*SPOILERS* If you haven’t watched all of BSG there will be spoilers
Okay Boomer vs Athena, they are both awesome in their own way but who is more awesome? My personal vote goes to Athena but you can’t just choose one and not give a reason so here’s why.
Boomer was amazing from the beginning, her relationship with the Chief was just heart warming and so perfect, her relationships with the rest of the crew was awesome, she was just all around a cool person. Then things start to go down hill for her *SPOILER* through most of it she manages to keep herself together and fight against her suspicions that she might be a Cylon . Then her sleeper agent self comes out and she shoots Adam, she gets shot, she wakes up on a Cylon ship and has to accept that she is indeed Cylon (Putting a long story in a nut shell lol). At first she was pretty resistant to accepting she was Cylon and yah she did try to help Galactica in her own way but in the end she had completely changed. They person she became…not as cool, sadly.
Athena, knowing she was a Cylon from the beginning gives her a slight advantage over Boomer from the get go lol but it’s what she does even though she is Cylon that makes her awesome. She goes in with this plan to seduce Helo, which she does, ends up falling for him, risks it all to say f**k you to the Cylons and get back to Galactica, pregnant and all. She does this knowing that even if they make it back to Galactica they might just kill her, they don’t but still lol She is hated, poorly treated and loses her baby but even after all that she decides to be loyal to Helo, Adama and the Crew. She works really hard to gain the trust of Adam and the crew and eventually succeeds in becoming part of the crew fighting along side them against the Cylons. Her loyalty is tested time in and time out and yet she always chooses Galactica over the Cylons. She brings about a change in the Cylons when they realize through her actions that they can be their own person and live with humans instead of killing them. Making her AWESOME! lol
So I guess what I am saying is Boomer got dealt a shitty hand lol and if she had more control of her actions from the beginning things probably would have been a lot different for her. I love Athena but I really truly missed the old Boomer throughout the whole show but characters as a whole and as they were, Athena kind of rocked it lol
ps. there were many other reason for both sides and lots of stuff I left out but I think you get the gist of what I’m saying lol who’s your fav? and why?
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I’ve never seen such a blatant instance of losing the plot as s4 Gaius—it’s like they forgot about what the point of Gaius was and tried to cobble together a character thesis out of confused hindsight. It’s killing me because he had such a clear, consistent place before, and every now and again I can see it in glimpses amidst the yards of stupid cult bullshit; at least once every episode, there’s a moment of you! you! I see you, I see the point of you, have they remembered the point of you?—and then, no, no, it blinks away into another fucking miracle, another fucking weirdly sincere Jesus tableau, another fundamental fucking misread of THE ENTIRE POINT OF GAIUS BALTAR.
this is a man who is consistently at his best and worst in the same episodes. he’s purposefully built that way, so that you can see the worst things he’s ever done and the best things he’s ever done in the same moment. the thing that people consistently cite as The Best lee moment is his speech in crossroads, the same episode where he questions roslin about her drug use. in the first half of the two-parter where lee pulls a gun on tigh because declaring martial law in that moment is wrong, lee gets into that fight with kara, which is one of the few scenes on this show where i find it difficult to look at him. and lee’s not fun to look at, narratively. he is very, very difficult to watch. but he gets these narrative mirrors placed so close together because, i imagine, the show wants you to look at that dualism in him. to see the way he builds himself around right and wrong and how difficult that is to maintain and how right and wrong isn’t as simple as one would hope for it to be.
i think the problem this fandom has always had is that they look at him and think he’s someone simple. i find lee very uncomplicated myself, but fandom has trouble with him and i do understand that on a certain level. it looks like lee is all over the place. it looks like lee doesn’t have a code, when in truth he has a very rigid moral code and it’s that rigidity that gets him in trouble. the same moral code applied to a variety of circumstances can’t fit. that’s why roslin tells him to be smarter and wronger; he has to learn to loosen the code. lee thinks about what’s Right before he thinks about what’s Kind. and lee is a good person, but it’s that goodness that gets him into trouble on this show and only on this show, because bsg does not care about moralizing. it does not care for the good v. evil moral structures that lee adama builds himself upon, but for that reason most of all it requires lee to be there.
