BSG:Stardoe

With the recent possible revelation about the nature of her destiny within Razor, it’s interesting to sit back and take a good look at the character Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace and her place on Battlestar Galactica.

Even though Starbuck is not the only male character from the original Battlestar series to find himself reinvented as a woman, it is arguably the most widely recognized and talked about of such transitions. Perhaps because the original Dirk Benedict version of the character was so much of a ladies’ man, or perhaps because the actor himself famously criticized the new series as a whole as being too “female driven”, by comparison to the weaker and more uncertain males in an article titled Lost in Castration.

The basic criticism at the heart of Benedict’s rant/article is in the decision to re-imagine the series at all. He seems to discount even the possibility of the inherent quality of the new series, judging it against his own idealized notion of the original and finding it wanting. It’s perhaps too easy to call his reaction misogynistic, even if one of his biggest gripes is in the prevalence of strong female characters. More to the point, it comes off sounding like a bitter aging quarterback, who doesn’t feel any particular need to pretend he likes his replacement and is certain that his own accomplishments will never be equaled. And certainly not by reinventing his bastion of masculine accomplishment in the form of a woman.

It’s perhaps not surprising that the actor playing a character like Starbuck would have an overly inflated ego. After all, even in her new incarnation, Kara is not one to lack in self confidence.

Starbuck is brash and bold, not only in the cockpit but also in her interactions with many of the crew. However her flaws are just as bold, with a practically pathological fear of commitment and self-destructive bravado that has at times been as likely to get her thrown in the brig as it is to save the day. Her own cocky attitude can be seen as a front for her deeper issues, dating back to a childhood spent being subjected to what could be characterized as mental abuse, as her mother sought to prepare her for what she believed to be her destiny. The result of a childhood spent being trained rather than nurtured lingers with Kara, helping to drive her reckless behavior with the sense of someone who at the same time believes she has nothing to fear in battle, because she has not yet fulfilled her destiny, and yet cannot commit herself completely to anything or anyone because in the end, it is that destiny which must come first in her life.

Adding to that dichotomy, the news that the destiny she has carried around like a badge of honor might be as the harbinger of the destruction of the human race is an the type of fatalistic irony which is perhaps too pervasive in the BSG. And among his other criticisms, Benedicts commented on this as well, talking about how it highlighted weaknesses over strengths, and essentially the worst elements of humanity at times rather than a more idealistic vision put forth by the original.

The struggle between the two warring aspects of humanity, its profound weaknesses played against staunch strength and determination is in itself one of the predominant themes explored by BSG. In the mini-series, Commander Adama talks about the human race, saying he didn’t know why we deserved the right to survive. And since, this has been one of the fundamental questions at the heart of it’s journey. The question of whether or not we deserve that right, and the importance of trying not just to survive, but to be worthy of survival.

And now we have learned that survival is somehow intertwined with the destiny of Kara Thrace. In Starbuck’s quest to be worthy of destiny which has been foretold for her, the question of the ultimate worth of humanity must somehow find an answer as well.

Not bad for a character Benedict, in his Lost in Castration essay, sarcastically dubbed “Stardoe”.

Saving Grace: Touched by Earl

It’s difficult at times to know what to make of Saving Grace. An undeniable star vehicle, the show revolves around Holly Hunter’s Grace Hanadarko, an Oklahoma City police detective who is perhaps a little too fond of booze, drugs and sex and not at all fond of God or any of the trappings of religion.

Now, since I live in Oklahoma City myself, I do get an undeniable thrill from hearing familiar names and places mentioned and just feeling like I’m even vaguely connected to a program in this way, an unusual feeling for a long time Oklahoma resident to be sure. When we make it on to television, it’s usually disaster footage on CNN, as we wait for the current president to come and survey the damage.

As such, I feel a certain sense of protectiveness about the terrible situations which my city and the surrounding area has experienced over the past few years. The Murrah building is often used as a side note, the obligatory disaster reference of choice before the attack on the Twin Towers. And rarely will a tornado movie or story not at least make reference to Oklahoma, unless it’s sending someone to Oz (or the O.Z., of course).

So it’s not surprising that such elements would be instrumental in a program set in this area. In fact, the Murrah bombing is a pivotal part of her character’s sense of anger at God and at herself in general, as she lost a sister in the disaster who had gone to the Social Security office to pick up an ID for her newborn son on the morning of April 19th, a day later than she had planned because Grace herself had been unable to babysit the previous day. Her own anger and guilt only served to amplify the emotional impact of the bombing, as like most police officers in the area would have, she had worked in the half-destroyed building, searching for survivors, finally turning much of her anger upward.

More than bitter, Grace is aggressively promiscuous, sleeping not only with her married partner on the force, but also other friends, acquaintances, random strangers she meets at the bar, and basically anyone who seems to catch her attention without demanding too much of it.

Complicating Grace’s life is one fateful night, when she ran over a stranger in a drunken stupor and in her shock and grief, called out to God for help. Answering the call was Earl, a scruffy, long-haired angel who looks as though he was recruited out of a truck stop. As it turned out, the man she had run over had not truly been hurt, but instead a the vision of another soul, that of a death row convict whom Earl had also taken under his angelic wing.

Once he had entered her life, Earl stated his intentions for saving Grace. Perhaps most of all, saving her from herself. But rather than being grateful or transformed by Earl’s appearance, Grace instead pointedly refused his efforts at helping her find a different path, fighting his attempts at salvation as though she had a front row seat to see Carrie after she got to Hell and wasn’t about to miss it.

Grace’s all out determination to thwart her own salvation define her character in the best and worst of ways. She is strong, bull-headedly stubborn when it comes to investigating crimes and doing her duties, but she’s also stubborn to the point of absurdity when it comes to her personal angelic companion. It’s like Touched by an Angel on acid, where even in the face of a divine being the rage and pain that drives Grace’s self-destructive behaviors will not be cowed.

Despite her rather blatant shortcomings, Grace is not depicted as a bad person. She is a good friend, a good cop, a good aunt to her sister’s orphaned son. And her slow acceptance of Earl’s presence in her life speaks to a need deep within herself to accept what he is offering.

In the most recent episode, Grace found herself in the obligatory and incredibly unrealistic Oklahoma tornados. Crawling through the ruins of a building she finds a woman unwittingly responsible for a terrible school bus crash. Needless to say, the storytelling is not subtle, or particularly believable, but the ideas raised by Saving Grace are intriguing almost despite itself. Having fought hard, and been willing to risk her own life trying to save the woman, just so she could face charges for her crime, Grace instead helped the woman to confess her sin, to take responsibility for what she had done and in the end, even if her life couldn’t be saved, Earl was there to let Grace know that it was more than the woman’s life Grace had helped to save.

Putting a face on the idea of a divinity is always tricky when it comes to storytelling. It must by necessity be enigmatic and careful to not deviate too far from commonly accepted expectations to seem believable. Earl comes across as the everyman angel, accepting the inherent troubles and weaknesses of those he seeks to help with the patience of knowing that it’s those traits which call for his presence in the first place. Like an angelic officer of the law, he’s doing his duty, constrained by other responsibilities and other regulations as he goes about trying to police the souls he has been entrusted with.

