Starbuck Is Dead, Long Live Starbuck and Other "Scar" Thoughts

Update 3/07: Hello people searching for some variant on 'starbuck dead'! This post is about the episode "Scar", but if you'd like to read my thoughts about "Maelstrom", click here.

Reading over the various responses to Friday's Battlestar Galactica episode, "Scar" (there's a nice selection over at 13th Colony), I'm surprised at the negative tone that many of the reviewers are taking towards Kat. More precisely, I'm surprised by the fact that so few of the reviewers seem to have recognized the obvious and deliberate parallels that the episode draws between Kat's behavior and the kind we've come to expect--and, for the most part, enjoy--from Starbuck. Kat's attitude during Starbuck's briefings is a precise mimicry of many of Starbuck's own performances; the confrontation in which she claims that Starbuck has lost her edge and crawled into the bottle is very nearly a shot-by-shot recreation of Starbuck's own confrontation with Tigh in the miniseries; not to mention the numerous, nearly uncountable incidents of Starbuck being as belligerent, boastful, casually violent and unthinkingly competitive as Kat is in "Scar", if not more so.

There isn't anything that Kat does in "Scar" that Starbuck hasn't done already (and usually been called charming and daring for doing), and it seems to me that if the object of her scorn were someone other than Starbuck, the episode's reviewers wouldn't necessarily be giving her such a hard time (although it certainly doesn't help that, as directed in this episode, Lucianna Carro lacks Katee Sackhoff's effervescent charisma and movie-star good looks). "Scar" may be, as many commenters have said, an episode about Starbuck coming to terms with the reality of death, but to my mind a more powerful theme in the episode is a profound change in Starbuck's personality and priorities.

At the episode's close, Starbuck has vacated her role as the ship's hotshot, the top-gun pilot who is crazy enough to get any job done. Kat is the new Starbuck, by which I don't necessarily mean that she is Starbuck's equal as a pilot or tactician. The episode makes it pretty clear that Kat lacks Starbuck's experience and wits--Kat's eyes may have been sharp enough to spot a Raider before Starbuck, but it's Starbuck who realizes that Scar is luring Kat into a trap (and in so doing, almost certainly saves Kat's life). It's doubtful that Kat would have been able to destroy Scar without Starbuck's help. That Kat fails to acknowledge this is hardly surprising--after all, how often have we seen Starbuck be gracious in victory?--but what is surprising is Starbuck's willingness to walk away from glory and act, for the first time in our acquaintance with her, like a team player. What Starbuck comes to realize in the celebration scene and in her closing conversation with Helo is that Kat is welcome to her new role--Starbuck has moved on.

Katee Sackhoff deserves a tremendous amount of kudos for her physical work in this episode. Starbuck as we have come to know her is a live wire, a bundle of barely suppressed energy held together by skin and an infectious grin. She does everything--talk, walk, fly--loudly and hugely. In "Scar", however, Starbuck seems to be trying to retract into herself. She walks stiffly, talks in a barely-audible monotone, her face is expressionless and her eyes are almost dead. The woman who lit up a cockpit with her smile, who was always incandescently, manically joyful at yet another remarkable flying feat in which she snatched victory straight out of the jaws of certain death, is nowhere to be seen. In her brief moments of animation, Starbuck is a frightening parody of herself, a person moving because she knows that to stop moving will mean death and is terrified by that knowledge. Reviewers have called this physical and emotional transformation a downward spiral, and to a point they are correct, but the crisis that precipitated this downward spiral is, to my mind, a good and necessary one--a process of growth. In "Scar", Starbuck is desperately trying to hold on to a person she can no longer be. The tension we see during the episode is the pain of growing up while still trying to hold on to a younger personality.

