The Ballad of Gaius and Laura - more BSG thoughts
Being a post on the Laura Roslin and Gaius Baltar encounters, contrasts, parallels, echoes and what have you, named after a John Lennon song just to scare the hell out of shippers of all calibres. (Err, in vain, I hasten to add. It's anything but a shipping manifesto.)
So, triggered by two scenes in The Oath, the most recent BSG episode, some thoughts that will be a complete essay only once the show is finished, as I think and hope we've not seen the last of these interweaving storylines.
The funny thing is, in several ways they've created another. Laura Roslin, former school teacher, former secretary of education, was already a gifted politician but she probably would never have become President if not for the devastating attack on the colonies. She had just found out she was diagnosed with cancer, her professional and personal relationship with President Adar was in the process of falling apart; most likely, without the Cylons she would have left the cabinet in disgust over Adar's behaviour towards the teachers' strike and over her own illness, and become a private citizen again. But the Cylon's genocidal attack suddenly made her leader of what was left of the human race, and she rose to the challenge in a magnficent way back then. Said attack could succeed because Gaius Baltar, media darling, scientist, and complete egotist thought nothing wrong with sharing nuclear defense codes to his hot girlfriend who he thought needed them because the company she worked for was fighting for goverment contracts with the competition. When the Cylons attacked, Laura's first reaction, after the horror of realisation, was to pull it together and calm the people in the ship she was in; Gaius' first thought upon realising just what he had enabled was that he really needed a lawyer. In many ways, the first season started them as two extremes of what humanity could be, and not in a monster/saint way, but in a strength, courage and thinking of the greater good versus weakness, selfishness and cowardice kind of way. The one thing they both seemed to share was that they were both really good at surviving. (Even with Laura's body working against her.)
Scenes in which they're both in the same room but not really interacting aside, the first big confrontation comes in Six Degrees of Separation, in which it's driven home to Gaius Baltar that Laura Roslin doesn't like him, isn't charmed or impressed or even amused by him, and distrusts him so much she's quite ready to believe he could have had something to do with the Cylon attack. (Which he does, though not for the reason Roslin thinks he has.) She is the first human to judge and condemn him, which I think is really important to what he later makes her into. Six Degrees of Separation, incidentally, is also the first episode in which Baltar, who started out as an atheist on this show, is scared and panicked enough - after his encounter with Roslin, who has made it very clear he can expect no mercy from her - to pray and claim he believes in (the Cylon) God. At this point, it's a no-atheist-in-a-foxhole thing, and he clearly doesn't mean it once he's out of danger, but it's the first step for a long term development. Come the episode Hands of the Gods, we for the first time get a prophecy which seems to have not one but two possible interpretations, and both with an origin that could be divine, or simply subconscious. By then, Laura Roslin secretly taking chamalla to fight her cancer has lead her to visions, visions that seemingly offer clues and in this case instructions, and Gaius Baltar, who has been seeing one particular vision ever since the attack, gets another one of those complete with, for the first but not the last time, cruxificion pose. Shortly after, the priestess Elosha tells Laura she could be the fulffillment of a prophecy, the dying leader, chosen. Gaius hears he's chosen from the Six in his head all the time.
Now, both Roslin and Baltar come around to starting to believe in all this for similar reasons; they keep seeing visions that turn out to be true and reveal things they can't have knowledge about in other ways, miracles happen to them. (Think of Roslin walking through a crossfire in early s2, with a bullet going through her jacket but not through her, and Baltar being stunned to find out the child Head!Six kept telling him about actually exists when Sharon and Helo return to the fleet.) What develops there isn't faith through fascination with the content of religion (compare Laura's type of belief with, say, Starbuck's; Kara has many issues, but whether or not the gods exist never is one to her, and the things that happen to her or which she does make no difference), it's conversion because of miracles. And of course there is a powerful pyschological allure. If Laura Roslin is the dying leader of prophecy, her cancer isn't a meaningless vicious illness that kills her as it killed her mother, it's something that is part of what enables her to save humanity by finding Earth. If Gaius Baltar really was chosen by a god, then what happened isn't his fault, not really, and he can justify it by saying it was meant to happen and that he himself has some more purpose as well. Is it really a surprise that three years later, both have a crisis of that faith pretty much simultanously when the miracle of miracles, Earth, is anything but salvation, there is no last minute divine intervention and they might not have been chosen for anything?
