Daily Pilots Post

[dramaturgca.livejournal.com]

It seems like all my DPPs are thinky questions. Is that a problem?

Continuing the trend...

Where would you branch off from canon?
Do you go all the way to the end and lose it at the poof? Is it Blood on the Scales when Kara chooses to stay with shot Sam?
Is it earlier? Maelstrom? Taking a Break From All Your Worries? Unfinished Business? Before the year break? Before Razor? Before Peg at all? After Home II when it felt like all things were possible? Before Kara slept with Sam? Before she slept with Baltar? Or are you fine with the way everything turned out?
Is there a moment in your personal canon that is the lynchpin where, if they just changed direction there, the whole thing would've come out right? What do you think?

Comments

[ninety6tears.livejournal.com]

I'd take out the point where Kara comes back as a physical being. She should have come back as a head character or something like that.
Though I do think the least convincing big development with K/L is in TABFAYW. I think it would have been great if that ep had left off with Kara just leaving Sam regardless of Lee's plans, as if she was daring him to do the same.

[x5vale.livejournal.com]

I think Kara chose to stay with shot Sam when she realized she could have never had a life with Lee because she was dead. This, along with her guilt.

I didn't like they brought a back as a real character. She should have been a head!character or something similar. It changed everything. Even the pure essence of Kara's character.

I also think Kara should have left Sam in any case, not just beased on Lee's decision. She didn't love Sam the way she should have, so it would have been fair to all the characters if Kara had left Sam after Unfinished Business.

[jeeshee.livejournal.com]

For the show as a whole, I'd say Crossroads is where it falls apart for me. At the time I defended the F5 stuff, but in hindsight it took the show too deep into the ridiculous and forced the writers to make stuff up (the whole 'they're cylons but not cylons' to cover up the plotholes, e.g. Tigh's aging).

For the ship...

Part of me thinks they should have just left Sam on Caprica!

Or, as stated above, TABFAYW. The relationship could have had a little happiness, and Kara could still have died if they really wanted to go down that path. On her return, Lee might have stuck around to fight her corner.

Alternatively I felt a spark of hope just before they found fake!Earth - they'd inhabited the Adama/Roslin roles so well, it felt like such a good climax for their respective stories. That would have been a great springboard for them to make it work. I didn't like Sam's ending as a whole and I feel like the guilt of that situation held Kara back in the latter part of the season. If K/L had worked it out before the mutiny, and Sam had just died, I think they could have stayed together right to the end.

Of course none of that solves the vanishing, so...

[koolaidmom11.livejournal.com]

Gosh...I feel like if they had just let Lee leave Dee when Kara asked him to it would have all been worth it. After all the angst, they might have FINALLY had a sense of appreciation for each other so they could have made it work. However, at almost any one of these branches you mentioned, it could have worked if only the writers had stayed true to character.

It's interesting how guilt drove so much of her relationship with Sam but she repeatedly treated Lee like shit and somehow managed to deal with that without guilt. Somehow ignoring and abusing Sam was okay to do but she felt bad about it but destroying Lee repeatedly was a thing she could live with.

I also couldn't believe that after the brig scene, they weren't put together. I mean...come on writers...talk about a big tease. Lee should have gone with her there on the Demetrious, not Sam.

Sorry for the rant...lots of coffee

[ninjamonkey73.livejournal.com]

This is certainly a question I've thought about before. I think this time, I'ma back it all the way up to Scar.

Let's say, hypothetically, that Kara doesn't slam on the brakes during the (come to find out, second) near table-frak when Leland gets all concerned about her frantic-ness. How would this happen without being OOC, you ask? Maybe all she does is take a deep, centering breath, smile seductively up at Lee, and purr something about waiting too long to do this (him). Maybe that's enough.

What would this change? I'd like to think that Kara wouldn't consider moving planetside later. Even if a "relationship" with Lee scared the crap out of her, I like to think that the, um, sex, would have kept her on the G. And that would save her from marrying Sam, being Leoben's bitch, getting all angsty over Kacey, and voila! No Quad of Doom!

[kdbleu.livejournal.com]

I've been playing around a lot with the Scar split scenario. It's not my usual split off point, but I was thinking about how maybe Lee wants to slow down because he's about to get a concussion and not because he wants to "slow things down". If Kara steps back and he takes over, I think we might have an in character solution.

I am always curious about how Kara not being on New Caprica changes things. Hmmm, more thinking.

