BSG: He That Believeth In Me
Apr. 6th, 2008 05:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaWow. So, after forever, it's back.
And I'm late reviewing because my friend was over this weekend so I literally only just finished watching. Usually I see what others have to say, think about it a while, then post a long, rambling review. But this time, I'm just gonna start writing and see where it takes me.
I'll get Gaius out of the way because he's probably the part I find least interesting. Which is to say, he's still interesting, just slightly less so. It's really cool to see Six back in full...Head!Six mode, cajoling, controlling, with an agenda. So much of last season we either didn't see her (that I recall) or it was involved in out-and-out survival (like when he was on the Basestar or being drugged by Roslin and Adama), it was easy to forget her underlying apparent agenda and her creepy way of forcing Baltar's realworld fortunes to seemingly dance to her tune. I still don't believe she's necessarily done anything that Gaius himself couldn't be responsible for with his amazing brain. The visions of the Opera House on Kobol are clearly a shared image and clearly evidence of something supernatural/machine-elf-style-similar-hallucinations. But that could be down to Gaius, not Six's influence on him. The way Oracles and Roslin-on-chamalla see that stuff too.
As to his behaviour in this episode, quite aside from finding the concept of a largely female cult of followers both plausible and deeply boring and a little bit icky (though I think I might have been supposed to be icked), I quite enjoyed Baltar's skeptical and dismissive attitude. I believe that his praying over the kid when everyone was asleep was genuine: the notion that a God could want a kid to die clearly shook him, and while he's got self-preservation on the brain, Baltar isn't sociopathic nor a monster. And if anything's going to elicit an emotional response it's going to be a dying kid. In a lot of ways, it's Baltar's atheism that allowed him to be shocked by the notion of God planning for a child to die. So yeah, I buy that in the quiet guilt of the night, he'd let out that feeling, and once he realised people were waking up? Well...there's something tempting about confession, and Baltar was in a setting where he could confess and knew damn well that it would only make them love him more. I'm...not saying there was only calculation involved, but I think it might have had more to do with making him feel better about the crappiness of his situation, and the world, and the situation with the kid, than actually repenting or believing it would work.
Regarding the bathroom scene - where - well done show for making me genuinely stressed about what was going to happen to that irritating other girl - I think that perhaps we're seeing a change in Baltar in that he's...become a little nihilistic? Again, less to do with faith or genuinely wanting to swap his life for the kid's and more to do with, well, not caring any more. He faced down death before by surrendering on the Basestar, and Three relented. He's done it again. Actually it's kind of like what he did with the kid.
I mean, is this Baltar's new MO? Outpsych everyone who wants to hurt him by screaming, "Yeah! Go on! DO IT!"
That'll go well when he tries it with Roslin. HA.
Also: "You might want to try less smiting if you don't want to be up on murder charges,"? That implies the smote dude ain't dead. Which surprises me cus that was some class-A THUDDING with a HEAVY metal pole. And I was impressed re: the level of violence it suddenly introduced (in a new and terrifying way from the prior situation because pounding on someone with horrible soft thudding noises when you can't actually see the damage being inflicted isn't something we usually get on TV and thus bypasses my "numbed-to-it" settings). And I was also impressed by how quickly and deftly it turned the weird-sounding-but-sympathetic-cus-victim-groupie into the weird-sounding-and-I'm-SCARED-of-this-person-groupie.
Moving on to the Final Four - Tigh is the least mentally stable of the four, but that's in keeping with his previous development and Adama's utterly boneheaded decision to reappoint him as XO. The hallucination and his fear of killing Adama combined with his utter inability to admit this fear to his peers is excellent. I kind of love how he's assuming the same persona over the final four as he does over the Galactica crew. That is, he's the cranky XO who makes bold statements and won't discuss his own flaws and demands absolute loyalty and obedience. Unfortunately, there's no one in charge in that group for him to, well, be a lackey of.
Tyrol...we didn't really get to see that much of his responses. I think that'll be coming soon, though. He's probably the most calm of the lot of them, I guess because it's something he's thought about before - extensively - at the end of season two, and has had to come to terms with in some ways dealing with Boomer's actions and later with Athena's return. I'm not saying it's easy for him, or that he'll ultimately come to a positive conclusion about his situation, but I think he's further through thinking the situation out than the others. Tigh just refuses to think about it, Anders is panicking and Tory is...
