The Pun Also Rises
Mar. 21st, 2021 03:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessBSG 3.17 Maelstrom and 3.18 The Son Also Rises
Well, we were due the Kara and her destiny episode, but I was left confused. Her spectacular death/suicide didn’t much hit me emotionally, because I suspect we’ll have a really trippy episode about her between life and death and the Five soon. (Plus I got to snark about a Cylon or woo-woo representation thereof talking about death when they get resurrected all the time.) And I’m a lot more worried about the survival of everyone who isn’t the big four and Gaius Baltar. But I certainly felt discomfited by these really abusive people in Kara’s life guiding her to this ‘destiny’, which might seem like a positive thing to her as it allowed her to turn away from fear. It certainly propelled the story forward (as she said to Lee, here they were, him still the CAG and her the hotshot pilot being a problem for him, although that also spoke to everyone still getting over New Caprica.) But when you looked at what was happening with Kara from everyone else’s POV, as they warned her to pull up, it was self-destruction. Kara wasn’t sleeping well and she was hallucinating. She hadn’t dealt with her enforced captivity and the rest of it. If it weren’t for all the supernatural stuff we’ve seen previously, especially with Gaius and the Cylons, it’s mental illness. But then there was more supernatural stuff in this episode, in the (new) oracle’s knowledge and then HE HAS A NAME I DIDN’T QUITE CATCH AND REFUSE TO CHECK somehow taking Kara back to her childhood home in her mind and letting her commune with her dead mother, (which made Bill and Caroline seem like child’s play.)
Having said that, when Helo talked about a psychiatrist, I snarked SURELY the most overworked person in the fleet (even if hardly any of the main characters who need support have asked for it.) I was a bit surprised at their taking Hera – is she even talking yet? And certainly I didn’t think it was what happened to Hera on New Caprica where she had a stable mother figure (who she maybe instinctively knew wasn’t her mother, because of her reaction to her when they were reunited) so much as on the Cylon ship that freaked her out. Or I suppose it could be losing her adoptive mother and worrying about losing her parents now. Anyway, I always like Helo and Starbuck’s interaction (spoiler: not that his grief as her friend was touched upon in the next episode.)
But I wasn’t sure what we were meant to think of Kara's mother ‘preparing her’ (where was the father? For a while, I wondered if this meant Kara was half-Cylon like Hera, but the Cylons were probably less evolved in the first war and it would have come up before, like on the farm.) Her mother did bring Kara up to worship the gods, I believe, but there seemed to be no religious aspect to her interaction with Kara that we saw here. And He Has A Name (ugh, don’t talk to me about Cylon nomenclature, in Watsonian terms, it rarely makes sense that they’d assume the human name one of their number used that one time) as a guide or whatever – what was that?
So the storm looked a bit like the symbol/nebula? And both the pantheists and the monotheists are again united about what the future will hold?
Romantically, Kara and Sam saddened, becase there was certainly something there, in that she opened up about her past and was clearly talking to him, even if it wasn’t a functioning marriage and she wouldn’t act on his suggestions that they try to move forward. It was fairly awful for Lee to watch her be ‘rattled’ (not knowing the half of it), with Kara still poking at them when she’d mostly messed that up. Although he said things were going great with Dee, nothing was shown either way. But I did notice and make a meal of Bill reaching for Laura after getting the figurehead.
And that leads me on nicely to the next ep, because watching them straight after each other, it felt odd that we had the previously setting up the trial plotline and the loss of Kara and instaed of replaying Adama smash his model ship at the end of the last episode, we had a new scene of him expressing his grief. About the only justification for that is that they wanted to show he was still in the same place emotionally, but there’d be other later new scenes that would do that. And it felt a bit samey.
I also thought the writer/director was a little too enamoured of linking unrelated scenes via the actions of one character at the end of one scene to that of another. It felt overly fussy when the reveal about the lawyer’s pickpocketing and the parallels of the grieving Adamas were strong enough links to hold all that was going on together.
So yeah, the dire warnings made to Roslin about letting Baltar go to trial were realised, as Adama and Lee sruggled with their grief over Kara, with their personal and professional relationships getting in the way of it.
Cally mostly spoke sense, except I still think she’d been overly influenced by Not!Mein Kampf and was entirely wrong about the level of Cylon influence. (Cue Athena going off in a huff, because nope, they still don’t accept her.) The problem seemed to be all human factionalism, take the various Galacticans’ griping about giving Baltar a trial and having to ensure due process. But then, I was nervous because Athena was the taxi driver for Gaius’s new lawyer.
