Oath

Alright you guys, I swear, when the weather gets better ( I mean like spring better, not like slightly less snow better) I AM going to find something interesting to do with my time. I don't care if I have to take up drag racing, or grave robbing, or whatever, I will have something to tell you that you might actually give a shit about. As it is, the high point of my day was watching X-Men and making a set of Runes out of clay. I will get less boring eventually, I swear.

All Along the Watchtower

As I said yesterday, the thing that bugged me the most abut Battestar Galactica was the way they handled the parts with the song. I don't think it would have been difficult at all to write it in a way that made sense. Instead, I feel like they made it so that All Along the Watchtower was this crucial part of the story, but they never actually tell us how or why. Why that song? How did the four hear the song? Where exactly was it coming from? Why did Starbuck's dad know the song? Why did Anders know the song better than the others? Did he write it? Why did Tory say that he played it for all of them? Was he a musician back on Earth? Furthermore, as I mentioned in a previous post, I kept analyzing the lyrics and trying to figure out how they relate to the story. I stand by my conclusion that the lyrics were relevant, but I feel like the writers didn't bother to explain exactly how. I feel like nearly every line in the song could have been related to the story, but they just didn't bother to write it that way.

So here is my, in depth, analysis of All Along the Watchtower as it relates to the show. The song is a about a joker and a thief, right?

"There must be some kind of way out of here"
said the joker to the thief.
"There's too much confusion."
"I can't get no relief."

I feel like it is just too much of a coincidence that they introduce the song right after they introduce a character who is a thief (Lampkin). After I realized who the thief was, I kept trying to figure out who the joker was. I think it was Baltar. He was, at least to me, the comic relief in the show from the beginning. So there are our two main characters.

"Business men they drink my wine.
Plowmen dig my earth.
None will level on the line.
Nobody of it is worth."

I think this could easily have been related to Baltar's theory about the separation between the classes in the fleet. Some people do all the work, while others reap the benefits. Then we have;

"No reason to get excited"
The thief he kindly spoke.
"There are many here among us
who feel that life is but a joke"

Right before the Cylons split into two faction, there was an argument between one of the Sixes and Cavil, during which she asked him if life was a joke to him.

"But you and I have been through that
and this is not our fate
so let us not talk falsely now
the hour is getting late."

Sounds an awful lot like "all this has happened before and all this will happen again" Yes? Also, at lot of people died by the end of the show. The joker and the thief were not among them, because that was not their fate.

All along the watchtower
princes kept the view

I asked myself, who would be considered a prince? Lee, obviously. I mean, his dad basically rules the fleet, right? And what did he and the other pilots do with most of their time? Flew around and watched for Cylons "kept the view" in other words.

while all the women came and went
barefoot servants too

I'm still not sure about the "barefoot servants" but there were certainly several women who "came and went" in one way or another. After Strabuck had come back from the grave and Ellen showed back up, one of the guys working on the deck even said something to the effect of "Where do they keep coming from?"

Outside in the cold distance
a wildcat did growl.
Two riders were approaching
and the wind began to howl.

This is the only part I couldn't quite figure out. I would be happy to hear any theories; unless the theory is "You're a fucking lunatic and everything you just said was completely ridiculous." In which case, I am already fully aware of this. Thank you anyway though.

Gripe List

As promised, here is a list of all the things I was hoping would be addressed at the end of Battlestar Galactica. Spoilers, obviously.

1. What was the deal with Daniel? They brought up this missing Cylon and how the others had done something to him, and I kept waiting for him to be relevant to the story somehow but, as far as I could tell, he never really was.

2.How did Baltar survive the attack on Caprica? I just don't believe that Six standing in front of him would protect him from a nuclear blast. For a while I thought maybe he was a Cylon. Then, toward the end, I thought maybe whatever happened to Starbuck to allow her to come back from the dead also happened to him, but no.

3.What the fuck did happen to Starbuck? Coming back from the dead is weird enough, but where did the new Viper come from, and why was it picking up signals from Earth?

4. What exactly was that design that kept showing up? The one that Starbuck kept drawing. It looked kind of like lots of things, and she kept seeing it everywhere but they never actually told us what it was.

5. Why was Hera the only character on the whole show named after a goddess? I mean, some of the others had call signs that were the names of gods or goddesses, but none of their real names were.

6. Who were the "angels" really? I don't feel like they were actually angels and, at the end, the one who looked like Baltar said something about God and the one who looked like Six said "He doesn't like to be called that." So if they didn't actually work for the real God, who did they work for?

7. I kept waiting for some of the pilots' call signs to be significant. Some of them were so weird that they almost had to mean something, and we knew that they had to have meant something to whoever gave them those names, but we never got to know.

