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BSG 3x17 - Maelstrom
Okay, so it took me something like three hours to watch this episode because of breaks for dinner and frantic typing of reactions. It made it seem all epic and long.
- Dude. DUDE. It's like the writers thought 'wow, what can we do to cater to those sad freaks who are crazy about Leoben/Kara? I know, we'll have them make out while covered in paint and it can all be a REALLY PORNY DREAM complete with TOSSING AND MOANING kjsdhsaksh it's like beautiful, horrible fanfiction. LOVE. Er, that said, this scene is incredibly powerful - the silence but for Kara's breathing, and the jerky camerawork, and the paint. It's very indigenous. Earthy. Something from myth.
- ...I want to laugh about the fact that their teensy half-toaster who isn't even capable of speech yet is being taken to a psychiatrist, but it does seem like something Sharon and Helo would do. They're endearingly overprotective. And I suppose they have good reason to be.
- The Aurora statue is an intriguing mixture of the old, old Gaia figures - limbless, fertility curves and not much else - and the hair & wings of a Christian-mythos angel. Huh.
- Okay, the Oracle's echo of Leoben's words is awesome.
- AHA. Fingers slammed in a door. Finally we have some clarification on that one. This has been handled SO much better than Lee's godawful, clumsy flashbacks in The Episode Of Which We Do Not Speak
- Golden light behind the Aurora statue = nice touch. And may I say that Michael Trucco is looking particularly hot this week? I think it's his hair. It's gotten slightly curly.
(- APROPOS OF ABSOLUTELY NOTHING except that they just showed a shot of EJO: Roberto Mendoza's canonical wife is called Laura. HAHAH. Anyway. The things you pick up while watching S1 of The West Wing for the second time.)
- MANDALA STORM! Wow.
- ...crush her like a cheap soda can. Yes, Saul, because what Adama really needs right now is a graphic visual of the death of his psuedodaughter. ASSHAT.
- ncxjcszjkds every time Lee gets worked up and panicky on the comms my heart does this horrible jumping thing.
- Whoa. IMAGINARY Raider. Kudos Racetrack for fulfilling one of the Functions Of Racetrack, which is to call Kara out when Helo is being calm and Lee is being nice. (The other Function Of Racetrack is to find stuff. You know. Basestars. Water. Planets. Electric storms.)
- "In peacetime he'd ground us all." YES. THANK YOU. EVERYONE ON THIS SHOW IS CRAZY. But what the hell, writers: Viper driver? EJO and Jamie Bamber handled this scene very well: they hate this conversation, they're talking about grounding a woman they both love, Lee's making an excellent case against but they've both got jobs to do. And that's who the Adama men are. And neither of them are as close to her as they were circa 'You'll Never Go Home Again', and that's a good thing, because they've grown and now they can make the right decision instead of the one that they might make because...it's a woman they both love.
- PILOOOOOTS. AUUGGHHH. This whole back-to-being-best-friends thing is KILLING ME because at least when they were being infidelicious and whiny you kind of wanted to knock their heads together. Now they're MY PILOTS AGAIN and they love each other with the quiet snarky wingman's love of the person who'll make sure your picture goes up where you want it to. I AM DEAD. OH PILOTS. HE TRUSTS HER WORD. AND HE THINKS SHE'S A RAVING LUNATIC AND SHE THINKS HE'S A BASTARD.
- Mandala #2 - wax! This is fantastic. Really, this is a fantastic episode. It's like RDM summoned all his strength and imagination and decided that fuck the rest of the season, there would be one really awesome episode, and this would be it. (Of course. It's the Kara's Special Destiny episode!) All it needs is Tom Zarek to be absolutely perfect, but I didn't see Richard Hatch's name in the opening credits. Alas.
- Nothing but the rain. Oh. Oh. STOPPIT, RON. NOT FAIR. (Roslin's like: wtf are they saying. damn this military code.) However, the overtones of this episode are very...morbid. Kara's telling her best friend where she wants her photo to go. She's giving away her possessions to her father. I think she knows.
