Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:35:00
Battlestar Galactica - Razor
If you can believe it, I have *not* watched the online “Razorettes” or watched them mushed in commercial breaks of whatever show Sci-Fi was trying to get me to watch. I figure it’s so long until the season and this is just bonus information anyway. We did watch Razor tonight, and here’s my take (spoilers below!).
I think that Razor was made so that we could understand Caine a little more. As it stood, I simply thought she was a cold bitch and somewhat of a monster, but I never had much respect for her as a warrior or a leader.
I still don’t.
She got lucky with her network being offline, and her crew performed in fight after fight out of fear of her, not respect or love or dedication. She’s even worse than I thought before Razor. She’s more of a monster than any one of the toasters.
I can understand Caine’s initial reaction toward Pegasus Six. I mean, she not only let a Cylon on her ship and on her bridge, but she slept with one. Trusted one. Gave a Cylon access to intimate thoughts, moments, etc. I can understand wanting to hurt that Cylon, and watching crew member after crew member die only compounded the problem. That’s not an excuse to murder civilians, to shoot your XO, to be a monster...to not only order your security officer to torture a Cylon, but to humiliate her, to make her afraid...to, as Caine put it, degrade her. Once she knew they were raping Six repeatedly, she let it go on. For ten months.
There’s just nothing that makes that OK. Contrast her with Adama, who is a warrior, a tactician and still a human being.
On the other hand, as the Old Man put it, he had Laura and SaltySeaDog and Apollo in his face to keep him human. When he stepped over the line, he had something and someone to help him step back and regain his humanity. Caine was the ultimate authority as far as she knew. She answered to no one. She had no one to tell her no. She wasn’t mentally stable enough to accept her XO questioning her decisions unless she was accountable to someone else. She was walking, for lack of a better phrase, a razor’s edge before the war. The fact that she was now the supreme Colonial military authority in the galaxy, and maybe the last Battlestar around drover her right over the edge. She was not cut out to have ultimate authority.
The biggest shame of Razor is that we were introduced to Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen only to have her die at the end. Lovely woman, Ms. Chaves-Jacobsen. Born in Hong Kong, she’s Portuguese, Norwegian, Chinese and English, raised since age 12 in Australia so she comes by the accent naturally. Too bad Kendra had to die. She felt like she had to atone for allowing Caine to turn her into a monster. Again, there’s that element caine was missing; the humanity that makes you feel bad when you do something horrible.
It was pretty cool to see old school Cylon Centurions. Although if I had to quibble - and I do - it was pretty obvious that they were rendered as new model robot Cylons and they just slapped Centurion skins over the models. They were shaped wrong and moved exactly like the new ones.
The only other observation I really have, aside from loving the BSG action after such a drought, is that we kind of already knew Starbuck was going to lead humanity astray. My current working theory is that Kara believes she’s seen Earth, is NOT a Cylon and doesn’t know she’s being manipulated.
It was a pretty damn good taste of BSG, all in all. What’d you think?
Posted by JimK at 12:35 AM on November 26, 2007
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Comments:
#2 Posted by ErikTheRed 
on 11/26 at 03:36 PM -
Meh… I’m sick of watching BSG in crap-def video on SciFi. I’ll wait until it’s out on Universal HD, DVD or HD-DVD.
@Rann Aridorn
So it’s basically like that other Starfleet captain on Voyager
You mean Captain Perky (considering her leadership skills, she must have been the ultimate EEO hire) and her sidekick, Tonto ("I’m definitely not a stereotype of an American Indian even though I do everything to make you think I am short of greeting aliens by raising my hand and exclaiming ‘How!’")?
#3 Posted by miguelito on 11/26 at 09:32 PM -
I liked that they did show the initial attack from their perspective and we got to see the initial panic and random jump. Was hoping they’d go there.
