Laura Roslin: A Woman of Noble Character
That's right. Laura Roslin makes ME read THE BIBLE This is a love-fest and is not meant to be at all objective. Laura Roslin is my favorite, and here is why.
A woman of noble character who can find? For she is far more precious than jewels - introduction & character background
Laura Roslin is my favorite character. I admire her, I cheer for her, I just like her. I, too, would stand by my president. I love Laura’s dry sense of humor and her decisive, selfless pragmatism. I’m challenged by her political mind. I’m moved by her relationships, whether they are romantic, familial, or adversarial. She anchors the BSG story for me. Laura Roslin is my own sine qua non.
Until the series finale, we find out frustratingly little of Roslin’s back-story. We know she adored her father, and that she cared for her mother as her mother died of cancer. In Daybreak, we see that Laura also had two younger sisters to whom she was extremely close. While Laura was still working as a teacher, her father and sisters were killed by a drunk driver. Though she will later claim to have gotten into politics because her predecessor Adar had been “a very hard man to say no to,” we will later see that she was offered a position on Adar’s first national campaign by a friend who hoped to provide her a distraction from her grief. She had a years-long affair with Adar, who seemed to adore her romantically and respect her as a teacher, but sorely underestimated her political skills and dedication to the preservation of life.
Roslin stays connected to her past as a teacher, though she never overtly claims to miss it. She takes every opportunity to sit with children. On New Caprica, part of her act of seizing the day is to become a teacher again, and take baby Hera under her own care. She doesn’t demean the welfare of children by using “for the children” as an excuse for an action she has no rational reason for. She uses her teaching skills to good effect in her political career as well, with her ability to get through to people and manage them, no matter how far out of their world she is. She takes protégés under her wing and helps them grow. She has an ability to take even the most nebulous spiritual concepts and readily turn them into explicable facts of life as she imparts them to others. Two plus two is four; a noun is a person, place, or thing; water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius; all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. She uses everything about what she has, what she knows, and who she is to protect others, and her teaching ability is all three of those things.
At the time of the attacks, Laura was in a somewhat long-term affair with the married President Adar, under whom she served as Secretary of Education. Adar seems to have had even less faith in her political abilities than Adama or even Roslin herself, and yet Laura found him to be a “very hard man to say no to.” Perhaps what Roslin’s relationship with Adar displays most about her character is her drive to seize the day. Her relationship with Adar seemed neither to be serious or getting serious, but rather a source of comfort and companionship in the moment.
Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all - Laura Roslin and gender on the Galactica
BSG receives greatly deserved credit for its diverse, complex female characters. Laura Roslin stands out because it is so rare to have middle-aged women, in particular, constructed as protagonists, agents of progress, successful and feminine professionals, and love interests. LR is all of these things, making her more like famous real life women than nearly if any of her fictional counterparts. Mary McDonnell has claimed in interviews to have modeled Roslin after Hillary Clinton; in a few key ways, Roslin is like no one as much as Elizabeth I. However, her in fiction, she is nearly (perhaps completely) unique.
BSG is one of very few popular culture works which endeavors to put some space between femininity and womanhood. Colonial society appears to have had a similar evolution towards gender equality as our own, but a couple of generations past our own. Because the BSG universe is gender-bent without being gender-neutral, the show presents a huge number of gender-transgressive characters without necessarily challenging the normative gender evaluations of our world. Masculinity, though not maleness, is largely associated with strength and morality; femininity is a murkier, more complex concept for the characters and in their presentations to the audience. Mostly, female characters see their femininity mostly disappeared in order to be heroic - seeing Starbuck in a dress is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”; Athena’s motherhood serves to make her the baddest gunslinger in town; even Six’s sultriness is usually in direct and conscious service of her military mission.
Roslin, however, becomes a gender-bent character in a particularly interesting way. She is exceptionally strong (though this is entirely mental and emotional, rather than physical), able to step back and see the big picture, the non-violent patron of the warriors in a society under siege. She’s only referred to as “sir,” in the way male and female superiors are, a few times in the miniseries and early episodes. Her title is “Madam President,” and she both accepts and ensures the respect the title garners. Roslin softens her orders with giggles, she cherishes the scant opportunities she has to be a caretaker of young children, and is almost never seen without her (oddly well-maintained) power suits and pumps, but she has discovered and built her own power partially using these tools; their association with her femininity is a help to her, not a hindrance.
Skepticism and criticism of Roslin, though no characters outright state that she is unfit for power because she is a woman, often takes heavily gendered forms. Though no character comes out and says Roslin cannot be trusted with power because she is a woman (as is, technically, rare in Western society as well), critics love to refer to her as a kindergarten teacher. Roslin fans are unlikely to consider “kindergarten teacher” to be an epithet, but it appears that such work is considered of low status, and the derogative use of a commendable profession suggests that being a “kindergarten teacher” is in part less respectable because, socially and economically, care of small children is a job mostly performed by women, and thus, considered to be of low-skill and production. This doesn’t hold up logically - even if Roslin truly were a kindergarten teacher at the time she took office and not a high-ranking government official, teachers are well-educated, used to managing people and caring for basic needs, and extremely hard-working people. This shouldn’t be a strike against her in any capacity; in fact, that skill set is part of what makes her so effective at crisis management. The use of her respectable resume as a criticism stinks of sexism to me. “Secretary of Education,” along with whatever political posts she’s held between her time as a teacher and her ascent to Adar’s cabinet, are jobs that are well-respected (and apparently male-dominated) and therefore less useful as an insult to a popular, competent president.
She’s a fascinating, if probably unintentional, exploration of the glass cliff. The “glass cliff” refers to the way in which qualified women seem particularly likely only to be placed in positions of authority during times of crisis. While the opportunity for female leadership is, unfortunately, still somewhat noteworthy, it’s a more difficult leadership scenario to sustain successfully. Roslin’s ascension to power is simply based in her good fortune to survive the attack. Once people feel the crisis is over, after they’ve survived for a year and can tell themselves they’ll find some measure of safety on New Caprica, they immediately dump her for the glib, ineffectual, transparently empty Baltar-shaped suit. When New Caprica proves to have been a catastrophe on its own, the people readily accept the power exchange from Zarek to Roslin.
Unlike other characters and their stories, Roslin is acutely aware of her gender performance and the way it affects her interactions with others. Laura Roslin is a feminist. Unlike other characters, and in particular Bill, Roslin refers pointedly but as a matter of course to “the men and women” of the Colonial military. Though she falters and makes her first giant mistake in The Captain’s Hand by criminalizing abortion, she first makes a straightforward moral argument for the right to choose, a value shared by many people (myself included) but only rarely given voice in popular culture. She does not need to state a desire to have her own children to trust her abilities to care for and protect them. She doesn’t need a marriage or marriage-like commitment to validate her relationships. She never apologizes for her success. Laura Roslin is important not solely because she is a Strong Female Character ™ but because she is a female character who finds and embraces her own strength. She is an inspiration.
She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. - The Swearing-In of President Laura Roslin
When the miniseries opens, Laura Roslin is about to receive the shattering diagnosis of terminal cancer. She handles it stoically, not breaking down until she is on board the plane that will shortly become Colonial One. experiencing the utter trauma of having lost her home and loved ones (including her boss and significant other President Adar), as is true for the rest of the fleet.
She takes charge right away, readily and sensibly. She kindly but firmly inspires the captain to “see what we can do to help,” does a quick and thoughtful press conference, has living quarters set up, both proving and defending her authority. It’s worth noting that the one character to openly question her authority is Doral, a Cylon. He should be keeping his head down and not antagonizing anyone, but Roslin’s leadership is more of a threat to the Cylons’ plan than him taking the risk of blowing his cover (or pissing someone off and being summarily shot). He seems to be going to Lee in hopes of bringing the ship under military control, thus eliminating one batch of survivors.