- MORE PILOTS! I saw this preview scene already but it still makes me INSANE WITH JOY. He'll fly her wing. He trusts her. She trusts him. And the way they look at each other...this is truer and better than all of their illicit kissing. This the most romantic kind of eyefrakking you could possibly imagine *flails herself stupid*. Also:
Kara: I MUST SPOIL THE MOOD BEFORE I KISS HIM. UM. LET ME BRING UP HIS WIFE!
Lee: Yeah. Uh. Things are going good.
And you can see him decide that no - if she's playing friends then he's going to make it easier for her to pretend. And she's happy for him, and you know? I think she is. She's glad he'll have someone there for him. This is a goodbye.
OH GOD. WHY DID I PICK UP ON THIS. Now I am morbiding myself to death.
I don't think they ARE back where they started, but it's close enough to be wonderful. And all that's been added is the knowledge that they love each other, dangerously and hugely and forever, even if all they'll ever be is...what they are. Because I'm just the CAG. And you're just a pilot. It used to be a fact that broke her heart, and now it's something to comfort her. They're definitely not where they started; something's healed, a little bit.
(That said, if Kara dies after Lee has talked her into flying one last time because she trusts him, he's going to be a WRECK.)
- ...well, she sure hit SOMETHING that time. AUGGHHH Lee is getting panicky again I hate this I hate it and he's calling her Kara sjdsaksaha. WAH.
- Okay, Leoben's here again. All Lee-panic momentarily shunted aside.
- Katee Sackhoff is amazing. She really is. Leoben's right: you can SEE the six years in her face, you can see how ashamed and pained and wistful she is. Also, I'd like to write a few reams on exactly how Starbuck must have felt, standing there in front of Laura Roslin and being told that the President - who had just called up her childhood, her beliefs, her gods, her mother - had cancer. I also find it interesting that this is, in the end, all inside Kara's head: just like Baltar, she's got a Cylon in her head that knows things he shouldn't know and tells her things she doesn't want to hear. And so this is it! The one giant guilt of Kara Thrace: she couldn't watch her mother die, and she's been paying for it ever since by watching everyone else she loves fall apart around her.
So now she gets to watch that one pivotal event, and say goodbye, and hear her mother say something kind. And yet we're in her head, so I don't know if this is emergency self-inflicted therapy or if this - ah - this is her equivalent of Baltar's balcony-house. As real as it needs to be.
Leoben says: there's nothing so terrible about death.
Kara needs to know that her mother wasn't punished, in the end. Needs to know that she, Kara, with all of her goodbyes and unconscious preparation, was doing the right thing.
Leoben says: you're free now --
-- and that's a psychotherapy breakthrough if I ever saw one, that's the cue to wake up drained and sobbing but FREE OF GUILT, READY TO HEAL, HURRAH but all she's going to wake up to is a crashing Viper. Free.
(I do find the fact that suddenly Kara wakes up to the fact that Leoben would have been WAY more sadistic about the whole process to be kind of funny.)
- Yeah, okay, she totally didn't smack that enormous hole in her OWN windscreen. I'll admit to being kind of confused about the Magical Possibly Imaginary Heavy Raider Of Healing Epiphanies that, nevertheless, packs a hell of a punch. Unless - hmm - she's imagining the damage as well.
- Heh. Adama and Tigh stand around bitching, and meanwhile, Gaeta and Dee run the show. I love those two.
- Fuck fuck FUCK with the parallels from wossface, Res Ship 2! That one. I'm sorry, Kara. My heeeeart. I suppose they both had to be suicidal at some point, being the Angsty Romantic Leads, but this is SUCH A BETTER EPISODE that Kara is heart-rending whereas Lee just looked...silly.
- Or at least it was better until that shot of the little girl with the gratuitous backlighting. TACKY. Grr.
- Well, folks, I don't know how she's coming back from THAT one. That was a pretty impressive explosion.
- ASJKSGAYSAJGS LEEEEEEEEEE. AND ADAMA. WITH HIS MODEL SHIP. I CAN'T WATCH.
