BSG 3/4/07: "Maelstrom" **SPOILERS**

Cafe Society
61

[QUOTE=Unauthorized Cinnamon]
I for one don’t necessarily have a problem with mixing science fiction and mysticism. I understand there are purists here, and I can see their point, but personally, if it’s done well, I think it would be fine. However, I expected her death to somehow help the fleet - reveal another signpost to Earth, or at least save them from a Cylon attack. But - nothing. Clearly she’s coming back - I hope they can make it interesting, because her “death” sure wasn’t.
[/QUOTE]

The goofy thing about complaints that “they got mysticism in my hard sci-fi!” is that most of the other major sci-fi series have done the same damn thing. Sure, in Star Trek or Stargate, they were “higher-order beings / beings of pure energy,” but it’s mystical mumbojumbo nonetheless. Heck, Babylon 5 had an episode where the station was rented out so that the dead could come back for one night. Farscape had Zhaan’s mysticism, and quite a few other instances, as well. Moaning over mysticism in BSG seems another instance of “it’s bad, because it’s not what I want to see.”

Also, from Ron’s podcast, I’m not so sure that Starbuck is coming back. He’s pretty clear that she’s not pining for the fjords, but that she’s dead. She’s shuffled off her mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the choir invisible. She is an ex-Starbuck. Yeah, mayb she’ll be back.

But maybe one thing about this episode won’t be cliché-driven, and she won’t. Now, that would turn expectations on their heads, which seems to have been Ron’s point for this whole sorry exercise he put us through.

62

The other thing that made me think that Starbuck isn’t “dead for good” is that any interview I’ve seen with Katee Sackoff she’s full of smiles. I mean, basically killing off her character means in effect she just got fired. Wouldn’t she be at least a little miffed about it? Unless she has future episodes lined up for whatever they have in store for Starbuck.

And I do agree with Cervaise…the previews made a pretty good case of how they have set up Starbuck from early on as having a “special destiny”. I just wish her death would have been more of a payoff as Unauthorized Cinammon suggested…having her come through the maelstrom in earth’s orbit, or finding the Cylon hideout, etc. The way it happened had a great setup but a bad climax.

Loved the bit of trivia that the ending scene with EJO was not scripted!! That makes it even better!

63

[QUOTE=Unauthorized Cinnamon]
I just want to confirm that the heavy raider was real.
[/QUOTE]

Not according to RDM, who refers to it as the “phantom raider” in the podcast.

Kara is dead, and she ain’t coming back. She was killed largely because RDM thought it would be cool, shocking, and controversial. No special destiny, no nothing. Just dead. Screw the fans that were emotionally invested in her story. He threw it all away for a cheap pop. EJO said the show will never be the same. Oakie says the show jumped the shark.

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Well, the producers and some of the cast will be at Comic-Con again this year. I think they will find their welcome considerably different than the one they got last lear.

“Hey, Ron! Bite me!”

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In other words, her death was realistic. In the real world, people die all the time for no good reason. In TV, people don’t - deaths have to be symbolic or meaningful or advance the plot. In real life, the man and the woman can fall in love and run off to elope in France, and the woman is run over by a bus crossing the street.

That in mind, I found it pretty groundbreaking that a TV show would take all that foreshadowing and building up and throw it all away for a senseless death brought on by insomnia and hallucinations. Very Ethan Frome-ish.

66

There could even be a purpose to the randomness of her death. Since Starbuck was the World’s Best Everything, there will be a scramble to fill the void left by her absence. Who will be the new flight instructor, for one thing? And now that they don’t have the talisman of her being Moses in Space, perhaps Adama/Roslin/Tigh/Lee will put together a plan to get to frakking Earth already. No more mucking about with prophecies; just make it happen.

ETA: I didn’t mean that quite as snippy as it sounds. I liked Kara, honestly. But she was so the infallible hero, I have to admit that her character prevented a lot more tension than it created.

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[QUOTE=Lightray]
He’s pretty clear that she’s not pining for the fjords, but that she’s dead. She’s shuffled off her mortal coil, run down the curtain, and joined the choir invisible. She is an ex-Starbuck. Yeah, mayb she’ll be back.
[/QUOTE]

She’s a leaf on the wind.

