Women in Battlestar Galactica: Take one

Battlestar: Galactica

First. let me say that I HATED the original series, which appeared when I was a teenager. I was a fan of Star Trek, Star Wars, and had even watched enought Space: 1999 to know the characters. I watched a few episodes of the original BSG, enough to be caught by the basic premise, and to experience an admittedly mild spiral of self-loathing for watching anything with Lorne Greene.

I resisted the reimagined series for years. This was very easy, as I don't have cable, and can't watch the SF channel.

Two months ago, I took out disc 1 of season 2.5. This was not a mistake; my reasoning was that be several years into the project, they should know what they are doing.

I wasn't exactly impressed with the depiction of Helena Cain, the commander of the Pegasus.. Let's see, she's young and attractive, so if she's commanding a Battlestar, there must be something nefarious afoot. She probably got the command over other, more qualified people.But I've spent enough time in This Life to know that sometimes people do get promoted into positions more on the basis of ambition than ability; presumably when this happens in the military, the results would be devastating not to a department, but to human lives. For TV to develop, it's got to develop complex female villians as well as complex female heroes, and this show did that.

So I went back and watched the miniseries, and series 1 and series 2.The Miniseries begins with Starbuck going througn a morning exercise routine while the rest of the ship is preparing for decommisioning. I was pretty sure that Starbuck had been a man on the original series, so I was pleasantly surprised by this reversal. So far, they've done a good job of creating a female action hero, and that's not nothing. I like the way that the actress, Katie Sackhoff, handles herself with aggressive ease among her male peers. In the miniseries, I wasn't sure she had found the "core" of the character--I never quite believed her facial reactions in the close-ups--but by the first and second series, I was convinced she knew the character better than the writers (which needs to be the case on episode TV).

Even so, I don't think the writers have ever given her the kind of free rein they would have given a male action hero. For that matter, they have done a much better job so far writing Jamie Bamber's "Apollo" character, but they deserve credit: Starbuck has been the wild kid on the block.

Ah but the Cylons.

The development of the "skinjob" cylons has been intriguing. First setting the artificial humans up as the evil beyond all evil, patricidal, genocidal forces. ( Where did they get the idea that human looking cyborgs would come back to hunt their human fathers? And where is Harrison Ford when you need him? )It may not be unique, but it is creative in its borrowings.The premise of the BSG deals inherently, and a little hamfistedly, with archetypes. Adam, Cain, the dead Zak filling in for Abel. (Where's Seth? )But okay, archetypes are archetypes because they are everywhere. What's important is what you do with them.

The premise of BSG deals a little hamfistedly with archetypes, but the exectution has been more subtle. The miniseries sets up a crude good/evil dynamic: humans good / cyborgs bad. Their attempted genocide of the human race makes that pretty close to an absolute. For my purposes, I’m interested in the way this reflects the natural (good) / unnatural (bad) binary opposition Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure splits. And then, having set up this opposition, they slowly go about deconstructing the opposition.

Let’s start with Six, since in many ways she’s the most two dimensional of the cyborgs. Introduced as the woman who has been fulfilling Baltars dreams (by passing advanced technology to him) and fantasies, she becomes, after her apparent death on Caprica (she later returns in "Downloaded," season 2.5) as "Inner-Six," a version of Six only Baltar can see an apparent male fantasy projection, who reeks of sexual power. The DVD of the first season used her image, with eyes glowing, as the iconic image of the first season, an appropriately so. This thread hits a weird type of apex in a scene where Six has bent over a table so that Baltar can take her from behind, and Kara walks in on them. The camera, weirdly, shows Six apparently from Kara’s point of view—though Kara can’t see her—apparently naked from the waist down (showing the camera a lot of thigh/buttock). Then we get close ups on Baltar, where Six is NOT there—showing not what he sees but what he knows Kara is seeing.

The actress playing Kara looked suitably unimpressed about what would have appeared to be a shipbound male taking himself by the hand. Nothing happening here!

I have to give the director’s credit for this: they play the Sexual Goddess straight. She embodies an archetype, and they play it that way. --I suspect that in the miniseries and in season 1, the producers, Moore and Eick, had little confidence in the actress to play other that "sultry"; if so, they may have been correct, but she gained some chops.

In season 2.5, Tricia Helfer gets to play several versions of Six. The version known as Gina is more complicated than the sex goddess Baltar sees. A Cylon who has been tortured aboard Pegasus, Gina is the flip side of the woman as sexual demon archetype that Six represents. Ginas—rape victims—are produced by the “Six” archetype. That is, the belief that women sexually manipulate men is a product of male anger and leads to male rage.

This is not how they play it in the show. Gina seems to be Admiral Cain’s shadow figure. She is the target of the Pegasus crew’s rage, including Admiral Cain’s, including the rage that might otherwise be directed at Admiral Cain. This is good if troubling psychology, but it’s also a new level of pandering. Showing an abused battered woman is another type of pornography, just as showing a woman being sexually available is porn. Consider the time that Helo and Sharon spend on Caprica. Caprica-Six beats the hell out of Sharon—why exactly? To make Helo feel for Sharon? As if he didn’t already?

Battlestar Galactica likes to show women who’ve been abused.

In all the scrapes they were in on Caprica, I don’t remember Helo being beat up. Seldom do the men show signs of physical trauma. For women on the show, it’s common.

Helfer gets her best chance to actually ACT (as opposed to "pose and strut") in the episode "Downloaded," where the reincarnated Caprica-Six turns out to have an Inner Baltar--who is just as cool, confident, and manipulative as Baltar's Six. She gets to play several versions of the same character in the same scene, and pretty much pulls it off.

Up Next: Boomer, Sharon, and President Laura.
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For other views on Starbuck, click here ("why Starbuck is Hot") or here.