My mother, who worked for most of her professional life at Israeli Aircraft Industries, likes to repeat a story related to her by a former test pilot. This man claimed to be able to tell whether a fellow pilot was married, and how many children he had, by the height at which the pilot buzzed the ground on his test flights. The unmarried, unattached young turks would hug the ground, but with each addition to their list of attachments--with marriage, and with the birth of each child--the distance they kept from the ground would grow. You can't have attachments in the world and still act as though you don't care whether you live or die. I'm not exactly pleased with the notion of Anders as the person who gives Starbuck a connection to the world, but if I accept it there's no denying that it makes perfect sense that once she realizes she loves Anders, Starbuck can no longer find it in herself to risk her life thoughtlessly (there's a reverse parallel here with Apollo in "The Hand of God"--the more grounded, connected pilot trying to recall his maverick instincts). Starbuck tells Lee that she's "hung up on a dead guy and it's driving [her] insane", but the truth is that Starbuck can't handle the dissonance between being the maverick, devil-may-care pilot, and being in love. As Helo--the only pilot we know who isn't fighting simply for the thrill of the fight--tells Starbuck, the very fact that she acknowledges her feelings for Anders gives her something to live for, and this both cripples her as a pilot and strengthens her as a human being.

Kat, who has nothing to tie her to the world beyond her role as a fighter, fears being forgotten. Starbuck, in contrast, fears forgetting--both the men and women she sent to their deaths and the man she left to his fate. But forgetfulness is actually Starbuck's refuge throughout the episode--she pretends to be able to move on, to let go of the people she's lost and still be the same person she was at the beginning of the day, but this disconnection has gradually become impossible. Starbuck is being crushed beneath memory and guilt, and the more she tries to drive them away--through drinking, through sex, through violence and simply through noise and movement--the more they haunt her. Starbuck regains her balance by rejecting forgetfulness, by remembering the names of her lost pilots and the love she shared with Anders. Instead of crushing her, these memories build her up.

I'm not entirely certain how I feel about the decision to humanize Scar to the point where his multiple deaths have caused him to hate humans, mostly because I think it's an important theme in the series that Cylons are just as incapable of cruelty and hatred as they are of kindness and sympathy (we might, however, choose to think of Scar as the Raider equivalent of Gina--both cut off from the Cylon commonality and forced to experience pain, through which they both achieve a measure of individuality, and humanity, which other Cylons are incapable of), but I do like the choice of Scar as a moniker and as a way of individualizing this Raider. Scars are a sign of experience, a record of our failures and successes, of the things we've gained and lost, and mostly, of the passage of time. The episode draws deliberate parallels between Starbuck and Scar--two grizzled old flyers most comfortable in a dogfight. Unlike Starbuck, however, Scar is merely an intelligent machine--it can learn, but it can't change. Kat is absolutely right when she tells Starbuck that Scar won't pull away in their game of chicken--it isn't capable of changing its inherent nature to the point where its life has a meaning beyond fighting. Starbuck is, and by choosing to accept that change, she saves her own life. I think the most moving image in "Scar" is the one in which Starbuck gazes out of her window at the wreckage of her former enemy. It's a moment of loss, as Starbuck surrenders her old roles and recognizes the change in herself, and, in some way, I believe that she both pities and envies the dead Raider for not being capable of that change.

Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Kara Thrace is growing up. I'll be very sad if this process of growth means that we'll never again see Starbuck burst into laughter in the cockpit of her Viper, in sheer exuberance at the joy of being alive and in motion, but maturity is a worthy accomplishment at almost any cost. A few weeks ago, in a discussion of Emma Bull's by now infamous essay about Galactica's treatment of gender, I wrote that despite my reservations about the writers' original concept for Starbuck's character, I'm enjoying the way that they've slowly been expanding and moving away from that concept. To quote Neil Gaiman, in life one must either change or die, and I'm tremendously pleased to see that Kara Thrace, and Galactica's writers, have chosen the former.

