Tuesday is one of my “days off” though I should (and sometimes do) use it for productive dissertation work. I need to get back to work on that but have been feeling a little unmotivated recently.
This evening I started working on a Battenberg cake to take in tomorrow; I’ll probably give it to my students rather than to my colleagues. The former have an exam to write — which I have yet to write/prepare — and could use a sugar-high while writing. The latter are getting used to my baked goods and do not need them every day (that I’m in, that is).
I’ve baked the cake and am letting it cool now. Later I’ll cut the four segments and cement them with warmed apricot jam. Other version of the recipe use orange juice and other jams/jellies. Then, once I have a “brick,” I roll a sheet of marzipan around it. Up to this point I’ve never worked with marzipan or almond paste in my baking and am not sure how easy it will be to handle.
Today I started listening to “M,” first with two songs by Maanam, a Polish group I came across years ago when looking for other things by another Polish group, O.N.A., a song of whose had been remixed by Laibach. I eventually bought an O.N.A. CD — I’ll get to that in a few days, I suppose. “M” is a rather extensive letter, and now I’m in the middle of 11 hours of Madonna.
I caught up on the most recent episode of BSG, the one in which — mini-spoiler alert (if you haven’t yet seen it) — it appears that Starbuck dies (we see her Viper explode in the sky as Lee is chasing her, and we never see her parachute to safety, even though her hand had been on the eject handle earlier in the segment).
What I do not yet get is the plot/story significance of killing off Starbuck. She’s one of the “major” characters, both in the original series and in this one. Because she has a family history (an abusive mother) and the Cylons tried to use her in human-cyclon offspring/pregnancy experiments it seems she’s unlikely to be a Cylon, unless 1) she was adopted and 2) because she’d be one of “The Five” the other Cyclons would not have known that she was one them. Even so, though, it does not appear that models of “The Five” are kept on the resurrection ships, so having “our” Starbuck simply download seems problematic.
When Lee was chasing her, from his perspective (cockpit) we seem to see a Cyclon raider during Starbuck’s final moments, and whereas the first Cyclon ship from earlier in the episode was almost certainly a delusion (given the film footage and Starbuck’s other hallucinations — the little girls and the mandala symbol throughout), it’s possible (as an “out” for the writers) that 1) she did eject and 2) the Cylons got her.
Again, the question is, what good does her death do? No major character has yet died; the closest was Billy, the president’s old gopher/assistant. Adama was shot, Baltar has had close-calls, as has the president. Tigh lost an eye, Lee was lost in space after a viper accident in one episode. Dee was injured, Cally has been injured several times, and so on. But Starbuck is even more central to the mythology, to be equalled only by Baltar, Adama, and Lee/Apollo, perhaps, with Boomer/Athena coming in next.
Furthermore her death — or rather her manner of death — would be a bit at odds with with Leoben’s prediction(s) regarding her importance; she has been built up, and so such a death seems a bit cheap, although the episode itself made the death natural enough, something that was built up over the course of the show. The part that seems contrary to her character is the eventual giving up, since she had always been such a fighter, although it is argued in the episode that her aggressiveness was to an extent a response to her abusive mother and based on fear; when/if she overcomes that fear she no longer needs that defensiveness and can accept not only her mother’s but also her own death.
Of course if she does die (and is not somehow “rescued”) and yet returns in some form, this requires the show to take a more decidedly mystical approach than it has so far, for so far all the religious/mystical elements can be explained through psychology, science, history, and luck.
Back to the Battenberg.
