![\"starbuck_oath\"](\"http:\/\/www.dreamloom.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/starbuck_oath1.png\" "\\"starbuck_oath\\"")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI could do this all day. Who\u2019s next?\u201d
\n\u2014Kara \u201cStarbuck\u201d Thrace<\/p>\n
\u201cFelix Gaeta. Who would\u2019ve thought?\u201d
\n\u2014President Laura Roslin<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen this is over, there\u2019s gonna be a reckoning. And live or die, it\u2019s how you act today that\u2019s gonna matter.\u201d
\n\u2014Admiral William Adama<\/p>\n
Semper frakkin\u2019 fi, indeed. What an amazing hour of television. So many chickens come home to roost in the form of a good old-fashioned hell raising, packed from fore to aft with petty comeuppances and epic betrayals, as well as a couple of gloriously dirty gunfights. \u201cThe Oath\u201d was also a welcome reminder that nothing that\u2019s happened so far\u2014no decision too great and no grievance too small\u2014has occurred in a vacuum. Everybody\u2019s fair game for a smackdown, and into the breach we go.
\n<\/p>\n
First a tally of the traitors, of friends and foes alike, from Gaeta to Racetrack to Seelix and Skulls, to Connor and Narcho and those two hideous, smirking apes from the Pegasus. So many grudges still burning! All of them deeply personal, everything that\u2019s eating its way through these people now coming from inside, straight from the gut. Who needs Cylons when they\u2019re so willing to destroy themselves?<\/p>\n
Still, line them up in a row and it makes sense that they would all come down on this side, which is inherently both right and wrong. Even Lee can see the logic behind Zarek\u2019s reasoning, although not how it could happen so suddenly and brutally, and with the explicit participation of so many friends. But wait\u2014they were never friends, were they? We made them friends because we knew their faces, but they were never more than fellow prisoners on this tragic march, victims of circumstance and soldiers of duty, and certainly never family. That was the admiral\u2019s mistake from the start, one that he pledged to rectify in \u201cUnfinished Business\u201d yet managed to keep making, over and over again. If ever a de facto dictator has ruled from the heart, it\u2019s Bill Adama, although it looks like those days might officially have just ended. But the stakes are even higher this time, and the outcome looks that much worse. And the question \u201cWhat are we fighting for?\u201d is once again lost on the air. He can\u2019t even tell who he\u2019s fighting anymore.<\/p>\n
For Gaeta, though, this mutiny is his chance to prove his own worth\u2014to himself and everyone else\u2014and he was Zarek\u2019s choice for all the right reasons. The brilliance of that choice, along with the slow revealing of its many implications, made it doubly horrifying, the fact that as the Great Communicator, Gaeta was both the way in and the way out of CIC, and controlled all points in between. His betrayal is an exercise in calculated manipulation, knowing exactly which buttons to push and when, and it highlights what is at once his greatest gift and fatal flaw: that he\u2019s able to chart and execute a nearly perfect course of action, yet incapable of seeing anything outside that map. When events occur that he couldn\u2019t plan for, he flinches (thus Laird dies, Jaffee dies, and Roslin and Adama will likely live. At least for now.). Zarek is a thug, but he\u2019s also a man of action, however short-sighted; Gaeta is a follower, and the greater journey is simply beyond him. (I\u2019m speculating here, of course, but how can it be otherwise? Do you think that when the Bad Cylons return, Gaeta\u2019s gonna be answering the door? Gaeta?<\/em> Not in a million years.)<\/p>\n And what a sight, to see the full fury of Admiral Adama finally brought to bear, as he went growling and shooting his way through the halls of his own ship with his XO by his side, two gunslingers reading each other\u2019s minds, making split-second calls in tandem. This is who they are, and that is what they do. It lives in their bones, human and Cylon alike, and regardless of that distinction, they trust this in each other. They both swore that oath, and both of them are willing to die for it. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever cheered louder than when the Old Man himself cold-cocked that marine and grabbed his weapon, turning on a dime to shoot the other, dumber marine in the chest. And then what does he do? Brings Marine #1 along for the ride, just because he can, and later sets him free for the same reason. The power of the admiral lives in the decency of the man, and I can\u2019t think of another actor who could sell morality<\/em> the way Edward James Olmos does. Or show the life flooding back into him again with such purpose, kissing goodbye the woman he loves in order to save the only thing he knows.