He’s not as effective in this role as the constantly changing faces of God seen in the short-lived Joan of Arcadia, where the form of Joan’s divine visitor was constantly changing, a literal ‘everyman’ who had different facets and goals depending on which form had been taken. The angel sent to people as their last chance at redemption, it’s constantly unclear whether his choice of assignment is because he’s very good at his job, or very bad at it. And the combination of an inept angel and a highly resistant soul make up the underlying dynamic of the series, which manages at times to be insightful enough to be interesting, while frustrating enough to grate a nerve or two.

I don’t think anyone truly believes that Grace won’t be saved in the end. And yet she has been so thoroughly defined by her multitude of sins, it’s tough to see how the show could survive or be driven by her if she were too willing to forsake them. If she does not, however, then the conceit of Earl’s presence in her life would be without purpose.

It’s hard to say how the show will find it’s way while Grace steadfastly refuses to find her own, and yet make the risks being taken by this type of storytelling seem worthwhile in the end. Even so, for those times when it tries too hard, or misses the mark, Grace is without question a unique character, with a story likewise uniquely tailored to fit an unusual location. Perhaps I’m biased, for the city as well as for such staunchly female driven dramas, but I’m strapped in for the ride, happy to see hardships that we’ve endured make their way onto this kind of format as more than a movie of the week or sensationalized plot point.

And as with Grace herself, I can hope for the best while simultaneously bracing myself for the inevitable shortcomings.

Tin Man: In Search of a Rainbow

I find myself torn about how well the story they attempted to tell with Tin Man really worked or not. As I noted earlier my biggest problem with the first installment was the lack of an engaging emotional element to the story. The second installment of the miniseries solved many of the problems I had been having, by giving depth to the character of Askadellia and suggesting that she hadn’t always simply been an evil sorceress out to destroy the sweet and innocent little DG. Instead the two had been close, their magical powers amplified by one another and it was in fact DG who had lead her sister into a dangerous cave and then abandoned her there at the mercy of the true Wicked Witch.

The result is to create an added level of emotion between the two sisters, by showing the closeness they had once shared to give the audience some sense not only of what was lost, but also the hope that there was a way for DG to reach her sister once again. If anything, that answer was perhaps telegraphed too much, nothing surprising or enthralling when DG came to her lost sister at the last moment, wanting to take her by the hand and renew the connection she had been responsible for severing so long ago.

And though I wish we had more of a denouement, with a chance to get a sense of Askadellia after she had been saved, to better appreciate what the struggle had been about rather than just cutting right to the tearful family reunion to wrap things up. Since the bond which would save the day was between the two sisters, a chance to see them reconnect on an emotional level instead of a CGI laden climax would have really helped add to the emotions driving the entire story.

Perhaps the greatest squandered opportunity however, was in the direct connection the story tried to draw to Dorothy, herself. As with the eventual climax of the story, by the end of the second installment of Tin Man, I had begun to guess at the actual familial connection to the original Dorothy. But instead of the truth that she was simply the progenitor of the line leading down to DG and her sister, I had guessed that she would perhaps turn out to be their mother, or more fittingly, their grandmother.

By having the connection between Dorothy and DG so far removed by time and emotions, it undercut the emotional impact that connection could produce. Instead of giving us as viewers the pleasure of seeing really come to life before us once again, letting the affection we feel for her be transformed into a greater connection with someone she so obviously loved, instead we got a brief throwback scene with an emotionless Dorothy handing off the reigns to DG without so much as a hug or anything else which would have made us feel we were seeing Dorothy, our Dorothy, again for at least a few moments before she vanished into her black and white world, waiting for the next time we watched The Wizard of Oz to come back to life before our eyes again. I’m not saying she needed to bust into a chorus of Over the Rainbow, but some kind of talk or anything at all which would have forged a deeper connection between Dorothy and her namesake would have added a priceless element to the story.

And while it was great to see DG constantly put in the Dorothy-like situations of peril and finding ways to use her wits and her burgeoning power to save herself rather than waiting for her band of misfit friends to come and get her, that fact also made me wonder why the series itself was called Tin Man in the first place. In a way, this was symptomatic of the problems I had with the story as a whole, because it was so focused on highlighting the cleverness of the reinvented characters and scenarios, hearkening back to the original story with hastily developed themes rather than necessarily concentrating on the story they were telling themselves, the emotions and journey of the characters. It was great to see the ‘Tin Man’ find his son, grown heartless as leader of the resistance and try to help him reconnect with his emotions. And yet, for all the wit used in reinventing the story in such a way, it was somehow still not as charming as a man made out of tin, dancing around and singing about his longing for a heart, or a young farm girl desperately trying to save her dog and longing for a mystical land from her dreams with all the starry-eyed wonder of childhood shining off her face.

Tin Man was the most frustrating to me because all the elements of a much better story were there, waiting to be tapped in to - waiting to spring it on us that everything we had hoped and wished for had been there the entire time. But it seemed to always find a way to miss the mark, or not hit it well enough to really resonate. The O.Z. really isn’t Oz as we know it. You don’t get there by drifting over the rainbow, or get to find a mystical Emerald City (whether or not you need a good pair of colored glasses to see it as green). As with the entire conceit of naming the main character DG, giving her a tenuous connection to her name sake without ever truly having an identity all her own, the miniseries was more interested in drawing a connection to the original movie than it was in connecting with audience in its own right.

I do believe I’ll be more likely to catch the next airing of The Wizard of Oz when it hopefully airs over the holiday season. Tin Man, not so much.

Next of Kin

In last night’s two-hour episode of The Closer, we saw Deputy Chief Johnson forced, though a tangled and twisted mesh of farcical devices, into a decision with the most grave of consequences.

Beginning with the obligatory nod to holiday spirit and family, as Brenda and Fritz try to decorate their house for the holidays as a means of giving it the appearance of familial bliss which would attract potential buyers. Brenda, for her part, was unhappy with being forced into being “festive”, and as it would continue to do throughout the episode, the questions being raised had to do with lies. And specifically, lies in connection to family.

Our mystery begins with a armored car hold up gone wrong, with two dead guards and a third who had only been injured who quickly disappeared from the hospital and went on the run. In searching for their suspect, Brenda and her team instead find in his apartment, instead find his younger brother, hiding and frightened. Using her southern charm to connect with the boy’s southern roots, Brenda gets the information out of him that his brother has headed back down to Georgia. And so, with Fritz in tow, Brenda heads down for a holiday with her family which is really nothing more than a trip to pick up her suspect.

Finding him, however, turns out to be the easy part. Having to contend with local police as unhelpful as the Los Angeles cops were upon her initial arrival from the south, Brenda takes the suspect into a more personal custody, having to house him in her parents’ overly decorated house even as he does everything he can imagine to make keeping hold of him difficult.

