MONDO EXTRAS

My bias shows because I don't consider it a weakness here, personally, but you have to find your audience and bring them with you, and I don't think Razor did that, for everybody. I think it sucks for precisely the same reason that it is awesome: it's a story told in a foreign language, of inference and emotion, social dynamic and philosophical implication, set against plot, plot, plot that we already know, start to finish. That we've been trained, by SF TV through the ages, to expect to have explained to us with vaudevillian, commedia dell'arte specificity. "This backstory signifies because, look, Cain is crying while she's alone. See? She totally just explained aloud how it happened; she clicked the narrative closed like a box so you don't have to do any of the work yourself. Don't you see the development? See, how a crazy lesbian will always kill everybody? See, how a woman scorned is so emotional and irrational that women in power will always fall, raving and frothing?" If "Crossroads" was like having your steak cut up for you into tiny pieces, like a good little boy or girl, or chewed and regurgitated onto your plate, Razor is more like being handed an entire live chicken. And this on top of Jacobsen-Chaves's dead-eyed lock on Shaw's every movement, her graceful stillness and shell-shocked resistance to emotion, the opposite of acting, almost -- and on top of that, it's asking us to do the impossible, once again: To love even the Pegasus, for what war requires. We can only understand Helena at this point in the story because it's only now that we have seen people do this and come back. Helena never loses control like Kara did in the New Caprica Detention Center, and never believed she could come back, so she didn't. That's the saddest part, to me. Nobody ever wanted to be a villain and nobody ever wanted to kill: they got there by cruel fate, and they must be loved.