BSG 2.12. Resurrection Ship II

[selenak]

Or blinking, as the case might be. I wasn't able to post my review yesterday due to some excessive roleplaying, so I got to read the other reviews first, and see this episode is somewhat controversial (big surprise). It worked for me, but then again, maybe my interpretation is off.

So, firstly, on the interesting and unpredicted fact that judging by all we've seen, both Kara and Fisk would have gone through with their assassination tasks - Kara had her hand literary on the trigger - despite their feelings about the wrongness, but both Adama and Cain decided, at the last moment, to go another way and called them off. I think that settles the matter of whether we're supposed to agree with Kara's eulogy for Cain at the end, or not, especially taken into account with both Adama's scene with Sharon and an earlier episode which came to mind quite often when I watched this one, Fragged. Because not only is Kara shown to be wrong about Cain never flinching - she did, which saved the lives of Adama and the entire CIC - but she is wrong in seeing this as a virtue, just as Cain was wrong an episode earlier pouring her scorn on Roslin and Adama for their debating and second-guessing. If the lack of flinching, the willingness to commit "the unpardonable sin", as Cain puts it in her earlier conversation with Kara, were indeed what was needed, then Six would have been right in her conversation with Baltar on Kobol. When she told him that the ability to commit murder, to go through with it, made him a man. Made him human, was the prime art of humanity. Baltar, incidentally, didn't believe her then (and pointed out the Cylons did plenty of effective killing on their own). What does make a difference between humans and Cylons is that humans do second guess themselves. That they have doubts. That they rethink their decisions, that they do consider they might be wrong about things, and that they can make alternate choices, which is what Adama did, and even Cain, who lost so much of her humanity.

No Cylon, so far, was able to do this other than in regards to individual attachments. I've seen people angry about Sharon's words to Adama - she's the "good" Cylon, the one who defected, so she's not supposed to justify genocide. Except that this is what makes Caprica Sharon a more interesting character to me than the Bond Girl I saw her as in the last season (i.e. the girl on the villain's side who falls in love with the hero and changes sides after some great sex, adopting his values without hesitation). She broke with the other Cylons (probably), but not because she ever doubted the rightness of their goals; she did it because of her attachment to Helo and to her unborn child. This makes Sharon as much an ideologue as the other Cylons; the chilling thing about the Cylons isn't that they're artificial lin origin, or that they hate humans - which I'm inclined to agree with with Sharon, they don't - it's that they justify their genocide in the way all genocides have been justified in human history. The other side is not worthy to live; the ideology/religion one believes in demands their extinction. Nothing personal. That is the true horror.

Now here's the kicker: I think it is possible that we get to see a Cylon change and do what so far only humans have been able to do on this show, make that leap to second-guess, to doubt, to see the other side, the opponent, as equally worthy to live. But not Boomer. Not the "good" Cylon, but the "bad" one, or rather, a version of her. Because the Cylon who has shown signs of doubting, of changing not because of love to a human but because of her own experience, the only Cylon we saw killing a human not for those horrible impersonal ideological reasons but for very personal, dare I say "human" reasons indeed? Is the Six model called Gina. Gina trying to die, to truly die, Gina answering Baltar's question with "God can forgive everything" when the Six in his head says "God won't forgive this" is going against the established Cylon ideology/religion in a way Caprica Boomer never did. (Galactica Boomer, when she tried to kill herself in Kobol's Last Gleaming, maybe, but that Sharon did not know who she was.)

More about Gina and Baltar in a moment, but back to the humans. Now whether Adama was right in calling Kara back at the last moment is actually another question, independent from Cain doing the same thing, unbeknowest to him. Say Gina hadn't killed Cain; then the impasse they were at would still be standing, and I still wouldn't have trusted Cain with the fleet any more than Roslin did (yes, Kara was wrong about that as well, imo). But Adama could have gone the riskier road of charging Cain with war crimes, Admiral or not, and deposing her of command. Because Cain was a war criminal. Even if the Cylons don't have the legal status of sentient beings in the Colonial fleet and thus Cain ordering/sanctioning the torture and gang rape of Gina for months (or however long since Gina's identity as a Six model was discovered) does not make her condemmable under the current Colonial law, her order to shoot those civilians in order to press gang the others does. I'm not saying a trial against Cain wouldn't have been far more difficult and impractical than taking her out via assassination would have been, but the option was there.