But playing against the mystery is Brenda’s own dysfunctional connection with her family. As the antithesis of her own, only decorated because she had been forced to do so, home, the home of Brenda’s parents is busting at the seams with the trappings of holiday cheer. Excited when they believe their prodigal child wanted to spend Christmas with them, they had cancelled plans to celebrate with their other children and their families only to find that Brenda had lied about the reason for her visit. Feeling guilty for her deception, Brenda attempts to extradite her suspect another way, only to have Lts Flynn and Provenza prevented from flying him back by his continued resistance (yelling “I have a bomb!” in an airport is a good way to get out of flying anywhere) and eventually the un-merry band wind up road-tripping across the country in the Johnson’s RV, with the continual trouble of the suspect plaguing them until Brenda makes a pivotal decision. Having previously kept the suspect from being able to speak with his brother as a means of trying to lure him into talking to her, Brenda changes tactics, instead telling the man that his brother had been killed by the men responsible for the original robbery. She describes a horrible death, using it to break his will to escape and milk his emotions and guilt in order to obtain his cooperation with trying to find them.

To complete the deception, she goes so far as to have a crime scene faked, looking the suspect in the eye and feigning sympathy even as she is manipulating him through the one piece of leverage she possesses, his love for his brother.

The questions raised by Brenda’s decision aren’t as simple as right and wrong. Aside from his emotions, she was trying to keep the suspect and his brother safe, catching the men who would have threatened them and whether or not the ends justify the means can be mitigated by the man’s extremely contentious behavior during his captivity. And yet, the question of truth and deception as it pertains to family is the much more complicated issue.

In an episode filled with lies, all types and degrees, the ultimate truth is that sometimes lies are necessary. As cold and brutal as Brenda’s twisting the knife in her suspect’s heart to obtain his cooperation by telling him of his brother’s death, in the end, after the suspect has realized the truth, still seeking vengeance against his former co-conspirators in order to keep Brenda’s lie from becoming prophetic, and getting himself killed in the process, it is the antithetical lie that must be told which truly defines this episode. Having lied about one brother’s death, Brenda in the end must face lying about the other brother’s life. At the request of her father, who had made the journey not knowing of the original deception, Brenda must come full circle from lying in order to hurt and cow the elder brother, to lying in order to spare the younger from the pain of finding out the truth. Instead, it allowed him to hold on to a more basic truth, that in the end his brother had been willing to sacrifice everything in order to save him, deserving to be remembered as the hero his younger brother would believe him to be.

Both of them are about artifice, just as the simple decorations in Brenda’s house were a reflection of sorts, contrasted with rigid expectation of merriment crammed into every corner and flat surface of her parent’s house. Is a pragmatic reason for telling a lie less valid than an emotional one? Perhaps the emotional lie is simply more palatable, dressed up with pretty decorations and more secure in its good intentions. The pragmatic lie is Brenda’s world, where to do her job she must delve into the minds and hearts of the criminals. In order to be the Closer, she must be so very good at lying it gives her an unfailing knack for getting people to tell the truth.

However, the much deeper question is what toll those lies take on Brenda. Lying to her parents about the reason for her trip was instinctual for her, as her knack for deception in order to get what she wants out of people can so easily be blurred into deception in order to try and give people what she believes they want. Her parent’s ability to accept the deeper truth about Brenda, herself. That no matter her methods, at her heart she does have good intentions. And the twisted roads she’s become so familiar with are a burden she accepts in order to use the talents she posses.

If It Only Had a Heart

Like Alice falling through her looking glass, most truly enduring fantasy stories which feature a female as the central character involve falling/traveling to an alternate and highly stylized and exaggerated version of reality. And arguably a reality which exists as a dream-like vision with symbols and motifs taking the heroine on an internal journey for the purpose of ultimately learning something significant about herself.

The story of the Wizard of Oz, specifically the adaptation onto the big screen staring the fabulous Judy Garland as Dorothy, has endured as possible the most famous and iconic example of this formula. It’s possible to suggest the film has even transcending it’s literary origins to become the most accepted and appreciated version of the story. And if Oz represents a trip through the imagination, the myriad of adaptations it has engendered are a testament to the scope of that imagination. From the original film, to The Wiz, the book and extremely popular musical Wicked, to the newly re-imagined version to be found in the Sci Fi channel’s miniseries Tin Man.

Unlike Wicked, which shuffles Dorothy off to the side to focus on the main character Elphaba (a take on the initials of L. Frank Baum), a peculiar and strong minded girl who grows up to be the Wicked Witch of the West, Tin Man instead re-invents Dorothy, into DG, a daydreaming and motorcycle riding waitress. Unknowingly, D.G. has her origins in ‘The O.Z.’ – short for Outer Zone, but which unfortunately does little but make me constantly wonder whether Marissa is going to show up – as a princess who was sent away as a child for her own safety.

Her well known companions have had similarly sweeping makeovers, with the titular Tin Man cleverly characterized as a former cop who was incased in a tin prison and forced to watch a projecting of his family’s suffering for years, burning away all but the quest for revenge in his heart.

The idea of D.G. as not only the princess, but also the sister of the Wicked Witch, here named Azkadellia – though it’s fair to assume that DG isn’t in danger of being crushed by any houses. Initially she comes across as a hybrid of sorts which is less based on Dorothy as it is Ozma, the princess and ruler of Oz in L. Frank Baum’s series of books. Using familial ties to bind the three central women together within the story, their mother becomes a Glinda of sorts, as the original bearer of knowledge and power who gives DG a mystical gift and helps set her upon her quest of self-discovery.

In the first installment of the mini-series, DG is a terrifically gung-ho protagonist, ready to jump into danger to help strangers and find her own way out of precarious situations. Armed with a mystical mark on her palm, and a lifetime of stories meant to prepare her for her journey, she embarks on it as the driving force rather than the timid child helped along her way by her adopted band of protectors.

And though this new version of Dorothy isn’t necessarily as intriguing or engaging as Elphaba, in the truly original lens Gregory McGuire used to transport us back into Oz, she is strong and bold, growing in confidence and ability as she finds her way through her homeland.

Perhaps it’s because Elphaba (and if you haven’t already, Wicked is well worth reading) helped paint the techni-colored land of Oz with a few more shades of grey than black and white, but the most disappointed aspect of the new miniseries so far is the two-dimensional nature of Azkadellia, herself. So far, she seems driven by nothing more than pure greed and ambition, which helps drives the story along, but doesn’t do much to add any depth or emotion to it.

And this is perhaps the biggest weakness of the story in general. It’s long on clever throwbacks to familiar situations and characters from The Wizard of Oz, but short on heart and truly engaging emotions. DG, herself, has motivations which are understandable, if not tremendously emotionally engaging.

If the original Dorothy was an example that you can take the girl out of Kansas, but you can’t take the Kansas out of the girl, what they’ve done in Tin Man, essentially, is to take the Kansas out of Dorothy. Since it was that origin which connected her fundamentally to the audience, the tangible loss of it, though subtle, is still there.

By making her quest for re-discovering Oz as her home, it is a journey which leads her emotionally further away from the audience rather than trying to make her way back to our more familiar sense of home. Somehow it means less to not be in Kansas anymore, if you weren’t ever really home there to begin with. And if the story is taking that sense of pathos out of the equation, to be as effective and endearing it should be there has to be some element which takes its place.

Or perhaps if it had the cleverly veiled, scathing political allegories which were at the heart of the original book, there would be something solid and tangible enough to ground the story despite it's fantastic elements. Fantasy for it's own sake is rarely the recipe for a good story, no matter the form it might take.

While we haven’t seen it yet, I’m hoping that the story will find its way, and it's heart, as DG does, but I'm afraid nothing in the Wizard's bag of goodies is going to solve all of its problems.

