Ransom and the Equinox
- Thread starter Immolatus
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They knew that the aliens were sapient from the start and murdered them for fuel anyway.
As someone who likes cats, I find some of the posts herein to be rather offensive. Tone it down please.
Can't tell if serious.
They were given the technology to summon them, and the first one was killed by accident. It was already dead so they figured they may as well use their 'fuel.' And then the temptation to keep doing it was too much
I always think of BSG's Pegasus episodes, and how that crew reacted to meeting another ship, as an example of how Equinox was done not so well.
ie. they've been stranded, alone in the Delta Quadrant for five years, and they meet up with another Starfleet vessel and crew... and they all just shrug
The use of the body of the accidental death victim is morally debatable. The willingness to kill others is not. That's murder, pure and simple.
Maybe, but "Equinox" was better than BSG's Razor movie in one key respect. At least in "Equinox" you got the sense that their morals eroded gradually as a result of all the hardships they faced over the years, that there was a reason for why they became what they did. But Razor revealed that Admiral Cain was pretty much a brutal psychopath from the beginning and that her crew started committing atrocities at the earliest possible opportunity, so it rendered the whole thing arbitrary and shallow.
That might be true of Razor, but the Pegasus trilogy in S2 of BSG is probably a more apt comparison to the Equinox episodes. And I think it handles the situation with a fair amount of nuance. Also, Adama never flat out judges or dismissed Cain the way Janeway does Ransom.
Don't even get me started on how erratic and consequence free Janeway's handling of Chakotay ends up being.
Don't even get me started on how erratic and consequence free Janeway's handling of Chakotay ends up being.
Compared to Razor, maybe, but the extremes of brutality, sadism, and misogyny portrayed among the Pegasus crew didn't strike me as particularly nuanced. It was all rather unpleasant to sit through.
I found that to be true about BSG in general, to a degree. There were a lot of wanton acts of, well, badness in there that just felt unbelievable because they seemed to lack a clear motivation, and I remain bewildered at how that simplistic portrayal of human nature was almost universally hailed as mature and realistic by critics. To be sure humans can do unspeakable things to each other, but what gets them to that point, individually or as a group, requires a careful examination that I found generally lacking in BSG.
On a different tack, this brings back memories of Voyager's attempts at a character study of a psychopath, the Lon Suder episodes ...
On a different tack, this brings back memories of Voyager's attempts at a character study of a psychopath, the Lon Suder episodes ...
Amen to that. Realistically, disaster brings out the best in people as well as the worst, but we rarely saw that. The BSG remake was as unrealistic in its own way as the perfected humanity that TNG was often criticized for, just in the opposite direction.
Actually I felt the very ending of the series redeemed that aspect somewhat for me, because
it turned out that these weren't humans like us; they and the Cylons were both fatally flawed and unable to break the cycle of destruction, but then they joined together into an improved breed, namely us, that had the potential to transcend the cycle at last. So ultimately the series wasn't saying that humans are irredeemable, it was saying that humans are the redemption that these incomplete, dysfunctional proto-humans needed to find. Which was a surprisingly humanistic message for a show that spent most of four seasons wallowing in nastiness.
Yeah, it's a shame they didn't explore that character further.
I'm not really sure if the Equinox and the Pegasus can be compared accurately. Yes, it did take the Equinox crew nearly five years of being alone before they succumbed hunting and killing an intelligent species to fuel their ship, while the Pegasus crew were brutally abusing prisoners and abandoning and executing civilians within the first six months of being alone. But circumstances are a bit different. The Equinox was a science ship and its crew felt a need to conduct Starfleet's primary mission to explore space. Meanwhile the Pegasus was a warship and they believed themselves the sole survivors of an attack which obliterated their homes, leaving billions dead. Their behaviour, terrible though it was, was a natural reaction to those circumstances.
^That didn't make it interesting or pleasant to watch. Like Sho said, a story saying "Hey, look how awful these people are" isn't as satisfying or meaningful as one saying "Let's examine and justify how these people came to this point." Ransom's crew had an arc that made them worthy of interest and sympathy as characters; Helena Cain's crew was just a bunch of one-note sadists and monsters, and that was boring and oversimplistic.
The ironic thing is that the original Cain/Pegasus story, "The Living Legend," is the finest, most intelligent two hours of the original Battlestar Galactica (which admittedly is faint praise), whereas I consider Razor to be the worst, most disappointing two hours of the remake (although it has stiff competition from the black market episode and the boxing episode).
The ironic thing is that the original Cain/Pegasus story, "The Living Legend," is the finest, most intelligent two hours of the original Battlestar Galactica (which admittedly is faint praise), whereas I consider Razor to be the worst, most disappointing two hours of the remake (although it has stiff competition from the black market episode and the boxing episode).
Their behaviour was not even close to 'natural reaction' for human beings.
Humans don't react to catastrophe/megadeath by turning into crazed animals. Indeed, the survivors behave more altruistically than usual.
See Steven Pinker 'The better angels of our nature'
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While I am a hug fan of RDM's BSG, I will admit they might have gone to far with the Pegasus crew, and I think the problem was that they wanted to make them worse than the Galactica crew, who already did some pretty bad things. Which leads to one of the other advantages to Equinox over the Pegasus story, in Equinox we got more of an examination of what could have happened if Voyager had played out differently, instead of just pitting our heroes against a bunch of people who were pretty much just nasty like they did in the Pegasus storyline.
You mean you like it so much you want to hug it?
One thing they have in common, though, is that in both cases the hero crew had other perspectives in the mix -- in Voyager's case, the Maquis, Neelix, Kes, and Seven, in BSG's case the civilians of the ragtag fugitive fleet -- while the counterpart crew was pure military. I think the idea in the BSG arc was that having civilians to take care of tempered the fleet leaders' decisions and attitudes, helped keep them more humane (at least relative to the horrendously low standards of BSG humanity). At least, that was an overt plot element in the original "Living Legend" storyline, though it manifested more as Cain's recklessness vs. Adama's caution.
I can't say that's as big an element in "Equinox," though, since VGR pretty much glossed over the whole Starfleet/Maquis thing. But at least in principle, there was a multiplicity of viewpoints represented -- Chakotay as someone able to question Janeway's decisions (when the writers remembered to give him a personality), Neelix as the heart of the crew keeping morale up, Seven as a gadfly always challenging authority, that sort of thing. So the crew wouldn't be as likely to march in lockstep behind a leader who went down the wrong path. "Equinox" tried to address that with Chakotay's defiance of Janeway, though it was hamfisted next to the similar dynamic back in "Scorpion."
(Yay, I managed to continue the BSG discussion yet keep the thread moderately on topic at the same time!)
Ooops, that was supposed to be huge. BGS isn't soft and cuddly enough to want to hug.
So your saying that the crew of a warship that has just witnessed the obliteration of their homes and billions slaughtered is going to adopt a "forgive and forget" attitude and not become hell-bent on revenge against those responisble for this? That they wouldn't consider those responsible to be the lowest form of life undeserving of common decency?
I'm not defending the actions of the Pegasus crew. I'm not saying you have to like it. I'm just saying it is believable.
Given things like the Haditha massacre, or My Lai, or the constant murders of innocent Pakistani civilians by U.S. drones being met with almost no outrage in the United States, I'm somewhat less sanguine about the idea that humanity in Battlestar Galactica is fundamentally unrealistic. I think the people of BSG aren't intrinsically any different than people in real life -- they just come from a culture that has encouraged the worst in their natures, the same way the Federation is a culture that encourages the best in human nature.
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