The Chosen One
Nov. 1st, 2010 06:22 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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karathracelives
Hybrid Chamber
(Kara looks at the Hybrid.)
Hybrid: ... All these things at once and many more not because it wishes harm but because it likes violent vibrations to change constantly then shall the maidens rejoice at the dance structural integrity of node seven restored repressurizing the children of the one reborn shall find their own country the intruders swarmed like flame like the whirlwind hopes soaring to slaughter all their best against our hulls ...
Starbuck: I'm here. You wanted me here, so...
Hybrid: ... Replace internal control accumulators 4 through 19 they'll start going ripe on us pretty soon compartmentalize integrity conflicts with the obligation to provide access FTL sync fault uncorrected no ceremonies are necessary ...
Hybrid: ... then shall the maidens rejoice at the dance structural integrity of node seven restored repressurizing the children of the one reborn shall find their own country. End of line, reset. Track mode monitor malfunction traced recharge compressors increase the output to 50% assume the relaxation length of photons transfers contact is inevitable leading to information bleed FTL sync fault stands uncorrected no ceremonies are necessary...
Starbuck, crouching: I don't understand.
Hybrid: ... Centrifugal force reacts to the rotating frame of reference the obstinate toy soldier becomes pliant the city devours the land...
Leoben, kneeling: You can't hurry her. You have to absorb her words. Allow them to caress your associative mind. Don't expect the fate of two great races to be delivered easily.
Hybrid: ... Assume the relaxation length of photons in the sample atmosphere is constant the intruders swarmed like flame like the whirlwind hopes soaring to slaughter all their best against our hulls...
(Helo paces the Demetrius CIC; Gaeta is looking rough in his makeshift sickbay.)
Hybrid: ...All these things at once and many more not because it wishes harm but because it likes violent vibrations to change constantly then shall the ...
Athena: Hey, we're rigged and ready. It's time to pull her offline and get out of here before we miss our rendezvous.
Hybrid: ...Reset...
Athena: Any luck, Captain?
Starbuck: Not a frakkin' thing.
Hybrid: ... But you are a spark of God's fire core update complete...
Starbuck: Frak it! Unplug the damn thing. Let's get the frak out of here.
Hybrid: ... Threat detection matrix enabled dendritic response bypassed the received dose is altered by the delayed gamma burst going active execute the children of the one reborn shall find their own country, end of line.
(An Eight opens a panel and unplugs the Hybrid, who shouts in an unceasing scream. A Centurion steps forward, converting guns.)
Natalie, angrily: Stop!
(The Centurion fires, dropping the Eight. Kara and Athena destroy it.)
Anders, entering: ...What the hell happened?
(The Eight's blood pollutes the water in the Hybrid tank; she's still screaming.)
Starbuck: What do you want from me? Please, I need you.
(She finally stops, and pulls one hand from the water with a calm smile.)
Hybrid: ...Thus will it come to pass the Dying Leader will know the truth of the Opera House the missing Three will give you the Five who have come from the home of the Thirteenth you are the harbinger of death Kara Thrace you will lead them all to their end.
(Kara is stricken.)
Hybrid: End of line.
(The Hybrid goes limp, and Athena fully unplugs her; the room goes dark.)
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Date: 2010-11-01 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-01 11:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 02:37 am (UTC)I am not among those who take the mythic elements of BSG too seriously; I don't think the show is saying or even trying to say anything profound about free will or fate, particularly, I think it's playing around with long-standing fantasy elements and a free-floating grab bag of religious themes. I'm fine with that in the moments when it's used to good dramatic effect (like the Tomb of Athena sequence in season 2, which carries a real sense of awe). For me, the problem is not that Kara has a destiny, I think the problem is that it turned out to be a destiny that 1) confused and killed her, not necessarily in that order, and 2)did so for no good reason as far as we can tell by the rules laid out within the BSG mystical canon.