Which brings me to Lee. Who breaks when Adama tells him Roslin suggested the assassination. I'm reminded of his words in Bastille Day: "And if we don't have the law, then you're not the Commander, you're not the President, and I don't owe either of you a thing." Lee might not always agree with Roslin, despite supporting her when his father tried his military coup, but she was the respresentative of the law to him, of, in lack of a better term, civilisation, in a way his father was not. Adama ordering Kara to murder someone on his behalf was a shock already; but he has disagreed, and gone up against his father before for the sake of a higher principle. Laura Roslin, though, the other authority in his life, being the ultimately behind this takes away any possibility of doing what he did in the season 1 finale and in the first half of season 2. Because changing sides and supporting Cain isn't an option, either. I don't think either Kara or Lee know what Fisk told Tigh about the civilians. But they do know Cain's reaction to Helo and Tyrol. And there you have again a crucial difference between them; Kara, for all her surface rebellliousness, does believe in the military, and is a part of the military in a way Lee just isn't. She might not like Cain's decision, especially since Helo and Tyrol are her friends, but she does appear to think Cain is within her rights there. Whereas Lee doesn't see it that way. He can't just accept this. And with no "right" side to support, and no hope of upholding the law, no matter who wins, he gives up. Hence letting himself die (it's not active enough for a suicide attempt), and the marked lack of enthusiasm about being saved. By doing this, of course, he goes against what he told Kara in the beginning, that they needed to trust each other and have each other's back. He made that choice of not calling for help, and in so doing, turned his back on her as well. He let her go to her likely rendezvous with death alone. And he'll have to live with that now.

Kara, meanwhile, has her most interesting scenes since Scattered in these last two eps if you ask me. Indeed I haven't been as intrigued by a Kara subplot since she tortured Leoben in Flesh and Bone (another thing Adama asked her to and which was ultimately due to a Roslin idea). Kara's willingness to go through with the assassination despite her increasing sympathy for Cain, that increasing sympathy for Cain and bonding with her and her final eulogy all make Kara interesting and flawed in a way I didn't see her as since then. Because Cain is Kara's personal dark mirror, and by giving his order and rescinding it (and how messed up is that the rescinding it contributes, too), Adama might have inadvertendly pushed her in that direction more than a living Cain could ever have done.

Which brings me to the woman herself, Admiral Cain. Who apparantly is either seen as written too evil or as written too evil and then suddenly too human in the last part. It didn't come across that way to me. I do think Cain was a monster, but not in the way, say, post-Waltz Dukat was written as one, and her monstrousness is not contradicted by her bodybag speech to Kara or her decision not to take out Adama after all. Cain became a monster both because of what happened to her - along with the rest of humanity - and the way she chose to respond to that. Each of her decisions is an enlarged version of a decision one of our heroes made, but pushed to the ultimate consequence and stripped of any second guessing. (Except the last one, of course.) She chose to believe that she could only kill and defeat the Cylons by giving up everything the humans held dear; she became that perfect killer the Six in Baltar's head said humans are. Looking at war criminals everywhere, in my own country as well as others, I find her very recognizable. They end up as monsters, but that doesn't stop them from being human; it would be far easier for us if it did.

Cain being killed by Gina is a bit like that Lilah-kills-Billy-so-Cordy-doesn't-have-to thing I feared, and isn't, because though in real life I'm against the death penality, in terms of storytelling there was more poetic justice in Gina killing Cain than if Kara had done it. Cain was the one ultimately responsible for what was done to Gina, and that was, to quote Cottle about what Thorne attempted to do to Sharon, unforgivable.

