I watched Battlestar Galactica: Razor twice this weekend just so I could have the following over-analytical email exchange with fellow Film.com writer and "Geek Goddess" MaryAnn Johanson.

DM writes: Some said BSG jumped the shark when Pegasus was introduced. Others said it was when they discovered the latest temple. The rest are predicting that last season's ending, with the four Cylons revealed, was the shark-jumping moment. Either way, I think, with *Razor,*BSG somehow jumped backwards over the shark, which may be the first time in history that's happened. Dark, disturbing and just cheesy enough around the edges to be real sci-fi.

MAJ writes: I can't speak to any shark jumping in S2, and I don't think there was a moment in S3 when I thought it jumped. But if a show needed to jump back over the shark, *Razor* is the kind of thing to do it. Dark and disturbing? Yes, hell. The thing that I've come to love about BSG is that it's not afraid to ask hard questions.. and then not answer them. There's not a lot of sci-fi -- and not a lot of pop culture of any genre -- that's willing to be so morally ambiguous. And I think we need that, especially with what's going on in the larger world. I think it's good to be reminded that what's right and what's wrong is not always as cut-and-dried as we'd like to think it is.

Did you see something cheesy in *Razor*? Cuz I didn't ... and I don't think "cheese" is a requirement of great sci-fi, either. *grin*

DM: Cheesiness? Well, for one, whenever it cut to commercial break, Sci Fi would flash this bizarre little summary, sponsored by Quiznos. "It has been revealed: Cain is getting it on with a Cylon," the booming voice would say. "It has been revealed: Bill Adama wasn't as pockmarked in his 20s." Or something like that.

MAJ: You can't blame BSG for Sci Fi's cheesiness. Sure, those summaries were bizarre, and pointless: I kept wanting to call them "BSG for Dummies," you know: "And here's a recap for everyone who just missed the completely obvious ..." But that's really got nothing to do with what was actually going on in the story.

DM: Well, I still can't disassociate Michelle Forbes (Cain) from her Bajoran character on Star Trek TNG, Ensign Ro. I mean, the very act of casting her makes it a little bit cheesy. And that's not even touching on the old school Centurions they brought back for the show. It felt like Starbuck was stuck on a ride at Universal Studios.

MAJ: I always loved Ensign Ro. She was tough and had a huge chip on her shoulder, but that was cool: she was so unlike the other female characters on Star Trek. Heck, she was unlike the male characters, too. She was "complicated," which is what is so fascinating about all the characters on BSG: you can't pin them down, and they never, ever fall into the gender stereotypes we're so used to seeing on TV, and in science fiction. Cain is emphatically NOT a "jilted lover," and to reduce her to that is to try to shoehorn her into the usual limited role women are allowed in sci-fi and other genre fiction. She is not "jilted" by the Cylon. She IS betrayed, but in a way that has more to do with trust in a sense that's far larger than anything sexual. And to call her any kind of "bitch" reduces Cain to something stereotypically female, and only in a negative sense. We might call Bill Adama or Sol Tighe a bastard when either is tough, but there isn't quite the same connotation to that as there is to calling a woman a "bitch."

DM: OK, Ensign Ro was, indeed, more complicated. Personally, I preferred her predecessor Tasha Yar, who, in one of the stinky cheesiest plot lines in all of sci-fi, had drunken sex with DATA.

But who's star waltzing with a toaster now? Cain. With Gina, played by Tricia Helfer, who also appeared in Playboy last February. It's a nerd fantasy.

MAJ: Hey, your nerd fantasy does not cheese make. Not everyone was watching *Razor* through the glasses of your dirty mind. *grin*

DM: Hey, all three of us -- a single guy, a married dude, and a gay kid -- all thought the same thing. We even rewound the TiVo to check whether the Gina-Cain kiss was on the cheek or the lips.

MAJ: Hey, straight girls like BSG, too. :-> We didn't rewind.

DM: You wouldn't need to. You saw it on the big screen.

OK, OK. Back to Cain. I read her as a sadist. I mean, who else but a sadist would give the order to shoot children while staring into the eyes of her former lover, now "degraded." I mean, the first time she slammed Kendra Shaw, she had a laugh afterwards.

