BSG 4.08 Sine Qua Non

[hazelk]

Well it didn’t start so badly. The teaser was awesome. The chaos at the Quorum and Zarek taking charge scenes were pretty good. Ditto Adama vs Athena but Romo Lampkin and his quantum feline turning up was like a signal for the subtext to skip the whole text stage and feed directly into the dialogue. By the time Romo was conveniently talking himself through the writer’s room process, white-boarding the name of the once and future president, I’d begun to wonder if it was deliberate. Maybe the whole episode was intended as a bold modernist experiment like one of those buildings with its insides on the outside, a TV case of situs evertus.

Good stuff aplenty in (out) there but it didn’t need Lampkin as the voice of the writers to explain it or randomly develop the worst ever case of Schroedinger’s cat survivor guilt so Lee could talk him (and allegorically all his future subjects) down from it. Again, since wasn’t that what his summing up speech at the end of Baltar’s trial was all about already?

Adama leaving to wait for Laura and appointing Tigh his successor was also perfectly believable if mildly insane but if they needed a bonding scene to represent the old guard falling apart I really don’t think Caprica getting knocked up was the sine qua non to that happening. And if cylon fertility still depends on love the skeeviness of either one of them being in love with the other really doesn’t bear thinking about.

Despite the method of getting there I’m happy and intrigued about where the episode ended up, so am going to pretend everything but the teaser happened off stage and skip straight to musing on the implications of President Leland. His appointment certainly recalls Baltar asking Tyrol whether the fleet was ever going to be lead by someone not called Adama and makes the recent Tyrol/Baltar reconciliation potentially interesting. I also think Romo made a good point that power is never acquired entirely by accident. Lee may not consciously seek power but never doubts that his voice is worthy to be heard. He is perfectly genuine in his idealism but he’s never had to work for it or be polled for it as Laura and Zarek have and is Romo Lampkin the only civilian he knows? One of the themes of the episode as the closing montage made very clear was that everyone has their sine qua non but all the ones they showed were personal. It’s interesting because they had almost the same montage at the end of the miniseries as Adama Senior convinced himself to listen to Roslin but at that point the without which nothing he was adopting was more abstract, a people not a person. With it becoming a person he becomes unfit for power (so why does he trust Tigh with it). But if it remains abstract then there are Laura’s dilemmas to face of always putting the people above the person and to what extent the necessary thing is the people or the power to work for them.

In other news thinking about Natalie’s real death her newfound belief that life only acquires meaning through death feels related to the damm cat somehow. Death opens Schroedinger’s box and collapses the superposition of real and unreal. Death is Doc Cottle in a white coat but he’s not in the opera house so not the fifth. Although it make a certain kind of sense that the fifth would be a physician, a guide on the way into life and out of it. Death is something that can’t be projected away and it has to do with identity as well as immortality, while the cylons retained their shared sense of self another Sharon could see Athena on tape and say “Look I’m alive.” A habit which dies hard. Athena shoots Natalie because to a Cylon, even though she rejects that side consciously, any Six is everySix and maybe Athena herself is still everyEight with the ghost of Boomer’s programming still latent.

Comments

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

I do not get the cat thing. At all. It has officially frakked me up worse than the inexplicable Jimi Hendrix. How can the cat have been dead for weeks if Lee saw it that afternoon? Or did Lee ever see it? Was the cat Lampkin's hallucination the entire time? And if so, for the love of the gods, WHY?

Also not buying his random homicidal freakout. At. All. I got briefly happy when I decided it was a test to determine whether Lee would make a good president -- which arguably it was, but Lampkin didn't play it that way. I have the sense we're missing something crucial that wound up on the editing room floor, something that would explain why Lee would hang around casually with/give a dog to the guy who was aiming a gun at his chest a few hours before. Not enough WTF in the world.

I'm sad about Natalie's death: because I liked her, because I liked tzikeh's idea that maybe *she* was the prophesied dying leader, and because it has Jossed the hell out of my most recent vid idea.

Wow. Bill can't live without Laura. The shippers must be going nuts.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

The cat makes quantum physicist sense which is to say none. I think it was supposed to be dead throughout this episode and Lee tripping over the food bowl was all he actually saw of it until he opened the bag, all the rest of the cat scenes were supposed to be in Romo POV. But I think they screwed up on when or how the cat dies because it definitely had scenes with Tyrol in season three when he saw it even though Romo wasn't there. Unless that's a cylon thing. It's just possible that this was covered in the freakout exposition but I wasn't really paying attention being too busy (like you) thinking this is test/any minute now they're all going to wake up or Angelus will start laughing.

In conclusion, Dr Who was good tonight and next week is another day.

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

Oh wow, I totally forgot that the cat had appeared in other episodes! Now I'm even more confused!

MAYBE THE CAT IS THE FINAL CYLON.

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

tzikeh explains the cat, and much else, in a comment in my LJ here. She got a lot more out of the ep than I did!

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

That was good -I missed the revenge killing bit so the cat's timeline does makes sense. The real problem is Romo being given more jobs than any one guest star should ever be given plus an emotionally complex back story with the animal that we had to swallow in one big info dump right at the end.

Liked the point about Tigh and duty too very much. I think Bill is wrong or confuses duty to the service with duty to him personally but it's a believable conflation. Also a recipe for disaster unless Bill comes back or Tigh learns to transfer his loyalty to another Adama.

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

plus an emotionally complex back story with the animal that we had to swallow in one big info dump right at the end.

I think that was why I lost it -- I just didn't understand why this was happening, why I was seeing what I was seeing. I still don't know why it was important for us to hear that story at that particular time, much less with a gun involved. It was just so needlessly extreme and implausible.

I agree with you about Bill. He's never been able to separate personal loyalties from the wellbeing of the fleet. That's the most crucial difference between him and Roslin as leaders.

[(Anonymous)]

Excellent point about Romo and the white board. Hadn't visualized it like that. But it makes sense.

He played his scenes well, like usual, but from a writerly point of view, it still struck me as a useless exercise since from the moment the conversation started it was clearly going to be Lee. Obvious, I guess, to everyone but Lee. But since it was so obvious, I'm not really sure they had to take us through the exericse. Though I'm glad that he pointed out the magical quality of Lee being hand delivered any job of high position he has ever been appointed to. I don't feel the Presidency was earned by him in any way.

Also, Lee is chosen to be president because he is the only one Admiral Adama will recognize. Two seconds after the ceremony, Adama resigns - even if it is only temporary. Was the audience not supposed to notice the lameness of that little plot development?

So the show is back to pointing to Roslin as the final cylon. I suppose that ever since earth became the derivation point of the final 5, her quest to get back to earth seems to mark that way. Not to mention the shared visions and the fact that she was part of the resistance as well.

[abrakadabrah.livejournal.com]

Whoops, that was me, didn't realize I wasn't signed in.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

I think they gave Romo way too many jobs for one guest star to carry. He had to guide the audience (quite unneccessarily) through accepting Lee's appointment, nudge Adama Snr into backing down from sending the whole fleet after his girlfriend and be the psycho to test Lee's President fu at gunpoint.

The promo pointing to Roslin as the fifth looks like a fake cut but I still say its more interesting what they are than who. What's the relationship between their Opera House forms and their bodily incarnations? If they're from Earth when and how did they get here? The Opera House was on Kobol so where does that fit in with the Earth timeline?And so on and so on...