In addition to religion, there is politics. In which Baltar originally had no interest, as in many a thing that doesn't concern himself. Laura Roslin, on the other hand, despite professing to despise party politics has been involved in them for years on Caprica, and takes to the top job like a duck to water. She also turns out to have an instinct not just for survival but power preservation. In Colonial Day, she has her first sparring with Tom Zarek, who brings up the good point that there should be a vice president, and also has good chances of getting elected. Roslin's countermove is to appoint Gaius Baltar, whom she not two episodes previously declared her dislike and distrust against and believes capable of having committed high treason as her own vice presidential candidate, correctly banking on the fact Baltar's media popularity and abiliity to charm people if he puts an effort to it will beat out Zarek with his dubious past. But think about this. Roslin knows she's a dying woman. (Though not many other people do - at this point Billy, Cottle, Lee Adama, and I think that's it.) Which means that whoever becomes her VP will have a more than good chance of succeeding her as President, and soon. And she's willing to risk for that person to be someone with zero experience in politics, with a big question mark in her eyes about his reliability, especially in a time of crisis, someone, in short, whom she KNOWS could be an utter disaster as President - all so she can beat Tom Zarek. (Um, more recent campaign parallels could come to mind...) I'm guessing Roslin planned in ditching Baltar as soon as she possibly could, except that he stays VP through the second season, she wrote that letter to him in case of her death, and he would have indeed succeeded her if if he hadn't saved her life in Epiphanies. Which led to a big karmic irony in the s2 finale.
Meanwhile, Baltar, while always fond of approval and applause, is that odd mixture of an egotist who actually isn't into power. (Which isn't helpful when he gets it and makes a bad job out of handling it.) The VP thing probably would never have occured to him on his own, and once he has the title, he doesn't do anything with it. (His big experiences during the first half of s2 are the crash on Kobol, where events go to hell and he kills for the first time, which is about saving himself but saves Cally and everyone else, too, and encountering Gina, the abused Six model, on Pegasus in the middle of the season. In retrospect, the most important scene of his part in the Kobol storyline probably wasn't the shooting in Fragged but his argument with Head!Six about the utter pointlessness of the bloody Cylon/Human struggle. It's the first but not the last time he says something like this - the next time will be to D'Anna; Gaius Baltar doesn't have many saving graces but one of them is that he consistently thought that "we kill you so you kill us so we kill you" was one of the stupidest things ever.) But then comes the episode in which he manages to save a dying Laura Roslin and Sharon's unborn baby at the same time, and gets the reminder of (not nearly) all of his flawys in a "in case I die" letter by Roslin. This results in a giant act of pettiness on Baltar's part, with horrible long-term consequences for the rest of the fleet, or rather, two acts. The first one is to give Gina the nuclear warhead, the second one is to get into politics for real and present himself as an alternative candidate to Laura Roslin. Since through four seasons, we've seen Baltar do many things out of weakness, fear for his life, and very, very rarely because he felt sorry for someone (Gina on Pegasus comes to mind, the dying child in the cult early on, Tyrol; Gaeta in 4.13. is a debatable case), but this lashing out in petty vengefulness - because campaigning against Roslin really isn't about anyone but Roslin - remains pretty unique, and I think I know why, given what happens in the third and fourth seasons. Because if no one else knows what he has done, and what he's responsible for, Gaius Baltar does. He can try to ignore it, try to find excuses (if there is a god, he wanted it, so it's not really Baltar's fault! Or maybe he's a Cylon himself, and then he's not a traitor, etc.), but it's there, lurking in the back of his mind, which is why the visualisation in the s3 episode where Baltar gets tortured and he hallucinates getting pushed under water and drowned by the burned dead of Caprica is so apt. And he also knows that Laura Roslin, who represents humanity, is the judge waiting for him. He knows because she was the first to pronounce a judgment back in s1. If he can get Roslin's approval, then he really is out of the waters. (Note that when in s2 finale Zarek suggests Roslin fixed the votes, Baltar says she would never do that; in his way, he has her on as high a pedestal as any of her admirers.)
