![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
A Tale of Two Boomers
Mar. 28th, 2005 06:03 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
selenak.livejournal.comHello there. First, but certainly not last post in this community, which I've been lurking in for a while now.
Reading commentaries on the two incarnations of Sharon Valerii, aka Boomer, with whom we get presented in the first season of BSG (discounting random Boomer models which exist to illustrate there are more around), I noticed that basically everyone favours Caprica!Boomer. Just a theory, but my guess is the reason lies somewherein audience expectations regarding certain very familiar romantic/sexual storylines. C! Boomer’s storyline is straightforward. She knows exactly what she is (a Cylon), as opposed to Galactica!Boomer, which gives her greater self assurance. After sex and various hardships, she falls in love with the human she is assigned to, and changes sides, helping him to escape his enemies for real after having pretended it at the start. In short, she’s a Bond girl. Though Helo is somewhat more clueless than the traditional James Bond. The reassurance that sex and true love will make a girl from the bad guys’ camp convert to the good guys for love of her hero is something nice and comfortable and wished for.
G!Boomer, on the other hand, offers no such assurance. She starts out full firmly in the good guys’ camp as far as she knows, but gets increasingly full of self-doubts, caused by the ever less repressible awareness that she is not what she always believed to be, a human being. Her romance with Tyrol does not help to convert her to anything; on the contrary, it only brings them misery, and the supreme irony is that it would have if she had been nothing but a human, because of their respective positions. Tyrol helps her avoid discovery in the short term, but shared danger and secrecy draw them apart, as opposed to bringing them together a la Helo and C!Boomer, and it does not help her with her basic problem at all, which remains the same. Sex and romance do not save the day, or cause the turning of sides. It fails. By episode 12, Sharon is so isolated and in despair that she makes an attempt to commit suicide to stop herself from what she can feel will overtake her soon, her inner program. In short, G!Boomer is not a Bond girl. She’s the Manchurian candidate. This is anything but reassuring to the audience.
I see the two Sharons as complimentary, but to me, G!Boomer is the more interesting because she’s the one for whom I can see no happy ending, and whose insecurities and emotional messiness is real to me in a way that C!Boomers are not. Because I know my Bond girls, and how their story goes. Same with the respective romances. The one between C!Boomer and Helo was predictable, and ever so slightly offensive (to me) because of the whole hero converting bad girl via the magic of sex and hero-(Helo-)ness not so subtext. The one between G!Boomer and the Chief, otoh, did not belong in the region of Bond or other action films. They loved each other. It didn’t help. The last thing Sharon says to Tyrol in the first season, “Chief, you’re dismissed” , and him saluting, both echoes their cheerful pretense of formal interaction in the miniseries and sums up in a final sad note why their relationship failed. It made me hurt for them both. Which the most successful love stories all do.
Reading commentaries on the two incarnations of Sharon Valerii, aka Boomer, with whom we get presented in the first season of BSG (discounting random Boomer models which exist to illustrate there are more around), I noticed that basically everyone favours Caprica!Boomer. Just a theory, but my guess is the reason lies somewherein audience expectations regarding certain very familiar romantic/sexual storylines. C! Boomer’s storyline is straightforward. She knows exactly what she is (a Cylon), as opposed to Galactica!Boomer, which gives her greater self assurance. After sex and various hardships, she falls in love with the human she is assigned to, and changes sides, helping him to escape his enemies for real after having pretended it at the start. In short, she’s a Bond girl. Though Helo is somewhat more clueless than the traditional James Bond. The reassurance that sex and true love will make a girl from the bad guys’ camp convert to the good guys for love of her hero is something nice and comfortable and wished for.
G!Boomer, on the other hand, offers no such assurance. She starts out full firmly in the good guys’ camp as far as she knows, but gets increasingly full of self-doubts, caused by the ever less repressible awareness that she is not what she always believed to be, a human being. Her romance with Tyrol does not help to convert her to anything; on the contrary, it only brings them misery, and the supreme irony is that it would have if she had been nothing but a human, because of their respective positions. Tyrol helps her avoid discovery in the short term, but shared danger and secrecy draw them apart, as opposed to bringing them together a la Helo and C!Boomer, and it does not help her with her basic problem at all, which remains the same. Sex and romance do not save the day, or cause the turning of sides. It fails. By episode 12, Sharon is so isolated and in despair that she makes an attempt to commit suicide to stop herself from what she can feel will overtake her soon, her inner program. In short, G!Boomer is not a Bond girl. She’s the Manchurian candidate. This is anything but reassuring to the audience.
I see the two Sharons as complimentary, but to me, G!Boomer is the more interesting because she’s the one for whom I can see no happy ending, and whose insecurities and emotional messiness is real to me in a way that C!Boomers are not. Because I know my Bond girls, and how their story goes. Same with the respective romances. The one between C!Boomer and Helo was predictable, and ever so slightly offensive (to me) because of the whole hero converting bad girl via the magic of sex and hero-(Helo-)ness not so subtext. The one between G!Boomer and the Chief, otoh, did not belong in the region of Bond or other action films. They loved each other. It didn’t help. The last thing Sharon says to Tyrol in the first season, “Chief, you’re dismissed” , and him saluting, both echoes their cheerful pretense of formal interaction in the miniseries and sums up in a final sad note why their relationship failed. It made me hurt for them both. Which the most successful love stories all do.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
