Five things meme response the third
Feb. 27th, 2010 05:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakDue to popular demand:
Five people Gaius Baltar loved
Yes, he did love himself best. In the sense of wanting to survive, at least, even when he felt a good deal of self loathing long with his usual high opinion of his intelligence and right to creature comfort. But that one interlude in a cell aside, which was as much about finding out the truth one way or the other as about anything else, he never stopped believing he was better off alive than dead. As he told Laura Roslin once, he loved to live.
He did love other people as well. Maybe not nobly, selflessly, but he did love them.
1.) His father. Of course, he also hated him, his father who behaved as if trying to leave an Aerolon accent behind was a betrayal, wanting an education instead of endless mind-numbing agriculture was filial ingratitude, and wanting to be someone else, someone new, was cowardice instead. (Years later, he watched the Adamas, father and son, with some clinical interest and realizes just why Bill Adama’s contempt felt so familiar.) All the same, his father was the one who had told him songs and stories when he was a child, the only one who truly could understand the magnitude of what Gaius had achieved, the sheer extent to which he had transformed himself, and it was unthinkable to leave him behind on Aerolon. So Gaius brought him to Caprica. After the world had ended, he still didn’t know whether the loss or relief was greater when he realized he would never see his father again.
2.) Six, in three of her incarnations. He doesn’t always manage to differentiate between his feelings for each, and sees them as aspects of the same woman, which is how he manages to destroy whatever good he has done Gina. After Gina, he is able to tell what he sees in them apart, but it’s too late for her. He knew Gina only for a few months, and maybe never less than at the end, when they had sex, and never more than at the start, when for once he hadn’t wanted anything from her but save her from what Cain and her people had done to her, to make her whole again. But Gina was the first of the Sixes he felt tenderness for, and when she kills herself, taking hundreds with her, he knows all the pills and all the sex in the world won’t be enough to wipe out the memory of failing her.
3.) Then there is the Six he first saw while leaving a doomed world behind, the Six who appears to him whenever she wants, making him wonder about being mad, chipped, a Cylon himself or genuinely chosen by the God she insists she speaks for. She is the only one of the Sixes he fears as much as he desires her. When he tells her for the first time he loves her he doesn’t; it’s a bargain, just as the old home he keeps recreating for himself in his head, or professing the belief he has not yet have. But between teasing, tormenting and saving him, she has a way of becoming as quintessential as the air he breathes. At some point, he realises he doesn’t care anymore if she is a hallucination, a symptom of his madness, or a chip sophisticated machinery can’t detect, or an angel who for some reason took the shape of his lover. He’s come to worship her, and that, too, is love.
4.) In the beginning and at the end, though, there is the Six who later calls herself Caprica. She is not a goddess, like the being in his head, and not irrevocably broken, like Gina was. She was, is, and always will be real. So were their mutual betrayals, when she left him to be tortured, when he left her for D’Anna and her truths. So is the way her body is heavy with a child not his, her courage in going among people who hate her, her survival. So is the way she looks at him, taking it all in, failures and successes, their shared guilt and the miracle of second and third chances, and holds out her hand, her flesh-and-blood, now slightly scarred hand, which will never be perfect again. She doesn’t need to be healed, or worshipped; she simply is, and he can’t imagine life without her.
5.) Felix Gaeta. As opposed to his father and the three Sixes, this was a surprise, to put it mildly. At first, Gaeta was simply useful, someone who unabashedly admired him and whom he could talk to about subjects that interested him, not that common in a fleet where scientists weren’t the norm. All very flattering, but Gaius Baltar was used to having fans, and even more fans who had a slight crush on him. Somewhere between saving his life and saving his elections, though, Gaeta went from being a fan to being a friend, in as much as Gaius had one. It still didn’t dawn on him he might feel something other than pleased gratitude for Gaeta until Gaeta had a gun pointed at him, tears in his eyes. This was when it occurred to Gaius that the past year on New Caprica had resulted in one of the biggest optimists in the fleet becoming broken in a way that reminded him oddly enough of Gina, and that this was partly Gaius’ responsibility. It resulted in a strange sense of pity and loss that lasted until Felix spied on him for Adama and Roslin and then perjured himself in order to get Baltar executed. Nobody would be thrilled about attempts at one’s life, but at this point most people in the fleet wanted Gaius Baltar did; that Gaeta did, too, should not have mattered to him the way it did. And yet it mattered. Gaius could have done without the discovery there was a difference between “I don’t want to die” and “I don’t want you to kill me, not you of all people”, which apparently came complete with “I don’t want to feel responsible for you going this far, either; I really don’t do responsibility”.