But of course he doesn't get it, and in s2, Baltar, in his ever so mature way, reacts with a gigantic "so there!"
S3 keeps turning things around. I don't think Roslin ever considered Baltar a serious opponent in late season 2. Zarek perhaps, Adama in early s2 for sure, but not Gaius Baltar, Mr. Superficial, the lightweight she had made into a VP just as a tool she needed at the time. She was absolutely confident in her ability to defeat him in the elections, and she had every reason to be, given what a contender she had become by that point. But then he did win the elections, not via sabotage, through the will of the people. (There's irony for you: to this day, Laura Roslin is an unelected head of state. She did not win a single election. Baltar did, Zarek did, but not Roslin.) And proceeded to make a thorough mess out of the office of President even before the Cylons arrived. Actually, I think Baltar surrendering was something Roslin understood, if not condoned, because with Galactia and Pegasus away and New Caprica hopelessly outgunned, what else could he have done? But he could have done a whole lot more before, and he could have done much better after. This, imo, is when she started to hate him, which she didn't before, as much as she distrusted him and was convinced there was something fishy about him and the Cylons she couldn't prove. But Baltar received what she didn't, the office of President via the expressed will of the people, and he chose to squander it in depression and hedonism. He was failure walking around, and the fact hat it was partly her failure (the VPship, remember) must have been especially galling. Then came the occupation, and his failure wasn't just being a lousy President, it was complete inability to protect humanity or fight for them. (I don't think Baltar's refusal to sign one particular death list until a literal gun was put to his head and Caprica Six shot in front of him would have carried any weight with Roslin even had she known, not with what other humans suffered and were prepared to fight nonetheless.)
And yet at this very point, where you could say the moral difference between the two was never larger, the writers do something incredibly clever. If subsequent encounters between Baltar and Roslin just had consisted in her righteously condemming and him cringingly excusing, nobody would have paid these scenes any attention. Instead, however, in the second episode of s3, when Gaius visits a temporarily arrested Laura in her cell, something unexpected happens. Not that he asks her to appear with him in to appease the population and she refuses, that's par the course. Or that she calls him out on the methods used by the occupation. No, the really breathtaking moment is when he asks her, point blank, whether she can really condone suicide bombings and the deaths of civilians along with Cylons (which is the method the resistance uses), and Laura just for a moment looks away (and indeed does not reply to this question at all). I don't think anyone managed that before. It's also the first time Gaius Baltar demonstrates insight into Laura Roslin, which he didn't have before. Maybe the year as a presidential failure did it, or maybe that he's at that point fastly sliding into as much suicidal depression as Baltar ever gets before survivalism kicks in again, but he's grown up somewhat. (Somewhat.) The visit ends in mutual frustration and him ordering to let her go, and that's the last time they see each other until the Cylons show up with him in tow mid season 3, which is but an interlude, and then when fortunes are reversed and he's her prisoner.
One of the reasons why I think BSG handles torture responsibly is that when someone gets tortured - be it Leoben in s1 by Kara, or Baltar in s3 by Adama and Roslin - this never results in achieving what the torturer wants. What they hear isn't anything to save lives, no information disarming bombs or prevent attacks. Instead, what they get is a reflection on themselves. In the s3 case, Roslin herself admits in the end that no, she didn't really want to know whether or not the Cylons knew about the way to earth, she wanted an admission of guilt from Baltar, and she wanted him to suffer. If Baltar embodies many of humanity's weaknesses - selfishness, cowardice, unwillingness to accept responsibility, thoughtless gratification, among several - he brings out the worst in Roslin at this point. But this isn't the end, either. The later part of s3 is in many ways payback time for Baltar - imprisonment, the torture session, and his mixture of a suicide attempt and/or last attempt to find out whether he's Cylon or human, with the resulting acceptence that yes, he's human. (Which still leaves him with his inner "there has to be intent for treason" defense - he's still not ready to accept responsibility yet.) It's also, in an odd way, the point where he burns out of cowardice. Not out of the ability to fear in general, or to want to survive, once that hanging attempt is done and over with - and he's still looking out for number one. But post-imprisonment Gaius is later ready to be beaten up by guards to make a point, or offer his life (whether he thought Head!Six and/or God were testing him or really meant it is up for debate), which he wouldn't have been before. He can't also leave well enough alone with Laura Roslin. Their 4.0. scenes on the basestar start as very black comedy, with her exasparation and his "but I'm the Cylon expert here and why won't you listen to me!" attitude, and then turn in a crucible for Laura when she finally gets her confession, at a point when she didn't expect it anymore. Because he's drugged with painkillers, but also, I suspect, as I wrote in my review at the time, because a part of him wants to tell her. Because she's his judge and jury, always was, and the combination of drugs and his newest theological loophole create a situation where he tells her.
