February 3rd, 2009
Last Friday’s episode (“The Oath,” 4.13) was seriously great, a sign that Moore may have a tighter grip on his end-game than I gave him credit for. Some spoiler-filled thoughts (in case it’s still sitting on your DVR):
* I’m a fool for Navy porn, law of the sea stuff and the legal implications of Gaeta’s mutiny are awesome to contemplate. Mutiny is a crime worse than treason, worse than collaboration. It’s hard to see how Adama could grant amnesty to any of the mutineers. When the admiral said that there will be a “reckoning,” what he really meant, I suspect, was “mass executions.”
* All of that said, we’re used to seeing mutinies portrayed as the product of villainy, ambition, or some other nefarious impulse. The Galactica mutiny is particularly interesting because the mutineers are objecting to a very real, very serious action: The integration of two hostile cultures by military force. In TV Land, these sorts of integrations usually go seamlessly with the cultures reconciling and the one or two holdouts dispatched or converted. In the real world, this is the type of conflict that causes civil war.
* Who knew Gaeta had this in him? Or rather, who knew Gaeta would be so effective as a mutineer? We’ve seen hints for a long time that Gaeta is ambitious and willing to question authority (his questioning of the election; his service to Baltar). What we hadn’t seen was cool, collected bluffing with everything in the balance. (For a brilliant exploration of Gaeta’s progress, see this.)
* The final Big Think point of “The Oath,” however is that Adama and Roslin share a large part of the blame for the mutiny. Since finding Earth, the two of them have been out of sorts. They became inward-facing and muddled, disengaged from the life of the fleet. “The Oath” affirms the notion that weakness is a provocation.
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