For me one of the most… um… disturbing moments was the Tory arc in this episode (Six of one) - when Tigh, Anders, and Chief (but if I remember correctly, mostly just Tigh) suggest she needs to sleep with Baltar for information because she’s the woman of the group, and she, painfully in my eyes, does so. This strikes me as out of character for the writing of the show when it comes for women. Is it consistent with what we see in the world of Galactica? Discuss.
I agree that it seems out of character and I also found it disturbing. I’m gonna need to rewatch before I can say more though.
Also frakked up that it’s Tigh. Ellen’s attempts at sexual espionage didn’t particularly work out well for them, did it?
Well, Tigh didn’t say she had to - he said she didn’t have to - then she did anyway.
Putting myself in her shoes (as a woman) - as repulsive as Baltar can be, if I were in Tory’s situation I’d probably be desperate to do anything that could get me some answers as to who I was and what the frak was going on - you go Mati Hari!!!
I hate to say it, but it’s not so out-of-character for Tigh. He’s very willing to have other people do horrible things to themselves to get what he wants (ex: suicide bombers on NC). Any way you slice it, Tigh, Tyrol, and Anders essentially pimping Tory is incredibly disturbing, but I think the writers and actors did a decent job of showing just how wrong and awful it is that the male Final Fivers are making Tori do this.
I see this in an opposite way. In this society sex doesn’t have the puritanical baggage that our society has. Asking someone to have sex with someone is like asking someone to help you move out of an apartment. The only reason Tory was asked is yes, she is a woman, and because Baltar fancies women she is the natural choice.
Has anybody else seen the movie, Lust, Caution? It’s about a Mata Hari of sorts, but it shows how thoroughly frakked up playing a Mata Hari can make a person. I don’t think I’m saying it quite right, but with the crying scene, it just felt to me that at least the writers were acknowledging that, the ugly, harmful side of it.
Interesting choice of metaphor - both get you sweaty and tired, I guess . . . why haven’t more people jumped at the chance to help me move, I wonder???
well, in the bsg world - there are a number of examples of women using sex to get information/access/ or other goals…
ellen sleeping with cavil to get tigh freed from detention on new caprica
caprica six using sex to gain baltar’s …um…trust…(we see how well that went…)
sharon/athena sleeping with helo to gain his trust…at least initially…on caprica
at least in the case of ellen, i figure it was her idea. can’t say for six or sharon…
as for tory. the out of character for the show is that it is not HER idea to do this…and as for tigh…it seems totally in his character to suggest she sleep with baltar…after all…ellen would have done this…
tory seems really lost in this episode, trying to figure out who she is. i think that might be what drove her to do something so out of character and emotionally painful, even though it is for a supposedly greater purpose…but that they show her crying while having sex with baltar, i thought this was well done and totally in character with her and the writing for the show.
Well, there’s puritanical, and then there’s just being a bit selective with your bed partners.
So, Dee would’ve gotten just as upset over Lee and Kara moving furniture as she did over them for hooking up (and Lee upset with Kara for frakking Baltar, etc)?
It didn’t feel right on several levels – but it did seem in character for Tigh to suggest it - remember what his wife was like and what she did for him? And Tigh had said she didn’t have to sleep with him, just attract him and get some information. She slept with him on her own. That’s the part that felt wrong.
What I didn’t like was the way Baltar, with no investigation or questioning, seems to buy into the “one true God” religion. He’s not much of a scientist for a super-scientist. Even if he’s figured out the whole god-thing is a good way to get laid I don’t see him starting to speak on God’s plans and doings just yet unless he doesn’t believe it.
Another thing that seemed wrong to me was when Caprica 6 gave the toaster Cylons free will by removing something. Since when do you have to give a robot something akin to free-will and then take it away by adding another device. Why build them with that kind of free-will function in the first place if its a problem?
Well I guess the skin jobs didn’t create the bullet heads - people did. So if they already had free will when the skin jobs came to be they would have to do something to take it away - it’s like on star wars - R2D2 had a restraining bolt to keep him from running away and Luke had to remove it…?
I got the feeling that Tory had no intention of following through with the ‘suggestion’ to sleep with Baltar, until he began to speak of ‘music forming from chaos, etc’…I think that by either luck or divine intervention he hit right on the “Watchtower” nerve that was so important to the final four, and I think Tory was caught up in wanting to understand herself and hoping Baltar might help.
Perfect Analogy !
So, why would people give them “free will” in the first place? And why would who ever is controlling their manufacture now keep doing that when they’ve already made Manchurian candidate humanoid robots? What the hell did the humans use the 'bots for that they would need what we think of as “free will”? We’re making robots now that do all sorts of things and there is more chance of cows rebelling than there is of self driving robot cars and smart bombs rebelling.