When Gaeta lost his leg, and sang for hours in med lab, Gaius came and left silently, at a rare loss of words. The troubling suspicion that he cared about Gaeta when there was absolutely no point to doing so anymore grew stronger. He didn’t know for sure until the mutiny, though, which was a hell of a time to find out. At least he dealt with it better than he had done with Gina, though; he stuck to listening when Gaeta asked for him as a last request, and didn’t make any last minute declarations. Except one, when Gaeta said nobody knew who he was. “I know who you are, Felix,” Gaius Baltar replied, and despite having made a lifetime out of lying, this was nothing but the truth.
Forcrossedwired:
The last five people whose phone numbers Agent Brand dialled.
1.) “Lothi, pick up. I know you have this cell phone, because it’s mine, and you always steal my stuff.”
2.) “This is Agent Brand. One of my people filed a paternity suit against a Captain Jack Harkness. Seems he thought the Skrull Invasion was a great time for interagency cooperation. Since Torchwood is paid by the Crown, I thought I might as well go directly to the source of the income, your majesty.”
3.) “Hisako? Just checking whether you still have the same number. Which you shouldn’t have. Summers should keep those switching on a regular basis. I’m just saying.”
4.) “Ms. Kildare, after Gyrich’s latest screw up S.W.O.R.D. really needs some good spin, and if I talk to reporters, I end up injuring them. What’s your fee?"
5. ) “Look, Stark, I realise you’re just out of a coma and there’s this Asgard business going on, but this is urgent. I know you’ve still got a few millions stashed somewhere. Now’s the time to use them. Buy the rights to the Terminator franchise and hand them over to Josh Friedman so he can continue the Sarah Connor Chronicles.”
Forresolute:
Five conversations the Doctor should have had, but didn't.
So many to choose from. Where to start? Right, at the beginning. Also, among others ideas are used that originated, as far as I can recall, fromjesuswasbatman, rozk and misstress_siana.
1.) He leaves Susan because she never would have left him. Her love for him would have caged her as surely as Gallifrey and its rules ever caged him. That is what he tells himself, and, without the part about Gallifrey, what he tells Barbara and Ian when they ask. What he doesn’t tell them is that if he had actually talked about this with Susan, she would have pointed out that he only started to behave like a Time Lord once he left the other Time Lords behind. That as an exile, he felt longing where previously he had felt stiffled and oppressed. She would have asked him if, by leaving her, he wanted to ensure she would remain his granddaughter in a way she would not if he had given her the opportunity to leave him, or to stay with him as an adult. She would have spoken with him about the power of absences, and being Susan, he would not have been able to lie to her. So he does not have that conversation.
2.) In the middle of all that business with Borusa, the Master and Rassilon, not to mention his four previous incarnations, the Doctor spots Sarah Jane with his third self and remembers with a pang his fourth self never actually came back for her. Presumably he could use the chance to explain without causing a time paradox. On the other hand – well. He tries to imagine Tegan and Turlough with Sarah Jane and winces, mostly because he thinks it might end with Tegan and Sarah ganging up on him. So he decides to provide Sarah with a K-9 instead of a conversation, which he will depose in front of her doorstep shortly after his fourth self left her. After all, words are words, but K-9 will actually help her investigate. Clearly, having conversations is overrated.
3.) After the Master has taken over Tremas’ body, the Doctor never talks with Nyssa about this. She doesn’t ask, but he also doesn’t offer. Nyssa is a scientist; she must have wondered whether her father’s body, its DNA rewritten at the Master’s convenience, is truly irrevocably lost, or whether it would be possible to reverse the process. To bring back Tremas, and destroy the Master in the process, beyond all possibility of recovery. It would be just. It also would be next to impossible, but if he really tried, the Doctor could do it. Which is why he’ll never, ever discuss the question with Nyssa.
