Daily Pilots Post

[dramaturgca.livejournal.com]

The conversation on yesterday's Lee Meta post is awesome, I highly recommend going back and reading it if you haven't yet.

Today, as promised, is Kara Meta Day! Time for character analysis, academic investigation, whatever thoughts you have on the complex tangle of person who is Kara "Starbuck" Thrace. I'm going to come clean (again. That seems to be what I do in these posts.) and admit that I am utterly obsessed with analyzing Kara. To the point where I wrote about 30 pages about her for a class last year. I'm very excited to hear what other people think of the character who ate my whole brain.


I am nothing if not a hardcore third wave feminist and my analysis comes out of that perspective. My paper is posted in my LJ, if anyone feels like wading through an analysis of Starbuck and how she advances and subverts the paradigm of the woman warrior. I had a lot of research/analysis material that didn't make the paper though (technically it should only have been 20 pages. oops) and one particular line of thought intrigues me and I want to share. (I apologize for the semi-academic tone, it's hard to shake)

I've thought a lot about Kara as the personification of a goddess, one of the Lords of Kobol, and how that fits into the rest of her character. In my research, I came across several descriptions of female goddesses that seemed to fit Kara as a character in general.

In her essay, “Evolution of “The New Frontier” in Alien and Aliens: Patriarchal Co-optation of the Feminine Archetype”, Janice Hocker Rushing describes the Divine Feminine as “wild, unpredictable, and free; seductive but unable to be possessed,” and also as "not a settled and domestic wife or mother under the patriarchy; she was independent and magnetic.” (98-99) Both of these seem to equally describe a certain hotshot blonde fighter jock.

Esther Harding's description of the Undivided Goddess in Women's Mysteries: Ancient and Modern further expands on this idea, “Her instinct is not used to capture or possess the man whom she attracts. She does not reserve herself for the chosen man who must repay her by his devotion, nor is her instinct used to gain for herself the security of husband, home and family... She is essentially one-in-herself. She is not merely the counterpart of a male god with similar characteristics and functions, modified to suit her feminine form. On the contrary she has a role to play that is her own, her characteristics do not duplicate those of any of the gods.” (124-125) I feel like this is particularly valid to Kara because her role in the quest to find Earth could not be played by any other character, she is unique.

Though she is deeply emotionally connected to her shipmates and friends, there is a core of independence, the "one-in-herself" quality that Harding discusses, that sets Kara apart. In Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women, the author, Sylvia Brinton Perera, extends the idea of unity in a single person, describing the Divine Feminine as one who "combines earth and sky, matter and spirit, vessel and light, earthly bounty and heavenly guidance.” (16) Which seems like a fairly apt description of Kara to me. She is earth (Pyramid) and sky (flying), matter (human) and spirit (RDM's "angel" idea or simply the fact that she returned from the dead), vessel (in both "Maelstrom" and "Daybreak" she seems to be a vessel for something other than herself) and light (as she guides the Fleet to Earth), earthly bounty (which *ahem* Lee has sampled?) and heavenly guidance (see above Fleet). Perera continues, "she symbolizes consciousness of transition and borders, places of intersection and crossing over that imply creativity and change and all the joys and doubts that go with a human consciousness that is flexible, playful, never certain for long.” (16) Creativity, change, flexibility in an ability to think outside the box, transition and the borders even between life and death... All of it sounds like Starbuck to me.

What do y'all think?

Comments

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

Excellent quotes! In looking up Third-wave Feminism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-wave_feminism) to see where you were coming from, I discovered that this is the term I should have been using for my viewpoint. I've been calling myself a post-feminism-feminist (yeah, I made that up), but Third-wave is what I've meant all this time!

The thing I love most about Kara is how unapologetically herself she is. She can be aggressive (punching Tigh or Lee), a strategic mastermind (um, every time humanity needed a plan), a sexually liberated woman (with Sam and Lee), a warrior (shooting Cylons out of the sky), resourceful (pushing Lee's dead Viper back to Galactica by hooking guns), and all of it without waiting for approval or reassurance. She just DOES and IS and kicks ass without bothering to take names.

