BSG meta: Gaius Baltar
Watching Serenity has reminded me of one of the differences between Firefly and BSG, two shows I love with equal fervour. With Firefly, I really don’t have favourites. I can’t say I love Mal better than Simon or vice versa, Jayne better than Book, Kaylee better than Zoe, Inara better than Wash, and so on. This might just be the ensemble show (plus movie) where I manage to keep an equal ensemble love. (I’m an ensemble girl in any case, but with, say, Babylon 5, I have my clear priorities, my characters that are adored beyond measure and characters I only like, and those I just tolerate.)
In the new Battlestar Galactica, I’m first and foremost a Laura Roslin fangirl, but love the rest of the gang as well. There isn’t a regular character I find uninteresting or not worth watching and fleshing out, and of the recurring ones, I’d have to stretch it and point to two-episodes-character Anders to find anyone I’m not intrigued by. However, the degree of my interest can grow or lessen. Take Starbuck, for example: I’ve always liked her, and I still do, but I found her more interesting pre-Kobol’s Last Gleaming than I did afterwards. This might change again, of course.
Gaius Baltar, in the other hand, has become increasingly fascinating to me. He doesn’t actually fit any of my fannish archetypes. If I’m fond of a villain, he or she usually tends to be courageous and intelligent (see also: Servalan, Arvin Sloane, Winn Adami) and quite often passionate about something other than their own advancement (any men with the initials A.S. would qualify, as would, say, Alfred Bester on Babylon 5). Good old Gaius, on the other hand, might not be stupid, but he gets introduced to us as anything but courageous, and as unabashedly selfish. The man’s first reaction upon hearing the lover he thought he was helping commit industrial espionage actually used him to help annihilate the human race is that he needs a lawyer. He might have been tricked into enabling the death of millions, but he very deliberately organized the (presumed) death of a patsy to deflect suspicion from himself. And he clearly seems incapable of emotional commitment; when Six, the Cylon who has been his companion for two years, asks him in the miniseries whether he loves her, he can’t answer her, and she sees him having sex with another woman soon after. And yet.
Baltar, in the old show, of which I still haven’t seen anything other than the pilot and the Pegasus episode, was the traitor who sold out the human race to the Cylons for a fiefdom and otherwise, as far as I could see, your standard muhawahhaaa type of Evil Overlord. He was evil because he was evil. Gaius Baltar in the new show is something for complicated. I think it was Deborah_judge who said that the main purpose of Baltar’s arc might turn out to be teaching him to love someone other than himself, and to believe, truly believe, in something greater than himself, and that this might be not a good thing at all. (For either Baltar or humanity.) Which would reverse and twist your standard redemption process.
The Gaius we meet might be a self-absorbed narcissist without any virtue other than being bright and none-too-bad looks, but he isn’t (yet) a killer. He did not deliberately set out to doom the human race. Fast forward to the point the first half of the second season ends, and Gaius Baltar isn’t nearly as self-absorbed, or as narcissistic. He’s been humiliated on a regular basis. He has come to believe in a greater purpose. He has also, wonder of wonders, shown empathy for others on some occasions - ambiguously for the doomed Boomer in Kobol’s Last Gleaming, for Boomer and Tyrol near the end of Resistance, most pointedly for the other Six, the abused model named Gina on the website, on Pegasus. He has saved one woman’s life and has under fire fought with others. He’s even finally able to say “love” and mean it.
But this same man also is now capable of killing, personally, not by arrangement or accident, if he thinks it’s necessary. (Ask Crashdown.) He is capable of blackmailing a woman by threatening to kill her lover (see also Boomer and Tyrol) precisely because he can empathize with the two of them. (Mind you, my favourite President uses the same tactic with the other Boomer and Helo, but I don’t think we’re meant to see this as anything but ruthless in either case.) And when the Cylon in his head tells him their child is meant to end the human race for good one day, he’s no longer shocked. He doesn’t call for his lawyer - i.e. reacts by “how will I get out of this one?” either. He seems to be unsure whether the end of the human race (and the creation of a new one) is actually a bad thing or not.
