tigh was willing to back Roslin up if she ordered Adama directly to stop the search. (Which she didn't; she shamed him into stopping it instead.)
The next point of disagreement comes after the Cylon Leoben has made his "Adama is a Cylon" accusation, which unfortunately coincides with Adama being all mysterious because he has found Tigh's wife Ellen and hopes to expose her as a Cylon. Roslin takes the accusation seriously enough to both immediately cause Leoben's death before he can spread it through the fleet and to allow for the chance it just might have been true nonetheless. (Though really, Billy = worst spy ever.) At this point, her medication also has started to produce the first side effects in the form of disquieting dreams. Note that in the first of Roslin's chamalla-induced dreams, she sees the military hunting for her. It expresses a remaining unease with the military and readiness to distrust which she consciously probably hadn't faced.
The third point comes of course in the big Kobol/Arrow of Apollo argument, about which I said quite a lot in the earlier mentioned post. It's the last, most serious, and most fateful point of contention, but it also builds on the earlier disagreements. To use the short version of my post: Roslin sees the long-term goal of reaching Earth, a safe haven, as justifying her decision to go around Adama when he won't agree to her plan about using the Raider, while Adama sees it as a personal betrayal. Because the irony is that Adama, who chastizes his son about having put "personal misgivings" first, is all about personal misgivings himself. His outraged argument to Tigh about why he's going to remove Roslin from power isn't "she acted irresponsibly" or "she discovered religion and therefore can't be trusted" (and keep in mind that Roslin never in her entire argument with Adama told him about the visions, or asked that he should listen to her because of them; he doesn't know about them, or about the chamalla, or about the cancer) - it's "she turned Starbuck against us" and therefore, she is dangerous. Well, sorry, Adama, but Kara is an adult woman. Who made a decision. And talked with you after talking to Roslin, at which point you could have come clean. Roslin didn't order or, or magically force her. And that probably hurts most of all.
Which brings me to Adama throughout the first season. Everything is personal to him, which makes him both likeable and frustrating. Whether it's the decomissioning of the Galactica in the mini (he definitely takes that personally), or the Kara versus the fleet scenario, Sergeant Hadrian and her investigation turning against him, or the two times when his son makes a very serious decision involving the law (Bastille Day and Kobol's Last Gleaming) - it is always a personal issue, rather than a political one. Not that he doesn't understand principles; of course he does. He has a very great respect for the law himself. It is Adama who brings up the danger of the military acting as police ("the people become the enemy"). But choosing long-term goals over people is not his natural instinct. Adama's solutions tend to be short term in nature. The people need a motivation and something to believe in? Tell them about Earth. Only he doesn't believe it exists and makes no serious efforts to find out, and probably hasn't considered in a year or two if there is still no Earth in sight and they're still running from the Cylons. The independent committee gets out of hand? Shut it down. (Which leaves the mystery of just who helped the Cylon agent unsolved, and boy does that ever come to bite Adama in the behind. ) The President breaks her promise to keep silent about Earth and convinces your adopted daughter to disobey you? Remove her from office, by force, if necessary. Never mind that the VP is someone you mistrust (and who's currently unavailable anyway), and the most likely person to win an election right now is someone you distrust even more because he's a former terrorist. And so on.
This, btw, shows why Adama and Roslin need each other; if either thinks they can do without the other, disaster follows. Never mind the reliability of visions question, the danger of someone always seeing the big picture like Roslin does is that they lose sight of the invidiual. Of individual relationships. The danger of someone only coming up with short-term fixings and always seeing everything in personal terms, like Adama does, is that it might very well get everyone killed in the long run. If Adama had been the sole voice of authority, humanity either would have perished in a glorious last stand back in the miniseries, or could have been wiped out by the Cylons while the Vipers were wrecked due to the Starbuck search. Otoh, Roslin isn't a military strategist; she couldn't have come up with something like the plan to take out the Cylon base in Hands of God, and she does need a voice (other than Billy's) questioning whether something like the retrieval of the Arrow of Apollo plan is worth the risk. Balance between them, like in episodes like 33 and Water, is to everyone's benefit. And we've seen where imbalance leads to.