The mysticism of the end of Kara's arc still bothers me. I waited all the way to the poof for a non-mystical explanation for her death and return. For a show that had such gritty realism up to Maelstrom, I wanted more than "I guess she's just an angel". I mean, I cut my teeth on Star Trek, where the writers had to find ways to break or disable the technology just to not have the easy out they otherwise provided. BSG had no transporters, no replicators, no tracking devices in their comm devices.

They had none of the comforts of space-faring culture I'd come to suspend disbelief for. And I loved it. So, of course, they end up killing my favorite character and bringing her back. I waited for the reasonable explanation. I figured she had ejected in Maelstrom, right before the explosion. And the Heavy Raider she thought she saw must have really been there, and picked her up. (I said all of this to my husband as we watched her appear to blow up, since we knew she wasn't gone long on the series.) I didn't even mind if it was a Leoben that picked her up.

But Kara finds her corpse on Earth 1.0? Wait, what? How the frak does that even work? She's corporeal and Kara, but not Kara. Setting aside the how-the-hell-is-that-an-explanation-ness, the Kara that returned was more at peace. There was less self-doubt. I didn't mind the way her character changed (ignoring the return from the dead), because it made sense that she might eventually get over her old wounds, as the end of the worlds and her role in it continued to strengthen her and reinforce her usefulness to humanity. And of course, there was Lee, always there for her, proving that not everyone failed or left her.

And then the poof. Kara deserved a better ending. She deserved to go out in a blaze of glory shooting Cylons, or woolly mammoths, or cavemen, or ANYTHING. She also deserved a happy ending. Or even a vague, fill-in-your-own-ending, standing in the field on Earth 2.0 with her soulmate, both of them no longer married to other people, both in a mental headspace where their future could be shared. It didn't have to be happily-ever-after. Just a moment of no angst, fade to black.

/rant :)

[rayruz.livejournal.com]

Excellent quotes, all of them perfect for our girl. *sigh* Whenever I talk about her, I call her the best crafted female character ever written. Because that is the honest truth.

[rayruz.livejournal.com]

I have to say, I've taken a lot of time to think about why I don't vehemently hate the poof as much as everyone else does. I guess it's because I've seen it before. I saw that scene. I saw it in the Angel episode "You're Welcome." As you cut your teeth on Star Trek, I cut my fandom teeth on Whedon that thrives in land of "I'm gonna kill off your favorite characters, and no amount of whining is gonna make me change that." Needless to say, my personal canon around Kara's poof, consists of Whedon themes.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Wow, you've presented some lovely and complex images of Kara and feminine divinity in your opening analysis, it's very interesting. I would agree that Kara possessed great independence and beauty within herself, though I think other BSG characters did as well, in their own ways. Your quotations made me think of a famous passage from Aristotle's "Politics," in which he argued that "man is a political animal" because no human being can survive outside of law and society: "The man who is isolated, who is unable to share in the benefits of political association, or who has no need to share because he is already self-sufficient, is no part of the city, and must therefore be either a beast or a god." (Bk I, Ch II). I bring up this quote only because I think it's interesting that self-sufficiency is defined as essentially divine (or bestial) whereas law and politics are defined as essentially human -- it seems like that might add another symbolic layer to Kara and Lee's relationship in that final season, when she's become an angel and he a politician. A union of human and divine qualities, perhaps? :)

Janice Hocker Rushing describes the Divine Feminine as “wild, unpredictable, and free; seductive but unable to be possessed,” and also as "not a settled and domestic wife or mother under the patriarchy; she was independent and magnetic.”

I agree that in many ways this passage seems to fit Kara, but I think that her inability to be possessed throughout the series is less a victory over partriarchy than this argument implies. I think that in relationships founded on mutual love, patriarchy plays no role -- love holds two people together as equals, freely choosing to possess and be possessed by one another in a relationship that helps each to fulfill their individual potential rather than to stifle or stunt it. I think that Kara avoided entering such a relationship with Lee for many reasons, but as others have suggested before, those reasons had more to do with self-loathing and a fear of hurting herself and him than they had to do with her own liberation or self-sufficiency, I think. There were many emotions passing through her eyes the morning after on New Caprica, but self-affirmation was not high among them. I think she sabotaged her relationships in an effort to keep her own perceived vulnerabilities under her own control, which is kind of the opposite of true and fulfilling self-sufficiency.

