season 3, "torn" and random insanity
Oct. 19th, 2010 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseThe biggest problem with this episode wasn't the episode. It was The Boy running into spoilers, which I then forced him to share with me because he accidentally dropped just enough info that I was going to explode if I didn't hear the details, and... now we're really confused.
So!
Here's what happened. Yesterday at work I passed on what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kungfuwaynewho had told me about the upcoming episode "The Woman King," namely that we might want to skip it. Naturally this piqued The Boy's curiosity, so he went off and read the synopsis somewhere. After I was finished going D: at him for looking up spoilers, he said "too bad, it looks like it's one of the only episodes that's actually about the doctor."
No harm done, right? Well, it doesn't stop there.
Because of a conversation I had a while ago withicepixie, I've been rereading one of my old religion/classics textbooks, "Religion the Ancient Greek City." As you can imagine, I am not at all doing this in order to sift for information I might use in a fic once I've finished this series. Not even a little bit. Nothing ground-breaking so far, except I turned a page and saw, neatly underlined in mechanical pencil like everything important in one of my college textbooks, the words "Agathos Daimon - good spirit." Dear me, thought I - so that's why I kept thinking I'd seen some variation on Helo's last name before. I had. And it means something like "good." That's adorable.
So when The Boy got home, I showed him this. After the obligatory and very obliging "awww, good spirit!" remark (he's so good at humoring me about my weird little fascinations), he looks a bit shifty. "So... wait. 'Agathon' is Helo's last name?"
"Yes."
"Oh. I thought that was the doctor's last name."
"No, that's... like, Coddle, or something. I don't know, I've never seen it written. But it's definitely something like "-oddle" or something like that."
He thinks for a moment. "That synopsis might've been more of a spoiler than I thought."
Naturally I could not let this hang. Eventually I dragged out of him that the synopsis for "The Woman King" apparently referred to Dr. Agathon dealing with some kind of Cylon virus that's passed over to the Humans, and it turns out that it was his fault the virus passed over or something. Or maybe he said it specifically said that Helo was at fault for the virus - I'm a little unclear, now, because, frankly, I got a little agitated over the whole thing. There was a lot of saying "Are you sure it said Doctor Agathon?" and things like that. "Because that doesn't make any sense!"
I mean, I realize this episode is supposedly a bit iffy on the continuity, but it seems to me that suddenly having a character be a doctor would be, er, a bit extreme. The disease has something to do with something on New Caprica (or something like that?) so we get even more confused because, dude, Helo wasn't even there - he was on Galactica the whole time. "I've got it," finally said. "Helo's secretly a doctor, and he made this virus to destroy the Cylons and sent it down by infecting Sharon before she went down on her mission. He's really an evil doctor! No wonder no one in fandom seems to really like him all that much!"
That solved, we watched "Torn." ...And got even more confused.
Because here's the virus! But it doesn't have anything to do with New Caprica! And Helo still isn't a doctor (seriously, this is perplexing me, and I'm going to laugh forever if it turns out The Boy just misread something or some idiot screwed up writing the synopsis, because it's been hurting my head for almost a whole day now!), but then... there's Sharon. Staring blankly up at the wreckage of all the sickened Cylon ships. And of course she's going to go investigate! And then get infected herself! And bring it back to Galactica, which is how it ends up passing along to the Humans!
...At least that's my current theory. Still no idea how Helo is a doctor. I think that might just be a case of whoever wrote these damned synopses being a total moron.