4.) He is still in his ninth body when Jack Harkness becomes an immortal fact. There is no reason not to regenerate at the game station but this one; this is why he gets Rose into the TARDIS and leaves. Later, when he finally talks about this with Jack in his tenth body, he wonders what difference it would have made if he had explained, to both Jack and Rose, then and there. He can sense alternate timelines, but not his own, so he’ll never know for sure what would have happened. Still, it’s hard not to suspect that at least Jack’s habit of seeing him as some kind of savior figure providing all answers would have been nipped in the bud, and that would definitely have been better. There is one thing he still hasn’t told Jack, and which he is glad to have successfully kept from Rose, and that is the precedent that existed for what Rose and the TARDIS have made Jack into. The last time someone was made immortal through the power of the vortex, it was a philosopher, a brilliant woman named Hypatia, who lived in Alexandria. The person who made her immortal thought he would save her from her timeline-written doom. She would not die by the hands of the Christian mob; instead, she would live forever. She lived forever, alright. But the mob had already torn her to pieces, and kept those pieces as trophies when the resurrection was started, and every single piece lived again, and was not allowed to die. Those many, far too many relics of supposed martyrs in churches all over the world? Bits of Hypatia, multiplying, attempting to get back together again until at least some dormancy was achieved, but her consciousness was still there, screaming for anyone with the least bit of telepathy to hear.
5.) “The thing is, Martha, the thing is – well. Imagine you visit a world where everyone is into poker. Really into it. Everybody who meets anyone else wonders how they are at cards. And you’re okay with poker, you really are, sometimes you enjoy it, very sometimes, you even have an ace up your sleeve, but generally speaking, you’d rather not play all the time. And really not directly after one big game ended. But. You’re not doing well on your own. You screw up when you’re on your own; you know you do. So you ask someone to come along, except they think you’re also asking them to play cards, because everyone is into cards, and while you say you’re not looking for a new game right now, they don’t believe you because maybe you didn’t do your best to be convincing when you say that. Maybe you didn’t want to be. Not because you do want a new game after all, but because you don’t want to be alone. So time passes, and the other person starts to think there is something wrong with her because you’re still not playing, and that’s not true, that’s so not true. But you have no idea how to say this without making things worse and making her even more believe there will be a game. So you talk less and less. About important stuff, anyway. When what you should have said was – no poker, but are you okay with backgammon?
I think that metaphor got away from me a while ago.”
Five people Gaius Baltar loved
Yes, he did love himself best. In the sense of wanting to survive, at least, even when he felt a good deal of self loathing long with his usual high opinion of his intelligence and right to creature comfort. But that one interlude in a cell aside, which was as much about finding out the truth one way or the other as about anything else, he never stopped believing he was better off alive than dead. As he told Laura Roslin once, he loved to live.
He did love other people as well. Maybe not nobly, selflessly, but he did love them.
1.) His father. Of course, he also hated him, his father who behaved as if trying to leave an Aerolon accent behind was a betrayal, wanting an education instead of endless mind-numbing agriculture was filial ingratitude, and wanting to be someone else, someone new, was cowardice instead. (Years later, he watched the Adamas, father and son, with some clinical interest and realizes just why Bill Adama’s contempt felt so familiar.) All the same, his father was the one who had told him songs and stories when he was a child, the only one who truly could understand the magnitude of what Gaius had achieved, the sheer extent to which he had transformed himself, and it was unthinkable to leave him behind on Aerolon. So Gaius brought him to Caprica. After the world had ended, he still didn’t know whether the loss or relief was greater when he realized he would never see his father again.
2.) Six, in three of her incarnations. He doesn’t always manage to differentiate between his feelings for each, and sees them as aspects of the same woman, which is how he manages to destroy whatever good he has done Gina. After Gina, he is able to tell what he sees in them apart, but it’s too late for her. He knew Gina only for a few months, and maybe never less than at the end, when they had sex, and never more than at the start, when for once he hadn’t wanted anything from her but save her from what Cain and her people had done to her, to make her whole again. But Gina was the first of the Sixes he felt tenderness for, and when she kills herself, taking hundreds with her, he knows all the pills and all the sex in the world won’t be enough to wipe out the memory of failing her.
3.) Then there is the Six he first saw while leaving a doomed world behind, the Six who appears to him whenever she wants, making him wonder about being mad, chipped, a Cylon himself or genuinely chosen by the God she insists she speaks for. She is the only one of the Sixes he fears as much as he desires her. When he tells her for the first time he loves her he doesn’t; it’s a bargain, just as the old home he keeps recreating for himself in his head, or professing the belief he has not yet have. But between teasing, tormenting and saving him, she has a way of becoming as quintessential as the air he breathes. At some point, he realises he doesn’t care anymore if she is a hallucination, a symptom of his madness, or a chip sophisticated machinery can’t detect, or an angel who for some reason took the shape of his lover. He’s come to worship her, and that, too, is love.