- In conclusion: awesome episode. Depressing as fuck. And...hmm, I was going to say that I hate RDM for dangling pilots in front of us and promising us an epic love story and then piking so spectacularly, but the love in this episode was almost - almost - enough. I'll mull it over. Mostly - and hilariously - I am just wondering if that damn Raider was real or not, because Lee saw two ships in that brief moment before he proclaimed visual contact. I swear he did.
I don't know what this is going to do to Lee and his father, but it's not going to be pretty. At all. I'm curious enough - and impressed enough by the show's quality lately - that I'm definitely going to keep watching, despite the lack of Starbuck for the foreseeable future.
No, I haven't QUITE written her off conclusively. There were lots of lines - passing through, becoming who you really are, the space between life and death - that could imply something. Possibly Cylonitude.
Anyway.
I'm going to go and do something cheerful.
:(
ETA: Some reactions to YOUR reaction posts, which I am reading now.
-![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wisteria_ brings up the interesting possibility that Kara is a goddess of some sort, possibly Aurora. The thing is, BSG does acknowledge the religious side of things, if you look at Laura's fulfillment of the prophecy etc., and I don't think it's entirely implausible that Kara will turn out to be playing the role of someone with a resurrection mission. If we're sticking with the Greeks, that'd be Dionysus, but - interestingly - Aurora renews herself every morning. (Thank you, Wikipedia.) We've got the cyclic nature of her destiny already laid out for us by Leoben, and you have to admit that it's a tempting hypothesis. AURORA + APOLLO = IMPLAUSIBLE MYTHIC OTP. ZOMG.
-liminalliz OH MY GOD YOU'RE RIGHT ABOUT THE HANNIBAL THINGDAKSGASLUSJAKDSKAKSH!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCK. I DIDN'T EVEN REALISE. AAAAAHHHHHHH.
-crazylittleme and ack_attack have an excellent theory about Kara being the first Cylon-human hybrid, here. I like it. I like it a lot. I don't know if it makes her resurrectable (though I'd certainly be happy if she was the first of God's children and also the Resurrected God archetypeKJDGJDSAFSAJS OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I JUST CAME UP WITH A JESUS ANALOGY. SOMEONE TALK THIS OUT WITH ME).
(...okay, reading further down the thread, they came up with that parallel too. But it just happened inside my skull like an explosion of meta before I could read that far. DUDES.)
- I love hownuit_belle and I had EXACTLY the same reactions. "So, trust me." Oh, Lee. The way he was looking at her in that scene, combined with the fact that he said he do "whatever it takes" to get her better. Lee's going to be guilting himself over this for a long time, isn't he? Blaming himself that he didn't pull her off CAP. He watched her ship burn! (He was killing me when Lee started to lose it and really yell at her to turn around.) There had better be a scene with him and the memorial wall next week. <--- WORD.
- Aha!wisteria_ has confirmed my suspicions regarding Lee's POV letting us see both ships. The Raider was real. I'm sticking with that story.
-elly457 says that the picture of Kara that Lee puts up on the memorial board should be the other half of the one that Dee had up in HER locker. Omg. That would be the best ever. Because Lee would have to go through Kara's stuff and he'd find the remaining half, with Zak and Kara. That would be perfect. I don't know if RDM will think of it (knowing our luck - nah), but: PERFECT.
Wow, I was all 'she's probably dead but maybe not!' and now I am being swung around to the camp of SHE'S TOTALLY NOT DEAD because of you lot. Heh. However, the episode reads better if her death is taken at least semi-seriously, so...even allowing for her return, I'm letting myself be sobered by it.
LEEEEEE ASASGJASG I am not going to get over how horrible this is going to be for Lee. PLEASE FIX LEE, SHOW. THROUGH LAWYERDOM, IF THAT'S WHAT WORKS.
Talk to me. I have piles of homework to do, but whatever, let's deconstruct this baby.
- Dude. DUDE. It's like the writers thought 'wow, what can we do to cater to those sad freaks who are crazy about Leoben/Kara? I know, we'll have them make out while covered in paint and it can all be a REALLY PORNY DREAM complete with TOSSING AND MOANING kjsdhsaksh it's like beautiful, horrible fanfiction. LOVE. Er, that said, this scene is incredibly powerful - the silence but for Kara's breathing, and the jerky camerawork, and the paint. It's very indigenous. Earthy. Something from myth.