Other parts of "Torn" that don't have to do with the spoiler fiasco:
So, I have to say - Starbuck was a total bitch for 95% of this episode, but - when Daddy!Adama calls her and Tigh on their behavior, she buckles down and decides to be a decent soldier and human being again. She symbolically chops off her hair - and boy do I LOVE how in TV and movies women can always do this to their hair and come out with it looking all nice and slick and properly layered. I used to have that haircut that she ended up with at the end, and let me tell you - I got a bad hairstylist at my old salon once and looked hideous for three months until I went back to my usual girl. And that was just a fricking trim. There was seriously only one girl who could make the layers on that bob look nice. If I'd done it myself with a pocketknife, it would have looked like something off a four-year-old's troll doll. /hair-rant ANYWAY, she does that and of course it looks nice because this is TV and because Katee Sackhoff probably would look cute even with troll hair, and then she goes off and, thank god, decides to be nice to Kasey and her mom. Good job, Starbuck! Thank you for living up to my constant protests (to The Boy and everyone else) that you're occasionally an annoying whiney bitch and make bad decisions, but you're good at heart and usually manage to fix your stupid mistakes once someone calls you on them.
Unlike someone else, whose name starts with TIGH.
Seriously - in what world, when your best friend says "dude, just shoot me, okay?" do you TELL HIM HE'LL NOT BE SEEING YOU AGAIN, THEN KEEP RIGHT ON DOING THE BAD THINGS HE'S CALLING YOU ON?! Dude. No. Not on. I realize you had to kill yourannoying crazy wife, but SERIOUSLY. Do not be blaming Daddy!Adama for this. It is so not his fault.
Any day Roslin's airlock finger starts getting itchy again, I vote we put Tigh at the front of the line. Because he's seriously pissing me off, and not just because he's being mean to Sharon and Helo. :P
Kat, on the other hand, just won the "awesome character I love" award for the week. ♥
Other things:
Athena! ♥♥♥ I did rather like some of the other suggestions, though - particularly "Toaster-Babe." ♥
Apollo lost his weight! Congratulations, Apollo, you don't have to wear tons of latex anymore! And apparently him and Helo are buddies now? That's good! They both need buddies, now that Starbuck is being a bitch and ignoring them. I'm a bit worried that we haven't seen hide or hair of D lately, though... I just know he's going to cheat on her with Starbuck, and I'm not looking forward to it.
Not sure what the hell to say about all the stuff on the Cylon base-star, except that Gaius is... still Gaius. Hopeless, pathetic, and neurotically focused on himself. And dude, he strangled a sick Six model to death. WTF, Gaius. Oh, and that both the cinematography and the music in that section were amazing.
Head!Six is still my favorite Six model. She's so crazy. ♥ I also loved Gaius' little panic about whether or not he's a Cylon. Honestly, at this point, I think his life would be a lot easier if he was. You'd think this might occur to him as well.
The Cylons we've met don't talk about the other 5 models. Interesting. An actual split? I thought they kept going on about how they were all about unity? Maybe that's a reaction to whatever split them in the first place?
The Hybrid. So... Cylon ships = Shadow ships, then? o_O And by "hybrid" do we mean... you know, Human/Cylon hybrid, or...? Jeez this is getting complicated. I thought Hera was still the first real Cylon/Human Hybrid, so this must be something else, but... I'm not sure what. I thought maybe cylon/ship, but... well, that wouldn't really be much of a hybrid, would it? And if that was the case, what would the point be of making it look human but not like one of the existing models? Do all the hybrids look different? Are they a separate model? What the hell is going on here?
And of course Caprica!Six saw the pod thing and isn't telling anybody because she's still in love with Gaius. Bless. ♥
Same thing with the whole "projecting" concept. I'm not sure wtf this is meant to really be about, apart from making us think that Gaius might be a Cylon. It's an odd little thing.
So!
Here's what happened. Yesterday at work I passed on what
kungfuwaynewho had told me about the upcoming episode "The Woman King," namely that we might want to skip it. Naturally this piqued The Boy's curiosity, so he went off and read the synopsis somewhere. After I was finished going D: at him for looking up spoilers, he said "too bad, it looks like it's one of the only episodes that's actually about the doctor." No harm done, right? Well, it doesn't stop there.