(Let me clarify something: it is so independently from what Sharon and Gina did. I don't care whether Gina personally killed half of Cain's crew or, like Baltar's original Six used Baltar, used Cain as a crucial instrument for genocide; abusing her via torture and rape still is a crime. If you consider torture and rape only a crime when it's done to someone you consider "innocent", you give up on morality altogether.)

Also, round of applause for the actual death scene, please, and both actresses. All too often, villains are made look "weak" by begging for their life to be spared when they die, then attempt to stab the hero in the back, then die anyway by a convenient fall. Or we don't see their deaths as real deaths, causing pain, because that would make them too real. Cain didn't beg, but still was visibly affected by the realization she would die. Conversely, Gina was given all the motivation in the world. And didn't do it because of anything that had to do with Cylon attitude towards humans, like I said. She did it because this was the woman responsible for her torture and rape, and she didn't play any games (compare this to the way Caprica Six toyed with Starbuck in Kobol's Last Gleaming), she just did it. In that sense, and in that sense only, Six' definition of the ability to kill as a human quality might fit.

Which brings me at last to Baltar and Six, and just what Gaius Baltar does here. I've seen various interpretations - that by using Six' memory, he wants to trigger something in Gina, that he's doing it to transfer Six to Gina in some way; that it's a rejection of Six in some way in favour of Gina is undisputed. All of which might be true, and here's my additional suggestion: it all depends on just what Six is, and what Baltar thinks that she is. When she plays her mindgame with him in Home, she suggests to him that his original interpretation, that she's the manifestation of a psychotic break in him, is true. (Now there are only two arguments against that, but they're good ones - Six' awareness of a human/Cylon hybrid child on the way, which Baltar couldn't have known, and the whole Shelley Godfrey thing.) That she's simply a part of his own subconscious. IMO, what he does in Resurrection Ship II is to choose to treat her as such. By reciting the memory she told him about as his own, he stops seeing Six as a seperate person and makes her a part of himself. Which a lot of things have been pointing towards this season - the fact that Baltar on Kobol is no longer able to retreat in his fantasy world without looking like the real life mess he is, the tone of their conversations, Baltar using Six-like tactics on Tyrol and Sharon without seeing her even once. Simultanously, he chooses to transfer whatever he feels for Six as a seperate person to Gina, who is and isn't Six. She's not a fantasy woman offering comfort, sexuality, teasing and threats alternatingly, an unblemished being literary from another world, she's as broken and battered as any of the humans around him. No, she can't give him what "his" Six gives him. But that's exactly the point. Baltar hasn't been the one who gives in a relationship before, but so far, he's now, and that standard redemption thing simultanously makes him ever more dangerous. Breaking Gina out and getting her to change her focus of aggression from self-loathing and the wish to die to encouraging her to take her revenge instead (and I don't think Baltar cared whether Gina would take out Cain or every single crew member on the Pegasus who ever raped her - safe the already deceased rapist in chief, Thorne - or all of them) is Baltar finally choosing a side otherthan his own.

It's not the Cylon side, either. (He had no problems with the Resurrection Ship getting blown up.) So far, I see him and Gina as a third party. Can't wait to find out where the series will take them...

Comments

[harriet-spy.livejournal.com]

I can see I would be out of step with this fandom if I were in it, because (admittedly, based solely on the previous episode and questioning my viewing companion about context) I think it would be wildly irresponsible and immoral to let a senior military officer continue to needlessly slaughter civilians and fellow-officers unchecked. Not vice versa.

In a "normal" situation, there would be effective civilian authority over such a military officer to--at least ideally--review Cain's actions and remove her from authority when necessary. A US military officer who committed multiple murders under the color of her authority would spend the rest of her life in a military prison. I believe that in theory, in the US, she would even be liable for the death penalty, although in practice the odds of someone that highly-ranked being sentenced to death are almost nil.

