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[trinityvixen]

Okay, I was totally tired of the SEKRET CYLONS TOSS EACH OTHER LOOKS OF APPREHENSION WHENEVER SOMEONE SAYS THE "C" WORD before this season began, but I find I don't mind it as much when one of them is being looked at on his or her own. Because the actor/actress must internalize the paranoia and the anger without shooting off a glance to someone else. Even in the middle of a scene where three of them were doing the "Dude, he said Cylon! We are totally Cylons OMG!" in the premiere, there was one reaction that really felt true for me. I love when Adama's talking about how one of the sekret Cylons could go unnoticed until it put a bullet in somebody's head and Chief Tyrol gives him this sort of hurt look and his lower eyelid twitches. It was a great character moment because you know that Tyrol, of all of them, is the one who's most defensive about this Cylon bullshit. (At the time, he wasn't full of the insecurity and was not yet elected Mayor of Suicidal Town, and he more or less thought being a Cylon was irrelevant to his life.)

Rewatching "Faith," there was a much longer bit with that where Anders is just finally calming the frak down and finding himself surprised at his own reserves of mercy for the dead Eight and then Leoben, Natalie, Athena, and, worst of all, Kara are peeing themselves with delight over the idea of finding the Final Five through waking up D'Anna. I have to give major props to the director and lighting guys and frakkin' Michael Trucco because it's not easy to make Anders look bad, but he looked like the ugliest of feelings were suddenly all over his face. AND NO ONE WAS NOTICING. Of course not--no one ever notices the SEKRET CYLONS in their midst. Until they put a bullet in someone's head.

Speaking of bullets, the whole scene with Barolay and the Six both irked me and made me want to cry. I'm more than a little pissed at the forums over at TWoP where most people seem to be empathizing with the PTSD!Six versus Barolay. Was Barolay perhaps a little psychotically pleased to kill a skinjob? Sure, why not. Remember where she learned it, though? The Cylons did, to be fair, start this shit. And if Barolay learned a measure of pleasure--or at least satisfaction--in paying some toasters back for it, so frakkin' what? She hasn't turned psychotic on anyone who couldn't resurrect. She's just a frakkin' soldier. Just like every goddamn Cylon. (THERE ARE NO CYLON CIVILIANS. WHAT DO YOU EXPECT, PTSD!SIX? MERCY?)

Point of fact, Barolay learned her lack of sympathy and learned that infllicting as much pain as possible was the only way to cripple an enemy that can't really die from a goddamn Cylon: Sam Anders. Way back when on Caprica, he, she, and another C-Buc/guerilla fighter had a plan to detonate a complex in which the humanoid Cylons had taken up residence. The other guy and Barolay both derided the plan, pessimism having firmly (and reasonably) set in against a) the odds of success and b) the relative uselessness of victory. It was Samuel FUCKING TOASTER Anders who brought them around with a sharp snap. He was the one to first make the point that the point was pain. Killing skinjobs was never going to be about thinning the crowd; it was about teaching them, through pain not to frakkin' mess with humanity because humanity will frak your shit up and laugh while you have to live with it forever. This is something Sam claimed to have learned from Athena--that downloading hurt and was traumatic--but given how Caprica internalizes pain as a great teacher, it's an open question whether Sam didn't know that all along. You don't have to be a Cylon to know it either. ("Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.")

The Cylons are great at compartmentalizing--anything they decide to do as a unit means that it's not any of their individual faults. That's rationalization like whoa. The crazy people who held the pilots hostage in "Sacrifice" wanted Athena's head for what she'd been a part of doing (uh, nuking the frakkin' colonies much, PTSD!Six?), and all the people who had gotten somewhat used to her being a useful individual tool defended her from what--I'm sorry, I do like Athena, but it's true--would have been justice.

And I don't frakkin' appreciate Natalie mocking that. An eye for an eye makes the world blind and shit? Yeah, right, well, if all the humans had lost was eyes, I might be inclined to forgive. (Then again, there's Col. Tight, so maybe not.) The Cylons wiped out humanity AND KEPT TRYING TO FINISH THE JOB. It's not like when they went "Oops, our bad," on New Caprica they were doing any better of a job trying to make nice with the humans.

After Natalie's snit-fit about "Woe is my sister! She won't resurrect!" I, more than ever, want her and her alone to discover that Sam, and only Sam, is a Cylon. Because I want her to suffer that knowledge and know that he hates her frakkin' guts. That neither he nor the others want anything to do with the goddamned Sixes and don't want to be part of some Cylon group hug. I want her to have her hopes crushed the way everyone else has. She is the one who committed murder and treason to get what she wanted and I don't want her to get it.