[scifishipper.livejournal.com]

For the Show: No final five - Keep it focused on the HUMANS and stay away from the cylons are just like us lets embrace them and invite them to dinner. Feh. AND NO CAVIL. *eyes bleed*

For Kara: She never dies and comes back as a whateverthefrakshe was. She didn't need to die to make it all happen.

For Lee: No poof. He deserved to be with the woman he loved, not to be left alone in the end. :(

For the SHIP: Like most shippers, I've thought about this a lot. In all of my scenarios, it looks like Sam dies. It's sad (sort of) but if he weren't in the picture, I guess I think Lee and Kara would have kept gravitating towards each other until something actually happened. If I had to choose a place, I guess I'd choose for him to die in the mutiny. I disliked the QoD, but it did give us UB and an incredible amount of angst.

Once Sam got shot, it was all over. I remember the point of no return feeling I got when Kara was crying at Sam's bedside and I was thinking What the frak is that all about? Since when was she so devoted to him? I had hope beyond hope that it would all work out in the end, especially when Sam flew into the Sun, but, well, RDM was not a shipper and the rest is a poof.

(I have five other answers to this question, too, but I guess in the end, I'm gonna go with this one. Ask me tomorrow and the answer will be different.)

[kdbleu.livejournal.com]

I think I'm going to go with Sam dies in the Resistance or escaping New Caprica today. Kara still comes back all messed up and angry. We still get UB but now actual QoD.

[eternal-nomad1.livejournal.com]

I think any one of these would work for me and I agree with just about everything that everyone else said. For me personally, I think it would be Kara coming back in Crossroads. I ended up wishing that the show was just canceled after S3 (even if it meant no brig scene) because they I could think they went to Earth (which was a better place than what we got in Daybreak) and finally gave being a couple a shot. The FF stuff I could just ignore.

[ddt73.livejournal.com]

The biggest mistake is not a particular point in cannon, it's the quadrangle of doom. Trying to make the ships K&S and L&D more then they ever should have been.

Both ships were just wrong on same levels. Kara flies off to Caprica after having slept with Baltar with tension between her and Lee and then we are to believe she falls in love in Sam on a war torn world within a couple weeks tops?

First Dee eavesdrops on a private conversation between K&L and then she starts something with Lee while with Billy and even when Billy dies trying to save her before his body is cold she's is sinking her teeth in Lee?

With neither ship they never took the time to try and sell us on why they are together. DVDs are litered with K&S and L&D scenes. These couples never were close to the chemistry K&L had, but TPTB just kept pushing them and trying to make them real.

At some point before they married these couples off they should have went their separate ways.

If I had to pick one point in cannon where things went very wrong it was the year jump at the end of season 2. Cause we find out both couples got married. Would have been awesome if after the year jump we find Lee and Kara got married and were living on the planet surface. Could you have imagined the amount of spec about the above development? Would have been good times. :)

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Well, I certainly enjoyed parts of their story all the way to the end. I think there are lots of places where things might have played out differently, and they're all fun to speculate about. I think the real trick is Kara -- in order for them to get together in an in-character way, we've got to get Kara to a point where she is willing to give herself a chance at happiness with him.

It's not that Lee never walked away from her, of course he did, repeatedly, but with Lee I think the writers could basically intervene at almost any point with a powerful, poignant show of commitment from Kara and that's basically what it would take to get Lee into this thing. She has to make him trust her, but I think he could believably do that without too much more work on her part at almost any point in the series. The problem for him tends to lie in obliviousness (Season One repression and Season Two denial), in their circumstances (after their ill-advised marriages, he doesn't want to cheat), or in their history (he stops trusting that she's serious about him). But I think if Kara really, seriously made a play for him on terms that he could accept (if she let her emotions engage in Scar, for example, or agreed to divorce in EoJ, or even told him she was completely sure it was him she wanted in TABFAYW) I think he could have reversed course in a believable manner on pretty short notice.

It's Kara's trust (not of him so much as of herself) that makes this a challenge. Between what her mother did to her and what she inadvertently did to Zak, I think she is trapped in self-denigration and fear and that she runs from relationships that force her to face painful, deep-seated feelings. In order for Kara to be ready, we have to find moments where she seems okay enough with herself to risk trusting that not everything she touches will be destroyed, and that the gods won't punish her for feeling like she deserves to be happy.

In the series, I would say our best shots at such moments are: Colonial Day; the end of Home Part Two with the promise of Earth; the end of Scar after she has chosen to honor the dead by renewing her own life; and maybe the end of Captain's Hand.