8. Why was Baltar trying to piss off the centurions? There was an episode, I think toward the end of season four, where Baltar and some of the others were on the Cylon base ship. I think it was when Lucy Lawless's character was trying to get the four to come join them. Baltar goes up to one of the centurions and starts telling him how the other Cylons are treating the centurions unfairly. What the fuck was his goal here? Did he really think that was going to end well for anyone?

9. Come to think of it, what happened to Lucy Lawless's character? Did she really just sit alone on Earth and starve to death?

10. What the was the deal with All Along the Watch Tower?! That bugged me more than anything else in the entire show! I really, really wanted this to make sense. You know what? I'm going to do a separate post just about the fucking song.

11. Remember the Arrow of Apollo? I kept thinking that since "all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again" that the Arrow of Apollo would have something to do with Apollo (Lee). But no.

12. In the last season, they kept showing Adama taking pills. What were those?! He kept holding his shoulder when he took them, and I assumed they were trying to tell us that he had a heart condition. I actually assumed that they were setting it up for him to die at the same time that Roslin did. Instead they just let us wonder whether he was having health issues or was just becoming an addict.

13. What actually happened on Earth? They gave us some of the story, but I wanted more. What led up to it's destruction? How exactly did the final five survive when no one else did? Who were they there? What were their lives like?

14. Why did half the characters on the show have hallucinations? It seemed like someone was always seeing things that weren't really there and they never give any explanation for most of them. The "angels", Lampkin's cat, Adama's ex-wife, all the weird shit Starbuck kept seeing, Tigh seeing Ellen all the time, etc.

15. Why could some people see the "angels"? So, maybe Six saw them because if the whole Cylon Projection thing, but what about Baltar and Starbuck? I thought maybe it had something to do with coming back from the dead, but they never say that actually happened to Baltar.

16. What exactly was the deal with Cylon projection? It just seems like that should have had more meaning than it did.

17. In what way was Starbuck the harbinger of death? I assumed it would have something to do with the Cylons and humans mixing together to form a new race. She would "lead humanity to it's end" by leading them to a peaceful existence with the Cylons so that they would create a new population of half Cylon half Humans. They never tell us that's what it meant though, and since they landed on our Earth with a whole new population of humans, I don't really know if that is what they were going for or not.

18. Why did the one hybrid call himself the Cylon god? Remember the one from Razor? I mean, he wasn't their God, right? He died at the end of that episode, didn't he? So why did he say that?

19. The hybrid on the base ship said something about the "children of the ones reborn" finding their own home, or something like that. When Tigh had the flashback to Earth, he saw Ellen tell him that they would be reborn together. So, I thought the "children of the ones reborn" would be the children of the final five, but none of them ended up having children. So who was reborn? and who were their children? I think Hera was the only child they ever really talked about. Were they talking about the entire population being reborn by starting fresh on our Earth? I don't know.

20. Everything the hybrid said. I really thought that they would eventually explain all of the seemingly nonsensical mumbling that she was always doing, but most of it was never addressed.

21. Why did Roslin make it to Earth..... twice. I thought the "dying leader" was never supposed to make it to Earth, according to the prophecy? Instead, she made it to two Earths.

22. Remember the weird disease that killed a shit-ton of Cylons? What was up with that?

23. Why did Leoben suddenly abandon Starbuck when he found out that she had come back form the dead? From the first time he met her, he kept talking about her special destiny. Then he finds out that she experience a genuine miracle ( I guess) and he's like "Nope. I'm done." Why?

24. The Cylons had this idea that love was the secret to conceiving children. What was the significance of that? Obviously love was not the secret, because Hera was the only Cylon child that was born. Were we supposed to be seeing that it's just sort of random for the Cylons, just like it is for humans? Like, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't? If that were the case, you would think they would have managed more than one.

25. Starbuck and Anders' tattoos. They were really cool tattoos, and I want to know what they meant. I mean people don't just get matching tattoos for no reason. Were they some sort of marriage ritual? What were they?

26. The opera house; everything about it. None of that made sense to me at all. I really got the impression that they wrote that in without thinking it through. Then they got to the end and realized that they didn't know what to do with it. Then someone was like "I know! What if Galactica was the opera house?" Was it Cylon projection? If so, who was projecting it? and why? I feel like they made that whole thing seem way more significant than it ended up being.

27. I wanted to know more about Gaeta. Right before he was executed, he said something about wanting people to know who he really was. I was hoping that we would get more of his back-story after that, but we didn't.

28. Why did no one seem to care that much that Athena kept killing people? She killed the one Six who was not doing anything wrong, I know she was scared for Hera but still. Then she killed Boomer when she was actually trying to help them. I don't know, I just felt like someone should have taken her gun away from her.