After the first had gone boom. Given what had just happened, nobody seemed quite paranoid enough. (Though this was partly Lee being off his game out of grief. I did call the toilet being wired to blow.) They had to rely on the cat to spot the second bomb. (And after that, the cat pretty much disappeared from the episde, IIRC.) Even though the culprit said he wouldn’t have let Lee blow up, he wasn’t sounding an alarm, but letting the flight proceed. Logic had nothing to do with his bombing motivations.
Enter Ronan Lambkin (have I even remotely got his name right? Again, can’t be bothered to check), replacement lawyer. Or Irish Daredevil as I dubbed him. (Accent duly noted after my tirade about accents last week.) Certainly a distinctive character, I was wondering what his game was even before he revealed part of it to Lee and later to Gaius. The story about his ex wife (who I would have asked questions about the first time he mentioned her to Roslin and Adama because it might have a bearing on his motivations, and it’s not like that hasn’t happened before) suggests that there’s even more going on. It also led to an interesting exchange with Caprica Six (there’s nomenclature that makes sense.) I presume that that was responsible for Roslin’s apocalyptic response to hearing about Caprica’s love, which didn’t quite land for me. But Laura has been so much the pragmatist over the Cylons, allowing them personhood in as much as it’s useful to her, but not quite recognising what that means, easy enough to do because they’re The Enemy and humanity is her priority. Meanwhile, we have a broader view.
So, grieving!Lee got played (and this is not the first time that he’s gone against Adama, which a smart lawyer paying attention would know.) But as admiral. Adama was right to pull him from CAG responsibilities, even if Apollo took that badly. Although it wasn’t as if Adama’s grief wasn’t influencing him – and fair play, this episode did show the devastation suicide wreaks on those left behind. Handy for the plot that he’s been called up to play judge.
Sam’s tentative ‘we can be friends now because we’ve both lost her’ to Lee was a nice attempt to continue getting screen time, because unless if they need to round up a resistance or turn civvies into guerrillas again, why would they call him? (When they could perhaps be spending more time on how Dee, a character who’s been around since the very beginning, might feel about all this.) This episode felt very male, even down to where Gaius hid his pen.
Overall, it set interesting things in play (though I suspect the trial will be too Adama vs. Adama vs. dead Grandpa heavy for my taste.)
Well, we were due the Kara and her destiny episode, but I was left confused. Her spectacular death/suicide didn’t much hit me emotionally, because I suspect we’ll have a really trippy episode about her between life and death and the Five soon. (Plus I got to snark about a Cylon or woo-woo representation thereof talking about death when they get resurrected all the time.) And I’m a lot more worried about the survival of everyone who isn’t the big four and Gaius Baltar. But I certainly felt discomfited by these really abusive people in Kara’s life guiding her to this ‘destiny’, which might seem like a positive thing to her as it allowed her to turn away from fear. It certainly propelled the story forward (as she said to Lee, here they were, him still the CAG and her the hotshot pilot being a problem for him, although that also spoke to everyone still getting over New Caprica.) But when you looked at what was happening with Kara from everyone else’s POV, as they warned her to pull up, it was self-destruction. Kara wasn’t sleeping well and she was hallucinating. She hadn’t dealt with her enforced captivity and the rest of it. If it weren’t for all the supernatural stuff we’ve seen previously, especially with Gaius and the Cylons, it’s mental illness. But then there was more supernatural stuff in this episode, in the (new) oracle’s knowledge and then HE HAS A NAME I DIDN’T QUITE CATCH AND REFUSE TO CHECK somehow taking Kara back to her childhood home in her mind and letting her commune with her dead mother, (which made Bill and Caroline seem like child’s play.)
Having said that, when Helo talked about a psychiatrist, I snarked SURELY the most overworked person in the fleet (even if hardly any of the main characters who need support have asked for it.) I was a bit surprised at their taking Hera – is she even talking yet? And certainly I didn’t think it was what happened to Hera on New Caprica where she had a stable mother figure (who she maybe instinctively knew wasn’t her mother, because of her reaction to her when they were reunited) so much as on the Cylon ship that freaked her out. Or I suppose it could be losing her adoptive mother and worrying about losing her parents now. Anyway, I always like Helo and Starbuck’s interaction (spoiler: not that his grief as her friend was touched upon in the next episode.)