My earlier prediction seems to be coming true: I think the Anders toaster is toast. I didn't read him as being Archduke of Nutballville like the other three Dylons, I just read him as being really, really stressed. With good goddamned reason. Until the Chief shaved his head and started listening to Baltar, I didn't think he was crazy either, so maybe it just takes time. But their reactions to events seemed extreme, born from pain, but still entirely reasonable. Anders is alone on a basestar and damned curious about everything, but he is still getting his job done as best he can.

And Starbuck was going to shoot him for it, so you know that that is evidence that he's still sane. She is Whackjob Monthly's Woman of the Year three years running. Not being on her side doesn't make you sane necessarily, but you take a look at who is on her side (Leoben, nuff said) and you start to wonder. But yeah, right as Sam is losing it emotionally because HIS ONLY SURVIVING FRIEND FROM WHEN THE WORLD ENDED JUST DIED, they show Starbuck unbuttoning her sidearm with Sam in the background, his gun still on the PTSD!Six. I am really getting tired of her holy destiny bullshit. If you've already married the guy just to use him (and told him as such) and cheated on him and hit him and ignored him and gone crazy on him, the last thing you can do is kill him and she's already threatened it so now it's just time for her to shut up and do it so I can be really mad with her. The more Sam proves himself the better, saner person, the less I can tolerate her self-interested bullshit. That's always been true--the fact that he could write off her affairs as being just part of who she is so long as she came back to him takes a bigger better person than just about anyone on this show. (The fact that he did it with zero hostility towards Kara makes him better than long-suffering emo-Dee.)

Plus? Athena's got Anders' back, which definitely means he's sane and just emotional because Athena is goddamned sane. (Until next week, apparently, from the promos.) She frakkin gets it. There are no more passes. You want humanity's help? You put down all your members who can't make it happen without flipping the fuck out. She also gets that turning your back on your allies because something got hard or because you suffered loss is JUST NOT COOL, ZEUS. You don't step on bodies to get what you want. Sometimes, you have to just not get what you want if it means being faithful to the people you have chosen. For two seconds after Gaeta was shot, Kara remembered that and I didn't hate her. Yeah, that didn't last long.

Comments

[viridian.livejournal.com]

Wow, you really are still Team Human, aren't you?

Interesting how we had completely opposite reactions to this one, because I'm 100% Team Kara and about 70% Team Cylon (the asshole Cylons can die, but I sympathize far more with the Cylons in general than with the humans as a whole.) I was just made of squee for the whole entire ep. And I feel like sure, maybe that Six deserved to die, but I can't let Barolay off the hook for the way she killed her in the first place. No one gets out of this with any innocence. The humans aren't innocent. I don't believe that it's as simple as "the Cylons started it." This show has never wanted us to entirely defend that point of view.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

I'm on Team Whoever Is Not Being An Asshole. It includes Athena and Anders and that's it. Anything they do is fine. They get a pass. Because they are more empathetic than anyone else. Athena and Anders have suffered--a lot--and they keep rising above it. Way back in the miniseries, Adama said it wasn't enough just to survive. You have to be worthy of surviving. I think they're like the only ones who still fit that bill.

I did like the episode, by the by. I nearly fell off my splooge-soaked chair with all the Anders action. I like how the seeds of destiny are being sewn with the Hybrid's words leading them to a new plan that will, irrevocably, out the Final Five. It's cool to imagine which way the Five will fall on this subject. I'm actually thinking that Anders will be on the side of making it happen, since he's near to outing himself anyway. I have two half-fic scenes about that, too: 1) as an apology to Gaeta, he gives Gaeta the chance for revenge and tells him that he's a Cylon (self-destructive like the other three) then we really examine this eye-for-an-eye business ; 2) Sam the guerilla fighter helps in some significant way with plans to unbox D'Anna. (Which would lead to the other sekret Cylons probably gunning for his head. Either way, Anders is fucked, man. Of course he is: HE ISN'T AN ASSHOLE.)

As for "who started it," the show is problematic. We are given the human point of view from the start--the Cylons are total jerks who not only rebelled but came back to wipe us all out--without enough information to suggest that maybe humanity was being dickish and provoked it. We only find out mitigating factors much later (like Adama peeking over the Armistice line). We never see how the chrome Cylons were treated before and only ever see evidence that their brutality is extremely alien, making them the Other that you usually set up in one of these stories. So while we're supposed to see it as muddy gray waters, the show didn't get into that fast enough. The closest they came to it in season one was Kara torturing Leoben. Even then, it was more a comment on torture than on who "started it." (This was back when the show was milking the 9/11 thing for all it was worth.)