Laura through four seasons has become a much harder character, had to, but hearing that confession out loud still makes her flinch, nearly throw up, and then proceed to kill him, until she doesn't. In this episode and in several previous ones in 4.0, we've seen she's troubled by several aspects of what she had to become, and when her inner justification is "well, at least I'm still better than Baltar", you know there is a massive problem indeed. (Gaius Baltar: should not be anyone's standard.) Her last minute decision not to kill but to save him partly comes out of Head!Elosha telling her that the point isn't whether Baltar deserves to live but that everyone does, which Laura at first misunderstands as a bargain guarantee for the human race. (Save Gaius, win the day. Err, not so much. Although, actually, in subsequent events...) They've come to a truce there, and I've seen at least one review expressing surprise at the sharp tone in The Oath, which surprises me. Because the truce isn't an easy one, nor should it be. I've no doubt Baltar means it when he thanks Roslin in Revelations (he got at least part of her judgment on him reversed, after all), but note the phrasing - "thanks for not murdering me". Just because she didn't do it doesn't mean he doesn't remember she was going to. And just because she did it doesn't mean she is ever going to forget what he did. But there has been a shift, and so when he offers to go to D'Anna and talk to her on behalf of humanity, she actually agrees.
Which brings me, after this long, long look back, to those scenes. Because it carries all that history. You have Laura the pragmatist and smart leader who knows that a) Baltar must have a wireless on his own if he managed all those broadcasts, b) being Baltar, he had to be still alive and interested in remaining so, and c) she could use all of this to reach the rest of the fleet. You have the mutual needling about conversions and the use of religion, because yes, they both did, in that mixture of sincere belief (as long as the visions and miracles happened and produced results) and clear survival skills; if the religious card, as she phrased it back then, was Laura Roslin's way to get out of jail in early s2 and get a third of the fleet to join her, it got Gaius Baltar protection (and a harem) in a ship where many people, trial or no, still wanted to have his guts. And then Roslin says the word "atonment", and you realise something: she hasn't told anyone what Baltar confessed. (The public trial back then had been about his term as President, which was all that could be proven.) But she knows, and he knows she does; that word and the look brings them back to that moment when he confessed, and his life was in her hands. So she gets her wireless.
Their second scene in The Oath, brief but important, has her bringing up Gaeta and the ever so casual "you probably knew him better than anyone - back on New Caprica". Now if there is one thing I don't believe, it's that Laura Roslin was just making idle conversation with Gaius Baltar to pass the time. She had a front seat to that Gaeta/Baltar scene, complete with pen stabbing, when Baltar was in the brig, and of course she was present during the trial and Baltar's "et tu, Felix?" moment. Concluding that Baltar would, at the very least, get a reaction out of Gaeta was a very educated guess. Mind you - Baltar back in season 1 would have just tried to bargain for his own life. Season 4 Baltar, several second chances and some reduced narcissism (while maintaining his ego) later goes for the big picture and wants the entire civil war situation to stop.(We're definitely far away from "I need my lawyer!" Baltar here; shame it took several apocalypses to get there.) He also, arguably, just feels sorry for Gaeta. It's of course a matter of interpretation, and one in which Baltar just says what he thinks will work is equally valid. But the fact he showed up silently (a rare thing for in-love-with-his-own-voice Baltar) after Gaeta lost his leg would support that. Preaching general forgiveness and forgiving yourself is one thing (and easy); showing compassion towards someone with whom you have a complicated history that includes a massive let down of hopes/ failure on your part, mutual betrayals, plus one stabbing and one perjury on his a better evidence of humanity. Which, as likely as not, would not have been possible had Laura Roslin not shown compassion towards Gaius Baltar first, releasing him from her condemnation to death.
