BSG 3.1-2:New Beginnings

[hazelk]

Occupation and Precipice

The new season starts off with a return to the super-episodic, almost novelistic style of storytelling that served the series so well in its beginning. Locations this time are the human settlement on New Caprica, the Cylon headquarters and the absent Galactica with what remains of the fleet. In the first two episodes the human resistance movement provides the main arcs. Occupation ends with a suicide bombing while Precipice closes on the cusp of a retaliatory shooting of the usual suspects.

The tone is a long way from Casablanca, beer but no bars, no Rick’s here, no music even. Do Cylons sing? Having unkillable robots as the occupying forces does provide a striking metaphor for the sense of powerlessness that fuels any terrorist movement, justified or not. No matter how many buildings are blown up, how many atrocities committed in the name of freedom, nothing changes, they’re always back, the same indistinguishable smug faces, the same outlandish and impractical clothes.

Equally realistic are the rifts forming between humans, collaborators do battle with resistance fighters and Laura Roslin turns her air lock dumping disdain for cylon prisoners against those who were once her own. It’s horribly necessary but at least her opposition to the suicide bombing bears some traces of the concern for falling population that misguidedly lead her to ban abortion not so long ago. She’s correct that something needs to be done to prevent falling into despair and complete appeasement but given the Cylon’s regenerative powers any action that reduces human numbers is counterproductive in the most direct possible way.

Suicide bombing is Colonel Tigh’s strategy, which he justifies by an old soldier’s argument. It’s his time to be the hero, hardened by torture he steps up to the place of an absent Adama but is psychologically just holding the fort for the old man’s return. His faith is justified in a confrontation between Adama and his steadily ballooning son (I get the feeling the writers enjoyed the fat jokes a little too much but who wouldn’t), where Lee rediscovers some the idealistic hope that seemed to die during the whole Pegasus affair.

Ellen Tigh seems set to scupper her husbands plans but from love not malice. Strange how effectively the loose sexuality that marked her as a villainess on first appearance gets spun into heroism, sleeping with the Cylon seemed at first to be her contribution to the Resistance, getting their leader a reprieve. Second time around it became clearer that, like the original Lady MacBeth, her first loyalty was to love. Love as a furnace that burns the wrong papers, not quite the world destroying passion of Baltar and Six but passionate love still gets a bad rap on this show.

From passionate to plain creepy and well Starbuck. Kara Thrace has come a long way. From the miniseries hot shot fighter pilot to kept woman hell with the Cylon who loves her. Everyday she kills him. The baby story is even stranger, can Cylon hybrids download when they die? Do Cylons ever have sex with other Cylons or does their God decree it a contraceptive sin? I’m hoping Baltar isn’t a Cylon because his downward journey is so much more delicious if he makes it to the bottom by his all too human self but they keep showing his ‘death scene’ at the beginning of every show. It’s either a big lie or maybe he’s something more interesting than just another sleeper agent. Maybe Caprica Gaius is the human template for a brand new model. He’s so individualistic that meeting other copies of himself might be the final thing to push him over the edge. Is there an edge left he can fall from?

Comments

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Right here with you!

I hope Baltar isn't a Cylon too, and I don't think he is. I found rather interesting that he didn't seem that enamoured of the real Six actually, in a way he prefered his Six, the one in his head.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Yes he definitely seemed pleased to see her. I wonder if CapricaSix secretly prefers Gaius in her head too. The split between the real and hallucinatory versions of both of them seems a little like the division between the two Xanders in The Replacementconfident and focused versus conflicted and disintergrating. Or I did think the imaginary versionsmight be seen as the ghosts of who they were before the bombs came down.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Or the imaginary version of Six is nothing but Baltar himself !

Don't you think that he loves himself more than anyone else?

Perhaps BSG just renewed the myth of Narcissus!

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

You Gaius/Gaius OTP makes so much sense but I'm suddenly remembering back on the Pegasus he did seem to reject the Six in his head in favour of Gina. Who really didn't love him even in the fanatical fundamentalist dominatrix sense. So I wonder if his problem with corporeal Caprica Six is that she's just too easy.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

Because it was his attempt at not being selfish...he rejected that part of himself that cared only about his own ass. It was when he was with Gina that Gaius was the less self-centred, he did have compassion for her and helped her.

[c-mantix.livejournal.com]

Great post!

Do Cylons sing?

This (rhetorical?) question had me thinking quite a bit about the nature of Cylon individuality and identity (not the same thing in their case, it would seem...)

And I agree with the poster above: Gaius does prefer 'his' Six to incarnations of Caprica Six.

[midnightsjane.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about Cylon individuality and identity too. What happens when a Cylon dies and is downloaded? Has the new version of the model just been kept in storage waiting for another to die, or are these memories and characteristics added to an already functioning and developing version? What does that mean to who/what the new Cylon is?
Baltar definitely seems to prefer his Six, who seems rather different from Caprica Six.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

This is what fascinates me about the whole idea of Hera being a hybrid because although she inherits the bodily characteristics of Sharon that ability to download their entire consciousness and the talk of cold storage seems to imply that Cylon identity is cybernetic rather than genetic. Unless it's some combination of the two. I mean what would happen if a Six's memories got downloaded into a Brother Cavil body by mistake?

[c-mantix.livejournal.com]

seems to imply that Cylon identity is cybernetic rather than genetic

This is the idea I'm grappling with too. To be truthful, I'm mostly stumped because I couldn't find a satisfactory way of explaining the Cylons' consciousness to my mother last Saturday (particularly as far as monotheism is concerned) and, as she hadn't seen the first two seasons, I couldn't count on her filling in the discrepancies in my lame explanation with examples of the Cylon models' interative yet individual behaviour. I do think that the BSG PTB have very specific ideas where they are going with this, though.

Note: When I started explaining about Pegasus Six and Caprica Six and Caprica Six in Gaius' mind not really being the same, my mom got a very rare WTF look on her face;) Who can blame her? LOL.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

This (rhetorical?) question had me thinking quite a bit about the nature of Cylon individuality and identity

Do tell. Do you mean singing specifically or any form of artistic expression? Or would the Cylon sing choral?

[c-mantix.livejournal.com]

Ha! I guess I meant to reference the manner in which many of the less 'experienced' or 'humanised' Cylons seem to yearn for their hearts to soar and sing like that of their counterparts. Their pining, for lack of a better word, is very much like that of an tone-deaf person wishing to sing well. This notion always intrigued me as far as Data's musical instrument playing abilities were concerned. He could engage in artistic endeavour, but the product of his efforts wasn't considered true art. Even he didn't see it as such.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

A sort of phantom limb feeling? Except that they never had that limb in the first place.

I get that I think, that struggle with the idea of individuality, individual emotions because it's not that they have no feelings the Sharons love all the Sharons and they all feel something hate? pity? contempt? towards humanity as a whole but feelings directed at a single individual who the rest of the model may not care for at all are new and strange and yearnful?