29. How long were Baltar and Six together, back on Caprica? Did he really never ask her name in all the time they were together?

30. ^ This. All of this. When he took off in the Raptor and said goodbye to everyone, I just assumed that he was going to crash it. He had said before that he couldn't live without her, so I just thought he was going to make sure that they died together. Instead, he waits until she is dead and then puts his wedding ring, from his previous marriage (kind of not very romantic) on her finger. Then he just parks on top of a mountain and sits around and talks to himself about cabins. What?

Griping

So, my dad and I finished Battlestar Galactica a couple of nights ago. I enjoyed the show overall; it had an interesting concept, complex characters, good dialog, and it definitely kept the audience guessing. I must say though, after the final episode, I was severely pissed. I feel like the writers tried so hard to make the story unpredictable that they didn't even bother to predict it for themselves. Then they got to the last episode and hadn't answered any of the questions they had raised throughout the entire show. Then they just said "Oh well." and went ahead and raised a few more that they also didn't answer. The other thing that bugged the shit out of me was all the stuff that seemed like it meant something but apparently didn't. From the very beginning, they talked about prophecies, and god's plan, and people having vision, and "all this has happened before." This, at least to me, implied that there was meaning in everything. Throughout the entire show, I kept analyzing everything and trying to figure out the symbolism that appeared to be everywhere. I came up with about a hundred different explanations for why certain things happened and what certain things were supposed to represent. Then we get to the end and the writers were just like " Nope. None of it meant anything." You can expect a list sometime in the next few days of all the questions that didn't get answered and/or all the things that seemed like they should have been relevant but weren't. I know this is stupid, but I put a lot of work into analyzing this show and I'm not going to let that all go to waste.

One thing about the show that I enjoyed, more than I probably should have, though was Mark Sheppard's character. I really felt like his first three episodes were nothing but straight Crowley jokes. This, of course, is impossible since Battlestar Galactica was over before Crowley ever showed up on Supernatural. Seriously though, two of his episodes were called "Crossroads" how is that not a Crowley reference? Plus, I dig the sunglasses. 

Seeing the Patterns

I have a compulsive need to find patterns in things; to find some sort of meaning in the chaos. This sort of ties into my other post about empathy and trying to understand people's behavior, but it goes further than that. I look for patterns in everything, not just people's behaviors.

Now that the CD player in my car is broken and I have to listen to the radio (grrrrrr), I sometimes notice that two or three consecutive songs will have common themes or very similar lines, and I wonder what that means. Then I realize that it's just a fucking radio and it doesn't mean anything. But I can't shake the feeling that I'm supposed to get something from it. I think I have mentioned before how I tend to have the same ideas, or images pop up in my life over and over again. I'm sure it's just that, once I've noticed it once, I'm more likely to notice it again. But it doesn't feel like that. It feels like it should mean something.

That's one reason I get so invested in different TV shows. The patterns (usually) actually do mean something. I get such a thrill from searching for the meaning in mundane events and trying to predict what they are going to bring about. Often times though, I end up reading into things even more than the writers intended. Then I get disappointed when no one acknowledges the fact that three seasons ago someone said something that relates to that thing that other person mentioned this season. Battlestar Galactica has been both perfect and terrible for this purpose because they make it seem like everything is significant but never actually explain why. The whole time we've been watching it I have been analyzing everything and predicting what those things are going to mean. We are now into season four and I have still received absolutely no confirmation whatsoever.

You have no idea how much time I have spent thinking about why they used All Along the Watchtower. I have read over the lyrics about a hundred times and come up with some sort of relevance for every one of them. I would be willing to bet that it doesn't mean even half of what I think it does. 

Empathy

It seems like there are those in this world who are capable of understanding other people's thought processes, and those who are not. I can't quite figure out if this is an inborn ability in some, a learned ability, or something that everyone can do but some choose not to. It just seems like some people's first instinct is to just write someone off as "crazy" or "stupid" or "wrong" or "an asshole" whenever they do something the other person doesn't understand. When I am in this situation, I automatically find myself trying to understand the person's thought process. Even if I don't agree with what someone does, I find that I can usually at least make sense of it. I feel compelled to know why people are the way they are, and what leads them to do the things they do. Do other people actually not have the ability to do this? or do they just not care to? Perhaps it's ironic that I have to ask that question?

My dad and I watched this episode of Battlestar Gallactica the other night, and he kept talking about how crazy they were for doing this. I was like "No, it's...." and went into this long detailed explanation about what each of them were thinking and feeling that led them to this point. Then he was like "Yeah, like I said, they're psychos." (Facepalm)