Battlestar Galactica: Razor
The SciFi Channel should call themselves “The Massengill Channel” – it’s a far more accurate descriptor and doesn’t take as long to type as “The We Hate Sci-Fi and All Sci-Fi Fans Channel” or “The Battlestar Galactica is Our Bread and Butter So We’re Going to Milk it Slowly for the Next Five Yarns Channel”.
Just to get it out of the way, I liked Razor. The past and present story lines were juggled well and played into some questionable events and character developments from the end of season two and the beginning of season three while setting up season four (which I will hopefully get to see before my ovaries dry up). And, as aggravating as BSG got in the middle of seasons two and three, I’ve missed it.
My beef is with those Razor flashbacks I’ve been watching in the middle of Flash Gordon for the past two months. I thought they were a mini-mini-series that led up to Razor – original stuff we wouldn’t see again except as a DVD extra. Halfway through the movie, I realized that the SciFi Channel took all that time and hype to broadcast a single scene from Razor, plus a couple of deleted scenes.
Hence, “The Massengill Channel”, because that was a douchey thing to do to the fans. I shouldn’t be surprised, though. It’s just one more douchey move in a long series of douchey moves for the channel, including moving BSG to Sunday nights at 11pm, broadcasting Extreme Championship Wrestling, and killing Farscape.
But, back to Razor.
For a few minutes, I thought that I would be forced to like, or at least sympathize with, Admiral Cain. Cain’s single kiss with Gina (the Cylon model also known as Caprica Six) explained her motivation behind the brutality of the Cylon’s interrogation.
That’s partly why Cain was so hellbent on destroying as many Cylons as possible rather than preserving what was left of humanity. It wasn’t just because all Cain knew was her military existence. It wasn’t just because Cain wasn’t shown to have a family of her own to help her maintain her basic humanity. All of that comes into play with her decisions, but underneath it all, Cain fell in love and that love was manipulated to horrific ends.
I can’t imagine the humiliation she felt to have that revealed in the middle of the CIC.
Then Cain shot her XO in the head for questioning an order (what a shame – he was so hot).
Then she came across fifteen civilian ships which she stripped for supplies and manpower and left for dead in the middle of hostile space, but not before ordering the execution of reluctant draftees’ families.
So, yeah. I’d say Cain got what was coming to her when she got her brains blown out.
[nms:cylon raider,2,0]
Admiral Adama is kind of a poopy jerkface. Bratty Lee issues an order that Pops Adama doesn’t like, so Pops interferes and issues a different order, which, since Pops outranks Bratty Lee, supersedes the previous order.
Two minutes later, Pops says to Lee, “It’s your ship. It’s your decision.”
Talk about conflicting messages. No wonder Bratty Lee got so fat – he was eating his feelings in an attempt to build a protective padding to insulate him from Pops Adama’s passive aggressive behavior.
I wonder if Pops has Borderline Personality Disorder. He seems to go through the love-hate cycle fairly frequently with everyone around him.
Admiral Cain’s Mini-me, Kendra Shaw, was essentially the anti-Starbuck. Just as tough and as good at her job, but whereas Starbuck is a loose canon and will disobey orders if it means saving a crew member, Shaw is obedient to a fault (at least to those she respects) and I question whether she grasps the sanctity of human life. Starbuck hasn’t had a good foil during the entire series – anyone who comes up against her is out flown, out drunk, out whatevered by Starbuck. She needs another female character who is truly her equal to present her with a greater challenge. As much as I disliked Shaw, she fit that role and I’m disappointed that she was killed off so soon.
What didn’t disappoint me was the old school Cylons. I actually squeed a little bit when the first Raider appeared. The classic Cylon Raider was my first ever nerd toy, so it holds a special place in my geeky heart (it’s a withered, oozing heart, so there isn’t much room in there).
I squeed even more when the Cylon Centurion’s robotic voice sputtered out, “By your command.” I’ve been waiting for that since 2004. Hopefully I won’t have to wait until 2012 to hear it again.
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Never watched the old series myself, but I got a kick out of seeing the old-skool models resurrected, too.
I’m aware that she’s a genocidal freak, but I still feel like Cain was not, not entirely, a bad person, nor was she entirely within the wrong side of the good/bad survivalist divide. Looking at how royally frakked up the folks attached to Galactica are and how magnificently they screw the pooch every two seconds, Cain seems, in comparison, a paragon of steadiness and reliability. Her characterization, at least, has been consistent. True, she cannot see (as the late XO attempted to point out) how she jumps the fence for crazier pastures, but she doesn’t spend her time doubting herself or wondering “Why me?” I appreciate the strength she had, and, like Starbuck said, they’re less safe without her than they were with her (even when it put her and Adama at lethal loggerheads).
And one nitpick: Gina is NOT Caprica Six. Gina is A Six, yes, but Caprica Six is a very specific model–she is the one who seduced and then fell in love with Gaius Baltar. She has retained her name among the Cylon because of her herculean efforts in their campaign. Gina, on the other hand, has come to have a name because she’s been so utterly cut off from the Cylons to the point that she committed permanent suicide (when she detonated the nuclear warhead, there were no resurrection ships nearby with bodies into which she would download). This is a degree of personalization that is, like Caprica Six, worthy of a permanent, unique name. The humbler moniker is an allusion to the means that brought her to such a sad end and the way she went out–like a human.