I was reading a JB interview the other day in which he said that the mystical elements of the show, including the Tomb of Athena sequence, made him uncomfortable because they seemed to take sides too definitively in the storytelling: after that, what kind of sense does it make to question the existence of supernatural gods? It seems like the story has definitively decided profound questions that should have been left open; in the BSG world, it doesn't make much rational sense to be an atheist. I'd say that has been true pretty much since season one and Roslin's supernaturally accurate visions. Now, as I say, I don't mind it when writers create their own mythos -- Star Wars is famous for doing so, and it's fine with me if BSG wants to have real Greek gods or a single over-ruling deity, malevolent or otherwise -- it's their fictional universe, they can do whatever serves their story. But I think maybe the problem was that the writers liked the idea of being ambiguous and leaving religious questions open to debate, but they had already closed that door from a plot perspective (in the story, prophecy, destiny and the gods have worked accurately from season one onwards), so they thought the way to keep things "mysterious" and to "leave the debate open" was to not specifically explain much of anything about the way the god or gods worked or their motives. So what we wound up with was a really vague and contradictory picture of these mystical forces and destinies. But leaving the audience with that jumbled picture does feel more like lazy plotting and not knowing where the story was going than it feels like genuinely thought-provoking religious/existential commentary. I have thought a fair amount about free will and predestination in my own real life and beliefs, and nothing I saw on BSG struck me as a serious examination of either.
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Date: 2010-11-02 09:19 am (UTC)x2. Actually, on pretty much everything you said. Except for the part about loving this scene, lol, because I hate it. But I agree with pretty much everything else you've written.
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Date: 2010-11-02 12:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 02:54 pm (UTC)- show is not trying to make a point about free will; mythic elements not a big deal
- OK with idea of Kara having a destiny
- pissed that Kara's destiny was stupid, and that she didn't need to die for it to happen
- supernatural element has been there since day 1, so it's kind of silly to object to it (hello, Laura Roslin!)...
- but the writers made a real unsatisfying mess of their mythology, and succumbed to lazy plotting
So, all in all, check, check and check! Except, heh, yeah, for that part about this scene. Because it causes me pain to see Kara told, yet again, that she is a cancer.
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Date: 2010-11-02 12:17 pm (UTC)I feel the same way not just about this religious stuff but with the cylons. I really wonder what they originally conceived as an endgame for the show (if they did). In later seasons they seemed to be working pretty damn hard to get to a "we have to accept each other because we are all we have" kind of conclusion but I think they skipped a step in that whole acceptance thing, because they never even defined what made the cylons different really. I mean they focused a lot on certain things: they worship one God rather than multi; they can't procreate but they can resurrect. But then they didn't answer other things like how they can be both man and machine but not just flesh over metal, but Sharon can jack in to some computer in her veins and send a virus out, etc. etc.
Anyway, I really agree with a point that I read from someone yesterday or the day before somewhere (vague enough? Lol), that the mystical stuff was always intriguing, until they decided that Kara could come back but not be a cylon and that they didn't have to explain it. Because that opened the door to it being a show where anything at all could happen and totally changed the tone of things. And her "destiny" was so completely unsatisfying and not....grand, in any kind of way. Bah.
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Date: 2010-11-02 04:54 pm (UTC)I know some people were bothered by the fact that the gods resurrected Kara, because they thought that broke the established rules of the show. I guess it didn't bother me that much because it seems like the gods were already shown to have extreme powers, like making suns explode, and it was also implied that they had a power over life and death. Besides being a traditional power ascribed to gods, you have elements like the "cost in blood" to be extracted on Kobol, or Roslin being the "dying leader," presumably a fate the gods set out for her and described through the Pythian prophecies. If they can control cancer, cursing Roslin with that role in the story in the first place, then granting her a temporary reprieve, and then overriding the miracle Cylon cure to turn her back into the Dying Leader as the endgame for Earth approached, then what they did to Kara seems of a piece with that. I'm not trying to argue anyone into liking these parts of the story, I'm just saying that for me, I would have been fine with the idea that the gods could grant life as well as doom it if the reasons why they did so had been more clearly and compellingly established. As it is, with Kara it seems like their blessings and curses were arbitrary.
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Date: 2010-11-02 06:31 pm (UTC)LOL. I always felt zero connection to the cylons personally and I think that while that worked for the first season where you were indeed supposed to mostly identify with the humans, it became a lot more problematic when the show decided to spend time giving them equal weight but without fleshing them out very much at all. (And for me, none of the actors playing cylons intrigued me or offered any kind of empathetic way to related to them. If Chief instead of Boomer had been revealed as a cylon at the end of the mini, I would've been so much more invested.)
By the time Downloaded rolled around, I still didn't care about any of those people enough to really pay much attention to a whole hour devoted to them.