- ...I want to laugh about the fact that their teensy half-toaster who isn't even capable of speech yet is being taken to a psychiatrist, but it does seem like something Sharon and Helo would do. They're endearingly overprotective. And I suppose they have good reason to be.
- The Aurora statue is an intriguing mixture of the old, old Gaia figures - limbless, fertility curves and not much else - and the hair & wings of a Christian-mythos angel. Huh.
- Okay, the Oracle's echo of Leoben's words is awesome.
- AHA. Fingers slammed in a door. Finally we have some clarification on that one. This has been handled SO much better than Lee's godawful, clumsy flashbacks in The Episode Of Which We Do Not Speak
- Golden light behind the Aurora statue = nice touch. And may I say that Michael Trucco is looking particularly hot this week? I think it's his hair. It's gotten slightly curly.
(- APROPOS OF ABSOLUTELY NOTHING except that they just showed a shot of EJO: Roberto Mendoza's canonical wife is called Laura. HAHAH. Anyway. The things you pick up while watching S1 of The West Wing for the second time.)
- MANDALA STORM! Wow.
- ...crush her like a cheap soda can. Yes, Saul, because what Adama really needs right now is a graphic visual of the death of his psuedodaughter. ASSHAT.
- ncxjcszjkds every time Lee gets worked up and panicky on the comms my heart does this horrible jumping thing.
- Whoa. IMAGINARY Raider. Kudos Racetrack for fulfilling one of the Functions Of Racetrack, which is to call Kara out when Helo is being calm and Lee is being nice. (The other Function Of Racetrack is to find stuff. You know. Basestars. Water. Planets. Electric storms.)
- "In peacetime he'd ground us all." YES. THANK YOU. EVERYONE ON THIS SHOW IS CRAZY. But what the hell, writers: Viper driver? EJO and Jamie Bamber handled this scene very well: they hate this conversation, they're talking about grounding a woman they both love, Lee's making an excellent case against but they've both got jobs to do. And that's who the Adama men are. And neither of them are as close to her as they were circa 'You'll Never Go Home Again', and that's a good thing, because they've grown and now they can make the right decision instead of the one that they might make because...it's a woman they both love.
- PILOOOOOTS. AUUGGHHH. This whole back-to-being-best-friends thing is KILLING ME because at least when they were being infidelicious and whiny you kind of wanted to knock their heads together. Now they're MY PILOTS AGAIN and they love each other with the quiet snarky wingman's love of the person who'll make sure your picture goes up where you want it to. I AM DEAD. OH PILOTS. HE TRUSTS HER WORD. AND HE THINKS SHE'S A RAVING LUNATIC AND SHE THINKS HE'S A BASTARD.
- Mandala #2 - wax! This is fantastic. Really, this is a fantastic episode. It's like RDM summoned all his strength and imagination and decided that fuck the rest of the season, there would be one really awesome episode, and this would be it. (Of course. It's the Kara's Special Destiny episode!) All it needs is Tom Zarek to be absolutely perfect, but I didn't see Richard Hatch's name in the opening credits. Alas.
- Nothing but the rain. Oh. Oh. STOPPIT, RON. NOT FAIR. (Roslin's like: wtf are they saying. damn this military code.) However, the overtones of this episode are very...morbid. Kara's telling her best friend where she wants her photo to go. She's giving away her possessions to her father. I think she knows.
- MORE PILOTS! I saw this preview scene already but it still makes me INSANE WITH JOY. He'll fly her wing. He trusts her. She trusts him. And the way they look at each other...this is truer and better than all of their illicit kissing. This the most romantic kind of eyefrakking you could possibly imagine *flails herself stupid*. Also:
Kara: I MUST SPOIL THE MOOD BEFORE I KISS HIM. UM. LET ME BRING UP HIS WIFE!
Lee: Yeah. Uh. Things are going good.
