Hmm...I got very upsetting news today that my sister and her partner had a house fire last night. They and their pets are ok but they will be unable to live in their home for several months and only have partial insurance coverage for their belongs. Both are semi disabled and in a precarious financial and emotional state already, so I'm feeling a lot of worry and dread about them. They are 800 miles away so I can't go help right now.
So...I retreated to a little therapeutic BSG clip watching and noticed something.
I was watching the scene between Lee and Laura at the end of Bastille Day when she tells him about her cancer and she asks him to keep it secret because the most important thing is the survival of the people and she fears knowledge of her disease will "erode hope" and he says "you count on me, Madame President" and she says, "I know I can, you're Captain Apollo." This made me realize that her sotto voce entreaties to him on the stand are an explicit callback to this scene in Bastille Day and when she says, "Don't do this, please" and "'Captain Apollo,' remember that?" she wasn't just evoking their earlier close relationship but the explicit promise and the reason for it. We can see she is still very concerned about how this will affect the people in the way she turns away from Lee after the next question and addresses the courtroom audience (representing the people) directly, trying to give them courage by her calmness and matter-of-fact tone. It doesn't really change the meaning of the scene in anyway but I thought it was cool to realize how directly the latter betrayal evokes the earlier promise and that yet even in Bastille Day, Lee already shows this propensity to follow his own (not smart Roslin would say) notion of "what is right" rather than familial or political loyalty. He is the same idealist even then. Sometimes I think BSG is a sprawling mess and that they were just making it up as they went along and then I see motifs like these and I eat my words.