Holding Out for a Hero

Of all the interesting roles for women created by science fiction on television these days, there are still those shows which have tremendous potential and yet seem to fall short of the mark. One such example is Heroes.

It’s not as simple as saying there are no complex or interesting roles for women in Heroes lore, however there is a peculiar tendency in the lore created by the show to have the female characters, even those with their own superhuman abilities, most often relegated to either victims in need of protection, or quasi-villains in need of being stopped or set upon a different path.

The most prominent female character in the show is arguably Claire Bennet, the indestructible cheerleader. And if you followed the story of the first season, she was the subject of the show’s first and most famous tagline: Save the Cheerleader, Save the World. Partly due to her young age, and partly to her essentially passive ability, the idea of saving, sheltering or protecting Claire was one of the most universal themes of the season, with most of the characters, even those without super-human abilities, motivated to aid in the cause of saving her from the parasitic villain Sylar, out to acquire her power as he had so many others, by getting very up close and personal with her brain – which would have been slightly difficult to overcome, even for the girl who makes a habit of throwing herself off of tall structures and sticking her hand down garbage disposals.

By the end of the season, despite the infamous declaration which had made her survival key to ‘saving the world’, Claire’s part in averting a nuclear disaster had more to do with inspiring heroics in others than it did accomplishing anything in her own right. As ‘The Cheerleader’ she existed in no small way as the representative of youth and hope, undying innocence to be saved and preserved. As the iconic personification of female adolescence, the all American cheerleader, she was something of a modern day equivalent of a princess in peril, waiting for the brave knights to prove their worth on the quest to save her.

By contrast, we have the other most prominent female character in the form of Niki Sanders. Despite being one of the more compelling emotional stories, Niki’s struggle through the season was largely against the nemesis in her own mind, an alternate personality known as Jessica. The result of abuse she endured as a child, and the death of her sister Jessica, Niki’s mind had splintered into another distinct personality. Like a mutant Sybil, Niki’s ability to use her incredible strength was paralyzed by her alter ego. Jessica was created by Niki’s mind in no small way to give her an detached sense of strength in the face of abuse she faced as a child, a separate persona who could endure the torments her mind didn’t know how to bear and protect her from even the knowledge of them. However, as an adult, her duty of serving as Niki’s emotional strength meant in turn that she was also the recipient of Niki’s physical strength.

Jessica existed in part as the villain in the story of Niki, and the struggles of her family and representing Niki’s inability to accept the burden of her own strength. And yet, in the end, Jessica’s defeat was signified by her giving up control rather than Niki seizing it, and Niki’s embracing her own power came in the face of a shape-shifting villain named Candace who merely impersonated Jessica, paralyzing Niki once again until Jessica appeared to her one last time to inspire her.

Most disappointing about Niki’s story, was that after all of her struggles, the idea of embracing her strength was never shown in more than fleeting glimpses. One blow disabled Candace, and even Niki’s jumping into the final battle against Sylar amounted to a single strike which seemed to exist more to give another character, Peter, the ability to absorb her power and aid in his ability to fight against the season’s biggest villain.

The new season of Heroes has been a mixed bag in terms of it’s female roles. With Claire’s storyline dominated by a new a love interest who along with her adoptive father has already helped to save her, and Niki struggling once again with the idea of her own strength, having developed yet another personality along the way and potentially losing her strength entirely, even as she is infected with a disease which left her in need of a male characters heroics in order to save her.

A much brighter spot has been the introduction of a new character, a cousin to Niki’s son Micah, named Monica Dawson, who possesses the ability to mimic any physical action she witnesses and as such has happily not yet been in need of rescue. However, in addition we have been introduced to Elle, a lightning powered sociopath, and Maya, for whom anxiety brings about a black-eyed plague which kills anyone near her with the exception of her brother, who in true Heroes fashion has the ability to save her and those around her by absorbing the disease and neutralizing it.

During the first season we were teased with glimpses of a character named Hana Gitelman, known as Wireless, who existed mainly in the graphic novel sub-set of the Heroes story and unfortunately seemed to disappear from there as well, was perhaps the most dynamic and outright heroic of all the female characters introduced into the Heroes universe. It’s hard not to hope, in a mythology where such abilities are manifested in such a variety of characters, that by the end of the current season we’ll actually get to see a few of the these female characters not in need of being saved or controlled. And ones who are inspired by the same kind of impulse toward heroism demonstrated by their male counterparts, rather than simply serving as the inspiration.

Sixes and Seven

Lately, I’ve found myself braving the wilds of Spike TV, and their corny commercials about Manswers, for the chance to re-watch episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. It’s interesting to watch how the show came alive with the introduction of Seven of Nine in the latter seasons, her distinctive personality adding a new perspective on the franchise’s well established canon of characters designed to explore the nature of humanity, though unlike those which came before, with Mr. Spock, Data and even Odo, Seven represented among the first female characters to occupy the complexity of such a role.

Interesting also, is the comparison which comes to mind to another numerically designated statuesque blonde making her mark on sci fi television these days.

As Seven did during her time as part of the Borg Collective, the idea of a shared consciousness and unity of purpose lends a certain sense of commonality among each unique humanoid Cylon models on Battlestar Galactica. And if Seven’s choice of attire lent itself to the perception that her introduction was meant to include a certain titillation factor, Cylon model number Six’s almost predatory sexuality makes no excuses for her revealing attire. Rather than being a meta-textual element designed to appeal to certain elements of the audience, Six’s appeal to the baser human instincts is a fundamental aspect of her characterization. As such, it serves to enhance the sense of menace she is able to invoke, like a Venus Flytrap seducing it’s prey with an intoxicating aroma and luring it to it’s doom.

Making her an even more indefinable threat is the genuine fascination with humanity, and the idea of love. By contrast, Seven of Nine’s introduction carried with it a basic disdain for the notion of humanity and its perceived weaknesses. Despite being born human, Seven’s assimilation by the technologically predatory race known as the Borg, where individuality is purged in the name of harmonious thought and the purpose of a unified whole, helped define her own beliefs and sense of self-worth. When encouraged to rediscover her humanity, Seven is contemptuous, describing humans as “hypocritical and manipulative”, adding “we do not want to be what you are!”

During her years on Voyager, Seven’s journey took her from this sense of derision, to an uneasy curiosity and finally a genuine, if tentative, exploration of her own nascent humanity. Equally transitory was her opinion of the Borg themselves, as she came to have a greater understanding of their destructiveness through the eyes of cultures and individuals they had victimized. And though she initially scoffed at the notion of guilt as irrelevant, Seven came to feel great remorse for atrocities she had been apart of, even without her individual consciousness or consent. More than once, she proved willing to sacrifice her own life in the name of doing penance for what she perceived as her crimes.

One of the Sixes, known as Caprica Six for her pivotal role in the dominating victory of her people over the human colonies, underwent a similar change of heart with regard to the beliefs and actions of her own race. Having fallen in love with Gaius Baltar, Caprica’s disagreement with the destruction of all humans caused her to stand up, along side another Cylon with emotional ties to humanity, as lone voices of dissention against the unified will of the Cylons, their experiences setting them apart from even other identical models much like Borg liberated from the Collective by being disconnected from the hive mind.

