Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Here's a fine discussion of whether or not Felix Gaeta was right.

Yes, I read all the comments. And FWIW, we seriously need some elected leaders.

Labels: watching tv

5:36 PM

2 Comments:

I love meta arguments but this one is pretty weak as far as such things go. The problem here is that "Concerned Colonial Citizen" (CCC) isn't making any substantive arguments for committing otherwise illegal and immoral actions. They are arguments, certainly, but only political arguments in the context of a debate in regards to support or opposition to an alliance.

In other words, these arguments would make sense if they were made by the people who were making the decisions, or by people looking to influence those decisions before they had been made.

But that's all they are and all they ever can be.

They are fairly generic (and already made arguments in regards to the episode, this is stuff we've already heard from our characters) arguments against an alliance or cooperation, but not to overthrow a government.

And we're not even talking about overthrowing a government here, insofar as these things can be legitimate, the only result could be the election of a new President and the firing of the highest ranking military officer. To simply arrest the the top military leader, appoint a junior officer as his replacement, declare the legitimate President persona non grata, and then murder the entire political structure simply for disagreeing with you -- that's not a revolution as some would consider it, it's a military coup.

The arguments made by CCC don't justify a military coup or seek to do so, they might justify impeaching the President and then firing Adama, but not this.

What Gaeta and Zarek did was indefensible, which really was the point of the episode. You have a lot of people in the fleet that agree with Gaeta, obviously, even without having to see people supporting the insurrection, but only a small number of them are going to become extremists to accomplish their goal at any cost.

I'd surmise that a number of fans would be supportive of Gaeta's faction and might even become disenfranchised with the show if it wasn't put down fairly quickly.

That need fits the character of Tom Zarek perfectly because this guy is a criminal. Remember, he was imprisoned originally and a bad guy that nobody could or wanted to trust. They tore that down over the years until his presence became somewhat incidental. Anyone could have served his role as a shady VP with skeletons in the closet, so why keep him around, and ask yourself what he added to it?

And weren't you wasting opportunities, since you had a truly bad guy, who wasn't doing any truly bad things?

I think they figured that out and used him to his full potential. Zarek did what he was meant to do.

Gaeta wasn't someone who would have done this in season 1, but they messed him up so bad that they had to do *something*, otherwise he would just be dragging down a show that was already too heavily burdened with depression-as-a-career. He made a likely sympathizer to the cause, was damaged, and served the story.

Really, I think the more interesting argument isn't whether or not Gaeta was right, but if something like this was inevitable and did it have to go down this way. In other words, was this creative decision right?

For the moment the answer is, to me at least, yes.

I don't really care who the players were, what matters to me is that this story had to be told and in that context, it was very well done.

By  Paul William Tenny, at 8:14 PM  

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By  Anonymous, at 3:18 PM  

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