Nothing but the rain....

[Conundrum]

Starbuck used this quote twice in the mini....anyone have any clue what its in reference to yet ?

[mattw65]

Well, what ever it means Adama seemed to know what she was on about.

This is addressed to those US fans who are old enough to remember (or knew someone who served), but is it some obscure reference to something said or a term used in Vietnam?

Just a thought

[Flippy]

mattw65 said:

Well, what ever it means Adama seemed to know what she was on about.

This is addressed to those US fans who are old enough to remember (or knew someone who served), but is it some obscure reference to something said or a term used in Vietnam?

Just a thought

Sounds like a pretty good guess. Maybe it will become clear later in the series? I have a feeling there will be an episode that explores some of Adama`s past in the future, maybe not this series, but I can see that coming.

pf

[Gecko]

I believe it refers to flak or AAA. Remember the metal fragments raining down on her cockpit? The cat may be her wingman or fellow piliots. Adama used this to get her out of the ZONE...k//ejk

[Mustex]

Conundrum said:

Starbuck used this quote twice in the mini....anyone have any clue what its in reference to yet ?

Sounds like it would make a cool episode name to me. ;D

[Wylden]

I vaguely recall --- and no I don't remember the name --- a book about WWII and the war in the Pacific aspect of things where a similar comment was made by two characters waiting for Gerry. They knew he was out there, but they couldn't see in the dark and all they could hear was rain (monsoon season in the islands). It might have been something Hemingway did, but it has been a long time.

[caseOrange]

mattw65 said:

This is addressed to those US fans who are old enough to remember (or knew someone who served), but is it some obscure reference to something said or a term used in Vietnam?

i knew a few vets who talked a lot about the war and nicknames they had for things, but none ever mentioned this. It's not a saying that's in the American vernacular, as far as i know.

i was as confused as the rest of you! Starbuck says it when pieces of blown-up Cylons are dropping on her cockpit, but this inside joke of theirs started before the Cylons attacked. And Starbuck is obviously too young to have fought in the 1st Cylon War.

The "cat" reference was used in the mini when they called back the vipers before the jump.

Perhaps it's from something that happened when Starbuck was training to be a pilot, or when she was training Adama's son Zak.

[Daliden]

Here's the dialogue between Starbuck and Adama when they meet right at the beginning of the mini:

"Morning, sir."
"Morning, Starbuck."
"What do you hear?"
"Nothing but the rain."
"Grab your gun and bring in the cat."
"Boom boom boom!"

Sounds a bit like frontier mythos to me . . . "too quiet outside, must be trouble ahead!"

[Recon]

I think it's just something that's made up for that particular unit. When I was in the US Cav. enlisted scouts would say, "Scouts at the Front", and the officer would say, "Tankers in the Rear"

It was just something that was unique to our unit.

We also used to call our Commander a T W A T, behind his back of course. It stood for Tanker Without A Tank, since most Cav. commanders are former tankers.

[caseOrange]

Daliden said:

Here's the dialogue between Starbuck and Adama when they meet right at the beginning of the mini:

"Morning, sir."
"Morning, Starbuck."
"What do you hear?"
"Nothing but the rain."
"Grab your gun and bring in the cat."
"Boom boom boom!"

Sounds a bit like frontier mythos to me . . . "too quiet outside, must be trouble ahead!"

It appears they are referring (with a wink and a nod) to some incident they experienced together. They're using they're own code language to refer to it. We get a hint at what it means when Starbuck says it during her battle scene.

In America, to "bring in the cat" when it's raining means just that. i've never heard of it having an underlying implication, such as "letting the cat out of the bag" (which means to reveal a secret), although, obviously, there are situations to which it could be used metaphorically.

"Grab your gun" has its literal origins, but can also mean to prepare to defend yourself, or to go off to fight.

(i hope i wasn't insulting anybody's intelligence by going into that--it was just for analysis)

Our speculations on this topic are interesting, but in the end, it's something only the writers know. All we can do is hope they'll tell us soon and stop driving everybody frackin' nuts!

[martok2112]

I am inclined to agree with you CaseOrange that the dialogue they had at the beginning of the mini suggests that there was something they experienced together.

Or perhaps when Starbuck was in officer training and flight school, Adama may have been her flight instructor. There may have been an incident during training where Adama may have had to carry out some minor punitive action on Starbuck. (Perhaps something like what we saw in "An Officer and a Gentleman"). Starbuck may have been close to the breaking point during this punitive exercise, in the hard rain.

