Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT All Aboard The Battlestar Handbasket!
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 13 | Aired on 01.30.2009
Racetrack clears the hangar deck by manufacturing a fictional fuel leak, and only Baltarite Jeanne sticks around long enough to see what happens next: Felix and Tom, attempting to commandeer a Raptor to get Tom to Colonial One. The LSO -- maybe the Mad Bomber What Bombs At Midnight Aaron Kelly? -- is also with the mutiny, leaving only poor old fucking Chief Laird, who watched Kendra Shaw and her buddies shoot down a room full of people and still wouldn't back down, to ask for some paperwork or confirmation that the known terrorist and murderer who just engineered civil war aboard the most precious ship in the Fleet, apparently just for fucking giggles, is now supposed to get the red carpet treatment right back to the center of Colonial government.
Felix tries to snow Laird, because Felix has no idea what it was like under Cain and doesn't know that she didn't even allow them to sit in chairs, much less let huge fucking implausible things slide. Laird asks for proof of this stupid order about eleven times, and finally goes to ask CIC directly, so Zarek kills him with a giant wrench. Felix is shocked and feels for a pulse, while Skulls finally develops a personality. A shitty one! "Well, good riddance. Frakker's been up Adama's ass since he transferred in from Pegasus." Which isn't really a diss on Laird -- because that's gratitude, for not killing him or taking his stuff or shooting his kids some more, that would cause him to be up that particular ass -- but yet more hatred for Adama himself.
The greatest thing about DEMAND HATE is that it replaces the Cylon -- who have helped keep humanity alive simply by existing and being terrible, who have forced them to cooperate for the last four years, who leave for five minutes and the Fleet goes to shit every time -- with the idea of the Cylon. A thing that not even the Cylons can wrap their heads around anymore. A thing that means nothing at this point, and turns the very idea of humanity's predators into a political football for the destruction that Zarek's creating in his own honor.
I do think that a people, a nation, expresses its collective trauma in shockingly gross ways -- I'm not looking forward, for example, to looking my kids in the eye and admitting that we hung Saddam -- and that's all very interesting and it's what we're seeing here. It doesn't really matter what they're rebelling against, because really what they're rebelling against is the complete death of hope that Earth's shittiness represents. And of course that's going to express itself this way: in pointless, self-destructive acts of hatred that do nothing and create nothing and only diminish us further. And of course if it weren't Felix and Tom, it would be somebody else. (It would probably still be Tom, though.)
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