I'd like to see Lee stay with her at the dance. I'd like to see him accept her apology in KLG Part II. I'd like to see her come to him after their experience in the Tomb. I'd like to see her come to him at the end of Scar after the toast to those pilots and tell him that she's going to rescue Sam but that she has a lot more to live for than just honoring the people she's left behind.

I think Captain's Hand would actually be an interesting place to intervene for them. After Sacrifice, Kara has just learned that keeping herself away from Lee romantically has nothing to do with keeping him safe -- she almost killed him when they were in the middle of giving up on each other and turning to other people. But she didn't kill him -- he is okay, he is healing, he doesn't blame her anymore, and they have both just rediscovered the incredible strength of their love and care for each other. He can survive her, I think is the point, and trying to pretend he can't doesn't keep him any safer. At that moment she's committed to rescuing Sam but hasn't yet decided what to do with him when she finds him. Lee is at the very beginning of his relationship with Dee, and might be willing to drop it before greater commitments build up, especially given the messy, traumatic way it started and the fact that he's about to transfer to another ship. I think this would be an interesting time to start a relationship between Kara and Lee; it would avoid the marriages, and also add whole new layers of angst and passion to storylines like Razor and New Caprica.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

I really loved this analysis of the difficulties they had to overcome to get together. Spot on. And I really like your suggestion that the end of Captain's Hand was a good moment for them to get things right. Good insight. Too bad you were not writing for the show. :(

[samstareagle.livejournal.com]

I do know what I would leave out or change all together...

FakeEarth/PrehistoryEarth- Frak it, they both have sooo many problems in making sense of either one, just have ONE. Make it OUR Earth, OR a distant future Earth, but just have ONE. The fakeout also managed to deaden any real emotional fulfillment at the end.

Abandonment of Kobol Mythos- No, writers, you don't get to convert the show to being neo-christian. This is Sci-Fi. Sci-Fi is about "What if?", not "How can we turn any made up world back into ours?" If the show says they had "Gods", they had "Gods", and if they looked Greco-Roman, why do we have to contradict it with the Gnostic Robots? WE DON'T.

"Humans and Cylons aren't strong enough alone."- That bit made me go WTF?! like nothing else. It was them admitting outright they were dumping BSG and turning the show into Star Trek. However, this might have worked had they used the idea from the movies with the Genesis Planet. Man learned (they thought) how to play God, but their own arrogance brought about it's destruction in an accelerated karmic cycle. In BSG, the Cylons were created from man's arrogance about his ability to make control life, but the Cylons followed the same rapid karmic retribution...up to where the writers jump in and say "Okay, now they're better than Humans" WRONG. To make this plot work, the Cylons go down in a firestorm of their own making. My Dad told me something really interesting once about the movie King Kong...what made Kong such a great character was all through the movie, he's a MONSTER. Sure he's playful, and heroic in his own way, but he's terrifying. At the climax, he goes on a horrific rampage across New York, ending up on the Empire State Building, and at the very moment he becomes the greatest monster ever...you feel sorry for him. He's trapped by his own power, a victim of his own ferocity. When he dies, you don't curse the Humans for taking him out, but you see his end as a tragedy that you wish could have gone differently nonetheless. But it didn't, and he goes splat. The original King Kong works because you only see him as a true tragic figure at the VERY END. If the Cylons had gone down in a horrific Armageddon, turning upon themselves, they could have had that ending, and they could have been great tragic figures. Instead, the writers decided to forgive them with badly conceived pseudo-religious drabble, and cut the tragic potential out entirely.

The Quad of Doom- No. I don't have a problem with them *considering* it for a space of time...but don't try and legitimize it. It just makes every character in it more and more a farce.

Turing it into "The Ron Moore (throws a tantrum about the network trying to take his show away and then blubbers for hours about it coming to an end) Show"- I'd rather just give Snookie a freakin' Emmy for best actress. :P

[ddt73.livejournal.com]

Hey Sam, it's been awhile bud. :)

I couldn't agree more. The show for a long time seem to be a battle between gods and god. Monotheism vs Polytheism. They did a good job for a long time walking that line, only to say monotheism was right and by silent omission polytheism is wrong. The show had no business making such statements. I remember in podcast I believe in season one, or maybe season 2, where RDM said the show wanted to walk the line, never saying definitively there is or is not a god or gods. This is one of the reasons the finale failed for me, it was the complete abandonment of one of the pillars of the show.

You said I what I was saying earlier about the Quad just much more succinctly.

