Cassandra
“Reduction occurs stepwise, though the essence is all one. End of line,” says the “hybrid” in the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica - reminiscent of the ramblings of the precogs in Minority Report, also perhaps the condition of those inserted into the Shadow ships in Babylon5.
But, given the unintelligibility of computer code mingled with ‘first philosophy,’ and the persistent recourses of BSG to Greek mythology, the “hybrid” will, I’ll hazard, turn out to be Cassandra.
While copping some criticism by fans for being difficult to follow and distressing the studio because of its difficulty - it is, I think, one of the series’ finest moments. Leaving the somewhat predictable culmination of the second series’ occupation and exodus behind, it ventured back into the emphatically biopolitical questions of previous episodes and, in this case, raising some peculiar questions about epistemology.
Anne Cofell Saunders is shaping up as my favourite writer, always keen to push at the boundaries just that much more.
ps - I’ve been busy chasing deadlines, some of which involves writing about machines (I can therefore tell myself that watching BSG is research, of course - but, yes John, I am a fan of longstanding, though I’m not sure why this should surprise). And I’ve just discovered a backlog of emails I should have replied to an age ago. So things have been, and might continue to be, a little slow in these parts … there are limits to how much writing this writing machine can do.
Well, you certainly called it with this one. The hybrid isn’t talking in gibberish after all. I just wish the recent episode hadn’t been so subpar. I spent half of it on the phone and wish I’d just given that conversation my full attention, or maybe watched the second half of The Grinch Who Stole Christmas (the Jim Carey one). Oh, phooey.
Sarapen [December 13, 2006 @ 11:51 am]
I really quite liked the most recent episode - the main problem with it is that it should have been two episodes rather than one, and I gather a lot was cut from the storyline. You could always watch ‘The Passage’ again. (Because I always like to help out others with their procrastinating.)
Or do you mean ‘Torn’ - the episode where the hybrid first makes an appearance? If the latter, it’s here.
s0metim3s [December 13, 2006 @ 12:28 pm]
I didn’t care enough about Kat for her sacrifice to have any meaning. Her dark past was introduced in the same episode where she died, and I think having more time to fully digest the revelation would have given more weight to Kat’s redemption. It felt kind of like her past was put in simply to justify her death:
“Okay, Kat dies in the end, how can we make the audience care about this?”
“Kat’s death is actually redemptive, and it’s redemptive because, umm, she was a smuggler in the past?”
“Genius, stick that in somewhere in the beginning!”
But if it had been two episodes, then I think the whole redemption thing wouldn’t have felt so forced to me. Was it supposed to be in two parts originally? And how do you keep finding these episodes online? I think I’ll watch it again after all, perhaps it’ll go down better this time.
Sarapen [December 13, 2006 @ 3:17 pm]
It wasn’t that I particularly cared about Kat (who’s been difficult to get close to for much of the series) than that I enjoyed the intense viscerality - flying through ‘firestorms’ for much of the episode, the radiation burns and sickness, the puking, the hybrid and its goo, Eight mucking about with death and resurrection … Of course, now that I read over what I ‘enjoyed’ about the episode, I admit this might not be to everyone’s, erm, taste.
I don’t really ‘find,’ so much as I sub to the delicious rss feeds for ‘galactica’ and ‘battlestar-galactica.’ And since delicious is still geekerville, well …
s0metim3s [December 13, 2006 @ 5:03 pm]