BSG 3:15 A Day in the Life

[hazelk]

Belatedly but I liked this one. It was mellow, gentle not pushy like last week’s polemic. Reflective, an old man reflecting, a very human piece.


As the episode itself put it, they need to remember what humanity used to be about, what they hope to make it again. It wasn’t always perfect, golden light and Frank Lloyd Wright housing notwithstanding. That light was important though, it’s so rare on this show to see light you might want to linger in, savour, appreciate. Spaceships are as darkly claustrophobic as giant submarines and every planet they visit is either one of the ones where it never stops raining or the one where the sun comes out only to go supernova. It’s a harsh, unrelenting universe that’s left and tempting to hark back to a lost paradise. So it begins. Bill Adama remembers but his memories are home to the unforgiving ghost of his ex-wife.

She’s quite like other imaginary companions in temperament, no comfortadorix, and physically also reminiscent of Ellen Tigh and Kara Thrace. Lee’s responses to the two of them make so much sense now. Why Ellen’s catting after him was so discomforting, why Starbuck at all. On the other hand (so to speak) Dualla is their physical and temperamental opposite - small boned and dark to their big, blonde and blousy.

This week I liked Lee again and only partly for the delicious legal set up for the one spoiler I know. He’s terrible at relationships, spineless and self-pitying but give him not a war but a cause, something to bring order to and he can rise above it. Apollonian in the Nietzschian sense of the word. (And who am moi to resist the power of the bad philosophy pun). It’s the knowing right from wrong, he knows by caring to think it through what Helo knows by instinct and thus we segue into my love of the scene where Helo sets himself aside from the others just as he said he did last week although the point is made better as comedy than as exposition.

Musing over it the episode seemed to have things to say about power and marriages, both Carol-Ann and the memory of Ellen Tigh come across as stuck in the Betty Frieden 50’s trap of only being able to taste power vicariously through their men. Mrs ex-Bill Adama had some of the bitterness of a woman who refused the Lady McBeth route but found nothing else to replace it. Times move on and although Chief Tyrol is as work-wedded a husband as Bill ever was, Cally has a job. Cally is the little girl who got what she wished for but she married the boss and lost her autonomy. Laura Roslin can choose to take the day off for a spin in the gym but Mrs Chief has to work not spend just one day with her son. That final image of her locked away from the world, frozen and isolated was not entirely hopeful. Athena seems able to juggle home and work but with both Kara and Roslin on the final five suspect list I hope not all the successful women are going to turn out to be robots.

Comments

[obsessive24.livejournal.com]

but with both Kara and Roslin on the final five suspect list I hope not all the successful women are going to turn out to be robots.
Huh. Wouldn't that be something.

Very enlightening reading your analysis, as usual. Thank you. :)

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Actually, my pet theory is the final five are incorporeal (because I'm the one person who thought the First Evil storyline on Buffy was cool). {g}

[midnightsjane.livejournal.com]

I really liked this too. It was an interesting way to look at Adama's past, and his feelings about his marriage and his family. We can see the roots of Lee's estrangement in Adama's fantasy about how secure his sons lives were without him there. I liked the way they were tentatively reaching out to each other in this.
I was glad to see the Cally/Tyrol relationship given a little more depth; so many fans seem to hate Cally and feel the marriage is a sham. I think it's not without problems, but I get the feeling that these two do care about each other.
I really loved the feeling of warmth I got from Roslin and Adama; two mature people who are slowly building a relationship.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes very much. The thing about this episode was I came away from liking all the characters and feeling like I understood them a little better. Cally too, I can see why people think she's whiny but whining and nagging is what peple do when they stop believing talking about things directly will have any effect and she wasn't wrong about Chief having other reasons for making her work 24/7 than those he was giving. He does care about her, he always liked her. I think having her with him on all those shifts might have been an attempt to recreate the circumstances of their old camaraderie before the bombs and the cylons came, not unlike Adama idealising the past.