But her vulnerabilities are one of the things I love most about her. She has such an incredible heart; she carries so much pain and yet she is this amazing, glorious light in every life she is connected to, so vibrant and strong. How could you hear her laugh, watch her cry, see her win at cards and pray in the silence of her room -- how could you see all that she is and not love her?

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

NOBODY puts a stake through my heart (pun intended) quite like Joss. Maybe RDM is a Wheedon fan? :)

[rayruz.livejournal.com]

I hope so...I know for a fact that Whedon's an RDM fan. For a while they were playing a game of "You steal my actor, I steal yours"... bits of the finale reminded me of the Angel penultimate episode... Plus there are those two characters in Caprica---Cyrus Xander and Clarice Willow. Though that might just be Jane Espenson's doing.

PS The thing that visited Kara in Maelstrom was TOTALLY the First, and she totally bargained with the Powers that Be to come back and set things right.

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

Holy plotbunny, Batman! I may need to write a Wheedonverse crossover for the months Kara was gone.

[rayruz.livejournal.com]

I actually wrote that theory into my BSG/Buffy crossover fic.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

"The mysticism of the end of Kara's arc still bothers me."

I have no words to describe how strongly I feel about this. There were many paths the writers decided to take that I was not particularly fond of or that I felt were poorly developed. But none, absolutely none reek of failure as much as this one. I absolutely LOATHE it. My hatred of the poof pales in light of this.

One of the things that was really amazing about Kara was how utterly human she was. She had such amazing, admiring qualities (such as the ones you mentioned in your post) and so many flaws. She was such a vibrant human being. Her life was all about extremes - extreme successes, extreme failures, extreme pain, extreme love.

To have her become an angel is to have all that humanity reduced. It is to say a human could never experience such things to such an extent. This kind of thinking really infuriates me. It's like those people who say the pyramids must have been built by aliens or gods because it would have been impossible for mere humans to ever build something as impressive as that. She was amazing BECAUSE she was human, not in spite of it.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

First of all, I'm really proud to be part of a comm with so many brilliant people. Who would have thought one could find Aristotle's quotes in a tv show forum? I believe most watchers probably never even heard of him. I certainly never imagined when I started reading the posts today that I would learn that I'm a third wave feminist. Wow! Kudos to all of you! You guys are amazing!

"that might add another symbolic layer to Kara and Lee's relationship in that final season, when she's become an angel and he a politician. A union of human and divine qualities, perhaps?"

Have I said today how much I admire your brain?
Such a lovely image!! Too bad the writers never thought of that.

I think that Kara avoided entering such a relationship with Lee for many reasons,(...) but self-affirmation was not high among them.

My thoughts exactly. I really loved reading Dramaturgca's ideas,though. I'll have to find time to read the whole thing in her LJ later.

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

And then the poof. Kara deserved a better ending. She deserved to go out in a blaze of glory shooting Cylons, or woolly mammoths, or cavemen, or ANYTHING. She also deserved a happy ending. Or even a vague, fill-in-your-own-ending, standing in the field on Earth 2.0 with her soulmate, both of them no longer married to other people, both in a mental headspace where their future could be shared. It didn't have to be happily-ever-after. Just a moment of no angst, fade to black.

I'm not a fan of the poof for many reasons, but your list of "other" endings makes me think about another reason. It's very passive. Kara was NOT a passive person - she didn't stand around and wait for people to tell her what to do or to push her in some direction. She took action. So, it seems very passive for her to just disappear. There is the perspective that she finally found peace, but that doesn't entirely solve the OOC nature of it for me. She said the words that she was done and it feels good, but it wasn't quite enough for me. Her character progression towards the poof, I suppose, was supposed to lead to wanting the period of rest and release. In looking back, I sort of think she'd react in a way that was similar to Lee's - some joy about exploring or starting over. I guess in some ways she did start over, but it's so vague and un-Starbuck like. :(

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I second the love for this comm ~ beautiful ideas throughout! I especially loved Dramaturgca's quotations and interpretations from Descent of the Goddess, they were incredibly perfect for Kara.

And the idea that Kara unifies disparate elements within her own expansive personality to be "one-in-herself" is something that I have inarticulately sensed for a long time, but never put into words in quite that way. Lovely. I'll just share one more quick quote, this one from Walt Whitman, that I think is getting at the same idea:

"Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes."