Because of a conversation I had a while ago with
icepixie, I've been rereading one of my old religion/classics textbooks, "Religion the Ancient Greek City." As you can imagine, I am not at all doing this in order to sift for information I might use in a fic once I've finished this series. Not even a little bit. Nothing ground-breaking so far, except I turned a page and saw, neatly underlined in mechanical pencil like everything important in one of my college textbooks, the words "Agathos Daimon - good spirit." Dear me, thought I - so that's why I kept thinking I'd seen some variation on Helo's last name before. I had. And it means something like "good." That's adorable. So when The Boy got home, I showed him this. After the obligatory and very obliging "awww, good spirit!" remark (he's so good at humoring me about my weird little fascinations), he looks a bit shifty. "So... wait. 'Agathon' is Helo's last name?"
"Yes."
"Oh. I thought that was the doctor's last name."
"No, that's... like, Coddle, or something. I don't know, I've never seen it written. But it's definitely something like "-oddle" or something like that."
He thinks for a moment. "That synopsis might've been more of a spoiler than I thought."
Naturally I could not let this hang. Eventually I dragged out of him that the synopsis for "The Woman King" apparently referred to Dr. Agathon dealing with some kind of Cylon virus that's passed over to the Humans, and it turns out that it was his fault the virus passed over or something. Or maybe he said it specifically said that Helo was at fault for the virus - I'm a little unclear, now, because, frankly, I got a little agitated over the whole thing. There was a lot of saying "Are you sure it said Doctor Agathon?" and things like that. "Because that doesn't make any sense!"
I mean, I realize this episode is supposedly a bit iffy on the continuity, but it seems to me that suddenly having a character be a doctor would be, er, a bit extreme. The disease has something to do with something on New Caprica (or something like that?) so we get even more confused because, dude, Helo wasn't even there - he was on Galactica the whole time. "I've got it," finally said. "Helo's secretly a doctor, and he made this virus to destroy the Cylons and sent it down by infecting Sharon before she went down on her mission. He's really an evil doctor! No wonder no one in fandom seems to really like him all that much!"
That solved, we watched "Torn." ...And got even more confused.
Because here's the virus! But it doesn't have anything to do with New Caprica! And Helo still isn't a doctor (seriously, this is perplexing me, and I'm going to laugh forever if it turns out The Boy just misread something or some idiot screwed up writing the synopsis, because it's been hurting my head for almost a whole day now!), but then... there's Sharon. Staring blankly up at the wreckage of all the sickened Cylon ships. And of course she's going to go investigate! And then get infected herself! And bring it back to Galactica, which is how it ends up passing along to the Humans!
...At least that's my current theory. Still no idea how Helo is a doctor. I think that might just be a case of whoever wrote these damned synopses being a total moron.
Other parts of "Torn" that don't have to do with the spoiler fiasco:
So, I have to say - Starbuck was a total bitch for 95% of this episode, but - when Daddy!Adama calls her and Tigh on their behavior, she buckles down and decides to be a decent soldier and human being again. She symbolically chops off her hair - and boy do I LOVE how in TV and movies women can always do this to their hair and come out with it looking all nice and slick and properly layered. I used to have that haircut that she ended up with at the end, and let me tell you - I got a bad hairstylist at my old salon once and looked hideous for three months until I went back to my usual girl. And that was just a fricking trim. There was seriously only one girl who could make the layers on that bob look nice. If I'd done it myself with a pocketknife, it would have looked like something off a four-year-old's troll doll. /hair-rant ANYWAY, she does that and of course it looks nice because this is TV and because Katee Sackhoff probably would look cute even with troll hair, and then she goes off and, thank god, decides to be nice to Kasey and her mom. Good job, Starbuck! Thank you for living up to my constant protests (to The Boy and everyone else) that you're occasionally an annoying whiney bitch and make bad decisions, but you're good at heart and usually manage to fix your stupid mistakes once someone calls you on them.
Unlike someone else, whose name starts with TIGH.