Roslin’s decisive action, in hindsight, saves the fleet, granting the civilians the chance to band together to become a civilization once more, and, more importantly, convinces Commander Adama to turn his mission from surely-doomed offense against the Cylons to stalwart defense of humanity. Bill thinks of the enemy - as of this moment, we are at war - while Roslin thinks in terms of searching for survivors. Her voice shakes as she takes the oath of office, but she calmly and clearly swears to protect and defend the Colonies with every fiber of her being. It is a promise she will keep for the rest of her life.
A woman who fears the LORD is to be praised - Roslin as visionary
Stretching between Roslin’s public trials and private conflicts is her journey of faith. Roslin isn’t much of a believer in the beginning of the series; we’ll find out later that she spent most of her adult life considering the gods to be metaphors rather than literal truth. Even when she thinks it’s only her life on the line, she doesn’t turn to the gods. It isn’t until she independently has the Pythian vision of the two and ten snakes that she turns to the priest. (It’s possible that she read the scrolls as a child and consciously forgot until circumstances triggered that hallucination under the influence of the drug, but this seems unlikely, as the visions eventually lead her to find the Arrow and the tomb, which are seen by people besides herself.)
And then she begins to believe. Roslin’s belief is always a bit self-conscious, tied in with her vocation, but somewhere along the line she gains a bit of reverence and faith. When Roslin claims her place as the dying leader to the Quorum, she’s not exactly lying; she’s saying something she thinks could very well be true. But she is telling a potential metaphysical truth for the very real political goal of wresting the fleet back from Tigh’s catastrophic dictatorship. She realizes that people will believe her, but on some level thinks it’s because people will want to believe her statement as much as she does. But then people ask her to pray with them and bless them, and she realizes that she has to some extent chosen her prophethood.
Her faith will become much more of a private issue once the fleet reunites and the conflict between secular might and spiritual leadership falls away, but she will continue to find hope and strength in Scripture until almost the very end of the series. Perhaps the most poignant scene showing Roslin’s faith is the moment she loses it, after Earth has failed her, as she sits alone and burns the words of Pythia in bitter disappointment. Without some modicum of genuine belief, one cannot be disappointed. Roslin’s gods have let her down, and though she is broken-hearted, she goes on to reclaim the power and sureness her few years as a true believer brought her.
She selects wool and flax, and works with eager hands: the Decisions of Laura Roslin
Roslin is often characterized as a ruthless Iron Lady who tends to err towards the authoritarian and overly hard-handed when she makes decisions. And it’s quite true, Laura makes decisions at which most of us, often including Roslin herself, would shudder. She’s not called Madame Airlock for nothing. Perhaps more than any other character on BSG, Roslin challenges viewers to consider what we would do in her shoes. Roslin does have the terrible job of life or death decisions, and with her survivor count whiteboard, the consequences of her decisions are immediate and personal. But what I’m most fascinated by is the frequency with which her mercy is not strained. She could refuse Zarek his seat on the Quorum and has every opportunity to have Zarek killed on Kobol; she does neither. She prods Tyrol into the creation of the Colonial workers’ union. Giving Hera to a foster parent is a deeply difficult decision for Roslin - one Adama tells us he would never have needed to make, because he would never have allowed Sharon’s pregnancy to come to term. They show that Roslin makes the hardest of her calls because she is genuinely convinced that she must do so, not because she rationalizes them or out of selfish desire. We know from those actions both that Roslin does not wish to cause harm, and that she is acutely aware of the pain her choices may inflict on others.
We the viewer don’t have a lot of reason to doubt, even from the beginning, that Roslin will do the difficult but, in her judgment, necessary work of keeping the fleet safe. Due to her role as the civilian leader of the fleet, her job is political and nearly always non-violent, with most of the uglier protective acts delegated to Adama’s military authority. Recruiting the convicts aboard the Astral Queen to melt the caps, beating back Zarek’s challenge through political maneuvering, initiating a genuine search for Earth by sending Starbuck to Caprica, even breaking out of jail and challenging Tigh’s and Adama’s respective dictatorships, she does by avoiding violence or even ordering the avoidance of violence.
With the arrival of Cain, though, a leader who rolls legal authority into military might, Roslin shows her own lines between those two types of authority blurred indeed. Whether she’s always acknowledged that those things are at their logical ends deeply intertwined, come to this conclusion after her experiences in the first two seasons, or even changed her mind on this is unclear, though the calm and ease with which she comes to her decision suggests that this isn’t a completely new thought to her. After only a couple of interactions with Cain, and perhaps even before, she explains to Adama that he and Cain have an untenable power imbalance. Roslin can tell, even before Tigh’s reconnaissance work with the Fisk, that Cain is a mortal danger to the civilian fleet. Indeed, she appears to be the only character who puts together Cain’s willingness to deny the civilian fleet the necessities of survival (exactly what she did to her own civilian fleet, but the military types don’t acknowledge the present reality until they’ve heard the story taken to its logical ends) with her willingness to execute officers and attack the Galactica to recognize the true threat posed by Cain.
Having been privy to Roslin’s thought processes, I as a viewer wasn’t particularly shocked at this side to Roslin; however, the other characters’ reactions are telling about them and about the face Roslin chooses to present to even those who know her best. Bill, and especially Lee, having put Laura on different sorts of pedestals, are shocked at Laura’s “bloody-mindedness.” (It isn’t bloodthirstiness, of course; it’s a desire to avoid as much bloodshed as possible co-existing with pragmatic recognition that some is unavoidable.)
Bill’s surprise gives way to a new respect for her authority and decision-making abilities, going so far as to give Roslin credit and responsibility for the assassination, citing her logic and authority rather than explaining his own when Lee questions him. It’s part respect for the “sterner stuff” he initially failed to give Roslin credit for, and part relief that the buck for the worst moral and ethical decisions stops with someone else. After this episode, Bill will accept Roslin’s decisions on security matters (Epiphanies) and even go so far as to expect direct orders for some military actions (AMoS). By the occupation less than a half-season later, the military insurgents - most notably initial Roslin skeptic Tigh - accept her as a leader of the resistance without her taking part in a single attack.
Despite the calm with which she raised the possibility of the assassination, she doesn’t flinch from her horror of the idea and its necessity. I am so glad you did not have to do what I advised you to do. She doesn’t say she was wrong, or that she regrets having advised it, or that she even has doubts about planning the assassination. Just that she’d prefer Adama not have had to do it. The exchange underlines Roslin’s commitment to even the darkest paths of action, it’s true, but it also reminds us that she does not minimize or excuse her decisions. Roslin considers both action and inaction to be choices with equal ethical weight - and they are - and she can be aware enough of the consequences of inaction to weigh them fairly with any distress over the safer course of action.
Another of Roslin’s most controversial actions is the removal of Hera from her parents’ custody. We see and feel deeply for Sharon’s and Helo’s trauma at the loss of their child at the hands of their leaders, and because they’re protagonists, it’s easy not to look any further. But I’d argue that we should consider not just the security interest of the fleet, but Hera’s best interests, and Roslin is the only character in the whole rigmarole to mention Hera’s well-being as a motive for her actions here. If Colonial law is not unlike our own, custody decisions are to be made in the best interests of the child. The crew at large only has disgust for Sharon and her offspring; Bill is concerned about the security threat posed by whatever Hera is; Sharon and Helo are broken-hearted about their lost parenthood; but Laura is the one to point out that Hera is distinctly unsafe in their present situation. Roslin’s concern about the Cylon kidnapping threat is sincere, and a valid concern at that. Galactica is a war zone. It’s not within a state at war, it’s not battlefield-adjacent, it is ground zero for every Cylon attack. Adults who have enlisted or agreed to work with the military can consent to such a risk, and be of some value to the fight against the Cylons. The infant Hera can do neither. Humans (wrongly if understandably) have on more than one occasion given vent to their terror and rage by attacking humans considered to be Cylon sympathizers - a child who threatens the human-Cylon binary is in a precarious spot indeed. Roslin is the president, in charge of seeing the big picture so she can protect the individuals within it when they lack the power to make those decisions themselves.
