Thoughts on Drummer's arc in season five.



I was thinking about that scene back early in the season when Oksana talks Drummer out of pursuing Marco, and tells her she used to be violent and full of rage, but now she can be softer because she has a family to support her.

I think that I, like everyone else, took that scene at face value at the time: that Oksana is right, that being with Oksana and the others has gentled her and settled her and made her happy. It's only looking back on it that it starts to feel like a sort of ... grinding down, I guess, of Drummer's moral center, with Oksana talking her out of trying to stop Marco before he hurts other people, and instead passing it off as someone else's responsibility, and convincing her that what she feels is right is actually the wrong thing to do.

Which is what Oksana continues doing throughout the show.

Oksana isn't a bad person. She's not even wrong. It's not Drummer's responsibility to go track Marco down. And she really is well-intentioned. She cares about Drummer and wants her to be happy.

The thing about Oksana, though, is that her moral compass is centered very firmly on keeping the people she loves safe. For her, responsibility centers on that one tiny group of people - her family.

And when someone like Marco comes along, that ends up turning her into a collaborator. With her family at risk, Oksana eventually will do whatever Marco wants her to, no matter how vile, as long as it keeps her family safe. It's not that she's evil or anything, in fact I really appreciate that she's not portrayed that way, but I saw someone on Tumblr call Oksana the moral center of the group and ... no?!! Dude. She's the textbook definition of a collaborator. She doesn't want to, but she will do anything Marco asks, up to and including killing people, in order to keep her family safe.

But Drummer is not like that. Working for Marco is tearing her apart all season, and comes to a head at the end, when she finally rips apart the bubble of uneasy safety that she and the rest of the Mowteng/DeWalt crew have created around themselves at everyone else's expense and does what she believes is right.

It's making me look back and think about the thing I disliked most about Drummer's storyline this season, which is that Drummer becoming a pirate feels like such a repudiation of her character up to this point, and realize that maybe it's supposed to feel like that.

When she turns off the message from the robbed ship asking her how she can live with herself, that's not supposed to be a moment of triumph. It's a moral quandary that Drummer is effectively bypassing, which comes back to bite her by the end of the season.

Drummer isn't a fragile flower; we saw her try to space a guy to keep order on the Behemoth. She's not going to shy away from piracy if it's what she needs to do to survive. And I'm now thinking about Drummer, adrift in the Belt, looking for a place to be, falling in with this group of people (led at that time by Oksana) who offer her a place as long as she does things their way. She doesn't have anywhere else to go, and she likes them, and she has a feeling of camaraderie, of equal camaraderie, and family, and love, maybe for the first time ever, so of course she's going to fall in with them and allow their moral compass to become her own. And every time she starts to steer back to who she used to be - a big-picture person, a commander, someone who spent the last year working thanklessly and tirelessly to try to maintain an uneasy peace between Belters and Inners - Oksana gently steers her back to who they are: a "family is everything, let the world burn" group of Belt pirates.

Getting back to Oksana as the moral center of the group: she is, actually. And that's not necessarily a good thing. It's what makes the group crack down the middle at the end, not that either Oksana or Drummer are necessarily right or wrong, but that Drummer's big-picture, trying to fix the world way of being is completely at odds with Oksana's "my family is what matters, let everyone else burn" way of being. It always was going to come to a head sooner or later.

Being the way Oksana is (Family Above All) turns you into a collaborator when someone like Marco comes into power. And being like Drummer (do what's right, no matter the cost; try to save as many people as you can) can very easily get your friends killed, which is what's been happening to her all season. It's not easy. I really appreciate that we actually saw the brutal, bloody cost of that.

But I also feel like we've spent the season watching Drummer pulled farther and farther out of true, dragged away from the core of herself, with Oksana as the main agent of that (however well-intentioned), and I'm really looking forward to seeing what she does next season, and who she turns out to be at the end of it all.