And you can see him decide that no - if she's playing friends then he's going to make it easier for her to pretend. And she's happy for him, and you know? I think she is. She's glad he'll have someone there for him. This is a goodbye.
OH GOD. WHY DID I PICK UP ON THIS. Now I am morbiding myself to death.
I don't think they ARE back where they started, but it's close enough to be wonderful. And all that's been added is the knowledge that they love each other, dangerously and hugely and forever, even if all they'll ever be is...what they are. Because I'm just the CAG. And you're just a pilot. It used to be a fact that broke her heart, and now it's something to comfort her. They're definitely not where they started; something's healed, a little bit.
(That said, if Kara dies after Lee has talked her into flying one last time because she trusts him, he's going to be a WRECK.)
- ...well, she sure hit SOMETHING that time. AUGGHHH Lee is getting panicky again I hate this I hate it and he's calling her Kara sjdsaksaha. WAH.
- Okay, Leoben's here again. All Lee-panic momentarily shunted aside.
- Katee Sackhoff is amazing. She really is. Leoben's right: you can SEE the six years in her face, you can see how ashamed and pained and wistful she is. Also, I'd like to write a few reams on exactly how Starbuck must have felt, standing there in front of Laura Roslin and being told that the President - who had just called up her childhood, her beliefs, her gods, her mother - had cancer. I also find it interesting that this is, in the end, all inside Kara's head: just like Baltar, she's got a Cylon in her head that knows things he shouldn't know and tells her things she doesn't want to hear. And so this is it! The one giant guilt of Kara Thrace: she couldn't watch her mother die, and she's been paying for it ever since by watching everyone else she loves fall apart around her.
So now she gets to watch that one pivotal event, and say goodbye, and hear her mother say something kind. And yet we're in her head, so I don't know if this is emergency self-inflicted therapy or if this - ah - this is her equivalent of Baltar's balcony-house. As real as it needs to be.
Leoben says: there's nothing so terrible about death.
Kara needs to know that her mother wasn't punished, in the end. Needs to know that she, Kara, with all of her goodbyes and unconscious preparation, was doing the right thing.
Leoben says: you're free now --
-- and that's a psychotherapy breakthrough if I ever saw one, that's the cue to wake up drained and sobbing but FREE OF GUILT, READY TO HEAL, HURRAH but all she's going to wake up to is a crashing Viper. Free.
(I do find the fact that suddenly Kara wakes up to the fact that Leoben would have been WAY more sadistic about the whole process to be kind of funny.)
- Yeah, okay, she totally didn't smack that enormous hole in her OWN windscreen. I'll admit to being kind of confused about the Magical Possibly Imaginary Heavy Raider Of Healing Epiphanies that, nevertheless, packs a hell of a punch. Unless - hmm - she's imagining the damage as well.
- Heh. Adama and Tigh stand around bitching, and meanwhile, Gaeta and Dee run the show. I love those two.
- Fuck fuck FUCK with the parallels from wossface, Res Ship 2! That one. I'm sorry, Kara. My heeeeart. I suppose they both had to be suicidal at some point, being the Angsty Romantic Leads, but this is SUCH A BETTER EPISODE that Kara is heart-rending whereas Lee just looked...silly.
- Or at least it was better until that shot of the little girl with the gratuitous backlighting. TACKY. Grr.
- Well, folks, I don't know how she's coming back from THAT one. That was a pretty impressive explosion.
- ASJKSGAYSAJGS LEEEEEEEEEE. AND ADAMA. WITH HIS MODEL SHIP. I CAN'T WATCH.
- In conclusion: awesome episode. Depressing as fuck. And...hmm, I was going to say that I hate RDM for dangling pilots in front of us and promising us an epic love story and then piking so spectacularly, but the love in this episode was almost - almost - enough. I'll mull it over. Mostly - and hilariously - I am just wondering if that damn Raider was real or not, because Lee saw two ships in that brief moment before he proclaimed visual contact. I swear he did.
I don't know what this is going to do to Lee and his father, but it's not going to be pretty. At all. I'm curious enough - and impressed enough by the show's quality lately - that I'm definitely going to keep watching, despite the lack of Starbuck for the foreseeable future.
