BSG 2.16, Sacrifice
Feb. 12th, 2006 07:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakMy filial project of cheering my depressed parent up via taking him skiing succeeded, although Sunday really isn't the best day - too many weekend skiers coming from the city, like yours truly. But the weather was splendid, and so was the snow. More skiing tomorrow, hopefully less crowded, and then he'll drive back to Bamberg and I'll be on the road, working.
Meanwhile, BSG 2.16, Sacrifice.
First thought: didn't we do the hostage episode already, with Bastille Day, and better? Second thought: no, because this is actually different. Here, everything that can go wrong in a hostage situation does go wrong and nobody saves the day.
This being said, Sesha still suffered from not being - I'm not saying Zarek, because that's an unfair comparison, their goals being diametrically opposite - but not being someone like the hostage takers in the DS9 two parter Past Present. They were one shot characters, too, and highly memorable nonetheless.
Now, on to our regular gang: Ave atque vale, Billy. You were sweet, and kind, and basically Lennier without the crush on your boss, and me being me, I love BSG for killing you off instead of Ellen Tigh whom a sizable portion of the audience (not me!) actually wants to die. More about Ellen in a moment. Anyway, schooled by the Jossverse, I knew Billy was doomed the moment he proposed within a minute of having talked at a meeting between Roslin and Adama out of his own initiative and without backing down. If there was a shining knight in white armor on this show, 'twas Billy who pushed all his personal disappointment back and was there for Dee and wounded Lee Adama the moment things got serious. Thereby showing more maturity than either Lee in Epiphanies and Black Market or Kara in this episode (but not the last one).
Meanwhile, I take it poor Dee is now the Scarlet Woman of BSG fandom. Mind you, I thought her flirtation with Lee was better set up than the Kara/Anders thing - it started as early as her checking him out in ep 3 or 4 of the season - but still could have been written better going from a bit of UST to "hm, should we?" in the last few episodes. That she didn't break off things with Billy until he proposed didn't come across as Dee being calculating and keeping her options open to me as much as Dee being confused. She had feelings for Billy, she started to be more and more attracted to Lee, and it wasn't until the proposal she realized just how serious this was for Billy, and that she did not love him.
As if addressing the complaints that Starbuck is unrealistically good at too many things and gets used in too many situations (a complaint that started, if I recall correctly, when Adama had Kara lead the marines to free the hostages in Bastille Day), here we see her try to pull off one of her crazy stunts and, forgive the horrid pun, it misfires dreadfully. In the tradition of iffy continuity these last few episodes, it would have made more sense to let her do this before, not after Scar, but I guess after Sacrifice trying to have sex with Lee just to get distracted from pain is out of the question, so that might be a reason for this order. Katee Sackhoff is very good conveying Kara's utter shock and breakdown.
I was glad to see Ellen again, who I must admit I missed since Home. Sue me, but I love Ellen Tigh in her selfish amoraleness and with her Edward Albee relationship with her husband. The dialogue with Lee was funny and sharp and made me wish they had rewritten the episode so that instead of getting shot, thus guilt-tripping Kara and setting up Billy for death, Lee would have been forced to work with Ellen as his only ally to save the day throughout (which I hoped they were going for when Lee dragged her in the bathroom). Best Odd Couple combination ever. But no, this wasn't the comedy episode, it was tragedy time, and thus, too little Ellen.
Tigh's confrontation with Adama over Sharon, and Adama's "would you tell me?" scene with Sharon were fab. But then, we're all suckers for scenes that support our own theories, and one thing I've liked about Sharon-C this season as opposed to last season when she was too much of a Bond girl for me was her feelings for Helo and the child do not equate her turning her back on Cylon beliefs for her. As I found her coziness with Kara last ep wrong for continuity reasons (coming after the almost abortion), her firm "No" here was greeted with a cheer by this viewer. Doesn't mean, btw, that I think Sharon is secretly plotting humanity's doom. Just that she has a brain, and she knows her intel is what's keeping her alive (once the humans have the feeling they know all the important stuff, she's useless), and she has no reason to love humanity in general (now less than ever), whereas her feelings about her own people have to be mixed.
Sharon-G makes another post mortem appearance, and I have to admit that though I found Adama's idea clever, the sight of her corpse being desecrated made me flinch. Which is silly (dead is dead, and she didn't get any deader from Sesha firing), but Sharon-G had a pathos for me, in her desperation and her doomed fight against her programming and her death, that never stops to work.
Adama watching her corpse again: creepy in the best way. Adama and dead Cylons scenes are only bettered by Adama and living Cylons scenes.
(Though the ultimate dead body and living person scene in this episode belongs to scene stealer Mary MacDonnell, as Laura Roslin grieves over Billy.)