I wish there was more Tory! I know I should be grateful that she's going to be getting more screen time, since before she was a C-List character at best, but she's fascinating and I want to know more about who she is. I'm also saddened that her affair with Anders will presumably be cut short since his wife has returned from the dead and Sam's besotted with Kara, but I guess they have bigger problems. I shall use my icon of her to make up for the fact that there's not so much of her in the episode as I'd like.
Anders is awesome, mind. I remember when he first showed up in season two and I was utterly indifferent to him. And now: awesome. They did a really good thing by having him carry sections of downloaded and then letting him act independently throughout the Resistance on New Caprica; use him sparingly in season three until the end. He's an awesome character now and I love him and honestly like him better with Kara than I like Lee with Kara. (Though that is probably due to my alternate shipping tendencies in that area...)
His attempts to get Kara to give some sign that she could love him as a cylon - however obliquely - while also getting to express his very real new, fervent belief about the nature of his own identity - made for a great scene. Though it was Kara backhanding him with the gun, and the fragile, determined expression on Kara's face that really shot that scene through the roof.
I loved how terrified he was in that cockpit. Great to see a rookie who's, well, scared. Though I know he had massive other reasons to be. But still, I appreciated that. I think that Racetrack is right and that he did just make a distracted rookie mistake because if he was programmed not to hurt the other Cylon, then the Chief wouldn't have been able to carry out his duties, or Tigh either. Though I guess it could be a more immediate sort of safety-switch. But still, we know something the actual four don't - the other Cylon don't know who they are or where they are. They're programmed not to think of them.
I can think of two explanations for this:
1) it's part of the long-term Cylon strategy: they're deep undercover agents and in order to protect that, they limited the number of models to prevent identification through duplication, and erased the records of their existence until the time of their activation.
Or, my preference,
2) they're a faction of Cylon who disagree with the other 7 and took a radically different approach to their existence, possibly even having their own plan to protect humanity. Certainly all four of them were in key defence roles in the Resistance of New Caprica. Anders lead a resistance on Old Caprica. Tory got a job and became ludicrously loyal despite her initial amoral pollster characterisation, that entailed protecting Roslin, the anti-Cylon prophet, after Billy's death. I can't explain Tigh unless the herding of humanity and allowing some to survive was always a plan (we still don't know why the mini series Doral put that Cylon device on the ship: certainly it didn't destroy Galactica and I was always curious if they deliberately didn't - if they wanted to spare that ship for some reason, hence having a couple of agents on board, even if the plan was simply to spare a more obsolete ship because it'd be easier to capture thus providing more human specimins for testing and "farming"). But I am also wondering if Tyrol wasn't specifically there to counter the threat posed by Boomer. Okay, he didn't do a great job, but it's convenient, isn't it? One Cylon from each "faction" oblivious but drawn to each other? Well, that's my weak evidence for the theory anyway.
Anyway, the point is, Boomer never pulled anything like that off with the Raiders, and Athena had to hardwire herself into something. What Anders pulled seemed more...almost mystical. It wasn't simply that the Raider didn't shoot at Anders: the entire fleet just went home, seemingly because Anders sent them home. That's awesome power there and seems to point to the idea that the four are a different type of model. Older or closer to God or pulling the strings or really great hackers, I don't know. But there's sure as hell something going on there.
I guess what I'm saying is, I think Anders protected the Fleet then, as opposed to endangering it.
Now, finally, Kara and Laura.
OH. I love this show.
At first I was worried that Laura would just stand around insisting everyone remember Kara's probably a Cylon. But then, the writers remembered that she and Tricia Helfer are electrifying together and they didn't simply forget the shared vision. Interesting indeed that Laura doesn't got to Adama's favourite toaster, Athena, to discuss these visions. As bonafide a turncoat as you'll get. And one who - while she hates Roslin's guts because of the Hera debacle - has a vested interest in playing nice and saving the fleet. No, she goes to Six. There's something about that I find fascinating.
Even if that scene did have that annoying end-after-ominous-phrase thing where my first thought is, "What? And then Roslin just LEFT?" I mean really, "They're clues. I feel it." I'd be like, "Okay, what sort of feeling? Could you locate them? What do you mean clues?" That...was not the ending of the conversation, dammit!
