A House is Not a Home

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Comments

[rayruz.livejournal.com]

Well, we only got to see part of it. We don't really know what happened over the course of 4 months. *cough*Persephone*cough*. I think the trauma comes from the fact that she was utterly powerless in that situation. She couldn't escape and she couldn't even kill the guy who was keeping her prisoner. No victories. Which I imagine made her feel too much like how she did as a child, and that's sort of where the trauma really comes from... my opinion.

[mserrada.livejournal.com]

Plus, nothing for Kara to do day after day but think? Starbuck's always been about action--she's a restless soul.
Being cooped up in what amounted to solitary confinement with far too much time to go over all the messed up things in her life would really frak with her head. Especially with no end in sight, since after four months she had to have decided that no one was coming to rescue her.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I hear you. Certainly Kara hates being powerless, as anyone would. I can see how you can approach the material with Kara's childhood background in mind and think about a lot going on off-screen and make it make sense for her character.

But for me personally, it didn't work on a dramatic level because the whole household set-up didn't play as very effective or convincing brainwashing. I just didn't believe that Leoben's constant repetition of "love" and "destiny" would somehow prove irresistible to Kara's psyche. She's heard it before from him, and she'll hear it again, and I really thought in that situation she would hurt him as much as she could as often as she could and otherwise ignore him, and I didn't see that causing her to have a mental breakdown. The fact that Leoben never does anything to her but talk, and that he doesn't seem to be saying much of anything new, didn't help me to invest in the storyline, I'm afraid. As others have said, boredom and inactivity seem to be more difficult for her to deal with than Leoben. If they were going to psychologically torture her, I wish they had delved into some more new material or played upon her relationships with people she cared about.

I can see her starting to despair/go crazy if she thought she would never be free again, but that would have been true no matter where she was locked up. If this was meant to be a recreation of her childhood traumas, I think they could have done it far more effectively (and a big part of her childhood trauma was physical abuse, IMO, which is not in evidence here, and also her love/hate for her mother, which I'm not convinced Leoben has the emotional weight to replicate).

And I'm not sure why caring about Kacey would cause her to care about Leoben. The child is innocent, Leoben is not, and Kara is quite capable of distinguishing between them. Even if she does believe she and Leoben are the child's mutual parents, she has no reason to bond with the "father," given that he took advantage of the violation of her body in The Farm and continues to violate her freedom now. Their "bond" over Kacey just doesn't follow logically or emotionally, as far as I can see. I realize that her emotions are not supposed to be rational throughout this storyline, but I personally felt they were coming out of left field. *shrugs*