BSG 3:12 Rapture

[hazelk]

F is for family
I recently read a post by vaznetti describing John Winchester (the paterfamilias from Supernatural) as having all the fatherly virtues admired by the Romans including the harsh admixture of love and duty that constituted pietas. Rome was a military society so it’s perhaps no surprise that Bill Adama would seem to fit right in.

Two scenes in this episode that made me catch my breath concerned an emotion even more ruthless than pietas, the first when Helo killed Sharon at her own request and the second her re-union with her daughter and bloody escape. Mother love spares no one but the child. The first scene I was genuinely baffled about what the plan was until the blood on the wall suddenly made it all horribly clear, the second was a brilliant inversion of Six with the baby in the miniseries but also had echoes of Gina snapping the guard’s neck without a second thought in Resurrection Ship. That model is a killer but you gotta love a girl who does it with her bare hands.

The family Cylon feels itself disintegrating and scapegoats the Threes who have indeed forsaken them in pursuit of personal salvation. The oracle did say she would find perfect happiness but who with? Having D’Anna as their representative made it possible she might recognise any of the human cast but that apology sounded personal and the only two people Three seems to have had a personal relationship with were Baltar and Caprica. Both of whom have been seen in that temple space before. It’s Caprica (or someone who looks like her) you’d think she needed to ask forgiveness of the most but that may have just been an apology for not appreciating the godlike qualities of the cloaked one. Which could apply to
anyone human or cylon. Or hybrid.

F is for fidelity
Seems as if the Lee/Kara/Dee/Sam quadrangle may have resolved itself in favour of the two marriages. Starbuck ends the episode with more pressing concerns as destiny catches up with her. Nice piece of continuity with the picture. All mandalas look alike to me and the whole supernova thing makes no sense (but it would probably be more annoying if it attempted to). Still the excellent news is the potential for a Kara/Lebonen re-match. Sick dirty and wrong but maybe those two crazy kids? Hell freezes over. In degrees Kelvin.

Dee was bitter yet likeable for it but the bitterness crown has to go to Boomer. It’s hardly suprising Hera could tell the two Sharons apart with all that world-hate coming off Not!Mommy in waves. Seeing your ex shacked up with your killer can do that to a girl.

F is for fashion
I may have mentioned this before but HeadSix and her bodily counterparts make very different clothing choices. HeadSix has clearly been following Trinny and Susannah in her obsession with primary colours but none of the corporeal Sixes ever seems to wear anything less monchrome than dark beige. HeadSix did have the same outfit that miniseries Six wore to be blown up in when Baltar was cheating on her but I think Caprica always wears teh trousers.

Early on in the season they seemed to setting up parallels between Three and Roslin with the dreams and the deaths and the alpha female but then veered away from any direct comparisons. There was a shot at the end of this episode though when, for a moment, I really thought Laura was D’Anna. Same hair and same ill-fitting white shirt. Given what happened to the Threes one wonders about Roslin’s fate. With the reveal of what she did with Hera the president seems to have lost all the moral authority that seemed so much a part of her in the beginning. When did that happen? She still had it for her Nelson Mandela speech at the end of Collaborators but maybe that was just a blip. Or she still has it in matters of state but since Billy’s death has been losing all her personal connections and Bill Adama was the last one. She did say when Billy was shot that using Boomer’s corpse to save the living Athena wasn’t worth it and that was Adama’s plan. Adama who seems to love all his Sharons.

Before Christmas I thought Gaius’s hair had hit rock bottom. There’s always a lower place.

Comments

[midnightsjane.livejournal.com]

The Sharon/Helo scene gave me chills. The look on his face after he shot her...
I thought it was interesting that Hera responded to her mother so immediately; I think it's that Sharon not only has the motherlove instinct, it's that the two of them share DNA, and Hera has changed Sharon's DNA by virtue of the pregnancy. Sharon Agathon is no longer totally Cylon, I think, just as Hera is partly human. Boomer is really pretty tragic here: she is the one who seems to have no real place in either society, the one who has been changed by her life on Galactica enough that she doesn't fit into the Cylon world, but has no other choice. No wonder she's bitter.
Six is interesting too: she seems to be the most ruthless of them all in some ways. I wondered if there was some significance to the fact that she used to dress in white, and now she is in black....except for headSix who is still the red dressed temptress for Baltar.
Baltar still has his Messiah wannabe hair. Maybe they'll shave it off next week!

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I actually rewound the Sharon/Helo scene halfway through because I though I'd missed some dialogue explaining what Helo was being asked to do and then figured we were going to find out later and relaxed and then wham! But yes that look of Helo's - he knows she's not dead but he still killed her.

I think the show is definitely going for Hera 'knowing' her mother as well as responding to Sharon knowing that she is and I like that as a metaphor or an aspect of cylon biology working differently from ours but I try not to think about it in terms of actual science because they've muddled up the immunology and the genetics of these things so much it's painful. Boomer's bitterness reminded me of the scene in her apartment when she was showing Caprica the photograph and saying that was love. And then on New Caprica it must as seemed as if that love counted for nothing, was no more real than her programmed childhood, none of them even remembered her as a person (she needs maybe to talk to Bill Adama who did mourn her in private).

Six is such an archetypal combination of sex and death, I'm sure there must be a goddess in one of the mythologies I can't remember who she corresponds to. The wierdest thing about Baltar's hair is that it makes everyone watching think he wants to be Jesus but Baltar wouldn't know Jesus (or his hair) from Adam. Or Adam for that matter.

[laddical.livejournal.com]

I think it's that Sharon not only has the motherlove instinct, it's that the two of them share DNA, and Hera has changed Sharon's DNA by virtue of the pregnancy. Sharon Agathon is no longer totally Cylon, I think, just as Hera is partly human.

The catch here, as it relates to physiologically explaining Hera's reaction to Sharon, is that Sharon now occupies a body that has never been pregnant and shares no biological kinship with Hera. At all but the "spiritual" level, Hera's mother is dead.

I actually caught myself thinking along those lines for a bit, assuming that what Hera was actually reacting to was not Sharon directly but the "scent" of humanity that she had grown up so healthfully among for over a year. That seemed the least bizarre of all possible explanations, but unfortunately, it doesn't work because of the resurrection.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

That's a very good point. I did wonder (wank) during the genocide/plague episodes whether downloading cylons might show some inheritance of acqured physical as well as mental characteristics (it's bioelectric!) but it couldn't be complete or they'd still be dead in the new body. The idea of babies being able to recognise their mothers is quite atavistic in humans so I think they were playing on that. Interesting that the cylons, or at least Caprica, would want to believe too.