So, triggered by two scenes in The Oath, the most recent BSG episode, some thoughts that will be a complete essay only once the show is finished, as I think and hope we've not seen the last of these interweaving storylines.
The funny thing is, in several ways they've created another. Laura Roslin, former school teacher, former secretary of education, was already a gifted politician but she probably would never have become President if not for the devastating attack on the colonies. She had just found out she was diagnosed with cancer, her professional and personal relationship with President Adar was in the process of falling apart; most likely, without the Cylons she would have left the cabinet in disgust over Adar's behaviour towards the teachers' strike and over her own illness, and become a private citizen again. But the Cylon's genocidal attack suddenly made her leader of what was left of the human race, and she rose to the challenge in a magnficent way back then. Said attack could succeed because Gaius Baltar, media darling, scientist, and complete egotist thought nothing wrong with sharing nuclear defense codes to his hot girlfriend who he thought needed them because the company she worked for was fighting for goverment contracts with the competition. When the Cylons attacked, Laura's first reaction, after the horror of realisation, was to pull it together and calm the people in the ship she was in; Gaius' first thought upon realising just what he had enabled was that he really needed a lawyer. In many ways, the first season started them as two extremes of what humanity could be, and not in a monster/saint way, but in a strength, courage and thinking of the greater good versus weakness, selfishness and cowardice kind of way. The one thing they both seemed to share was that they were both really good at surviving. (Even with Laura's body working against her.)
Scenes in which they're both in the same room but not really interacting aside, the first big confrontation comes in Six Degrees of Separation, in which it's driven home to Gaius Baltar that Laura Roslin doesn't like him, isn't charmed or impressed or even amused by him, and distrusts him so much she's quite ready to believe he could have had something to do with the Cylon attack. (Which he does, though not for the reason Roslin thinks he has.) She is the first human to judge and condemn him, which I think is really important to what he later makes her into. Six Degrees of Separation, incidentally, is also the first episode in which Baltar, who started out as an atheist on this show, is scared and panicked enough - after his encounter with Roslin, who has made it very clear he can expect no mercy from her - to pray and claim he believes in (the Cylon) God. At this point, it's a no-atheist-in-a-foxhole thing, and he clearly doesn't mean it once he's out of danger, but it's the first step for a long term development. Come the episode Hands of the Gods, we for the first time get a prophecy which seems to have not one but two possible interpretations, and both with an origin that could be divine, or simply subconscious. By then, Laura Roslin secretly taking chamalla to fight her cancer has lead her to visions, visions that seemingly offer clues and in this case instructions, and Gaius Baltar, who has been seeing one particular vision ever since the attack, gets another one of those complete with, for the first but not the last time, cruxificion pose. Shortly after, the priestess Elosha tells Laura she could be the fulffillment of a prophecy, the dying leader, chosen. Gaius hears he's chosen from the Six in his head all the time.
Now, both Roslin and Baltar come around to starting to believe in all this for similar reasons; they keep seeing visions that turn out to be true and reveal things they can't have knowledge about in other ways, miracles happen to them. (Think of Roslin walking through a crossfire in early s2, with a bullet going through her jacket but not through her, and Baltar being stunned to find out the child Head!Six kept telling him about actually exists when Sharon and Helo return to the fleet.) What develops there isn't faith through fascination with the content of religion (compare Laura's type of belief with, say, Starbuck's; Kara has many issues, but whether or not the gods exist never is one to her, and the things that happen to her or which she does make no difference), it's conversion because of miracles. And of course there is a powerful pyschological allure. If Laura Roslin is the dying leader of prophecy, her cancer isn't a meaningless vicious illness that kills her as it killed her mother, it's something that is part of what enables her to save humanity by finding Earth. If Gaius Baltar really was chosen by a god, then what happened isn't his fault, not really, and he can justify it by saying it was meant to happen and that he himself has some more purpose as well. Is it really a surprise that three years later, both have a crisis of that faith pretty much simultanously when the miracle of miracles, Earth, is anything but salvation, there is no last minute divine intervention and they might not have been chosen for anything?
