The Face of the Enemy: Webisode #8

Interesting commentary by Jane Espenson available at www.scifi.com/rewind/

"Grace was helping me with these speeches because I had written some stuff that instinctively felt right to me, but that I hadn't totally thought through with respect to this character. It was that some material about how the human brain can delude itself where the Cylon brain is forced to record and know the truth. And Grace came to me and pointed out that the Eights are singularly self deluding. That these are models who do fool themselves all the time. And we worked together and came up with a version of the speeches that reflected that much better. Very, very helpful."

Notice how the guilty confrontation of Gaeta's gruesome discovery combined with the pain of the fiber connection transforms "Sweet 8" into "Let's Face Facts 8."

"Pain is how I learn from the guilt. There's wisdom there, clarity. You know yourself there. Our minds were designed based on your minds. We learned things about how you work that you've never known. When you're in pain, that's when you learn who you really are. That's when you focus, sharp as the point of a knife." - Caprica Six, Escape Velocity (also written by Jane Espenson)

Just who is crazier here? Gaeta who has lied to himself ever since New Caprica? Or this Eight who had to kill in order to save lives once before. Interesting parallels between Gaeta and Baltar. Baltar never meant to be an accomplice in the genocide of humanity. Gaeta never meant to get his friends executed. Baltar has chosen to forgive himself. Gaeta has chosen to forget.

"The insurgency stops now or else we start reducing the human population to a more manageable size. I don't know, say... less than a thousand.

We need to stop being butchers." - Cavil, Sharon, Occupation

When you consider that this particular Eight might have known Gaeta was the inside mole for the New Caprican insurgency, her apparent betrayal of Gaeta takes on completely new connotations. From her point of view, every name that Gaeta writes on that list is a potential threat to everyone. The insurgency is leading to a Cavil led Cylon crackdown that would result in a second genocide. Unless the insurgency is stopped by other means, Cavil's solution is to kill 43 out of every 44 Colonists.

Back to webisode #8, this plot point comes across in the story jumbled but evidently, countdown clock or no, there's only going to be enough air for one person. Sweet 8 has taken it upon herself to again make hard decisions about death and survival. The kind of decisions that most humans are not very good at. It is not in our nature to do so easily. Most people will cling to hope and die from inaction rather than abandon their hope and act decisively. I probably would cling. How about you?

Of course, Gaeta is trapped in a lost Raptor running out of air and power with a crazy Eight murderer. But it's also true that Gaeta will not come out a winner. Gaeta is no wiser for the horrific experience. Gaeta is something of a hypocrite. Gaeta will learn the wrong lesson "never trust Cylons" instead of learning any truth about his own weakness.

"There is a fine line between ignorance and hope. I thought you would have known that by now." - Sweet 8

"I need some encouragement. A ray of hope about the future. An inkling...

You've got me." - Baltar, Head Six, He That Believeth In Me

"...you are a shining beacon of hope. Only hope is the last thing we need! We're a doomed race, and it's time that we made our peace with that essential truth." - Romo Lampkin, Sine Qua Non

Where's the line between perseverance and futility in the spectrum of hope? It is an ill tiding for Gaeta that he cannot admit to himself that sometimes such a line exists and can be seen clearly. I think this little webisode speaks to Felix Gaeta being doomed. Adversity forces some people to grow, in others it causes them to shy away from the ugliness that life can sometimes be. In Gaeta's defense, he doesn't have any Head Six to chart his own moral course for him. Short of an eleventh hour epiphany, I can't see how he can not be one of the first regular characters to die. Final Cylon stuff or not.

End of line,
-ThP