Piloticians wish you a very happy Fourth of July!

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Hi everyone! Happy 4^th of July! I hope you’re all having a wonderful, relaxing weekend. I’m Rachel, and it’s my pleasure to be hosting the DPP this week. I'm jumping the gun a bit by posting a day early, but I didn't want the 4th to pass without a chance to honor our pilotician heroes :)  I’m planning on posting a discussion topic each day except for next Sunday, which I’d like to leave open so that people who are too busy to comment every day can still have time to read over the weekly developments and add their thoughts to earlier posts at the end of the week.  Sunday will also be an opportunity for all of you to start new conversations as the spirit moves you :) But till then, you’re stuck with me! BWA-HA-HA-HA.

Today’s post is a split-personality patriotic celebration, half silly and half serious.

 

Silly first:

                                  VS                         

 Be Smarter.  And Wronger.                                               Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six.
 VOTE APOLLO / STARBUCK                                                      VOTE ROSLIN / ADAMA
           148,000 B.C.E.                                                                         148,000 B.C.E.

Let’s imagine presidential competitions between our favorite characters. I think Apollo/Starbuck versus Roslin/Adama could be entertaining (imagine the Vice Presidential debates!), but feel free to run our pilots against each other, or alone, or in different pairs as you see fit. Give them political slogans, bumper stickers, campaign posters, party names and platforms, or write a little snippet of their speeches and debates. Have fun!

 

And if anyone is in a more contemplative mood…

On the Fourth of July it seems only natural to think about the men and women of the armed services. I would say that BSG in general provided a positive view of the military, and we’ve certainly discussed what our pilots’ individual roles and callsign personas meant to them. But I’m curious: what do you think the military itself meant to them? What did they value about the ethics and lifestyle of the service? What did they dislike about it? Were Kara and Lee’s views of the meaning of their work similar or different? To what extent was soldiery their true calling at any given time?  What aspects of their personalities, good and bad, did it develop, which might otherwise have gone unrealized? It’s interesting to me that the military seems to have been a second choice for both of them. They were each pressured to join from an early age by a domineering parent, though both apparently planned to make their own way pursuing other careers (Lee was a reservist, and Kara had dreams of professional pyramid). Looking back, what do you think they’d say about this ‘second choice,’ and how it ultimately shaped their lives and the lives of others? And, not to get into any real life controversies, but if you’d like to share, I’d be curious as to whether having Kara and Lee as your favorite characters affected the way you thought about the military at all?

 

Comments

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Will have to ponder the silly. (oddly enough)

For serious, at the moment I'm going to ignore all of Rachel's lovely questions to say other stuff. ;)

One of the most interesting things to me is that they both joined at a time of peace, when there was little expectation of war becoming a reality. It's a bit surprising to me that Kara wasn't bored by the daily repetition/routines of military life. (Or maybe she was and that's why she ended up in the brig so much). I always think Dee's line about Lee needing a war, is actually most true for Kara.

For Lee, I guess the fact that he was reserves makes sense but I wish we knew what else he did with his time/why he was serving on Atlantia (for an extended period?) when the decommissioning happened. Also, if you think about it, the impression given in Black Market is that the confrontation with pregnant Gianne was the same day as/very close to the day the war started. So why was Lee all hanging out in his khakhi shorts and sneakers?

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

Yes!! You've hit on a couple of thoughts I've had about Kara - I also find it hard to imagine her not being bored with the routine of military life - she thrives on the thrill of war and needs it MUCH more than Lee. And YES about the brig. :D

And Lee and the polo shirt and khaki shorts - LOL. He seems sooo incredibly uptight. :) I definitely prefer the confidence and relaxed posture of his presidency.

Interesting questions about Atlantia and the reserves - I'd forgotten. In the US Military, reservists go on brief assignments (voluntary or not) to advance in the ranks or for special training. Was a length ever specified? I've seen some "special assignment" themes in fic.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

You raise a very good point about Kara and peacetime enlistment. She has that line in UB about "the war's over. So's all the good stuff." I think it's interesting that she was thinking seriously of mustering out and starting a life on the planet with Sam, even before the pilots!tryst gave her extra reasons to establish distance between herself and all Adamas :) And in "Someone to Watch Over Me," we catch a glimpse of her depression and sense of worthlessness when she's acting CAG during a time when all they're doing is sending out survey teams week after week. She starts coming apart at the seams, and not all of that is due to her "harbinger" worries, it seems to me.

As for Lee, I don't know how the reserves work at all, honestly. I get the sense that Lee kept saying he was going to do something else with his life, but that he kept extending his enlistments until he came up with an actual concrete better idea. I think that led to a lot of volunteering and putting off the big decisions he felt deep down he needed to make. I would have thought if he were going to break with the military, it would have been after Zak's death. He certainly broke with his father at that point. But maybe he would have felt like leaving the service at that moment could be seen as cowardly, or would have justified the nepotism rumors he'd probably run into before. I think maybe he wanted to prove he could succeed in the military without his father's approval; maybe he even intended to serve out Zak's enlistment (four years?) as a way of honoring him. I don't know. But it's interesting to speculate.