Perhaps most importantly, there’s good reason to wonder if Sharon is a fit parent. In retrospect, we know Athena to be a dedicated mother; however, Laura doesn’t have the script. Even giving Sharon the benefit of the doubt and saying she has truly renounced her part in the holocaust (and it’s not wholly unreasonable to put some long odds on that), Laura knows for a fact that Cylons can be triggered into completely unconscious violence. Is it worth the risk to Hera’s life to wait and see? Sharon claims to make her own choices, but so did Boomer. Most importantly, Roslin was and always will be a teacher, and no responsible educator fails to be aware of the terrible possibility that parents can be a danger to their children. It is and has always been her job to consider this scenario, and recognize when it’s more or less likely to occur. (I haven’t mentioned Helo here because there aren’t the issues with his fitness as a parent, and in any event it’s not about punishing Sharon for her transgressions, but about the protection of Hera; that said, if he is too much of a useless asshole to consider these things for the safety of anyone including his own child, I’m not real impressed with him either.) The fleet has no CPS, it has no courts, no foster system, no police to enforce Hera’s safety in any event. There’s Roslin, Cottle, and a grateful young mother who will keep her own secret. Roslin, like any other piece of a family law system, isn’t omniscient. She makes judgments based on an intellectually honest appraisal of the facts available to her, and she does so using what I in any event believe to be the paramount factor in custody issues, which is to protect as reliably as possible the best interests of the child. As with everything else on BSG, there’s no good option, only dangerous, more dangerous, and completely awful choices. Roslin’s risk-management here is completely responsible.
One of her most complicated, and awful, actions is the near-theft of the election. Nobody, not Adama, not Roslin herself, not even Baltar seems quite able to believe she could do such a thing. “Laura Roslin is many things, but she is not corrupt, and she is not dishonest.” And as we see even throughout the aborted election fraud, those things are true. Tory provides Roslin with plausible deniability, and yet, when asked by Adama, she tells him frankly and with full honesty that she’d known something along the lines of Tory’s eventual action. She’s not in it for any kind of personal gain, as corruption implies. Her goal here, as it has been all this time, is to protect humanity. Baltar has lied, badly, to her face about having known Six before the attacks, when he could have - completely truthfully! - explained that he had known Six, but he hadn’t known she was a Cylon. She’s got every reason to believe he’s actively colluding at the time, and doesn’t even have reason to believe that the election wasn’t rigged or swung by Cylons and Cylon agents for their man Baltar. If they can orchestrate near-total genocide on twelve planets at once, and if that drunk jag Tigh could manage to steal the election, there’s no telling for her (or, strictly speaking, for us) that they didn’t do so. Everything she does is consistent, rational, even if it is a shock to the very core of everything we (including Roslin) believe to be right. She doesn’t rationalize her actions based on this possibility, but rather chooses to take full responsibility for what she knows she is probably doing; that said, I doubt the possibility has escaped her. In the end, she decides that respect for the (probable) democratic election results is more important to humanity’s long-term survival because of its importance to their reason for survival, and so she agrees that Adama should reinstate the Zephyr’s original ballots. Right or wrong, that’s not corruption.
Inexplicably (to me) the people fail to re-elect Roslin, and so she spends most of her time on New Caprica returning to her roots as a schoolteacher. Because she is no longer in a position to fight against the end of humanity, and in particular because of her somewhat-substantiated opinion of Baltar as someone who will hand them over to the Cylons, she simply accepts a brutal end to humanity as inevitable and imminent, and decides accordingly to seize the day. Though she expects the children she teaches never to grow to adulthood, she teaches them to read and write and share, so that they can participate in what little society there is left at the end of their cold, hard world. When the Cylons come back, however, Roslin returns to duty, apparently immediately. She seems to be working as a sort of head of intelligence for the insurgency, writing her letters to no one with her opinions of the occupation, considering morale rather than tactics as a motive for military maneuvers, and perhaps most tellingly, asking Tory for a list of names of the people who have signed up to work for the Cylon police force, which implies that she (a) has a means of getting the names and (b) can do something about it. We see her importance to all the insurgents most powerfully during Exodus. She, not Tigh or Anders, coordinates the escape and plans for Maya’s and Hera’s safety as best as possible.
Perhaps the most notable instance of her ethical decision-making comes during her second administration when she insists on giving Gaius Baltar his trial, even over Adama’s frank (and deeply plausible) offer to have him “just disappear.” This is actually quite a risk, as Zarek points out; it’s asking for emotions to run high in the fleet, the anti-Cylon hardliners clashing with Baltar’s supporters. Because this is the commendably practical Laura Roslin with her eyes on the ball, it isn’t all risk and no reward - a trial isn’t just a theoretical commitment to justice for Baltar, but a political opportunity to remind the fleet that they live under the rule of law and in a society where they have rights. It’s a deliberate effort not to be the gang Lee Adama claims they are. Moreover, it’s an opportunity to perhaps air out the lingering resentments of New Caprica. These things are of pragmatic good to be sure, but they remind the viewer that Roslin takes the wide view.
Lampkin’s and Lee’s allegations aside, Roslin doesn’t set up a sham trial. She makes a good-faith effort to have Baltar properly charged for his participation in the genocide. She supports Lee every step of his journey as part of the legal system, from recommending him for tribunal planning on, until he betrays her during her cross-examination, not in spite of the fact that Lee will bullheadedly pursue whatever fool-ass course of action he feels to be just (WITH LOVE, LEE, AT LEAST FOR YOUR CHEEKBONES) regardless of the pressure from his father or even her, but because of it. She also refuses to lie at his trial, even though it is dangerous to the prosecution and politically terrible for Roslin herself when Lee outs her as a cancer patient. There’s an argument that Lee was well within his rights or even ethically obligated to do so; there’s an argument that he overstepped his boundaries; right or wrong, he posed the question, and Laura Roslin refused to lie. By this time in the story she has resigned any hope of keeping even her most private experiences a secret. She has learned that her truth is powerful and that it should not shame her. And yes, she believes that she is under oath during a trial as a witness for the Colonial people, and she believes that the truth matters. She says time and again that she wants not only to preserve humanity, but to give human beings a reason for survival, and though it’s the stability of her government as well as her own privacy on the line, she reaches for order, civilization, and justice.
She speaks with wisdom, and faithful instruction is on her tongue: The Ethics of President Laura Roslin
What fascinates me so much are not the decisions President Roslin makes, but the thought process by which she arrives at those decisions. Roslin’s constant is that she does what needs doing. Human beings tend to confuse “need,” on some level, with “want,” and we don’t hurt for comparisons to Roslin on this front. Adama claims to have “had” to arrest Roslin; Tigh claims to have “had” to murder Ellen; Cain in particular claims to have “had” to do any number of things. Roslin, however, does not claim to “have” to do anything unless it is in direct service of her one imperative, which is to save humanity. From there, she makes decisions which are nearly uniformly rationally (if imperfectly so, due to limitations on information, which is an unfortunate reality for any decision-maker in her world as well as ours) and cautiously tailored towards that goal. Whatever the course of or abstention from action is, Laura Roslin has rigorously thought it through, without personal animus or dangling “just because” clauses.
That’s true even for her more puzzling or enigmatic decisions. Roslin’s leadership appears characterized by her sureness, and the clear strength of her convictions. Yet privately, we see that it’s not so much about strength and sureness than it is about a conviction that sureness is necessary. Roslin is sure about nothing but the rightness of her one goal, which is that humanity is worth saving. She holds herself out to the public as a prophet, but privately, she confesses to disbelief in the gods. She pays no heed to Adama’s lie about Earth until she sees Pythia’s snakes crawl across her platform. She acknowledges the difference between her ideals and her actions.