Keep in mind that “free will” is just a short cut term from folk psychology that that actually refers to something far more complicated and layered than it seems. Free will is something of an illusion. There have been a lot of experiments in this area, Micheal Gazzaniga’s experiments on people with split brains:
http://www.macalester.edu/psychology/whathap/UBNRP/Split_Brain/Pioneers.html
Benjamin Libet’s experiments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Libet
To even have a will you have to have desire. To have the illusion of free will you need conflicting desires. So where do these robots get these desires for autonomy or even self-preservation?
The whole back story here doesn’t make much sense on a logical level (at least not yet) - we just accept it because it’s the familiar Frankenstein myth.
So if they already had free will when the skin jobs came to be they would have to do something to take it away - it’s like on star wars - R2D2 had a restraining bolt to keep him from running away and Luke had to remove it…?
That metaphor doesn’t seem to cut it. Keeping R2D2 from running was just a temporary solution. Whatever they had in the toasters sounded like it was designed to be part of the design.
I was speaking more to the actual mechanics of the situation; the Six displayed a small part that she had evidently removed from the Centurions, some type of behavioral/mental inhibitor perhaps…akin to the SW ‘restraining bolt’…in that light I found the scenerios very similar.
Okay, maybe at that level. But I’m talking about the writers painting themselves into a corner with the basic premise. It’s going to be even worse if Baltar is right and the writers are really going to have a deus ex machina give the Cylons their emotions.
I got the feeling that Tory had no intention of following through with the ‘suggestion’ to sleep with Baltar, until he began to speak of ‘music forming from chaos, etc’…I think that by either luck or divine intervention he hit right on the “Watchtower” nerve that was so important to the final four, and I think Tory was caught up in wanting to understand herself and hoping Baltar might help.
It sounds good, but we didn’t see her asking a lot of the questions I would expect someone who wanted to “understand herself” would ask. Baltar told her he’d been with the Cylons, why wouldn’t she ask more about what they’re like – what kind of emotions did you see Cylons having, do they love, do they have sex, why did they attack us, etc…
And come to think of it – why isn’t anybody else debriefing Baltar about his time with the Cylons? Don’t these people read Sun Tzu: know your enemy.
[QUOTE=NormanDoering;23660Another thing that seemed wrong to me was when Caprica 6 gave the toaster Cylons free will by removing something. Since when do you have to give a robot something akin to free-will and then take it away by adding another device. Why build them with that kind of free-will function in the first place if its a problem?[/QUOTE]
Probably they don’t know how to make brains without free will. Maybe their brains are organic or maybe they are just lame programmers.
That’s an interesting way to think about it, and perhaps helps me to reconcile the sex scene. However, I felt that within the episode that scene was very jarring and actually very difficult to watch, particularly with Tory’s tears. In particular:
[ul]
[li]Tigh et al using her because she’s a woman. Yes, in character for Tigh, in retrospect. But for Chief, who argued against Tigh during the occupation? For Anders?
[/li]
[li]Sex as a way to find illumination or meaning? That’s a very tired literary trope, and while it’s somewhat interesting to see that in this case it’s the woman using sex for that purpose (if indeed that is how we are reading it), most writers who have argued that sex brings enlightenment either revised their opinion later, or never really convincingly proved the truth of their thesis in their writing. Not to say that sex isn’t great; I just take issue with the idea that it can lead to some sort of metaphysical or spiritual moment of clarity and understanding.
[/li]
[li]A woman crying during sex, or a man, or whoever, doesn’t strike me as a good thing. Good for Baltar for noticing, but to me at least, those certainly weren’t tears of joy.
[/li][/ul]
Other ideas and reasons keep coming to me while I’m away from the computer, but I’m also very interested in if this line is consistent with the way BSG writers write women characters. This was an Angeli episode? But we haven’t seen sex presented in this way before; it’s either alluded to, as with the girl who comes to the Galactica to get an abortion, or mutually desired for fairly clear reasons (Kara with whoever). I think the ambiguity of motivation is part of what makes the scene so disturbing.
what about the implied/attempted rape of sharon in “pegasus”- or was it resurrection ship part 1? that was very disturbing.
After watching again (and again), I’ve got to agree that Tory wasn’t happy at all, and carried through with the act pretty much solely at Tigh’s request. Isn’t it strange how the human females in the show are portrayed as strong, independent, very equal in every way…intellect, physical prowess, and freedom of sexual expression…and the Cylon(z) seem to be much more stereotyped within their sex/model categories, more demeaning to each other, etc. They seem to be desperate to attain humanity, yet there’s Tigh treating Tory like a thing. Even within their own ranks they treat each other like machines.