Top Ten Reasons Admiral Cain Became a Cold-Blooded Beeyotch
We know that when Razor is released we’ll get to see the back story of how Cain dealt with the attacks on the colonies. It’s been suggested she may not have always been the ice queen we came to know and love/hate.
Here’re the top ten reasons she got that way:
10. She was gonna be an actress. She was gonna be a star. She was gonna shake her ass on the hood of Whitesnake’s car. Then she got drafted.
9. Her college nickname: “Magic Carpet Ride.” She’d show them when she was in charge.
8. Lost a bet in grade school: Either Tommy Davison asks you out, or you become an all-powerful misanthropic dictator who terrorizes the last crumbling remnants of the human race.
7. Tired of her older brothers claiming she “fought like a girl.”
6. Had a fling with President Adar’s predecessor, Wally, and loved the taste of raw power.
5. Did a teaching stint in public junior high for three years before joining up.
4. Knew Paula Abdul was thinking of her when she writhed around, singing “Cold Hearted Snake.”
3. Always thought Cain was the cooler brother.
2. Thought women should rise to the top by kicking, rather than sitting on, men’s laps.
1. Out to shake off those damnRo groupies once and for all!
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No Audra, you’ve got it wrong. Cain ain’t much different from us ordinary folks who miss their coffee. Maybe the Toasters and all their computeristic mumbo gumbo screwed up the hi-tech networked capuccino machines on Pegasus.
Maybe there is a lesson here for all of us. You don’t want to be around a nuclear armed inter-stellar warship full of combat trained space veterans when it runs out of coffee. I reckon Cain was on at least five cups a day before the colonies got toasted. If only she had packed her own reserve supply of tea bags all this trouble could have been avoided.
(I know this is a little off topic, but let’s try a big stretch here.
Speaking about Razor, and sci fi movies generally, have you guys read the recent piece in the London Times, online here, by Ridley Scott of Alien fame. He says Sci-Fi movies are dead.
At the Venice Film Festival for a special screening of his seminal noir thriller Blade Runner, Sir Ridley said that science fiction films were going the way the Western once had. “There’s nothing original. We’ve seen it all before. Been there. Done it,†he said. Asked to pick out examples, he said: “All of them. Yes, all of them.â€
I love his Alien (and Aliens), so it’s sort of sad to hear him say this as presumably he won’t make any more Sci Fi.
I guess the real problem is that he’s never seen BSG or Firefly.)
“5. Did a teaching stint in public junior high for three years before joining up.”
Who says merely junior high makes you that way? All grade levels these days have challenges as bad as the stereotype of junior high.
8 and 9 had me cracking up.
11. The fact that the Cardassians killed off all her Maqui comrades REALLY pissed her off.
12. Wearing only one earring really drove her nuts
13. Jack Bauer just annoyed the hell out of her (24 second season)
14. Really upset her medical career didn’t work out (two years on Homocide: Life on the Street)
Alpaca H,
I disagree, with a son who has been in junior high for two years, (8th Grade now), it would send anyone over the edge. Most of his teachers are over the edge.
So, Alpaca, David and Audra….
Are you saying that Cain went “teacher” (which is much worse than going “postal”)?
Oh, I’m thinking of a very, very naughty carpet joke………
15. She was allergic to spirit gum..
(Too obscure?)
(FM, I bet pretty much everyone is.)
How come how come he can he can tell-a tell-a you’re-a you’re-a
Always always number number one without a doubt!
ahh, Paula.
StevieSpin Says: ahh, Paula.
yeah, her songs are so much better when you don’t listen to them… 🙂
Sorry, that was mean.
Dave
Wally! lmao Funny stuff. Keep cranking these out.
Audra-once again, you’ve proven why you’re the coolest. 🙂
Altair IV-on your off topic comment, maybe “Sir Ridley” (really? When did this happen?) is right. I haven’t seen a science fiction film that struck me as any good in a long time.
Oh scratch that: Children of Men. Damn good film. Perhaps Sir Ridley missed it or didn’t recognize it as science fiction because the future it portrays is so frighteningly plausible?
The Fountain: okay, this movie was really, really, REALLY flawed, but at least Darren Aronofsky tried (and, IMO, he succeeds about 85% of the time in this thing. A little more exposition in the futuristic section would’ve been nice).
Pan’s Labyrinth: okay, technically this is a fantasy/fairy tale, but I’ll count it anyway. It’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen and manages to be both hauntingly beautiful and frightening at the same time, often within the same frame.
The Prestige: again, kind of a blend of genres and probably more fantasy than science fiction, though since the fantasy element comes from a scientist (I won’t say who so as not to give anything away), I think it should count.
A little older but still highly underrated: Gattaca. Someday we may look back on this film as one of the great science fiction movies. No? Okay, maybe I’m stretching, but it’s still pretty darn good.