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Hhmm. It's funny that, among so many like-minded people, I have such a different reaction to the mysticism/poof, etc.

I don't read Kara's angel-hood as a devaluation of her humanity or as a denial of her freedom. She chose to sacrifice her life in a leap of irrational, hopeful faith - she saw death not as the end of herself but as a transition into fuller awareness; an opportunity to find the impossible salvation her people had spent the last three years searching for fruitlessly - and to me she had never seemed more human than she was at the moment she made that decision. She finally faced everything in her past that she had run from most desperately, and she found peace in an act of mercy towards a mother she justly hated and hopelessly loved. She believed in herself, fully and fearlessly, probably for the first time in her life. And she decided to risk everything on the chance that the mysterious powers who had guided the fleet this far might just confide their final secrets to her.

Would I be in favor of someone following hallucinatory visions to their death in real life? Of course not. But this isn't real life, and in the mythical context the show had established and in the character of Kara Thrace as we knew her, I found her decision in Maelstrom a compelling and believable one. And I don't think that we have to believe that when she came back she had lost her humanity. I think part of the point was that human beings (ALL human beings) had immortal as well as mortal life inside them; Kara was still herself, she just broke the normal rules (as always) and led a liminal, mixed life of mortal and immortal elements rather than settling firmly on one side or the other of death's dividing line. But she lived after death, still individual and human.

I don't have a problem with that characterization or mythology. My problem, actually, is wholly plot-centric. The *big* missing piece in Kara's final story arc, as others have pointed out, is that there is never any clear reason established as to why her death was necessary for her to be able to lead the people to Earth. It apparently gave her access to mystic song memories, but Head!Angels were appearing to people left right and center throughout the series and neither death nor Cylonhood was required for humans like Baltar or Roslin to receive divine messages. I don't see why Kara's Head!Daddy couldn't have popped in at that bar at any time, regardless of her mortal status, to pass along his melody. Her death was never made integral to the mechanisms by which humanity found their final home. That is what made her death seem unnecessary, and *that* is what is really wrong with this story, in my mind. The lack of clearly plotted follow-through robbed her sacrifice of all the potential meaning it might have had if it had really proved central to humanity's last journey. As it is, it seems like Kara died because the gods couldn't be bothered to send their key message through previously established non-lethal channels. And that is NOT OKAY.

However, as I said, I don't hate the idea on a character level. I think they could have saved it with better plotting and follow-through.

That's my take on it, anyway :)

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

there is never any clear reason established as to why her death was necessary for her to be able to lead the people to Earth.

I agree with this completely. It sums up much of why I am not a fan of Maelstrom.

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on much of this. I like the human story - it bothers me, and has always bothered me, when sci-fi stories abandon human ingenuity and use randomly found alien tech or divine intervention to wrap up the storyline. Kara's humanity was very important to me, as a watcher, and I disliked that she became "other" - it didn't work for me on many levels.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I totally understand that reaction. Pesonally, I love the episode Maelstrom, but the comments of many Kara fans have opened my eyes to the problems that her storyline ran into later on when the purpose of her death was never established. This is a pity, because it does create problems for Maelstrom in hindsight. But I love Katee Sackhoff's performance in that episode, and it has a number of the most haunting and perfect scenes of the series for me. But I can see now why you and so many others consider it a major mistake in terms of Kara's overall story.

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

Her death was never made integral to the mechanisms by which humanity found their final home.

This. A thousand times this.

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

:D Yeah. I love Katee's acting in Maelstrom. It's amazing. The problems I have with it are numerous, but I don't mean to take away from the acting or directing. It's the character development and plot that bother me. If you are curious, I wrote my view on it here (http://sci-fi-shipper.livejournal.com/36577.html#cutid1). It's a more general comment on the direction the writers took with Starbuck from Maelstrom on. It was a somewhat heated post, but a lot of very smart people made some excellent points that had me thinking a lot about her character.

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

Kara was NOT a passive person - she didn't stand around and wait for people to tell her what to do or to push her in some direction. She took action.