This is not a normal situation. The law cannot deal with the situation as it usually would, because the law is barely operating. It's obvious that Roslin's authority over Cain is tenuous at best and would not stretch to forcing her to submit herself to trial. The mechanism of bloodless removal of a officer guilty of war crimes and clearly up for more doesn't exist. The principle--that such an officer must be removed, that to allow such an officer to continue to use military resources to commit her crimes would itself be criminal--does not go away. The use of force, as endorsed by the civilian authority, is the only remaining option. Killing Cain would not be the destruction of the rule of law; it's the only means of maintaining it. The use of lethal force is hardly unknown in law enforcement, either civilian or military. It's not anything one should be happy about, or glad to resort to, but in the end, the rule of law can only be built on the willingness to use violence if necessary to preserve that rule. It's not all that is required, but without that, the law won't last very long.

It's really convenient that someone else killed Cain so that Adama and Roslin won't have to bear any guilt for Cain's subsequent promotion of rape, murder of fellow-officers, and deliberate and unnecessary killing of innocent civilians, but it pretty much cripples any pretensions the show might have, for me, of asking the hard questions or tolerating moral ambiguity, for which I've so often heard it praised. *shrugs* Maybe it did it better earlier.

[bluebanrigh.livejournal.com]

Definitely like your insights into Gina. I never did make the connection that this was the first personal murder for the cylons.

Kudos, it was a good read.

[lucie-p.livejournal.com]

A very nice review. I fully agree on your view of Lee's action and reaction and it was nice to see someone who did not put Cain into the "plain evil" drawer.

Your thoughts about Gina and clyons and morality in general were interesting to read. I will make sure to return after the next episode and read what you have to say about it.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

As usual, you're helping this make more sense than I could have done on my own . . .

I didn't like the episode, mostly b/c I think it was structurally a mess. I liked the first 2 in the series a lot, and the first couple segments of this one were about as tense as I've been watching television in a very long time -- I turned to erinpoetchica during the broadcast and said I didn't remember being this tense since watching "Not Fade Away" and not knowing what would happen. Then I could understand Adama changing his mind, but I couldn't figure out why Cain did, so that felt like copout one; then the whole Gina-as-Lilah-in-Billy thing which worked better than it could have, b/c Gina did have a legitimate grievance (to put it mildly), cop-out number 2 (though at least I think Laura knows it, as the smily "thank god you didn't have to do it" is kind of chilling since it's basically "I'm glad someone else took her out"); then Helo and Chief inexplicably freed, copout number 3 (though now it occurs to me as obvious that now-Admiral Adama ordered the release, so that makes more sense, though I still would have liked to see some indication to that effect rather than, "yay, the bitch is dead, the boys are free!)

Like you, I find Cain believable and I like what you say about how she fits into the Cylon view of humans. Still, I wanted the writing to give us a little more -- how does she justify what she does, or does she bother to justify it? The body-bag scene felt a bit pat and simply couldn't have explained her actions to the civilians, so I can't take it as anything other than rhetoric.

Still, I probably would have been able to deal with the whole episode if not for the absurdity of the Apollo-lost-in-space plot. Though I can see his realization about Laura eventually leading to despair, but it was way too fast for me, and I wanted him to at least try to get answers from her directly. He just seemed to give up way too easily for me, and removing him from the action for the climax of the ep seemed like a weird move; also the plot seemed like a blatant attempt to manufacture tension where artificial tension was hardly needed.

The Baltar/Six scenes, since "Home," are quickly becoming my favorite thing
on the show. I like the idea that Gina is the Cylon who will change her mind, but I also wondered while watching if brain-Six could be manipulating Gaius by acting so pissed off and maybe in some sense he's playing into her hands. Or, maybe i need to learn to give Gaius some credit.

So. . .where do you think Gina went? smashsc is voting for Zarek which of course I would love a lot, but I'm not sure I see Baltar allying himself there.

[solarbird]

I think what happened with Cain is pretty simple. I think she just fought a battle against the actual enemy with someone who is a political foe but clearly, in the frame of what just happened, not the actual enemy.

