Rating: **1/2
Written by: Carla Robinson
Directed By: Jonas Pate
A purely plot-driven episode that, as a consequence, did few favors for the on-screen cast. I guess Ed Olmos drew the long straw this week.
Plot Device #1: President Roslin orders elections held to form a new Quorum of the Twelve. The quorum is composed of a single representative from each of the twelve colonies, kind of like if each State governor was also his/her state's representative in a unicameral Congress. This body, in turn, is more parliamentary than it is republican (small "r"), with the president serving as a de facto prime minister.
I know, Kobolian civics isn't really the point of this exercise, but I have a weakness for this sort of thing.
Well, unless you slept through Bastille Day, you know that the most popular man on/from Saggitaron is the, depending upon your point of view, the freedom fighter or terrorist, Tom Zarek.
Once again, I wish we had a bit more of a handle on just which label fits Mr. Zarek better, and for that we would need a lot more backstory on the circumstances of why he pulled a Timothy McVeigh by blowing up a government building. Maybe we'll get that down the line, though I'm starting not to count on it.
Here, though, it should have been blindingly obvious that Zarek would be elected to the Quorum by his fellow Saggitarans, who have no doubt about which label fits him better. To them he is a hero who took up arms against "Colonial oppression." His ascension to the upper reaches of power in the fleet, once Kobolian democracy started functioning again, was a fait accompli.
There is, however, one person who got caught completely by flat-footed surprise by this development: President Roslin.
No, I'm not kidding. And she's the one with the supposed wily political instincts and twenty years in the political game? Man, never has civilian control of the military looked less attractive.
Adama gets on the horn to Roslin immediately urging that Zarek not be allowed to even leave the prison vessel Astral Queen. A hamfisted reaction to be sure that Roslin wisely vetoes, as it would only make Zarek into an even bigger martyr/hero and her look like she was deathly afraid of him. Having somehow suffered the mother of all brainfarts by not seeing this coming, she now has to, somehow, play it out politically so that Zarek's drive for power is deflected.
Zarek, naturally, isn't about to make it easy for her.
As we see in the opening act, he has an assassin working for him, though his target, while it would straightforwardly be presumed to be President Roslin, is a tad less clear, at least as the murk of the plot seems to indicate in this area.
Away from the shadows, Zarek, as a Quorum member, makes his first order of business nominations for the election of a vice president - which, again, is day-glo obvious, but which Roslin, again, never sees coming. Boy what I wouldn't give to play a few hands of poker against this woman.
That Zarek is his own annointed candidate for the job is so obvious as not to even merit explicit mention.
Now let's get more into just exactly what Tom Zarek is "today," as opposed to twenty "yarhen" ago when he blew up that building.
First of all, he's a glad-hander who knows all the ins and outs of amassing political capital. Case in point: the delegate from Geminon, as he pointedly explains in nominating Zarek for veep, had a mechanical problem on his ship recently. Going through official channels didn't even yield him a return phone call; however, a lateral request to the Astral Queen brought a repair team over in short order, fixed the problem, and washed his windshield and topped off his crankcase oil for good measure. Heck, they might have given him a book of free coupons as well.
Quite a few other delegates have had similar experiences, and they are all in Zarek's corner too. What we call "constituent service" would always matter, but never more than in a transformational crisis situation like this, when what would once have been the equivalent of "filling a pothole" can have vastly greater importance in conditions where lives could be at stake. Remember that, though we really haven't seen this as viscerally as it was depicted in the original Battlestar Galactica, these people are refugees only a few weeks removed from the destruction of their civilization. Patience in waiting for "official channels" wouldn't be abundant, just as emotional partisanship borne of gratitude for anybody who could "get things done," and quickly, would be boundless.
Zarek, knowing this well, invested his time since Bastille Day wisely. And now, with the Quorum as his platform, is when he starts cashing in those chits with a vengeance.
Secondly, Zarek recognizes the unique nature of the fleet's situation and that it presents his ambitions for power with an opportunity that could probably never have arisen any other way.
When he's being interviewed at his "cross-country press conference," he dispenses a monologual lecture that, to the even minimally trained ear, is a Castroite rant that Hugo Chavez would probably have framed and hung on his office wall. He talks about people clinging to their old jobs and old lifestyles - all the things, of course, that Zarek, as a "revolutionary," has always railed against - in a situation in which neither are relevant anymore. He speaks of the holdover mindset, which exists as a sort of mass security blanket for the people to cling to in a situation of disaster and freefall, as a lie that must be repudiated if "the people" are to survive. He talks about an economy with no money, lawyers with no clients, businessmen with no businesses. In short, he makes the status quo look and sound utterly foolish.
