BSG 2.10., Pegasus
Sep. 26th, 2005 11:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakHad a stressful couple of days while my personal year is coming to a close; tomorrow is my birthday. Right now, I’m in Berlin with the Aged Parents. Which means very little online time. But I did have the occasion to watch the new BSG, finally.
The Pegasus episode was actually one of the two or three of the original Battlestar Galactica I had watched way back when, but the only thing I dimly recall was that the other (male) commander was called Cain, and had a daughter named Sheba who flirted with Apollo. I think there was some kind of conflict, but I’m not sure what it was about. One thing is certain, it can’t have been about the same things.
The episode is meta in a couple of ways; when Cain (female) suggests to Adama a Cylon attack, the viewer automatically, like her, expects Adama to say no, that the conflict will be about that. But that’s not it at all. In my review of “Flight of the Phoenix”, I talked about human ugliness as a big part of the episode, and of course despite the occasional space battle the new BSG has always been more about the conflict within than the conflict without. In retrospect, I think we can see a line here: from Leoben getting tortured and spaced in Flesh and Bone to the way Tigh interrogates Sharon (G) and Cally only getting a few days for killing Sharon (G), and a celebration, to Apollo and Starbuck using the image of Sharon (G and C) as casually for target practice as the other Cylons, to now the remaining Sharon getting abused and raped, or almost raped (I’m not sure whether or not Tyrol and Helo arrived on time – not that it matters much in terms of what Sharon went through) and the model of Six on Pegasus being chained, bruised, beaten, battered, and obviously raped many, many times.
Cain. Cain is the son of Adam and the one the biblical tradition burdens with the first murder, the murder of his brother. Am I my Cylon’s keeper? Imo, it’s not that the people from the Pegasus are so different from those on Galactica – they simply are a few steps ahead in the development of dehumanisation that has been going on on Galactica as well.
Which is not to say that Admiral Cain doesn’t have a few good points. (The biblical Cain has, too. He sacrificed, same as his brother, but God still ignored him. And it was Cain who survived, east of Eden.) Adama has shown outrageous favouritism to his kids in the past – there is no way the fleet would have remained as long as it did for, say, Racetrack during “You can’t go home again”; he did dissolve the independent tribunal when it behaved in a way he didn’t like. But, as Adama says to Tigh, context, context. Would Cain have listened to Adama re: Tyrol and Helo if Adama’s conduct in the past had been more impartial? Maybe, maybe not.
Military conduct and the rules thereof: Adama showed favoritism, he loves his crew and his crew knows it, and his two dearest subordinates do behave like children in front of him, not soldiers. Cain permitted her people – do we say her men, though there were some female members of the Pegasus crew spotted as well, just not in the crucial scenes leading up to the rape? – to abuse their prisoner in every possible way. The cards are stacked in Adama’s favour here, because clearly his blind spots had not similar horrible results. But again, I point to the line starting with Flesh and Bone. A matter of degrees. No, Adama would not have permitted a guard to rape a prisoner. But he permitted a climate in which this prisoner was called a “thing” on a regular basis, in which it was made clear that the lives of the prisoner and her kind did not deserve the same kind of consideration as human lives. Last week’s episode saw Cally celebrated for killing Sharon, and Racetrack calling the surviving Sharon a “Cylon whore”. This week again saw the deck personnel coming together, and the talk of Cylons that ended in smirking about rape started pretty much where the other conversation had left off. A matter of degrees. The crew of the Pegasus is not the Other, the mirrorverse to our crew. They are more extreme versions. And that’s frightening, and meant to me.
On the other hand in this pretty dark look at human nature, we get the character who started this show by unwittingly making genocide possible. Good old self-centered Gaius Baltar with the need to survive and his libido as primary motivations, no one’s idea of either a hero or a compassionate person. Starting with “Kobol’s Last Gleaming” and with the regrettable exception of “Final Cut” in which he’s used badly as cheap comic relief, he’s been getting really interesting ongoing character development, with Fragged as a particular but not the only important point. There is also Resistance, or was it another episode, in which Baltar interrogated the doomed Sharon and had that little exchange with Tyrol about love at the end. Which showed Baltar becoming both more ruthless and displaying real insight; he does get, and doesn’t doubt, that Cylons can love. Whether Baltar can is still open to debate. When he tells Six he loves her for the first time, in Six Degrees of Separation, he clearly doesn’t mean it – he’s the proverbial atheist in a foxhole converting and using any means he can think of to escape. His words, despite the phrasing, are all about himself and for himself.