They just won a massive battle on the same side against the enemy she's been unable to strike back against since her entire nation was utterly destroyed. You have to think that that'd snap pretty much anybody a little bit back to reality.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

though at least I think Laura knows it, as the smily "thank god you didn't have to do it" is kind of chilling since it's basically "I'm glad someone else took her out"

Oh, definitely. I don't think Laura ever changed her mind on the subject, and maybe Adama didn't even tell her he had changed his mind, either, just that Cain got killed by the escaped Cylon prisoner in the aftermath of the victory.


Re: Cain's self-justification for what she did to the civilians - have you read queenofthorn's Cain story? That worked for me. But I don't see how we could have gotten an explicit self explanation on the show, because Cain would have been incredibly dumb to talk to Starbuck about this ("say, I'm not sure whether you heard about those civilian ships we had") when trying to win her over, and Kara was the one who got to see her, for lack of a better term, not-hostile side. I don't see why Cain would talk with Fisk about it, either; they probalby never referenced the civilians again. Adama or Roslin wouldn't ask her why because they had already made up their minds to kill her, so, short of a Macbeth monologue in front of the mirror...

On the other hand, I do agree, Lee at least attempting to talk to Laura would have made sense. *mourns for lack of scenes between them since Home*

Where Gina went: on the one hand, Zarek has the connections to hide someone, on the other, I don't see him consciously help a Cylon, and Baltar couldn't have passed her off as anything else, not if Shelley Godfrey's likeness along with those of the other recognized Cylon models were passed around the fleet, as we saw in some season 1 eps they were. Hiding Roslin when it's Roslin versus the military is one thing - this is pragmatic and makes Zarek look good, no matter who wins, because it means the President has chosen to ally herself with him which gives him some political cred but does not make him responsible for any of her religious actions - he was careful to always let Roslin make those announcements, and before when the Quorum visited, he said to the representative from Geminon, you know the scriptures, what do you think?, thus making her the one to proclaim Laura a prophet, he never did.

But to aid a Cylon - one of the enemy who wiped out the families of everyone in the fleet - would not win him anything. So, I don't see how Baltar could sell that to him, and that's assuming Gaius would be willing to go for a Zarek alliance to begin with, which as you say isn't quite sure, either.

However, it might be more likely soon, because Laura is feeling death very near now, and I don't think she ever intended Baltar to actually succeed her, so she'll try to get rid of him before she dies. And then I could see Gaius and Tom discovering mutual interests.

Which totally doesn't answer where Baltar is hiding Gina, I know. But I really have no idea.

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

Where Gina went: on the one hand, Zarek has the connections to hide someone, on the other, I don't see him consciously help a Cylon,

the only thing I can think of in favor of it is the deleted scene from Home 2 where Zarek and Meier are musing about why is everybody picking on Boomer & Helo? I think Z is personally a lot more wrapped up in the human rivalries than the fight against the Cylons -- but still, he's a smart enough politician to realize that's not going to be a popular position.

re: Cain-justification, perhaps if somebody had found out and confronted her with it? I don't really know what I would have wanted, I just hated the feeling that there was more to do with the on-ship plot and time being wasted on the Lee-rescue. I'll check out the story you mentioned, Cain-fic is definitely interesting to me --

[kimbari.livejournal.com]

I didn't read a single thing I disagreed with, which was a relief. LOL Thanks for putting into words what I couldn't. :)

[selenak.livejournal.com]

You're welcome.*g* Also, icon love!

[violaswamp.livejournal.com]

Because the Cylon who has shown signs of doubting, of changing not because of love to a human but because of her own experience, the only Cylon we saw killing a human not for those horrible impersonal ideological reasons but for very personal, dare I say "human" reasons indeed? Is the Six model called Gina.

Yes. Also, Cain's interaction with Gina is another mark in favor of her personhood, perversely, because Cain's abuse of Gina is so clearly personal. If Gina's really just a machine, then one has to ask, why is Cain getting so emotional and angry at a mere toaster?

