Battlestar Galactica 4.15
Feb. 14th, 2009 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakLet me make a prediction: people who are watching BSG for the pilots, and/or the space battles, and/or Roslin/Adama, and/or Roslin & politics are going to dislike this one, as it is (nearly) all Cylons, all the time, much as Downloaded was. It's basically Book of Genesis: Cylon Version. I loved it. Not I don't love many of the other shows BSG consists of as well, but there is something about the entire Cylon storyline from the miniseries onwards that just speaks to me, and though I'm reasonably sure back then none of what this episode reveals was a glimmer of a thought in the writing staff's head, this is the best kind of retcon: the one which enhances and adds depth and manages to make sense out of an incredibly lot.
The male Cylon models have never interested me as much as the female ones - well, of the seven, at any rate - which is due to the writing. Leoben aside, the writing never gave them much depth. (What would one base Doral or Simon fanfiction on, huh?) Cavil was a good villain, in a mixture of suitable repulsiveness and a dry wit (with his quote marks whenever he said "God"), but so black in black he wasn't that interesting, either. But lo and behold, this episode took some established traits - the "we're machines, and this wanting to be like humans is just ridiculous" insistence, his extreme aversion against any attempt to find out who the Final Five wer, making Boomer his "pet Eight", making Ellen prostitute herself on New Caprica in exchange for Tigh's freedom and life - and put them in a context where without making him better they made him much more interesting. Because here Cavil - "John" - is Lucifer to Ellen's God, raging about his creation at her hands, about being sidelined in favour of the younger creations, about being imperfect but with just enough awareness to know he could be more. He's Cain to humanity's Abel. The need to control and humiliate, which we've seen in his interactions with Ellen, with D'Anna, with Natalie and with Boomer is part all this vengeful creature-against-creator rage, and making it against a mother creator instead of a father creator was a great twist.
(That, and what we now know about Ellen and Cavil takes the oedipal concept on a new level. So she created him to look like her father and gave him her father's name, while he used her blocked memories state to blackmail her for sex. "The jealous little boy I made" indeed.)
It hooks into stories like Frankenstein, which Mary Shelley prefaced with a Milton quote from Paradise Lost - " Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/ To mould me man? Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me? ". Of course, equally true of Cavil is another quote Mary Shelley uses in her novel - “Hell is the burning ignorance of the eternally self-absorbed soul". Ellen's counter argument, when Boomer asks her, is first the Augustinian one (as to why God lets evil exist and created us imperfectly) - she gave her creations free will, and thus every choice they make is their own - and then something echoeing Paradise Lost again, where Satan wonders whether God would take him back, whether he could accept God's forgiveness if God did, and comes to the conclusion that no, he couldn't. Ellen while refusing to give Cavil what he wants is offering forgiveness, if he starts to make new choices, but he's not able to accept it. Meanwhile, the character whom writing screwed over as much as Cally is watching. I mean, of course, Sharon "Boomer" Valerii", who arguably had her last good character scene in Precipe (the meeting with Cally in the cell) and since them a series of ever more bewildering cameos with all the character development happening off screen, in deleted scenes, or had to be guessed. Was she bitter and decided to become more Cylon than Cylons because Athena basically took her place on Galactica, so even if she had wanted to go back, she couldn't have? We don't know. Did Caprica siding with Athena make her choose Cavil later? We were never given any scenes. It was all very frustrating. She didn't say that much in this episode, either, but what she said was important, as was her being a witness to the Cavil-Ellen arguments. Cavil at the start of the episode tells her that here is someone to blame for the misery of her existence, the contradicting emotions, going from human to machine, all of it. But Boomer is able to do in the end what Cavil can't, and do so unrequested. In a narrative that is kickstarted by a genocidal and paricidal act of revenge - the Cylons attacking the colonies - and where "all of this happened before, all of this will happen again" mostly meant an eye for an eye, the one thing to stop the cycle would be an act of forgiveness between created and creators, parents and children, and not one presumptously requested (a la the "Like us NOW, and if you don't, you're dead" thing on New Caprica or more recently the demand for a seat on the Quorum, but something that is given on a person to person level. Boomer can forgive Ellen as her creator, and she can do something with the free will she has instead of looking for the next stronger person (Tyrol, Caprica, Cavil) for guidance. And she does.