4.) In the beginning and at the end, though, there is the Six who later calls herself Caprica. She is not a goddess, like the being in his head, and not irrevocably broken, like Gina was. She was, is, and always will be real. So were their mutual betrayals, when she left him to be tortured, when he left her for D’Anna and her truths. So is the way her body is heavy with a child not his, her courage in going among people who hate her, her survival. So is the way she looks at him, taking it all in, failures and successes, their shared guilt and the miracle of second and third chances, and holds out her hand, her flesh-and-blood, now slightly scarred hand, which will never be perfect again. She doesn’t need to be healed, or worshipped; she simply is, and he can’t imagine life without her.
5.) Felix Gaeta. As opposed to his father and the three Sixes, this was a surprise, to put it mildly. At first, Gaeta was simply useful, someone who unabashedly admired him and whom he could talk to about subjects that interested him, not that common in a fleet where scientists weren’t the norm. All very flattering, but Gaius Baltar was used to having fans, and even more fans who had a slight crush on him. Somewhere between saving his life and saving his elections, though, Gaeta went from being a fan to being a friend, in as much as Gaius had one. It still didn’t dawn on him he might feel something other than pleased gratitude for Gaeta until Gaeta had a gun pointed at him, tears in his eyes. This was when it occurred to Gaius that the past year on New Caprica had resulted in one of the biggest optimists in the fleet becoming broken in a way that reminded him oddly enough of Gina, and that this was partly Gaius’ responsibility. It resulted in a strange sense of pity and loss that lasted until Felix spied on him for Adama and Roslin and then perjured himself in order to get Baltar executed. Nobody would be thrilled about attempts at one’s life, but at this point most people in the fleet wanted Gaius Baltar did; that Gaeta did, too, should not have mattered to him the way it did. And yet it mattered. Gaius could have done without the discovery there was a difference between “I don’t want to die” and “I don’t want you to kill me, not you of all people”, which apparently came complete with “I don’t want to feel responsible for you going this far, either; I really don’t do responsibility”.
When Gaeta lost his leg, and sang for hours in med lab, Gaius came and left silently, at a rare loss of words. The troubling suspicion that he cared about Gaeta when there was absolutely no point to doing so anymore grew stronger. He didn’t know for sure until the mutiny, though, which was a hell of a time to find out. At least he dealt with it better than he had done with Gina, though; he stuck to listening when Gaeta asked for him as a last request, and didn’t make any last minute declarations. Except one, when Gaeta said nobody knew who he was. “I know who you are, Felix,” Gaius Baltar replied, and despite having made a lifetime out of lying, this was nothing but the truth.
For
crossedwired:The last five people whose phone numbers Agent Brand dialled.
1.) “Lothi, pick up. I know you have this cell phone, because it’s mine, and you always steal my stuff.”
2.) “This is Agent Brand. One of my people filed a paternity suit against a Captain Jack Harkness. Seems he thought the Skrull Invasion was a great time for interagency cooperation. Since Torchwood is paid by the Crown, I thought I might as well go directly to the source of the income, your majesty.”
3.) “Hisako? Just checking whether you still have the same number. Which you shouldn’t have. Summers should keep those switching on a regular basis. I’m just saying.”
4.) “Ms. Kildare, after Gyrich’s latest screw up S.W.O.R.D. really needs some good spin, and if I talk to reporters, I end up injuring them. What’s your fee?"
5. ) “Look, Stark, I realise you’re just out of a coma and there’s this Asgard business going on, but this is urgent. I know you’ve still got a few millions stashed somewhere. Now’s the time to use them. Buy the rights to the Terminator franchise and hand them over to Josh Friedman so he can continue the Sarah Connor Chronicles.”
For
resolute: Five conversations the Doctor should have had, but didn't.
So many to choose from. Where to start? Right, at the beginning. Also, among others ideas are used that originated, as far as I can recall, from
jesuswasbatman, rozk and misstress_siana. 1.) He leaves Susan because she never would have left him. Her love for him would have caged her as surely as Gallifrey and its rules ever caged him. That is what he tells himself, and, without the part about Gallifrey, what he tells Barbara and Ian when they ask. What he doesn’t tell them is that if he had actually talked about this with Susan, she would have pointed out that he only started to behave like a Time Lord once he left the other Time Lords behind. That as an exile, he felt longing where previously he had felt stiffled and oppressed. She would have asked him if, by leaving her, he wanted to ensure she would remain his granddaughter in a way she would not if he had given her the opportunity to leave him, or to stay with him as an adult. She would have spoken with him about the power of absences, and being Susan, he would not have been able to lie to her. So he does not have that conversation.