[samstareagle.livejournal.com]

And it is EXACTLY what they did...Ron's odd brand of Catholicism seemed to trump anything the show had set up for plot, simply, it seemed, because he and the writers felt a real world faith could make a completely made up one more legitimate. To which I counter with this...

Imagine Star Wars Episode VII...Luke Skywalker Finds Jesus. :P Sound ridiculous? Even...outright insulting not only to the Star Wars verse, but to a figure head of some of the world's largest religious communities? It should. Because it would be. Star Wars used elements from every religion, but had the good sense to stay it's own entity, and in so doing, The Force became one of the best made up religious concepts in all of fiction. IF, however, it had tried to explain that "GOD" was trying to save the galaxy from the evil Empire, but also the lightsaber wielding monks, it would have been utterly ridiculous. First, because it wouldn't have made any sense dramatically, but also because it would be using a real religion in an uber-hackneyed way to cover up bad story telling.

Stanley Kubrick in making 2001: A Space Odyssey, legitimized the science fiction movie by for once, taking the science SERIOUSLY. Before it, science in sci-fi was usually so bad 5 year olds could tell it was crap. My point being, WHY should religion in fiction be any different? Yes, faith and belief are ideas normally considered beyond accountability to logic...but most of us see an obvious difference in searching for the divine in religion/nature/ourselves, and waiting out in the field with Linus for the Great Pumpkin. :P There's always a difference in taking something seriously and treating a subject, even a divisive one, with respect, and simply being silly. BSG was amazing at taking things seriously for the most part, and in doing so, legitimized the points that it tried to make in observing the world we live in. But eventually when it came to religion, they decided "Sure this doesn't make any sense, but it's religious faith, so who cares? That doesn't have to make sense anyway." When they did that, they refused to respect the subject they wanted to comment on, and sadly just managed to embarrass themselves.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

You make really good points especially about the writers converting the show being neo-christian and turning it into Star Trek. I kind of liked the human-cylon alliance, though. But I really didn't like how mystical the show became. Fate and god/gods became more important than free will and possibility for humans and cylons to learn from their mistakes or choose to repeat them again.

[samstareagle.livejournal.com]

I personally never mind mystical as long as it can explain itself in the end. If it can't, get out of my story. And they didn't even need a "mystical" explanation for anything, just an elevated use of science fiction...which would have been easy sense the whole show was about people living on spaceships fighting robots. :P

I actually posted a big unified theory on a possible explanation for everything here a while back...http://samstareagle.livejournal.com/17008.html It's weird, but it does make itself make sense...;)

And I did like the initial possibility for what could have happened when both the Fleet AND Human Models were running from the rest of the Mechanicals (NO Cavil, frak it, the Mechanicals all rise up together and try and kill everything everywhere, forcing a believable last ditch alliance *think Terminator 2*) Just imagine one Battlestar, a broken Baseship, and the RTF facing off against dozens of Mechanical Baseships, thousands of Raiders over EARTH...would have been AWESOME. :D

And THEN, finish the show back where Humans began untold generations ago...an uninhabited Earth, the ruins of vast civilizations fading back into the green of life, a future ahead of them again for sure, but as uncertain as always... Will they fight, scar and eventually ruin this world again, forcing the same millenia long exodus across the stars once more, burning countless worlds in their wake...or will they begin anew building toward the hope of their bitterly won knowledge. Lee comes to believe in all the stories, all the Gods, not as divine beings, but flawed and weathered voices urging Humanity to go on, to keep reaching for the world they imagined as Kobol had been, lost over and over again, but given again to them to do what they want. They become their own Gods, the very characters they remember and lament and honor, and their paradise lies not on the ground they stand on, or as a mythical point of light in the sky...but the hope of their own future.

That would have beat the pants off the "Lets just abandon civilization and go camping!" ending...:P

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

Very well put. I don't have anything against the mystical, but not the way they used it in the show. There are certain aspects of the polytheism X monotheism there that I found were interesting (or had interesting possibilites), but that wasn't really what the show was about. It was about humans choices and mistakes and whether or not they would ever be able to break the cycles of destruction that had been going on for so long. And the fact that the cylons were repeating them as well. But when they turned to the mystical to solve things that were not about religion and when they decided to do it in such a convoluted , contrived way, I think the show lost its way. The best symbol of that was Kara's after death return. It seems to me that there were so many more interesting and fitting storylines to be followed after that.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

Well there are certainly many things I wish hadn't happened at all, especially relationship wise. But I can live with most of them. Lee and Kara are like dearly loved friends. They may frak up real bad and I'd still love them. So, although I didn't like that they didn't get together on Colonial Day or on Scar, although I hated that Kara got involved with Sam and Lee got involved with Dee, although I loathe that they didn't resolve anything after their night on NC and got married to the wrong people and refused to get divorced later, I think their love for each other never ended and it wouldn't be too difficult to come up with a way for them to fix the mess they had made of their lives. And I would be OK with it. Perhaps they even needed to go through all that to reach a point where they could finally be together.