Ellen herself is and isn't a new character, which is a fascinating contrast to the Dylan Four, who basically remained the same after finding out who they were. Cavil claims Ellen is the same, too, but she's really not. There are shared traits with Believing-herself-to-be-Human-Ellen - her sharp tongue, specially when asking Boomer about the swirl in order to humiliate Cavil, her unconditional love for Saul - but Ellen the Cylon with all her memories regained is sovereign in a way that Ellen the human was not, and also into the big picture as opposed to seeing only what was best for Saul and herself. I was a bit disappointed she didn't do more than talk to Cavil and Boomer during her months of glamorized captivity, but then again, Ellen in neither state knew anything about piloting, so she couldn't have escaped through other means but turning Boomer around anyway.
Meanwhile, on the Galactica, the Dylan Four and Kara go through some memory retrieval of their own. The whole Daniel story - the missing model 7 which was killed at birth, as it were - is a retcon to explain why the Sharons are numbered "Eight" instead of "Seven", but as opposed to just throwing that explanation at us, the script uses it to make two character points - one about giving Cavil a Cain experience towards Ellen, who made the mistake of playing favourites and neglecting her firstborn, and one about Kara, who "has to be something", human, Cylon, she just wants to know, and is willing to let Sam risk his life in order to find out, but not anymore once she realizes she's not a Cylon, no matter how much Sam begs her. It's a very Kara mixture of selfishness and love - if she cared more she would have told Cottle to operate right away, if she cared less she'd have let Sam conclude his story even if it meant he died - and now she's her only judge on that; none of the others noticed what she did, and Sam, who'd know, might never talk again.
The ways Tyrol, Tory and Tigh respond to the backstory they're given is very characteristic for each. Tory shrugs off responsibility by declaring that in the end, it's the humans on Kobol's fault, since they created the Thirteenth Tribe, including the Five. Tigh thinks they should shoulder the complete responsibility for the second Cylon/Human war, because they created the Seven. Tyrol, by contrast, sees it another way; by teaching the Centurions of the war forty years ago how to create the Seven they ended said war and gave everyone forty years of life and peace. Just as he sees the creaks and tears in the Galactica but refuses to see doom, fixing on the possibility of helping through the merging with Cylon technology instead. Or, for that matter, how he coped with the last retcon, Hot Dog's biological paternity of Nicky, which he ended up solving by making Hot Dog a co-parent.
Parents: we get the first scene between Tigh and Caprica Six alone since the one where they started to have sex. I'm still not really sold on them as a couple - Caprica falling for Tigh looks like male wish fulfillment to me, while Tigh literally kept projecting Ellen at her which while making the sex believable from his pov didn't convince me he even knows the slightest about Caprica Six as herself. But this time at least he responded to who was in the room - Caprica and that unborn child - and not to who wasn't. I have no idea as to what will happen once Ellen gets back because while Ellen has been through a download Tigh has not, which means he still has only those few fragments of Cylon memories he experienced on Earth and otherwise is firmly locked in his human sense of self. And Tigh as he is doesn't strike me as the type to go for polygamy, though Caprica and Ellen probably would.
Lastly: the one scene with Laura and Lee, though it wasn't about Laura's co-responsibility for the mutiny, was still something that made me happy as a viewer. Laura mourning for the Quorum and stating that no matter how much she hated some members at times, they were quintessential to preserving democracy gave me back whom I had lost during these last four episodes, the Laura Roslin who cares for people not named Adama and knows that what's at stake isn't just the survival of the human race but also the survival of their ideals. Lee pointing out that they should have representatives from ships rather than from Colonies makes sense and gives me hope as well. What I'm in two minds about is Laura making Lee her successor. On the one hand, it's been prepared from Bastille Day in seaosn 1 onwards, despite the bewildering one and a half season interlude where they had no scenes together at all, and it fits with the whole parents have to go so the new generation can try theme the fourth season has. Plus it makes Watsonian sense if you consider Laura is still dying. But. Coming shortly after her decision to move together with Bill Adama, it makes for a storyline where our female leader of four season abdicates as soon as she's found love and puts the young male hope in her place. (Unfortunately, I don't see how this is avoidable, either, because as mentioned Lee has been groomed for the presidency since eons, and no one else has. Of our remaining female Fleet characters, Kara at her best wouldn't do because Kara is a warrior, not a politician, while Tory is a politician but has turned her back on humanity for a good while now (and has killed Cally, but no one except for Tory knows this). I do hope once Ellen and Boomer are back we'll still have a Laura and Ellen rather than Ellen and Lee encounter, because the symbolism - guardian of what's left of humanity and creator of the current Cylon race - is just far better if it's these two. Lee can talk parent issues with Cavil in the meantime.