I don't think a war crimes tribunal would have been an option, simply because Cain would not have allowed it to take place. Maybe in law she doesn't have the authority to stop it, but she certainly has the sheer brute power to stop it (or at least put up a huge fight and end up dying in it and taking others with her as well).

I'm okay with Gina killing Cain because it looks like Starbuck is going to do some dark things as a result of it. So it's not a way of avoiding corruption of Starbuck, the way Lilah killing Billy was a way of avoiding corruption of Cordy. It's a step on the road to corrupting her, assuming I'm right. And I like it because of the irony--Adama doesn't order Starbuck to kill Cain because he wants to maintain moral purity, but this will ultimately result in a greater loss of moral purity for Starbuck.

[selenak.livejournal.com]

Also, Cain's interaction with Gina is another mark in favor of her personhood, perversely, because Cain's abuse of Gina is so clearly personal. If Gina's really just a machine, then one has to ask, why is Cain getting so emotional and angry at a mere toaster?

Yes, exactly. If Gina is just a machine fulfilling a programming, then she can't have betrayed anyone. Roslin putting Leoben out of the airlock and intending to do the same to Sharon before Sharon proved useful - that was cold (and pragmatic) and treating them as machines, not sentient beings. What Cain and her crew did... you know, when Fisk said "you can't rape a machine", the entire perverse paradox was right there. Because of course he's aware this was rape, and not his men, and possibly himself performing some strange masturbartory action with a toaster, but if he admits that, whatever self justifications he used otherwise fall away. The fate of the civilians, of the previous X0 - those are all actions he can blame on Cain. But rape is something you can't just be ordered to do, you have to want to do it on some level.

Corruption of Starbuck: yes, I think so, too. Her final speech definitely points in that direction. Plus to use another Angel parallel - Gunn thought that by killing Seidel and preventing Fred from killing him he saved for from corruption, but instead it destroyed their relationship. (Plus Fred was very aware "we" not "he" killed Professor Seidel.)

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

(Plus Fred was very aware "we" not "he" killed Professor Seidel.)

Legally and morally, yes, and I just have to be a lawyer and point out that Wesley is clearly an accessory before the fact, which by law (if not always in practice) is treated just the same as if you pulled the trigger. I always thought that Gunn's motive was more of a putting-them-both-in-it-together than of keeping her pure; and ironically, this puts him in with with Wes as well!

[kiaforrest.livejournal.com]

Baltar has repeatedly said: "I don't take sides" - twice that I can remember. I agree that his choice to set Gina free is a continuation of this. Baltar's side is the one he lives and plans to continue to live. I still enjoy that we aren't Totally Sure about Six. :grin:

Your point about Lee 'giving up' - allowing death to take him is well made. Emotional/ Spiritual exhaustion coupled with oxygen deprivation could certainly enhance his more passive/ aggressive core. Like he cut himself off from his father for so many years in Silence - he seemed to embrace the opportunity presented to him in that moment. It's sad that he hasn't learned how to stomp and shout and blow away his own cobwebs so he can let go of the fact humanity is peopled with Flawed Beings. This isn't tragedy, it IS. NO one, including himself will ever meet those standards of ideals he was clinging to. Doesn't mean we don't strive for the ideals, only that we stop expecting a person of flesh to embody them "for us" (or for Lee in his case). Choosing to punish himself and others for this fact of life, even to the point of ultimate silence is gotta be hard on the heart.

Adama might have inadvertendly pushed her in that direction more than a living Cain could ever have done.
I think this is very true. That Kara struggles against second guessing - her own conflicts - and had before her a person who Appeared never to have done this and has now been Martyred will probably have a Big Impact on Kara.

Groovy commentary - thanks for sharing!

[sxyblkmn.livejournal.com]

great commentary!

[sabaceanbabe.livejournal.com]

I really like your assessment of Sharon vs. Gina and their motivations. There's a resonance there that's lacking in some of the other reviews I've read. :)