Viewing Pegasus while also half way through first season

[alephnul]

This contains spoilers for BSG, both first season (Episodes 1.5, 1.6, and 1.8 in particular) and the latest episode (2.10). Those on my friends list who have yet to see any of it should just pretend this post doesn't exist. I'll be lending you my Season 1 DVD just as soon as we finish watching it. Yes, it is a good show.

Comments

Outstanding

[boztopia]

Thank you for a very complex and thought-provoking look at what is, clearly, anything but a good-guy/bad-guy situation

Re: Outstanding

[alephnul]

Thanks!

I agree that the extreme lack of discipline on the Galactica is largely due to meta-textual concerns. If the ship merely had pretty lax discipline for a military vessel, it would probably look very strict to most of us civilians (just as the strict military discipline of the Pegasus looks like inhumanity to us).

Well, on a gender equality level, I think it is probably a good thing, although I think it does show that gender equality is largely only worth pursuing for its own justness, and not out of a hope that a gender equal society will automatically less sick and evil in other ways.

I still wish that the rape had been replaced with brutal torture (including allowing all of the crew to participate in the torture as a stress release). This would have created very strong parallels to current US practice in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a more complicated viewer response than the "rape is wrong" response that bringing rape into the picture seems to produce (although, mostly I wish that bringing torture into the scene would

Re: Outstanding

[tiferet]

That's why I don't actually think this is a 'fantastic' episode--it's not at all sensible--it's just emotionally manipulative.

I love this show, but at times I don't know why.

Hadrian's investigation WAS a witch hunt, but at the same time the discipline on Galactica really IS that bad.

We have the choice of Roslin and theocracy (and I love her to death, but she IS running the government based on her faith alone), Adama's paternalism, including nepotism that allows him to risk the entire human race for one pilot, and Kane's complete hard-ass ultramilitary total dehumanisation of an enemy that seems to want to become human. None of these choices don't suck.

Re: Outstanding

[alephnul]

While Roslin has gone all religious, she hasn't replaced the Quorum with priests or mandated religiosity for civilians, so she isn't that bad of a theocrat (about on par with our own divinely mandated Pres ;) ). Of course, shortly Roslin will die and Baltar will become Pres., so the pro-human theocrat will be replaced with the anti-human theocrat

[phylogenetics]

Excellent post

[alephnul]

I think that Adama's method works well with being the protectors of the civilian fleet, while Cain's method is probably better for soldiers who are required to charge into battle every day for months with no hope of anything but eventual death. I do think her method shows some personal attention (or rather lots of attention to maintaining morale

[heron61]

I agree with much of your analysis, but I also think that the fact remains that Admiral Cain is ultimately overly aggressive and far too caught up in her own power. Specifically, during the stand-off at the end, she was willing to escalate to war with the Galactica because she was both certain that she would win and seemed to believe she could make Adama back down, both of which seem rather foolish decisions. A very obvious and simple alternate plan is to let the Galactica ships land on the Pegasus, act like she is opening negotiations, seem reasonable, and then go over to the Galactica with a couple of trusted aids and in front of her crew arrest Adama for insubordination (and then presumably execute Helo and the chief). The Galactica crew are trained military and while they are willing to fire on another ship, it looks very likely that if faced with someone in-person who was operating in an approved military fashion, they might hate what was happening, but they would also likely not stop it, especially since Starbuck and Apollo

[alephnul]

It seems to me that Adama is the one who escalates to threatened ship-to-ship violence, under the insane hope that the Admiral will stand down and allow his forces to extract her prisoners. When Cain says at the end of the episode that Adama has already crossed the line beyond which things start to spiral out of control, I tend to agree. Her response of a massive display of force (but no shots fired) seems like the only thing that could possible get Adama to reconsider and back down. It is clear that Cain will never let him take back his men, so it is only a question of whether he wants to get his people killed in a pointless mutiny. Helo and Tiro are going to be executed no matter whether he chooses to back down or not (well, okay, in actually they aren't

[heron61]

Wrt the rape issue. The torture of the Cylon prisoner by Starbuck and the rape/torture of PegaSix seem completely comparable and place the two ships on an approximately equal moral footing. However, the attempted rape of Boomer was different, in that all of the records that Admiral Cain saw indicated that she was an exceptionally cooperative prisoner. Throwing away a level of cooperation that literally saved the Galactica was idiotic, and needlessly using such tactics was reprehensible. One key difference between Adama and Cain is that Adama is now at a point where he is (very grudgingly) willing to admit that just because a group (in this case the Cylons) is his enemy, that does not mean that all members are monsters deserving only of death or torture. Adama is an idiot and the crew of the Galactica are morally culpable for no shortage of wrongs, but Cain's inflexibility and moral rigidity seem notably worse flaws (or it might just be that I'm a meyer's-briggs ENFP) that led to both the attempted rape of Boomer and the

[alephnul]

Actually, it does seem very weird to suddenly torture a relatively cooperative prisoner, which emphasizes the "lets have a scene showing just how horrible the Pegasus crew are, and give our boys a chance to defend their woman" aspect of that scene.

I suppose that if PegaSix used pretending to cooperate to inflict further damage on the Pegasus, then the Pegasus chief torturer may view information given willingly as the most suspect sort, and only be interested in information given under torture (a not uncommon view of literary torturers, I don't know how likely it is in real-life). Still, it seems odd.