Oh, my beautiful girl.
Spoilers within.
What do you do when the world ends?
You build a wall and light candles and you go there to remember.
You strap yourself in and you fly.
You burn all your bridges, fuck your best friend, get married by the side of a river and when it all goes to hell, as it has to, because this show is about nothing but the things that we keep on doing to each other, when it all goes to hell, you get back up, and you build another wall. Light some more candles. You strap yourself in. And you pull back on the stick, and feel the solid ground beneath you fall away.
This show has always been about what happens when everything ends. About what happens next. About running and resting and fucking it up, about loving and losing when loving and losing so incredibly aren’t the biggest problems you have, about the small apocalypses, every day, about water shortages and coffee riots and cancer. About reinvention, resurrection, getting caught up in an idea of yourself as a part of something greater. Starbuck always was the religious one.
What if we’re not storing up riches in Heaven? What if there’s no Gods, and Earth is a lie after all? What then? This is why Communists are atheists: what if this is all there is? What if we keep running, forever? The lines we draw in the salt now, the systems we put in place now, aren’t just preserving the Colonies as they are, they’re creating the Colonies as they will be. The responsibility isn’t just to preserving democracy and the spirit of the Colonies while in a time of war, but making allowances for what happens if this never ends. If all we have left are rough spots, what then?
I don’t have an answer for Jacob, except to say that the story’s in the falling, and here we are: Lee and Kara, Starbuck and Apollo, sitting underneath the Viper on the flight deck, hydraulic fluid leaking out, wings burned, ship scarred from one too many times not all of her made it back. And she says to him, “This is all we’ll ever be.”
And maybe I was supposed to hear disappointment in that, but I heard joy. I heard the gloriousness of purpose, I heard acceptance of one’s own strength, I heard the kind of peace that only ever comes when you’re fighting the fight of your life. Maybe I was supposed to hear resignation in that, but I heard something wild and gorgeously alive, something triumphant. This is all we’ll ever be. The wonder of it. Think of the moment you became who you are. This is the best it’ll get. I wanted, so very much wanted, Lee to say to her, “And that’s a lot.”
There’s a bunch of possibilities here, which I could fanwank to death: She’s a Cylon, and she’ll come back. Leoben was luring her to her death, the raider was real, the storm was real, and he caught her out at the last moment. She’ll pop up one day leading them to Earth. She’ll find Earth first and come back to get them all. She’s not really gone, because she’s too fracking beautiful and great to be gone, though if you’re going to kill a character, oh, is that a way to do it so maybe it’s all okay. I have this horrific headache right now. I mean, ouch.
Kara’s mother and the bugs and the nightmares, the holdovers from every war you’ve ever fought, the nights you get up and stumble down the hall and you’re halfway to the room you need to be in before you realize that was three houses ago and your hair is gray now, that house was torn down long ago, all those people are dead. It’s so hard, with somebody that difficult and inexcusable and fracking wrong, I think people who abuse children ought to be shot immediately following conviction, I really do, so it’s so hard to think of somebody like that having anything useful to teach you. Fear will kill you, though. Anger keeps you strong. And in the end, you hold your mother’s hand, you take out the pictures, you realize what you were, and then you rise.
The world ends. Then what?
I miss Starbuck already.
A.
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Nope. The more I think of it, the more I see what at least a portion of the season-ending cliffhanger will consist of: Starbuck, having ejected unseen into the murk, is picked up by that heavy raider. Right about the time Gaius Baltar is preparing to meet his doom, the Fleet gets word from the Cylons: they have Starbuck.
She ain’t dead. Being back in Leoben’s custody may make her wish she was, though.
Posted by: Slithy Tove | March 06, 2007 at 06:14
I’m with Slithy Trove on this.
If she wakes up on a base ship, I’m gonna barf.
Nope, I can’t see Starbuck as one of the Five.
You look on one of the Five, you go nuts–D’Anna showed us that.
People look on Starbuck, _she_ goes nuts. She’s an anti-fiver.
But seriously. Through Apollo’s windscreen at the end, we briefly saw two ships, one of which had already smashed Kara’s viper for real. So she wasn’t hallucinating.
