Monday, April 14, 2008

Where's the ambrosia when you need it?

It always amazes me how actors can sometimes miss the real depth and meaning of the shows they are in, and even the very characters they play. The thing to remember is that for most actors, acting isn't about understanding human life, it is about imitating what human life looks like. Sometimes I forget this. Like for example, just when I had concluded that actress Katee Sackhoff - Starbuck on BSG was pretty intelligent and reflective (for, well, an actor...yes, I know that is a biggotted thing to say...) here she is waxing really weird (and gut-kicking the lion's share of BSG fans which she doesn't usually do because she seems to me basically well-bred) in a recent interview:


Is the relationship between Starbuck and Apollo something that could ever work out or are they in a bad cycle of repeating mistakes?

I don't think that Lee and Kara will ever be happy together. I don’t think that they’re meant to be together. I think that they’re meant to be best friends, they’re meant to push each other, they’re meant to have those arguments that drive you. That’s the purpose that I feel that they serve in each other's lives.
I don’t think that they were ever meant to love each other. I don’t think they’ll ever end up together; I never did really.
If there’s anyone that she would actually allow herself to be happy with and be with, it’d probably be Leoben Conoy [a Cylon].


Um, yeah. Because nothing cements a happy forever like starting out with torture and graduating onto kidnapping, psychological and emotional abuse, deception and murder.

The gut kick isn't that Katee doesn't see Kara and Lee as meant to be together, (even though it seems abundantly clear that the writers have been constantly indicating that they are in love). I think the case could be made that neither of those two are meant to find normal happiness because, like King David in the Bible, they can't build the Temple because they have too much blood on their hands. But after we watched Kara drive knives into Leoben several times, drown him in a bucket and toss him into deep space, and have him nearly make her lose her mind in his perverse pseudo-marriage trap, it would be all manner of twisted to suggest that they could find love together. After surviving a childhood of abuse, what kind of anti-arc would it be for Starbuck to end up in domestic bliss with the guy whose whole relationship to her has been abusive?

It seems to me a stunningly unkeen sense of the obvious to miss that. But maybe it is something a lot simpler, and despite their screen chemistry, Katee and Jamie Bamber just don't click in real life as well as do Katee and the Leoben guy, and that is bleeding out here. I have had the sense in many interviews that Sackhoff has a lot more moral sense than does Kara Thrace, and so has run out of patience with the character's flailing around. It's kind of a funny dichotomy that appears in actors every so often, in which they begin to resent the dramatic personas which are their bread and butter.

Re: the cross tattoo.... Katee has said she is a Christian. Keep her in your prayers as it seems more and more she is being marketed as little more than a sex-object. I would hate to see her get shoved along in this trajectory. She really has talent and doesn't need to prostitute herself. But certainly, the pressure on her to compromise herself will be quite strong. Don't do, it, Katee! Don't do anything that makes you gulp.

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