Roslin’s “gut” feelings, despite the unfortunately illogical term, are always substantiated, if not consciously. Roslin claims in KLG that “everything I have done is logical, consistent,” and really, based on the information she has, she continues to be right throughout most of the series. Her decision to turn the search for Earth from the official story to an actual good-faith quest isn’t really that unreasonable; they’ve got to be going somewhere, and they have enough clues to suspect that scripture is, if nothing else, legend based in ancient history. Sometimes, you gotta roll the hard six, go for broke relying on nothing but luck and slight probability.
Like any drama, BSG loves to present extreme moral dilemmas. Roslin shows the much rarer exploration of intellectual, rational ethics, rather than emotion-driven moral impulses. Roslin’s ethos, nearly her sole determinant of right and wrong, is the preservation of humanity. Regardless of our comfort level with her decisions, she never strays from this ethical compass. Saving as many people as possible is right, failing to do so is wrong. Those are the stakes. Those are always the stakes, from the moment she takes executive command of her plane until the very day she dies.
Morals in BSG, by contrast, are shown as individual, emotional, and just so incontrovertibly right that they require no explanation. That’s an experience that can feel good, to know and be so sure of The Right Thing, No Damn Matter What; however, it can and often does lead to a self-centered tunnel view of the world, where one individual’s relationships and FEEEEEEEELINGS end up prioritized over the lives of other individuals. I AM LOOKING AT YOU, KARL AGATHON. BEING SEEN AND NOT HEARD IS ALWAYS AN OPTION. JUST SAYING. Roslin’s survivor board forces her to consider all individuals of equal importance, including herself. That is rare. That is fucking radical. In this light, Roslin’s commitment to “what needs to be done” is the most if not only moral line of logic. For all her identification as a religious figure is supposed to mark her as an irrational spiritualist, she’s the exception in her refusal to make rationally unsupportable arguments about souls to justify letting people die for her own emotional comfort.
This commitment, narratively, sets Roslin up as a ruthless means-justifying force of will. And she is. She’d airlock you as soon as look at you, if she found it necessary. But it also constrains her morally in a way no other character is restrained. Roslin never, ever, acts looking backwards, except for information. It’s about preservation, not vengeance. Politically, one need look no further than the blanket amnesty she gives in the wake of the occupation as she sets up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in order to let people move on peacefully. For Roslin personally, the epitome of this is, as it so often is, Dr. Teflon himself. He's responsible (but consciously refusing to take responsibility!) for the holocaust, the figurehead of the occupation, the man who signed Roslin’s own death warrant. If any human being has ever had it coming due to past actions rather than projected future ones, it’s Gaius frakking Baltar. And yet. Given a clear opportunity to let him die, with no repercussions whatsoever (his wound looked bad enough that she could have folded the bandage back on after he died and left no one the wiser), she cannot bring herself to take it, because of her deep and passionate conviction that every life is worthwhile. Even Gaius Baltar.
I’m endlessly fascinated, and not a little bit aggravated, when I compare the treatment of Roslin’s consistent and eminently respectable ethos to the treatment of other characters. Most notably, we’re supposed to feel compassion for Tigh, who, among his many other transgressions, which include everything from ordering the bombing of civilians for the sake of making a spectacle to pissing me the fuck off, murders his own wife in cold blood to punish her for collaboration. Talk about sympathy for the devil! Why do other characters buy this, referring euphemistically to “what happened to his wife” even after he’s confessed to murdering her, though they’re more than willing to condemn Roslin? Why does the show seem to expect us to be at times startled or even horrified by Roslin and sympathetic towards Tigh? Why does it frequently seem to work? Perhaps the mere existence of positive ends on Roslin’s part opens her up to stricter moral judgment. Perhaps we’re supposed to see things from Lee’s perspective, idealizing complete pacifism on the part of the civilian system while readily accepting military judgment on the inevitability of some deaths. Or maybe it’s just that…she’s a girl, and therefore she’s supposed to save everyone backwards in high heels without tarnishing her white kid gloves, whereas the boys (and masculine-coded girls) are laudable for getting down and dirty even if it’s not necessary or even helpful.
Until almost the very end of the series, Roslin upholds a strict binary between humans and Cylons. She considers the Cylons nothing but a threat, with neither their existing consciousness nor their potential for change as a mitigating factor. Her duty is to humanity, the Cylons struck first and proved they were a mortal threat to humanity, and so she considers everything she can do to them to be not only justified, but an ethical imperative, up to and including total extinction. Humans under Roslin’s jurisdiction get a trial; Cylons are thrown out the airlock like garbage. Roslin actually began the practice of airlocking humanoid Cylons (as opposed to the firing squad condemned humans get), distinguishing the removal of Cylons from the executions of humans. There’s no blood after airlocking, there’s no body, there’s no need for the executioner to even be in the room with the condemned. As the series goes on, airlocking becomes the method of execution for collaborators as well, though this is under Zarek’s authority and not Roslin’s. Whether the viewer finds her stance on Cylons to be commendable, understanding, or horrifying, it’s clearly and consistently in line with her goal of the preservation of humanity. As far as she knows - and not for lack of trying, and with a few exceptions correctly - every single humanoid Cylon is an entity who was consciously involved in the nuclear holocaust and who continues to threaten the lives of every single person in the fleet. She chooses to meet deadly force with deadly force. She doesn’t flinch from the logical implications of the military’s unquestioned willingness to blow the Cylons out of the sky, or her own willingness to airlock one or two Cylon offenders. To Roslin, necessity is necessity, killing is killing, and justified defense of self and others is not just acceptable but right.
I don’t know, factually, what I would do in any of the characters’ shoes in the scenarios BSG presents. It is such an extraordinary hypothetical, and sometimes the analogies to the real world work and sometimes they don’t, and so I don’t know where my opinions and ethics, informed by our world, would lead me. But I know how I hope I would think and act. I hope I would accept power without allowing myself to be poisoned by it, and know when to hold on for dear life and when to let it go. I hope I would choose worthy goals and pursue them to the fullest extent of my ability, without passion or prejudice, with every fiber of my being. I hope I would consider situations critically and rationally. I hope I would be painstakingly conscious of the effects my actions and inactions had on others, without being frozen by fear or guilt. I hope I would be brave and confident whether I was staring down a peer or cancer or the barrel of a gun. I hope I would retain some sense of self and ability to find love and joy. I hope I would always remember why we fight. I hope I would be like Laura Roslin.
She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks - Roslin’s Formidable Strength
Also? Laura Roslin is a fucking badass. Though she touches a weapon once in all the years we know her, and gives only a small handful of direct military orders (only one of which, the order for the release of the bioweapon against the Cylons, is an actual aggressive maneuver, as opposed to purely defensive positions), she is, I say again, a fucking badass among a cast full of trained professional badasses. Roslin’s arsenal is verbal - her conviction, her ability to observe the interests and predilections of others and persuade them, her strong and clear understanding of a situation.
Perhaps my favorite Roslin moment of the show (as if I could pick just one!) is her Churchill moment during Blood on the Scales, which on its own nearly redeems the whole of the lamentable season 4.5, when she has convinced the Cylons to use the base star to fight the mutineers, and Tom Zarek tries to convince her to surrender. No. Not now. Not ever! Do you hear me!? I will use every cannon, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon I have down to my own eye teeth to end you! I swear it. I'm coming for all of you! And she does. All of our main characters are necessary to suppression of the mutiny, but Roslin is the keystone of the effort. She pries a critical mass of the fleet away from Gaeta with nothing but a radio address, coordinates the military strategy of the base star, convinces the rebel Cylons to stay and fight for humanity, and she will never surrender.