What Adama Should Have Said to Boomer and Other "Resurrection Ship II" Thoughts

I was spoiled for Boomer's line, "Maybe you don't deserve to survive", several days before watching the episode and, having assumed that it came as a bitter response to the attempted rape, hit the roof in fury. I wrote a long tirade that I think has been a long time coming for Boomer and the rest of the Cylon characters, which I won't post here because, having watched the episode, it's clear that Boomer's intention was neither plaintive nor personal. Her argument for the destruction of the human race is that we fight amongst ourselves, kill and rape and hurt each other. This ties in nicely to the observation that Dan Hartland made a few weeks ago in his Strange Horizons article--that Cylons haven't yet grokked the concept of individuality. If we are to assume that they evolved as a hive-like species (which, for an artificial intelligence, makes a certain amount of sense) then it would folow that they have only a limited understanding of what individuality is, and that to see members of the same species fight and try to kill each other would seem to them a strange sickness. As we can already tell, and as the Cylons are still refusing to admit, the choice to take on distinct human forms is already taking its toll on their uniformity. We see this especially in Baltar's scenes with the battered Six model, Gina, who unlike the 'ideal' Six in Baltar's head has discovered a form of individuality through having been left alone with her pain.

All that said, and recognizing that we've gained a further insight into the Cylon psyche, I still deeply dislike that scene. A sharp response to Boomer's absurd proclamation was definitely warranted, even if it wasn't the tirade I had going on in my head when I first heard the line. At the very least, Adama should have said something along the lines of "And you do?" I've said it before, but the fact that the Cylons commit atrocities and then turn around and claim the moral high ground like they were born there doesn't bother me--it's neat and not a little bit scary. It's the complete obliviousness of the human characters to this moral bankrupcy that drives me up the wall, and the implication that Galactica's writers are more interested in highlighting humanity's darker impulses than they are in telling a story with a consistent approach to ethics. I understand that Adama's conversation with Boomer was part of his long night of the soul as he struggle with the decision to assassinate Admiral Cain, but I can't help but be irked, and possibly even offended, by the notion that a person as staunchly ethical as Bill Adama needs to have an issue of morality cleared up for him by Sharon, who has yet to demonstrate that she possesses a conscience.

By placing Adama in Boomer's presence and having her question his species' right to survive, the writers were obviously trying to make us mull over that tired old chestnut, Are We Any Better Than Our Enemies. Problem is, when it comes to the Cylons, the answer is yes, a great deal better--not because we're so fantastic but because what they've done is so awful. The whole 'our bad guys believe in God and are always polite and well-dressed' thing was neat for about five minutes, but now it's grown tedious, and I really do wish Galactica's writers would stop using the Cylons as a Dark Mirror of Humanity and start working on giving these villains some depth--at the top of my list would be a Cylon who questions their orders for moral reasons, and possibly even a fifth column.

What kills me is that Sharon's experience is actually a brilliant opportunity for the character to show a little growth. Only a few weeks ago, she was blithely defending rape as an experience that might not be so bad if you didn't struggle. Now that she's had a taste of it herself, she has a chance to develop the one quality we've yet to see a single Cylon display--empathy--which might, in turn, be the first indication that she could one day grow into a moral individual.

The episode itself I found sadly disappointing. After the intensity of both "Pegasus" and "Resurrection Ship I", the elegiac tone (which anyway isn't something that Galactica does well for any extended period of time) felt out of place. The problem, I suspect, is that the decision to split "Resurrection Ship" into two episodes was predicated solely on there being enough material to bulk out the first half of the story. The remaining two acts of what should have been a single episode weren't sufficiently expanded, and we were left with endless shots of Lee floating in a pool. The result was not only padded but insulting to the viewers' intelligence--the first shot of Lee floating in water and then transitioning to the vacuum of space was beautiful and odd, but the writers should have had enough faith in our intelligence to trust that we'd understand what Lee was doing without providing visual metaphorical aids--see, he's letting the water close in on him, see?

The question of hope and despair--and the way that both of them affect human behavior--recurs throughout the episode, but I couldn't help but feel that, once again, the writers were hammering the issue in (and rather suddenly too--it's not a theme that showed up in either "Pegasus" or "Resurrection Ship I") because they needed to fill up space. I like the idea that his disillusionment with his father and his adopted mother pushes Lee over the brink and into despair. Like all members of the fleet, he's been hanging on to hope out of sheer habit, taking his life one day at a time and never letting up for one minute, lest he curl up into a ball and die. Which is precisely what he does towards the end of "Resurrection Ship II", as the realization sinks in that the life he has to come back to is one in which the people he admires let him down and he's expected to commit terrible crimes. His only regret is that in letting go of life he's breaking his promise to the one person who still represents something pure and good. I'm not surprised at Lee's choice, nor at the fact that despite his rescue, he's nowhere near whole--having let go of hope and life, it's going to be tremendously difficult for him to regain the desire for either.