Seriously - in what world, when your best friend says "dude, just shoot me, okay?" do you TELL HIM HE'LL NOT BE SEEING YOU AGAIN, THEN KEEP RIGHT ON DOING THE BAD THINGS HE'S CALLING YOU ON?! Dude. No. Not on. I realize you had to kill your
Any day Roslin's airlock finger starts getting itchy again, I vote we put Tigh at the front of the line. Because he's seriously pissing me off, and not just because he's being mean to Sharon and Helo. :P
Kat, on the other hand, just won the "awesome character I love" award for the week. ♥
Other things:
Athena! ♥♥♥ I did rather like some of the other suggestions, though - particularly "Toaster-Babe." ♥
Apollo lost his weight! Congratulations, Apollo, you don't have to wear tons of latex anymore! And apparently him and Helo are buddies now? That's good! They both need buddies, now that Starbuck is being a bitch and ignoring them. I'm a bit worried that we haven't seen hide or hair of D lately, though... I just know he's going to cheat on her with Starbuck, and I'm not looking forward to it.
Not sure what the hell to say about all the stuff on the Cylon base-star, except that Gaius is... still Gaius. Hopeless, pathetic, and neurotically focused on himself. And dude, he strangled a sick Six model to death. WTF, Gaius. Oh, and that both the cinematography and the music in that section were amazing.
Head!Six is still my favorite Six model. She's so crazy. ♥ I also loved Gaius' little panic about whether or not he's a Cylon. Honestly, at this point, I think his life would be a lot easier if he was. You'd think this might occur to him as well.
The Cylons we've met don't talk about the other 5 models. Interesting. An actual split? I thought they kept going on about how they were all about unity? Maybe that's a reaction to whatever split them in the first place?
The Hybrid. So... Cylon ships = Shadow ships, then? o_O And by "hybrid" do we mean... you know, Human/Cylon hybrid, or...? Jeez this is getting complicated. I thought Hera was still the first real Cylon/Human Hybrid, so this must be something else, but... I'm not sure what. I thought maybe cylon/ship, but... well, that wouldn't really be much of a hybrid, would it? And if that was the case, what would the point be of making it look human but not like one of the existing models? Do all the hybrids look different? Are they a separate model? What the hell is going on here?
And of course Caprica!Six saw the pod thing and isn't telling anybody because she's still in love with Gaius. Bless. ♥
Same thing with the whole "projecting" concept. I'm not sure wtf this is meant to really be about, apart from making us think that Gaius might be a Cylon. It's an odd little thing.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-19 10:30 pm (UTC)I'm assuming you want and see "The Woman King" to clear up your spoiler-induced confusion, but if you want a simple answer to it, I can give it to you without giving away the plot of the episode.
Adama kicking Starbuck out of her chair was an AWESOME moment. I also liked the hair extension-chopping and Lee ditching the fat suit.
Eeeee, you're getting to the Final Five arc! I remember them torturing us with it forever and ever, but it was the kind of torture you secretly love. Or at least I did. I think I spent half my time during the next x-many episodes speculating on who they were, or if they were even in the fleet, and it changed every week depending on what the latest episode had done. Also, there were several characters whom I really didn't want to be Cylons, so each week we went without a reveal, I had some hope left...
So... Cylon ships = Shadow ships, then?
Kind of, yeah. There's a key technical difference, but the concept is pretty much the same. "Hybrid," IIRC, doesn't really mean anything; it's just a somewhat sloppy word chosen to indicate that the ship has a sentient mind controlling it.
Now we can start calling Sharon Athena, yay! :D
no subject
Date: 2010-10-20 02:33 am (UTC)I'm waiting til we see it to clear up the whole issue with "The Woman King," I just had to have a moment of spleen-venting regarding the whole saga so that I could feel better. And also so that I can go back to this entry later and laugh at how stupidly I got it all wrong, because that's half the fun of making these entries.
Adama kicking Starbuck out of her chair was an AWESOME moment.
Totally! I still do love Starbuck, but damn did she need that.
I think I spent half my time during the next x-many episodes speculating on who they were, or if they were even in the fleet, and it changed every week depending on what the latest episode had done.