And while the most often seen version of Six is a literal fantasy, existing only in the mind of Baltar as a constant, if often meddlesome, companion, unwilling to let him forget his own isolation from humanity, the real Caprica Six, downloaded into a new body after using her old one to shield Baltar from a nuclear blast, carries a similar illusion of Baltar, reminding her in turn of her own detachment from the other Cylons and her ultimate conscience and guilt for her instrumental part in the destruction of the human societies. The implied connection between Baltar’s troubled psyche and Six’s equally troubled consciousness strengthens the notion of the connection between them, not only as characters, but as representatives of their respective races, further blurring the lines between what defines someone as being alive. Seen as initially dangerous by the rest of the Cylons for being “celebrities in a culture based on unity” whose voices might carry over the collective whole, the idea of such a threat was also shared by the singular consciousness in command of the Borg Collective, their Queen, upon discovering an anomalous unconscious connection between many of her own drones, allowing them the freedom of independent thought and action, if only during unconsciousness.

For both the Sixes and Seven, their characters came as a result of putting a face and identity on previously established faceless technological villains, yet villains which had some tenuous connection to humanity. In this new version of Cylons, they were created by humans, their ideological children while the Borg absorbed a connection to humanity by assimilating individual humans and gaining an interest in them in the process.

The idea of the link between artificial intelligence, artificial life and our own humanity is a staple of science fiction storytelling, seeking to push the boundaries of what can be called life and the idea of when increasingly complex and lifelike beings cross over into sentience and truly independent identity.

Using Freud’s model for understanding the human minds, perhaps the most interesting comparison of Six and Seven come in their contrasting journeys, with Six’s introduction being pure Id, approaching humanity through the realm of the sensual and sexual and only slowly finding a path to conscience and responsibility. While Seven carried the Borg beliefs and understandings with her as if it were the personification of a super-ego imposed over her consciousness. Her hesitant journey had to discover her own sense of identity before she could gain an understanding of, or appreciation for the idea pleasure, comfort and other primal instincts regarded as useless or irrelevant by the singular consciousness dominating the Borg.

In both cases, it would be easy on the surface to discount either of these characters based on the assumption that overt sexuality, in appearance or by design, exists in this context to mask shortcomings, or to serve as window dressing to the distract from the story being told rather than adding to it. But instead, both characters were embarking on a journey taking them, literally and figuratively from being just a number, important only in relation to the greater whole, to an identity born of that number, and defined by their distinctiveness from what other such numbers represent.

Openings Made by The Closer

With such an increase lately in programs featuring female leads, it’s interesting to note that the model for many of these shows share some basic similarities.

One could argue the trend began with Kyra Sedgwick playing Brenda Johnson in The Closer. Deputy Chief over a division handling priority homicides in Los Angeles, Brenda begins the series as a southern transplant, resented by many in the department for coming in to such a position as an outsider. Further complicating matters is the fact that she had once been involved in an affair with her new boss, Will Pope, as well as her no nonsense methods of investigations. Known as The Closer, for her ability to get airtight confessions out of her suspects, Brenda’s talents are most on display as she by turns charms, cajoles, intimidates and manipulates her quarry. Within the interrogation room, Brenda often leads her suspects down a labyrinth of words and emotions, twisting and turning until they wind up exactly where she intended them to be, when her sugary sweet demeanor can fall away to reveal the razor sharp wit beneath it like a trap snapping shut around them.

Her trademark is a using her soft southern twang, saying “Thank you, thank you very much”, when what it translates to is more like ‘you can’t deny that I’m right, so just do what I say and we can just get this over with’.

Contrasting with her uncanny ability to manipulate people as part of her work, is the issue of her personal life, where without her skills at emotional manipulation and ability to have tight control over the process, Brenda often seems as lost and off balance as she strives to make her suspects when going in for the kill. The ease of reading people, and morphing herself into whatever persona will achieve the desired result translates into difficulty in relating to real, honest emotions and offering the same in return. Her relationship with FBI agent Fritz Howard is most often characterized by that struggle, as she tries to allow the carefully constructed persona to fall away in the face of genuine emotion.

The idea of competence in the workplace contrasting with being hopeless in her personal life is the most common thread of similarity between characters such as Holly Hunter’s Grace Hanadarko from Saving Grace, Angie Harmon as Lindsay Boxer on Women’s Murder Club, all of which portray the characters as being as incompetent in their personal lives as they are talented at be police officers. To a lesser degree, perhaps even Mariska Hargitay’s detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: SVU and similar characters fit the bill.

The malady is not confined to law enforcement, however. In Damages, for Glenn Close and Rose Byrne, the idea of workplace competence coming at the expense of a personal life was integral to the plot of the first season, as Rose’s Ellen Parsons began her legal career trying to balance her life between her ambition and her fiancé. The impossibility is accepted as a cynical reality by one of her more experienced colleagues, Ellen is even told that when her life falls completely apart, that “means it’s time for a promotion.”

Interestingly, many of these women are also childless, either by circumstance or design and having to consider whether they will ever choose to become mothers. Close’s Patty Hewes is an exception, her troubled relationship with her son mirroring in no small way Brenda Johnson’s difficulty in relationships. For Patty, who as a lawyer makes her living by manipulation and control, the prospect of letting go of that control is a constant, often maddening struggle with a son who has come to resent and rebel against such treatment.

It’s not surprising, nor is it exclusive to women, to portray an inherent imbalance in terrific ability in the workplace with severe limitations in a character’s personal life. Indeed, the two aspects of a character are often portrayed as inversely proportional. The better you are at one element of your life, the more another will suffer.

It’s certainly not a new conceit. The struggle between the divergent aspects of work and life was one of the central themes of Cagney and Lacey, with Sharon Gless’ Christine Cagney as the workaholic alcoholic contrasting with Tyne Daly’s Mary Beth Lacey, a wife and mother caught between her partner’s drive and her family’s needs, often conceding that one must come at the expense of the other.

Replacing the alcoholism with a more mundane sugar addiction, Brenda Johnson brings in the new breed of workaholic female with perhaps a less accusatory sensibility. Not that Cagney was necessarily vilified for her devotion to work, but that the inherent struggle for balance between the personal and professional, while it might be difficult, is now shown as more of a constant struggle rather than an abject impossibility. As though such characters are now allowed to exist somewhere in between the two extremes, having a genuine interest in each even if the more natural ability might exist in the workplace. While the personal struggles are now able to be characterized with fumbling charm as easily as they might be with darker obsessions.

Perhaps this is a reflection of a society which has grown somewhat more comfortable with the idea of a woman in a position of power or authority, and yet still not entirely at ease. As she began her new position, Brenda was greeted with unease and suspicion, having to at one point tell an officer that, “If I liked being called a bitch to my face, I’d still be married”, yet, as they had the opportunity to see her work, she slowly was able to gain the loyalty and respect of a team once ready to transfer en mass away from the division rather than work with her. And in the process perhaps helped pave the way for others to be given the same sort of opportunities.

Brenda: Low-functioning autistics have no language skills; they cannot survive independently by themselves. Keith is not like that. According to his school records, he's very intelligent but he does have issues - he's unemotional, frequently says inappropriate things. He's literal-minded. He gets fixated on minor details. He gets agitated when his routine is altered, and he's extremely uncooperative when anything or anyone gets in the way of him doing what he wants.
Detective: Does he have a Georgia accent?