Which isn’t to say Baltar has accepted the Cylon agenda. The focus of the conversations he has with Six has somewhat shifted in the course of the series. At first, they were about his own survival, sex, and her god, not necessarily in this order. When he talked to her, she created an idyllic environment for him more often than not, his luxurious house on Caprica, and whether she prodded, berated or praised him, it usually served as a refuge. This changed with his arrival on Kobol, or maybe a bit earlier, in the aftermath of his night with Starbuck and its none-too-happy ending, when he asks Six to be alone in the small bathroom on Colonial One and she smashes his face in the mirror. Afterwards, on Kobol, you could say he goes through the mirror, through a long and extended hallucination/vision and some hellish real life events, at any rate.
Baltar isn’t there later when everyone finally finds the map to Earth, but he had his own revelations. During his conversations with Six on Kobol, he was no longer imagining himself as the smooth, well-kept well off man of yesteryear. No matter which environment she created, Baltar looked exactly as damaged as he did in “real” life. And the topics she addressed weren’t exactly comforting, either. Death was a major one. When Six calls murder the one human art, he points out the Cylons did plenty of killing of their own. “We are humanity’s children”, she says. Where is the sense of it all, he asks her. Cylons kill humans, humans kill Cylons - what is the point, and when will it end? It’s the kind of question I can’t see the Gaius of the miniseries asking, and the kind of question that makes BSG such a good show.
The show kept the nature of Six open to debate for as long as possible. In the miniseries, Baltar first thinks she’s a psychosis, something his mind produced under the stress of everything that happened. Six suggests she could be a chip instead. We didn’t hear her tell him anything his subconscious could not have come up with or do anything that proved her existence outside of his mind until Six Degrees of Separation, when “Shelley Godfrey” turned up, and was seen by everyone else. The first information which really couldn’t have come from Gaius’ subconscious, somewhat later, was the news about the child, and it is this which finally seals it for him again, in the second season, after an interval in which Six mindmesses with him on a grand scale and convinces him she’s a psychosis… right until the existence of a child, Boomer’s child, is confirmed. One of the deleted scenes which I wish they had kept shows us something I find very interesting, that Gaius, who at first was bewildered and uncomprehending about the “there will be a child” news and called the entire idea ridiculous when arguing with Six has come to the point where he shows grief when realizing that if Six is a psychosis, then there will not be a child. That he has come to want one. But what is Six? God’s messenger, she says. I’ll be your conscience, she tells him on Kobol. You’re no longer my fancy, he tells her, angrily, on Galactica. Weeks later, he tells another version of her, the battered, bruised Gina whose sight shocked both of them: I love her. As opposed to the hasty “I love you” in “Six Degrees of Separation” in season 1 which clearly was nothing but an attempt to get out of a dangerous situation, this confession rings true, not the least because this time, Baltar isn’t the one in danger.
Six might have been his perfect fantasy once upon a time; she certainly was both his punishment and reward for his original unwitting and later deliberate betrayals. I’m not sure whether or not she is his conscience; if she were, he would not argue with her about death and the meaning of it all. But I think he has one, now, when he didn’t before. He has one because he has learned to care for more than his own survival. But is this a good thing for humanity? Probably not. And what a twist if conscience makes not cowards of us all but makes a not-coward out of Gaius Baltar… and thereby makes him into the doom of the human race the (worse) man he was could not have been?
I might be wrong about where this is going, of course. Maybe Moore & Co. have something else entirely planned for Baltar. But whatever they’ll come up with, I think I’ll find it interesting. Two final thought: in a deleted scene from Valley of Darkness or Fragged, Six tells Gaius that he will be the only human who will live to see Earth. The thing about Cylon prophecies? They might come true in unexpected ways… but they usually come true. And here’s another thing: Gaius Baltar is one of the few characters who I’m absolutely positively certain will not turn out to be a Cylon. Because his very role in the narrative is defined by him being human. Not the best humanity has to offer, like, say, Lee Adama. Not the worst (I’d say the “worst human” award so far could go to Thorne, but that’s arguable). But with his collection of horrible flaws and maybe some growing virtues intensely, deeply human.