I like the fact that Adama's decision to kill Cain, even though he didn't go through with it, has irreparably damaged both of his 'children', with Kara now wondering about her allegiances (I'm not entirely certain where Kara stands with regard to Cain, Adama, and the position she was placed in. Her eulogy for Cain seems to suggest that she recognizes how a loss of hope damaged Cain and led her to make reprehensible choices, but the very end of the speech suggests that Kara is now uncertain as to whether those choices weren't necessary, and she certainly has ambivalent feelings towards Adama and what he almost forced her to do). As we saw when the Pegasus crewmen came to attack Helo and Tyrol, Admiral Cain's choices have had a similarly corrosive effect on her crew, and there's no question in my mind that Cain's death will solve very little in the short term. Some of her crew will no doubt reassess their behavior in the wake of their exposure to the fleet and its more normative moral compass, but others have crossed a line that can never be un-crossed.

I can sympathize with Galactica's writers, who found themselves in an impossible situation when the time came to write the episode's ending (although only to a point because, really, this is something they should have seen coming), but I can't help but feel that the manner in which Admiral Cain was got rid of was contrived, an easy out that seems entirely out of place for this show. I wonder whether Roslin would have been as pleasant and cheerful in her last scene with Adama if Gina hadn't killed Cain, and he came back and told her that he wouldn't commit an immoral act. We're all as grateful as she was that Adama didn't have to kill Cain, but the manner in which she was gotten rid of leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Once again, I wonder if a tighter, more intense story wouldn't have helped to allay that sensation--if the plot had moved faster, I might not have noticed its inherent contrivance until I thought about it. In general I can't help but feel that "Resurrection Ship II" is a mass of good parts that come together into a muddled whole, and that it sadly cheapens the two excellent episodes that preceded it.

Oh, and Roslin may not die.

Lamest. Feminist Icon. Ever.

Over at Strange Horizons, Dan Hartland has an interesting write-up of the second half of Battlestar Galactica's summer season (am I wrong, or are most of the critical opinions about this show coming from genre insiders? Certainly it seems that mainstream venues can't stop falling over themselves to indiscriminately praise the show). Hartland makes a good argument about the importance of individuality and its acceptance within the show, and suggests that it is this ability to accept individuality--the huge range of human experience and personality--that separates good from evil on the show.

The Number Six stored in Balthar's mind exhorts us to consider the abused woman as an individual, a reality, rather than a scientific problem or icon. Balthar later observes that her catatonic state emphasizes more than anything else so far that the psychology of those Cylons who appear human is identical to that of the beings they imitate and destroy. When Cain, assuming command of the fleet, splits up the Galactica's crew on the grounds that Commander Adama is too close to them, and when Apollo is told by his new CO that he should not allow the problems of his friends to trouble him, what is really going on is a destruction of the very philosophy that has kept the understaffed crew of the obsolete Battlestar alive: their acceptance of individuality.

It's a good argument, despite some clunky supporting examples (it seems disingenuous to offer the reporter in "Final Cut" as an example of someone who learns to see past preconceived notions and recognize the crew's humanity, and it is downright incorrect to claim that Adama--who may be clinically incapable of thinking impersonally--attacks Sharon in "Home, pt. 2" because he forgets that she is a person), but more interesting to my mind is Hartland's criticism of Galactica's treatment of gender. Despite what mainstream reviewers may think, Galactica is at its core a very conservative show when it comes to issues of gender, although I haven't been able to decide whether or not this is intentional on the writers' part.