What they showed instead were the Cylons being dillweeds: Athena snookering Helo in Radiationville; Boomer shooting Adama; Six in various guises freaking Baltar the fuck out; Doral walking onboard Galactica as a suicide bomber. (How's that for "who started it"?) In contrast, the fleet was trying to still be civilized and protect rights and happiness and life and, most importantly, hope. Putting them on the defensive made them more innocent than the Cylons.

Gradually, that has changed. In order to bring some humanity to the Cylons, the show really made an effort not to focus on that whole "Oops, we blew up your everything" factor. Instead, they focused on intra-human conflict with Cain and Gina and Baltar and Roslin. The characters we tended to see weren't allowed to be heroes or innocents any more. The two significant Cylon presences were Athena and Caprica, who were the redeemers. Boomer was there to be a victim with the "Hey, I didn't sign on for this shit," the only Cylon (possibly including the Final Five) who is not responsible for the destruction of the colonies. (So, of course, that's why she got killed. Irony is good!)

Lost in the background of episodes about how great Apollo and Helo are, is the entire rest of humanity that still remembers what the Cylons did and hasn't had any time to make peace what with starving, dying of thirst, being constantly under attack...

All I'm saying about Barolay is that she is as much a child of the Cylons as they are of humanity. The Cylons chose to respond to previous hostilities with more hostility, and they have raised a generation of humans who know nothing else. The solution is the one that Athena represents: unity, forgiveness, love. They didn't even try that on New Caprica. It was still hostility--murders, disappearances, lording over every thing and keeping the humans suppressed.

The line that broke my sympathy with the PTSD!Six was "We were trying to help them!" It was so patronizing and ignorant and said loads about Cylons and their disconnect from responsibility.

[viridian.livejournal.com]

See, that's where that Six won me over, because she seemed so honestly confused. Of course Cylons are disconnected -- how could they not be? It's clear that the Cylons who haven't been hanging out with humans all the time just fundamentally do not understand things that humans take for granted. They're like kids who were raised by wolves, in a way. They're capable of feeling all the same things that humans do, but they've not developed the same way. There's a fundamental difference, and some of it's got to be programming, some of it's belief in whatever the Cylon God is (and I sort of hope that it turns out to be something that the humans programmed in cycles ago in an attempt to give their creations a moral compass, because I love that kind of irony.) Some of it's just how they developed, apart from humanity.

The other thing is, both sides are so firmly entrenched in all this that I don't think anyone's allowed to point fingers. Sure, the Cylons blew up humanity, but, you know, if you buy into the "All this has happened before" stuff, for all we know the last time through we struck first. For all we know the initial revolt and war was 100% justified. This is why the cycle of violence keeps going - because both sides think they're right and both sides want vengeance. At some point that has to stop mattering. That's why Natalie won me over, too, with her "eye for an eye" line. She's one of the few who are finally starting to get it -- if they don't stop drawing lines in the sand, there are going to be like five sentient creatures left in the entire universe once everyone gets done blowing each other up.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

It's clear that the Cylons who haven't been hanging out with humans all the time just fundamentally do not understand things that humans take for granted.

That's fine until you consider one of the things that they don't understand is responsibility. You're saying, if I read this right, that the Cylons aren't completely at fault because humans created and enslaved them. Okay, fine, humanity accepts that. Cylons now have to accept that they committed genocide with intent, too. They won't do it. They will work towards a new goal with humanity, but they just do not acknowledge past failures. Very machine like, which is very cool don't get me wrong, but incredibly frustrating for people who do remember when they were merciless killer robots who kept nuking the shit out of people even when the President had offered to surrender.

It's also not a confident position for humans to ever try to work with Cylons because the Cylons are liable to turn around and change their minds and completely revise their history such that that has always been the case. And if you're on the wrong side of that, you're screwed.

ut, you know, if you buy into the "All this has happened before" stuff, for all we know the last time through we struck first.

But if no one knows it, then that knowledge doesn't affect them. They have to learn cooperation some other way, and learning that give-and-take without experience requires being a bigger person and swallowing your own bile and turning the other cheek. I don't see Natalie doing that, actually. The first thing she says when the Raptor land is that "Oh, great, FTL. Let's kill the humans, we don't need them." She's operating on a grudge basis as much as Anders was over Barolay. She was like "We don't need humans, we just need their stuff." Leoben was better with his "We need them and they need us and from such things truces are born."