And Kara. I know that this stuff runs directly contrary to the grounded, handheld camera documentary feel of a lot of the show (and I thought that was more prominent again here than it had been recently and I enjoyed it immensely). But I love the mystical stuff. Especially since, as I already explained, I think I now have to take the god/s and other supernatural magical stuff as read. It is real here. The fact that they manage to mix it as not incompatible with a solid, grounded approach to reality is to their credit. This stuff is as much a part of the world as gun-camera footage and military jargon.
So yeah, I love this odd, certain/uncertain Kara. I love her reaction to each jump. I love her magic knowledge.
And OH MY GOD do I love that it ended up with her pointing a gun at Laura. Those two characters so rarely intertwine. Really, it hasn't been since the Arrow of Apollo stuff, and before that the airlocking of Leoben, and they deserve to get screen time together. They're more interesting together than tied, tenuously, by their links to various Adamas. And that's another awesome thing that's been done by bringing Kara into the religious prophecy aspect even more strongly: irrevocably tied to Roslin now, because the search for Earth is both of theirs. Previously Kara was tied to the Cylon religion, with Laura tied to the humans. Which in itself made me want them to share more screen time. But now the two converge more clearly.
Oddly Adama didn't piss me off in this episode. I agree with him: loving Kara as a daughter (or not, since he didn't confirm he still did, I guess) has nothing to do with whether he can afford to trust her with this.
The conversation between him and Lee about Zak was...cool. Nice to see Zak remembered. Nice to see Lee realise that there someone being a Cylon doesn't destroy your emotional ties to them. I think what made me feel odd about this scene was that it was a bizarre meld of the emo!Lee I find less interesting who moons after Kara, feels wronged by his family past and makes oddly nonsensical decisions and statements, and the principled!Lee we get when he escapes the self-doubt/deceptive quagmire of his family relationships (which encompasses his entire military career and in which I count his relationship to Kara), when he makes wonderfully inciteful points and acts according to his conscience and refuses to let his past define the moral direction of his current actions.
And here I got...both and it was weird. I'm very glad that he's not putting the uniform back on, though I want to know what job he's taking. I also wouldn't be surprised or upset if, in future, he's temporarily drafted back to Viper duty during major attacks (if he's on Galactica) simply because there is an issue of survival and if he can help I think he should/will. That said, I'm looking forward to his being a civilian. I think his relationship with his father might improve to (after is gets worse because Adama will have to get used to his son on "the other side") because their relationship will only be a familial one. Well...actually I guess depending on his job, it might not be. Hmm.
(Side note: I wonder if those "feelers" were on Roslin's behalf? I kinda doubt it considering how mad she was at him - and...yeah, THAT'S a missing scene, the first one where they really talk about that - but then again, any government position in a government that tiny is...probably going to at least be known to her, right? Huh. I guess we'll see.)
Anyway, back to that scene. I really agree with Lee's comments about how if Zak were a Cylon it wouldn't change how they'd feel being true and right. I was hoping Adama would apply the same reasoning he did with the Kara situation and told Lee that no. It wouldn't change how they felt about him. But it might change their ability to safely act on those feelings.
You can love someone as much as you ever did, but no longer trust them.
Is this an intriguing new era of BSG? Where some humans are starting to be able to not hate the Cylon for simply being Cylon, to recognise that they can be objects of love or attachment, but to know that, objectively, there is a vast, and almost unassailable gulf with regards to trust?
Clearly this is an important theme to bring up now since that's what we're being asked to do as an audience with the final four.
Either way, Lee, way to bring up a great point and then...miss it because you're still half being emo!Lee. He can love Kara. He can't trust her.
And, on another final note: I really forgot that the show was almost over! I was watching that scene with Kara breaking into Roslin's quarters and then there was "to be continued" and I was like NO! NEXT WEEK? NO! NO!
So yeah. This is going well so far. Very well.
I have vague plans to steal an awesome idea from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
projectjulie and make 10 second vidlets for all the episodes. I have an idea for this one already, though I don't know if I'll make it or not. We'll see.
And I'm late reviewing because my friend was over this weekend so I literally only just finished watching. Usually I see what others have to say, think about it a while, then post a long, rambling review. But this time, I'm just gonna start writing and see where it takes me.