Ex-ACT-ly. End of line.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

love holds two people together as equals, freely choosing to possess and be possessed by one another in a relationship that helps each to fulfill their individual potential rather than to stifle or stunt it. I think that Kara avoided entering such a relationship with Lee for many reasons, but as others have suggested before, those reasons had more to do with self-loathing and a fear of hurting herself and him than they had to do with her own liberation or self-sufficiency, I think

Would love to hear your thoughts on why she was able to consider and actually enter this kind of relationship with Zak and Sam. I think the common response is that Zak was before she really believed herself to be a curse who hurts the ones she loves (despite her mother's words) and with Sam it's because she doesn't love him as much as Lee, so that if she fouls it up and he leaves her, she'll still be okay. But...if she does love him at all, I'm not sure why she commits to him--is it all down to protecting herself (and Lee from herself)/cutting off Lee for good?

I suspect a lot of the reason why is simply because the writers didn't want Kara and Lee to be in that kind of relationship, that they kept repeating the cycles of hurt to keep them apart because of typical TV reasons of not getting your star-crossed couple together too early, but somewhere along the way it changed into not getting together at all. :(

It doesn't make any sense of course, but sometimes I think my brain is tricked into feeling like if the damn writers would've just stayed out of their way and stopped contriving things, those two crazy kids could have made it work!! Hee.

There's so much we have to swallow in terms of the choices they made with other partners that seems ill-developed. I so wish they'd kept the conflict in their relationship wholly internal. That's really where it worked the best.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

I can't help but feel (aided by what I've read in their own interviews and podcasts) that the writers just didn't think very hard about what Kara would turn out to be and why when they killed her off in Maelstrom. And as such they couldn't spin a compelling story about her return. They wanted a Jesus figure of sorts, who would bring the people to their "end." The problem was they didn't know how to tell a great story that relied specifically on who Kara was to people to make that happen. So instead of making it really amazing and meaningful and satisfying on a character level, they just turned her into a plot device that things happened to, not who made things happen. Which is the antithesis of who Kara had always been. She always made things happen. And now she was just cast into this sort of passive, vaguely mystical role and it wasn't that compelling.

What happened to Kara after she sacrificed herself for Destiny?
*She returned, through no apparent power of her own.
*She found the signal to Ruined!Earth, through no apparent power of her own. (The Final Five cylons told her to listen to her viper and she found a magic frequency that wasn't previously discovered)
*She puttered around the ship, feeling dead, until her dead father suddenly appeared to her and magically reminded her how to play an old song with the help of some notes Hera scribbled. ALL OF THIS IS THROUGH NO APPARENT POWER OF HER OWN EXCEPT TO KNOW HOW TO PLAY THE PIANO.
*She assigned some numbers to the notes and magically, mystically, on a wing and a prayer, typed them in as coordinates when Adama told them to just jump them anywhere and they magically, mystically worked.

It's all just mystical coincidence/happening and not a single thing there actually requires that it be KARA experiencing these things, if you think about it. The only thing that requires it to be Kara is in Six of One when Bill agrees to let her go on the (pointless?) Demetrius mission because he loves her and wants to believe her. (I guess the Demetrius enabled the human and cylon truce, so it wasn't completely pointless, but that could have happened so many other ways.)

The show misstepped so many times. The easiest fix would have been to make Daniel the missing 7th cylon also Drielide, Kara's dad, and make Kara the first organically born cylon-human hybrid. All the pieces were there and they just didn't connect it. They could've explained her death/resurrection this way, and it would've been such a richer storyline to explore her relationship with Bill, Lee, Laura and even Sam if she'd actually been a cylon. (Even Helo, Sharon and Hera would have had a subplot because what if Hera isn't special because she wasn't the first, etc. etc.) Plus if they really wanted to tell the story of how cylons/humans learn to forgive and love each other IT WAS RIGHT THERE between Kara and Lee for the telling.

It's just so frustrating that they fumbled this particular ball. Because if they wanted to make a point about how immortality and mortality can co-mingle in humanity and/or cylonosity, then why did Kara have to poof? Why did she need to leave the human plane of existence at all if angels were coporeal and could drink and frak and kill people and be confused and have their own head ghosts and get pissed off?

There were just so many better ways to execute it.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for this link! Your post and the following conversation there is thought-provoking and wonderfully open to numerous points of view. I must admit that I get a bit nervous about delving into analyses of gender roles and/or religion in BSG because these topics tend to raise deep emotions in many people, including myself, and I can find myself getting a bit depressed in the midst of such debates sometimes. But this post really handled those questions well and reminded me of what a great group of people are involved in this fandom. I enjoyed reading it, and it provided food for thought -- thanks again!

