Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C- | 3 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Breakaway Song
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 20 | Aired on 03.24.2007
Lee and Lampkin agree that a mistrial's their best option -- the long and short of it is that every witness they destroy (Tigh, Laura) is another brick in the wall, because the Fleet hates Gaius Baltar. Of course, Gaius doesn't get it, and starts pissing his pants, so Lee goes a little... Lee, baby. Take a frakkin' nap. You are making it so very hard to love you, and that was never your job. That was hers. "You didn't hear what my father just called you," Lee says, losing the war by winning this momentary battle. Playing the Baltar game. "He called you a traitorous piece of garbage, a man who doesn't even deserve a trial." Lampkin's ears perk the fuck up; Baltar cries and whines some more. "Right, so now because we're winning we're losing, actually?" Gaius Baltar: Getting It Eventually, Since Time Began. "Perverse, isn't it? One of the reasons why I love what I do." So hot. Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it. Lee reads from another one of his grandfather's books, and in so doing reveals what a legal dilettante he really is -- and that his grandfather was a crap writer: "Forcing a mistrial may seem of little benefit to either side, but in fact, it can be a boon to the defense. The prosecution's shown their hand; at retrial the defense has all the tactical advantages, and the statistical chances of an acquittal rise by 25%." Joseph Adama, Trial Tactics & Strategies, page 273. Lampkin calls Joseph a "smart man," and Baltar goes... in another direction entirely.
Actually, you know what, hold up. In the beginning was the Word: Logos. The word is the face that floats on the water, and it's God: codifying, creating laws and language and the systems that we live in. Institutions, republics, contracts, everything that falls under Saturn, Chronos, Lear, Daddies back through time immemorial. Words are the way we share and know the male face of God. (Counter to the Word is the Sound, or the Feeling: the Hybrid, the Goddess summoned at the crossroads, the Oracles with their ceremonial bowls -- water resists the hard, fixed forms of the Word -- and their utterances that don't make sense until later, or until an interpreter can turn it back into Logos. A Leoben, or a male priest of Apollo at Delphi. Logos tells immediate and concrete truths; the Oracle tells better truths yet.) Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves. But essentially that's the problem here: Bill Adama and his son Lee are both rebelling against the mortal avatars of the Logos, which is always going to be your Dad, because of how brains and people work. If Lee lived here and now, he'd have bad credit and shitty dealings with money, get into fights with the cops; if he were Kara it would be...well, see "Tigh, S." (One of Odin's names is All-Father; he gave up his eye for the language of water, and heard music nobody else could hear: women's magic.) As it is, Lee's just using the Logos against his father, the same way that by subverting the entire trial (and by misusing the masculine energy of war, throughout the series, even against Roslin; and by constantly readjusting his parental relationships with everybody, by the second, trying to be the best dad ever to an entire race) Bill himself is giving Joseph Adama the finger. Not to cram fifty years of psych and lit theory into one paragraph starting with the Bible, but I tend to think a lot of theory's the same game: getting back at Daddy by twisting what words are, what they can do. I'd like to see Lampkin's father one day.
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