This time, they don’t have necessarily to be true. But I think Baltar tells the Pegasus model of Six what he does for her sake. Not necessarily because he actually does love. Again, that’s open to debate. But he does want to help this battered and bruised creature, and these words are probably the one thing he could think of would get a reaction out of her.
On another level: this is Baltar saying out loud, for the first time ever to another being not in his head, what happened. Confessing. On a ship where you get condemned to execution within minutes for protecting a Cylon from abuse, so you can imagine what you get for confessing being involved with a Cylon on Caprica and dooming the human race. True, there are no other people in the cell, but paranoid Baltar in the first season still wouldn’t have risked it. What happened on Kobol changed him in this regard.
I also think that Baltar still wants to help Baltar. But if all he wanted was to save his own skin, yet again, he could have killed the Pegasus model of Six with that handy thing he used on Tyrol in Resistance - catatonic as she was, nobody would have suspected something, and it would have ensured she couldn’t betray him.
Speaking of Six: if the one in Baltar’s head isn’t lying throughout, this underlines, as the final scene of Final Cut did, that she can’t be in contact with the other Cylons right now. I remember there was some debate in Valley of Darkness about whether or not the skulls she showed Baltar as examples of humans sacrificing each other were real or not, lies or not, and my take was that while they were of course used by her ina manipulative way, I do think they were the truth. (As there were human bones and talk of sacrifice in the tomb of Athena in Home, I’m even more convinced of it.) So, would Six be capable of presenting Baltar deliberately with a broken version of herself in order to strengthen his emotional distance from the humans and growing closeness to the Cylons? Probably. But I think her reaction in this particular case was genuine. Watching her alter ego in that cell was horrible to her.
Moving from the man who may not love a Cylon but definitely knows more about them than any other humans to the men who love a Cylon: Helo and Tyrol unite in this episode to save Sharon, and may I say that I can’t help it, I loved that the Chief was the one who had his priorities straight and pointed out to Helo that instead of getting in a fight with the Pegasus guys, they needed to help Sharon now?
What I’d like to know: did the guard lie and forgot to mention Helo killed the “interrogating” officer when the later was in the process of raping a prisoner, or, more chillingly, didn’t the guard have to lie and could just tell the truth, and that didn’t matter anyway, because hey, the prisoner was a Cylon, and Cylons are things. There is no such thing as “a bit of torture”. If you condone beatings, near drownings, and the entire enchilada, you condone rape as well. Again: what the crew of the Pegasus does is more extreme than what the Galactica crew does, but they’re on the same path. So take a good look, people. What have “we” become?
The Pegasus episode was actually one of the two or three of the original Battlestar Galactica I had watched way back when, but the only thing I dimly recall was that the other (male) commander was called Cain, and had a daughter named Sheba who flirted with Apollo. I think there was some kind of conflict, but I’m not sure what it was about. One thing is certain, it can’t have been about the same things.
The episode is meta in a couple of ways; when Cain (female) suggests to Adama a Cylon attack, the viewer automatically, like her, expects Adama to say no, that the conflict will be about that. But that’s not it at all. In my review of “Flight of the Phoenix”, I talked about human ugliness as a big part of the episode, and of course despite the occasional space battle the new BSG has always been more about the conflict within than the conflict without. In retrospect, I think we can see a line here: from Leoben getting tortured and spaced in Flesh and Bone to the way Tigh interrogates Sharon (G) and Cally only getting a few days for killing Sharon (G), and a celebration, to Apollo and Starbuck using the image of Sharon (G and C) as casually for target practice as the other Cylons, to now the remaining Sharon getting abused and raped, or almost raped (I’m not sure whether or not Tyrol and Helo arrived on time – not that it matters much in terms of what Sharon went through) and the model of Six on Pegasus being chained, bruised, beaten, battered, and obviously raped many, many times.
Cain. Cain is the son of Adam and the one the biblical tradition burdens with the first murder, the murder of his brother. Am I my Cylon’s keeper? Imo, it’s not that the people from the Pegasus are so different from those on Galactica – they simply are a few steps ahead in the development of dehumanisation that has been going on on Galactica as well.
Which is not to say that Admiral Cain doesn’t have a few good points. (The biblical Cain has, too. He sacrificed, same as his brother, but God still ignored him. And it was Cain who survived, east of Eden.) Adama has shown outrageous favouritism to his kids in the past – there is no way the fleet would have remained as long as it did for, say, Racetrack during “You can’t go home again”; he did dissolve the independent tribunal when it behaved in a way he didn’t like. But, as Adama says to Tigh, context, context. Would Cain have listened to Adama re: Tyrol and Helo if Adama’s conduct in the past had been more impartial? Maybe, maybe not.