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

I'm glad to hear that you liked it. I understand about the depressing aspects of discussing meta and I doubt I'll be delving again - it gave me a lot of unexpected stress. :(

That said, I'm glad to have had a wide variety of opinions. I have a greatly diverse group on my flist - lots of k/s shippers, cylon shippers, anti-shippers (LOL!) makes for great discussion

*HUGS*

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

What happened to Kara after she sacrificed herself for Destiny?
*She returned, through no apparent power of her own.
*She found the signal to Ruined!Earth, through no apparent power of her own. (The Final Five cylons told her to listen to her viper and she found a magic frequency that wasn't previously discovered)
*She puttered around the ship, feeling dead, until her dead father suddenly appeared to her and magically reminded her how to play an old song with the help of some notes Hera scribbled. ALL OF THIS IS THROUGH NO APPARENT POWER OF HER OWN EXCEPT TO KNOW HOW TO PLAY THE PIANO.
*She assigned some numbers to the notes and magically, mystically, on a wing and a prayer, typed them in as coordinates when Adama told them to just jump them anywhere and they magically, mystically worked.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. You've summed it up beautifully.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

There's so much we have to swallow in terms of the choices they made with other partners that seems ill-developed. I so wish they'd kept the conflict in their relationship wholly internal. That's really where it worked the best.

I couldn't agree more :) If beloved TV characters are never strapped into a love triangle (or quadrangle) again it will be to soon. I don't know why writers/creators are so convinced that stuff like this is what we want to watch, or that it makes for good storytelling. Give me genuine internal and interpersonal conflict that is not repeatedly intruded upon by contrived obstacles. That's what I want to see. And when the characters reach the point where the believable thing for them to do is to decide to be together, then why not be daring and let them?

I realize that this is an odd tangent, but my friend was reading about a group of 19th century socialists and she joked that their rallying cries must have been something along the lines of:

"What do we want?"
"Sustainable reform!"
"When do we want it?"
"In due course!"

It may not sound dramatic, but I think there's a lot to be said for gradual, realistic character development that leads to interesting and sustained changes over time. I wouldn't want them to take out all the crises or back-sliding or dysfunction in the K/L relationship by any means, just spread it out and ground it in the characters' established emotions and motivations and balance the good with the bad, the fear with the love.

So that's just a long way of saying that I agree with pretty much all that you said :)

I'm not sure I have many insights into Kara/Zak or Kara/Sam beyond the widely-accepted views that you summarized there. I'm not quite sure what to make of the Kara/Zak engagement, to be honest. I get very different impressions of that relationship in the two episodes where we see it. In Daybreak it obviously and immediately takes a back-seat to Kara/Lee, whereas in AoC, though Kara is certainly not open or honest with Zak about his own limitations, she does give the impression of being passionately immersed in their relationship and of opening herself up to giving and receiving real tenderness. I think that engagement did represent something important and hopeful to her, though I'm not sure exactly what it meant to her and I'm not convinced that she considered Zak an equal. They were both so young, I don't know if they'd figured themselves out yet, much less each other.

The Kara/Sam engagement was clearly a snap decision in a moment of panic. That's not to say she didn't love Sam at all, but she had said twelve hours before that she wasn't planning on marrying him. She changed her mind because she decided she needed to break with Lee, and she used Sam to do that. It was grossly unfair to Sam, just as Lee was grossly unfair to Dee by using her. I think first Kara and then Lee were trying to make incontrovertible declarations of independence from each other, trying to force themselves to move apart and move on by burning their bridges behind them (I think they were afraid of their own tendency to backslide - in Kara's panic and Lee's anger, they shared a momentary determination to make sure they could never do what they had always done before and wind up coming back to each other). And I think they were so caught up in their own unhappiness that they didn't recognize how miserably they were treating their imminent spouses. Each one probably thought that if anyone was going to be miserable in this marriage, it would be them more than their partner.

Crummy. Not fun. I vote for reform.

"What do we want?"
"Sustainable romance!"
"When do we want it?"
"In due course!"