(Not enough Laura? I KNEW I LIKED YOU. Continued in Part II)
A woman of noble character who can find? For she is far more precious than jewels - introduction & character background
Laura Roslin is my favorite character. I admire her, I cheer for her, I just like her. I, too, would stand by my president. I love Laura’s dry sense of humor and her decisive, selfless pragmatism. I’m challenged by her political mind. I’m moved by her relationships, whether they are romantic, familial, or adversarial. She anchors the BSG story for me. Laura Roslin is my own sine qua non.
Until the series finale, we find out frustratingly little of Roslin’s back-story. We know she adored her father, and that she cared for her mother as her mother died of cancer. In Daybreak, we see that Laura also had two younger sisters to whom she was extremely close. While Laura was still working as a teacher, her father and sisters were killed by a drunk driver. Though she will later claim to have gotten into politics because her predecessor Adar had been “a very hard man to say no to,” we will later see that she was offered a position on Adar’s first national campaign by a friend who hoped to provide her a distraction from her grief. She had a years-long affair with Adar, who seemed to adore her romantically and respect her as a teacher, but sorely underestimated her political skills and dedication to the preservation of life.
Roslin stays connected to her past as a teacher, though she never overtly claims to miss it. She takes every opportunity to sit with children. On New Caprica, part of her act of seizing the day is to become a teacher again, and take baby Hera under her own care. She doesn’t demean the welfare of children by using “for the children” as an excuse for an action she has no rational reason for. She uses her teaching skills to good effect in her political career as well, with her ability to get through to people and manage them, no matter how far out of their world she is. She takes protégés under her wing and helps them grow. She has an ability to take even the most nebulous spiritual concepts and readily turn them into explicable facts of life as she imparts them to others. Two plus two is four; a noun is a person, place, or thing; water boils at one hundred degrees Celsius; all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. She uses everything about what she has, what she knows, and who she is to protect others, and her teaching ability is all three of those things.
At the time of the attacks, Laura was in a somewhat long-term affair with the married President Adar, under whom she served as Secretary of Education. Adar seems to have had even less faith in her political abilities than Adama or even Roslin herself, and yet Laura found him to be a “very hard man to say no to.” Perhaps what Roslin’s relationship with Adar displays most about her character is her drive to seize the day. Her relationship with Adar seemed neither to be serious or getting serious, but rather a source of comfort and companionship in the moment.
Many women do noble things, but you surpass them all - Laura Roslin and gender on the Galactica
BSG receives greatly deserved credit for its diverse, complex female characters. Laura Roslin stands out because it is so rare to have middle-aged women, in particular, constructed as protagonists, agents of progress, successful and feminine professionals, and love interests. LR is all of these things, making her more like famous real life women than nearly if any of her fictional counterparts. Mary McDonnell has claimed in interviews to have modeled Roslin after Hillary Clinton; in a few key ways, Roslin is like no one as much as Elizabeth I. However, her in fiction, she is nearly (perhaps completely) unique.
BSG is one of very few popular culture works which endeavors to put some space between femininity and womanhood. Colonial society appears to have had a similar evolution towards gender equality as our own, but a couple of generations past our own. Because the BSG universe is gender-bent without being gender-neutral, the show presents a huge number of gender-transgressive characters without necessarily challenging the normative gender evaluations of our world. Masculinity, though not maleness, is largely associated with strength and morality; femininity is a murkier, more complex concept for the characters and in their presentations to the audience. Mostly, female characters see their femininity mostly disappeared in order to be heroic - seeing Starbuck in a dress is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”; Athena’s motherhood serves to make her the baddest gunslinger in town; even Six’s sultriness is usually in direct and conscious service of her military mission.
Roslin, however, becomes a gender-bent character in a particularly interesting way. She is exceptionally strong (though this is entirely mental and emotional, rather than physical), able to step back and see the big picture, the non-violent patron of the warriors in a society under siege. She’s only referred to as “sir,” in the way male and female superiors are, a few times in the miniseries and early episodes. Her title is “Madam President,” and she both accepts and ensures the respect the title garners. Roslin softens her orders with giggles, she cherishes the scant opportunities she has to be a caretaker of young children, and is almost never seen without her (oddly well-maintained) power suits and pumps, but she has discovered and built her own power partially using these tools; their association with her femininity is a help to her, not a hindrance.
Skepticism and criticism of Roslin, though no characters outright state that she is unfit for power because she is a woman, often takes heavily gendered forms. Though no character comes out and says Roslin cannot be trusted with power because she is a woman (as is, technically, rare in Western society as well), critics love to refer to her as a kindergarten teacher. Roslin fans are unlikely to consider “kindergarten teacher” to be an epithet, but it appears that such work is considered of low status, and the derogative use of a commendable profession suggests that being a “kindergarten teacher” is in part less respectable because, socially and economically, care of small children is a job mostly performed by women, and thus, considered to be of low-skill and production. This doesn’t hold up logically - even if Roslin truly were a kindergarten teacher at the time she took office and not a high-ranking government official, teachers are well-educated, used to managing people and caring for basic needs, and extremely hard-working people. This shouldn’t be a strike against her in any capacity; in fact, that skill set is part of what makes her so effective at crisis management. The use of her respectable resume as a criticism stinks of sexism to me. “Secretary of Education,” along with whatever political posts she’s held between her time as a teacher and her ascent to Adar’s cabinet, are jobs that are well-respected (and apparently male-dominated) and therefore less useful as an insult to a popular, competent president.
She’s a fascinating, if probably unintentional, exploration of the glass cliff. The “glass cliff” refers to the way in which qualified women seem particularly likely only to be placed in positions of authority during times of crisis. While the opportunity for female leadership is, unfortunately, still somewhat noteworthy, it’s a more difficult leadership scenario to sustain successfully. Roslin’s ascension to power is simply based in her good fortune to survive the attack. Once people feel the crisis is over, after they’ve survived for a year and can tell themselves they’ll find some measure of safety on New Caprica, they immediately dump her for the glib, ineffectual, transparently empty Baltar-shaped suit. When New Caprica proves to have been a catastrophe on its own, the people readily accept the power exchange from Zarek to Roslin.
Unlike other characters and their stories, Roslin is acutely aware of her gender performance and the way it affects her interactions with others. Laura Roslin is a feminist. Unlike other characters, and in particular Bill, Roslin refers pointedly but as a matter of course to “the men and women” of the Colonial military. Though she falters and makes her first giant mistake in The Captain’s Hand by criminalizing abortion, she first makes a straightforward moral argument for the right to choose, a value shared by many people (myself included) but only rarely given voice in popular culture. She does not need to state a desire to have her own children to trust her abilities to care for and protect them. She doesn’t need a marriage or marriage-like commitment to validate her relationships. She never apologizes for her success. Laura Roslin is important not solely because she is a Strong Female Character ™ but because she is a female character who finds and embraces her own strength. She is an inspiration.
She watches over the affairs of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness. - The Swearing-In of President Laura Roslin
When the miniseries opens, Laura Roslin is about to receive the shattering diagnosis of terminal cancer. She handles it stoically, not breaking down until she is on board the plane that will shortly become Colonial One. experiencing the utter trauma of having lost her home and loved ones (including her boss and significant other President Adar), as is true for the rest of the fleet.
She takes charge right away, readily and sensibly. She kindly but firmly inspires the captain to “see what we can do to help,” does a quick and thoughtful press conference, has living quarters set up, both proving and defending her authority. It’s worth noting that the one character to openly question her authority is Doral, a Cylon. He should be keeping his head down and not antagonizing anyone, but Roslin’s leadership is more of a threat to the Cylons’ plan than him taking the risk of blowing his cover (or pissing someone off and being summarily shot). He seems to be going to Lee in hopes of bringing the ship under military control, thus eliminating one batch of survivors.