In addition to religion, there is politics. In which Baltar originally had no interest, as in many a thing that doesn't concern himself. Laura Roslin, on the other hand, despite professing to despise party politics has been involved in them for years on Caprica, and takes to the top job like a duck to water. She also turns out to have an instinct not just for survival but power preservation. In Colonial Day, she has her first sparring with Tom Zarek, who brings up the good point that there should be a vice president, and also has good chances of getting elected. Roslin's countermove is to appoint Gaius Baltar, whom she not two episodes previously declared her dislike and distrust against and believes capable of having committed high treason as her own vice presidential candidate, correctly banking on the fact Baltar's media popularity and abiliity to charm people if he puts an effort to it will beat out Zarek with his dubious past. But think about this. Roslin knows she's a dying woman. (Though not many other people do - at this point Billy, Cottle, Lee Adama, and I think that's it.) Which means that whoever becomes her VP will have a more than good chance of succeeding her as President, and soon. And she's willing to risk for that person to be someone with zero experience in politics, with a big question mark in her eyes about his reliability, especially in a time of crisis, someone, in short, whom she KNOWS could be an utter disaster as President - all so she can beat Tom Zarek. (Um, more recent campaign parallels could come to mind...) I'm guessing Roslin planned in ditching Baltar as soon as she possibly could, except that he stays VP through the second season, she wrote that letter to him in case of her death, and he would have indeed succeeded her if if he hadn't saved her life in Epiphanies. Which led to a big karmic irony in the s2 finale.
Meanwhile, Baltar, while always fond of approval and applause, is that odd mixture of an egotist who actually isn't into power. (Which isn't helpful when he gets it and makes a bad job out of handling it.) The VP thing probably would never have occured to him on his own, and once he has the title, he doesn't do anything with it. (His big experiences during the first half of s2 are the crash on Kobol, where events go to hell and he kills for the first time, which is about saving himself but saves Cally and everyone else, too, and encountering Gina, the abused Six model, on Pegasus in the middle of the season. In retrospect, the most important scene of his part in the Kobol storyline probably wasn't the shooting in Fragged but his argument with Head!Six about the utter pointlessness of the bloody Cylon/Human struggle. It's the first but not the last time he says something like this - the next time will be to D'Anna; Gaius Baltar doesn't have many saving graces but one of them is that he consistently thought that "we kill you so you kill us so we kill you" was one of the stupidest things ever.) But then comes the episode in which he manages to save a dying Laura Roslin and Sharon's unborn baby at the same time, and gets the reminder of (not nearly) all of his flawys in a "in case I die" letter by Roslin. This results in a giant act of pettiness on Baltar's part, with horrible long-term consequences for the rest of the fleet, or rather, two acts. The first one is to give Gina the nuclear warhead, the second one is to get into politics for real and present himself as an alternative candidate to Laura Roslin. Since through four seasons, we've seen Baltar do many things out of weakness, fear for his life, and very, very rarely because he felt sorry for someone (Gina on Pegasus comes to mind, the dying child in the cult early on, Tyrol; Gaeta in 4.13. is a debatable case), but this lashing out in petty vengefulness - because campaigning against Roslin really isn't about anyone but Roslin - remains pretty unique, and I think I know why, given what happens in the third and fourth seasons. Because if no one else knows what he has done, and what he's responsible for, Gaius Baltar does. He can try to ignore it, try to find excuses (if there is a god, he wanted it, so it's not really Baltar's fault! Or maybe he's a Cylon himself, and then he's not a traitor, etc.), but it's there, lurking in the back of his mind, which is why the visualisation in the s3 episode where Baltar gets tortured and he hallucinates getting pushed under water and drowned by the burned dead of Caprica is so apt. And he also knows that Laura Roslin, who represents humanity, is the judge waiting for him. He knows because she was the first to pronounce a judgment back in s1. If he can get Roslin's approval, then he really is out of the waters. (Note that when in s2 finale Zarek suggests Roslin fixed the votes, Baltar says she would never do that; in his way, he has her on as high a pedestal as any of her admirers.)
But of course he doesn't get it, and in s2, Baltar, in his ever so mature way, reacts with a gigantic "so there!"