Which is why I find him fascinating.
In the new Battlestar Galactica, I’m first and foremost a Laura Roslin fangirl, but love the rest of the gang as well. There isn’t a regular character I find uninteresting or not worth watching and fleshing out, and of the recurring ones, I’d have to stretch it and point to two-episodes-character Anders to find anyone I’m not intrigued by. However, the degree of my interest can grow or lessen. Take Starbuck, for example: I’ve always liked her, and I still do, but I found her more interesting pre-Kobol’s Last Gleaming than I did afterwards. This might change again, of course.
Gaius Baltar, in the other hand, has become increasingly fascinating to me. He doesn’t actually fit any of my fannish archetypes. If I’m fond of a villain, he or she usually tends to be courageous and intelligent (see also: Servalan, Arvin Sloane, Winn Adami) and quite often passionate about something other than their own advancement (any men with the initials A.S. would qualify, as would, say, Alfred Bester on Babylon 5). Good old Gaius, on the other hand, might not be stupid, but he gets introduced to us as anything but courageous, and as unabashedly selfish. The man’s first reaction upon hearing the lover he thought he was helping commit industrial espionage actually used him to help annihilate the human race is that he needs a lawyer. He might have been tricked into enabling the death of millions, but he very deliberately organized the (presumed) death of a patsy to deflect suspicion from himself. And he clearly seems incapable of emotional commitment; when Six, the Cylon who has been his companion for two years, asks him in the miniseries whether he loves her, he can’t answer her, and she sees him having sex with another woman soon after. And yet.
Baltar, in the old show, of which I still haven’t seen anything other than the pilot and the Pegasus episode, was the traitor who sold out the human race to the Cylons for a fiefdom and otherwise, as far as I could see, your standard muhawahhaaa type of Evil Overlord. He was evil because he was evil. Gaius Baltar in the new show is something for complicated. I think it was Deborah_judge who said that the main purpose of Baltar’s arc might turn out to be teaching him to love someone other than himself, and to believe, truly believe, in something greater than himself, and that this might be not a good thing at all. (For either Baltar or humanity.) Which would reverse and twist your standard redemption process.
The Gaius we meet might be a self-absorbed narcissist without any virtue other than being bright and none-too-bad looks, but he isn’t (yet) a killer. He did not deliberately set out to doom the human race. Fast forward to the point the first half of the second season ends, and Gaius Baltar isn’t nearly as self-absorbed, or as narcissistic. He’s been humiliated on a regular basis. He has come to believe in a greater purpose. He has also, wonder of wonders, shown empathy for others on some occasions - ambiguously for the doomed Boomer in Kobol’s Last Gleaming, for Boomer and Tyrol near the end of Resistance, most pointedly for the other Six, the abused model named Gina on the website, on Pegasus. He has saved one woman’s life and has under fire fought with others. He’s even finally able to say “love” and mean it.
But this same man also is now capable of killing, personally, not by arrangement or accident, if he thinks it’s necessary. (Ask Crashdown.) He is capable of blackmailing a woman by threatening to kill her lover (see also Boomer and Tyrol) precisely because he can empathize with the two of them. (Mind you, my favourite President uses the same tactic with the other Boomer and Helo, but I don’t think we’re meant to see this as anything but ruthless in either case.) And when the Cylon in his head tells him their child is meant to end the human race for good one day, he’s no longer shocked. He doesn’t call for his lawyer - i.e. reacts by “how will I get out of this one?” either. He seems to be unsure whether the end of the human race (and the creation of a new one) is actually a bad thing or not.