Military conduct and the rules thereof: Adama showed favoritism, he loves his crew and his crew knows it, and his two dearest subordinates do behave like children in front of him, not soldiers. Cain permitted her people – do we say her men, though there were some female members of the Pegasus crew spotted as well, just not in the crucial scenes leading up to the rape? – to abuse their prisoner in every possible way. The cards are stacked in Adama’s favour here, because clearly his blind spots had not similar horrible results. But again, I point to the line starting with Flesh and Bone. A matter of degrees. No, Adama would not have permitted a guard to rape a prisoner. But he permitted a climate in which this prisoner was called a “thing” on a regular basis, in which it was made clear that the lives of the prisoner and her kind did not deserve the same kind of consideration as human lives. Last week’s episode saw Cally celebrated for killing Sharon, and Racetrack calling the surviving Sharon a “Cylon whore”. This week again saw the deck personnel coming together, and the talk of Cylons that ended in smirking about rape started pretty much where the other conversation had left off. A matter of degrees. The crew of the Pegasus is not the Other, the mirrorverse to our crew. They are more extreme versions. And that’s frightening, and meant to me.
On the other hand in this pretty dark look at human nature, we get the character who started this show by unwittingly making genocide possible. Good old self-centered Gaius Baltar with the need to survive and his libido as primary motivations, no one’s idea of either a hero or a compassionate person. Starting with “Kobol’s Last Gleaming” and with the regrettable exception of “Final Cut” in which he’s used badly as cheap comic relief, he’s been getting really interesting ongoing character development, with Fragged as a particular but not the only important point. There is also Resistance, or was it another episode, in which Baltar interrogated the doomed Sharon and had that little exchange with Tyrol about love at the end. Which showed Baltar becoming both more ruthless and displaying real insight; he does get, and doesn’t doubt, that Cylons can love. Whether Baltar can is still open to debate. When he tells Six he loves her for the first time, in Six Degrees of Separation, he clearly doesn’t mean it – he’s the proverbial atheist in a foxhole converting and using any means he can think of to escape. His words, despite the phrasing, are all about himself and for himself.
This time, they don’t have necessarily to be true. But I think Baltar tells the Pegasus model of Six what he does for her sake. Not necessarily because he actually does love. Again, that’s open to debate. But he does want to help this battered and bruised creature, and these words are probably the one thing he could think of would get a reaction out of her.
On another level: this is Baltar saying out loud, for the first time ever to another being not in his head, what happened. Confessing. On a ship where you get condemned to execution within minutes for protecting a Cylon from abuse, so you can imagine what you get for confessing being involved with a Cylon on Caprica and dooming the human race. True, there are no other people in the cell, but paranoid Baltar in the first season still wouldn’t have risked it. What happened on Kobol changed him in this regard.
I also think that Baltar still wants to help Baltar. But if all he wanted was to save his own skin, yet again, he could have killed the Pegasus model of Six with that handy thing he used on Tyrol in Resistance - catatonic as she was, nobody would have suspected something, and it would have ensured she couldn’t betray him.
Speaking of Six: if the one in Baltar’s head isn’t lying throughout, this underlines, as the final scene of Final Cut did, that she can’t be in contact with the other Cylons right now. I remember there was some debate in Valley of Darkness about whether or not the skulls she showed Baltar as examples of humans sacrificing each other were real or not, lies or not, and my take was that while they were of course used by her ina manipulative way, I do think they were the truth. (As there were human bones and talk of sacrifice in the tomb of Athena in Home, I’m even more convinced of it.) So, would Six be capable of presenting Baltar deliberately with a broken version of herself in order to strengthen his emotional distance from the humans and growing closeness to the Cylons? Probably. But I think her reaction in this particular case was genuine. Watching her alter ego in that cell was horrible to her.
Moving from the man who may not love a Cylon but definitely knows more about them than any other humans to the men who love a Cylon: Helo and Tyrol unite in this episode to save Sharon, and may I say that I can’t help it, I loved that the Chief was the one who had his priorities straight and pointed out to Helo that instead of getting in a fight with the Pegasus guys, they needed to help Sharon now?
What I’d like to know: did the guard lie and forgot to mention Helo killed the “interrogating” officer when the later was in the process of raping a prisoner, or, more chillingly, didn’t the guard have to lie and could just tell the truth, and that didn’t matter anyway, because hey, the prisoner was a Cylon, and Cylons are things. There is no such thing as “a bit of torture”. If you condone beatings, near drownings, and the entire enchilada, you condone rape as well. Again: what the crew of the Pegasus does is more extreme than what the Galactica crew does, but they’re on the same path. So take a good look, people. What have “we” become?