Roslin’s decisive action, in hindsight, saves the fleet, granting the civilians the chance to band together to become a civilization once more, and, more importantly, convinces Commander Adama to turn his mission from surely-doomed offense against the Cylons to stalwart defense of humanity. Bill thinks of the enemy - as of this moment, we are at war - while Roslin thinks in terms of searching for survivors. Her voice shakes as she takes the oath of office, but she calmly and clearly swears to protect and defend the Colonies with every fiber of her being. It is a promise she will keep for the rest of her life.
A woman who fears the LORD is to be praised - Roslin as visionary
Stretching between Roslin’s public trials and private conflicts is her journey of faith. Roslin isn’t much of a believer in the beginning of the series; we’ll find out later that she spent most of her adult life considering the gods to be metaphors rather than literal truth. Even when she thinks it’s only her life on the line, she doesn’t turn to the gods. It isn’t until she independently has the Pythian vision of the two and ten snakes that she turns to the priest. (It’s possible that she read the scrolls as a child and consciously forgot until circumstances triggered that hallucination under the influence of the drug, but this seems unlikely, as the visions eventually lead her to find the Arrow and the tomb, which are seen by people besides herself.)
And then she begins to believe. Roslin’s belief is always a bit self-conscious, tied in with her vocation, but somewhere along the line she gains a bit of reverence and faith. When Roslin claims her place as the dying leader to the Quorum, she’s not exactly lying; she’s saying something she thinks could very well be true. But she is telling a potential metaphysical truth for the very real political goal of wresting the fleet back from Tigh’s catastrophic dictatorship. She realizes that people will believe her, but on some level thinks it’s because people will want to believe her statement as much as she does. But then people ask her to pray with them and bless them, and she realizes that she has to some extent chosen her prophethood.
Her faith will become much more of a private issue once the fleet reunites and the conflict between secular might and spiritual leadership falls away, but she will continue to find hope and strength in Scripture until almost the very end of the series. Perhaps the most poignant scene showing Roslin’s faith is the moment she loses it, after Earth has failed her, as she sits alone and burns the words of Pythia in bitter disappointment. Without some modicum of genuine belief, one cannot be disappointed. Roslin’s gods have let her down, and though she is broken-hearted, she goes on to reclaim the power and sureness her few years as a true believer brought her.
She selects wool and flax, and works with eager hands: the Decisions of Laura Roslin
Roslin is often characterized as a ruthless Iron Lady who tends to err towards the authoritarian and overly hard-handed when she makes decisions. And it’s quite true, Laura makes decisions at which most of us, often including Roslin herself, would shudder. She’s not called Madame Airlock for nothing. Perhaps more than any other character on BSG, Roslin challenges viewers to consider what we would do in her shoes. Roslin does have the terrible job of life or death decisions, and with her survivor count whiteboard, the consequences of her decisions are immediate and personal. But what I’m most fascinated by is the frequency with which her mercy is not strained. She could refuse Zarek his seat on the Quorum and has every opportunity to have Zarek killed on Kobol; she does neither. She prods Tyrol into the creation of the Colonial workers’ union. Giving Hera to a foster parent is a deeply difficult decision for Roslin - one Adama tells us he would never have needed to make, because he would never have allowed Sharon’s pregnancy to come to term. They show that Roslin makes the hardest of her calls because she is genuinely convinced that she must do so, not because she rationalizes them or out of selfish desire. We know from those actions both that Roslin does not wish to cause harm, and that she is acutely aware of the pain her choices may inflict on others.
We the viewer don’t have a lot of reason to doubt, even from the beginning, that Roslin will do the difficult but, in her judgment, necessary work of keeping the fleet safe. Due to her role as the civilian leader of the fleet, her job is political and nearly always non-violent, with most of the uglier protective acts delegated to Adama’s military authority. Recruiting the convicts aboard the Astral Queen to melt the caps, beating back Zarek’s challenge through political maneuvering, initiating a genuine search for Earth by sending Starbuck to Caprica, even breaking out of jail and challenging Tigh’s and Adama’s respective dictatorships, she does by avoiding violence or even ordering the avoidance of violence.
With the arrival of Cain, though, a leader who rolls legal authority into military might, Roslin shows her own lines between those two types of authority blurred indeed. Whether she’s always acknowledged that those things are at their logical ends deeply intertwined, come to this conclusion after her experiences in the first two seasons, or even changed her mind on this is unclear, though the calm and ease with which she comes to her decision suggests that this isn’t a completely new thought to her. After only a couple of interactions with Cain, and perhaps even before, she explains to Adama that he and Cain have an untenable power imbalance. Roslin can tell, even before Tigh’s reconnaissance work with the Fisk, that Cain is a mortal danger to the civilian fleet. Indeed, she appears to be the only character who puts together Cain’s willingness to deny the civilian fleet the necessities of survival (exactly what she did to her own civilian fleet, but the military types don’t acknowledge the present reality until they’ve heard the story taken to its logical ends) with her willingness to execute officers and attack the Galactica to recognize the true threat posed by Cain.
Having been privy to Roslin’s thought processes, I as a viewer wasn’t particularly shocked at this side to Roslin; however, the other characters’ reactions are telling about them and about the face Roslin chooses to present to even those who know her best. Bill, and especially Lee, having put Laura on different sorts of pedestals, are shocked at Laura’s “bloody-mindedness.” (It isn’t bloodthirstiness, of course; it’s a desire to avoid as much bloodshed as possible co-existing with pragmatic recognition that some is unavoidable.)
Bill’s surprise gives way to a new respect for her authority and decision-making abilities, going so far as to give Roslin credit and responsibility for the assassination, citing her logic and authority rather than explaining his own when Lee questions him. It’s part respect for the “sterner stuff” he initially failed to give Roslin credit for, and part relief that the buck for the worst moral and ethical decisions stops with someone else. After this episode, Bill will accept Roslin’s decisions on security matters (Epiphanies) and even go so far as to expect direct orders for some military actions (AMoS). By the occupation less than a half-season later, the military insurgents - most notably initial Roslin skeptic Tigh - accept her as a leader of the resistance without her taking part in a single attack.
Despite the calm with which she raised the possibility of the assassination, she doesn’t flinch from her horror of the idea and its necessity. I am so glad you did not have to do what I advised you to do. She doesn’t say she was wrong, or that she regrets having advised it, or that she even has doubts about planning the assassination. Just that she’d prefer Adama not have had to do it. The exchange underlines Roslin’s commitment to even the darkest paths of action, it’s true, but it also reminds us that she does not minimize or excuse her decisions. Roslin considers both action and inaction to be choices with equal ethical weight - and they are - and she can be aware enough of the consequences of inaction to weigh them fairly with any distress over the safer course of action.
Another of Roslin’s most controversial actions is the removal of Hera from her parents’ custody. We see and feel deeply for Sharon’s and Helo’s trauma at the loss of their child at the hands of their leaders, and because they’re protagonists, it’s easy not to look any further. But I’d argue that we should consider not just the security interest of the fleet, but Hera’s best interests, and Roslin is the only character in the whole rigmarole to mention Hera’s well-being as a motive for her actions here. If Colonial law is not unlike our own, custody decisions are to be made in the best interests of the child. The crew at large only has disgust for Sharon and her offspring; Bill is concerned about the security threat posed by whatever Hera is; Sharon and Helo are broken-hearted about their lost parenthood; but Laura is the one to point out that Hera is distinctly unsafe in their present situation. Roslin’s concern about the Cylon kidnapping threat is sincere, and a valid concern at that. Galactica is a war zone. It’s not within a state at war, it’s not battlefield-adjacent, it is ground zero for every Cylon attack. Adults who have enlisted or agreed to work with the military can consent to such a risk, and be of some value to the fight against the Cylons. The infant Hera can do neither. Humans (wrongly if understandably) have on more than one occasion given vent to their terror and rage by attacking humans considered to be Cylon sympathizers - a child who threatens the human-Cylon binary is in a precarious spot indeed. Roslin is the president, in charge of seeing the big picture so she can protect the individuals within it when they lack the power to make those decisions themselves.
