Cain and GinaThis is a featured page

When we first saw Gina, frail and hollowed out like a shell, destroyed by the viciousness of Lieutenant Thorne and his compatriots, the explanation given for their behavior when they were challenged on moral grounds was that it was a Cylon, only a machine, not a person. But that never rang quite true, for many reasons; fundamentally of course, there is the deeper truth to such an excuse that whether or not the victim is capable of caring or even knowing they were hurt, the person who dealt out the hurting is still culpable for having done so. But more than that, there is the specific truth of this event, which is that this happened on a ship run by a woman, that a woman knew of it, condoned it, and therefore, had ordered it. That alone was enough to conclude that there was something between these women. For one woman to allow, much less to encourage, such brutalizing of another, there is something deeper than war or the cold, impersonal cruelty of a captor to their caged enemy. To hate someone that much, you have to have loved them first.

And in Razor, we got to see that love. The Number Six known as Gina was to Admiral Helena Cain much the same as Caprica Six was to Gaius Baltar. Her purpose, the role her line was designed and programmed for, is to enchant and seduce, to gain access by way of passion and emotion, some of the most easily exploited traits of human nature. But we know Number Six, and she's far too good at losing herself in the role. Watch her in that moment when she has the chance to kill Cain on the bridge of the Pegasus, just after she has been revealed as a Cylon. She should take the shot, she knows it, but she's been with this woman so long, so intimately; not only does she find herself incapable of harming Cain, she cannot likely imagine how horribly at ease Cain will be with giving the order to harm her. The Cylons haven't lived long enough with the torment of love; how could they understand the human instinct toward vengeance for emotional pain?

Gina learns all of this from Cain, by way of Cain's delegated brutality. She is able to deliver Cain one final blow, just before killing her, with the insult, "You're not my type." Though it may not have been true, though Gina may have genuinely been attracted to Cain and cared for her, she twists that knife that Cain has no doubt been working in her own gut for months: this beautiful, intelligent, warm woman never loved Cain at all; she was just an assignment. Cain's been lashing out at Gina secondhand for this perceived slight, and now Gina gets to use it to see tears glinting in Cain's eyes just before pulling the trigger.

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Latest page update: made by bansidhewail , May 8 2008, 8:44 PM EDT (about this update About This Update bansidhewail Edited by bansidhewail

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