![\"\"](\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/bsg_gaeta_zarek.jpg\" "\\"bsg_gaeta_zarek\\"")
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There are spoilers ahead.<\/p>\n
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Last night we went to the Bagdad <\/a>to watch the new episode of BSG in a room with several hundred other BSG fans. Major mistake. Every time a character picked up a gun or said anything macho, the room cheered, and the MC was obsessed with talking about Starbuck’s “balls” (as in, “she got them back” — he went on and on and on about it). It just made me feel that maybe my favorite current TV show is enjoyed by stupid people.<\/p>\n Also, am I the only one who thinks that on the whole, Zarek and Gaeta are in the right? It’s only this episode — after <\/em>the fleet is in rebellion — that we see anyone actually attempt to persuade the public that an alliance with their former genocidists is a good idea. The leaders of the fleet are so used to thinking of themselves as dictators who don’t have to give a shit about what the nonentities they’re ruling think, that using persuasion to get the population on their side simply never occurred to them.<\/p>\n More importantly, the moment a military leader gives the order to have the elected government arrested, he loses all moral legitimacy. It’s likely that if the rebellion succeeds (which it won’t), Zarek’s government would be more effectively democratic than the Adama\/Roslin government. (And as Elkins pointed out, it’s appropriate symbolism that the president and the admiral are literally in bed together.)<\/p>\n That isn’t to say that Zarek or Gaeta are perfect, or that their motives are pure and good. There’s clearly a lot of anti-cylon racism going on, which is understandable given the genocide and all, but still not fair to innocent cylons. And of course, Gaeta in particular is motivated by all the ways he believes he’s been betrayed. (I have a lot of sympathy, in particular, for his feeling that there was something terribly wrong about a circle of self-appointed vigilante executioners, led mainly by secret cylons, throwing people out of airlocks for collaboration with cylons.)<\/p>\n Despite all that — at least in the midst of that audience cheering every time one of the protagonists posed with a big gun — it seemed that this is being turned into a simple matter of good guys (the current military dictatorship) versus the bad mutineers. In particular, I thought the threat of Sharon getting raped was gratuitous — it was used by the episode not to show that rape is used as a weapon of war (which would have been a point worth making), but to establish that apart from Felix Gaeta himself, the mutineers are Bad People. Similarly, Starbuck — usually an excellent shot — manages to fail to execute the prisoner, because if she had executed an unarmed prisoner, that would have made it seem like atrocities were being committed on both <\/em>sides — it would have created a parallel to the young soldier killed on the CIC, and that wasn’t an equivalence the writers wanted made.<\/p>\n I hope that in part two, things get a little more complicated — although Elkins tells me the writer of part 2 is one of the worse writers on BSG, so I may be disappointed.<\/p>\n On a shallow side, I got a lot of fun out of seeing Gaeta effectively and intelligently exploit his position to postpone Adama finding out that there had been a mutiny as long as possible. And Gaeta’s “why won’t my ex stop calling me” expression (as Jacob <\/a>described it) when he was told Baltar was on the phone was priceless.<\/p>\n Thoughts?<\/p>\n Images found here <\/a>and here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are spoilers ahead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-popular-and-unpopular-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/01\/bsg_starbuck_gaeta.jpg\" "\\"bsg_starbuck_gaeta\\"")
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