Really? I tend to see him has the epitome of what’s wrong with SGU.
SGU seems to blindly copy BSG’s more out there aspects without understanding BSG did what it did. Now to be fair, half the time, the BSG’s writers didn’t seem to understand why they were doing what they were doing, but they managed to mostly fit things together. Mostly. But with SGU, I can’t help but imagine the writers periodically having conversations along the lines of: “Let’s do this.” “Why?” “Battlestar did it.” “Ok.”
Anyway, relating this back to Rush, anyone who’s seen both BSG and SGU should immediately recognize the similarities between Rush and Gaius. However, where as Gaius started as an egotistical, self-serving weasel who sometimes did treasonous things for purely selfish reasons, Rush seems to do sneaky shit solely because the writers need drama and have no better way to inject it into the show. Gaius kept secrets in order to protect his life by any means. Rush keeps secrets because… um…
Now Rush does have some interesting aspects to his character. He’s a bit of a ruthless pragmatist who idolizes science and learning. In a way, he’s even better than Young at making the hard military-style choices where someone has to die for the greater good. Yet instead of fully exposing this aspect of Rush’s character, we instead have to suffer through his inscrutable desire to horde secrets. It’s maddening.
I have difficulty seeing real similarities between Gaius and Rush. Rush is way more unpredictable. Rush is a clear psychopath. Gaius was just an enigma. You didn’t know if he was going to turn out to be a cylon or not at the beginning. Turns out he was just Gods pawn, like everyone else in that series.
I did like that occasionally, they had actual monsters. I was always hoping that those three people that went through the gate in the first episode would come back horribly mutated and angry for revenge. They really needed to run into more alien civilization.
Just to continue engaging in a little armchair psychoanalysis, Rush is more of an amoral sociopath who viewed people solely depending on their value to his goals and the mission overall. This was never more evident than when he was “comforting” Chloe about the death of her father right after he said that her father was the logical choice to be sacrificed, or when he wanted Young to order someone to sit in the Ancient chair and potentially die.
Baltar, on the other hand, was just an extreme self-centered narcissist. He wasn’t really interested in science for science’s sake or for any lofty goal beyond women, money, or power. But he didn’t seem to be an actual sociopath, since he did feel deeply guilty over inadvertently betraying humanity (though he rationalized it away) and he was broken by the end of the Cylon occupation on New Caprica for collaborating and signing off on the deaths of hundreds.