I agree with this. And the worst part of it, for him, is that this makes him vulnerable to his wife’s manipulations. She has always been much more at ease in social situations; she’s much more in tune with the details of interpersonal interactions, politics, and all the rest. Hell, she’s slept with half the uniforms around her husband. He knows this. He knows she’s better at this stuff than he is. And when he’s out of his depth, as he is when he’s trying to deal with the Quorum, she can step in and tell him what to do, and it sounds reasonable to him because he simply doesn’t know any better. (Not to mention how she keeps feeding him booze.)
The last few minutes of this episode, where Tigh followed her advice to the letter (which, it’s important to recognize, would have worked exactly as intended, except that Roslin got her meds), then confessed to Adama that he was fracking everything up, were just excruciating to watch. Tigh is indeed a very good XO, as he’s demonstrated several times, but he’s crap in the top job. (Remember in the miniseries, his indecision about shutting off part of the ship during the fire crisis?) All of this is perfectly in character for him.
Actually, the show has been fairly careful about keeping its people flawed. Starbuck is great at operational stuff, but an emotional mess. Crashdown was a good pilot and a good military cog, but couldn’t handle his group in a survival situation on the ground. Tyrol is an excellent people person and would have been a much better leader, but his loyalties blind him to larger obligations (e.g. his refusal to turn on Boomer, despite compelling doubts, during the tribunal episode). And so on.
The least-flawed personality on the show so far is Gaeta, and we just haven’t gotten to know him that well yet. He probably picks his nose and wipes the boogers on the underside of his duty console.
Considering last week they used the D-Day password / challange “Flash” / “Thunder”? And all of them hovering around that dieing guy just before giving him a lethal dose of whatever their version of Morphine is just like Ribisi’s character? All it needed was Six to tell Baltar to “earn this” and we’d be out of homage country and into great big rip-off town.
Both, I think. The only time Tigh isn’t a total hard-ass is when he’s got a few belts in him. You know whenever you hear that almost human chuckle in his voice, he’s been hitting the cup, but then, that’s the only time you really want to serve under the asshole. A sober Tigh is a real inhuman hard-ass.
My thoughts exactly, although I would have compared it to “Lost” in Space.
While having Starbuck being a Cylon would be consistent with the universe as presented on the show so far, I think that as a plot device it would be pretty cheesy, and Ron Moore wouldn’t do that to us.
You would think aiming would be a problem in parabolic motion easily solved by a computer. OTOH, the seem to be a prototype for Imperial Stormstrooper weapons training.