And speaking of living Cylons, this was the second episode with no Baltar and no Six or Gina. Damm it, I miss them! What with Gina being on Cloud Nine, too. I guess my ideal version of this episode wouldn't have just prolonged the Lee/Ellen team-up but would have made Gina secretely contacted by Baltar and made her, of all the people, instrumental in rescuing the hostages. Given what Sesha said about Cylon infiltration, that would have been a fitting irony, too.
Meanwhile, BSG 2.16, Sacrifice.
First thought: didn't we do the hostage episode already, with Bastille Day, and better? Second thought: no, because this is actually different. Here, everything that can go wrong in a hostage situation does go wrong and nobody saves the day.
This being said, Sesha still suffered from not being - I'm not saying Zarek, because that's an unfair comparison, their goals being diametrically opposite - but not being someone like the hostage takers in the DS9 two parter Past Present. They were one shot characters, too, and highly memorable nonetheless.
Now, on to our regular gang: Ave atque vale, Billy. You were sweet, and kind, and basically Lennier without the crush on your boss, and me being me, I love BSG for killing you off instead of Ellen Tigh whom a sizable portion of the audience (not me!) actually wants to die. More about Ellen in a moment. Anyway, schooled by the Jossverse, I knew Billy was doomed the moment he proposed within a minute of having talked at a meeting between Roslin and Adama out of his own initiative and without backing down. If there was a shining knight in white armor on this show, 'twas Billy who pushed all his personal disappointment back and was there for Dee and wounded Lee Adama the moment things got serious. Thereby showing more maturity than either Lee in Epiphanies and Black Market or Kara in this episode (but not the last one).
Meanwhile, I take it poor Dee is now the Scarlet Woman of BSG fandom. Mind you, I thought her flirtation with Lee was better set up than the Kara/Anders thing - it started as early as her checking him out in ep 3 or 4 of the season - but still could have been written better going from a bit of UST to "hm, should we?" in the last few episodes. That she didn't break off things with Billy until he proposed didn't come across as Dee being calculating and keeping her options open to me as much as Dee being confused. She had feelings for Billy, she started to be more and more attracted to Lee, and it wasn't until the proposal she realized just how serious this was for Billy, and that she did not love him.
As if addressing the complaints that Starbuck is unrealistically good at too many things and gets used in too many situations (a complaint that started, if I recall correctly, when Adama had Kara lead the marines to free the hostages in Bastille Day), here we see her try to pull off one of her crazy stunts and, forgive the horrid pun, it misfires dreadfully. In the tradition of iffy continuity these last few episodes, it would have made more sense to let her do this before, not after Scar, but I guess after Sacrifice trying to have sex with Lee just to get distracted from pain is out of the question, so that might be a reason for this order. Katee Sackhoff is very good conveying Kara's utter shock and breakdown.
I was glad to see Ellen again, who I must admit I missed since Home. Sue me, but I love Ellen Tigh in her selfish amoraleness and with her Edward Albee relationship with her husband. The dialogue with Lee was funny and sharp and made me wish they had rewritten the episode so that instead of getting shot, thus guilt-tripping Kara and setting up Billy for death, Lee would have been forced to work with Ellen as his only ally to save the day throughout (which I hoped they were going for when Lee dragged her in the bathroom). Best Odd Couple combination ever. But no, this wasn't the comedy episode, it was tragedy time, and thus, too little Ellen.
Tigh's confrontation with Adama over Sharon, and Adama's "would you tell me?" scene with Sharon were fab. But then, we're all suckers for scenes that support our own theories, and one thing I've liked about Sharon-C this season as opposed to last season when she was too much of a Bond girl for me was her feelings for Helo and the child do not equate her turning her back on Cylon beliefs for her. As I found her coziness with Kara last ep wrong for continuity reasons (coming after the almost abortion), her firm "No" here was greeted with a cheer by this viewer. Doesn't mean, btw, that I think Sharon is secretly plotting humanity's doom. Just that she has a brain, and she knows her intel is what's keeping her alive (once the humans have the feeling they know all the important stuff, she's useless), and she has no reason to love humanity in general (now less than ever), whereas her feelings about her own people have to be mixed.
Sharon-G makes another post mortem appearance, and I have to admit that though I found Adama's idea clever, the sight of her corpse being desecrated made me flinch. Which is silly (dead is dead, and she didn't get any deader from Sesha firing), but Sharon-G had a pathos for me, in her desperation and her doomed fight against her programming and her death, that never stops to work.
Adama watching her corpse again: creepy in the best way. Adama and dead Cylons scenes are only bettered by Adama and living Cylons scenes.
(Though the ultimate dead body and living person scene in this episode belongs to scene stealer Mary MacDonnell, as Laura Roslin grieves over Billy.)