I can actually envision this.


The scene: Hard rain on the tarmac of a Colonial training ground on Caprica. Ensign Kara Thrace is being made to run more laps than she's been accustomed to for some disciplinary action. (She had been put in the brig previously for a drunk and disorderly incident.) Not content with just having her cool her heels in the brig, command wants her broken. So it falls upon Lieutenant Colonel William Adama, her flight instructor, to carry out the reinforcing punishment.

Thrace is tired. She is about to give in to her fatigue.

Lt.Col. Adama knows there is greatness to be had in this one, if she can just temper her flaws. He does not want to see Ensign Kara Thrace wash out.

Ensign Thrace shows signs of extreme fatigue, but her spirit forces her to drive on. Her body can only take so much more though. She almost stumbles, and she staggers to recover herself, and resume her pace, which is considerably slower than what she had started out with.

Adama feels that the punishment has gone on long enough. He takes a couple of breaths, and jogs to her side to pace her.

She is almost euphoric in her exhaustion. Her nerves are aflame.

After a moment of pacing the young ensign, Adama picks up his own pace, putting some distance between himself and her.

She's quite the little starbucker, Adama muses to himself, admiring her resolve which now threatens to fail.

"Starbuck!" he calls out.

Ens. Thrace does not realize that Adama is addressing her.

"Good morning, Starbuck!" Adama bellows out.

In a daze, Thrace shakes her head. She can see her flight instructor jogging ahead of her, but running backwards. He seems to be addressing her. His words are almost distant, as if from the bottom of a barrel, or from the far end of a dark tunnel.

"What do you hear?!" he shouts.

Thrace is barely able to form words as her breathing is much more rapid. Her lungs are filled with cold fire.

"Sir?" she asks, trying to maintain her voice of pride, although speaking seems to be a difficult task at this point.

Adama jogs back to her position, and again sets pace with her. He is practically in her ear as he repeats himself over the din of the thundershower.

"Good morning, Starbuck! What - do- you -hear?"

Kara Thrace is confounded by this particular question, and by this particular moniker that her flight instructor seems to have given her. She gives a weak chuckle as she contemplates what she wants to reply with. She can reply about the only thing that is physically registering with her, beyond her own pain right now.

"Nothin but the rain," she whispers feebly, maintaining an internal laugh known only to herself.

"What's that, Starbuck?!" Adama presses sternly. "What do you hear?!"

Unable to contain her mirth anymore, Thrace responds loudly, seeming to expend some hidden reserve of strength to make her reply loud and clear. "Nothin but the rain, sir!" Her eyes roll and she begins to laugh almost maniacally.

"Grab your gun, and bring in the cat." Adama tells her, again getting ahead of her.

Adama reaches the entrance to the gymnasium, and holds open the door. Kara Thrace is still a couple hundred meters away, and her body threatens to make her drop in her tracks.

"Come on, Starbuck! Grab your gun and bring in the cat! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! LET's GO!" he roars at her, pressing her on as if he were more a drill instructor than a flight instructor. "SHOW ME WHAT YOU GOT!"

Thrace shakes her head yet again. The door to the gymnasium, shelter from the driving rain, is open, and her superior officer is urging her to get inside, but quick! The welcoming sight of the open door seems to help her summon up one more last ounce of hidden inner strength. Taking as deep a breath as she can, closing her eyes hard, she screams a battle cry at the top of her lungs, and sprints toward the door. Her pace is astonishing, for someone so tired.

"Come on." Adama whispers to himself, silently urging the young officer to hustle it. "You can do it, Thrace!"

It seems like an eternity for the young Kara Thrace as she rushes for the waiting shelter. The hard rain seems to keep her marginally cool, although every single nerve in her body feels like it is about to explode.

Then, before she knows it, she is inside the warm gymnasium...the rain has stopped assailing her worn out body. She is about to collapse, but inexplicably does not hit the wooden floor. Something is holding her upright, and keeping her walking.

"You crash now and you'll go into shock," a distant, yet familiar voice quietly admonishes her. "Come on, keep walking. This is a cool down. Let's go."

She can barely keep her eyes open. The words she hears still have the reverberating, far end of the dark tunnel effect. When she does manage to clear her head some, and her nerves seem to tingle with overwhelming numbness, she looks up and sees that Lt. Col. William "Husker" Adama is supporting her, and assisting her with walking around the gym floor.