Changing the Cylons from none-too-bright robots into Blade-Runner style androids allowed BSG to use them not just as opponents but ongoing challengers of what "being human" actually means. This was largely accomplished through the two Boomers, Six, and the Cylon Leoben, all distinct individuals. Again, I dealt with the two Boomers in an earlier post, so, quick summary: Galactica!Boomer, who is the central character in the second episode, Water is essentially the Manchurian Candidate. A tragic character, fighting against the Cylon within and ultimately being defeated by her programming. Caprica!Boomer is a Bond Girl, but the fate of G!Boomer allows for the interesting speculation that despite C!Boomer believing she turned against the Cylons out of love for Helo from her own initiative, it might not matter in the long run. After Helo's discovery of her Cylon identity, C!Boomer gets to make some important points. She is sentient. She has feelings. Helo rejects her as "not Sharon", but she is who Sharon always was. G!Boomer's desperate "I'm Sharon Valerii" when confronted with the other Boomer models makes a similar human assumption; that identity is tied to humanity. Either Sharon has as much sentience and emotional life as the humans around them. Do they also have the same free will? Which would also mean, in the case of C!Boomer at last, the same moral responsibility a human would have for participating in a genocide. But then again, the humans believe in the "cycle of time". Predestination and free will are two clashing concepts, just as free will and programming. Leoben, being interrogated by Starbuck, told her he could see the future. Which might have been simply a way to mess with her mind, or might have been the truth (or both). Does prophecy allow for free will?
In the show Babylon 5, every prophecy tends to become true, but in the way the people familiar with it least expect. In one of the episodes, the question of a universe allowing for prophecies that imply predestination also allows for free will is touched upon: "Prophecy is just a guess that comes true. Otherwise, it is a metaphor." The BSG episode Hand of the Gods introduces a prophecy which gets two very different interpretations, one by Elosha, the human priestess, after Roslin confides in her about her vision, and one by Six, given to Baltar at the end of the episode. Which one, if either, is the right one? Or was it just one big coincidence?
Sidenote here: Roslin and Baltar are the two characters who experience visions/hallicunations and are told that they have a destiny by third parties, Baltar throughout the entire season, Roslin in the last four episodes. Neither Roslin nor Baltar come up with the interpretation by their own. (Something which gets overlooked by commentaries accusing Roslin of setting herself up as a religious authority - she does no such thing. Instead, she asks the only religious authority around, Elosha, just what the visions might mean.) Both are initially sceptic, then won over, though it takes much longer for Baltar. Both, however, are won over by a very different thing. Baltar by the ongoing bait and switch between threats to his life and miraculous savings. His life being saved repeatedly by incredible events make him come around to believing that yes, there is a God and he might be his instrument. Meanwhile, Roslin gets convinced by a) a prophecy that confirms to her what she already knows but tried to fight against, her imment death, and b) the promise of salvation for her people, not herself. In a clear Moses analogy, Elosha recites that the prophecied leader will die BEFORE the people reach safety and the promised land/haven. There is a more subtle play to her ego, too, if you like, Becket's last temptation - her death will have meaning, instead of being just the random result of illness. But it's still a very different motivation.
The question of faith is something that gets increasingly important in the first season. Both faith in the sense of having confidence in someone - Lee doesn't believe his father has faith in him, for example - and faith in the religious sense. Faith, ultimately, isn't rational. (Thomas Aquinas not withstanding.) It can be used to justify horrible things; the Cylons certainly see their faith as justification for what they did to the humans. But it also offers motivation, hope, salvation in desperate situations. Adama creates faith in the survivors by promising them Earth, even though he doesn't believe in it. Roslin finds it, and gambles on it helping her to save humanity. Which, you know, it just might do. This doesn't mean she didn't make a mistake by breaking faith with Adama; but if you ask me whether Roslin's visions will turn out to have been the result of an Evil Cylon Plot (tm), solely endangering everybody instead of helping them to find Earth? I don't think so. Because religion in the BSG universe is more complicated than that.
Now for season 2. I'm starting to count the days already...
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Date: 2005-04-02 10:09 pm (UTC)And -- going off at something of a tangent -- you have to wonder how much slack Adama cut Starbuck during those two years on the Galactica between Zak's death and mini. My suspicion is that she wouldn't have survived in a more rigorous environment (ie somewhere that wasn't an elderly Battlestar tagged for decommissioning, serving under a commander she was personally close to). I'm sure there were a number of people on the Galactica who had reason to be resentful of her favoured position.
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Date: 2005-04-03 05:58 am (UTC)