BSG: The Hub
And this, my friends, is why Laura Roslin always was, and always will be, a far better, a far more decent person than Gaius Baltar.
I tried to cut this down, I promise, I did. I can't. It hit me in the gut. So the first part is longer than sanity, and please, feel free to just read the above sentence then skip down to "Reality", which is where I get crack!serious.
It's strange. Throughout season one, I liked Baltar. I mean, I personally liked him on some weird level. I felt bad for him. Sure I thought he was dangerous because of his own selfishness, his own weakness and his narcissism. Sure I thought he screwed up so badly he caused the destruction of nearly everyone alive in the galaxy. And I loved how that was juxtaposed with the fact that Baltar is (was) such a gentle person. A spoiled child, sure, but the gentleness and the fear, and the guilt. Because the guilt was there. Every time it reared its head, he ran from it, coming up with a dozen excuses about how really, really, it wasn't him, but he never succeeded. Never exorcised it. We kept watching him screw up, try to walk that line between keeping Gaius Baltar safe and Not Screwing Over Humanity. Such a tiny measure of decency, but you have to start somewhere. And on a human decency scale of one to one-hundred, Baltar was always, at least, an eight.
Even in season three, after the disaster of New Caprica, I believed he did the best he could. It was a crappy best, but he was trying. He was scoring 8/100; maybe even 12/100 when he did things like refuse to sign the death sentences until they shot his girlfriend and threatened to shoot him. He was stuck on a baseship, threatened with death, threatened with love, hell, got tortured. I didn't exactly feel sorry for him, but I sympathised, because he was still the 8/100 guy, gentle and horribly out of his depth and struggling. And if his first cause was his own safety, at least the guilt and the fear was always there, and I could see it under the surface. It's always about Gaius Baltar. But at least what Gaius Baltar wants is usually fairly benign.
Then we get to season four and what Gaius Baltar wants isn't benign at all. And Gaius Baltar has his own frakking cult and his ego is exploding and now, well now, my friends, the guilt is gone.
In an episode where Laura Roslin, who has done nothing but kill herself trying to save humanity, in an episode where Laura Roslin learns to feel the weight of the things she's done and the things she is willing to do, Gaius Baltar who killed most of humanity trying to elevate himself, professes that he doesn't need to feel any guilt.
Now, let's examine my view on guilt for a moment. Because my conviction that all this episode proved is that Baltar cannot - can never be a messiah - not because anyone is above forgiveness but because Baltar has never asked for forgiveness or understood what he was being forgiven for - my conviction on that point has nothing to do with revenge thinking or punitive measures or justice.
I mean, as a separate issue, justice is important, but setting that aside for a moment. Because mercy and forgiveness aren't easy concepts and if they were, they wouldn't be worth a damn. Mercy is never earned, it can't be. If it's earned or deserved, it's not mercy, it's justice. But you have to know to ask for it. You have to understand what's been given to you.
I don't think Baltar does.
Now, in many ways, guilt is a profoundly useless emotion. Sure, it works as a great motivating force - a barometer for empathy, maybe. It lets you know when you've done something that you need to correct or apologise for, both of which are important mechanisms in any society. But the lifespan of guilt's usefulness is very short. Mostly, in my experience, we feel guilty for things we shouldn't or try to avoid the guilt we deserve. And it lingers crippling us. There's a social taboo about putting guilt behind us and moving forwards (and it's one I share: I feel guilty about bloody everything sometimes), because we fear it makes us bad, uncaring people. But an inability to put it behind us and move on renders us profoundly useless, and even sabotages our attempts to fix the very thing we feel guilty about.
In short, guilt is a shortcut to being emotacular.
So I'm all for learning how to jettison guilt. And to an extent, what the fuck can Baltar do? He really only has two choices. 1) Feel guilty and go insane. 2) Try to move on. (I don't include submit to the justice of the people because in terms of his mental state, even while on trial, he'll have to be in mindset one or two).
The problem is, he's taken option 2 without LEARNING ANYTHING.
It was his fault in a very literal way. His character flaw. His mistake.
His confession is a patronising explanation about how you shouldn't actually be angry that it was his fault everyone you ever loved, every plan you ever had for your future, every chance you had to be something other than a starving, dirty refugee three seconds from death from a dozen causes, is gone. Because he has the answers.
It's not about exonorating the Cylon, or pinning the entire attack on Baltar.