this show needs lee because it’s so focused on the inversions of justice, because it wants to show you the good people are just as capable of evil as the bad scary robots, because it wants to deconstruct right and wrong, and you cannot deconstruct right and wrong if you don’t have a character who lives his life by defining what is right. gaeta did the same thing, but gaeta doesn’t get as much screen time. and i could write you a post about gaeta and lee because i have one knocking about in my head but that’s not the point of all this. the point of this is that lee is one of those characters that fandom hates because they — i don’t know why. the text has always been very clear on him, the text makes explicit comments about the things he does right and wrong and about how he believes in a system that others think is fundamentally broken but he wants to save it and how he does the right thing instead of the smart thing and if he’d keep a cooler head he might have half a chance and these are lines from the show. but people somehow look at him and see someone who sits around and whines a lot and is self-righteous, which is a complaint i actually don’t understand because lee doesn’t think he’s better than anyone. i’d actually venture to think he feels he’s the worst of anyone. because i’m the coward. i’m the traitor. i’m forgiven. all the same, i understand how fandom could misread him, because he’s one of the very last idealists standing at the end of the world. but just because he’s coded as the Moralist doesn’t mean lee thinks of himself as any better than those that surround him. it’s just that we want lee to pick a side we’re comfortable with, and lee doesn’t like to be comfortable. and when he does pick sides, it’s not a person he chooses. it’s an idea.
in season one, perhaps you remember, adama asks if lee’s on his father’s side or roslin’s. and lee says i didn’t know we were picking sides, and adama says that’s why he hasn’t picked one yet. not long after, lee pulls a gun on tigh’s head not for laura roslin (as the text tells you) and not to get back at his father (as the text tells you), but because lee has always had a side and that side is the forever complicated moral landscape of Truth and Justice, which is not the easy flat path that i think people conceptualize it to be. it is very difficult, with some tough terrain and it’s difficult to stand upright on it and yes, lee falls down quite a lot. but he has his side. and that side is not wed to any particular person (not even kara, who constitutes his most egregious moral blind spot, and most certainly the most important person in his life), it is to a notion, to an ideal.
this show is all about interpersonal relationships, and there are layers upon layers of them. but in season four, lee leaves everyone he knows and loves to join the government because he’s tied to the mission, that mission, not to one particular person. and in the end, lee is left by himself in a field and it’s terrible, it’s horrible, it’s something i can’t stand to look at to this day, but he’s still got his fucking side and if you take that away from him he doesn’t exist. and if that’s not a narrative you’re interested in, that’s fine. i think you’re missing out on the absolutely best aspect of this show, but that’s a matter of personal preference. but to not take five minutes out of your day before writing angry posts about him to think about why he does what he does, to respect that narrative for the intricacies it carries from start to finish on a show that does nothing else right from start to finish (and i say this as someone who likes a lot of stuff on this show, but everything and everyone else has been a disappointment to me), is to do a disservice to this series, to lee, and imo to your viewing experience. you don’t need him. but i think it makes the show better if you at base understand him.
and i don’t know why i wrote this post but i’m angry about this fandom a lot these days so i’m going to type about it. and i could have made this post longer but i didn’t so you’re welcome.
“Please don’t do this. Please.”
3.19 - Crossroads, pt. 1THIS. AND ALL OF THIS. IS WHY I WILL ALWAYS HATE LEE ADAMA. LEE ADAMA, SIR, YOU ARE THE MOST STUPID PERSON IN THIS WHOLE UNIVERSE. YOU NEVER SHOULD HAVE MADE YOUR MOMMY CRY AND BEG FR MERCY. YOU NEED TO GO AWAY NOW SIR.
Ellie, your tags are amazing
Except Lee doesn’t want to do it either. Do you really think Lee wants Baltar to be acquitted? Do you think he wants to put his surrogate mother on the stand and publicly accuse her of being out of her mind on drugs? No, of course not. But he’s going to do it anyway. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do.
Lee Adama always does the right thing. Not the good thing. Or the compassionate thing. Or the nice thing. The right thing. It’s practically a compulsion.
And you know what? It causes him no end of misery.
It’s what pits him against his father in seasons 1 and 2. Yes, he has all sorts of underlying father-issues related to Zak and parental abandonment and all that, but the world just ended. What better time to make amends? But Lee doesn’t, he can’t, but he truly believes his father is in the wrong. And again, yes, there are elements of just wanting to distance himself from his father, but no one can seriously argue that when the battle lines are drawn in the season 1 finale that Lee was anything but miserable to be on the opposite side as Adama. But he did it. Because it was the right thing to do.
And then he does it again in seasons 3 and 4 with Roslin. Both this scene and those after his appointment to the Quorum where he’s forced to call Roslin out of her sneaky pseudo-legal maneuvering. He doesn’t actually want to make Roslin angry or upset or any of that. But he does it because it’s the right thing to do.