68

[QUOTE=Smapti]
In other words, her death was realistic. In the real world, people die all the time for no good reason.
[/QUOTE]

They didn’t do it that way. They had Cylon Magic. It wasn’t established as being in her head. If it were truly for no good reason, there was no need for Cylon Magic™. Kill her with ground fire in a dog fight, like Richentofen. :slight_smile:
The show is starting to look like 24; they just killed off Kat.

69

[QUOTE=levdrakon]
Hey, how come y’all get to trash the show but don’t get yelled at, but when I trash the show I get yelled at? :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, it just occurred to me last week Seelix got promoted to officer and pilot trainee (nugget). Hm. Maybe Starbuck is gone for gooders.
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I really liked season one and two. Watching a couple episodes from season 3 made me buy the DVD’s from season 1 & 2. I’m wondering if that’s why I have a problem with this season. Maybe I should just wait and watch season 3 all together and I’ll like it better.

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[QUOTE=Smapti]

That in mind, I found it pretty groundbreaking that a TV show would take all that foreshadowing and building up and throw it all away for a senseless death brought on by insomnia and hallucinations. Very Ethan Frome-ish.
[/QUOTE]

It’s not groundbreaking, it’s cheating. For three years we’ve been told Starbuck is something special. Then she freaks out and kills herself. That’s just not fair to the fans. If you establish something as a major plot point, and build it the way Starbuck’s “destiny” was built, you can’t just blow it off as meaningless. Especially not because the author thought it would be “cool”. Fuck RDM and the horse he rode in on.

71

[QUOTE=HelloKitty]
The other thing that made me think that Starbuck isn’t “dead for good” is that any interview I’ve seen with Katee Sackoff she’s full of smiles. I mean, basically killing off her character means in effect she just got fired. Wouldn’t she be at least a little miffed about it? Unless she has future episodes lined up for whatever they have in store for Starbuck.
[/QUOTE]

Full of smiles? Well, maybe. But also saying things like “All I will say is I will never cut it [her hair] again for Battlestar…” interview

Which, you know, she might need to do if she came back in a guest cameo.

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[QUOTE=Lightray]
Full of smiles?
[/QUOTE]

Roger Cross was full of smiles on Larry King, the week Curtis got whacked on 24. :slight_smile:

73

I agree - the ship appears to have been real - freeze frame on my DVR showed it. What the implications of that are, I don’t know, especially as “Leoben” revealed himself to not be the Cyclon Leoben (or maybe he was?).

So yeah, this could either be a pointlessly stupid way to kill of a major character, or develop into an interesting story line. I’m hoping for the latter - IHMO the best episode ever was the start of this season (rescue from New Caprica)…I hope they end it in a similar fashion.

One thing that bothers me…why not assume the Oracle was a Cylon? Starbuck never repeated her exchange w/ Leoben while he was in captivity…but he knows it. It seems to me that the Oracle really did not know anything that we could not have expected him to know.

74

I liked Kara dying. It’s such a well-established convention in shows that main characters never die, so their peril is not very perilous to us viewers at this point (“Yeah, it looks like she’s going to die/just died, but she’s a major character and there’s half an hour left in this episode, so we all know she didn’t actually die.”) You know what would be really cool? A character like Jack Bauer dying.

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[QUOTE=Oakminster]
Not according to RDM, who refers to it as the “phantom raider” in the podcast.
[/QUOTE]
Well, all right, but the effects guys seem to think it was real!

I think it kind of would have been cool for her to get herself killed purely because she was an emotional basket case, etc., and for her death to be kind of random and meaningless. There is a way to do that that is dramatic and effective. However, this is a show that has had oracles and NDEs and all manner of supernatural bits and pieces, and the series and this episode were structured in such a way as to imply Starbuck really did have a destiny, and she fulfilled it somehow by flying into the maelstrom.

I didn’t get any hints that it was meant to be all in her head, or that the thrust of the death is, “sometimes life sucks for no good reason.” Again, they could have played it that way, but they didn’t. The closest they came was to show that others in the fleet started to doubt what she was seeing. But then, as I said - there were two birds in the sky, from a vantage point outside Lee’s viper, so it couldn’t be him participating in her delusion or something. Regardless of what Ron says or thinks, that shot is part of the episode.