When it comes to sexual humiliation on the show, the men are seduced and the women are raped. As I wrote when I discussed the show back in September, all of its individualized villains are female, and two of those villains use sexuality as a weapon. On both Galactica and the Pegasus, there is a marked absence of women in positions of authority and command (in fact, with the exception of Admiral Cain, we've seen no female crewmembers on the Pegasus at all). And then there's Starbuck, who, whatever Laura Miller might think, is anything but a feminist icon.

Galactica's writers can't seem to stop apologizing for writing the character as she is. Starbuck is violent and headstrong because she's trying to fill up the empty void inside. The fact that she's sexually assertive and promiscuous is a sign that she's a 'screw-up'. That she doesn't want children is an indication of trauma and the result of being abused as a child (by her mother, who was apparently also a religious fanatic). Starbuck, we're told, wants to think of herself as mean and unworthy, wants to believe that she's not worth respect and love. Her confident demeanor conceals, as the stereotype goes, a profound lack of self-confidence and self-esteem.

I wouldn't like to be seen as saying that I want Starbuck to be perfect and well-adjusted, but the shape of her disfunction infuriates me. When I watch her, I find myself constantly recalling that genuine feminist SF icon, Farscape's Officer Aeryn Sun, whose character starts out, like Starbuck, as a capable soldier who is incapable of recognizing her feelings and who treats sex as recreation. Aeryn grows and changes over Farscape's run, and although by the show's end she has traded in her role as an emotionless soldier for that of a wife and mother, it is an empowering journey. Aeryn is flawed and, as a person, incomplete, but at no point did Farscape's writers suggest that, in order to experience the full range of human emotions, Aeryn needed to be cured of her strength or her personality. "You can be more", she is told by love interest John Crichton in their first meeting, and more is indeed what Aeryn becomes. She casts away the parts of her training that, as she comes to realize, don't mean a damn, and opens herself to new experiences. At the same time, however, Aeryn holds on of the skills that have kept her alive and made her strong, and uses them to safeguard her new, more rounded existence.

Instead of suggesting that Aeryn's competence and strength are an armor concealing her inadequacies, as Galactica's writers seem to be doing with Starbuck, the Farscape writers recognized that those strengths were an integral part of Aeryn's personality, that they had to be added to, not stripped away. Like all complete human beings, Aeryn had to learn to be vulnerable (although it's worth noting that throughout their relationship, Crichton was always 'the girl', emotionally speaking), but the writers never tried to make her pitiable. Galactica's writers use pity as a shortcut to making us love Starbuck--poor abused, lost child--but it is that pity, and the pity that Starbuck feels for herself, that is the most off-putting aspect of the character. It tells us that Starbuck is shamming strength, and that she may never make the journey into adulthood.

There has been some indication of progress for Starbuck's character--her journey to Caprica seems to have rattled her and forced her to take a long, hard look at herself, and she did seem to have something approaching a normal relationship with Anders--and as I've said before, Galactica's near-real-time progression means that any change we see in the character will be slow and gradual, but I'm not at all certain that the roots of the problem have been dealt with. Whether or not they meant to do so, Galactica's writers are treating feminine strength as a problem or an indication of a problem (with the exception of President Roslyn, of course), and they will never be able to write feminist fiction while they continue to do so.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out the comments to Hartland's article. There's a very interesting and well-written discussion going on there about the show's strengths and weaknesses, and the point is made that Galactica is a conservative show in more ways than just its attitude towards gender.

Dear Ronald D. Moore: Scattered Thoughts at the End of Battlestar Galactica's Summer Season

I know that Battlestar Galactica's second season hasn't officially ended but rather gone into hiatus (with one frakking hell of a cliffhanger. Could someone get the Stargate people a copy of that episode while I go depress myself by counting the days until January?), but given the recent television theme of this blog I thought it would be a good idea to talk about where the show has been and where it might be going. Plus, Galactica is a fantastically cool show and worth writing about. This is less a wish list and more a series of observations, and since it's always easier to criticize faults than to praise accomplishments I'll just get the praise part out of the way: in the first half of its second season, Galactica has maintained and occasionally surpassed the level of quality I'd come to expect from it. It's an intelligent, challenging show, full of complicated, human characters, that offers an irresistible mix of edge-of-your-seat action and byzantine political games. If you're not watching it, it's time to start.

