Tuned In

BSG Watch: Coup de Ta-Ta

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Sci Fi

Sci Fi

Spoilers for Friday’s Battlestar Galactica coming up after the jump: 

 

“I just hope, I hope that people realize eventually who I am.” 

I direct you, as usual, to Maureen Ryan and Alan Sepinwall’s already posted breakdowns of this episode for more point by point discussion, but let’s just answer that question for a second. Who Felix Gaeta is, and what this two-part story showed him to be, speaks to some of the things that make BSG so great. The show could have made him Zarek’s craven toady or a slimy power-grabber, but we see—even while sharing Adama’s revulsion for him—that he’s finally a principled man too.

He may be morally weak (as we saw on New Caprica as well), he may be misguided, and he may be out of hiss depth, but he carries out his coup out of a genuine feeling that the fleet has gone wrong. And unlike his co-conspirator, it’s important to him to do it in (as he sees it) the right way, getting justice rather than just grabbing power. Thus he insists on a trial, and thus he recoils when he realizes what Zarek has done to the Quorum.

And yet, rather than take the expected easy way out—having Gaeta see the error of his ways and turn on Zarek, redeeming himself at last—he sticks to his guns. He would rather fail than do things Zarek’s way (he would probably have succeeded if he had done things Zarek’s way), but that doesn’t mean he stops believing in his original goal. Instead, he goes down, faces the firing squad and—in a final moment worthy of Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities—looks down at his leg and experiences one last second feeling whole and painless before he dies.

A great end to this story arc and a good sign that BSG will pull no punches in its final episodes.  A few miscellaneous thoughts:

* How many times by now has someone said a reckoning is coming? Do you suppose a reckoning is coming? 

* “I am coming back for all of you!” That’s my new answering machine message! Seriously, great work by Mary McDonnell in that scene. One of the first things I ever learned about acting is that anger is one of the easiest emotions to play, and that may be generally true, but she’s doing so much more in this raging moment: underneath the fury is her grief—subordinated for the moment— at the false news that Adama is dead, as well as the effort that it takes for her, after having given up on life, to rouse herself to the task of fighting back, or of vengeance. 

* One quibble: Baltar’s dreaming Adama’s execution was a cheap shock, like most such switcheroo dream sequences are. (The one weakness of the last few episodes, I feel, is that BSG seems like it has forgotten what to do with Baltar.) Baltar’s recognition of how he ran from his flock on Galactica was a good moment, though, as was his final scene with Gaeta—in some ways his soulmate—and another switcheroo: the cut from Gaeta’s execution order to Tigh holding the gun on his executioner.

* It’s amazing how much contempt Adama was able to convey for Gaeta after the coup failed, without so much as uttering a word—just motioning with the barest nod for him to be taken away.  

* So there’s a rip in the hull. Those are not good, right?