It's about the fact that Baltar didn't even apologise.
The tiniest, most miniscule thing he could have done. Express remorse. Apologise that he had a fault, and that fault lead to the end of everything.
And Roslin.
Oh, how I love that woman. We'll get to her various revelations about love shortly, but for now, let's talk about Baltar and her scene with him dying.
That was a scene that deserves every award that can possibly be pinned on it. We forget about the horrors of the attacks. We see the 9/11 wall, we see the grind of the Fleet, but this is television, and this is the status quo, and we forget the visceral loss until someone like Mary McDonnell acts it for us without ever saying a word.
70% of the reason why Baltar's confession came off as horrifying, rather than simply ludicrous, was down to Mary McDonell sat in the background, so grief-stricken, I lack the words to even describe what she was doing. It was the scene where Baltar's human decency fell from eight to one, perhaps to zero.
The intensity of that scene is utterly indescribable, but to try, in Roslin's face I saw sheer incoherent rage; anger so intense it can only be expressed in hopelessness and sorrow. Everything she's been through, every time she broke herself and lost a part of herself and denied herself and stole babies and hearts and souls and lives, and threw people out of airlocks, and watched good people die and young people die, and made decisions to abandon children to death, and split the Fleet, and lead her people onto a path she half believed was inspired by insanity - here is a man telling her it was all him.
Every day, Laura Roslin gets up, and takes personal responsibility for the survival of her entire species. And if she fails, the buck stops with her. She has never shied from that. Taking responsibility is what Laura Roslin does.
And it makes her an infinitely better human than Gaius Baltar, who has never once taken responsibility for anything in his life if it wasn't the responsibility-equivalent of a backhanded compliment.
And then she saves his life. Because Laura Roslin has airlocked a cylon but she's never killed anyone out of spite, or revenge, or fear. Because that is Laura Roslin's other gift: self-examination. Acceptance. Responsibility for who she is. It gets faded this season especially, but it's there. She listens to Tyrol about his union complaints. She lets Natalie talk to the quorum.
It's when it's hardest to recognise that someone has an inalienable right to draw their next breath that it's most important. It's a maxim that should perhaps be applied to the cylon, but let's keep it on Baltar for now. She might be wrong, but Laura has her reasons for drawing her lines where she does, and this is about why she's a better being than Baltar, not whether or not she's big enough to forgive genocide.
Laura Roslin at her most tyrannical is a better person than Gaius Baltar at his best. His gentleness has been lost, somewhere. Now he's the bitter, selfish, snotty kid who will try to convert a centurion the way an asshole pokes an angry dog to see if he can get it to bite someone. He's bought his own propaganda and instead of releasing his guilt as a way to become a better person, he's used it as carte blanch to never change one damn thing about himself.
Laura Roslin saves the person she hates most in the universe. And she cries, and she begs him not to die. Because she is a good person. And because Baltar has an inalienable right to draw his next breath.
Gaius Baltar talks Boomer into a suicide attempt and chokes the dark-haired Six on the infected baseship to death because he feels threatened. On a more metaphorical level, Baltar soothes his own ego by landing on a planet and colonising when he KNOWS there are cylon agents in the Fleet for a fact.
The point is, people die so things are easier for Gaius Baltar. Gaius lives even though it'll make things harder for Laura Roslin.
To talk about her actual issues this episode, I'm obviously not thrilled that she's all I LOOOOVE YOU to Bill, but whatever, I can deal. I honestly don't think her soul was in need of saving. I think she's isolated, sure, though I'd say it seemed to me Bill was being more obsinate about admitting his feelings than she was earlier this season. I think that actually, if anything demonstrates her coldness it's how she treats Lee given his role in the trial given how quick she was to forgive Adama even though he actually voted for Baltar's innocence. I guess I feel that she never went past any point of no return, because this episode happened, and she thought about it, and she stopped herself and corrected herself. Because Laura Roslin understands that guilt is a luxury and what you do with it is: you learn and you get rid of it. She learned.
I suppose I feel that this is less the episode where Laura Roslin saved her soul, and more the episode where she proved she wasn't in need of saving. Crunchtime, and she's still a hero. And actually, while I'd love her no matter what shit she was pulling, I am...profoundly moved and grateful by the fact the show stood up and said, "This is Laura. She is good, and she loves, and she saves lives and she is a hero."