Of further interest: the Centurions coming up with monotheism on their lonesome and the Five, including Ellen, adopting it when designing the Seven. Which I like; it was one of the aspects of the miniseries that fascinated me, the fact that the machines were the ones to invent monotheism, while the humans went with pantheism.
The male Cylon models have never interested me as much as the female ones - well, of the seven, at any rate - which is due to the writing. Leoben aside, the writing never gave them much depth. (What would one base Doral or Simon fanfiction on, huh?) Cavil was a good villain, in a mixture of suitable repulsiveness and a dry wit (with his quote marks whenever he said "God"), but so black in black he wasn't that interesting, either. But lo and behold, this episode took some established traits - the "we're machines, and this wanting to be like humans is just ridiculous" insistence, his extreme aversion against any attempt to find out who the Final Five wer, making Boomer his "pet Eight", making Ellen prostitute herself on New Caprica in exchange for Tigh's freedom and life - and put them in a context where without making him better they made him much more interesting. Because here Cavil - "John" - is Lucifer to Ellen's God, raging about his creation at her hands, about being sidelined in favour of the younger creations, about being imperfect but with just enough awareness to know he could be more. He's Cain to humanity's Abel. The need to control and humiliate, which we've seen in his interactions with Ellen, with D'Anna, with Natalie and with Boomer is part all this vengeful creature-against-creator rage, and making it against a mother creator instead of a father creator was a great twist.
(That, and what we now know about Ellen and Cavil takes the oedipal concept on a new level. So she created him to look like her father and gave him her father's name, while he used her blocked memories state to blackmail her for sex. "The jealous little boy I made" indeed.)
It hooks into stories like Frankenstein, which Mary Shelley prefaced with a Milton quote from Paradise Lost - " Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay/ To mould me man? Did I solicit thee/From darkness to promote me? ". Of course, equally true of Cavil is another quote Mary Shelley uses in her novel - “Hell is the burning ignorance of the eternally self-absorbed soul". Ellen's counter argument, when Boomer asks her, is first the Augustinian one (as to why God lets evil exist and created us imperfectly) - she gave her creations free will, and thus every choice they make is their own - and then something echoeing Paradise Lost again, where Satan wonders whether God would take him back, whether he could accept God's forgiveness if God did, and comes to the conclusion that no, he couldn't. Ellen while refusing to give Cavil what he wants is offering forgiveness, if he starts to make new choices, but he's not able to accept it. Meanwhile, the character whom writing screwed over as much as Cally is watching. I mean, of course, Sharon "Boomer" Valerii", who arguably had her last good character scene in Precipe (the meeting with Cally in the cell) and since them a series of ever more bewildering cameos with all the character development happening off screen, in deleted scenes, or had to be guessed. Was she bitter and decided to become more Cylon than Cylons because Athena basically took her place on Galactica, so even if she had wanted to go back, she couldn't have? We don't know. Did Caprica siding with Athena make her choose Cavil later? We were never given any scenes. It was all very frustrating. She didn't say that much in this episode, either, but what she said was important, as was her being a witness to the Cavil-Ellen arguments. Cavil at the start of the episode tells her that here is someone to blame for the misery of her existence, the contradicting emotions, going from human to machine, all of it. But Boomer is able to do in the end what Cavil can't, and do so unrequested. In a narrative that is kickstarted by a genocidal and paricidal act of revenge - the Cylons attacking the colonies - and where "all of this happened before, all of this will happen again" mostly meant an eye for an eye, the one thing to stop the cycle would be an act of forgiveness between created and creators, parents and children, and not one presumptously requested (a la the "Like us NOW, and if you don't, you're dead" thing on New Caprica or more recently the demand for a seat on the Quorum, but something that is given on a person to person level. Boomer can forgive Ellen as her creator, and she can do something with the free will she has instead of looking for the next stronger person (Tyrol, Caprica, Cavil) for guidance. And she does.
Ellen herself is and isn't a new character, which is a fascinating contrast to the Dylan Four, who basically remained the same after finding out who they were. Cavil claims Ellen is the same, too, but she's really not. There are shared traits with Believing-herself-to-be-Human-Ellen - her sharp tongue, specially when asking Boomer about the swirl in order to humiliate Cavil, her unconditional love for Saul - but Ellen the Cylon with all her memories regained is sovereign in a way that Ellen the human was not, and also into the big picture as opposed to seeing only what was best for Saul and herself. I was a bit disappointed she didn't do more than talk to Cavil and Boomer during her months of glamorized captivity, but then again, Ellen in neither state knew anything about piloting, so she couldn't have escaped through other means but turning Boomer around anyway.
