SPOILER WARNING!!
So last week’s Battlestar Galactica got interesting as Starbuck got a little crazy at being told that they were going back to the main fleet. What I don’t understand is how she cooled down so quickly as soon as Gaeta got shot. Bit contrived, but ok. Is it just me, or is anyone else getting annoyed with Baltar’s “savior” spewings? It’s an interesting twist on the old coward Baltar, but it does leave me wondering. It’s too much of a change of character without sufficient motiviation for change; a coward doesn’t become a hero overnight. Back to Starbuck and the events on the base star after Leoben offered a treaty: it was weird seeing a cylon skinjob admitting to death being traumatic, although I suppose I should have expected it. The different Sixes are…strange, to say the least. So it was quite shocking to see the one Six pretty much execute the other (even tho Anders was wielding the pistol). It appears that the resurrection ship is out of range, so no downloading into a new body for these dead skinjobs. Death is permanent, just as in the colonialists. So who else felt that the hybrid’s words “You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace!” was a little chilling, especially since she’s supposed to help lead the fleet back to Earth. And whose death is the hybrid referring to? Questions that will be answered in the coming episodes, I’m sure. Still, it does leave me wondering where it’s all going. Oh…and a bald Laura Roslyn…seriously strange. Seriously.
I found the previous two episodes of BSG to be a bit on the slow side and I’m at least glad that it picked up a bit in this one.
Wrt Baltar, I think he’s been coming around towards this messianic thing for a long time. From ep one, the Six in his head has been priming him for this whole “God loves you, believe in Him, trust Him” thing. He’s always been a bit narcissistic and sex crazed but he still is. On the other hand, he’s also been grappling with issues about humanity, spirituality and destiny for a long time, and a lot more directly than any of the other characters on the show.
For a while there I just wanted to bitch slap Kara but I think the point of the Gaeta thing was to show that although they are all losing it, they are all still officers. We probably don’t get it as such a big deal but in the military, mutiny is dire and everything that went on in that room prior to Gaeta being shot was sheer madness from a military perspective. Shooting Gaeta didn’t just cool down Kara, it cooled down everyone. I think she sprang into action because she is still the commander of the ship (and you’ll note that after that, everyone began to defer to her again) and the incident made her realize that she needed to take charge and act in the best interest of everyone. Going off in the raptor was the first sane thing she’s done for the last three episodes.
Regarding the Six, I think if you look back to Boomer and Caprica Six’s resurrections, you will find that the circumstances of their deaths affected them deeply and changed them forever after. Gina was another Cylon who could not deal with the horrors from her past and she also chose true death over resurrection. I think the Six in this episode also couldn’t deal with her previous life/death and in fact wanted to be killed, permanently. Seeing as the Cylons were seeking an alliance with the humans, there is no way she could have imagined that they would have allowed her to just be after killing that woman. It jeopardized the tenuous alliance that they were about to form. She wanted to die. Her sister Six was just helping her along.
And that brings us to the issue of the Hybrid. I think that the whole “harbinger of death” thing is about Kara bringing an end to Cylon resurrection. The Cylons are obsessed with procreation coz they can’t do it. Because they can’t do it, there are always only 12 models of Cylon and in fact, only 7 models that are commonly known of. To pass things on from “generation” to the next, they download and resurrect. If the Cylons ever overcame the problem with procreation and lived full individual lives among another race, where each one has drastically different experiences from the next, and each Cylon child becomes and individual, different from other Cylon children, I believe the need to download and resurrect after a full life would come to an end, and in the end, aged Cylons would choose to die. After all, why live on if you partner or children cannot resurrect as well? It would be too painful. So I think, that whole harbinger thing is about Kara bringing humans and Cylons together, to live in peace alongside each other.