I’m afraid I’m going to have to disagree with a few of my esteemed fellow 'dopers.
As satisfying as it would have been to see Adama et al. dispense some sudden, violent, and personal vengeance, there was a great deal of poetic justice about Gaeta and Zarek sitting together in the same place of execution where Adama stood alone, looking down (or is it up?) the barrels of identical weapons held by identically anonymous Marines.
A quick search doesn’t show there being any particular significance to the victims of a firing squad being seated. It does seem that firing squads are not normally used for war criminals, who are normally hanged. I don’t know that Gaeta undertook anything that would qualify as a war crime. Zarek’s actions aboard Colonial One, though, I think might.
In the nineteenth century the Royal Navy hanged seamen and shot officers, unless the crime was dishonorable and then would hang officers. I presume a mutinous officer would be hanged.
In Breaker Morant, set during the Boer war, 2 British army officers convicted (falsely) of various war crimes were shot while sitting. In fact, I was completely expecting Tom to shout “Shoot straight you bastards! Don’t make a mess of it!”
I think it’s simply a matter of it being the easiest way to keep the condemned stationary, while their chest is upright and still making a nice target. Digging holes to install 8’ high fence posts doesn’t work well on a battlestar.
It wouldn’t have made sense for Adama to shoot Gaeta and/or Zarek when he took back the bridge. Much better for the fleet to have a quick trial and execution, rather than shoot them on the spot just for vengeance.
Gaeta’s little counseling session with Baltar at the end was great. As soon as they started talking, I realized he was just waiting for his last appeal from the governor.
Yeah, it took me a second, but I realized, “Oh, he’s Gaeta’s priest!”
I’ve been thinking…why do you think the writers made the decision to take Helo out of commission during this whole business?
Well, once he realized they’d taken his wife, he would have gone all Liam Neeson until he’d either killed every one of them or gotten knocked out first. Since the plot wouldn’t allow him to be the agent of destruction (and since the mutineers probably realized the same thing about him), they did a pre-emptive knockout.
Though it might have been fun to see Helo put his badge on his desk, so to speak.
Another possibility for what the damage that Tyrol saw is: When the Cylons upgraded the jump drives, they sabotaged it.
I would think that Cylon sabotage would be more subtle than ripping huge tears in the walls. Didn’t Adama see cracks in the walls in his bathroom recently? I think the ship is falling apart. It was a museum piece at the beginning of the series and about to be retired, and since then it’s been rode hard and put away wet. Now, they also don’t have a working FTL drive. My theory is that they’re going to have to abandon Galactica when Cavil shows up. That’s speculation on my part and not a spoiler.
ETA: Did Tyrol show Cylon super-strength when pulling that piece of the FTL drive out with his hands, or was that something any desperate person could do under duress?
Gaeta and Zarek were sitting down so that Gaeta could have his artificial leg off, and thereby comment that it no longer hurt.
Helo was probably taken out of commission because his character and Lee’s overlap a lot of the same ground – do-the-right-thing guy. Since Lee was in on the action again, Helo was superfluous. Also, he’d’ve been unlikely to have left Athena and their kid, and he’d’ve been unlikely to take being brigged calmly, so since there was no secondary storyline on what was going on with the Cylons in the brig, he wasn’t needed anyway. Might as well make him a casualty to show how serious the coup was.
I don’t think that the Cylons upgraded the Galactica’s jumpdrives; those were already military, and no-one had squawked about Cylon tech on Galactica. They were upgrading the fleet’s jumpdrives.
I absolutely love Tyrol and Helo. Two characters that I just can never seem to hate. Tyrol was great in this episode. The whole time I’m thinking “What the hell is he up to? Where is he going?”. And when I saw him rip the FTL apart with his bare hands, I just loved it.
Someone over on Aint-it-Cool was asking about the final scene with Baltar and Gaeta. Was that a “inside Gaeta’s head” Baltar he was conversing with, or the actual Baltar.
I assumed it was the actual Baltar. In the previous episode, we saw Baltar trying to rationalize with Gaeta, so now he was visiting him before his execution.
Thoughts?
I was reminded of that scene in Wrath of Khan where Spock saved the Enterprise with his bare hands.
At least Tyrol didn’t die.
Oooh, I found an interview with the writer of the episode. It was, as I figured, the real Baltar talking to Felix.
Apparently, there was a lot more story for Baltar, but it got cut.
Overall, think this was a good episode. If last week was an “A”, then this one was a solid “B”. If they’d had another 30 minutes of airtime, it could have been an “A” show.
I doubt there was much of a trial for Gaeta and Zarek. It was a mutiny, so it would be tried by Court Martial rather than a regular criminal court. The judge would have been Adama, and the principal witnesses were the loyal command staff. Guilt was never really an issue.
I liked the detail of a target on the chest of the condemned. It’s a little thing, but it adds a bit of realism, I think.
Questions:
Why would Baltar have a vision of Adama’s execution?
Was that a real or a virtual Six he wasn’t having sex with after the vision?
Is this the first time Baltar has turned down sex?
It’s not supposed to be a kind of prescience, but rather the physical (psychical?) manifestation of Baltar’s guilt for leaving his cult behind on Galactica. He was familiar enough with the punitive implications of Adama being found a traitor in a court martial (a situation he himself only just winged clear off) and so Adama’s execution became his mind’s reprimand of itself for being a coward.
Hell yeah I watch this show! I still own sebastianspence.net but the site itself isn’t up because it was hopelessly outdated and I haven’t had time. I have the biggest crush on him… fangirl sigh (I had a major fan site, not his official site, though his publicist and I discussed it at one point. Frankly I should get back in touch with her as his official site right now isn’t really up either.
I don’t have any of FW on dvd. Waaahhh. I want the whole thing though. I have TiVo’d episodes here and there archived on my TiVo from years past, though, intending one day to do something more permanent with them.
My take on that is that he discovered some major hull fracture kind of thing that, had the ship actually jumped, probably would have 'sploded it. So in sabotaging the FTL, he saved the ship.
I’d imagine that “The Adama Maneuver™” although incredibly frakking cool (the coolest bit of starship maneuvering yet) certainly didn’t help hull integrity too much, those rips look more like stress-tears (or someone’s been having nightmares involving Freddy Frakking Krueger) due to the ship encountering stress it wasn’t designed for, like, oh, falling through a planet’s atmosphere and jumping away at the last second
After all this mischegas, I wonder how many humans are left alive now?
Where can I watch the webisodes? The link I found at Hulu doesn’t go back to the first one…