I guess it comes down to whether or not you learn from your experiences, whether you have the chance to resurrect or not. PTSD!Six only learned to fear and thus could never live without it (and that's not even really learning). Whereas I see Barolay had learned to live with her grief for many things--she lived to protect her friends, the fleet, to find Earth. When it comes down to it, the PTSD!Six couldn't let go but Barolay, with her last breath, preserved the tentative truce by trying to shake off her own goddamned death by going "No, I'm okay..."

[arcane-the-sage.livejournal.com]

Looks like viridian and I agree on both "Yay team Cylon" and that humans aren't really innocent in this series. Perhaps it's for different reasons, but on those two general points we agree.

Did the Cylons start it? Honestly we don't have a real answer. Humans broke the treaty first (both in spirit and action); humans initially put down Cylons when they first asked to be recognized as beings back in the mechanical days; can we honestly say that Cylons started this track, or can we say that mutual distrust on both sides lead to this conflict?

I must say that I disagree with you assessment of the Barolay moment. To me it was the best example of "everyone gets what they want and everyone losses, war sucks" type moment. Barolay got her wish of helping Kara deepen the trust in the Cylon arrangement. PTSD-Six killed off her tormentor and was freed from a life of trauma. Anders got his vengeance. Kara got fast-tracked to the hybrid. Natalie got one step closer to an alliance with the humans. Yet everyone loss. Really as war metaphors go you can't get much better than that. I even rematched the eps to watch Barolay go down to figure out what actually killed her (PTSD-Six may have wanted to kill her, but her death was actually a "lucky" fluke).

On a bit of a side note, why the hell with all those folks in the room did no one wonder about the little bit about Kara being an agent of death and leading them all to their end? You would think that a line like that would be enough for someone to off Kara just to safeguard Human and Cylon lives.

Back to topic though, I think you're going a tad light on the humans here. As a track record, humans in this series have done some rather messed up things. The "it's ok, it's just a toaster" argument really doesn't hold much water. Hell just look at how they treat Baltar. I the eyes of most human Baltar was for all intents and purposes a Cylon. Yet when you take a look at the bulk of Baltar's offenses against humanity you see that much of it was out of ignorance or with a gun to his head. The whole messenger of god thing is the first nice thing that's actually happened to him and he's still having the crap kicked out of him frequently. Oh, and he's fraking human!!! In general the humans have not held the moral high ground for the entire show (one could argue that they held it during the mini-series/pilot). Really it seems like a one-ups-manship contest between the humans and cylons as to who could accomplish the greatest set of atrocities for the dumbest reasons..... and they are neck and neck to the finish-line.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

A shorter way of expressing the statement you made? "Everything you want in the worst possible way." That's not mine, it's from the brilliant BSG reviewer on TWoP, but it's absolutely true. This show has made a habit of giving you what you wanted and needed to see but in such a way as it broke your heart. (One of the bestworst was Athena getting back Hera. Her husband only had to murder her for that to happen. Yeah, no lasting trauma there.)

As for who is the bigger asshole farm: Cylonicity or humanity, it's only become a toss-up in later seasons was my point. (See my comment to viridian. Until Kobol, we had very few humans who were truly vile and irredeemable. Not until Athena do we have a redemptive story line for a Cylon, but once we did, to smooth her entrance into the fleet, the very fact of Cylon obliteration of the colonies was, more or less, dropped in favor of the "all humans are assholes, all the time" plot lines. (Hello, Admiral Cain.)

Until then, humans were individuals, with varying returns on their morality meters. Cylons were, save two--Athena and Boomer--100% behind the "Kill All Humans, God Says So" plan. They didn't think genocide was a bad idea. In fact, when Caprica and Boomer initiated the "Let's Love Humans, It's Much More Fun" plan, they were still missing a key component of humanity to make their offer admirable: regret. Except because it complicates their new direction to be loved, the Cylons don't ever express regret or sorrow for blowing up humanity. They presume that by offering not to shoot humans to bits that humanity is totally going to get over the genocide thing. (PS: They won't.)

Does this mean all Cylons are evil? No, like I said, I like Athena. I like Athena because she embodies the best of both her communities--she has the ability to be faithful to a course like a Cylon but the determination to stick to that course like a human. Clearly, that's the goal--be the best you can, even when it means people call you a frakkin' toaster or a traitor or what have you.