We saw her hand going for the eject handle, and then her ship exploded.
Apollo saw her ship go up in the midst of the clouds and storm, but didn’t see a chute. But “not seeing a chute,” especially i n those conditions, is not the same thing as “there was definitely no chute.”
Vipers don’t have enough “smash” to get away from the planet once they’ve descended below the “hard deck,” we were told. Apparently this may not be true of Raptors, since Papadama was willing to launch the SAR bird to go get the hopefully-surviving Kara. We were very definitely _not_ told that heavy raiders don’t have enough “smash” to get back away from the planet, and that was a heavy raider we saw.
Nope. The more I think of it, the more I see what at least a portion of the season-ending cliffhanger will consist of: Starbuck, having ejected unseen into the murk, is picked up by that heavy raider. Right about the time Gaius Baltar is preparing to meet his doom, the Fleet gets word from the Cylons: they have Starbuck.
She ain’t dead. Being back in Leoben’s custody may make her wish she was, though.
“I feel that way today. It’s stupid. But I love good stories. I love stories that do this to me.”
Plus, you have a total crush on Starbuck…
BuggyQ, during the second season of the West Wing, the run-up to “Two Cathedrals,” I called up a friend who watched the show and asked if I was crazy, if he also felt that these horrifying things were happening to good people we both knew as friends.
He said no, I wasn’t crazy, he felt that way, too.
I feel that way today. It’s stupid. But I love good stories. I love stories that do this to me.
A.
Upon further review — I think having Kara be one of the Five is just too easy. That’s what we’re all expecting. And that doesn’t really give her any ‘special’ destiny does it? She’s just one of Twelve in that case.
Plus, not-Leoben told her he was there to help her find the world between life and death. I suspect that world is resurrection. I think her destiny is to be the first to step between Cylons and humans. Somehow she’s going to resurrect, thru the Resurrection Ship, but as a human, not a cylon. She will be one of two cylon/human hybrids, one thru birth and one thru resurrection.
She damn sure can’t be dead because they haven’t explained what that frickin’ mandala is all about yet.
Whatever happens, wherever the story goes from here, all I know is, when that ship blew up, my stomach dropped into my shoes.
That’s how much this show made me feel. The Greeks thought catharsis was a good thing, that somehow processing your feelings about the real world through a fictional world was good for you.
Not today.
If the cylons have their twelve, who are the human twelve?
this is fiction. how does gaius always have his cylon brain with him? how did athena and helo have a baby? remember when d’Anna talked to the one of the five, “forgive me, I didn’t know?” besides, in blade runner the replicants had memories implanted. a big part of the plot line has been gaius wondering if he were one of the five. not beyond the bounds. plus–how many on galactica were kara’s childhood friends, not just from the academy?
My hairy ass she’s dead. I dunno how they’ll explain it, but she’s not dead. There’s too much left in her so-called destiny that’s been alluded to.
From the simplified Roman mythology: Aurora renews herself every morning at dawn and flies across the sky, announcing the morning’s arrival . . She also has many husbands and four sons, one for each cardinal direction: North, East, South, and West.
Yep. I can see that. It’ll be beautiful.
I think the great grace of the episode was Not-Leoben.
It anyone else willing to lay bets down on Lee and D’s marriage now?
What was all that business about down at The Farm, then, if she’s a cylon after all?
It was the first thing I thought of, though, on seeing her auger in.
“yeah, i think she is one of the five. but, damn. she’s the reason i watch this show.”
Cylons are resurrected full grown. How was she a little girl if she’s a cylon?
Or are her memories somehow implanted?
I’m going to have to absorb this one for awhile. This show has always been about couples. Laura and Bill. Kara and Lee. Gaius and Number Six. Sharon and Helo. Killing off Starbuck is like having uneven numbers for a country dance. Things are out of balance and just don’t work the way they should.
So either she’s dead and they’ve fucked up what made this show work or she’s not dead and they’re gonna cheapen it by cheating somehow.
And boy I hope I’m wrong.
yeah, i think she is one of the five. but, damn. she’s the reason i watch this show.