When I saw the pregnant woman wanting an abortion, I figured it was going to be because she was knocked up by a Cylon male. Would have been an interesting twist compared to a pro-life/pro-choice debate.
Well, the problem I had with the decision is that the rationalization provided by Baltar, and subsequently used by Roslyn, doesn’t make sense. Unless a very large percentage of pregnancies are being terminated, banning abortion isn’t going to make an appreciable difference in the birth rate.
You think maybe Baltar was setting her up? Or maybe it’s one of those “story telling over science” Moore plot decisions? 
Those are the Swiftian Scrolls.
Political arguments rarely do, actually. When some grinning blowdried yahoo says he’s “pro-family,” what does that mean, exactly? Who ever says they’re “anti” family? It’s a senseless, stupid assertion if you think about it for two seconds, but these soundbite arguments aren’t designed to be thought about, they’re designed to sound nice and feel nice and slide unexamined into the back of your brain, setting up an irrational positive association between the sentiment and the candidate. On that level, the public statements given by Roslin and Baltar felt pretty right to me.
True enough. However, I don’t think Roslyn made the decision for political reasons. At the time, she thought her only opposition was Zarek and she was pretty much a shoe in at the next election.
I think Baltar lied to her. The guy has already given a nuke to an unstable cylon hiding out with a passivist group with terrorist tendencies. Lying to get the political upper hand isn’t that much of a stretch for him.
So what will Baltar do if he finds himself Preident and threatened by a pro Cylon group that has a nuke? Discuss it with his tie?
That sounds like a possibel episode to me.
Yeah? What was the last time YOU parked on the ceiling, smart guy?
On advice of legal counsel, I decline to answer that question.
Loved this episode. As I said to the little woman, “That one was good even for a Battlestar Galactica episode.”
Couple comments before I read everyone else’s.
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The cameraman seemed to have some problems when Dualla was nude…he kept aiming high! Bastard!
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I thought Lee was already a Major. Did I miss something somewhere?
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Yes, Gardner’s death was kind of predictable once we’d reached that point. That’s life on a TV serial.
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Last week, when we saw this week’s preview, didn’t we see someone firing off a gun on the bridge of the Pegasus? I could have sworn one of their nifty glass tracker-things got shot out in the preview.
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Baltar is a sneaky little bastard, eh?
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It shows how good a show it is that I actually said to the girlfriend at one point, “You know, the Adama boys might be wrong about [the ambush].”
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How did the Raptor pilots die? Their ships looked pretty good, but they seemed to die bloody. Certainly not lack of oxygen.
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Anyone else think that Roslin’s new assistant looks like a younger Pam Grier?
And now…
MacTech - seems a safe bet to me that Sharon’s wakeup will be a flashback. Old Boomer got herself capped well over a month ago.
MaddyStrut - who says BaseStars have personnel? If a Raider is a singular entity, who is to say that a BaseStar isn’t as well?
Not only did Roslin piss off a lot of people by banning abortions, she also still pissed off the religious fanatics by still allowing That Girl to get one just under the wire. Funny thing is, I don’t see there being a chance in hell of Doc Cottle quitting. And if he does get caught, what are they going to do, execute him?
I think Doc Cottle would make a good veep.
-Jo
Regarding Baltar’s population numbers, we do have something to consider, here.
We have no idea how many abortions are going on in the fleet. Sex seems to be the hobby of many people…
Apart from that, though, didn’t Baltar say, essentially, that “at this rate we’ll be extinct in 18 years”? Who says abortions will make an appreciable difference? Something tells me that a couple dozen combat losses a month will more than offset any births they’ve got going on. All it takes is a net delta-p of negative one and it’s all over.
-Joe
We also don’t know how many people are currently known to be pregnant and are therefore expected to squirt out a grub in the next few months.
I also had some questions about the abortion=extinction claim. Like, just what is the population capacity of the fleet right now? They’ve emphasized rationing and shortage of supplies. A smaller population might be a relief at this point.
And Baltar’s 17 years seem like a pretty long time. Were they really planning on sustaining a population in space for that long? Is it even realistic that they could maintain the ships in the fleet for that long without a planet-based industrial infrastructure? I had assumed that their plan was “colonize a planet (maybe Earth) where the Cylons can’t get us.” It seems premature to worry about maintaining nonnegative population growth until it looks like there will be no such planets on the horizon.
Why worry about instituting draconian population growth measures until the low population really looks like it’s becoming a problem? It actually seems like a problem that should solve itself anyway. It’s usually not hard to convince humans to breed enough to fill up all of the available space. If the population really started to get low, then I should think that the high fatality rate plus all the unused space would be all the encouragement people would need to start cranking out the babies.
Baltar played Rosyln with the “we’ll be gone in 18 years”… near as I can tell, he was just looking at a screensaver.
He knew that she would ‘ban abortion’, thereby letting him have an ‘easy’ way to oppose her for the upcoming election. I did like his speach… funny to hear those words coming from someone ‘we know’ is batting for the wrong team.
He, of course, could care less about the population… atleast outwardly… he’s as manipulated as they get.
Presumably the Cylons lured them in with their fake distress call, then killed them and left their ships as bait.
Except we saw at the end of season one that the one basestar was filled with dozens of nekkid BoomerBots.
I haven’t edited the episode yet, but I thought there was blood on their faces, indicating decompression; the cockpits were exposed to vacumn from weapons fire.
Did anyone notice if the blood was from nose/ear/eyes?
The only Raptor cockpit shown had shattered glass, suggesting a projectile hit from Raiders. Both pilots’ faces were covered in blood.
Don’t know if it’s fair to quote myself, but to expand upon this…
Baltar had his argument either way…
Rosyln bans abortion… he has the argument we saw.
Rosyln doesnt ban abortion… he has the ‘man of science, we’re going to be extinct in x years and your current president is a fool’ speach prepared.
Either way, he gets to play.
Doesn’t mean the basestar isn’t also somehow sentient. The nekkid Boomerbots could be like, y’know, mitochondria or e. coli.
Someone or something has to repair the raiders Starbuck shoots up, check the oil, pump aviation fuel and load ammo. If the raiders are Cylons, it would make sense for the basestars to be also. There may be different ‘brains’ for lack of a better term, to operate different functions and serve redundant functions.