<\/p>\n On morality\u2019s flipside, of course, lives Gaius Baltar, who will survive by his wits and the simple miracle of crossbreeding that somehow managed to turn him into both a weasel and a snake. Not only has he got a supercute new haircut, but yet another new lease on life to go along with it, and one that has him tossing aside his own religious dogma and girly\/groupie\/sex cult the second the bullets start flying. And the best thing about Baltar is that it\u2019s nearly impossible to tell what his motivation is at any given time, and exactly how much of what he\u2019s saying he ever actually believes. Did he genuinely take to God last season, or was he just trying to whittle down the non-sex time in that cuckoo\u2019s nest? Who knows. The only thing he\u2019s ever said that I bought was \u201cI love living,\u201d back in \u201cThe Hub,\u201d and that\u2019s only because he was dying and drugged up at the time. But I loved watching him and Laura come to terms with their collective prophetic failings (\u201cMaybe we\u2019re both frauds, and this is our last chance to atone\u201d), and the fact that they\u2019re both so willing to strip it bare for each other these days (that should\u2019ve sounded less sexual) and go straight for the jugular. And the hubris in imagining that he, of all people, might be the one who could talk Gaeta down from the ledge, and do so by reminding him of the very sins he\u2019s currently trying to repent? What a weasel! And what a snake. Also, have you noticed that he is by far the biggest crier on this show? Damn, the genius of Baltar.<\/p>\n Even more sensational was the return of Starbuck, who was so awesome we need a whole other word for \u201cawesome,\u201d probably something with a lot of tough, spit-making vowel sounds and at least 14 exclamation points. From the minute she let that dish fly at poor, dumb Hot Dog, you knew something else was about to go up in flames, and she did not disappoint. All the girl needs is a mission and a gun, and she remembers her reason for living. She knows who she is when she\u2019s fighting something\u2014and never more so than when she can drag Lee along for the fun\u2014and she understands the rules of this particular game even better than the admiral. There are no hostages, for example, and remember who your enemies are. And who do you want on your side when the next reckoning comes? You want this new kind of awesome, who\u2019s also an old kind of crazy, who\u2019s not afraid to shoot first and doesn\u2019t even care about the questions (which after all is what you drag Lee along for).<\/p>\n Also coming back to life was Madame President herself, mostly out of love but also at least partly out of duty and, I like to think, plain unspoken pride. Let Tom Zarek step into her shoes after all that she\u2019s done? That thug? After she\u2019s led them this far and given up this much? Unpossible! Of course she was always going to go back; she leads now out of habit but also, finally, by choice. Because this is who she is, too, no matter how badly she wanted to lay it aside for good last week, or however stubbornly she denied it to the admiral over their sexy morning coffee. Laura Roslin was never going to just fade away, and it\u2019s possible that Gaeta\u2019s biggest mistake in this whole affair was not getting rid of her first. Silly Gaeta! Beware a woman in love whose own death certificate has already been signed. I am so looking forward to her wrath.<\/p>\n To be continued…<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI could do this all day. Who\u2019s next?\u201d \u2014Kara \u201cStarbuck\u201d Thrace \u201cFelix Gaeta. Who would\u2019ve thought?\u201d \u2014President Laura Roslin \u201cWhen this is over, there\u2019s gonna be a reckoning. And live or die, it\u2019s how you act today that\u2019s gonna matter.\u201d \u2014Admiral William Adama Semper frakkin\u2019 fi, indeed. What an amazing hour of television. So many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[14,17,74],"class_list":["post-770","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-battlestar-galactica","tag-bsg","tag-scifi-channel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dreamloom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dreamloom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dreamloom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dreamloom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dreamloom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=770"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.dreamloom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/770\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dreamloom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=770"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dreamloom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=770"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dreamloom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=770"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}