And, to borrow a sentiment from Under Siege 2 (I believe) - if you don’t have a corpse, you can’t treat the person as dead. Especially in scifi (didn’t every *Farscape * character “die” at least once?); especially especially in scifi with supernatural elements. Lee saw her viper explode. Yes, that’s closer to dead than “she flew below the hard deck and we can’t find her on DRADIS,” but the whole freakin episode was about her destiny, they went out of their way to show her reaching for the eject handle, and there at least appeared to be another ship right nearby. (BTW, I’m in no way *lobbying * for Starbuck to come back. I’m just being realistic with the evidence here - it is far from certain that she’s permanently dead.)

Incidentally, (spoiler box for those what haven’t seen Serenity)Wash’s death was a good “shit happens” death. Whedon said he felt he had to kill someone major purely to make the possibility of death real, and the death was pretty random and pointless otherwise. And yeah, I’m still kind of mad that Wash is dead, but I have to admit, it worked within the story’s framework. In contrast to Starbuck’s death in this episode.

76

[QUOTE=joemama24_98]
I agree - the ship appears to have been real - freeze frame on my DVR showed it. What the implications of that are, I don’t know, especially as “Leoben” revealed himself to not be the Cyclon Leoben (or maybe he was?).

[/QUOTE]

Again, this was debunked by the podcast. It was an imaginary ship, seen only by Starbuck.

Editting to avoid consecutive posts. RE–ejection handle. Starbuck reached for it, then pulled her hand back. She told Lee to just let her go. Then she closed her eyes and slumped. When the ship blew, she was in it.

Starbuck is dead. She ain’t coming back, unless they throw together some flashback sequence or something.

77

[QUOTE=featherlou]
You know what would be really cool? A character like Jack Bauer dying.
[/QUOTE]

He has. :slight_smile:

78

[QUOTE=Oakminster]
Again, this was debunked by the podcast. It was an imaginary ship, seen only by Starbuck.
[/QUOTE]

Part of me wonders then if they shot the footage w/ one storyline in mind and now their working on another…we see the viper and the raider from Lee’s cockpit view, which does not seem to sync up w/ the podcast…I’ll have to listen to it (I generally don’t, but its hard to reconcile the shot with his comments).

Also, she took damage in the second sequence…I don’t think this was imagined like in the first. Where did that come from?

79

God I hate this show and everyone involved in making it.

Now we have the most annoying paradox possible:

Either Kara comes back, somehow, fulfilling all the cliches we hate, OR her death really was as pointless and anticlimactic as it seemed and the show has well and truly screwed the pooch.

Next Week: Ted McGinley joins the cast as cocky fighter jock “Ace.”

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[QUOTE=Unauthorized Cinnamon]
Incidentally, (spoiler box for those what haven’t seen Serenity)Wash’s death was a good “shit happens” death. Whedon said he felt he had to kill someone major purely to make the possibility of death real, and the death was pretty random and pointless otherwise. And yeah, I’m still kind of mad that Wash is dead, but I have to admit, it worked within the story’s framework. In contrast to Starbuck’s death in this episode.
[/QUOTE]

The difference in these two was that this episode of BSG foreshadowed Kara’s Kroaking so much that it wasn’t at all unexpected. Just off the top of my head, the list of “things that mean this character is doomed” included:

  1. talking about getting away from it all with her estranged husband.
  2. talking about where she wants her picture put up after she’s dead.
  3. revisiting the “What do you hear, Starbuck?” “Nothing but the rain, sir” bit from the mini-series.
  4. the sit-down with Lee, where she points out that after all the changes, they’re back to where they’ve started.

There were probably more I can’t remember rolling my eyes to, but it’s not as though Starbuck had a huge pointy thing shoved right through her without any warning or set-up.

(that’s why I didn’t like the writing on this one; too much damn foreshadowing – they should’ve just killed her and be done with it. the aftermath would’ve been more interesting than the buildup, anyway. as EJO demonstrated)

[QUOTE=Oakminster]
Again, this was debunked by the podcast. It was an imaginary ship, seen only by Starbuck.
[/QUOTE]

I’m not willing to take Moore referring to it as the “phantom raider” as an explicit confirmation that it was a raider that only existed in Kara’s head. The guy’s often sloppy in his podcasts (still couldn’t pronounce Kara’s name right), and – apparently – quite often somewhat sauced, too.

“Phantom raider” could be used as adequate shorthand for “raider that everybody else (but Kara) thinks is a phantom.”