Perhaps most importantly, there’s good reason to wonder if Sharon is a fit parent. In retrospect, we know Athena to be a dedicated mother; however, Laura doesn’t have the script. Even giving Sharon the benefit of the doubt and saying she has truly renounced her part in the holocaust (and it’s not wholly unreasonable to put some long odds on that), Laura knows for a fact that Cylons can be triggered into completely unconscious violence. Is it worth the risk to Hera’s life to wait and see? Sharon claims to make her own choices, but so did Boomer. Most importantly, Roslin was and always will be a teacher, and no responsible educator fails to be aware of the terrible possibility that parents can be a danger to their children. It is and has always been her job to consider this scenario, and recognize when it’s more or less likely to occur. (I haven’t mentioned Helo here because there aren’t the issues with his fitness as a parent, and in any event it’s not about punishing Sharon for her transgressions, but about the protection of Hera; that said, if he is too much of a useless asshole to consider these things for the safety of anyone including his own child, I’m not real impressed with him either.) The fleet has no CPS, it has no courts, no foster system, no police to enforce Hera’s safety in any event. There’s Roslin, Cottle, and a grateful young mother who will keep her own secret. Roslin, like any other piece of a family law system, isn’t omniscient. She makes judgments based on an intellectually honest appraisal of the facts available to her, and she does so using what I in any event believe to be the paramount factor in custody issues, which is to protect as reliably as possible the best interests of the child. As with everything else on BSG, there’s no good option, only dangerous, more dangerous, and completely awful choices. Roslin’s risk-management here is completely responsible.
One of her most complicated, and awful, actions is the near-theft of the election. Nobody, not Adama, not Roslin herself, not even Baltar seems quite able to believe she could do such a thing. “Laura Roslin is many things, but she is not corrupt, and she is not dishonest.” And as we see even throughout the aborted election fraud, those things are true. Tory provides Roslin with plausible deniability, and yet, when asked by Adama, she tells him frankly and with full honesty that she’d known something along the lines of Tory’s eventual action. She’s not in it for any kind of personal gain, as corruption implies. Her goal here, as it has been all this time, is to protect humanity. Baltar has lied, badly, to her face about having known Six before the attacks, when he could have - completely truthfully! - explained that he had known Six, but he hadn’t known she was a Cylon. She’s got every reason to believe he’s actively colluding at the time, and doesn’t even have reason to believe that the election wasn’t rigged or swung by Cylons and Cylon agents for their man Baltar. If they can orchestrate near-total genocide on twelve planets at once, and if that drunk jag Tigh could manage to steal the election, there’s no telling for her (or, strictly speaking, for us) that they didn’t do so. Everything she does is consistent, rational, even if it is a shock to the very core of everything we (including Roslin) believe to be right. She doesn’t rationalize her actions based on this possibility, but rather chooses to take full responsibility for what she knows she is probably doing; that said, I doubt the possibility has escaped her. In the end, she decides that respect for the (probable) democratic election results is more important to humanity’s long-term survival because of its importance to their reason for survival, and so she agrees that Adama should reinstate the Zephyr’s original ballots. Right or wrong, that’s not corruption.
Inexplicably (to me) the people fail to re-elect Roslin, and so she spends most of her time on New Caprica returning to her roots as a schoolteacher. Because she is no longer in a position to fight against the end of humanity, and in particular because of her somewhat-substantiated opinion of Baltar as someone who will hand them over to the Cylons, she simply accepts a brutal end to humanity as inevitable and imminent, and decides accordingly to seize the day. Though she expects the children she teaches never to grow to adulthood, she teaches them to read and write and share, so that they can participate in what little society there is left at the end of their cold, hard world. When the Cylons come back, however, Roslin returns to duty, apparently immediately. She seems to be working as a sort of head of intelligence for the insurgency, writing her letters to no one with her opinions of the occupation, considering morale rather than tactics as a motive for military maneuvers, and perhaps most tellingly, asking Tory for a list of names of the people who have signed up to work for the Cylon police force, which implies that she (a) has a means of getting the names and (b) can do something about it. We see her importance to all the insurgents most powerfully during Exodus. She, not Tigh or Anders, coordinates the escape and plans for Maya’s and Hera’s safety as best as possible.
Perhaps the most notable instance of her ethical decision-making comes during her second administration when she insists on giving Gaius Baltar his trial, even over Adama’s frank (and deeply plausible) offer to have him “just disappear.” This is actually quite a risk, as Zarek points out; it’s asking for emotions to run high in the fleet, the anti-Cylon hardliners clashing with Baltar’s supporters. Because this is the commendably practical Laura Roslin with her eyes on the ball, it isn’t all risk and no reward - a trial isn’t just a theoretical commitment to justice for Baltar, but a political opportunity to remind the fleet that they live under the rule of law and in a society where they have rights. It’s a deliberate effort not to be the gang Lee Adama claims they are. Moreover, it’s an opportunity to perhaps air out the lingering resentments of New Caprica. These things are of pragmatic good to be sure, but they remind the viewer that Roslin takes the wide view.
Lampkin’s and Lee’s allegations aside, Roslin doesn’t set up a sham trial. She makes a good-faith effort to have Baltar properly charged for his participation in the genocide. She supports Lee every step of his journey as part of the legal system, from recommending him for tribunal planning on, until he betrays her during her cross-examination, not in spite of the fact that Lee will bullheadedly pursue whatever fool-ass course of action he feels to be just (WITH LOVE, LEE, AT LEAST FOR YOUR CHEEKBONES) regardless of the pressure from his father or even her, but because of it. She also refuses to lie at his trial, even though it is dangerous to the prosecution and politically terrible for Roslin herself when Lee outs her as a cancer patient. There’s an argument that Lee was well within his rights or even ethically obligated to do so; there’s an argument that he overstepped his boundaries; right or wrong, he posed the question, and Laura Roslin refused to lie. By this time in the story she has resigned any hope of keeping even her most private experiences a secret. She has learned that her truth is powerful and that it should not shame her. And yes, she believes that she is under oath during a trial as a witness for the Colonial people, and she believes that the truth matters. She says time and again that she wants not only to preserve humanity, but to give human beings a reason for survival, and though it’s the stability of her government as well as her own privacy on the line, she reaches for order, civilization, and justice.
She speaks with wisdom, and faithful instruction is on her tongue: The Ethics of President Laura Roslin
What fascinates me so much are not the decisions President Roslin makes, but the thought process by which she arrives at those decisions. Roslin’s constant is that she does what needs doing. Human beings tend to confuse “need,” on some level, with “want,” and we don’t hurt for comparisons to Roslin on this front. Adama claims to have “had” to arrest Roslin; Tigh claims to have “had” to murder Ellen; Cain in particular claims to have “had” to do any number of things. Roslin, however, does not claim to “have” to do anything unless it is in direct service of her one imperative, which is to save humanity. From there, she makes decisions which are nearly uniformly rationally (if imperfectly so, due to limitations on information, which is an unfortunate reality for any decision-maker in her world as well as ours) and cautiously tailored towards that goal. Whatever the course of or abstention from action is, Laura Roslin has rigorously thought it through, without personal animus or dangling “just because” clauses.
That’s true even for her more puzzling or enigmatic decisions. Roslin’s leadership appears characterized by her sureness, and the clear strength of her convictions. Yet privately, we see that it’s not so much about strength and sureness than it is about a conviction that sureness is necessary. Roslin is sure about nothing but the rightness of her one goal, which is that humanity is worth saving. She holds herself out to the public as a prophet, but privately, she confesses to disbelief in the gods. She pays no heed to Adama’s lie about Earth until she sees Pythia’s snakes crawl across her platform. She acknowledges the difference between her ideals and her actions.