"Starbuck, sir?" she asks in a labored breath as they continue their cooldown pace.

"Congradulations, Lieutenant! You have been purified, and born again. Your new callsign is Starbuck."

Her clouded mind considers the sound of the nickname, and something triggers a rather pleasant acceptance.

She tries to speak, and ends up coughing. When she finally stops, she whispers: "So say we all."

Starbuck is born!



I don't know...that's what I envision.

Respectfully submitted for your consideration,
Martok2112 (Colonial Storyteller, and Ambassador of Goodwill between the fans)

SO SAY WE ALL!

[caseOrange]

Respectfully to: Martok2112, Colonial Storyteller, and Ambassador of Goodwill between the fans

;D
That was excellent! ;D

Halfway through the story, i realized i was hooked into it as if i was reading a good novel--i had to keep reading to find out what happened next! ;D

i had actually envisioned a situation where she had to do flight training in the rain, and the type of training viper (or whatever type of vehicle it may have been) was nicknamed the "cat", and...well...i really hadn't thought about it much beyond that.

i have a couple of questions, simply out of curiousity.

i realize in what sense you're using the term "starbucker", as in a kind of rough and ready, never-say-die type of person. Is this an actual term from TOS or the the original movie, or just a thought for now? Seriously--i'm just wondering.

Second--and this is seriously, also--is Adama's nickname really "Husker"? And if so, how did he get it?

The only other thing i would add--and this is with ALL due respect, because i think you've got a great idea going and you've painted the scenario very vividly--is that i think Starbuck should get her nickname sometime during the beginning of basic training. i say this for two reasons:

1) Realizing the condition she's in, Adama is trying to elicit a coherent response from her to make sure she's still with him. i don't think that he would choose to call her by a made-on-the-spot nickname at that point.

2) Usually (but definitely not always) a drill sergeant (or flight instructor) will give recruits their nicknames in the begining of boot camp (a la Full Metal Jacket). i'll freely admit, though, that this could be one of those situations where a recruit earns his or her nickname. i just don't think he'd start calling her that until they were inside the gym.

[martok2112]

caseOrange said:

Respectfully to: Martok2112, Colonial Storyteller, and Ambassador of Goodwill between the fans

;D
That was excellent! ;D

Halfway through the story, i realized i was hooked into it as if i was reading a good novel--i had to keep reading to find out what happened next! ;D

i had actually envisioned a situation where she had to do flight training in the rain, and the type of training viper (or whatever type of vehicle it may have been) was nicknamed the "cat", and...well...i really hadn't thought about it much beyond that.

WOW! Thank you for that assessment, Case Orange. I am most flatterred and honored. And I think it goes to show that great minds think alike on some ideas....and so do ours.

Most flatterred. Thank you so much.

caseOrange said:

i have a couple of questions, simply out of curiousity.

i realize in what sense you're using the term "starbucker", as in a kind of rough and ready, never-say-die type of person. Is this an actual term from TOS or the the original movie, or just a thought for now? Seriously--i'm just wondering.

Second--and this is seriously, also--is Adama's nickname really "Husker"? And if so, how did he get it?

Well, in TOS, Starbuck was a proper name (although if you take Galactica 1980 into account, it would seem that Starbuck's name coulda been like Boxey's, more of a cute nickname that just seemed to stick with him through childhood. He may have had a more traditional name...just like when we find out that the fully grown Boxey is called Troy) As for Starbuck, I don't think that there was an actual incident (short of birth christening) that gave Starbuck his name. However, (at least in the novels) there was term that was created as a result of his name...it was called "getting Starbucked", which meant that one had fallen victim to one of Starbuck's scams (which often came as a life lesson more than a practical joke) .

As for William Adama, if you look at the nameplate on his Viper Mk II, he has the callsign of "Husker", so that is what I went by. AFAIK, and AFAIC, his callsign was Husker.

caseOrange said:

The only other thing i would add--and this is with ALL due respect, because i think you've got a great idea going and you've painted the scenario very vividly--is that i think Starbuck should get her nickname sometime during the beginning of basic training. i say this for two reasons:

1) Realizing the condition she's in, Adama is trying to elicit a coherent response from her to make sure she's still with him. i don't think that he would choose to call her by a made-on-the-spot nickname at that point.