I'll get Gaius out of the way because he's probably the part I find least interesting. Which is to say, he's still interesting, just slightly less so. It's really cool to see Six back in full...Head!Six mode, cajoling, controlling, with an agenda. So much of last season we either didn't see her (that I recall) or it was involved in out-and-out survival (like when he was on the Basestar or being drugged by Roslin and Adama), it was easy to forget her underlying apparent agenda and her creepy way of forcing Baltar's realworld fortunes to seemingly dance to her tune. I still don't believe she's necessarily done anything that Gaius himself couldn't be responsible for with his amazing brain. The visions of the Opera House on Kobol are clearly a shared image and clearly evidence of something supernatural/machine-elf-style-similar-hallucinations. But that could be down to Gaius, not Six's influence on him. The way Oracles and Roslin-on-chamalla see that stuff too.
As to his behaviour in this episode, quite aside from finding the concept of a largely female cult of followers both plausible and deeply boring and a little bit icky (though I think I might have been supposed to be icked), I quite enjoyed Baltar's skeptical and dismissive attitude. I believe that his praying over the kid when everyone was asleep was genuine: the notion that a God could want a kid to die clearly shook him, and while he's got self-preservation on the brain, Baltar isn't sociopathic nor a monster. And if anything's going to elicit an emotional response it's going to be a dying kid. In a lot of ways, it's Baltar's atheism that allowed him to be shocked by the notion of God planning for a child to die. So yeah, I buy that in the quiet guilt of the night, he'd let out that feeling, and once he realised people were waking up? Well...there's something tempting about confession, and Baltar was in a setting where he could confess and knew damn well that it would only make them love him more. I'm...not saying there was only calculation involved, but I think it might have had more to do with making him feel better about the crappiness of his situation, and the world, and the situation with the kid, than actually repenting or believing it would work.
Regarding the bathroom scene - where - well done show for making me genuinely stressed about what was going to happen to that irritating other girl - I think that perhaps we're seeing a change in Baltar in that he's...become a little nihilistic? Again, less to do with faith or genuinely wanting to swap his life for the kid's and more to do with, well, not caring any more. He faced down death before by surrendering on the Basestar, and Three relented. He's done it again. Actually it's kind of like what he did with the kid.
I mean, is this Baltar's new MO? Outpsych everyone who wants to hurt him by screaming, "Yeah! Go on! DO IT!"
That'll go well when he tries it with Roslin. HA.
Also: "You might want to try less smiting if you don't want to be up on murder charges,"? That implies the smote dude ain't dead. Which surprises me cus that was some class-A THUDDING with a HEAVY metal pole. And I was impressed re: the level of violence it suddenly introduced (in a new and terrifying way from the prior situation because pounding on someone with horrible soft thudding noises when you can't actually see the damage being inflicted isn't something we usually get on TV and thus bypasses my "numbed-to-it" settings). And I was also impressed by how quickly and deftly it turned the weird-sounding-but-sympathetic-cus-victim-groupie into the weird-sounding-and-I'm-SCARED-of-this-person-groupie.
Moving on to the Final Four - Tigh is the least mentally stable of the four, but that's in keeping with his previous development and Adama's utterly boneheaded decision to reappoint him as XO. The hallucination and his fear of killing Adama combined with his utter inability to admit this fear to his peers is excellent. I kind of love how he's assuming the same persona over the final four as he does over the Galactica crew. That is, he's the cranky XO who makes bold statements and won't discuss his own flaws and demands absolute loyalty and obedience. Unfortunately, there's no one in charge in that group for him to, well, be a lackey of.
Tyrol...we didn't really get to see that much of his responses. I think that'll be coming soon, though. He's probably the most calm of the lot of them, I guess because it's something he's thought about before - extensively - at the end of season two, and has had to come to terms with in some ways dealing with Boomer's actions and later with Athena's return. I'm not saying it's easy for him, or that he'll ultimately come to a positive conclusion about his situation, but I think he's further through thinking the situation out than the others. Tigh just refuses to think about it, Anders is panicking and Tory is...
I wish there was more Tory! I know I should be grateful that she's going to be getting more screen time, since before she was a C-List character at best, but she's fascinating and I want to know more about who she is. I'm also saddened that her affair with Anders will presumably be cut short since his wife has returned from the dead and Sam's besotted with Kara, but I guess they have bigger problems. I shall use my icon of her to make up for the fact that there's not so much of her in the episode as I'd like.
