Episode Report Card Jacob: A+ | 6 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Without Crutches
By Jacob | Season 3 | Episode 4 | Aired on October 19, 2006
On Colonial One, there's an interesting thing happening. Remember last week, how Caprica was so totally polite with Gaeta and he didn't even look at her? And now he's calling Baltar "Gaius"? There are a lot of different kinds of jealousy. So Gaeta's got this severe drama happening with the gun to Gaius's head, and Caprica's trying to talk sense to him, but sense is not what he's interested in talking: "I believed in you. In the dream of New Caprica." Caprica is making calming gestures about how they all did, but Gaeta shakes his head. "No. Not him. He believed in the dream of Gaius Baltar. The good life. Booze, pills, hot and cold running interns. He lead us to the apocalypse, and I turned out to be --" I don't know what he was going to say there. "An idiot," probably. But also, it's a terrible thing to hijack an election, you know? So the "I" word that Gaius is about to say is the right word, but maybe in the wrong context. "An idealist. There's no sin in that."
So, but let's talk for a second about complexity, because it's kind of the same deal as the suicide-bomber stuff: Roslin was wrong to steal the election, but it so happened that Gaeta's actions regarding that huge misstep are the reason we're all here now. Gaius's "dream of New Caprica" was only as the quickest route to an election win. He filled in the blanks after the fact, but he ran with the New Caprica platform because he wanted to screw Laura over. Not authentic, right? But then there's Gaeta, whose idealism checked Roslin's rampant bullshit, which put Gaius in office, which put them on New Caprica, which is why Gina killed herself, which is why the Cylons came, which is why Gaius had no options but to surrender, which is how we all got to where we are right now. And where Kara is, and Ellen and Saul are, right now. When Gaius says "idealist," he thinks he's saying that Gaeta was too much of a pussy to play ball with the Cylons, so it hurt his feelings, but that's not really what he's saying at all: he's saying that Gaeta's assumption that everybody plays by the rules leads in a direct line to this moment. And not only that, but the most subtle accent to Gaeta's character has always been his hero worship of Gaius Baltar. He had the option of staying on Galactica, and chose to separate from military service and go with Gaius to the planet surface. The second that Gaius lost faith in himself -- when he signed the death warrants on the detainees -- is the second that Gaeta realized how bad things really were, and how bad they'd always been. Everybody gets what they want, in the ugliest and most twisted way possible. And it's still happening, and I think what Gaeta was going to say was not "idealist" but something like "I turned out to be the one that did it." Which makes me very sad, and very worried for Gaeta, between that and Chief's creepy choking scenario before, except that A) Jammer is clearly going to die horribly aboard Galactica, and B) at some point somebody's going to realize he was the mole, and probably C) everybody will realize that the Collaborator Witchhunt is a bad idea at that point, but Gaeta will still hold a grudge. That's my guess.