2) Usually (but definitely not always) a drill sergeant (or flight instructor) will give recruits their nicknames in the begining of boot camp (a la Full Metal Jacket). i'll freely admit, though, that this could be one of those situations where a recruit earns his or her nickname. i just don't think he'd start calling her that until they were inside the gym.

You've got some very good reasoning there, Case....and I agree with a lot of it. (Much of what I wrote was obviously on the fly.)

Now, the way I envisioned it here was that you had two different schools, OCS (Officer Candidate School) and FCS (Flight Candidate School) (Granted, I don't think this is the way it works in the real world military, but I wanted to give it some sense of uniqueness.) Kara Thrace, in my little scenario, had already graduated OCS, and she was now working on becoming a fighter pilot.

The reason I had her earn her nickname here as opposed to OCS was because of the conversation she had with Tigh at the card game, just before she decked him.

TIGH: Starbuck. Starbuck....buck buck buck buck....Where did you get that nickname? Was that before, going into the brig for drunk and disorderly, or after?

THRACE: (smugly) After.


So, for the purposes of my little scenario, I had it set up to where she had served her time in the brig after her incident, at sometime during FCS. The reason that I thought Adama would make the perfect choice for giving her that nickname was because if you watch the card game incident in the mini, she has a VERY smug look on her face. I interpretted that as "you drunk S.O.B., you would absolutely kill yourself if you found out just WHO gave me that nickname."

In my scenario, Adama wanted to get her attention through rather abstract means...so he gave her that nickname on the spot...as kind of a spirit lifter. It is quite possible that she had a different callsign originally, (during OCS and it may have carried over into early FCS) and I wanted Adama to convey that he had more confidence in her than most other senior officers, and perhaps her peers. When Thrace catches on that Adama is indeed addressing her, something in her psyche tells her to run with that moniker.

I hope those made some sense.


I sincerely thank you, Case Orange, for your assessment, and for your takes on the matter. You have some very intriguing ideas I'd not considered.

Check out my Yahoo group where my fanfictions for classic Galactica are kept.

groups.yahoo.com/group/BSGCon

The first story is called "Battlestar Galactica: Dark Exodus", it is a continuation story where Galactica finds Earth in the 21st century, and they must fight against the coming Cylon invasion. Reciprocity is the story's direct sequel. You can also find the story at Colonial Fleets.

also, I made up a teaser trailer for Dark Exodus here:
battlestargalactica-forum.com/post/Dark%20Exodus%20DC%20Teaser.WMV


You will have a better chance of getting the teaser from there than you might at my Yahoo group (since Yahoo is so stingy with their bandwidth).

Thank you again, and yet again, Case Orange. I am honored.

Respectfully,
Martok2112

[caseOrange]

martok2112 said:

As for William Adama, if you look at the nameplate on his Viper Mk II, he has the callsign of "Husker", so that is what I went by.

i had wondered about that when i saw the mini. It didn't even click that, unlike TOS, some character's names were now their call signs.

martok2112 said:

TIGH: Starbuck. Starbuck....buck buck buck buck....Where did you get that nickname? Was that before, going into the brig for drunk and disorderly, or after?

THRACE: (smugly) After.

i'm glad you mentioned this. ;D i remember that conversation clearly (probably because of the fight scene that followed it), but i kept drawing a blank when it came to her response. i couldn't remember if she said "before" or "after".

martok2112 said:

The reason that I thought Adama would make the perfect choice for giving her that nickname was because if you watch the card game incident in the mini, she has a VERY smug look on her face. I interpretted that as "you drunk S.O.B., you would absolutely kill yourself if you found out just WHO gave me that nickname."

Nice. i like that thought you assigned to her look, and i totally agree that Adama should be the one to bestow the nickname on her. They seem to have the utmost respect for each other, plus they have that little inside joke that got this thread started!

The trailer you created was pretty cool! i won't have a chance to check out the bboards on your site for a few days because of work, but i will definitely sign up as soon as i get a chance!

Who knows? Maybe "Dark Exodus" will become part of a pseudo-BSG canon (i say "pseudo" because Alan already trumped me on tying the two series' together into a cohesive linear story. But it did help me to understand TOS a little better ).
;D

[martok2112]

Thanks for all the kind words, Case. Made my night.

This little scenario seems to have gotten a favorable response at Colonial Fleets as well. I am near prompted to write up a fanfic of Kara's backstory.

And all because of a cool thread that got started here called "Nothing but the rain."

Respectfully and with great appreciation,
Martok2112