And hell it’s what costs him Kara. Because there are a million and one reasons why it’s not right for them to be together. He lets her go after their first meeting in the “Daybreak” flashback, because she’s his brother’s girlfriend and it wouldn’t be right to break them up. He lets her go in season 2, because he recognizes that she’s still hung-up on Anders and it wouldn’t be right to take advantage of her emotionally vulnerable state. He lets her go in season 3, because it won’t be right for him to cheat on Dee. He lets her go in season 4, because he sees that she has something bigger that she needs to do then and it wouldn’t be right of him to stop her.
If Lee had just stopped for one second and been selfish, he would have been so much happier. But he can’t because he’s Lee Adama and being good is his greatest virtue and his greatest tragedy.
First off: could kiss it six ways from Sunday. I mean, I’m midway, I’m not done yet, there’s a fair-to-probable chance everyone’s narrative is going to go spectacularly tits-up on a constructional level (have been warned: s4 exists), but this post is being written in the immediate aftermath of having seen “Unfinished Business”, regular and extended, for the first time, and basking in this equilibrated ridiculousness.
23. How does your show/book/movie depict marriage?
[spoiler alert]
Marriage is definitely an illusion on this show. Most of the characters on the show who do get married do so for the wrong reasons, and use marriage as a mask and as a marker of “normal” in order to escape from what they really want. Marriage is a means of expression, a way of telling others in a very public way that love exists between two people. It is meant to affirm to others what the couple is expected to know already. This idea falls apart when marriage is used as an idea but not applicable to the couple itself. I’m thinking specifically of Dee/Lee (wow, how did I never notice that it rhymes), Anders/Kara, and Cally/Chief. The exception seems to be Helo/Athena.
The theme of being normal or leading a normal life is pervasive throughout the show in a variety of ways: cylons wanting to be accepted as human because it’s considered “normal”; the attempt to return to or to maintain the way of life pre-attack by holding Colonial Day, honoring the Colonies’ traditions and religious beliefs; Laura’s longing to live for herself before cancer consumes her; the soldiers on Galactica who were hours away from retirement/decommissioning who have to fight and let go of the dream of returning to civilian life. And it goes on.
Marriage is one of those traditions of life on Caprica, and seems to be a symbol of monogamous love in a long-term commitment. It carries the weight that is does in our society of being something that is expected of everyone once they reach a certain age. Settling down, having a family: it’s such a mundane, typical expectation that it seems to become something precious and yet out of place in the years of living on Galactica. How can something this mundane fit in with the chaotic instability of this new life? Part of the issue with the marriages on Galactica is that they are a means of having something typical within a context that requires adaptability and a restructuring of tradition. The marriages created on the show are an attempt to have something stable and established in an unstable world, but because the characters themselves are so unstable, this marriage structure is unsuitable for them.
Cally and Chief in particular, for me, represent that marriage that was carried out because the idea of marriage was so appealing, but not necessarily the concrete relationship underneath the marriage. Chief in particular struggles with his longing to settle down, and sees New Caprica as an opportunity to have that Normal Life. New Caprica is that place of New Normality for everyone, so marriage seems to fit the bill at last. But as I’ve said before about Chief and Cally, being in love with the idea of being in love is an illusion that does nothing but further disfigure the original idea of marriage and harm these characters.
Kara and Lee get married respectively in order to escape from each other. Kara actually marries in order to escape from herself: she realizes her feelings for Lee and doesn’t want to confront them for fear of ruining her relationship, and instead makes things worse, using marriage as a tool to protect herself from Lee. Marriage becomes a way of bringing third parties into two (immature) individuals’ problems.
Saul and Ellen’s marriage, which definitely started out as dysfunctional and unhealthy, seems to have come into its own by the end of the series; they are the only ones (besides Helo/Athena) who recognize that their marriage structure is different from “the norm” and they accept it as such. In fact, they embrace it and embrace each other as a result.
I think the irony of Laura and Bill’s successful and unwed relationship is a perfect way to make the distinction clear between love and marriage on the show. What all of the other characters in their marriages fail to understand is that marriage is supposed to be a manifestation of mutual love and commitment between partners. Marriage does not necessarily create love, but love can certainly lead to marriage. The two are not necessarily connected at all, and one does not always follow the other. Laura and Bill never marry, but they have always loved each other. They function like a married couple but never need the vows to prove it. They fight, they confide in each other, they share a bed (eventually). They dream of settling down and living the rest of their days together, but they never, ever actually marry. They express and exhibit the sentiments of marriage, but show that the emotions can be exclusive from the social construct. And when Bill puts his wedding ring from his first marriage onto Laura’s finger after she dies, the gesture is symbolic of Bill’s letting go of his old life at last and letting himself admit to what he had been hiding from himself for protection. He does it for himself, as an intimate and personal reminder of how much he will always love her. The ring is restored to its original symbol: fidelity, and a public, everyday reminder of what he feels.
