I really hated the opening scene. Poor Jammer! I do support capital punishment, but only in certain circumstances. Here they executed out of vengeance. Jammer should have gained a reprieve for saving Callie. Gaeta was let off the hook; Jammer deserved to as well. Maybe some kind of punishment, but not blown out an airlock. This is vigilantism. This is Ox-Bow Incident style lynching. I don't care that there's a legal document giving them the authority; the fact is, as Roslin says, everyone has the right to representation. Now, I'm with Zerek, I don't think every trial needs to be a public spectacle. They can be secret tribunals for all I care, so long as the accused has a fair shot. In these cases, the six convicted on their own. Tigh is really not thinking clearly these days. I'm glad he told off the other guy and said it was about justice, not vengeance. That may well be in theory, but it seems they hid behind Presidential signatures to cover their own butts. In this manner, they are no different from the Cylons who needed Baltar's signature to keep things "legal" and keep their consciences clear. These are the kind of ridiculous death ordinances passed in secret that remind me of the book of Daniel. At least he got out of the lion's den; there's no coming back from the harsh void of space!
I am so terribly confused about the succession to the Presidency. Last episode it seemed that Roslin had usurped the office. Now we find that Zerek is the acting President. Was he Baltar's VP? We were never explicitly told. (And may I ask, doesn't that make Zerek as culpable as Gaeta, and shouldn't he be executed too? Oh they can't do that; he's the one who gave them the authority.) So he's the President now. Okay. Wait, why does Roslin become President at the end of the episode? Didn't they need to hold an election?? I though Zerek was a big proponent of that sort of thing? Did he just make her his VP, then resign the office and give it to her? And in the end, doesn't this make her every bit the power-hungry dictator that Zerek accused her of being in "Bastille Day"??
Hey, they changed the opening back again! I wondered what they would do with New Caprica out of the way. And did you see that survivor number? In a little over a year they lost over 8000 people! Were a lot of them killed on New Caprica during the escape?
I like the slow reveal of Gaius' dream. Though I was annoyed that they quoted the Incredible Hulk again.
I realized the interesting parallel about there being twelve Cylon models, just as their are Twelve Colonies. They vote as a group, all the Sixes together, all the Threes together, etc. This gives the Cylons something of a Quorum of Twelve. Do they have a Presidential equivalent? Is there an Imperial Leader in this version?
The one nice thing about the collaborator plotline is that Baltar is also being tried as a collaborator, but on the other side. I like that the Sixes are conflicted. I'm not even sure the Six who came to see him was really Caprica Six; they might have sent another one to trick him, just as a way of assessing him.
I meant to point this out earlier, but when did Kara get that tattoo on her arm? It must have been on New Caprica. I wonder, did Katee Sackoff get a new tat and they just went with it, or did they specifically decide that Kara needed one?
I still don't much like Starbuck, and I don't really know how to read her anymore. Anders is starting to grow on me though. He takes a stand for justice even before Tyrol does.
Anyway, this episode was very frustrating. Tigh is even worse than he was before. But at the same time, I don't completely agree with Roslin's blanket pardon for all of them either. Execution seems extreme in most cases. It seems a very Klingon thing to do (which is maybe why it appeals to Ron). There were just a lot of extremes. Having said all that, I do think it's important to point out some good. The exterior camera is slowly moving away from the constant shaky-cam zoomy stuff. In this episode we got a great majestic pull back from inside the base ship out to the rest of the Cylon fleet. The last episode had a similar great reveal of the Pegasus. I think it's good that the show do things like this. Shots like this work. You don't need to constantly re-frame to be interesting. Sometimes the zoom thing works, but I'd like it if they keep mixing it up. It also seems to me that they've recently slightly redesigned the Centurions. I like the current version because they seem a lot less top-heavy. Their limbs seem like they can really support the weight.
There's a lot of baggage left over from New Caprica. I hope things move forward with less insanity. I really wish Laura wasn't President right now though.
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