Which isn’t to say Baltar has accepted the Cylon agenda. The focus of the conversations he has with Six has somewhat shifted in the course of the series. At first, they were about his own survival, sex, and her god, not necessarily in this order. When he talked to her, she created an idyllic environment for him more often than not, his luxurious house on Caprica, and whether she prodded, berated or praised him, it usually served as a refuge. This changed with his arrival on Kobol, or maybe a bit earlier, in the aftermath of his night with Starbuck and its none-too-happy ending, when he asks Six to be alone in the small bathroom on Colonial One and she smashes his face in the mirror. Afterwards, on Kobol, you could say he goes through the mirror, through a long and extended hallucination/vision and some hellish real life events, at any rate.
Baltar isn’t there later when everyone finally finds the map to Earth, but he had his own revelations. During his conversations with Six on Kobol, he was no longer imagining himself as the smooth, well-kept well off man of yesteryear. No matter which environment she created, Baltar looked exactly as damaged as he did in “real” life. And the topics she addressed weren’t exactly comforting, either. Death was a major one. When Six calls murder the one human art, he points out the Cylons did plenty of killing of their own. “We are humanity’s children”, she says. Where is the sense of it all, he asks her. Cylons kill humans, humans kill Cylons - what is the point, and when will it end? It’s the kind of question I can’t see the Gaius of the miniseries asking, and the kind of question that makes BSG such a good show.
The show kept the nature of Six open to debate for as long as possible. In the miniseries, Baltar first thinks she’s a psychosis, something his mind produced under the stress of everything that happened. Six suggests she could be a chip instead. We didn’t hear her tell him anything his subconscious could not have come up with or do anything that proved her existence outside of his mind until Six Degrees of Separation, when “Shelley Godfrey” turned up, and was seen by everyone else. The first information which really couldn’t have come from Gaius’ subconscious, somewhat later, was the news about the child, and it is this which finally seals it for him again, in the second season, after an interval in which Six mindmesses with him on a grand scale and convinces him she’s a psychosis… right until the existence of a child, Boomer’s child, is confirmed. One of the deleted scenes which I wish they had kept shows us something I find very interesting, that Gaius, who at first was bewildered and uncomprehending about the “there will be a child” news and called the entire idea ridiculous when arguing with Six has come to the point where he shows grief when realizing that if Six is a psychosis, then there will not be a child. That he has come to want one. But what is Six? God’s messenger, she says. I’ll be your conscience, she tells him on Kobol. You’re no longer my fancy, he tells her, angrily, on Galactica. Weeks later, he tells another version of her, the battered, bruised Gina whose sight shocked both of them: I love her. As opposed to the hasty “I love you” in “Six Degrees of Separation” in season 1 which clearly was nothing but an attempt to get out of a dangerous situation, this confession rings true, not the least because this time, Baltar isn’t the one in danger.
Six might have been his perfect fantasy once upon a time; she certainly was both his punishment and reward for his original unwitting and later deliberate betrayals. I’m not sure whether or not she is his conscience; if she were, he would not argue with her about death and the meaning of it all. But I think he has one, now, when he didn’t before. He has one because he has learned to care for more than his own survival. But is this a good thing for humanity? Probably not. And what a twist if conscience makes not cowards of us all but makes a not-coward out of Gaius Baltar… and thereby makes him into the doom of the human race the (worse) man he was could not have been?
I might be wrong about where this is going, of course. Maybe Moore & Co. have something else entirely planned for Baltar. But whatever they’ll come up with, I think I’ll find it interesting. Two final thought: in a deleted scene from Valley of Darkness or Fragged, Six tells Gaius that he will be the only human who will live to see Earth. The thing about Cylon prophecies? They might come true in unexpected ways… but they usually come true. And here’s another thing: Gaius Baltar is one of the few characters who I’m absolutely positively certain will not turn out to be a Cylon. Because his very role in the narrative is defined by him being human. Not the best humanity has to offer, like, say, Lee Adama. Not the worst (I’d say the “worst human” award so far could go to Thorne, but that’s arguable). But with his collection of horrible flaws and maybe some growing virtues intensely, deeply human.
Which is why I find him fascinating.