I have no idea why Kara was there. I mean, I love that she was, because I think the Laura and Kara dynamic is fabulously weirdly complicated and it is criminally underincluded in the series. But it's weirdly interesting that Kara is someone that Laura thinks of subconsciously as family. I think a lot of that is probably because of her connection with Lee and Adama, but I do also wonder if it's the fact that they are both the theological poles around which this entire show revolves. I'm not sure, either way.
Also, I have worked out why she now has a HeadElosha. Who I hope is not going to disappear since she appeared outside a jump, but fear will just vanish.
But anyway, I worked it out. Romo's cat, Kara's return, the Opera House visions, Caprica's pregnancy, ALL OF IT.
It's like Dark City. You think it's night because it's noir, but no, it's literally always night. We think these things are inexplicable (at least the the Head!People, and perhaps some of the specifics of Kara's return) because they're stylistic cinematographic choices and because RDM is fond of saying, "Eh, we have no idea what that meant, but it seemed fun!" But hey, maybe they do mean something. Maybe they are literal.
Reality is falling apart.
Now, 90% convinced this is not true, but it really was like, the first thing that I thought of while watching this episode. "Oh, so either Laura is insane, or reality is actually falling apart. Hmm, the first one is awesome, but not as awesome as the second one."
I mean, maybe there's a reason this is happening during the jumps, between times, during a rip in reality. Or we could blame chamalla if she's still on it. Though what does that do except expand one's reality, and let human Oracles speak like Leoben on steroids? It's all the same stuff.
All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. Time is already circular. That's already a leap of faith in terms of reality as we understand it. Perhaps at the crescendo of this cycle, everything starts falling apart to evolve into something unexpected - a leap forwards and sideways and up. Evolution.
It starts small, with a single Head!Six and a single Cybrid. But now we have miraculous resurrections and cylon/cylon babies and an increasing number of vivid hallucinations from Adama remembering his wife to Romo's cat to Roslin and Elosha.
Reality. It's breaking down.
Or at least, maybe all these head!people are going to be more than just a stylistic decision and we'll get Dark City'd somehow.
Or then again, maybe not. ;)
Also, cus I didn't get a chance to say it anywhere, AHAHAHAHA! THREE! YOU SLAY ME.
But I'm a little disappointed that you said that to Laura because now that there's a fake-out it's unlikely to be actually true and that makes me sad. :(
I tried to cut this down, I promise, I did. I can't. It hit me in the gut. So the first part is longer than sanity, and please, feel free to just read the above sentence then skip down to "Reality", which is where I get crack!serious.
It's strange. Throughout season one, I liked Baltar. I mean, I personally liked him on some weird level. I felt bad for him. Sure I thought he was dangerous because of his own selfishness, his own weakness and his narcissism. Sure I thought he screwed up so badly he caused the destruction of nearly everyone alive in the galaxy. And I loved how that was juxtaposed with the fact that Baltar is (was) such a gentle person. A spoiled child, sure, but the gentleness and the fear, and the guilt. Because the guilt was there. Every time it reared its head, he ran from it, coming up with a dozen excuses about how really, really, it wasn't him, but he never succeeded. Never exorcised it. We kept watching him screw up, try to walk that line between keeping Gaius Baltar safe and Not Screwing Over Humanity. Such a tiny measure of decency, but you have to start somewhere. And on a human decency scale of one to one-hundred, Baltar was always, at least, an eight.
Even in season three, after the disaster of New Caprica, I believed he did the best he could. It was a crappy best, but he was trying. He was scoring 8/100; maybe even 12/100 when he did things like refuse to sign the death sentences until they shot his girlfriend and threatened to shoot him. He was stuck on a baseship, threatened with death, threatened with love, hell, got tortured. I didn't exactly feel sorry for him, but I sympathised, because he was still the 8/100 guy, gentle and horribly out of his depth and struggling. And if his first cause was his own safety, at least the guilt and the fear was always there, and I could see it under the surface. It's always about Gaius Baltar. But at least what Gaius Baltar wants is usually fairly benign.
Then we get to season four and what Gaius Baltar wants isn't benign at all. And Gaius Baltar has his own frakking cult and his ego is exploding and now, well now, my friends, the guilt is gone.
In an episode where Laura Roslin, who has done nothing but kill herself trying to save humanity, in an episode where Laura Roslin learns to feel the weight of the things she's done and the things she is willing to do, Gaius Baltar who killed most of humanity trying to elevate himself, professes that he doesn't need to feel any guilt.