Meanwhile, on the Galactica, the Dylan Four and Kara go through some memory retrieval of their own. The whole Daniel story - the missing model 7 which was killed at birth, as it were - is a retcon to explain why the Sharons are numbered "Eight" instead of "Seven", but as opposed to just throwing that explanation at us, the script uses it to make two character points - one about giving Cavil a Cain experience towards Ellen, who made the mistake of playing favourites and neglecting her firstborn, and one about Kara, who "has to be something", human, Cylon, she just wants to know, and is willing to let Sam risk his life in order to find out, but not anymore once she realizes she's not a Cylon, no matter how much Sam begs her. It's a very Kara mixture of selfishness and love - if she cared more she would have told Cottle to operate right away, if she cared less she'd have let Sam conclude his story even if it meant he died - and now she's her only judge on that; none of the others noticed what she did, and Sam, who'd know, might never talk again.
The ways Tyrol, Tory and Tigh respond to the backstory they're given is very characteristic for each. Tory shrugs off responsibility by declaring that in the end, it's the humans on Kobol's fault, since they created the Thirteenth Tribe, including the Five. Tigh thinks they should shoulder the complete responsibility for the second Cylon/Human war, because they created the Seven. Tyrol, by contrast, sees it another way; by teaching the Centurions of the war forty years ago how to create the Seven they ended said war and gave everyone forty years of life and peace. Just as he sees the creaks and tears in the Galactica but refuses to see doom, fixing on the possibility of helping through the merging with Cylon technology instead. Or, for that matter, how he coped with the last retcon, Hot Dog's biological paternity of Nicky, which he ended up solving by making Hot Dog a co-parent.
Parents: we get the first scene between Tigh and Caprica Six alone since the one where they started to have sex. I'm still not really sold on them as a couple - Caprica falling for Tigh looks like male wish fulfillment to me, while Tigh literally kept projecting Ellen at her which while making the sex believable from his pov didn't convince me he even knows the slightest about Caprica Six as herself. But this time at least he responded to who was in the room - Caprica and that unborn child - and not to who wasn't. I have no idea as to what will happen once Ellen gets back because while Ellen has been through a download Tigh has not, which means he still has only those few fragments of Cylon memories he experienced on Earth and otherwise is firmly locked in his human sense of self. And Tigh as he is doesn't strike me as the type to go for polygamy, though Caprica and Ellen probably would.
Lastly: the one scene with Laura and Lee, though it wasn't about Laura's co-responsibility for the mutiny, was still something that made me happy as a viewer. Laura mourning for the Quorum and stating that no matter how much she hated some members at times, they were quintessential to preserving democracy gave me back whom I had lost during these last four episodes, the Laura Roslin who cares for people not named Adama and knows that what's at stake isn't just the survival of the human race but also the survival of their ideals. Lee pointing out that they should have representatives from ships rather than from Colonies makes sense and gives me hope as well. What I'm in two minds about is Laura making Lee her successor. On the one hand, it's been prepared from Bastille Day in seaosn 1 onwards, despite the bewildering one and a half season interlude where they had no scenes together at all, and it fits with the whole parents have to go so the new generation can try theme the fourth season has. Plus it makes Watsonian sense if you consider Laura is still dying. But. Coming shortly after her decision to move together with Bill Adama, it makes for a storyline where our female leader of four season abdicates as soon as she's found love and puts the young male hope in her place. (Unfortunately, I don't see how this is avoidable, either, because as mentioned Lee has been groomed for the presidency since eons, and no one else has. Of our remaining female Fleet characters, Kara at her best wouldn't do because Kara is a warrior, not a politician, while Tory is a politician but has turned her back on humanity for a good while now (and has killed Cally, but no one except for Tory knows this). I do hope once Ellen and Boomer are back we'll still have a Laura and Ellen rather than Ellen and Lee encounter, because the symbolism - guardian of what's left of humanity and creator of the current Cylon race - is just far better if it's these two. Lee can talk parent issues with Cavil in the meantime.
Of further interest: the Centurions coming up with monotheism on their lonesome and the Five, including Ellen, adopting it when designing the Seven. Which I like; it was one of the aspects of the miniseries that fascinated me, the fact that the machines were the ones to invent monotheism, while the humans went with pantheism.