Then there’s BSG, Lost and Heroes. Sure, they’re on television but they’re very good shows (though I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of the latter two, alas) which address fundamental questions about human nature.
Methinks Sir Ridley is full of crap. (But then, I’ve never cared much for his movies anyway, aside from Alien…though I prefer James Cameron’s sequel better.) Or, more likely, he is referring to the mass-market Hollywood version of the science-fiction film, in which we seem to have reached a saturation point as to what we can expect from the genre. I don’t know. Then again, while there aren’t as many westerns produced as back in the 30s-60s, they’re still produced and often result in some fantastic work (“Unforgiven,” the upcoming remake of “3:10 to Yuma” is supposed to be quite good), so maybe we’ll see something like that happening in sci-fi.
Pike: As someone who’s worn spirit gum on his lip to keep an idiotic mustache on, I can’t imagine how it feels to have that gunk spread down your nose.
Armando: Children of Men was my favorite film of last year, just after United 93. I had to defend it from a friend who called it a waste of celluloid and didn’t understand why it was so dark. But it felt dark in the same way that BSG is dark, because sometimes humans end up that way, and it makes the hope in the end that much brighter.
Audra: I watched the Razor clip, and when Cain took out the pocketknife, I thought, “Oh frak, she’s gonna make her cut her hand to show how tough she is!” Didn’t happen, but I squirmed a little.
LOL
Off topic slightly, I’m playing through Half-Life 2 for a second time (my favorite game EVER) and I just realized that the actress who plays Admiral Cain also voices a character in the game whose trustworthiness is also ambiguous. Add that to 24 and Star Trek (don’t know what her character was like in Trek though); she seems very type-cast. =D
Armando’s comments in reply to Sir Ridley’s poo poo-ing of sci fi movies is excellent. Although I must disagree with him about the original “Alien” movie which was a pathbreaking movie in many ways (i.e. Alien largely invented the ‘blue collar’ spacefarer and Sir Ridley’s (?) last minute decision to cast a woman in the role of Ripley, originally written for a man, really made the show and the series.)
In some ways the old Sci Fi genre ghetto that Audra mentioned in a recent GWC podcast has really broken down. The older ghetto-ised Sci Fi dealt with fantasy, the far future and hardware and hardly had breath left to deal with anything else.
Today movies like ‘Children of Men’ (great) and TV series like ‘X Files’, ‘Lost’ and ‘Heroes’ have broken down the ghetto walls. Sci Fi is really more ‘mainstream’ now. Or maybe I should say “Sci Fi is dead, long live Sci Fi”.
Another element in ‘bringing down the wall’ has been the rise of two “new” genres or “quasi-genres”, namely the ‘techno-thriller’ genre and ‘quirky’ ‘quasi-genre’. These have blurred the boundaries and created ‘intermediate stepping stones’ between mainstream TV and movies and ‘conventional’ Sci Fi.
The techno-thrillers, of which Tom Clancy is a leading exponent, are usually set in the immediate or near future, feature lots of hardware, and derive plot lines and elements from contemporary news and world events. They are kind of ‘near future’ Sci Fi with a minimum of ‘fantasy’ elements.
The ‘quirky’ genre comes at it from an opposite angle. They are usually ‘contemporary’, often based on mainstream story lines but add a lot of ‘fantasy’ elements. “Northern Exposure” strikes me as a great example of this, kind of Maybury with a dose of fantasy. More recent examples include Lost, the Simpsons, etc. Generally speaking the average Sci-Fi fan is often a fan of techno-thrillers and/or ‘quirkies’ too.
It’s great to see that more people are realizing that sci-fi is a great medium to tell a story. It still has a lot of baggage, though, because the studios want to crank out garbage that’s also sci-fi. There’s just been too much craaap, like the new Flash Gordon, to shake off all the good that shows like BSG has done. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again, 30 years from now, people will look back on this show as one of the greatest ever (maybe the best sci-fi series ever, Trek was a bit cheesy) and I’m really pleased to see it as it first aired. I think it’s going to stand the test of time, as all great stories do.
Only on GWC do we go from a comical start to super serious, and vice versa, in the span of 15 posts. lol
Maybe we need the GWC bloggers to kick off a discussion based on Number 13’s comment. Call it “BSG 2037: How will BSG look in 2037?”.