S3 keeps turning things around. I don't think Roslin ever considered Baltar a serious opponent in late season 2. Zarek perhaps, Adama in early s2 for sure, but not Gaius Baltar, Mr. Superficial, the lightweight she had made into a VP just as a tool she needed at the time. She was absolutely confident in her ability to defeat him in the elections, and she had every reason to be, given what a contender she had become by that point. But then he did win the elections, not via sabotage, through the will of the people. (There's irony for you: to this day, Laura Roslin is an unelected head of state. She did not win a single election. Baltar did, Zarek did, but not Roslin.) And proceeded to make a thorough mess out of the office of President even before the Cylons arrived. Actually, I think Baltar surrendering was something Roslin understood, if not condoned, because with Galactia and Pegasus away and New Caprica hopelessly outgunned, what else could he have done? But he could have done a whole lot more before, and he could have done much better after. This, imo, is when she started to hate him, which she didn't before, as much as she distrusted him and was convinced there was something fishy about him and the Cylons she couldn't prove. But Baltar received what she didn't, the office of President via the expressed will of the people, and he chose to squander it in depression and hedonism. He was failure walking around, and the fact hat it was partly her failure (the VPship, remember) must have been especially galling. Then came the occupation, and his failure wasn't just being a lousy President, it was complete inability to protect humanity or fight for them. (I don't think Baltar's refusal to sign one particular death list until a literal gun was put to his head and Caprica Six shot in front of him would have carried any weight with Roslin even had she known, not with what other humans suffered and were prepared to fight nonetheless.)
And yet at this very point, where you could say the moral difference between the two was never larger, the writers do something incredibly clever. If subsequent encounters between Baltar and Roslin just had consisted in her righteously condemming and him cringingly excusing, nobody would have paid these scenes any attention. Instead, however, in the second episode of s3, when Gaius visits a temporarily arrested Laura in her cell, something unexpected happens. Not that he asks her to appear with him in to appease the population and she refuses, that's par the course. Or that she calls him out on the methods used by the occupation. No, the really breathtaking moment is when he asks her, point blank, whether she can really condone suicide bombings and the deaths of civilians along with Cylons (which is the method the resistance uses), and Laura just for a moment looks away (and indeed does not reply to this question at all). I don't think anyone managed that before. It's also the first time Gaius Baltar demonstrates insight into Laura Roslin, which he didn't have before. Maybe the year as a presidential failure did it, or maybe that he's at that point fastly sliding into as much suicidal depression as Baltar ever gets before survivalism kicks in again, but he's grown up somewhat. (Somewhat.) The visit ends in mutual frustration and him ordering to let her go, and that's the last time they see each other until the Cylons show up with him in tow mid season 3, which is but an interlude, and then when fortunes are reversed and he's her prisoner.
One of the reasons why I think BSG handles torture responsibly is that when someone gets tortured - be it Leoben in s1 by Kara, or Baltar in s3 by Adama and Roslin - this never results in achieving what the torturer wants. What they hear isn't anything to save lives, no information disarming bombs or prevent attacks. Instead, what they get is a reflection on themselves. In the s3 case, Roslin herself admits in the end that no, she didn't really want to know whether or not the Cylons knew about the way to earth, she wanted an admission of guilt from Baltar, and she wanted him to suffer. If Baltar embodies many of humanity's weaknesses - selfishness, cowardice, unwillingness to accept responsibility, thoughtless gratification, among several - he brings out the worst in Roslin at this point. But this isn't the end, either. The later part of s3 is in many ways payback time for Baltar - imprisonment, the torture session, and his mixture of a suicide attempt and/or last attempt to find out whether he's Cylon or human, with the resulting acceptence that yes, he's human. (Which still leaves him with his inner "there has to be intent for treason" defense - he's still not ready to accept responsibility yet.) It's also, in an odd way, the point where he burns out of cowardice. Not out of the ability to fear in general, or to want to survive, once that hanging attempt is done and over with - and he's still looking out for number one. But post-imprisonment Gaius is later ready to be beaten up by guards to make a point, or offer his life (whether he thought Head!Six and/or God were testing him or really meant it is up for debate), which he wouldn't have been before. He can't also leave well enough alone with Laura Roslin. Their 4.0. scenes on the basestar start as very black comedy, with her exasparation and his "but I'm the Cylon expert here and why won't you listen to me!" attitude, and then turn in a crucible for Laura when she finally gets her confession, at a point when she didn't expect it anymore. Because he's drugged with painkillers, but also, I suspect, as I wrote in my review at the time, because a part of him wants to tell her. Because she's his judge and jury, always was, and the combination of drugs and his newest theological loophole create a situation where he tells her.