Now, let's examine my view on guilt for a moment. Because my conviction that all this episode proved is that Baltar cannot - can never be a messiah - not because anyone is above forgiveness but because Baltar has never asked for forgiveness or understood what he was being forgiven for - my conviction on that point has nothing to do with revenge thinking or punitive measures or justice.
I mean, as a separate issue, justice is important, but setting that aside for a moment. Because mercy and forgiveness aren't easy concepts and if they were, they wouldn't be worth a damn. Mercy is never earned, it can't be. If it's earned or deserved, it's not mercy, it's justice. But you have to know to ask for it. You have to understand what's been given to you.
I don't think Baltar does.
Now, in many ways, guilt is a profoundly useless emotion. Sure, it works as a great motivating force - a barometer for empathy, maybe. It lets you know when you've done something that you need to correct or apologise for, both of which are important mechanisms in any society. But the lifespan of guilt's usefulness is very short. Mostly, in my experience, we feel guilty for things we shouldn't or try to avoid the guilt we deserve. And it lingers crippling us. There's a social taboo about putting guilt behind us and moving forwards (and it's one I share: I feel guilty about bloody everything sometimes), because we fear it makes us bad, uncaring people. But an inability to put it behind us and move on renders us profoundly useless, and even sabotages our attempts to fix the very thing we feel guilty about.
In short, guilt is a shortcut to being emotacular.
So I'm all for learning how to jettison guilt. And to an extent, what the fuck can Baltar do? He really only has two choices. 1) Feel guilty and go insane. 2) Try to move on. (I don't include submit to the justice of the people because in terms of his mental state, even while on trial, he'll have to be in mindset one or two).
The problem is, he's taken option 2 without LEARNING ANYTHING.
It was his fault in a very literal way. His character flaw. His mistake.
His confession is a patronising explanation about how you shouldn't actually be angry that it was his fault everyone you ever loved, every plan you ever had for your future, every chance you had to be something other than a starving, dirty refugee three seconds from death from a dozen causes, is gone. Because he has the answers.
It's not about exonorating the Cylon, or pinning the entire attack on Baltar.
It's about the fact that Baltar didn't even apologise.
The tiniest, most miniscule thing he could have done. Express remorse. Apologise that he had a fault, and that fault lead to the end of everything.
And Roslin.
Oh, how I love that woman. We'll get to her various revelations about love shortly, but for now, let's talk about Baltar and her scene with him dying.
That was a scene that deserves every award that can possibly be pinned on it. We forget about the horrors of the attacks. We see the 9/11 wall, we see the grind of the Fleet, but this is television, and this is the status quo, and we forget the visceral loss until someone like Mary McDonnell acts it for us without ever saying a word.
70% of the reason why Baltar's confession came off as horrifying, rather than simply ludicrous, was down to Mary McDonell sat in the background, so grief-stricken, I lack the words to even describe what she was doing. It was the scene where Baltar's human decency fell from eight to one, perhaps to zero.
The intensity of that scene is utterly indescribable, but to try, in Roslin's face I saw sheer incoherent rage; anger so intense it can only be expressed in hopelessness and sorrow. Everything she's been through, every time she broke herself and lost a part of herself and denied herself and stole babies and hearts and souls and lives, and threw people out of airlocks, and watched good people die and young people die, and made decisions to abandon children to death, and split the Fleet, and lead her people onto a path she half believed was inspired by insanity - here is a man telling her it was all him.
Every day, Laura Roslin gets up, and takes personal responsibility for the survival of her entire species. And if she fails, the buck stops with her. She has never shied from that. Taking responsibility is what Laura Roslin does.
And it makes her an infinitely better human than Gaius Baltar, who has never once taken responsibility for anything in his life if it wasn't the responsibility-equivalent of a backhanded compliment.
And then she saves his life. Because Laura Roslin has airlocked a cylon but she's never killed anyone out of spite, or revenge, or fear. Because that is Laura Roslin's other gift: self-examination. Acceptance. Responsibility for who she is. It gets faded this season especially, but it's there. She listens to Tyrol about his union complaints. She lets Natalie talk to the quorum.
It's when it's hardest to recognise that someone has an inalienable right to draw their next breath that it's most important. It's a maxim that should perhaps be applied to the cylon, but let's keep it on Baltar for now. She might be wrong, but Laura has her reasons for drawing her lines where she does, and this is about why she's a better being than Baltar, not whether or not she's big enough to forgive genocide.