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no subject
Date: 2005-09-26 08:42 pm (UTC)You're so right. It's too easy to see this as about the bad Pegasus and bad Cain versus the good Galactica and good Adama and Roslin. But yes, this is what the Galactica is becoming, and what our heroes are turning into. I kept thinking about Lee shooting at a picture of Sharon's head.
Good thoughts. Thank you.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 07:50 am (UTC)Me too. The attidue of the Pegasus crew wasn't born yesterday and didn't come out of nowhere; seeds such as the target scene are from what the dehumanization, in lack of a better term, develops from.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-26 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-26 09:14 pm (UTC)I think it's a very interesting look at how command style and personality at the top of the chain trickles down, too. Adama called Sharon a 'thing' just in the previous episode, right after she literally shed blood to save the fleet (if she's not still playing her part in an elaborate game), yet at the same time, she's not being tortured, she's not been abused physically past his initial attack at their first meeting.
It's as you say, an example of how Galactica could be, if Adama began to ignore the humanity in humanity's children.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-26 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 07:52 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-26 09:19 pm (UTC)Great post and yes, this is all a matter of degrees and a very hard episode. Diamond hard. Adamantine hard. And I loved it.
I loved that the Chief was the one who had his priorities straight and pointed out to Helo that instead of getting in a fight with the Pegasus guys, they needed to help Sharon now?
To be fair to Helo, I have to point out that he seemed to have been there drinking with the Pegasus
asshatscrew and the Galactica deck crew for a bit, I would guess while waiting for the Chief, and thus was probably a bit foggy on that point. Right until Tyrol pointed out the immediacy of Sharon's danger and then he was right there with Tyrol, running to save her, the alcohol buzz having been burned off by the adrenaline surge.no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 07:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-26 09:26 pm (UTC)I think this is what happened on screen with Cally, during the scene with the two members of the Pegasus crew who were boasting about the rape. You can see her growing increasingly more uncomfortable (and more horrified) as she starts to see just what's entailed in treating Cylons as if they aren't people -- suddenly she's forced to see herself in Sharon.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-26 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 07:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 07:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 09:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-26 10:14 pm (UTC)My reaction here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/karabair/324918.html), which I think hits on most of the same points.
I do hope they find a way to keep this Cain around -- not just b/c I love Michelle Forbes, because she's an interesting foil to both Adama and Roslin. And I kind of want her in the same room with Zarek at some point, but that's just my obsession talking.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 08:02 am (UTC)Your reaction: clearly, we're mental twins at times. *g*
Cain and Zarek: she's of course what he has always accused Adama of being. And they're both ideologues. Could be an interesting encounter indeed.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 10:59 am (UTC)that's a very nice compliment, though clearly, I'm really just your minion.
Writing 50 times on the chalkboard -- i will not write Zarek-POV fic about Pegasus. Will not write. . .oh, hell, now I'm in for it. maybe I'll just bug
and of course, happy (upcoming) birthday!
no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 09:13 am (UTC)And that fanfic has to exist.
Also, thank you, she says, still from an internet café in Berlin.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 01:13 pm (UTC)great. now I'm gonna be stuck with serious thoughts
Date: 2005-09-28 03:19 pm (UTC)do you recall if the quorum was mentioned in "Pegasus"?
and also, do you suppose Zarek would be interested in trying to get that intriguing Deana to do a hardhitting yet ultimately sympathetic documentary about him?
in Berlinian brevity
Date: 2005-09-28 08:55 pm (UTC)Yes, I think he would.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-26 11:04 pm (UTC)Can you point to a group on the show that is *not* a version of another group - either more or less extreme in one fashion or another?
I'm not entirely agreeing with the "this is what Galactica is turning into! Galactica is the same sort of monsterous crew as Pegasus, they're just not showing it yet!"
The same sort of thinking would say that in, say, 1830's America, a shopowner in Boston who would not hire a black man as a counter clerk was the same sort of person who operated as a slave catcher.
There is no such thing as “a bit of torture”. If you condone beatings, near drownings, and the entire enchilada, you condone rape as well.
I disagree. I think that "torture" and "abuse" is not an either/or thing - it's a gradient, a shading from black to grey to white, and what is "wrong" is what we say is wrong. Hence, organizations and societies define what conduct is permitted, and what is not, to make things clear.