Yes! It's so crazy! The speculation started a while ago, honestly, but it's really starting to get serious now. I'm hoping for Gaius - he's probably the one who's Cylonocity would upset me the least if it was the case. Other than that, I just don't know! It's so hard to figure out, and I kind of don't want to think about it, at the same time as compulsively reworking the odds in any given characters' favor after every episode.
"Hybrid," IIRC, doesn't really mean anything
Thank you! I was having a really hard time figuring out wtf that could mean, so I'm happy it's just a thing they pulled out of a hat, more or less.
And yes, Athena! XD
no subject
Date: 2010-10-20 04:55 am (UTC)Hee. I did that for what little of B5 I wasn't spoiled for. And now I'm doing it for Fringe. (Although that one is a lot less gratifying than either B5 or BSG, because JJ Abrams is sort of like, "Logic? Logic doesn't exist in my world! Mwahahahaha!" so I'm continually going, "Did that bit there mean something, or was it just put in there to look cool and will never be explained or referred to again? Dammit, Abrams!")
BTW, in one comment I made since you started watching this, I very deliberately phrased something in a way that I think will make you laugh if/when you go back and read it.
I'm hoping for Gaius
I always thought that him turning out to be a Cylon would take away some of the impact of him giving Six the codes to destroy the Colonies. Like, between that and his general skeeziness and self-centeredness, he's so vile that he has to be human, you know?
I kind of don't want to think about it, at the same time as compulsively reworking the odds in any given characters' favor after every episode.
Yep. I was so doing that. Well, that and chanting, "Don't let it be Laura or Bill!" every week...
I was having a really hard time figuring out wtf that could mean, so I'm happy it's just a thing they pulled out of a hat, more or less.
Yep. The hybrids become important later, but it's not for their names.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-20 09:21 pm (UTC)True, true. It's just that he's one who it wouldn't actually break my heart if he turned out to be a Cylon. But yes, it would be a pretty serious cop-out.
Well, that and chanting, "Don't let it be Laura or Bill!" every week...
Yeeeeeeeeah... I have to admit, I'm going to be utterly heartbroken if either of them turns out to be a Cylon. It would just be so wrong!
no subject
Date: 2010-10-19 10:54 pm (UTC)Starbuck and Tigh are, to me, quite honestly two of the most interesting characters. I mean, the entire cast of characters is layered and complex and fascinating, but those two are such dynamic characters and have such ~intense lives sometimes.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-20 02:28 am (UTC)Misery does love company, and this show has more than its share of misery. Plus, yes, I'm enjoying the hell out of it and want everyone to enjoy it with me. ;)
Starbuck and Tigh are, to me, quite honestly two of the most interesting characters.
They really, really are, and I don't want to give the wrong impression by my constant harping on Tigh - I've been nothing but impressed by the actor, the writing, everything surrounding him (and of course the same can be said of Starbuck). The very fact that he makes me so angry sometimes is a compliment to them - I just can't seem to not react when he does the things he does! And Starbuck... god, I can't decide whether I love her or want to slap her from one episode to the next. Mostly love. But there are definitely moments of wanting to slap, as well. So much going on there. So much emotional content.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-20 01:32 am (UTC)I'm curious, what's your opinion of Roslyn as of this episode? Because this was about where I started really, really hoping she'd have an accident with an airlock.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-20 02:26 am (UTC)Roslin? In this episode she didn't do much of anything apart from, along with Adama, asking Gaeta for information about Gaius' research on finding Earth, but I was impressed as hell by her in "Collaborators." I think she did exactly what was necessary for the situation by calling for the general amnesty and specifying that everyone's stories should be told and written down for posterity. In general, I'm quite fond of her.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-20 03:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-20 09:23 pm (UTC)Yeah, that gave me some serious issues as well. I tend to forgive it a bit on the same basis that you mentioned, but on the whole I'm torn between delighted and horrified by what a hard-ass Roslin is, based on the exact decision she's making at any given moment. Fascinating character.