But you're right on the word "jilted." You caught me more in sloppy writing than anything else. She was betrayed. But no more than Helo and Tyrol; each of them would've died for their Cylon partner (at Cain's hands, no less). Ultimately, Battlestar is the cheesiest plot line of all: hope and love conquers all.

And that's why I think you can nail the characters down. They fall into, if not stereotypes, then archetypes. All of this has happened before and will happen again ... They're all being moved by fate. Apollo, for example, is always the rising son. You can predict exactly what decision he has to make, *Razor* being case in point. You knew exactly how that showdown with his dad was going to play out. It played out the only way it could.

It was incredible seeing female characters at the center of both story lines. But I mean, really, I don't think there were any characters here that you couldn't find in, say, Starship Troopers.

MAJ: Sure, I'll agree that Cain is a sadist. And if anyone did the jilting, it's Cain: as you note, other humans have been able to deal with the sudden knowledge that they're in love with toasters. And I'll agree to your archetypes label... to a degree. It's possible to say that you won't find any characters here that you wouldn't find in Starship Troopers in the same way that it's possible to say that you won't find any characters in one of Shakespeare's comedies that you won't find in any given Adam Sandler romantic comedy: it's what you do with those characters that matters. BSG is so well written that the potentially foregone conclusions that character arcs come to don't seem foregone. I wouldn't have predicted that Cain would shoot her XO. I wouldn't have predicted that Lee would order Starbuck to sacrifice herself. In retrospect, they all might seem obvious, but while you're watching, they come as a surprise.

Cain is hard, and makes some decisions that, in a more comfortable light, look wrong. But as Adama points out, history is written by the winners, and Cain comes out on the losing side. It's not to say that morality is entirely relative, but how we look at events is inevitably tinged by our hindsight.

DM: History being written by the winners. Such a great literary moment. We just learned even more about their fate from the tub monster who looked like Bill Nighy. They can write their history, but their future's already been written.

That line, though, wasn't about Cain. It was about Kendra Shaw and the weight of her soul, whether history will remember her as a murderer or a hero. Kendra Shaw ties Baltar as my favorite character on the show. What did you make of her?

MAJ: Shaw? I see her as being under Cain's sway: not necessarily in a nefarious way, but in that way that young people find a mentor and fall in love with them, in a non-romantic way. We don't know much about Shaw before she arrives on the "Pegasus," but what we do see is a woman who is a little insecure: Cain's refusal to let Shaw wallow in that combined with the urgency of the Cylon attack honed Shaw into her own kind of razor. She's a person who found herself because of the war... and found that who she was wasn't someone she particularly liked, in the end.

One thing that bugged me about Shaw is this: Why did she see the Cylon guy in the tub as someone who was able to forgive her in any way that would mean anything to her? I understand her desire for forgiveness, but I really, really wanted her to tell that guy, "You don't have the power to forgive me." With the implication being that only her own death could do that, for herself.

DM: I had trouble with the end as well. For a moment I wondered if it was some sort of allegorical statement about Christianity being an "evolutionary dead end." That didn't matter, though. Shaw didn't get the warning to Apollo, not really... so does that mean she's not forgiven? After getting burnt on my Journeyman foot-in-mouth post, I'm inclined to wait and see how it plays out in the next season.

MAJ: Is Shaw not forgiven? I guess that depends on who you think has the power to forgive Shaw, and from whom she was seeking forgiveness. If she wants her fellow humans to think better of her, then she has surely accomplished as much of that as she could, and as much atonement as Apollo and the gang could have expected: they don't know that Shaw didn't relay the message she was trying to relay. (And again: Why would Shaw believe the Cylon-in-the-tub when he talks about Starbuck? Is maybe Shaw a Cylon herself and hence subconsciously predisposed to believe another Cylon, even if she never knew it?) If she was seeking to forgive herself, then maybe she doesn't feel as if she did that, because she knows she failed to get that message through.

DM: Great. Now you have me thinking she's a Cylon. After all, if she were a Cylon, her mission might have been the same: destroy the obsolete technology. I'd be seriously stoked if she was the final Cylon.

But the questions remain:
1.) What was that stuff in the syringe?
2.) What kind of accent is that?

MAJ:
1.) Adam "Takezo Kensei" Munroe's blood?
2.) Sounds Australian to me. Er, I mean, um, Gemenonian.

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