Laura Roslin at her most tyrannical is a better person than Gaius Baltar at his best. His gentleness has been lost, somewhere. Now he's the bitter, selfish, snotty kid who will try to convert a centurion the way an asshole pokes an angry dog to see if he can get it to bite someone. He's bought his own propaganda and instead of releasing his guilt as a way to become a better person, he's used it as carte blanch to never change one damn thing about himself.
Laura Roslin saves the person she hates most in the universe. And she cries, and she begs him not to die. Because she is a good person. And because Baltar has an inalienable right to draw his next breath.
Gaius Baltar talks Boomer into a suicide attempt and chokes the dark-haired Six on the infected baseship to death because he feels threatened. On a more metaphorical level, Baltar soothes his own ego by landing on a planet and colonising when he KNOWS there are cylon agents in the Fleet for a fact.
The point is, people die so things are easier for Gaius Baltar. Gaius lives even though it'll make things harder for Laura Roslin.
To talk about her actual issues this episode, I'm obviously not thrilled that she's all I LOOOOVE YOU to Bill, but whatever, I can deal. I honestly don't think her soul was in need of saving. I think she's isolated, sure, though I'd say it seemed to me Bill was being more obsinate about admitting his feelings than she was earlier this season. I think that actually, if anything demonstrates her coldness it's how she treats Lee given his role in the trial given how quick she was to forgive Adama even though he actually voted for Baltar's innocence. I guess I feel that she never went past any point of no return, because this episode happened, and she thought about it, and she stopped herself and corrected herself. Because Laura Roslin understands that guilt is a luxury and what you do with it is: you learn and you get rid of it. She learned.
I suppose I feel that this is less the episode where Laura Roslin saved her soul, and more the episode where she proved she wasn't in need of saving. Crunchtime, and she's still a hero. And actually, while I'd love her no matter what shit she was pulling, I am...profoundly moved and grateful by the fact the show stood up and said, "This is Laura. She is good, and she loves, and she saves lives and she is a hero."
I have no idea why Kara was there. I mean, I love that she was, because I think the Laura and Kara dynamic is fabulously weirdly complicated and it is criminally underincluded in the series. But it's weirdly interesting that Kara is someone that Laura thinks of subconsciously as family. I think a lot of that is probably because of her connection with Lee and Adama, but I do also wonder if it's the fact that they are both the theological poles around which this entire show revolves. I'm not sure, either way.
Also, I have worked out why she now has a HeadElosha. Who I hope is not going to disappear since she appeared outside a jump, but fear will just vanish.
But anyway, I worked it out. Romo's cat, Kara's return, the Opera House visions, Caprica's pregnancy, ALL OF IT.
It's like Dark City. You think it's night because it's noir, but no, it's literally always night. We think these things are inexplicable (at least the the Head!People, and perhaps some of the specifics of Kara's return) because they're stylistic cinematographic choices and because RDM is fond of saying, "Eh, we have no idea what that meant, but it seemed fun!" But hey, maybe they do mean something. Maybe they are literal.
Reality is falling apart.
Now, 90% convinced this is not true, but it really was like, the first thing that I thought of while watching this episode. "Oh, so either Laura is insane, or reality is actually falling apart. Hmm, the first one is awesome, but not as awesome as the second one."
I mean, maybe there's a reason this is happening during the jumps, between times, during a rip in reality. Or we could blame chamalla if she's still on it. Though what does that do except expand one's reality, and let human Oracles speak like Leoben on steroids? It's all the same stuff.
All of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. Time is already circular. That's already a leap of faith in terms of reality as we understand it. Perhaps at the crescendo of this cycle, everything starts falling apart to evolve into something unexpected - a leap forwards and sideways and up. Evolution.
It starts small, with a single Head!Six and a single Cybrid. But now we have miraculous resurrections and cylon/cylon babies and an increasing number of vivid hallucinations from Adama remembering his wife to Romo's cat to Roslin and Elosha.
Reality. It's breaking down.
Or at least, maybe all these head!people are going to be more than just a stylistic decision and we'll get Dark City'd somehow.
Or then again, maybe not. ;)
Also, cus I didn't get a chance to say it anywhere, AHAHAHAHA! THREE! YOU SLAY ME.
But I'm a little disappointed that you said that to Laura because now that there's a fake-out it's unlikely to be actually true and that makes me sad. :(