What I really find hard to accept and would really, really change so it never happened if I could, was the decision to have Kara killed. I believe it was never necessary and she could have saved everybody and found the way to Earth and got all mystical without that. And there would be no poof without it and a happy ending would still be possible.

[ddt73.livejournal.com]

I do have a big beef with them killing Kara. It had the makings for a powerful episode, a majorly emotional episode. It was probably the most emotional episode of the series for me.

However lot of shows could kill main characters and have a powerful emotional episode, but you better have a hell of a plan to back it up. There is just no doubt they hadn't a clue what it meant and you can't do that to such an important character.

From the 2 different endings of Crossroads 2 (head Kara for Lee, vs everyone can see her), to whether or not there are hieroglyphics on her viper, to Kara being Zen-like on her return to her being basically insane. Everything shows how little they understood her death and return.

In Maelstrom they say Kara was really afraid to die, that she had to face her fear of death to become what she really is, and this was something to their credit at the time, was a theme they repeated with her being afraid to be at Lee's bedside, then Kat's in season 3, and showing it started with her being afraid to face her mom's death. Then all that is thrown away cause in Daybreak 2, near the end she says, she's not afraid to die, but of being forgotten.

When you watch each of those scenes seperately, Kara at her mom's death bed in Maelstrom, and her telling Lee she's afraid of being forgotten. They are great moments in themselves but yet they are at conflict with each other. Think about how she tells Lee she's not afraid any more, when you look back that doesn't jive with the full backstory.

We are supposed to just say Kara died and came back to lead humanity to an end and new beginning and when she did this, she left.

If you take it as a short sentence it makes sense, but the reality of it all, the details of it, just don't add up. She didn't need to die to get them to Earth 2.0. The coordinates are to a song that her father taught her, that Hera helped her remember. They found Cylon Earth cause they followed a tracker beacon on her viper that miraculously went from a gas giant to that planet, and she wasn't even aware of the tracker signal, the final five told her about that signal. Considering Ellen was downloaded and remember everything by this point, she could have told them where Cylon Earth was and what happened on it. Was it for the cylon alliance? The Demetrius mission eventually lead to the cylon alliance. But why should she have to die for that? Seems a high cost for a dubious alliance that probably caused more problems then it solved. See when you break it down there was no good reason for her to die.

If you say a character died to help fulfill her destiny then shouldn't it be clear why she had to die. Like to gain knowledge that she otherwise wouldn't have had? She had nothing like this, just makes seems so pointless, and makes the poof that much worse.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

She didn't need to die to get them to Earth 2.0. The coordinates are to a song that her father taught her, that Hera helped her remember.

I couldn't agree more. There are millions of things they could have come up to make her remember that. They could even have gone mystical and give her visions or something. Anything would have been better than killing her. Especially because they didn't really know what to do with that later. I think the decision to bring her back the way they did made things even worse (even if some of my favorite K/L scenes happened after that). They were clearly making it up as they were going and there was no clear plan.

I really liked what you said about her being afraid to die. I hadn't noticed that pattern. But there is no point in all that given that she didn't really need to die in the first place.

[acsgrlie.livejournal.com]

Really, I think it was TABFAYW. After UB we saw how Lee was the "pusher" of their relationship and Kara ran away. But here was Kara finally saying that if Lee wanted, they could be together. Now, it's still uncertain whether or not Kara really would've left Sam but I really thought that that episode was when they were both gonna make their final decisions and be with each other once and for all when I first saw the promos for the episode. I even had hope up until the end.
I even had high hopes for the finale after Islanded In A Stream of Stars aired and we had that "this is all that matters" scene.

[ddt73.livejournal.com]

Originally TAB was supposed to be like it's namesake, a funny happy episode. The original story was more about how the bar was created. My feeling is it changed when they decided to kill Kara in Maelstrom. To do that, they had to tie up the Quad of Doom first. Also it wouldn't have made sense to have K&L to get together for Kara to kill herself a few weeks later. I think that's how TAB winded up as it did.