And speaking of living Cylons, this was the second episode with no Baltar and no Six or Gina. Damm it, I miss them! What with Gina being on Cloud Nine, too. I guess my ideal version of this episode wouldn't have just prolonged the Lee/Ellen team-up but would have made Gina secretely contacted by Baltar and made her, of all the people, instrumental in rescuing the hostages. Given what Sesha said about Cylon infiltration, that would have been a fitting irony, too.
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no subject
Date: 2006-02-12 07:19 pm (UTC)I enjoyed Sacrifice and thought it a pretty solid ep, but your ideas (Lee working with Ellen and Gina being their final savior) would have pushed it into brilliiance, as far as I'm concerned.
And I loved the scene between Sharon and Adama. It worked on so many levels and no, it does NOT equate in any way to Sharon playing him or him losing sight of his priorities or any of the other myriad criticisms I've seen of the two of them in fandom the past couple of days.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. :)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-13 04:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-12 08:03 pm (UTC)Another vote for Billy death instead of Ellen. Billy characters are a dime a dozen, even though I liked him; Ellen is a marvellous and highly unique character (not the skanky part, but the part where she actually loves Tigh and all that other good stuff!)
I take it poor Dee is now the Scarlet Woman of BSG fandom
Oh yes! It makes me more in favor of her than ever, because I'm contrary :P
comparisons to Zarek are always unfair. . .
Date: 2006-02-12 08:22 pm (UTC)Another vote for Billy death instead of Ellen. Billy characters are a dime a dozen, even though I liked him
Except that Billy was one of the few civilian characters in the mix, and also a confidante to Roslin -- I'm wondering if the loss of him is going to mean a return to more Roslin - Apollo interaction, which could be good.
I was semi-spoiled on this ep, so I pretty much wrote it off as "the one where they kill Billy"; Lee getting shot (and the meta-comment on the downside of an "all guns blazing" approach) was the one thing that really surprised me in this ep, and it was a good kind of surprise. Alas, Kara. Since last week we established that she can only connect emotionally to the dead, maybe half-killing him takes her half there? That said, I'm now highly amused by the AU "Ellen & Lee save the day" scenario.
Dee/Apollo -- it could all make sense; I just wish we'd seen a little more of what their relationship is like and less in the vein of "hanging a neon sign that says LEE'S NEW LOVE INTEREST" around her neck. For that matter, if we'd seen more of Dee/Billy than OMG CUTE SNUGGLING than her reservations about the relationship would have more context.
Despite all the nitpicks, I thought this was a decent episode with some lovely scenes -- Roslin with Billy at the end stealing the show.
Re: comparisons to Zarek are always unfair. . .
Date: 2006-02-12 08:27 pm (UTC)I feel like last week and the week before it have like, no bearing at all on the arc. I mean, we have known for a long time that Kara thinks she kills the people who love her - and this was just further proof of that. She really didn't need to nearly sleep with Lee to recognize this - and I think some of her shock and horror could also be explained by her knowledge that at one point Lee actually DID want to die and now she's gone a ways toward helping him out, which cannot have ever been her intent. Poor Kara!
I agree that the Dee/Apollo relationship is awfully amorphous and undeveloped - but then I think the Anders-is-Kara's-true-love thing kind of came out of nowhere as well. We're all having to blink like mad to get these stories to make sense, which is, again, I think some bad, bad writing. Or else a sign that the writers just don't care about THESE relationships at all so they won't take the trouble to develop them.
And like you, despite some nitpicks, this was actually the first episode in a very long time that I've enjoyed without massive, massive reservations.
Re: comparisons to Zarek are always unfair. . .
Date: 2006-02-12 08:41 pm (UTC)The Anders flashbacks were a little anvilicious, admittedly, but I thought her attitude in "Scar" was consistent with the Caprica eps. And also consistent with her habit of idealizing the guy who's not there (Zak in the early shows, Lee when she's with Baltar, now Anders when she has the chance to be with Lee). Clumsy execution, but characterwise it made sense to me.
My problem with Dee/Apollo so far is that I have absolutely no idea how he sees the relationship. We've gotten just enough from Dee's POV that I could buy her motives, but I have no idea what his are. I'm not sure we know enough about how Lee functions in a relationship to figure out what he could possibly be thinking.
no subject
Date: 2006-02-13 05:05 am (UTC)*am thinking of writing fanfic wherein Ellen gets some extra cash by writing Dear Abby advice columms for the Fleet media, only her advice would be something along the lines of "Dear Pilot-in-Distress, get over yourself, and while you're at it, get over here if you really want guilt free casual sex"...
no subject
Date: 2006-02-13 08:17 pm (UTC)Hee! I just want an Ellen icon that says One True Skanky Ho ;) Because she is and I LOVE HER!