2.) In the middle of all that business with Borusa, the Master and Rassilon, not to mention his four previous incarnations, the Doctor spots Sarah Jane with his third self and remembers with a pang his fourth self never actually came back for her. Presumably he could use the chance to explain without causing a time paradox. On the other hand – well. He tries to imagine Tegan and Turlough with Sarah Jane and winces, mostly because he thinks it might end with Tegan and Sarah ganging up on him. So he decides to provide Sarah with a K-9 instead of a conversation, which he will depose in front of her doorstep shortly after his fourth self left her. After all, words are words, but K-9 will actually help her investigate. Clearly, having conversations is overrated.
3.) After the Master has taken over Tremas’ body, the Doctor never talks with Nyssa about this. She doesn’t ask, but he also doesn’t offer. Nyssa is a scientist; she must have wondered whether her father’s body, its DNA rewritten at the Master’s convenience, is truly irrevocably lost, or whether it would be possible to reverse the process. To bring back Tremas, and destroy the Master in the process, beyond all possibility of recovery. It would be just. It also would be next to impossible, but if he really tried, the Doctor could do it. Which is why he’ll never, ever discuss the question with Nyssa.
4.) He is still in his ninth body when Jack Harkness becomes an immortal fact. There is no reason not to regenerate at the game station but this one; this is why he gets Rose into the TARDIS and leaves. Later, when he finally talks about this with Jack in his tenth body, he wonders what difference it would have made if he had explained, to both Jack and Rose, then and there. He can sense alternate timelines, but not his own, so he’ll never know for sure what would have happened. Still, it’s hard not to suspect that at least Jack’s habit of seeing him as some kind of savior figure providing all answers would have been nipped in the bud, and that would definitely have been better. There is one thing he still hasn’t told Jack, and which he is glad to have successfully kept from Rose, and that is the precedent that existed for what Rose and the TARDIS have made Jack into. The last time someone was made immortal through the power of the vortex, it was a philosopher, a brilliant woman named Hypatia, who lived in Alexandria. The person who made her immortal thought he would save her from her timeline-written doom. She would not die by the hands of the Christian mob; instead, she would live forever. She lived forever, alright. But the mob had already torn her to pieces, and kept those pieces as trophies when the resurrection was started, and every single piece lived again, and was not allowed to die. Those many, far too many relics of supposed martyrs in churches all over the world? Bits of Hypatia, multiplying, attempting to get back together again until at least some dormancy was achieved, but her consciousness was still there, screaming for anyone with the least bit of telepathy to hear.
5.) “The thing is, Martha, the thing is – well. Imagine you visit a world where everyone is into poker. Really into it. Everybody who meets anyone else wonders how they are at cards. And you’re okay with poker, you really are, sometimes you enjoy it, very sometimes, you even have an ace up your sleeve, but generally speaking, you’d rather not play all the time. And really not directly after one big game ended. But. You’re not doing well on your own. You screw up when you’re on your own; you know you do. So you ask someone to come along, except they think you’re also asking them to play cards, because everyone is into cards, and while you say you’re not looking for a new game right now, they don’t believe you because maybe you didn’t do your best to be convincing when you say that. Maybe you didn’t want to be. Not because you do want a new game after all, but because you don’t want to be alone. So time passes, and the other person starts to think there is something wrong with her because you’re still not playing, and that’s not true, that’s so not true. But you have no idea how to say this without making things worse and making her even more believe there will be a game. So you talk less and less. About important stuff, anyway. When what you should have said was – no poker, but are you okay with backgammon?
I think that metaphor got away from me a while ago.”
no subject
Date: 2010-02-27 09:10 pm (UTC)(a) I think that Borusa would have been much more in the Doctor's mind than the Castellan after the events of Five Doctors.
(b) Ten's invitation to Martha to travel with him at the end of Smith & Jones is, to my mind, so overtly sexualised that he can't even get away with the "I just let her assume".
no subject
Date: 2010-02-28 05:05 am (UTC)Re: invitation: a matter of individual perception then; I did see it as ambiguous.