special

on sunday's episode of battlestar galactica, we lost starbuck. or did we? and if she returns, will she still be the same person? indeed, will she even be a person? or will she be ... a CYLON?

huh. i'm banking on her coming back as starbuck the white, but i really can't guess whether or not she'll be a toaster. over at ain't it cool news, there's a link to an audio interview with actress katee sackoff, who, in the manner of performers put in positions such as hers, is both coy and forthcoming about her future on the show.

i really hope starbuck isn't dead and isn't a toaster. i suspect i won't get at least part of my wish. i don't want to believe she's a cylon, but it's certainly a possibility. i joke that she'll come back as starbuck the white, but i would actually prefer to see her return as some sorta freaky mystical priestess (with a bitchen staff! and an elvish horse!) than a cylon. but some things add up, like when the lucy lawless cylon saw the faces of the five and recognized one of them: "i had no idea." but she's in cold storage now, so we can't ask her.

i am repeatedly stopped dead by this notion that the cylons know some truths about the humans that the humans cannot perceive. and that somehow this is a good, even transcendent, thing. in the case of starbuck, i have serious issues with this crap about leoben the frakkin' toaster showing starbuck her true "special" destiny, revealing her true path and all that. this bastard kidnapped her, imprisoned her for four months, psychologically tortured her, told her a bunch of fucking lies, LIED ABOUT HER BEING A MOTHER (and took another woman's little girl from her in order to perpetuate the lie) ... and yet HE is the one who has the TRUTH???? fuck that. i mean it. fuck that fucking noise. it's like some kind of orwellian nightmare: lies is truth. argghhhhhh! how can the cylons be good? it's like the others on lost claiming over and over and OVER that they aren't bad people. but they are. they can talk all they want; that doesn't make it so. they keep people against their will, and they also torture them. if the others were good people, they would have rescued the survivors of flight 815 right away and sent them home. after all, their freaky experiments (or whatever they are) were directly responsible for what happened to the plane.

but i digress.

i love a starbuck episode, but it bugs me that the writers feel so fucking compelled to de-toughen her. why can't she just be a hard-ass fighter pilot who gets the job done? why's there gotta be all this crap about how she feels guilty for leaving her mom to die and never seeing her again? and she needs forgiveness -- wah wah waaaaaah. her mother was evil. i don't care if she saved all of starbuck's fucking grade-school papers. she treated her daughter like shit and deserved to die alone. starbuck did the right thing, divorced herself from a bad, bad influence who was the source of much misery for her. she had nothing to feel guilty about; it was the smartest thing she could've done. why this is supposedly the central issue keeping starbuck from happiness or her true destiny or whatever, i cannot figure out for the life of me. methinks it's just that they cannot allow a female soldier to stay a soldier. to toughen and harden and be scarred and just keep on going, fighting the good fight no matter the cost. look at all the shit that's happened to saul. he had to kill his own wife, fer fucksake. yet we don't see him hallucinating cylons and blubbering in his imagination. it's like, "well, starbuck is a WOMAN! she CAN'T be unemotional! that would be ... unwomanly." grrrrrrrr.

in conclusion, gimme my warrior chick back, and don't muck her up with fucking whingy feelings.