New Lease on Life

As we approach the mid-point of the television season, the networks, even in a season unquestionably affected by the writer’s strike, have begun making the calls about which freshman shows will receive full season pick ups. Happily, among those shows green-lighted for the back nine is Life.

In the face of more media friendly programs such as Chuck and Bionic Woman, Life found a way to persevere, embracing quality over hype and slowly but steadily finding a loyal audience, of which I happily count myself as one.

Though it is unquestionably Damian Lewis’ show, Life also features Sarah Shahi as his partner Dani Reese, Robin Weigart as Lt. Karen Davis, and Brooke Langton as Charlie’s former lawyer turned DA Constance Griffith.

Rather than just being ancillary to Charlie’s story, each of these characters have developed into integral parts of the story, including the deeper conspiracy plot which serves as the shows biggest hook. In addition, the show has managed to blur the lines with each, making the question of on which side of the issue their loyalties might fall genuine for each in a different way.

Early on in the series, Lt. Shaw seemed a lock to be a part of the larger conspiracy which sent Charlie Crews to jail for over a decade for murders he didn’t commit. An image of her being the first new addition we see Charlie make to his closet-sized outline of his evidence and information about the series of people and events which lead to his imprisonment. Lt. Shaw pushed Charlie’s new partner to produce information which would allow them a loophole in the settlement which gave him a place as Detective in the police department, practically threatening Dani’s own position if she didn’t comply.

As the story has progressed, however, the lieutenant has been portrayed as a good cop, interested in justice above all else, and her interest in forcing Charlie out of the department possibly explained by the justifiable fear that he was there with ulterior motives which could be harmful to the department as a whole. It would have been easy within the story to paint Lt. Shaw with a darker brush, making her an unquestioned villain for the show’s hero to overcome. Instead, she is an example of how the show rarely goes for easy or simplistic choices or the easiest answer.

By contrast, the character of Constance Griffith has gone from Charlie’s unquestioned ally, the champion who obtained his release from prison, complete with huge monetary settlement and ensuring his desired reinstatement as a police officer, to a newly hired member of the DA’s staff, despite knowing of the DA’s desire to put Charlie back into prison. Hired for her new position only a week before a the murder of the investigating officer, Griffith’s potential shift of alliance effectively speaks to the overwhelming scope of the conspirators working against Charlie. And, as with Lt. Shaw, our initial impression of the character changes by subtle degrees as the story moves on, calling any basic assumptions into question and turning away from any simplistic understandings of them. The added dimensions lend to depth of the overall story, heightening the sense that Charlie is wading into untested waters, and leaving us uncertain as to what his secretive investigations are going to uncover.

Foremost among the murky loyalties surrounding him is Dani, herself. The partnership between the two has grown and developed into an effective, if at times uneasy alliance, given its charm by their wit and banter as well as the demons which seem to lurk under the surface of each of them. Through their investigations, Dani and Charlie have come to effectively work in tandem. And despite being ordered to help boot Charlie from the department, Dani has instead shown increasing trust and trustworthiness.

Complicating the matter, however, was an ambiguous warning to Charlie hinting at Dani’s connection to several million dollars which had gone missing from a bank heist when she was a girl, eventually connecting to her father, Jack Reese, Lt. Shaw’s former partner and a figure who has emerged to have a prominent place on Charlie’s wall documenting the conspiracy.

As with the other featured female players, this kind of twist adds to the richness and complexity of the character, giving her own backstory and the undercurrents of her personality a sense of weight and gravitas to potentially rival even Charlie’s own complicated psyche. And the growing sense of balance and equality between them only heightens the potential weight of Dani's being caught in between her history, her family, her partner and her sense of duty.

This type of storytelling, letting characters deepen slowly, hinting at secrets rather than wallowing in them and defining characters in no small part by what we don’t know about them is a refreshing change from programs such as Lost which constantly use flashbacks or flash-forwards to create and heighten the sense of mystery and ambiguity, rather than letting it develop organically. At times such shows seem more in love with their narrative devices and the conceit of their secrets and the revealing of them than they are with the characters themselves, and the journey they must undertake.

A show like Life works because its mystery develops slowly, using something of a narrative chiaroscuro. What we see and understand is defined, in large part, by the shadowy secrets surrounding everyone. The conspiracy looms over and around the story, helping to define it without dominating. And the drama is then developed from the ground up rather than falling from the sky or the need to constantly create new, larger then life devices for creating mystery and suspense to hook the viewers into the next phase of the story. This sense of drama over device is why Life seemed such an underdog at the beginning of the season, and the news that we’ll get to see more of this story is such a welcome gift.

Razor's Edge

Cain: When you can be this, for as long as you need to be, then you’re a Razor.

In Battlestar Galactica’s new in-series movie, Razor, we go back in time to the command of Admiral Helena Cain and the path which lead her Battlestar, the Pegasus, on it’s controversial path in the wake of the Cylon invasion of the Twelve Colonies. To guide us on this journey, we have the introduction of Kendra Shaw, an officer who found her first day aboard the Pegasus the same as the Cylon attack, marking her as the witness, and eventually the embodiment of Cain’s actions and decisions in the days and weeks to follow.

We also see Shaw closer to the present, chosen as Lee Adama’s XO as he is given command of the Pegasus after the deaths of the previous three commanders, beginning with Cain’s own death at the hands of her former prisoner and Cylon spy, Gina Inviere. Shifting back and forth between the two important timelines of her service on the Pegasus, Kendra is chosen by Lee because of her close association with the philosophical standards enforced by Admiral Cain. In her own words, she is “Cain’s legacy”.

So, to understand Shaw, and what she represents, we must see the journey of the Pegasus through her eyes and her experiences. And we must gain insight into the choices made by Helena Cain, her beliefs and the notorious actions she took in the name of the survival of her ship and struggle against the Cylons.

Taken out of context, many of those actions appeared questionable to outright horrific. We learned through the drunken confidence of the Admiral’s XO her original second in command had been killed by Cain herself, shot in the head when he refused to carry out her order in the midst of a battle. We also saw the condition of Gina, her Cylon prisoner who had been subjected to intense physical abuse, and even sexual abuse which was made something of a sport among her crew. And finally, we learned that Cain had stripped a civilian fleet of their valuable components and personnel, taking both by threat of the deaths of the families of those who refused to comply. Threats which were carried out against the first few who refused the orders.

In Razor, we see these same actions through the eyes of Kendra Shaw, who not only witnessed many of the actions but was the first to carry out Cain’s order to shoot the families of the civilian fleet. The story of how she grew from a new officer, lost on her way to reporting to her Admiral, to a soldier ready to carry out orders, regardless of consequences or conscience, is the key to understanding those decisions themselves.

It is a journey taken by degrees, first with the initial attack which left their ship crippled and about to be destroyed, sending the Pegasus on a blind FTL (Faster Than Light) jump which could have taken them anywhere in the galaxy, including the inside of a sun. Having no time to calculate their destination, Cain ordered the jump in the face of repeated nuclear strikes against her ship, with two more missiles inbound to complete the ship’s destruction. Kendra is the officer who is ordered to make the jump, at first questioning the decision, but in the end carrying it out just before the ships destruction.