No, I haven't QUITE written her off conclusively. There were lots of lines - passing through, becoming who you really are, the space between life and death - that could imply something. Possibly Cylonitude.
Anyway.
I'm going to go and do something cheerful.
:(
ETA: Some reactions to YOUR reaction posts, which I am reading now.
-
wisteria_ brings up the interesting possibility that Kara is a goddess of some sort, possibly Aurora. The thing is, BSG does acknowledge the religious side of things, if you look at Laura's fulfillment of the prophecy etc., and I don't think it's entirely implausible that Kara will turn out to be playing the role of someone with a resurrection mission. If we're sticking with the Greeks, that'd be Dionysus, but - interestingly - Aurora renews herself every morning. (Thank you, Wikipedia.) We've got the cyclic nature of her destiny already laid out for us by Leoben, and you have to admit that it's a tempting hypothesis. AURORA + APOLLO = IMPLAUSIBLE MYTHIC OTP. ZOMG.-
liminalliz OH MY GOD YOU'RE RIGHT ABOUT THE HANNIBAL THINGDAKSGASLUSJAKDSKAKSH!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCK. I DIDN'T EVEN REALISE. AAAAAHHHHHHH. -
crazylittleme and ack_attack have an excellent theory about Kara being the first Cylon-human hybrid, here. I like it. I like it a lot. I don't know if it makes her resurrectable (though I'd certainly be happy if she was the first of God's children and also the Resurrected God archetypeKJDGJDSAFSAJS OH MY GOD YOU GUYS I JUST CAME UP WITH A JESUS ANALOGY. SOMEONE TALK THIS OUT WITH ME). (...okay, reading further down the thread, they came up with that parallel too. But it just happened inside my skull like an explosion of meta before I could read that far. DUDES.)
- I love how
nuit_belle and I had EXACTLY the same reactions. "So, trust me." Oh, Lee. The way he was looking at her in that scene, combined with the fact that he said he do "whatever it takes" to get her better. Lee's going to be guilting himself over this for a long time, isn't he? Blaming himself that he didn't pull her off CAP. He watched her ship burn! (He was killing me when Lee started to lose it and really yell at her to turn around.) There had better be a scene with him and the memorial wall next week. <--- WORD.- Aha!
wisteria_ has confirmed my suspicions regarding Lee's POV letting us see both ships. The Raider was real. I'm sticking with that story.-
elly457 says that the picture of Kara that Lee puts up on the memorial board should be the other half of the one that Dee had up in HER locker. Omg. That would be the best ever. Because Lee would have to go through Kara's stuff and he'd find the remaining half, with Zak and Kara. That would be perfect. I don't know if RDM will think of it (knowing our luck - nah), but: PERFECT.Wow, I was all 'she's probably dead but maybe not!' and now I am being swung around to the camp of SHE'S TOTALLY NOT DEAD because of you lot. Heh. However, the episode reads better if her death is taken at least semi-seriously, so...even allowing for her return, I'm letting myself be sobered by it.
LEEEEEE ASASGJASG I am not going to get over how horrible this is going to be for Lee. PLEASE FIX LEE, SHOW. THROUGH LAWYERDOM, IF THAT'S WHAT WORKS.
Talk to me. I have piles of homework to do, but whatever, let's deconstruct this baby.
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no subject
If you mean, do I want to be spoilered further: no, not really :) I'd like to keep some suspense.
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And so. *clears throat, reacts* OMG WTF EP. You have summed it up nicely. I have no coherence.
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but, but, gaius had the jesus beard
D:!
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(- APROPOS OF ABSOLUTELY NOTHING except that they just showed a shot of EJO: Roberto Mendoza's canonical wife is called Laura. HAHAH. Anyway. The things you pick up while watching S1 of The West Wing for the second time.)
Totally! I had forgotten he was in it, and when I was in S1 of my watch-through, I was like "Oh yeah, ADAMA! and with a stache!"
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And I just.
THEY WENT FROM PINKO MARXIST HEAVEN
TO THIS
WHAT THE FUCK
I HATE THIS SHOW
<33333333333333333
no subject