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]

Oops you're right, that is when he becomes the rep. I feel like there was some confusion about what he was doing before that possibly but timelines are iffy as always on BSG.

I like your argument for it. But still the execution (to me anyway) felt kind of aimless. All those endless quorum scenes were soooo dull in the first half of s4, so I would've liked to have seen perhaps a different route to the presidency.

Although honestly, on a personal level, it just didn't make sense to me that Lee would go off in a different direction with Kara back. It actually invalidated Romo's whole argument for me and I felt like Lee learned nothing from that clearly, because here he was with this miraculous second chance...and he's like "OK I'll see ya later" and then they're never together again practically for all of S4.

I know it's because the writers were out of ideas of what to do with K/L and didn't really want them together or whatever anyway, but their motivations were showing and that made his departure make even less sense (and be of less interest) to me.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty much in full agreement with all you say here. I think you're right that the most out of character thing was for Lee to leave Kara so soon after her return and to see so little of her for so long. Emotionally, it doesn't ring true. It's pretty inexcusable, from a storytelling perspective.

And although I think Lee's reasons for switching from the military to the civilian side of things could potentially have made sense, they just weren't explored onscreen. And yes, the Quorum stuff was dull, although I tended to like his direct confrontations with Roslin. The two of them were always interesting, especially when they were convinced that the other one's worldview was dangerous.

I can't actually sit through "Sine Qua Non" because I find the Romo hold-up scene so ridiculous. But I thought it was interesting that apparently Jamie Bamber argued vociferously for a chance to show that Lee knew exactly what he was doing when he put himself in position to take over for Roslin. Basically the writers said, "We can't portray him as back-stabbing and ambitious," to which Jamie said, "But he *is* ambitious, and it's not like he's doing this for an egomaniacal power trip, he's doing it because he knows his own worth and he thinks he can save the fleet by doing exactly this. Please, let me *want* this. Let me show why he cares about this." So in the final script they tried to compromise, but I don't think it came across very clearly. But I think Jamie had a point, that one of the things that storyline was missing was the sense that Lee saw the crisis coming and that he deliberately put himself in the place he thought he could do the most good, and that he thought the stakes were high enough to be worth fighting for.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Some days I'm seriously convinced that Jamie must have pissed in someone's cornflakes. >:(

The one thing I do like in Sine Qua Non (which fails in many ways for me) is that assessment of Romo's that Lee is more ambitious than he let on. "One could argue that Laura Roslin is a study in repressed ambition. Just like you, Mr. Adama. Never seeking out a job until it's handed to you? Flight leader, Battlestar Commander, Quorum Delegate... A man doesn't carve out a path like that through life without... "

It's interesting to me that Lee doesn't elucidate that ambition but seemingly sidles into things.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

I love that line too.