One of the 'compliments' that mainstream reviewers have been heaping on Galactica is that it's a non-SF kind of science fiction. Usually, this kind of phrase means that the reviewer is embarrassed to be seen praising science fiction (see Laura Miller in Salon, who spent two paragraphs trashing all other SF television, including Farscape, before she lauded Galactica for doing something as innovative as creating a female character who is a capable military officer and acts like a man), or that they know so little about SF that anything out of the Star Trek mold startles them, but in Galactica's case I think this observation might point to a possible crack in the show's foundation.

It occurs to me that there are two Galacticas: Galactica-as-a-9/11-allegory and Galactica-as-a-story. The former is the one getting praised in Newsweek and Salon and other mainstream publications, with the SF setting merely a backdrop for a story that powerfully mirrors America's situation in the last five years--a devastating attack that has launched not only a war but a slew of internal crises: conflicts between government and the military; religious fanaticism; jingoistic war-mongering; the breakdown of democratic institutions and the erosion of human rights. The latter has captured the hearts of many a genre fan, who expect a story that is perhaps not predictable but that conforms to universal notions of good storytelling. Where these two shows conflict, we find the potential roots of the show's undoing.

One example is the two kinds of Galactica episodes. The best stories we've seen on the show have been the ones that grew organically out of the characters' personalities and the situations they were placed in--several Galactica crewmen are stranded in hostile territory, under the command of Crashdown, who is only an officer because of the military tradition that pilots hold officers' ranks and has no leadership experience, and in the presence of Tyrol, who is almost overqualified for the job of leading them but is only an NCO. Now what? On the other hand, we have episodes that seem to have been written out of the desire to address an issue--witch hunts are bad, is torture acceptable--and by and large they've been preachy and obvious.

In the podcast for the episode "Home, pt. 2", Moore points out that, having finally resolved or brought to a point of stability most of the issues raised in the first season finale (and by the way, kudos to the Galactica writers for taking a leisurely seven episodes to wrap up these plot strands. At no point did this decision seem like an indulgence. One of Galactica's greatest strengths is that the writers recognize and even revel in the inherent messiness of their premise. However closely they look at their characters and situations, they find compelling stories to tell), his writers are now free to write episodes that are more self-contained as the fleet inches its way towards Earth. I have no problem with this approach in theory, but the episodes that completed the summer season are definitely in the 'issue' camp--cynical reporter is embedded on Galactica and learns to appreciate the crew's sacrifices; low morale on the ship is combatted by a symbolic gesture of hope; the dehumanization that occurs when a military commander allows herself to succumb to vengeance and violence--and have been weaker for it.

To their credit, the Galactica writers seem to be aiming for a mix of issue stories and situational stories--"Final Cut" is nearly rescued by its twist ending, the sappy "Flight of the Phoenix" is actually quite affecting because we do love these characters; "Pegasus"'s slow first half is redeemed by its second, in which interpersonal crises begin to flare up--but they don't yet seem to have found the happy medium between telling an organic story and making a point. It would be nice if they did, as many of the issues they try to address in the show's standalone episodes are important--so important that until the writers figure out how to deal with them without becoming shrill, it would be better if they were left alone.

Another point of friction between allegory and story is the nature of the human-form Cylons. As stand-ins for America's enemies in the 21st century, the human-form Cylons make perfect sense--they're relentless, cruel, insidious, devoted to a fanatical religious dogma we can barely comprehend, and yet fundamentally, just like us. If we choose to view Galactica as a story in its own right, however, the human-form Cylons make no sense. Are they robots? If so, why have we been told that they have biological innards, and apparently no discernible mechanical components? And how are they capable of breeding with humans? Are they clones? If so, what is the source of their strength, their ability to transmit their consciousness when they die, and their ability to interface directly with fiber-optic cables? What distinguishes a human-form Cylon from a human? And why have none of the human characters asked any of these questions?