Re: Kara. Hindsight is naturally 20/20 and all, and my problem with the storyline definitely lies in the execution of it, but death/resurrection seemed like a much larger hurdle to suspend some disbelief over than someone having visions or their cancer temporarily cured by half-cylon blood. I mean the one logical route in their world to resurrection was through cylonity, except the show wanted to be cagey and say she wasn't a cylon, that this is just another free-standing miracle of the Gods, and it just always felt a little false and a little forced. The writers wanted us to love the story so much that we'd understand that what she was or how it had happened wasn't the point, but...they kind of failed to make a point, or to make all the rest of it so engaging that we could handwave those things. A story needs answers and just saying "because God made it so" as the resolution to a seven-year saga is both lame and unsatisfying answer.
I wouldn't say it broke the rules of the show, exactly, though it certainly did invalidate some of the tenets of their story bible () (i.e. "We will eschew the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mindcontrol,
evil twins, God-like powers and all the other cliches of the genre.") I was just more interested in what the original story told in the mini and s1 would have played out like.
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Date: 2010-11-02 03:59 pm (UTC)the problem is not that Kara has a destiny, I think the problem is that it turned out to be a destiny that 1) confused and killed her, not necessarily in that order, and 2)did so for no good reason as far as we can tell by the rules laid out within the BSG mystical canon.
Even in BSG universe, I think it's possible to be perhaps not an atheist exacly but to keep a health dose of agnosticism in the sense that if there are things beyond our understanding (gods and prophecies and special destinies), you can't control them and therefore you can't really give them any major role in your decision making process. You can only take into account the things you do understand and control. That is what Lee and Adama do, I guess. And, despite her religious beliefs, that's what Kara did up to the moment she died. After that, she became more focused on understanding what her destiny was supposed to be and on what she had to do fulfill it, setting aside the rest of her life and her own happiness. That and the fact her destiny seemed so stupid and poorly thought-out combined to make me really dislike that plot.
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Date: 2010-11-02 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-03 01:23 am (UTC)You're right, of course. But at first, Earth was not really their destination. It was a ploy to keep the morale up while they figure out what to do exaclty. Later, Roslin started to bring the mysticism into play but even she used it as a political way to grant support. The big turning point came when they found Kobol and the Tomb of Athena. But even there there was enough physical evidence that there was some truth to the old myths to support believing in them as something real. And to take the more mystical aspects (as the vision or whatever they experienced in the tomb) with a grain of salt - something that is accepted though it can't be explained. Bill and Lee are more worried about the physical clues they found along the way than in the prophecies themselves. When Kara's destiny became something bigger than life there wasn't really anything concrete to base it on. It was purely mystical and it didn't make a lot of sense.
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Date: 2010-11-03 03:44 am (UTC)I guess you could say that Lee and Adama somehow accepted the Tomb of Athena map without accepting the prophecies behind it, but that seems a little irrational, given the circumstances. Those prophecies were about finding Earth, the mythical haven for humanity. If you don't think they're true, then why bother following the physical map? If Earth isn't really the safe haven that the Scriptures promise, then it's a really bad idea to go there and try to settle when the Cylons are still chasing you, it seems to me. You'll just get yourselves killed or occupied, like at New Caprica, and bring down whoever is already settled there along with you.
I definitely share your frustration that they never explained why Kara needed to die in order to guide humanity to Earth. That's bad storytelling, period. Although now that I think about it, I realize they never explained why Roslin needed to be a dying leader in order to lead her people to Earth, either. "Because that's what the prophecy says" seems to be the only answer we get in either case. So I think maybe they've been playing that little game from Season One onwards, too.
Now, I freely admit I enjoyed the Arrow of Apollo/Tomb of Athena stuff a lot more than I enjoyed the Magical Viper/Mystical Lullaby stuff. But for me it was mostly because the earlier storylines played better as drama and had happier outcomes for the characters I loved, not because the series was following certain rules then that they later abandoned. I always accepted that there were gods and/or a higher god wandering around this fictional universe, but I always viewed them as plot devices rather than as serious examinations of real life or beliefs. Sadly, though, even as plot devices they proved unsatisfying, since the plot was muddled and they were muddled along with it.
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Date: 2010-11-02 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-11-02 01:48 pm (UTC)