Don't get me wrong, I think that Pegasus's treatment of the captured Cylons stepped way over my lines of "acceptable". But even among civilized Western nations, there is a range of acceptable punishments for various crimes. One man's hard labor is another man's torture.
And Baltar's actions - which were illegal when he did them - were responsible for the deaths of billions. Ever since then, he's been aiding and abetting the Cylons. I'm afraid I'm pretty much without much condemnation for anyone who wanted to execute him for those crimes.
- hossgal
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 08:13 am (UTC)No, but my observation did not mean the Pegasus crew are unique in this regard. I was thinking of the "other ship/other commander" motif as used in other shows, and since I come from Star Trek, that's what I was mentally comparing the episode and its narrative structure with.
The same sort of thinking would say that in, say, 1830's America, a shopowner in Boston who would not hire a black man as a counter clerk was the same sort of person who operated as a slave catcher.
I'd say that both the shopowner and the slave catcher are making choices - different choices, I'll grant you - that reflect the conditions of a society which by and large accepts slavery and the status of a part of the population as less than human.
Baltar: oh, he belongs in prison, to be sure. (Since I'm against the death penalty both in fiction and real life.) So do a lot of fictional characters whose arcs I find interesting. Liking his development doesn't mean I'm thinking of him as a woobie who should be patted on the head and sent into the fictional sunset.
I'm afraid I'm pretty much without much condemnation for anyone who wanted to execute him for those crimes.
I get that, but would you be without condemnation if, say, upon learning every one of Baltar's deeds Tigh (or whoever in the command structure) would order he'd get the rape/beating/other abuse treatment as well before getting executed? Rethorical question. I know you wouldn't.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 05:46 am (UTC)The scenes I found most chilling were the ones of the bound and beaten Six. It really does make me wonder where the line between human and humanoid Cylon falls. Are the humans who abused her more machine like than the machine/human hybrid?
I know there are those who absolutely detest this version of BSG, who feel betrayed by this episode. I found it a fascinating, chilling warning: if we regard the enemy as Other, how soon will we fall into the darkness, and become what we are fighting against? That is what I find so compelling about this episode, and this show.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 08:21 am (UTC)Same here, and that's one of the reasons why it connected to me with the earlier examples on the show I gave, all of which also reminded me of those scenes. The attidude of the prison guards in RL didn't come from nowhwere, and neither did those of the Pegasus crew. We saw seeds for it in the earlier episodes on Galactica as well. Which is not to say that the Galactica people will end up doing exactly the same thing - they have choices, they can learn, and as you say, Adama and Roslin work as checks and balances for each other. But the possibility is absolutely there.
I found it a fascinating, chilling warning: if we regard the enemy as Other, how soon will we fall into the darkness, and become what we are fighting against? That is what I find so compelling about this episode, and this show.
Same here. It's so easy to do that in wartime, and especially in a war where the enemy seems to be winning most of the time. (Always easier to be considerate if you're the winning party.) Managing to retain your humanity, in lack of a better term, under those circumstances - that's incredibly important, no matter how difficult.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 10:26 am (UTC)And... it seems, I'll become the fan of BSG before as it will show at us. But I hope, sometime it will take place...
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 01:54 pm (UTC)But don't read too many posts, because it really should be enjoyed unspoiled.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 01:58 pm (UTC)I try! But...
*sighs*'
BSG surrounds me slowly but truly!!! @.@
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 04:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 07:03 pm (UTC)(I sent you an honest-to-God birthday card, but it is in Munich whereas you are in Berlin. Alas!)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 09:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 09:14 am (UTC)Water bassin & revue: fantastic. 'Twas a great birthday treat.
no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 05:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-27 10:57 pm (UTC)How does the new episode end? Who dies? Just curious.... not thinking about watching or anything...really...not...at...all
Spoiler for "The Pegasus"
Date: 2005-09-28 05:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 09:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 05:20 pm (UTC)(Sorry I'm late. Work keeps me so busy that I'm not reading LJ as regularly as I'd like to.)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 08:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-29 09:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-30 06:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-28 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-29 01:49 pm (UTC)Voyager: I was reminded of that episode, which had an interesting concept, badly executed. (The Doctor suddenly switching sides because his ethical programmes were deleted, whereas the Doc from the Equinox remained loyal to his crew, Janeway going bloodthirsty and against her own ethics in minimal time - if the point was to show Janeway could have gone the same way, there should have been a better lead up to it.)
no subject
Date: 2005-09-30 03:52 pm (UTC)Wish I could comment on the Galactica post but alas it's not being shown here yet and I lack internet, I guess I'll just have to come back later. *g*