pocketjournal

Last night I had some wine after work with insijaam and then Pita and I watched the next 3  BSG’s, Collaborators, Torn and A Measure of Salvation. 

Like I said, this series got incredibly dark incredibly fast. One minute we were shooting Cylon raiders and rewinding to get a better look at Apollo’s towel scene and the next minute Tigh’s eye is rolling across the floor like a hard boiled egg and Jammer is being sucked out of the airlock for crimes against humanity. Intense. Collaborators deals with what the fleet is to do with those humans who collaborated with the Cylons in the occupation of New Caprica. The acting president convenes secret juries to consider extreme crimes against humanity and execute those who they unanimously decide are guilty. I have to say, I do not feel very bad for Jammer. I know that he felt very conflicted about joining the New Caprica Police. While occupying the planet that the humans had settled on, the Cylons recruited for humans to be in a police force for the occupiers. Like in Vichy France. But even if he felt bad about it, he still did it. Some things are just wrong, even if they are hard to resist and even if you have good reasons for the choice you make. Plenty of people made a different choice.

The two episodes that follow, Torn and A Measure of Salvation deal with genocide. The Cylons follow Baltar’s instructions to find a beacon left behind by the 13^th Colony on the way to Earth. When they bring it on board it is contaminated with a virus that makes all the skinjobs really sick. Humans are immune. So the Colonials decide to get close to a Cylon ship and execute the sick Cylons. When they download into new bodies they will take the virus with them. There’s a debate about the use of biological warfare and in the end Helo kills the Cylons out of range so that the genocide cannot take place. He just thinks that it’s wrong.

Threading through these episodes are a lot of interaction between Skinjobs and Humans and most of them don’t have the faintest idea about humans. Sharon seems to get it, but D’Anna is totally clueless. She tortures Baltar and when he screams to his Head Six that he loves her, D’Anna softens and releases him thinking that he is talking to her. Leoben also seemed to think that Kara really loved him. That a forced declaration of love is somehow comparable to the real exchange of emotion between two people. Their occupation of New Caprica seems similarly flawed. They just don’t understand about some things that are key to being human – free will, freedom, love, revenge, family, loyalty.

I still really miss Lost, but Pita and I are going out tomorrow night to see Chris Rock at the Paramount! Hooray!