But I wasn’t sure what we were meant to think of Kara's mother ‘preparing her’ (where was the father? For a while, I wondered if this meant Kara was half-Cylon like Hera, but the Cylons were probably less evolved in the first war and it would have come up before, like on the farm.) Her mother did bring Kara up to worship the gods, I believe, but there seemed to be no religious aspect to her interaction with Kara that we saw here. And He Has A Name (ugh, don’t talk to me about Cylon nomenclature, in Watsonian terms, it rarely makes sense that they’d assume the human name one of their number used that one time) as a guide or whatever – what was that?
So the storm looked a bit like the symbol/nebula? And both the pantheists and the monotheists are again united about what the future will hold?
Romantically, Kara and Sam saddened, becase there was certainly something there, in that she opened up about her past and was clearly talking to him, even if it wasn’t a functioning marriage and she wouldn’t act on his suggestions that they try to move forward. It was fairly awful for Lee to watch her be ‘rattled’ (not knowing the half of it), with Kara still poking at them when she’d mostly messed that up. Although he said things were going great with Dee, nothing was shown either way. But I did notice and make a meal of Bill reaching for Laura after getting the figurehead.
And that leads me on nicely to the next ep, because watching them straight after each other, it felt odd that we had the previously setting up the trial plotline and the loss of Kara and instaed of replaying Adama smash his model ship at the end of the last episode, we had a new scene of him expressing his grief. About the only justification for that is that they wanted to show he was still in the same place emotionally, but there’d be other later new scenes that would do that. And it felt a bit samey.
I also thought the writer/director was a little too enamoured of linking unrelated scenes via the actions of one character at the end of one scene to that of another. It felt overly fussy when the reveal about the lawyer’s pickpocketing and the parallels of the grieving Adamas were strong enough links to hold all that was going on together.
So yeah, the dire warnings made to Roslin about letting Baltar go to trial were realised, as Adama and Lee sruggled with their grief over Kara, with their personal and professional relationships getting in the way of it.
Cally mostly spoke sense, except I still think she’d been overly influenced by Not!Mein Kampf and was entirely wrong about the level of Cylon influence. (Cue Athena going off in a huff, because nope, they still don’t accept her.) The problem seemed to be all human factionalism, take the various Galacticans’ griping about giving Baltar a trial and having to ensure due process. But then, I was nervous because Athena was the taxi driver for Gaius’s new lawyer.
After the first had gone boom. Given what had just happened, nobody seemed quite paranoid enough. (Though this was partly Lee being off his game out of grief. I did call the toilet being wired to blow.) They had to rely on the cat to spot the second bomb. (And after that, the cat pretty much disappeared from the episde, IIRC.) Even though the culprit said he wouldn’t have let Lee blow up, he wasn’t sounding an alarm, but letting the flight proceed. Logic had nothing to do with his bombing motivations.
Enter Ronan Lambkin (have I even remotely got his name right? Again, can’t be bothered to check), replacement lawyer. Or Irish Daredevil as I dubbed him. (Accent duly noted after my tirade about accents last week.) Certainly a distinctive character, I was wondering what his game was even before he revealed part of it to Lee and later to Gaius. The story about his ex wife (who I would have asked questions about the first time he mentioned her to Roslin and Adama because it might have a bearing on his motivations, and it’s not like that hasn’t happened before) suggests that there’s even more going on. It also led to an interesting exchange with Caprica Six (there’s nomenclature that makes sense.) I presume that that was responsible for Roslin’s apocalyptic response to hearing about Caprica’s love, which didn’t quite land for me. But Laura has been so much the pragmatist over the Cylons, allowing them personhood in as much as it’s useful to her, but not quite recognising what that means, easy enough to do because they’re The Enemy and humanity is her priority. Meanwhile, we have a broader view.
So, grieving!Lee got played (and this is not the first time that he’s gone against Adama, which a smart lawyer paying attention would know.) But as admiral. Adama was right to pull him from CAG responsibilities, even if Apollo took that badly. Although it wasn’t as if Adama’s grief wasn’t influencing him – and fair play, this episode did show the devastation suicide wreaks on those left behind. Handy for the plot that he’s been called up to play judge.
Sam’s tentative ‘we can be friends now because we’ve both lost her’ to Lee was a nice attempt to continue getting screen time, because unless if they need to round up a resistance or turn civvies into guerrillas again, why would they call him? (When they could perhaps be spending more time on how Dee, a character who’s been around since the very beginning, might feel about all this.) This episode felt very male, even down to where Gaius hid his pen.
Overall, it set interesting things in play (though I suspect the trial will be too Adama vs. Adama vs. dead Grandpa heavy for my taste.)
