Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B- | 2 USERS: D+ YOU GRADE IT Speaking Truth To Power
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 8 | Aired on 11.16.2006
Roslin's going to bring this up in a sec, but as long as all the parts are here: two men, deserted by Bill, assuming that he was infallible, locked in cages. Okay, that's one thing. And they get up and walk out of those cages, into bigger cages. But we're also talking about guilt, and about shame. Taking personal responsibility for an engine of war, with all its million moving parts, is just another way of asking for the easy answer: of getting control. So really, you've got three men thinking Bill's in charge, only Bill's one of them, and none of us is going to survive unless the man at the top can forgive himself. Again. But you have to look closer and further away: there's another cage here. Count their masters as they multiply: Three sends Bulldog on a mission of vengeance, using his pain for her own purposes. Tigh contributes, adjusting Bulldog's vector to make it easier; aiming him at Bill. And when Danny calls for him, Bill comes running, supplying the target. All because the buck stops with Bill. But the war started when the Admiralty used Bill, and Bill used Bulldog, to start the war -- so the buck stops with the Admiralty, and blood leads to blood, but these are still the easy answers. It's another cage, which is what Roslin's about to explain; this episode reflects the season like a fractal, as they all have, which is why I love this season. It only takes one man because the personal is not political. That's self-obsessed Baby Boomer thinking. The political is made up of the personal, which is a very different proposition. E pluribus unum: there was never a movement or a war or a terror that didn't amount to a lot of people's personal shit accumulating in a particular direction, on a particular day. Without Cally endangered, without Leoben and Kacey, without Charlie's son Kevin, there's no Circle. But that's resisted, always, because we need easy answers and we need control. We need to point a finger and say, "Terrorists are so vaguely evil and crazy that they don't even register as human; they all look the same, their religion is complicated. My racism is patriotic, because I can't handle a complex, realistic, tainted image of my country, because the personal is political." The Other becomes the scapegoat, carries the monster, and that's how the Admiralty stays clean -- and that's how we stay clean, too. But you're still in a cage, and there's still an ugliness that pertains to using people that way, but human psychology is based on projection. New Caprica was settled and later occupied because Laura got suckered into a gay marriage debate, because thousands of people bought the image of Gaius Baltar, because they were tired and wanted a home, because Gaius took something broken and broke it further, because Bill let Fleet defense trickle through his hands day by day, because Caprica and Boomer were changed by love. All of these and a thousand more. And once there, Kevin was only seven when he was killed. While taking it all on, like Bill, is the more honorable option, it's still just another easy answer.