BSG 4.12 A disquiet follows my soul

[hazelk]

Last week I bemoaned the dearth of crowd scenes and this week they come back with one of the best fleet oriented episodes since the New Caprica arc. This week really did manage to convey a sense of how the fleet was taking things through a combination of actual crowd scenes (Baltar’s followers), letting occasional extras like the nurse have significant reaction shots and giving the plain people of NotGalactica a credible outsider as spokesperson.

Zarek’s credibility being undercut by the fake blackmail was a misstep I think. It felt as if the dramatic die were being unfairly weighted in favour of the current administration. Bill Adama is when all is said and done an unashamed autocrat. In the military Father makes the decisions and his family follow the orders, that’s how it works but should it? The series has questioned this before but with Roslin AWOL Bill’s use of military power to enforce his undemocratic decisions wasn’t effectively queried, wasn’t given the aura of wrongness that Tigh doing the same thing in S2 had.

The spin was unspun a little by the follow-up scene of Zarek recruiting Felix. Zarek may be corrupt but he can recognize his own weaknesses and see that the movement needs someone less tainted at its head. Similarly, Felix’s verging on real world racist baiting of Kara being shown as a deliberate ploy to get her out of the room rather than an accurate representation of Gaeta’s ideology. But we are still left with both anti-Adamaists being driven by bitterness and an inability to forgive verging on the self-destructive. In the pursuit of the long term survival of both human and cylon races the Adamaists may be right to force an alliance even if Zarek is correct about that being for all the wrong reasons.

I’d always thought Baltar’s faith was based on observing actual Angels and actual miracles so his apostasy was to be expected once the promise of Earth was revealed to be a mirage. He’s strangely like Roslin in moving from faith to nihlism, also weirdly her nihlism is more hedonistic. According to Bear McCready’s blog the shots of Gaius smoking while Rome beat itself to a pulp were supposed to be intercut with a reappearance of Head Six pleading God’s case but this seems to have only made the final cut of the soundtrack and isn’t present in the visuals.

Talking about God the Father was a little jarring in that I don’t recall the term being part of Baltar’s theology before but it fit with the episode’s overall patriarchosity as did the babydaddy issue with Nicky. I disagree with those who think this retcon (which it fairly blantantly is) makes nonsense of Cally taking Nicky to the airlock with her. She did that, I felt, not because Nicky was half Cylon and needed to be destroyed but because Nicky was hers, all hers and if she had to die how could he live? Also post New Caprica Hotdog had gone back to being a pilot and being raised by pilots was something Cally already considered a fate worse than death in the S3 episode when she and Tyrol had to be rescued from the airlock.

Caprica having the scan was a sweet scene but easy to see how her rhapsodies over the Cylon race no longer needing resurrection ships or hybrids would be chilling to a human onlooker. It makes it clear that the Cylons regard any alliance as a marriage of convenience. However, it also suggests an area where human expertise outstrips theirs. The baby doesn’t just have to be born, it has to be raised and only the final four have any idea of how that works.