3.17: Maelstrom

Carolyn Hill

Brown Rat, wandering & wondering
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Now I understand why Kara has been acting so cruddy to Lee and her husband. Mothers sure can mess a kid up. And imprisonment by Leoben didn't help, pushing old buttons.

The closing scene, where we see Adama's reaction to Kara's apparent death, is powerful: he's lost not just an officer (as with Cat), but someone he thinks of as a daughter--yet another of his children dead.

I'm mulling over the myth threads in the episode, ending up with questions:

1. Kara says that the entity in her vision (the one in which she visits her dying mother) isn't Leoben, so who is it? One of the gods? One of the final five Cylons, who seem to exist in the space between death and life?

2. In going into the space between life and death (taking that step she's always run from before in her fear of death), Kara seems to be fulfilling part of her preordained destiny. If she returns from death, will she have new power--or, at least, greater wisdom, and be less screwed up? Is there a parallel between her journey into death and the folkloric journey that shamans and other heroes take to the underworld, from which they return with greater power?
 
Well, this Starbuck episode was quite good, that is, up until the climax. Right from the mid-second season, we have been hinted that Starbuck has a "destiny" to fulfill. But what exactly is that destiny? To die? It's a no-brainer that everyones' destiny is to die, but what we do with our lives until that time comes is whats important and meaningful. But in the case of Starbuck, we don't have a clue as to what her destiny is all about. Her death was anti-climatic at best, predictable at worse. What's more, her demise was pointless and didn't make much sense from a story point-of-view. It would have been better if the writers had Starbuck die in a superb dogfight with the Cylons, but all she does is deliberately fly too close to The Eye of Jupiter and her viper plane explodes into a huge fireball. For those who are clinging to the false hope that Starbuck ejected in the nick of time, don't hold your breath: Apollo has confirmed that he did not see her eject from her viper, hence, she's dead folks. Here is a direct quote from a Ron Moore interview on Starbuck's fate:

Interviewer: People are speculating that her character dies. Do you not want to characterize it that way?

RM: “I don’t know that I want to say that directly. I think people will have to watch that episode and judge for themselves what happens. I can say that Galactica will suffer a shocking loss in that episode and Kara is a key member of the crew. Certainly if she were not there suddenly, that would shift the parameters of what the show is and what the show is about and who the key players are.”


Here is the link:

Chicago Tribune | The Watcher

Based on this comment by Moore, I have reason to suspect that Starbuck is in fact a Cylon, if she were human, there is no way for her character to return, that is, unless the Colonials have cloning technology and seeing that they're a spacefaring civilization, its quite possible to believe they have that technology as well. But one thing I'm almost certain of is that Starbuck will NOT be revealed as an angel, considering that the tone of this show is cynical and does not subscribe to such things as extra terrestrials, much less angels or pure energy beings. If the latter is the case, then I will stop watching the show to maintain my self-respect. Thoughts?
 
Well, you can probably tell from my initial post that I think that Starbuck dies, but that I don't think she'll stay dead. And I'm expecting that her death won't be pointless. I'm guessing that her death and resurrection will lead her to gain a power or knowledge that will tie into the show's mythology.

I like your idea that she may be a Cylon. Could she be the one that D'Anna was apologizing to--the one that D'Anna didn't expect to see--when D'Anna went into the space between life and death in "Rapture"?

If she's a Cylon, do you think Leoben knows? And what was he trying to do to her when he kidnapped her? And do you think Kara's mom knows?

Hmmm. The more I think about it, I wonder if there's enough room in the universe for more than one Kara Thrace.

Anyway, she doesn't need to be an angel to return, even if she's not a Cylon. And she doesn't need to return as a human clone. There are gods aplenty in the show's myth, and the mandala cloud she dove down into looks a lot like the Eye of Jupiter in the temple. (And the scripts keep saying that everything that is happening has happened before, which seems to apply somehow to Starbuck's situation.)
 
Yep, the hints point to her being one of the final 5 (or howevermany finals there are). When the vision guy talked about the place between life and death it's reminiscent of the between D'Anna was talking about when she kept offing herself. Good episode. Nice to see the show back on track. The death did seem pointless so it will be interesting to see how the 'destiny' plays out.

You guys rock! have a great weekend.
 
Interesting info: in his podcast, executive producer Ron Moore says that the script didn't call for the grieving Adama to smash the model sailing ship he's been building throughout the series. Olmos just smashed it, in the moment, as he was playing Adama's emotions--totally unplanned. But the ship was an actual museum-quality ship that the show was renting, worth "hundreds of thousands of dollars"! :eek:

Whitestar, I stared to watch the gag reel you supplied a link for, then stopped. I don't want to know! But I'll definitely watch it after season three ends. Thanks!
 
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