Galactica's packed storylines and slower-than-real-time progression (from the miniseries to the middle of the second season, less than six months have elapsed) are a great aid to writers who suggest the existence of an intricate backstory without knowing what that story might be. To my own great surprise, I haven't found myself obsessing about the Cylons' master plan, or becoming upset by the egregious contradictions in the show's premise (if the Cylons wanted to destroy humanity, why wait until the day before Galactica--the one ship they couldn't easily disable--was decommissioned? If they wanted Galactica to survive--possibly because they believe the fleet will lead them to Earth--why do they keep attacking it? And if the Cylons are so desperate to reproduce that they're willing to farm the job out-of-species, why did they kill and/or irradiate all but a tiny fraction of their potential breeding stock?), but the human-form Cylons have been so prominent and so crucial to the show's various plotlines that it is becoming impossible to ignore the glaring contradictions that they represent. I have my own theories about the nature of the human-form Cylons, but the show keeps providing us with more and more contradictory information, the allegory overwhelming the story, and in the end I suspect that no answer will be sufficient to explain away this plot hole.

Along those same lines, I can't be the only viewer frustrated by the Cylons' injured superiority in the face of the humans' reaction to, well, being exterminated, or more accurately by the writers' indulgent attitude towards this superiority. Moore is using the Cylons as a way of demonstrating our tendency to dehumanize our enemies, to deny their personhood, their ability to make moral judgments, and their capacity for emotion. The problem is that Galactica's villains may very well lack at least some of these qualities. I'm perfectly willing to accept that the Cylons are people, but if they are, it follows that they knowingly committed a monstrous crime, and should be made to pay for it.

We have yet to see a single Cylon, human-form or otherwise, who has displayed an ounce of remorse for being part of genocide on an unprecedented scale. Sharon doesn't count: the show has made it abundantly clear that she had no problem with the 'kill all humans' platform before it started interfering with her love life, and even now she doesn't seem to have comprehended the inhumanity of her people's actions--watch her trying to justify the Cylon breeding camps by explaining that, if Starbuck had acquiesced to being used as a brood mare, she would have been partnered with a nice-looking specimen. Sharon is only on the humans' side because she loves Helo, and although being capable of love is a good thing--certainly better than the alternative--it isn't a moral accomplishment, and it doesn't entitle her to sadly tell Helo that "[He's] only human" because his superiors' reaction to the extermination of their race by her people is to put her in a cage.

Again and again, the human-form Cylons demonstrate a frightening lack of empathy. There's no excuse for what Admiral Cain did to the Pegasus Six (or, for that matter, for what Starbuck did to Leoben), but wouldn't it have been nice if there had been someone around during Six's hissy fit over her counterpart's mistreatment who could have pointed out that she herself has been known to butcher babies in their sleep? If I believed that the writers are aware of the Cylons' inherent hypocrisy, and that they were intentionally highlighting it in order to make them more terrifying as villains, I might enjoy them. But it really does seem that Moore intends for us to feel sorry for the Cylons, which makes no sense given all that we know about them. It's wrong--not to mention stupid and dangerous--for the humans to insist on treating sentient beings as if they were merely machines, but nothing Moore does is going to convince me that doing so is somehow analogous to, or even worse than, genocide, and that treating the Cylons with suspicion and a certain amount of violence is not the correct course of action.

If you've been reading this blog for any amount of time you already know how allergic I am to dogma in my fiction, so it's possible that my violent reaction to the allegory in Battlestar Galactica is out of proportion to most people's, but I truly do believe that if Moore and his writers don't find a way to tell a story that mirrors present-day events without being overwhelmed by symbolism, Galactica will flounder. In all forms of writing, story must come first: the characters need to be real, the plot needs to make sense, you can't demand too much suspension of disbelief from your viewers. Place story second to ideology, and you'll soon find yourself with neither.