“The ‘quirky’ genre comes at it from an opposite angle. They are usually ‘contemporary’, often based on mainstream story lines but add a lot of ‘fantasy’ elements. “Northern Exposure†strikes me as a great example of this, kind of Maybury with a dose of fantasy. More recent examples include Lost, the Simpsons, etc. Generally speaking the average Sci-Fi fan is often a fan of techno-thrillers and/or ‘quirkies’ too. ”
In literature this sort of thing is referred to as “magic realism.” It was primarily developed by Latin American writers, most notably Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez, in whose novels and short stories extraordinary things like angels falling from the sky or rain falls that last years happen without anyone involved giving them too much thought. They are treated as completely mundane (Some critics read Ray Bradbury’s early short stories as having more in common with magic realism than traditional sci-fi, and while I’m not completely sure about that–Audra, you’re the lit. expert; any thoughts?–I see where they’re coming from.) I think that what sci-fi has become has made the genre more palatable to people who weren’t particularly interested in it before (myself, for instance. Other than Star Wars I’ve never really been into science fiction until very recently with some of the films I mentioned above and, especially, Battlestar Galactica starting in 2003-4 or so).
And you’re right about Alien. That’s probably the only Ridley Scott movie I actually can say I like, even though it’s not one of my favorite movies in general nor in the series (there’s something about Ripley among the marines and Paul Reiser’s beaurocrat that really makes Aliens something special for me) and it was certainly important in developing a certain ethos in science fiction film.
Number 13 & Altair IV: You might consider contacting the television area chair (or somebody else if they are more relevant contextually) for SW/TX PCA/ACA with a paper proposal. See http://www.h-net.org/~swpca/Areas/areachair_08.htm#film .
She was just a bad seed. I shook my ass on the hood of Whitesnake’s car and you don’t see me destroying what’s left of the human race…
I think Ridley Scott is wearing the nostalgia blinders that often come with age. His Alien was great, but Cameron’s Aliens bettered it. Not a big fan of Blade Runner, very handsome movie with characters you care little about. Sci-fi films of old broke some barriers and introduced new concepts but often the dialogue, drama, acting were over the top, unbelievable. And yes, the special effects who used to dazzle then make you disbelieve now, become a curiosity.
Certainly on TV, sci-fi has shown greatness of late, Firefly, BSG and select episodes of X-Files have been wonderful. Futurama did a great comic turn on the genre, as does Venture Bros. Better than what I’ve seen in movies.
Stephanie: Right on!
Armando: I’m not sure about Bradbury. My understanding is that magical realism originated in Latin America, most notably Garcia Marquez, and its influence spread to the U.S. I think Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels has been associated with magical realism, as has Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
I do know that the literary sci-fi community claims Bradbury for its own. So my overall impression is that Bradbury is sci-fi rather than magical realism.
Maybe we need to propose the Galactica Water Cooler amendment to Arthur C Clarke’s “First Law”.
Clarke’s first law stated:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
The GWC amended version could be:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic realism.”
I hate to drag the thread off topic even more. but I had all this “magic realism” discussion in my head when I did my ‘normal’ technogeek reading. In particular I read the following item, entitled “Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes”, on the “O’Reilly Radar” blog. That’s written by Tim O’Reilly (not Radar O’Reilly) the tech book publishing entrepreneur. He’s one of my heroes. Anyhow O’Reilly has a link in it to an Amazon.com entry for a book by Robert Bly called “Leaping Poetry”.
The first customer review for Leaping Poetry kicks off with following paragraph (presumably) from the book:
‘In ancient times, in the “time of inspiration”, the poet flew from one world to another, “riding on dragons”…. They dragged behind them long tails of dragonsmoke…. This dragonsmoke means that a leap has taken place in the poem. In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the center of a work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again, a leap from the known part of the mind to the unknown part and back to the known.’
Dragonsmoke? Isn’t that in FTL drives?
Maybe I should stop smoking.
Altair IV: How about this for the amended version:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from that specified in the Sacred Scrolls relative to the Final Five”?
off topic but priceless!
http://18to88.com/Articles/starwars2007.htm
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Stephanie: do you have footage of you on that car? I’d love to see it.
For science, of course. Pure academic interest. (Cough)
Fair Melissa: a carpet joke? Naughty? You? Are you trying to corrupt us?
ummm, sand in her vagina? Ok that was just terribly sexist and demeaning. Are lesbians (moi) permitted to bash other women in a sexist manner? Her character was originally male anyhow. So we really can’t blame her gender. She went the extreme direction Adama would have gone if it hadn’t been for the president and his fatherhoodship….apparently. Except anyone who disagreed with Cain got shot in the head. I didn’t, couldn’t see Adama doing that. Hmmm, we’ve seen this whacked out renegade soldier behavior before ie that dude making a necklace of ears in Universal Soldier, Brad Pitt collecting scalps in Legends of the Fall, after his brother is killed.
“Pain of course. Fear, degradation and shame.” My guess is Admr Cain was in her first lesbian relationship. Maybe even the first time she ever let herself become vulnerable on an intimate level. Sigh, you always hurt the one you love.