Battlestar Galatica

As should be painfully clear from this blog by now, I'm a big nerd. I play video games, I read fantasy literature, and, oh yeah, I watch Battlestar Galactica.

Which all makes me totally awesome, of course.

My brother got me started watching BG over Christmas break, when we had a marathon session for 3 days where it seemed that we did nothing but watch the entire first season. I thought it was a lot of fun, with interesting characters in addition to being set in space.

I didn't have time to catch up on all the back episodes, though, and when I briefly watched one episode after Christmas, I realized I was woefully behind and wouldn't enjoy it as much without understanding what was going on. So I gave up until I had time to watch season 2. Which I'm doing right now, in preparation for season 4 this winter. And yes, I cheated. I read the summary of the last episode of season 3, so I know all about the Cylon speculation around the major characters.

At any rate, I just finished season 2.0, and am now cursing myself for not seeing ahead and making sure I had the first disk of season 2.5 on hand, because I really want to know what happens in this confrontation between Adama and Cain.

Adama is the commander of the fleet, whom everyone loves and who's this wonderful father figure; Cain is the admiral of the recently found Pegasus who outranks Adama and is proving herself to be a real, well, you know.

This pause between seasons 2.0 and 2.5 is giving me time to think about what makes Admiral Cain so effective as a "bad guy."

My initial thought was that it had something to do with gender. Cain is female; Adama is male. Perhaps we don't like/aren't comfortable with the leader of the military operations not being an older, experienced man. Although Cain has the rank and the title, because she's female, when she (rightfully) expects to be treated with the respect and obedience her title deserves, she comes across as power-hungry and "evil." It's the Hillary Clinton syndrome.

Then I thought that perhaps I was looking to pick a gender-based fight with the producers of BG, and maybe I should give it a rest. And so I started to think about other reasons she's so awful, and it became clear that her presence challenges everything that we like about Battlestar Galatica and its crew. We like that the crew is like family--she thinks that's wrong and breaks up the teams that have come to mean so much to us. We like that Laura Roslin has proven herself to be a very effective leader; Cain turns up her nose at the Secretary of Education. We are starting to become quite uncomfortable with the idea of Cylons as mere machines, and the word "toaster" is starting to sound racist; Cain has no problem torturing and condoning the rape of female Cylon prisoners. On every front, she challenges some aspect of the show that the viewer has come to enjoy or appreciate, and I think that regardless of whether or not her character were male or female, we would still intensely dislike her.

That said, I think the directors knew what they were doing when they cast a younger woman as Admiral to Bill Adama's Commander. In the original Battlestar Galactica series, the same character in a similar episode is played by Lloyd Bridges, a man. I think that the change in casting really is effective; we dislike Admiral Cain for how she treats the crew of Battlestar Galactica, but that dislike is heightened by the discomfort we feel in a younger female bossing our beloved Adama around. Although they're not the primary reasons for our dislike, age and gender make us come to this conclusion a lot faster.

At any rate, it was something to keep me busy until the next disk gets here. Hurry, Netflix, hurry!