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

I would have loved to see the scene where she musters out. Has anyone written a fic about that? It's strange to think that Adama would just let her go - I mean he had a problem with the Chief, but not Kara? Doesn't make a whole lotta sense.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

wisteria_ has an excellent fic about Kara mustering out: Essential (http://users.livejournal.com/wisteria_/590662.html)

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that rec. I loved the fic but soooo wanted K/L to end up together. Hee. It does fill in the blanks nicely, tough.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

I probably should have said it was sorta Kara/Anders (whoops!) although the ending is pretty devastating eh?

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

Hee. That's okay - I enjoyed it. My K/L shipper self interprets the ending as Sam gets sick and dies and K/L get together. :D:D My realistic self says it ends where the show picks up on New Caprica. I prefer my version. :P

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know a lot about how the military works, especially in the US, much less about what being reserves actually entails but I had the impression he wasn't actually reserves when the attacks happened but was instead thinking of leaving the service and joining the reserves at the time. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't there a deleted scene where he is about to board the transport to the decommissioning ceremony and he is talking to a bartender and he says he had been accepted to Pitot Test Program (os something like that) and wasn't sure if he was going to do it because he was considering leaving the service altogether. Also, in one of the last episode's flashbacks, didn't he tell Kara, the military had paid for his education and therefore he would pay them back by serving a certain number of years, but that after that he would leave?

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

Yes, right - the pilot test program. I remember that. It makes more sense with that extra tidbit of info. Thanks!

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

True. Maybe they just forgot they labeled him as Reserves in Final Cut. Wouldn't surprise me.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Huh, you make another really good point here. His rank as displayed in "Final Cut" indicates that he was a reservist, but what you say makes me think that maybe that was a very last-minute thing; perhaps he served on Atlantia as a career-track officer, and the very last thing he did before the Cylon attack was to request a switch to reserve status...maybe it was indicative of a preliminary decision to leave the military. Perhaps it might even hint that he was thinking about trying to work things out with Gianne, or at least to be closer to home when the baby was born? I could see him staying up all night, then forcing himself to call head-quarters and request the shift to the reserves, and then heading off to Galactica. And the rest, as they say, was history...

Who can say? It's another puzzle.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

I guess all this Is possible, but I think it was just a writer's mistake. In fact, if he had just requested the transfer before going to Galactica, there wouldn't have been time for it to be processed and accepted. And it wouldn't make any sense for him to request or remind anyone of that request in the middle of a war.And with the colonies destroyed, there would be no records available for them to get an update on his status after the war began.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Too true. Ah, well. Another theory squelched :)

On the up side, though, it means I can continue ignoring Black Market. So there's always a silver lining.

I think Ron Moore made the choice to list Lee as a reservist pretty deliberately - he talks about it in the "Final Cut" commentary. He wanted to indicate that Lee did not intend to stay in the military for his career. He mentioned that this was an alteration to their original backstory for Lee, in which they'd toyed with the idea that he was planning to enter an advanced test pilot program, the kind of military position that would have allowed him to be an absolute loner. But as they got to know the character better (allegedly), they didn't think 'test pilot' fit him, and decided that instead he would have become a reservist and planned to make a living by opening a bar somewhere back home. This doesn't sound like Lee at all to me, although innibis built a beautiful AU story around that idea in her "Cinderella" fairy tale. I think the deleted scene in Razor about the test pilot program, and in Daybreak where Kara bets him that he'll never leave the service, were call-backs to previous ideas about the characters' backstory. But maybe part of the reason they got cut is that the writers realized they were confusing and were starting to contradict each other.

Though I enjoy trying out little theories to explain things better, at the end of the day what canon says is 1) he always planned to leave the military at some point, 2) he was a reservist by the time the war broke out, and 3) he was serving on Atlantia at the time, though 4) he was back on Caprica, presumably on leave, shortly before that. Even these little tidbits are hard to reconcile, but I guess joining the reserves was his equivalent of 'getting out of the military,' at least as a full-time thing. I don't know what he was doing out on Atlantia, though.

:) I'm totally sure that we have put more thought into this in the last hour than the BSG writing team did. C'est la vie.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

"I'm totally sure that we have put more thought into this in the last hour than the BSG writing team did"

LOL. So true.

Well, we all have things in canon we choose to ignore.( I kind o like lots of things about Black Market, though)
In this particular case, I choose to ignore he was supposed to be in the reserves. It just makes things easier. Hee

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

That works too! Go for it.