I’ve always maintained that this is the exact moment when the cylon plan began to fall apart.
(Source: lastonesleft, via martinusmiraculorum)
18. Then it’s made worse when it’s clear that Lee is just taking out his fury on being stood up on Starbuck and then I just want them to hug and make up.
19. Which is fucking ironic, right? Because both Dualla and Anders watch this shit with looks of disgust and confusion because THEY DO HUG. And I get what I want and it is then suddenly something I WANT NONE OF.
20. No, seriously, when the crowd starts leaving, I realize there has never been a more uncomfortable moment in this show’s entire run.
21. This is like a combination between watching a parent ruthlessly punishing her child in public and a gratuitous display of affection between a couple. It’s somewhere right in the middle of that, and I want to be shot out into space on a rocket, as far away from this moment as possible."
—
Mark Watches ‘Battlestar Galactica’ S03E09, Unfinished Business
~I will never recover from this show~
(via ichmeinedieseworte)
(Source: allgeministotheraspberryhats)
Sort of yes, and sort of no. That feeds into my intense “Kara is half-cylon theory.” I think that—if we throw Zoe Graystone into the Cylon genesis (which BSG in no way indicates, but Caprica is a masterpiece of retconning anyway, so I’m just going to say that Zoe, indeed, was instrumental in making the Significant
SevenEight) it makes the whole thing much more complicated. I imagine that Zoe, in some way shape or form, created Daniel in her father’s image much the same way Ellen created Cavil in her father’s image. Daniel Graystone has been shown to frequently play the piano—even playing pieces that Starbuck’s “father” (or ghost or angel, or whatever you decide to believe) played in “Someone To Watch Over Me” (and I will take a tangential pause to say that I cannot think about that episode without singing Gershwin—the lyrics of the song make it even more sad, desperate, and a little bit crazy.) Also, both actors have a similar coloring—red hair, blue eyes, etc. Again, I’m just detailing my Starbuck as half-Cylon theory, but they make some pretty explicit parallels that they didn’t have to make as everything said in Caprica is a retcon job. (And yes, I know that RDM deliberately quashed the “Daniel is Starbuck’s Father” theory, but I don’t like RDM poking his nose in where it doesn’t belong, and I’m also certain that they had no idea what they were doing and later possibly thought better of dismissing that theory all together. To me? It would have been a much more satisfying conclusion of so many mysteries and plotlines than what we got. YMMV.)Now, my Starbuck theory aside, if they weren’t attempting to suggest that Daniel Graystone was in some way connected with Daniel the Missing Seven, there was no reason to name him Daniel. There are a myriad of other suitably appropriate, non-threatening, ethnically neutral names to choose from. So rather than thinking Daniel Graystone is a Cylon, I’m more inclined to believe that—somewhere along the line—Zoe had a hand in creating a Cylon avatar of her father. Whether said Cylon was indeed Daniel the way that the Cylon Zoe was Zoe? That is an absolutely intriguing thought and yet another reason why I lament that this show was cancelled. They could have done so much with it. But, hey, that’s what fan fiction is for. (I’m inclined to think “no,” just because Daniel Graystone would not make a docile, obedient Cylon given his self-preservation instinct and extreme intellect. Then again, neither did Cavil. But it’s clear from BSG’s incredibly muddled canon that Daniel the Missing Seven was “murdered” by Cavil well before the Final Five were overthrown, rather than taking part in the coup as one would expect Graystone to.)
And, tangentially, I love how as we go up in number from 1-8, the Cylons get progressively closer to being normal flawed humans, rather than sociopaths. But that’s a subject for another day.
(Source: bluefootedbooby)
Characters taking their glasses on or off is a metaphor for their relationship with what is True or Just - whether or not they can see clearly.
Just one quick example: in “The Son Also Rises”, the episode where preparations are made for Gaius Baltar’s trial, we see that Romo Lampkin is wearing sunglasses, appearing like a blind man with the glasses on indoors - “Justice is blind”. No other character has worn sunglasses on the show with a possible exception of Starbuck smoking with aviators on in S1.
Meanwhile, Laura says she “can’t find her glasses.” Jump cut to her completely and unethically listening in on Lampkin’s conversation with Caprica Six, glasses-less. The loss of her glasses coincides with losing her way.
There are a million other examples. I could write a whole book on the use of clothing and props to signify a character’s moral compass on this show.
