BSG: This Is Supposed to Feel Like a Victory Right?
Caution: spoilers for “Blood on the Scales” (4.14)
Man. Am I going to have to eulogize every week now?
Hang onto your seat. It’s going to be another long one.
Easy stuff first:
Crack in Galactica
Wouldn’t it be a kick in the pants if they had to abandon Galactica and make the Basestar the new flagship? Installing Cylon FTL drives doesn’t seem so bad now. Huh, fleet?
Conspiracy
If I were a person in the fleet, I’d totally be smelling conspiracy. Roslin and Adama are back at their respective helms. No Quorum. No Zarek. More dependent on the Cylons than ever. Yup, conspiracy.
Racetrack
Her story got cut because of running time, but that moment where she and Zarek are sharing a joke just sickened me—as I’m sure it was meant to.
Teasers
My cable set up doesn’t have the Sci-Fi Channel. I watch the series through an On Demand feature. This means I don’t get next week’s teaser. I think I like the omission because when the screen goes to black, I get to focus on what just happened instead of automatically jumping ahead to next week. The only negative is that I get to say “Holy crap!” in front of a computer screen when I read about the teaser somewhere else.
Baltar
Hurrah for change! One of the reasons I love Doctor Who is because it constantly asks the question, “What do you do after you’ve walked with god?” I hope they’ll keep exploring this development in Baltar.
Narcho
I hope Adama really hears what this pilot had to say. Adama and Roslin need to refocus on effective communication.
Revolutions
I just recently reread George Orwell’s Animal Farm and this passage from Jacob at TWoP:
The reason that all revolutions turn to the right is that the only people selfish enough to agitate violence toward any kind of praxis or new paradigms are the same people who are too short-sighted to put something better in place, or else they would realize it’s possible to do so without all this drama in the first place. One big day of damage is never as good as the hundred or thousand days before it that you could have used to work toward a better world.
There seem to be two types that start revolutions: the believer in the something better and the agitator looking for something more. Neither is particularly adept at actually building a new society once everything is brought down.
I wonder if the United States somehow escaped this fate because for as many of the above archetypes we had, we had just as many who did not fit the mold.
Gaeta
I’ve been wondering lately, “How did I get here?” I’m a business owner. I have a condo and a permanent household. I had enough financial strength to lose significantly when the stocks went south.
How did I get here? This wasn’t the life I envisioned eight years ago.
My place now is in no way bad or undesirable, but if I stop to think about it, where I am is certainly bewildering.
Perhaps that’s why I feel a kinship to Dualla and Gaeta. Where and who were they eight years ago?
They did what they’re supposed to do. They tried to keep up. They’re always wonderfully above average, but the world just keeps shifting around.
And one day, Gaeta finds himself at a dead end. He’s a tragic character in the classical sense—someone who brings about his own downfall. But, significantly, he knows what he did to get there. The intentions did not match the results, but he understood the results and his part in them.
He messed up. He read everything wrong. He allowed himself to get angry and corrupted inside. And unlike Dee, he allowed all this to bring down the fleet, kill his friends, and destroyed who he was and who he could have been.
Knowing, definitively, the truth about oneself may be the scariest threat ever. People run so long and hard to avoid it.
Except—once you get there, you know that the truth is never bad. It is simply the truth. And Felix had at least one moment of that clarity and acceptance. Before it all was over.
Zarek
The very reasons why I have sympathy for Gaeta are why I don’t feel the same for Zarek. Over the eight years, he hasn’t changed. He hasn’t changed since he was in jail before the Cylon attack.
I do believe in the importance of dissenting voices. What he says, for me, is separate from what I think of him as a person.
Agitation for agitation’s sake is the stuff of children. In all his moves, why does he choose to be the man behind the power?
He pushed Baltar out front. Lee stepped forward. Gaeta also. Zarek hid behind them all. I haven’t figured out why yet. Cowardice? A sneaking suspicion of one’s own inadequacy? As a protective measure to ensure he’ll never fail?
But to break things down without sufficient thought to the rebuild is an immature tantrum.
Zarek was most at ease and most likeable on New Caprica, where there was nothing he could do to gain anything.
But power doesn’t seem to be his ultimate goal. He doesn’t seize it with enough gusto. I don’t get the sense that he really wants to be responsible for the choices that he’s seen Roslin able to make over the years.
So he can’t build a world according to these tenants he’s always exposing. He doesn’t even want to be king. He just wants to bring people down—to be the king killer. Zarek dresses it up in feathers and lace, but being willing to kill the Quorum without a greater plan doesn’t make him a freedom fighter able to make the hard decisions. It just makes him a homicidal maniac.
And a little boy with something dark inside kicking down other people’s block towers because it feels good.
Read Richard Hatch’s rebutal (not to me personally duh).