Thrown clear of the immediate threat of war, the Admiral has to make the choice of what their next course of action will be, what to do in the face of the destruction of their society. The Galactica, left in a similar position at the end of the original mini-series, finds a disheartened and demoralized crew and civilian fleet given a rousing speech by, then Commander, William Adama, where he blatantly lies to his crew, telling them he knows the location of a lost colony known as Earth and inspiring them with the promise of finding a new home far away from the Cylon forces. In the end, his crew is left chanting “So say we all!”, having been given something to focus on and hope for in the face of their tragedy.

Admiral Cain’s speech defines a much different path for her own crew. She tells them:

Cain: When faced with untenable choices, you should consider your imperative.

Looking around her Battlestar, she sees a ship designed for war, and a crew more than inspired to fight. She defines their purpose as continuing the war, extracting revenge on the Cylon forces in any way they can, and that so long as their ship survives, the war will never be over. Unlike Adama, who had to coax and cheerlead hope and the chants of “So say we all!” from his own crew, the Pegasus takes up the chant slowly Cain having appealed to their hatred instead, the chants coming from deep in the hearts of her crew until the entire ship is united in voice and purpose.

The entire ship save one, of course. Because aboard the Pegasus is a Cylon, a model number Six, known as Gina Inviere. Under the guise of a civilian system’s analyst, tasked with updating the Pegasus with the software designed to cripple them in the face of the upcoming Cylon attack, Gina has become romantically involved with Helena Cain in the process. The reason for this involvement probably parallels that of Caprica Six, who became involved with Gaius Baltar in order to gain access to the defense mainframe. And as with the very first number Six, who makes her entrance in the teaser for the original miniseries, this model appears to explore the idea of life and humanity through her sexuality, asking a Colonial representative if he is alive, and then asking him to “prove it” with a kiss even as his station and is being destroyed.

She has no reason to fear death after her mission is completed and the ship destroyed, because the Cylons simply download their consciousness in a new body and are reborn. In fact, we are told that Gina’s last name, Inviere, means ‘resurrection’, a constant reminder of her essential immortality and sense of invulnerability.

We learn of Gina and Helena’s involvement, also through the eyes of Kendra Shaw, who sees them together at a meal and gleans their relationship from the subtle touches and glances between them. Later, as she discusses their relationship with Shaw, Gina uses the implied trust to get Shaw’s access codes, allowing her to leave the ship vulnerable to the Cylons in an upcoming attack.

Gina speaks of her relationship with Cain to Shaw, saying in part that even though they had tried to hide their involvement:

Gina: Guess that’s hard when you truly care for someone.

One of the dichotomies of the Sixs is that it’s possible for both sides of her nature to be genuine. It’s possible that in her own way she did truly care, or perhaps even love, Helena even as she facilitated her death and the destruction of her ship. It’s questionable, for example, why she wouldn’t have had the ships systems up and running, corrupted software in place before the attack happened, given that she’d been working with Cain for weeks, to complete her task of crippling the ship in anticipation of it’s destruction.

Certainly it seems she pushed Cain and the Pegasus into a trap as they were to begin their guerilla campaign against the Cylon fleet. The Cylons mistake however, is sending another Six in among the attack forces. Killed by Kendra, the identical model is their means of identifying Gina as a spy, taking her into custody rather than the death she had counted on, and leaving her to answer for the hundreds more lives lost in the thwarted attack. But even as she grabs a gun to fight off her captors, Gina has the opportunity to kill Cain herself, but hesitates just long enough to allow for her capture, once more calling into question how much of her feelings for the Admiral were genuine.

It is the revelation of her lover’s betrayal which causes the most dramatic turn in Helena Cain’s character. She describes to Kendra how Gina was able to mimic human feelings in order to manipulate her and gain her trust, guessing Gina’s software might be vulnerable to human weaknesses as well. As such, she orders the torture and torment of her former lover in order to find her weaknesses and limits, and to gain whatever knowledge of their enemy she could give them.

But most importantly, Cain now has a new understanding of the Cylons and their tactics. Gina had signified the one sense of humanity and vulnerability Cain allowed herself to feel, a subject discussed by Gina and Kendra earlier. Her imprisonment represents a constant reminder of the Admiral’s need to excise that vulnerability. Feeling this weakness in her was responsible for the newest destruction and loss of life on her ship, it is in this mindset that Cain finds herself with access to a civilian fleet, and orders it to be used to replenish what she has lost.

She stands outside Gina’s cell, seeing her beaten and bloody, a sight which should engender sympathy, or even pity to one who had loved her, but now sees those emotions as nothing more than weaknesses her enemy would use as a means of her destruction. So she makes the decision to turn her back on those aspects of her humanity, to become more of a machine in order to fight these machines who would mimic human feelings in order to prey on them. In this mindset, she orders the families of the unwilling recruits killed, determined as she would later describe to Kendra, “to show the enemy our will”.

And Kendra, herself, is the means to this demonstration. She is the one to pull the first trigger, take the first innocent life in the name of continuing the fight. The action earns her a promotion and praise from Cain, who appreciates that she was able to overcome her revulsion and natural inhibitions in order to do what needed to be done. Cain toys with her razor, as the symbol of her philosophy, using it as the personification of what the crew would need to become.

Cain: If we don’t, we don’t survive. And then we don’t have the luxury of becoming simply human again.

In the present, we see the price Kendra has had to pay for letting go of that humanity. She has become Cain’s Razor, a sharpened weapon in this war whom Starbuck discovers in the kitchen late at night, each of them looking for a means of “taking the edge off”. Kendra seeks in a drug some small measure of humanity to indulge in, something to make her feel in a place where circumstance has forced her to become unfeeling. Kara likes the idea that Shaw has some means of releasing tension, taking it as a sign that "The XO's human after all." But being caught keeps Kendra from indulging in her vice and the pressure valve it offered instead can only continue to build.

Perhaps one of the tragedies of the story of Helena Cain is that she never allowed herself the luxury of taking the edge off. In her first scene in Razor, we see Cain on a treadmill, looking at the schematics she had been working on with Gina, with her razor perched next to it like the two divergent sides of her nature. Her XO tries to get her to relax, telling her, “Every once in a while, it’s okay to get off the treadmill”, her unspoken response is to start running harder the moment he leaves. The idea of letting up is a luxury she wasn’t inclined to allow herself before the attacks, Gina representing perhaps the one exception to that rule. Afterwards, especially in light of her betrayal, Cain wouldn’t allow herself to let go of her edge, her anger, or her will. The endless axe she ground with Gina would eventually come back to destroy her.

Likewise, we see Shaw’s own inevitable destruction. After she is wounded on a mission, Shaw forcibly takes Starbuck’s place, intent on carrying out an order to sacrifice herself in order to destroy a Cylon vessel containing the product of the original Cylon experiments with humanity, a hybrid being who served as an interesting thematic counterpoint to Shaw’s own dual nature. She approaches death almost with a sense of release, in much the same way that Gina eventually would as well, the two of them so caught up in the pain of their experiences they can seem to find no other escape

After her death, the actions of Kendra Shaw and Helena Cain are discussed by William and Lee Adama, where the Admiral asks his son to consider a commendation for Shaw in the wake of her sacrifice, even as they share a stiff drink to take the edge off their own experiences.