The whole Caine/Gina thing.. did help to explain a bit more why she did allow things to get so bad. Not an excuse, but helps to understand since she was so personally betrayed as well. I liked that the whole relationship was subtlety done too… not something shoved in our faces. Though the following commercial was annoying “It’s been revealed.... “ Quizno’s commercials. Blah. Hadn’t skipped ahead the tivo yet.
The bits about flashbacks to Adama in the first war were interesting and a bit odd.. and that opens up a whole possible can of worms too.
Who didn’t see her sacrificing herself to detonate the bomb as soon as they were on the station though? I thought that was just way too obvious. Their way of getting on board was just bad-ass though… talk about a seriously risky plan. I love how they’ve done that a couple times now: even shown initial briefings and such but still pulled a cat out of the hat when it really happened (like the earlier attack on the mining asteroid in S1). The bit with Lee ordering Starbuck to stay behind adds a bit to their dynamic too.
I liked the final conversation between the Adamas. The way he pointed out that neither of them was really wrong, but it shows that different people, both doing “the right thing” could still have completely different outcomes in a given situation.
As for the HD mention… I still think the DVD copies are a jump above TV. Surround sound for one. I also would like to see blu-ray win… the formats are almost identical but blu-ray has more space, and HD-DVD has MS’ fingers in the pie, and I distrust them a lot more then I distrust Sony. Though I have no love for Sony either. My experience thus far with the formats (I have both the 360’s HD drive and a PS3) is that blu-ray tends to edge HD-DVD out. Just my opinion though. I’m still on a 2001 model 1080i TV and component video (no HDMI).. hoping to go 1080p Samsung TV and HDMI switching receiver shortly after 1st of the year.
#4 Posted by Christian on 11/28 at 12:21 AM -
Right there with ya. I thought from the first moment I saw Caine she was a freaken psycho. She is the best example of absolute power corrupting absolutely. While “Razor” explains why it all happened, but it in no way should allow her to get off on bein a murderous bitch.
Mostly what “Razor” was was an examination of how decisions are made, and how everyone will make a different one even in the same situation under the same circumstances. And sometimes, their is no right or wrong decision, just a decision.
I knew that the new CO was toast the moment we met her. Something had to have happened to her for her not to be around later in the series. Great character, and shows the strength of BSG is in the characters. Hate them, love them, like them, their really isn’t a boring one in the bunch.
#5 Posted by miguelito on 12/01 at 07:20 PM -
.I knew that the new CO was toast the moment we met her. Something had to have happened to her for her not to be around later in the series
Yeah, I was almost hoping the show might explain her being demoted to a lower position or even tossed in the brig or something for them to try to explain why she wasn’t shown for awhile, then could be brought back in the last season. Once the whole mission thing came up though, I knew it was going to result in her having to stay to destroy it or something though.
Great character, and shows the strength of BSG is in the characters. Hate them, love them, like them, their really isn’t a boring one in the bunch.
And with RD Moore and how he is, you can’t get too attached to anyone, because he could change/kill them at the drop of a hat if he thinks it works.
#6 Posted by miguelito on 12/09 at 05:00 AM -
FYI, DVD is nice. About 16min of additional footage including a really good part just before the Adama flashback to the end of the 1st war which is good. Some small details here and there too.
Listening to commentary now. Some interesting stuff, but have a gripe about how much they sometimes ramble on about minutiae while something really interesting or with a heavy impact goes on and they either don’t say anything at all about it, or barely just mention that it happened but no info on it.
Haven’t even touched the 2nd disk yet and already glad I bought it.
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So it’s basically like that other Starfleet captain on Voyager, the one that was capturing the aliens and fueling his ship with them to try and get back to the Federation faster?
Because as utterly incompetent as she was, Janeway at least managed to keep largely to the values she put forth. The other guy… he pissed that all away for the sake of higher warp power.
So, wait. Starbuck’s a cylon now? ... So, uh… why was she being kept in the camps or whatever? ... Or was she? Or… I mean…
... Okay, as ridiculous as that show is, you don’t get to make fun of CSI: Miami fans anymore.