Anders is awesome, mind. I remember when he first showed up in season two and I was utterly indifferent to him. And now: awesome. They did a really good thing by having him carry sections of downloaded and then letting him act independently throughout the Resistance on New Caprica; use him sparingly in season three until the end. He's an awesome character now and I love him and honestly like him better with Kara than I like Lee with Kara. (Though that is probably due to my alternate shipping tendencies in that area...)
His attempts to get Kara to give some sign that she could love him as a cylon - however obliquely - while also getting to express his very real new, fervent belief about the nature of his own identity - made for a great scene. Though it was Kara backhanding him with the gun, and the fragile, determined expression on Kara's face that really shot that scene through the roof.
I loved how terrified he was in that cockpit. Great to see a rookie who's, well, scared. Though I know he had massive other reasons to be. But still, I appreciated that. I think that Racetrack is right and that he did just make a distracted rookie mistake because if he was programmed not to hurt the other Cylon, then the Chief wouldn't have been able to carry out his duties, or Tigh either. Though I guess it could be a more immediate sort of safety-switch. But still, we know something the actual four don't - the other Cylon don't know who they are or where they are. They're programmed not to think of them.
I can think of two explanations for this:
1) it's part of the long-term Cylon strategy: they're deep undercover agents and in order to protect that, they limited the number of models to prevent identification through duplication, and erased the records of their existence until the time of their activation.
Or, my preference,
2) they're a faction of Cylon who disagree with the other 7 and took a radically different approach to their existence, possibly even having their own plan to protect humanity. Certainly all four of them were in key defence roles in the Resistance of New Caprica. Anders lead a resistance on Old Caprica. Tory got a job and became ludicrously loyal despite her initial amoral pollster characterisation, that entailed protecting Roslin, the anti-Cylon prophet, after Billy's death. I can't explain Tigh unless the herding of humanity and allowing some to survive was always a plan (we still don't know why the mini series Doral put that Cylon device on the ship: certainly it didn't destroy Galactica and I was always curious if they deliberately didn't - if they wanted to spare that ship for some reason, hence having a couple of agents on board, even if the plan was simply to spare a more obsolete ship because it'd be easier to capture thus providing more human specimins for testing and "farming"). But I am also wondering if Tyrol wasn't specifically there to counter the threat posed by Boomer. Okay, he didn't do a great job, but it's convenient, isn't it? One Cylon from each "faction" oblivious but drawn to each other? Well, that's my weak evidence for the theory anyway.
Anyway, the point is, Boomer never pulled anything like that off with the Raiders, and Athena had to hardwire herself into something. What Anders pulled seemed more...almost mystical. It wasn't simply that the Raider didn't shoot at Anders: the entire fleet just went home, seemingly because Anders sent them home. That's awesome power there and seems to point to the idea that the four are a different type of model. Older or closer to God or pulling the strings or really great hackers, I don't know. But there's sure as hell something going on there.
I guess what I'm saying is, I think Anders protected the Fleet then, as opposed to endangering it.
Now, finally, Kara and Laura.
OH. I love this show.
At first I was worried that Laura would just stand around insisting everyone remember Kara's probably a Cylon. But then, the writers remembered that she and Tricia Helfer are electrifying together and they didn't simply forget the shared vision. Interesting indeed that Laura doesn't got to Adama's favourite toaster, Athena, to discuss these visions. As bonafide a turncoat as you'll get. And one who - while she hates Roslin's guts because of the Hera debacle - has a vested interest in playing nice and saving the fleet. No, she goes to Six. There's something about that I find fascinating.
Even if that scene did have that annoying end-after-ominous-phrase thing where my first thought is, "What? And then Roslin just LEFT?" I mean really, "They're clues. I feel it." I'd be like, "Okay, what sort of feeling? Could you locate them? What do you mean clues?" That...was not the ending of the conversation, dammit!
And Kara. I know that this stuff runs directly contrary to the grounded, handheld camera documentary feel of a lot of the show (and I thought that was more prominent again here than it had been recently and I enjoyed it immensely). But I love the mystical stuff. Especially since, as I already explained, I think I now have to take the god/s and other supernatural magical stuff as read. It is real here. The fact that they manage to mix it as not incompatible with a solid, grounded approach to reality is to their credit. This stuff is as much a part of the world as gun-camera footage and military jargon.
