Ok Boomer did some bad stuff, but … I rewatched the ep yesterday.
I beleive that Boomer did use Chief, but regretted it. The sorrow is completely evident in her face during the projection sequences. She knows she is destroying him, destroying their tenuous relationship, closing the door on them forever.
But she is on a MISSION, and a good soldier completes her mission. Whatever it takes. Including frakking Helo in the john, though maybe she didn’t need to enjoy it quite so much once it got started. But how else was she going to get past him without raising suspicion? Oh honey I have a headache? I don’t think so…
She told Chief to remember everything she said in the brig and that no matter what happened it was the truth. There were tears on her face as she flew out of Galactica. She was resigned to her fate, and sad, a little ironic.
There’s some truth to this, but I also agree with Chuck’s description of her as a certain type of lier, the kind that believes her lies as she tells them. Boomer’s messed up and this is the most messed up thing she’s done yet.
I agree. Aaron and Grace played it very well, I believe we were all sold.
It would be interesting if Boomer gets back to the basestar and Cavil is shown “adjusting” some settings on her. She is his “pet” Eight. You know, he could wave his hand or some device and she’d look as if she awoke from a dream.
Although I think dramatically it plays better if she made the choice.
I’m pretty sure that her frakking Helo was just to mess with Athena and not to get past him, otherwise why would she have left her alive and in a position to watch the whole interlude. The fact that we saw her getting intimate with Cavil at one time suggest to me she’s willing to frak anything to get what she wants, and she’s believed from the beginning (that is, from downloading post the Cally gut-shot) that her destiny is tied to Hera’s, whether by delusion or otherwise.
How could she have predicted that Helo would show up there? She couldn’t have. He suprised her, she tried to brush him off, realized it wouldn’t work, and went for it. She couldn’t have known that Athena was concious.
I don’t quite agree. I don’t think Boomer believes in her own feelings. She has them, she uses them to fool people – but because of Cavil and Tyrol she doesn’t accept her feelings as real.
I suspect one clue to Boomer’s motives was in Tyrol’s flashbacks. There was a scene where Tyrol told her that, I paraphrase, “you’re a machine. You don’t have feelings, you have software.” I think Boomer took that to heart. Remember what Cavil was teaching her – how to be more of a machine. She repeated Cavil’s rhetoric about humanity and Cylons to Ellen. Boomer would also realize that, even if she wanted to go back, she’d never be accepted by the other Cylons nor by many of the humans.
Now she can easily steal babies and sleep with Helo. She not only treats her own “illusory” humanity coldly, she treats other people’s humanity coldly too. To her, it’s not just her own Cylon feelings that are an illusion, but human feelings too. Thus she seems to have no more sympathy for human beings.
I also think that Boomer wanted to make a point to Athena, her sister, about their nature versus human nature – Helo can’t tell them apart. Message: “He doesn’t know you as well as you think.”
That’s a very likely understanding of Boomer. I think it’s not as true as she would like it to be, she’s still having those feelings, hence all the great acting by Grace, but she’s acting like it were true. She’s messed up, she has issues, however you want to say it, in her screwed up mental state, she’s gone and done something that’s hurt many people. And she’s going to have to suffer the consequences of those actions.
I didn’t read it that way. I saw her trying to get out of it because she worried that it would give her away. When she was putting him off and having to talk, he was getting closer to feeling that something was wrong with her. Seeing that, she decided to go for it with gusto, because having Helo really into the sex would make it easier for her to get away with it.
Once she reach that, I think she enjoyed potentially torturing Athena or at the least doing something to hurt her. One of Boomer’s most formative experiences was the trauma of being reborn and discovering that everything she knew and remembered was a lie- or based on a lie. She wanted to be Sharon Valerii again, to inhabit that world, and to be Galen’s lover. It drove her to move right back in to her old apartment. Knowing that, imagine how much it would have galled Boomer to know that Athena took her place on the Galactica? Of course, Athena didn’t really displace Boomer, but I bet it felt like that from B’s point of view.
Norman, I think you are right that Galen’s rejection of her as a machine and Cavil’s embrace of her machine-origins are both pivotal. Galen’s rejection destroyed her- broke her heart. She hoped to find healing in living with the humans on New Caprica, but didn’t because you really can’t make someone love you at gunpoint. Cavil comes along and tells her, “Frak that, it is awesome that you are a machine!”
Of course Boomer clings to that, and to him. It’s the only acceptance she’s found in years- the only acceptance she’s ever felt whiel knowing the truth about her nature.
Then again, as WIMH points out, she doesn’t 100% buy it. I think she can feel that Cavil doesn’t love her, that he only cares about her insofar as she helps him fulfill his plans. I think her memory of love and desire to have it causes her inner conflict, much more so than her inherent personality programmed by the FF.
Is Boomer a liar? She started off as an unknowing sleeper agent. She fought with Caprica Six to change Cylon society. I understand she wasn’t exactly on the sides of the angels during this episode, she pretended to be Athena during this episode and took Hera, but before that, she never really did anything to consciously deceive anyone. Looking back, the writers didn’t turn Boomer dark until mid-Season 3, and before that Boomer struggled with her Cylon nature. Besides that scene in Rapture, she didn’t do anything I’d consider bad. Yes, she voted with Cavil in “Six of One,” but she was also aware of what happened to the thirteenth colony, informing her of what happened during the “last Cylon civil war.” She was also saddened that Cavil actually killed the 2s, 6s, and 8s, surprised that he was “really killing them.” Her moment with Cavil during “The Hub” was with Cavil trying to convince Diana to put the Cylon fleet back together. Besides her actions in this episode, where she was acting as the soldier, I don’t see her character as duplicitious, merely as a soldier.
And I’m still not sure why this episode paints her as having any real power during New Caprica. Nothing showed her having any real say when everyone else kept overriding her and Caprica Six. It is a little strange that Galen had admonished her for New Caprica when the rebels forged an alliance with RTF after executing a hostage and threatening to destroy the fleet.
I’m pretty sure that her frakking Helo was just to mess with Athena and not to get past him, otherwise why would she have left her alive and in a position to watch the whole interlude.
I have to disagree. Boomer tried to get out of that in that scene. She didn’t stay to seduce him, she tried to leave. It was only when Helo was insistent that she frakked him. She never even looked Athena’s way during the scene. The fact that she didn’t kill Athena shows that Boomer isn’t some bad hat villain.