Roslin’s “gut” feelings, despite the unfortunately illogical term, are always substantiated, if not consciously. Roslin claims in KLG that “everything I have done is logical, consistent,” and really, based on the information she has, she continues to be right throughout most of the series. Her decision to turn the search for Earth from the official story to an actual good-faith quest isn’t really that unreasonable; they’ve got to be going somewhere, and they have enough clues to suspect that scripture is, if nothing else, legend based in ancient history. Sometimes, you gotta roll the hard six, go for broke relying on nothing but luck and slight probability.
Like any drama, BSG loves to present extreme moral dilemmas. Roslin shows the much rarer exploration of intellectual, rational ethics, rather than emotion-driven moral impulses. Roslin’s ethos, nearly her sole determinant of right and wrong, is the preservation of humanity. Regardless of our comfort level with her decisions, she never strays from this ethical compass. Saving as many people as possible is right, failing to do so is wrong. Those are the stakes. Those are always the stakes, from the moment she takes executive command of her plane until the very day she dies.
Morals in BSG, by contrast, are shown as individual, emotional, and just so incontrovertibly right that they require no explanation. That’s an experience that can feel good, to know and be so sure of The Right Thing, No Damn Matter What; however, it can and often does lead to a self-centered tunnel view of the world, where one individual’s relationships and FEEEEEEEELINGS end up prioritized over the lives of other individuals. I AM LOOKING AT YOU, KARL AGATHON. BEING SEEN AND NOT HEARD IS ALWAYS AN OPTION. JUST SAYING. Roslin’s survivor board forces her to consider all individuals of equal importance, including herself. That is rare. That is fucking radical. In this light, Roslin’s commitment to “what needs to be done” is the most if not only moral line of logic. For all her identification as a religious figure is supposed to mark her as an irrational spiritualist, she’s the exception in her refusal to make rationally unsupportable arguments about souls to justify letting people die for her own emotional comfort.
This commitment, narratively, sets Roslin up as a ruthless means-justifying force of will. And she is. She’d airlock you as soon as look at you, if she found it necessary. But it also constrains her morally in a way no other character is restrained. Roslin never, ever, acts looking backwards, except for information. It’s about preservation, not vengeance. Politically, one need look no further than the blanket amnesty she gives in the wake of the occupation as she sets up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in order to let people move on peacefully. For Roslin personally, the epitome of this is, as it so often is, Dr. Teflon himself. He's responsible (but consciously refusing to take responsibility!) for the holocaust, the figurehead of the occupation, the man who signed Roslin’s own death warrant. If any human being has ever had it coming due to past actions rather than projected future ones, it’s Gaius frakking Baltar. And yet. Given a clear opportunity to let him die, with no repercussions whatsoever (his wound looked bad enough that she could have folded the bandage back on after he died and left no one the wiser), she cannot bring herself to take it, because of her deep and passionate conviction that every life is worthwhile. Even Gaius Baltar.
I’m endlessly fascinated, and not a little bit aggravated, when I compare the treatment of Roslin’s consistent and eminently respectable ethos to the treatment of other characters. Most notably, we’re supposed to feel compassion for Tigh, who, among his many other transgressions, which include everything from ordering the bombing of civilians for the sake of making a spectacle to pissing me the fuck off, murders his own wife in cold blood to punish her for collaboration. Talk about sympathy for the devil! Why do other characters buy this, referring euphemistically to “what happened to his wife” even after he’s confessed to murdering her, though they’re more than willing to condemn Roslin? Why does the show seem to expect us to be at times startled or even horrified by Roslin and sympathetic towards Tigh? Why does it frequently seem to work? Perhaps the mere existence of positive ends on Roslin’s part opens her up to stricter moral judgment. Perhaps we’re supposed to see things from Lee’s perspective, idealizing complete pacifism on the part of the civilian system while readily accepting military judgment on the inevitability of some deaths. Or maybe it’s just that…she’s a girl, and therefore she’s supposed to save everyone backwards in high heels without tarnishing her white kid gloves, whereas the boys (and masculine-coded girls) are laudable for getting down and dirty even if it’s not necessary or even helpful.
Until almost the very end of the series, Roslin upholds a strict binary between humans and Cylons. She considers the Cylons nothing but a threat, with neither their existing consciousness nor their potential for change as a mitigating factor. Her duty is to humanity, the Cylons struck first and proved they were a mortal threat to humanity, and so she considers everything she can do to them to be not only justified, but an ethical imperative, up to and including total extinction. Humans under Roslin’s jurisdiction get a trial; Cylons are thrown out the airlock like garbage. Roslin actually began the practice of airlocking humanoid Cylons (as opposed to the firing squad condemned humans get), distinguishing the removal of Cylons from the executions of humans. There’s no blood after airlocking, there’s no body, there’s no need for the executioner to even be in the room with the condemned. As the series goes on, airlocking becomes the method of execution for collaborators as well, though this is under Zarek’s authority and not Roslin’s. Whether the viewer finds her stance on Cylons to be commendable, understanding, or horrifying, it’s clearly and consistently in line with her goal of the preservation of humanity. As far as she knows - and not for lack of trying, and with a few exceptions correctly - every single humanoid Cylon is an entity who was consciously involved in the nuclear holocaust and who continues to threaten the lives of every single person in the fleet. She chooses to meet deadly force with deadly force. She doesn’t flinch from the logical implications of the military’s unquestioned willingness to blow the Cylons out of the sky, or her own willingness to airlock one or two Cylon offenders. To Roslin, necessity is necessity, killing is killing, and justified defense of self and others is not just acceptable but right.
I don’t know, factually, what I would do in any of the characters’ shoes in the scenarios BSG presents. It is such an extraordinary hypothetical, and sometimes the analogies to the real world work and sometimes they don’t, and so I don’t know where my opinions and ethics, informed by our world, would lead me. But I know how I hope I would think and act. I hope I would accept power without allowing myself to be poisoned by it, and know when to hold on for dear life and when to let it go. I hope I would choose worthy goals and pursue them to the fullest extent of my ability, without passion or prejudice, with every fiber of my being. I hope I would consider situations critically and rationally. I hope I would be painstakingly conscious of the effects my actions and inactions had on others, without being frozen by fear or guilt. I hope I would be brave and confident whether I was staring down a peer or cancer or the barrel of a gun. I hope I would retain some sense of self and ability to find love and joy. I hope I would always remember why we fight. I hope I would be like Laura Roslin.
She sets about her work vigorously; her arms are strong for her tasks - Roslin’s Formidable Strength
Also? Laura Roslin is a fucking badass. Though she touches a weapon once in all the years we know her, and gives only a small handful of direct military orders (only one of which, the order for the release of the bioweapon against the Cylons, is an actual aggressive maneuver, as opposed to purely defensive positions), she is, I say again, a fucking badass among a cast full of trained professional badasses. Roslin’s arsenal is verbal - her conviction, her ability to observe the interests and predilections of others and persuade them, her strong and clear understanding of a situation.
Perhaps my favorite Roslin moment of the show (as if I could pick just one!) is her Churchill moment during Blood on the Scales, which on its own nearly redeems the whole of the lamentable season 4.5, when she has convinced the Cylons to use the base star to fight the mutineers, and Tom Zarek tries to convince her to surrender. No. Not now. Not ever! Do you hear me!? I will use every cannon, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon I have down to my own eye teeth to end you! I swear it. I'm coming for all of you! And she does. All of our main characters are necessary to suppression of the mutiny, but Roslin is the keystone of the effort. She pries a critical mass of the fleet away from Gaeta with nothing but a radio address, coordinates the military strategy of the base star, convinces the rebel Cylons to stay and fight for humanity, and she will never surrender.
(Not enough Laura? I KNEW I LIKED YOU. Continued in Part II)