So yeah, I love this odd, certain/uncertain Kara. I love her reaction to each jump. I love her magic knowledge.
And OH MY GOD do I love that it ended up with her pointing a gun at Laura. Those two characters so rarely intertwine. Really, it hasn't been since the Arrow of Apollo stuff, and before that the airlocking of Leoben, and they deserve to get screen time together. They're more interesting together than tied, tenuously, by their links to various Adamas. And that's another awesome thing that's been done by bringing Kara into the religious prophecy aspect even more strongly: irrevocably tied to Roslin now, because the search for Earth is both of theirs. Previously Kara was tied to the Cylon religion, with Laura tied to the humans. Which in itself made me want them to share more screen time. But now the two converge more clearly.
Oddly Adama didn't piss me off in this episode. I agree with him: loving Kara as a daughter (or not, since he didn't confirm he still did, I guess) has nothing to do with whether he can afford to trust her with this.
The conversation between him and Lee about Zak was...cool. Nice to see Zak remembered. Nice to see Lee realise that there someone being a Cylon doesn't destroy your emotional ties to them. I think what made me feel odd about this scene was that it was a bizarre meld of the emo!Lee I find less interesting who moons after Kara, feels wronged by his family past and makes oddly nonsensical decisions and statements, and the principled!Lee we get when he escapes the self-doubt/deceptive quagmire of his family relationships (which encompasses his entire military career and in which I count his relationship to Kara), when he makes wonderfully inciteful points and acts according to his conscience and refuses to let his past define the moral direction of his current actions.
And here I got...both and it was weird. I'm very glad that he's not putting the uniform back on, though I want to know what job he's taking. I also wouldn't be surprised or upset if, in future, he's temporarily drafted back to Viper duty during major attacks (if he's on Galactica) simply because there is an issue of survival and if he can help I think he should/will. That said, I'm looking forward to his being a civilian. I think his relationship with his father might improve to (after is gets worse because Adama will have to get used to his son on "the other side") because their relationship will only be a familial one. Well...actually I guess depending on his job, it might not be. Hmm.
(Side note: I wonder if those "feelers" were on Roslin's behalf? I kinda doubt it considering how mad she was at him - and...yeah, THAT'S a missing scene, the first one where they really talk about that - but then again, any government position in a government that tiny is...probably going to at least be known to her, right? Huh. I guess we'll see.)
Anyway, back to that scene. I really agree with Lee's comments about how if Zak were a Cylon it wouldn't change how they'd feel being true and right. I was hoping Adama would apply the same reasoning he did with the Kara situation and told Lee that no. It wouldn't change how they felt about him. But it might change their ability to safely act on those feelings.
You can love someone as much as you ever did, but no longer trust them.
Is this an intriguing new era of BSG? Where some humans are starting to be able to not hate the Cylon for simply being Cylon, to recognise that they can be objects of love or attachment, but to know that, objectively, there is a vast, and almost unassailable gulf with regards to trust?
Clearly this is an important theme to bring up now since that's what we're being asked to do as an audience with the final four.
Either way, Lee, way to bring up a great point and then...miss it because you're still half being emo!Lee. He can love Kara. He can't trust her.
And, on another final note: I really forgot that the show was almost over! I was watching that scene with Kara breaking into Roslin's quarters and then there was "to be continued" and I was like NO! NEXT WEEK? NO! NO!
So yeah. This is going well so far. Very well.
I have vague plans to steal an awesome idea from
projectjulie and make 10 second vidlets for all the episodes. I have an idea for this one already, though I don't know if I'll make it or not. We'll see.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-04-07 04:05 pm (UTC)But then I want to say the opposite is true at the same time, that sometimes we discover we're cowards when we're pressed and in danger, and we squirm and try to save our own hides, while it's far easier to be generous and caring when we're sitting in relative luxury.
And then I get the horrible question arise: which is better? In general, we tend to believe that when we're pushed, we see our real selves. That it's better to be good and kind when there's no reward than only when it's easy. Does that make Baltar a better person than many of us? Good lord, that's a horrifying thought! o.O