Spoilers boxed for those who have not yet gotten through season 4.5 of BSG…
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Tom and Felix, you just had to go and
stage a bloody coup, wipe out the quorum, and then get executed, didn’t you?
After that episode–“Blood on the Scales”–I had nightmares. A whole series of them. Bloody, violent, zombie apocalypse nightmares. I’d wake up after one and then go back to sleep and have another. It was frakking horrible.
I was/am a Gaeta fan and so in a sense I wasn’t pleased that a favorite character ended up falling so far. But I thought it was realistic to take this starry-eyed idealist and systematically strip him of every aspect of his idealism until he was nothing but a bitter shell. Gaeta was fucked over and inadvertently fucked himself over, hard. That he would become a villain, however reluctantly, was good plotting. I thought it was really well done.
As opposed to, say, the “Dark Willow” transformation in Buffy, which was a good idea flubbed in the execution.
Ditto on both points. Dark Willow was a great idea in concept, but was terribly executed. The fact that it had actually already been done well by the same show (see “The Wish” and “Doppelgangland”) just made the suckage of actual Dark Willow seem that much worse.
Gaeta’s trip to the dark side, on the other hand, was foreshadowed as early as the first season, and is believably executed throughout, from the loss of innocence during the early days of the war to the disillusionment with the People In Charge during and after New Caprica. His relationship with Gaius was particularly well done - especially in the lovely way their roles reverse over the course of the show.
Overall, Gaeta ranks as my second favorite “good character gone bad” arc on modern TV, after Wesley Wyndham-Pryce on Angel.
Whew! I’ve finally finished BSG, and am free to look at spoilers, and now it seems like everyone’s having spoilered discussions of The Plan, instead. It’s nice to see spoilers for what I’ve already seen, now that I can see them!
And yes, I thought it was a believable path, but only if you’ve seen the “Face of the Enemy” webisodes. Without them, it seems like it would just be jarring.
Do what I did – add returns with periods. Empty returns just disappear. Or, do a two-post OP, with the spoilers in the second post. Mouseover only shows the first post.
Not really. It was still a believable arc, and one I really liked. But then again, I never really liked Gaeta. That Zarek would end up the way he did was pre-ordained.
In normal, shitty, TV writing, he would probably have died while saving the fleet from Space Weevils or some such. Last minute redemptions are a cheap way out. BSG, OTOH …
Zarek wasn’t a surprise, of course, but I wasn’t expecting him to be quite that evil. It almost seemed like he was getting some redemption, when he refused to go along with Baltar and the Cylons on New Caprica.
Yeah, he was planning on assassinating Rosalyn and Adama in one of the first episodes we saw him in, but there’s a difference between an assassination and a massacre. I had him figured for the type to only kill where he deemed necessary, and preferably where it could be done subtly, without pointing directly to him.
It’s off topic, but I don’t think Wesley went bad. Nothing he did to Angel and Connor was motivated by anything but love for both of them; he wasn’t even a tiny bit selfish in that arc.
I actually don’t believe that Felix and Zarek were villains - the coup may have been rather more bloody than would be ideal, but they were correct to try it. The “Letter From A Colonial Citizen” makes this point more eloquently than I could: http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-tom-zarek-was-right.html
Zarek wasn’t evil (in the two dimensional sense TV shows usually portray it) - he was unethical, and was unwillingly to accept authority unless it was his own. He is ALWAYS the rebel; it doesn’t matter if it’s humans in charge (the fleet pre-Final Five) Cylons in charge (New Caprica) or sort of both (fleet after Final Five.)
Zarek was the product of two very real character traits; pathological rebellion and a lack of ethics. He probably DID see the massacre of the council as necessary, just as countless radicals have massacred people to “defend the revolution.”
Gaeta, by comparison, is driven to the coup by a misplaced sense of ethics; he truly believes Adama et al. have betrayed the human race.
What’s interesting about the story arc is that Zarek and Gaeta become allies in the same enterprise for totally different reasons of character and motive. Zarek is a driven rebel and radical who wants to take power because upsetting the apple cart of power is his purpose in life. Gaeta, by comparison, gets there because a confluence of events points his moral compass in the wrong direction. As Mr. Excellent’s link points out, Felix is not wrong in his mistrust of Cylons and he in particular has been personally stung by them; to be honest, he has a point. Zarek simply mistrusts anyone who tries to exert powr over him.
Once the two sort of take over it starts to fall apart for the same reason it got together; Gaeta wants an orderly, lawful transition of power, while Zarek remains a revolutionary and just wants to put all his opponents against the wall.