:)

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

Rachel,

I really, really admire the way your brain works. It is such a shame you weren't among their writing staff. If the scenario you described had been the one we saw, not only would I accept it, I would really love it. It has both logic and lyrism, poetry. And it doesn't deny or diminishes her humanity at all. Instead, it takes it to a whole new level. Her death would have been so meaninful. Tragic, but so meaninful.

This combined with the distinction you described in a previous post between self-suficiency and politics, devine and human, Kara and Lee... well if all that had been present in the show, I believe we would have had a true masterpiece. We already like BSG so much with all its misfired plotlines, can you imagine what we all would be like if the show had been even better? OMG.

Unfortunately, none of that ever crossed the writers' minds. Consequently,as you pointed out , ther was "never any clear reason established as to why her death was necessary " . Therefore, I can't help but think it was a cheap, ill-conceived storyline and one that in the end frustrated me a lot, not only because I fell Kara's character (and her relationship with Lee) deserved better, but also because it ended up lessening her humanity.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

Loved the quote. Thanks. ;D

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

WORD!!!!

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

Exactly!!!

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I can't help but think it was a cheap, ill-conceived storyline and one that in the end frustrated me a lot, not only because I fell Kara's character (and her relationship with Lee) deserved better, but also because it ended up lessening her humanity.

Yes, it took me a long time to recognize how flawed the overall storyline became, because there was a lot that I really enjoyed in Season 4 and 4.5, but I would have to agree with you, and also with Taragel's insightful comment below, when it comes to the missed opportunities this plot led to for Kara's character.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Yes -- I'm convinced. Excellent points, all the way through.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Lol. I vote for The Reform Party too. Their motto must be: In Fanfic, We Trust. ;)

I really wish we knew more about canon Zak and Kara. The show bible is really unhelpful on that front because it says Kara took a nurturing approach to Zak and with Lee she felt a more "womanly challenge" or some such crap. And also that she and Lee only knew each other for a weekend....which makes zero sense based on things they say/do in the mini. Ah well.

The further we get away from the show, the more I hate the marriages because it posits Kara and Lee as acting disloyally and dishonestly which seems to fly in the face of their best characteristics. Sigh.

[kag523.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't have time to answer, so I'm just going to say: "Exactly what sci_fi_shipper just said." That expresses my feelings PERFECTLY.

And now I'm heading back into my AU where I can rewrite things the way that I want to, and avoid all of that nonsense. *laughs deviously*

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I agree on all counts.

*In fanfic I trust.
*Kara and Zak (and Lee and Zak!) cried out for more exploration.
*Kara and Lee *definitely* knew each other for more than a weekend. (And in my canon-denying head they knew each other for more than a few hours before they acted on their attraction).

Those marriages are my least favorite plotline of all the crummy plotlines (well, and the table flashback for the same reason). I don't want their love to bring out the worst in them.

Boo.

Let's just live in Seasons One and Two, OK? :)

[ddt73.livejournal.com]

I couldn't agree more.

When you break down her return from death as you did, what exactly did her death accomplish? In Maelstrom we are led to believe she has to overcome her fear of death to become what she really is. Well in Daybreak at the end she says she is not afraid to die but being forgotten, and we never find out what she was.

To me they took a complicated character who was strong but flawed and diluted her by saying she's a supernatural entity.

If they wanted her to bring cylon & human together they could have done it with a vision, much like Roslin in season one. No need to die.

Somehow Kara's dead body winding up on Earth 1.0 made no sense, cause her body and viper would have been dust from the pressure of that gas giant. Not to mention there's no way it could have gotten from the gas giant to Earth 1.0.

They were scrambling to make her death seem important, but all they need is weaken her character greatly in my opinion.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Seriously, there are like a kabillion ways they could've made it more meaningful. Although honestly, if they wanted to tell a story about humans forgiving the cylons, they just could have done it so easily through Kara and Lee (and Kara and Bill) by just making Kara a cylon. The potential was there and they just let it slip through their fingers.

Kara died twice! In space in an explosion, then burned up on Earth 1.0! That makes zero sense!

[ddt73.livejournal.com]

Personally I think they shouldn't have killed her. Killing her and bringing her back like did was asking for trouble.

Besides originally Lee and Kara were both supposed to be hurling toward the hard deck, profess their love for each other and then somehow manage to get out of harm's way. Would have loved to see this played out.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

Agreed. Sigh.