Laura through four seasons has become a much harder character, had to, but hearing that confession out loud still makes her flinch, nearly throw up, and then proceed to kill him, until she doesn't. In this episode and in several previous ones in 4.0, we've seen she's troubled by several aspects of what she had to become, and when her inner justification is "well, at least I'm still better than Baltar", you know there is a massive problem indeed. (Gaius Baltar: should not be anyone's standard.) Her last minute decision not to kill but to save him partly comes out of Head!Elosha telling her that the point isn't whether Baltar deserves to live but that everyone does, which Laura at first misunderstands as a bargain guarantee for the human race. (Save Gaius, win the day. Err, not so much. Although, actually, in subsequent events...) They've come to a truce there, and I've seen at least one review expressing surprise at the sharp tone in The Oath, which surprises me. Because the truce isn't an easy one, nor should it be. I've no doubt Baltar means it when he thanks Roslin in Revelations (he got at least part of her judgment on him reversed, after all), but note the phrasing - "thanks for not murdering me". Just because she didn't do it doesn't mean he doesn't remember she was going to. And just because she did it doesn't mean she is ever going to forget what he did. But there has been a shift, and so when he offers to go to D'Anna and talk to her on behalf of humanity, she actually agrees.
Which brings me, after this long, long look back, to those scenes. Because it carries all that history. You have Laura the pragmatist and smart leader who knows that a) Baltar must have a wireless on his own if he managed all those broadcasts, b) being Baltar, he had to be still alive and interested in remaining so, and c) she could use all of this to reach the rest of the fleet. You have the mutual needling about conversions and the use of religion, because yes, they both did, in that mixture of sincere belief (as long as the visions and miracles happened and produced results) and clear survival skills; if the religious card, as she phrased it back then, was Laura Roslin's way to get out of jail in early s2 and get a third of the fleet to join her, it got Gaius Baltar protection (and a harem) in a ship where many people, trial or no, still wanted to have his guts. And then Roslin says the word "atonment", and you realise something: she hasn't told anyone what Baltar confessed. (The public trial back then had been about his term as President, which was all that could be proven.) But she knows, and he knows she does; that word and the look brings them back to that moment when he confessed, and his life was in her hands. So she gets her wireless.
Their second scene in The Oath, brief but important, has her bringing up Gaeta and the ever so casual "you probably knew him better than anyone - back on New Caprica". Now if there is one thing I don't believe, it's that Laura Roslin was just making idle conversation with Gaius Baltar to pass the time. She had a front seat to that Gaeta/Baltar scene, complete with pen stabbing, when Baltar was in the brig, and of course she was present during the trial and Baltar's "et tu, Felix?" moment. Concluding that Baltar would, at the very least, get a reaction out of Gaeta was a very educated guess. Mind you - Baltar back in season 1 would have just tried to bargain for his own life. Season 4 Baltar, several second chances and some reduced narcissism (while maintaining his ego) later goes for the big picture and wants the entire civil war situation to stop.(We're definitely far away from "I need my lawyer!" Baltar here; shame it took several apocalypses to get there.) He also, arguably, just feels sorry for Gaeta. It's of course a matter of interpretation, and one in which Baltar just says what he thinks will work is equally valid. But the fact he showed up silently (a rare thing for in-love-with-his-own-voice Baltar) after Gaeta lost his leg would support that. Preaching general forgiveness and forgiving yourself is one thing (and easy); showing compassion towards someone with whom you have a complicated history that includes a massive let down of hopes/ failure on your part, mutual betrayals, plus one stabbing and one perjury on his a better evidence of humanity. Which, as likely as not, would not have been possible had Laura Roslin not shown compassion towards Gaius Baltar first, releasing him from her condemnation to death.