cross-posted from tumblr - some rambles on the Lee/Laura witness stand scene in "Crossroads"
Because this set of gifs got me STILL EMOTIONAL, and I have a minor pet peeve with fandom (talking about no one on my flist, I swear) reacting to that scene like "This is when I started hating him!!!", "Goddammit, Lee!", "How could you DO that to spacemommy?!", etc. Stoooop. Like he's not even my favorite character by a long stretch, but when he's defending my GBalt I can't help paying it forward and getting defensive of him. :p
1. Lee is not the villain of this storyline.
2. I don’t think people register enough that burning his last bridge with her (and all he’s doing in this episode is burning bridges, his dad and Dee and Roslin) is every bit as self-destructive to him as it is ~mean to her, and he’s putting his ideals above that, and it kills him.
And it kills him what Romo did to Tigh even as he judges the fuck out of Tigh, and what Adama said to him about ~handing the shiv to a stranger~ wasn’t even true but it would be true if Romo was the one talking to Roslin, so he has to face her and do this himself, even if that’s a million times harder.
And it’s a crappy line of questioning that has no bearing on the truth of what she’s saying, and they both know that, but it’s all he has, it’s the ONLY thing he can use against her to make her less composed and terrifying. The trial is a game that way and it’s awful, but underneath the game there’s still a life and a principle at stake and the alternative is not playing dirty and holding back something and he can’t do that. He’s got nothing else. So he’s willing to be the person that does this, and hate himself for it.
3. As much as she’s throwing it in his face that they’re not buddyroos anymore, the fact is she’s changed a LOT more since “Captain Apollo has a nice ring to it” than he has. She lost Billy and got Tory since then. She tried to steal an election. She tried to assassinate Admiral Cain. She joked about burning books and stood in a room where Baltar was being strip-searched and smirked at him. The gulf between her and the closest to a Lawful Good character on the show was not put there by him. LOVE Laura, I think she’s near flawless on a character level, but there is a point in this series where she stopped being my ‘hero’ and I don’t know why people expect her to be Lee’s? I don’t know why he ought to be showing blind loyalty and deference to her?
‘Cause yeah, he’s stood up for her before, when their values lined up with each other. But they don’t anymore and he has no obligation to be on her side in this, and NOT defend GBalt to the fullest extent of his ability. Which… also means throwing her under the bus in a deeper, more personal way. There’s a real betrayal here in him revealing a very private, painful secret to everybody in the world, I get that. But there’s also a supposed ‘betrayal’ in the fact he’s fucking up the trial and the outcome she wanted, and I don’t believe in that. I don’t think it’s part of the same Lee Is a Jerk To Laura story. I think he’s *right* to do that, at the very least I see *he* thinks he’s right, and the way he does it is a necessary evil he takes onto his conscience for it.
You can draw a straight line from Lee putting a gun in Tigh’s face for her, to publicly embarrassing her here. He hasn’t changed that much from season one. He doesn’t like democracy in name only; he doesn’t like people getting steamrolled.
4. (Here’s where I start going crazy about it, lol.) Can we talk about how Baltar is only getting a trial at al by the grace of her conscience because she still felt some shred of mercy for him and said “yeah, let’s do this the civilized human way” when she explicitly had the chance to just make him disappear? Because she’s in bed with the admiral now (possibly literally at this point and definitely figuratively) and THIS IS THE KIND OF THING THE TWO OF THEM GET TO DECIDE NOW? The fate of the former president who they held in secret and tortured for a couple of days until they didn’t feel like doing that anymore, and then they had a quiet little conversation about whether or not they should secretly murder him and it was weirdly shippy. And that’s not a minor thing, it’s actually kind of terrifying, and it just might - JUST MIGHT - be bigger than the relationship between Laura and Lee, it might be bigger than her cancer even.
Of course she *didn’t* disappear him, she chose to give him a trial and everything, because she’s not the bad guy of this storyline either. (There are no bad guys!) But that mercy didn’t extend to letting him go FREE, she’s not frakking *insane*, she still assumed there’d be a measure of control and justice whereby Gaius would be guilty and punished for his crimes, and it’s totally understandable and rational for her to feel that way and want that. Lee, on the other hand, goes one step further and wants *fairness* and that’s where it gets tricky ethics-wise.
5. ‘Cause - here’s where my own biases come in and I come down way more on Lee’s side, even if I understand both - the problem with fairness is that there’s nothing you can prove Baltar did on New Caprica that wasn’t done in a panicky and impossible situation. The last really AWFUL thing he ever did was give Gina the nuke, something nobody ever knew about or mentioned again, and after that everything was out of his hands. After that, season three was just watching his will and voice being taken away over and over. There are ways in which NC was his fault, but it’s never quite for the same reasons people blame him for it.
And Lee who fled the minute the Cylons arrived, who concentrated on the few survivors they had and argued REPEATEDLY to abandon everyone else, and who did eventually make a heroic gesture but it was after a lot of resistance and (very logical) fear… it’s Lee who identifies with him, and sees how slippery and uncertain the definitions of ‘traitor’ and ‘coward’ can be, and how different the rules are for the leaders of the fleet when it’s one of their kids (literal, figurative) vs. some awkward-ass bearded pariah only a Six could love.
(Just I see these comments about HOW COULD HE DO THIS TO HER, *FOR BALTAR OF ALL PEOPLE*? And I just… sigh. Kind of the point, isn’t it? Kind of the point that this isn’t about who he LIKES more and who’s been NICER to him. Kind of the point that he’d go against someone he had a genuine bond with once, for someone who actually makes him cringe nearly every time he opens his mouth, because that shouldn’t be how the LAW works.)
6. Meanwhile, can we acknowledge that Roslin is being incredibly and knowingly manipulative in that moment? Of course it’s because she’s hurting, I’m not saying that she’s NOT hurting, but she’s also very intentional in what she says to him and how she appeals to his emotions and his guilt right there. How she condescends to him in the next breath because she already knows it’s not gonna stop him and she’s *angry* at him. She’s not a passive victim any more than he’s a bad guy. She’s shaming and hurting him back just as much. [Edit: Actually this was my favorite comment someone added on tumblr - this one Roslin fan posted the gifs with something like "LOL I love how mean Laura can be" underneath. YES. BLESS YOU.]
7. Yes, there’s an important layer of this where they are two human beings who are no longer BFFs and he’s hitting her in a place where she’s vulnerable (and vice versa, honestly) and as viewers it’s easy to be like POOR THING, WHAT A BASTARD, but there’s another layer where she’s the goddamn president and he’s giving up everything and this is bigger than them.
OKAY I’M DONE NOW.
Edit: I also made a follow-up post about Lee's climactic speech, in which I basically made two opposing points back and forth for like seven paragraphs.