A few more scattered thoughts and observations:

• Only a few weeks ago I wrote about the three stock types for a female villain--the temptress, Lady Macbeth, and the ball-buster. With the addition of Admiral Cain to Six and Ellen Tigh, Galactica now has the full set, and this is a show that hasn't been eager to embrace traditional notions of villain-hood. Apart from Six, the Cylons have been a rather faceless, amorphous sort of antagonist, and the show's male bad guys--Tom Zarek, Simon the Cylon, Baltar--have been wishy-washy and morally ambiguous. I suspect I'm meant to be impressed by the female bad girls, but despite the best efforts of Tricia Helfer, Kate Vernon, and Michelle Forbes--truly a talented group of actresses--they are one-dimensional, uninteresting, and slightly troubling when you consider how few women there are in Galactica's command structure.


• While we're one the subject of Ellen Tigh, the woman must go. Toss her out an airlock, reveal that she's a Cylon, have her drink herself to death, I don't care. Just get rid of her. Without Ellen, Tigh has the potential to be an interesting character. Unlike almost everyone else on the ship--and for that matter, most characters in disaster stories--Tigh isn't rising to the occasion, but is rather overwhelmed by it. He's the stereotypical underqualified middle manager, who reacts to a trying situation by snapping at his underlings (in "Flight of the Phoenix" he manages a pitch-perfect impression of the pointy-haired boss when he orders Gaeta to find a computer virus by reviewing Galactica's computer operating system code line by line) and making bad decisions. In this, he's probably more like us than we'd like to admit, but the writers keep providing him with an escape hatch in the form of his manipulative wife. Tigh, we're constantly told, is a good man with good instincts, if it weren't for that pesky wife of his messing things up. Which, quite frankly, makes me lose whatever respect I still had left for him. "My wife made me do it" is rarely a good excuse, but when 'it' means "placing the fleet under martial law" or "sending marines to deal with protesting civilians", it only serves to make Tigh look even more pathetic than he already is.


• The last science fiction show to deal intelligently with religion, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, walked away from the opportunity to face the subject head on when it gave its viewers a rational explanation for the Bajoran gods. Galactica seems to be heading the same way, with a true prophecy already in evidence. Before we get too involved in Colonial mythology, I'd like to make a case for a little mystery. True faith isn't just independent of rational proof, it is incompatible with it. Let's see something like a real religion - an irrational lie that can never be proved, that is felt in the heart and not in the head. The show has already shown great promise with the introduction of Starbuck's quiet yet powerful religious convictions. Let's investigate that side of faith a little more.


• It's refreshing to see a show as allergic to exposition as Galactica seems to be. Viewers are often dumped into the middle of the action, only to discover that they really didn't need the five minutes of talking that would have preceded it in any other show and recapped events the viewers had already witnessed (I'm looking at you, Lost). This aversion to info-dumps might explain why the human characters are so uninquisitive--sometimes absurdly so. When Sharon tells Starbuck that "[She has] a destiny", how is it possible that Starbuck doesn't ask her to elaborate? Why doesn't anyone question Sharon when she announces that the Cylons know more about the Colonials' religion than the Colonials do? Why hasn't anyone sat down for a heart-to-heart with her about what she is and what the Cylons' plan is? Either the writers don't know, or they have other things they want to write about, but either way they're making the characters look stupid.


• Just to be clear: Laura Roslin can't die. Mary McDonnell owns the character--she practically owns the show. I refuse to believe that the writers are going to kill Roslin off. I'm tempted to say that if Roslin goes, I go, but we all know that's not true. So, writers, please?

Just When I Thought Battlestar Galactica Couldn't Get Any Cooler

I didn't love the original Battlestart Galactica when I saw it as a kid, but I remember liking the episodes that introduced Pegasus, the second surviving battlestar, and its bigger-than-life Commander Cain. So I was pleased to hear that the new BSG would be introducing its own Pegasus.

Of course, this is Ron Moore we're talking about, and naturally there's a twist--not only is Cain a woman, but she's an admiral, and therefore outranks Adama!

And if that's not enough for you, according to The CIC, the actress playing Cain is none other than Michelle Forbes, known to genre fans as Star Trek: The Next Generation's Ro Laren, and also the best and only reason to watch 24's second season.

I couldn't love this news any more if it were made of chocolate.

Also BSG-related: Battlestar Galactica Accidentally Cancelled