I’ve never seen such a blatant instance of losing the plot as s4 Gaius—it’s like they forgot about what the point of Gaius was and tried to cobble together a character thesis out of confused hindsight. It’s killing me because he had such a clear, consistent place before, and every now and again I can see it in glimpses amidst the yards of stupid cult bullshit; at least once every episode, there’s a moment of you! you! I see you, I see the point of you, have they remembered the point of you?—and then, no, no, it blinks away into another fucking miracle, another fucking weirdly sincere Jesus tableau, another fundamental fucking misread of THE ENTIRE POINT OF GAIUS BALTAR.

The Entire Point of Gaius Baltar: he’s fundamentally human, sort of the ultimate human of the show. He’s not bound by duty nor morality, is barely bound by any kind of external need; he’s a reactive force whose desire is simply life, whose duty is simply survival. That’s what he’s good at. That’s the one thing he’s good at. And his nature is like Occam’s Razor lessons in humanity: when you strip away all the constraints of humanity, all the rituals of civilization, what do you get? A bunch of faults, a myriad of imperfections, and you bind them up into one very small man called Gaius Baltar and you say: live. And he does.

That is the point of him. He reacts to the world, changes; he’s protean because that’s his one great essential skill, here. And the human world reacts to him in big, mass-conscious ways because he holds mirrors up to their fundamental natures and they either love that or hate that. He’s been a celebrity from day one, now he’s a great mind in a world that doesn’t really need it; he’s hated because he’s too human which means massively fucking up, like, every share of power he gets (we just don’t like him very much—because he’s a fuck-up and because he hits too close to home); he’s loved because he’s human and he gets human nature and can tap into primal things and make them theater. Gaius Baltar can work a crowd. That’s the other thing he’s good at, which comes in fits and starts of significance in the series; he’s baaaaaaaaaaaaaad at individual relations, but he’s good at The Masses. Good at humanity in broad swaths, at giving the world what it needs in the moment, because changing shape to fit that need means survival. So: Gaius Baltar, Cult Leader isn’t something I disavow completely. It’s stupid, it was always going to be stupid in an of-all-the-things-you-could-do-you-chose-to-do-this? kind of way, but in and of itself it makes total sense. He can be what the cult needs. If they’re what’s going to keep him safe, he has a vested interest in being that—in embodying their Ultimate Human.

And there’s a moment in the first ep, maybe the second, of s4 when it’s SUPER GREAT, even, because he loves celebrity, loves living, loves being loved, loves women, all that jazz—and he has it, it’s fallen into his lap all of a sudden, his greatest dream, but seen through this awful funhouse mirror. It’s everything he’s ever wanted, and it categorically sucks. He categorically sucks. King of fools. Like—fuck if that isn’t a moment of clear perfection, because what else has he ever been, when he’s getting what he wants? And he pleads to Head!Six, and she consoles him, and she clasps his hands, and from the outside it looks like prayer, and it is, it’s that sincere-insincere boundary where the rest of the world only gets the half of the script that Head!Six needs them to hear, to shape him into the thing they need. That’s perfect. She is and always has been—textually—his personal religion. The pair of them accidentally manipulating the world into finding him messianic when in actual fact he just kind of sucks, his accidental tableaux of worship of her, her words in his mouth—yes, yes, yes.

But that’s not where it stays. It goes weird, sincere, hyperliteral deus-without-the-machina places, and that’s so many different betrayals; it’s like the show swapped its scripts somewhere along the line. I mean, something is definitively backwards when you get him walking away from Six because he knows the mission statement of monotheism better, like, the fuck? Gaius Baltar, atheist scientist rational blasphemer who’s been literally manhandled into religion by his own personal evangel, acting like he has a claim on his own salvation, acting like she doesn’t have a part in it? No. And his miracles, then being…real miracles? No, NO. Ultimate human, fundamental human, human fallibility incarnate, smallest man in the universe cast in the biggest roles—THE WHOLE POINT OF GAIUS BALTAR IS THAT HE KEEPS COMING INTO CONTACT WITH MAGIC BECAUSE OF HOW DRAMATICALLY HE HIMSELF LACKS IT. That’s the dramatic irony, that’s the thing that keeps pushing him forward and changing him: because he keeps coming up against galvanic forces beyond his comprehension. Making him a part of those forces lessens his place in the narrative, lessens everything he’s ever been. Elevating him—morally, spiritually, whatever—misses the fucking point of everything that makes him work as a character.

But the biggest problem with the messianism here is—even if, EVEN IF it’s a question of him buying into his own hype (fine! I mean, no one convinces Gaius Baltar like Gaius Baltar, no one believes in Gaius Baltar like Gaius Baltar—which is the beautiful thing, the ridiculous protean thing, he is lying all the time with absolute conviction that he deserves to be where he is, because he needs to believe that his life is worth living, because living is all that he is good at)—THE SHOW BUYS INTO IT TOO, AT A LEVEL THAT ACTUALLY FUCKS WITH THE SHOW AT LARGE. You cannot believe Gaius Baltar when he absolves himself. You cannot narratively absolve Gaius Baltar when he decides to shoulder the burden of monotheism singlehandedly and acts like as huge a dick as the history of monotheism would demand. The narrative being unequivocally on Gaius Baltar’s side when Gaius Baltar goes in and makes a huge twat of himself in the temple is a huge fucking problem. Bigger than just narratively betraying the point of Gaius Baltar, that betrays the mythos of the show, and the hands-off morality of that mythos. He’s their most basic thesis on humanity, he’s always been; if you make that guy your thesis on monotheism and say yes to every stupid thing he chooses to do in the name of the One God you’ve decided to make him believe in, THAT IS A HUGE FUCKING MESS.

And not his job! The opposite of his job! I hate to keep reiterating this, but it bugs: he’s been an instrument from the get-go, not a believer. He’s never been out to reach transcendency on his own; Six, robot evangel, iconic and messianic and full to the brim with light and love and faith, picks him because he is so small and so protean and so damn good at living and so damn awful at everything else. That is the point of them. That is the point of him. The messianic iconography is her job.

Which, then there’s how the show’s wasting Caprica Six in the meantime, which makes me so sick that I’ve already got a post about it drafted—but have held off because apparently it gets “worse”. Fuck.

1. login93026 liked this
2. saladlaughingalonewithwoman reblogged this from hotelsongs
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5. whoistorule said: I blocked out the fact that the show decided to side with gaius baltar because…well….I remember less than 10 minutes of the entirety of season 4
6. weesleyisourking reblogged this from martinusmiraculorum and added:

   S4 really seems like a collection of lazily written and tired tropes bunching a couple of really fantastic arcs and then...

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8. thebookofpythia reblogged this from hotelsongs
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11. thewaxlion said: never seen a show fall apart the way bsg has, tbh.
12. panicman said: Season four is just… everything BSG is not. I ended up being okay with it in the long run, but S4 turned all my excited BSG feelings upside down. I can’t even really watch the show without thinking: too bad, and that’s rare because I love everythin
13. hariboo said: it’s downward spirals for my feelings in s4
14. hotelsongs posted this