And he doesn't just criticize. He proclaims what is designed to sound like a bold new vision for Kobolian humanity: pure, undiluted communism. "We must think not of the individual, but of the community" (probably not a verbatim quote, but close enough) can hardly be interpreted any other way. And the soil of the fleet would be open to it, too. Remember, Roslin doesn't only represent "the past," but she also is the face of the government that allowed the Cylon holocaust in the first place. It wouldn't matter that she had nothing personally to do with that, that she was a lowly education secretary forty-third in line of succession, or that nobody except a certain perpetually horny genius knows just how Colonial defenses were compromised so suddenly and comprehensively. A public just emerging from a state of shock would be eminently mobilizable toward whatever direction a skilled demagogue wanted to direct them.
Don't think so? Does the name "Adolph Hitler" (or "Barack Obama") ring a bell?
Tom Zarek isn't Adolph Hitler; but he is a skilled demagogue.
However inexplicably belated her realizations, Roslin knows it too. And she knows that she has to find a candidate who can blunt Zarek's charismatic popularity.
You may have noticed that I'm two and a half pages into this review and haven't written a single sentence about the assassin story track. That should provide an indication of how meaningful it was to the overall story. It was almost ancillary, and dragged down the ep sufficiently that I can't quite recommend it.
For starters, I didn't quite get Apollo's penchant for picking fights with every Saggitaran that crossed his path - which meant quite a few since he was in charge of security on what I'll dub "the Holoship" since I can't remember it's name from the narrative. For another, I never quite understood why, if they were supposed to be keeping Zarek under surveillance - meaning, I would think, that stealth would be of the essence if they were to discover anything - Apollo walked right up to Zarek during a Quorum session and whispered into his ear, "We've got your assassin, and you're next." Thirdly, perhaps competent assassins are hard to come by what with civilization being destroyed and humanity reduced to a 50,000-weak "rag tag fugitive fleet" in permanent flight from a merciless enemy determined to destroy them and all, but could Zarek's triggerman have been any more of a bumbling fool than to leave his weapon unsecured to where simply knocking the briefcase off the bar caused the lid to fly open and the gun to skitter along the floor once Apollo's barfight broke out?
That combination of alternative head-scratching and outright bad plotting led to the one interesting development to come from the assassin angle, Ellen Tigh becoming a covert ally - and operative - of Tom Zarek. She's the one who killed the assassin (which made Colonel Tigh grousing about it in Roslin's office all the more ironic). And, with her Alexis Carrington-like personality of ruthless ambition for herself, and nominally her husband, she is perhaps the perfect covert spy in the upper echelons of the power that Zarek can't quite reach. At least as long as there's something in it for her, of course.
No, Tom Zarek didn't attain the vice presidency. And that may prove to be a decidedly mixed blessing.
Roslin initially taps her chief of staff, who is definitely a top-flight bureaucrat and is the best she knows at getting things done. Unfortunately top-flight bureaucrats generally make lousy politicians, and it rapidly becomes apparent that he won't stand a chance against Zarek.
During the aforementioned hand-wringing strategy session in Roslin's office after Zarek's assassin has been offed, the President has an epiphany while listening to a press interview of another of the Quorum members. And she makes a very difficult decision.
She pulls her chief of staff, and substitutes in his place…the man she finds in a bathroom stall with the Kobolian Katie Couric.
The man is initially reluctant, just as he was initially horrified by the idea of becoming a Quorum delegate in the first place. But, after the prompting of his personal advisor, he accepts Roslin's recruitment and the veep nomination.
And, after a tense Quorum vote, in which Roslin ends up breaking the tie, the fleet has a new vice president of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol.
Gaius Baltar.
At the Colonial Day (analogous, I'm assuming, to our Independence Day) celebration, Tom Zarek pays his due to President Roslin for a "game" well-played, but reminds her that the next election is only six months away. Of course, she's scheduled to be dead of cancer by then, but he doesn't know that.
But with the Benedict Arnold of humanity now a heartbeat away from the seat of power, nobody in the fleet, including Laura Roslin, realizes that they've jumped from the frying pan straight into the fire itself.
Next: Number Six's prophecy comes true - but can Roslin's own new-found prophesying save the fleet and point the way to Earth?
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