I was partly right (Callie bit the dust) and partly wrong (it wasn’t her husband Tyrol accidentally killing her).

I guessed pretty early on that it would probably be Assistant Girl (let’s call her AG, I can never remember the character’s name) that killed Callie. And then as Callie was really losing it, I thought, well, maybe I’ve really been led astray here and Callie will actually kill Tyrol, and geez Louise, she surely came close!

And then it was, “Callie, don’t give that baby to AG. Don’t do, Callie. Don’t give her that baby.”

That was perhaps the most horrid death I’ve ever seen portrayed on TV. Not in its physical brutality, amount of torture, bloodshed, “creativity” (people — well, Cylons — have been sucked out airlocks before on BG!). The crime shows gleely pursue more and more disgusting things to portray in their attempts to outdo each other with horrid deaths. But Callie’s death was horrific without shedding a drop of blood (other than the blow to the head that initially knocked her to the ground). I still can’t even really let myself fully imagine what that would be like — to come to the realization that your baby has been taken from you by a Cylon (or super-bad guy whom no one else realizes is a super-bad guy, in non BG terms), immediately followed by the realization that within second you are going to be dead, with absolutely no hope that you will survive, you will never see your baby again, and you will go to your death unable to tell anyone that the person who has your baby is a Cylon (super-bad guy). If Callie had time to think about it, she might have thought too that she was going to her death as the only person on the ship who knew that there are murdering traitors on the ship who could cause the death of everyone else, and not even just her baby. But how horrid to see your baby through the glass and count the seconds…

I know, I know. Callie is a character, written by some dudes in Hollywood or Vancouver or whatever, brought to life by an actress who (presumably) is walking around today in perfect health. But for me at least, the ability to empathize with a character, to put myself in his/her shoes and imagine what would that be like is what makes TV/movies/books etc. worthwhile. And, now that I think about it, it’s probably a big part of why I don’t really get into the whole internal Cylon deal. Do Cylons think and feel the same way humans do? I don’t know. I can’t empathize with them. The ones who never knew they were Cylons and presumably do think and feel the same as humans, those I can empathize with a bit more. Imagine you found out you were a Cylon!

I can remember reading Dostoevsky’s Besy (The Demons, or The Possessed), and, when a particular character died and the man who loved her is so devastated, I was crying and asking God, “Why? Why?” (!!!) And then I remembered I was reading a book and should have asked Dostoevsky “Why? Why?”

But back to BG. I found the scenes with Starbuck painful. Not painful-good but painful-unpleasant. This is not the Starbuck I loved. But…maybe it could be OK. The rebel with/without a cause who finally pushes things so far people no longer thinks she’s cool…they just think she’s nuts. We’ll see.

And a compaint…the use of the ubiquitous BG “frak”. I am so sick of this word. In my view it has become nothing more than an excuse to basically use the “f” word constantly. It is now used in every place, every context, every collocation (phrase) that the “f” word is used in in English. Except that much “f” word would make it rated R. I try not to watch a lot of R-rated movies, but there’s no absolute moratorium on it for me. But I really, really get sick of hearing the “f” word over and over and over and over again as if it were about as common and necessary as the word “the.” And on BG, as in the scene between Starbuck and her (estranged?) husband, it’s gotten pretty close to that. Enough already. I don’t want to hear “frak” all day any more than I want to hear the vulgarity it’s oh-so-obviously substituting for.