Lee is uncertain a commendation would be appropriate, questioning the violent acts which called into question both Admiral Cain’s nature and Kendra’s, as the one who carried the empirical torch to Cain’s legacy. Admiral Adama, unlike when he first learned of Cain’s actions, has had the chance to review her logs, to gain insight into the reasons for her decisions. In light of his new understanding, he can find no real fault in the things Cain did, saying he, himself, might have made the same choices if put into her place. But having Roslin as champion of the civilian fleet and Lee, himself, as an ever present reminder of his conscience and responsibility, Adama found himself on a different path. He encourages Lee to give his implicit approval of the legacy Cain and Shaw represented, by writing the first version of the history which will remember them favorably in his logs.

In one of the final scenes, we see Starbuck toying with the Razor and considering Shaw’s sacrifice, which saved her own life. She comments it’s “Not a lot to show for a life, huh?” The self-deprecating irony that she, herself, is what is left to show of Shaw’s life, making her the uneasy bearer of the last remnants of Cain’s legacy.

When giving her rallying speech, Cain told her crew that as long as their ship survived the war would never be over. The promise became something of a curse, defining the ship and her crew’s purpose even as it trapped them in a never-ending cycle of pain and destruction.

The question we are left is if that cycle will continue on with the Galactica, having learned from the Cylon’s hybrid being of a prophecy that Kara Thrace is the harbinger of the apocalypse, the one who would lead humanity to its destruction. Even as she holds Cain’s razor and the legacy it signifies, Starbuck teases Lee about her destiny, giving the now ominous promising that she will be around until the end, and leaving us to wonder if that end was somehow hinted at or foretold by the ill-fated story of the Pegasus.

The Parable of Cain

In anticipation of the upcoming Battlestar Galactica movie, Razor, I thought I'd spend a little time getting to know Admiral Helena Cain a little bit better. Her introduction in the episode Pegasus, where Galactica’s fleet of human refugees found themselves in the company of another Battlestar, this one named Pegasus, who managed to survive the Cylon attack on the twelve colonies as well.

In command of the Pegasus was Admiral Cain, described by Commander Adama as a promising, up and coming officer who had found herself on the fast track to her rank. A rank which so happened to be above Adama’s own, making Cain his immediate superior and de facto commanding officer of the entire military, including the Galactica and her crew.

As Cain’s story unfolded, it became clear her quest for survival had taken a much different path than Adama had taken. It was learned she commanded with fear and intimidation, shooting her XO when he refused to follow an order, stripping a civilian fleet not only of parts, but of personnel taken by force from families who were lined up and shot if they failed to cooperate.

The power struggle which inevitably developed between the two highly divergent philosophies for survival lead each of the leaders to go so far as to plan the assassination of the other in a bid to gain unquestioned command. Despite their divergent and seemingly irreconcilable philosophies, the juxtaposed assassination plotting served to highlight the similarities between the two military commanders, each of them coming up with a nearly identical scenario for disposing of the other at the conclusion of a mutually planned and executed battle to deal a crippling blow to the Cylon fleet. Even more fascinating is the fact that each of them also chose not to go through with their plots, though they had the means of succeeding in their goal, with Cain’s end instead coming at the hands of a former Cylon prisoner whom she had exposed to horrific conditions and treatment (more on that to come in the analysis of Razor).

Admiral Cain’s character, in the end, can be seen as the embodiment of the redemptive violence of a fascist military dictator. Her quest is for revenge, to continue the war the Galactica and her fleet have long ago given up as lost, and that vengeance necessitates any actions which strengthen their chances at fighting the Cylon forces. It is that same single mindedness which not only leads her to plan Adama’s death, but also gives her the clarity to see through the battle against the Cylons they wage together, that Adama’s presence offers her a unique strength of it’s own. And that together, they are stronger than either could be on their own.

Perhaps the most intriguing element of Cain’s character is in the mirror she represents, to other characters such as President Laura (speak softly but carry a big airlock) Roslin, Starbuck and of course Adama himself.

She can be seen as a pure distillation of strengths of each of these characters. She possessed Roslin’s ruthless pragmatism gone unchecked by her sense of responsibility, Adama’s myopic decisiveness left unhindered by his compassion, and Starbuck’s arrogance and nerve without her sense of honor to serve as a balance. Cain existed with all these divergent elements merged into a single voice with a single purpose, unwilling to tolerate any dissention or questioning of her authority.

As such she commanded her forces by calling on their basest elements, ruling them through fear and intimidation, encouraging their anger and lust for revenge to fuel the fight against their more powerful enemies. And yet, the strength she represented was genuine. The passion she inspired in her troops was powerful and effective.

After her death, Starbuck – who had once been tasked with carrying out the murder herself – gave a memorable eulogy, declaring the simple truth that for all her faults, they had been stronger with Helena Cain’s presence than they were without it.

Stripped of the idea of glamour and heroics, war is ugly and primal. It’s about defeating one’s enemy by any means necessary. In the miniseries which kicked off the re-imagined voyage of the Battlestar Galactica, newly appointed President Roslin insisted that the war was over, convincing Commander Adama they had lost and the only hope was taking whatever survivors they could and trying to ensure the survival of humanity. Helena Cain and the Pegasus were unwilling to concede defeat so easily. The war for her was not over so long as she had the means to fight it, and it’s hard to argue her cause itself wasn’t just and righteous even if her methods were unacceptable within the structure of polite society.

This struggle is a classic one in modern storytelling, personified by the infamous “You can’t handle the truth!” from A Few Good Men, where Jack Nicholson’s Nathan Jessup gives his famous monologue, saying in part:

Jessup: …And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives...You don't want the truth. Because deep down, in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty...we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something.

What BSG does, perhaps better than any other series which has come before it, is blur the lines of gender mores and expectations. That Admiral Cain was a female is almost inconsequential to her story. No part of her actions or decisions were shown to be predicated by her gender, and indeed, the parallel drawn between her decisions and those made of Adama serve to highlight the many ways there were alike almost as deeply as it highlights the differences between them.

Perhaps Helena Cain’s greatest weakness was that she was so focused on defending and avenging the society which had existed before, she did not consider the need to defend what was left of humanity, and the new society which had evolved after the Cylons had decimated their worlds. Her inability to concede the battle which had been lost left her blind to the necessity of saving what had been left behind. And yet the question of what part she might have played in the stories which followed her death is an intriguing one. Her decision not to have Adama and his senior staff killed represented perhaps the kernel of change within her, a glimmer of understanding that the strength he represented and the fleet he protected were the same things she had been fighting for.

It would have been easier, perhaps, especially in a time where questions of the morality of war loom so large over our own society, to portray such a character as purely a villain, to have her death be a triumph. Instead, the questions she represented are allowed to linger, and her shadow looms large enough to bring Razor to our screens for a more in depth analysis of her actions and the legacy she left behind among not only her own crew but the fleet as a whole. It speaks to the complexity of her character and the allegory she represented, the question of how much of one’s own humanity can be sacrificed in the name of saving humanity itself, and how easy it can be to focus so completely on fighting you lose sight of what you’re fighting for.