BSG Final 4 Recap: The Rage of Achilles

This week’s episode of Battlestar Galactica, “Blood on the Scales,” begins with the arrest of Admiral Adama and Colonel Tigh. The flash grenade the mutinous marines threw into the airlock at the end of the last episode has incapacitated them both, and Adama appears to be bleeding from his ears.

Meanwhile, Roslin and the other refugees from Galactica approach the Cylon baseship with two vipers closing in for the kill. Hotdog hesitates in making the kill, especially after he hears Roslin’s voice coming from the raptor, giving the refugees just enough time to make it aboard the baseship. The Cylons inside are alarmed that the vipers seemed to fire on them and even more alarmed when they hear that there has been a mutiny on board Galactica. Roslin tells the Cylons that they’ll never see their cybernetic comrades again if they jump away and advises them to take up a position inside the fleet so it will be more difficult for Galactica to attack. “Gaeta won’t jeopardize the fleet, he doesn’t have the guts, now come on, do it!” Roslin shouts.

Tigh is thrown into the brig with the other Cylon prisoners, while Adama is brought before Gaeta. “I care too much about this ship to let it be overrun by rats,” Adama growls when asked why he didn’t abandon ship. Gaeta says that if Adama really wants to save lives, he should call Roslin and tell her to surrender. Adama removes his flags and tells Gaeta that he’s the admiral now. “So call up Roslin, and make her laugh.”

Zarek informs Adama that he is charged with treason and desertion, among other infamies, and faces execution by firing squad. Zarek and Gaeta have retrieved Romo Lampkin, the attorney who successfully defended Baltar in his trial for the atrocities on New Caprica, to serve as Adama’s attorney. Gaeta will serve as the prosecution, and Zarek will preside. It is clear that the trial is only the flimsiest pretense at justice. However, Lampkin does manage to convey to Adama that his loyalists are on the march throughout the ship, seeking to reverse the mutiny.

Zarek goes to Colonial One and informs the Quorum that Gaeta has mutinied. The Quorum pointedly reminds Zarek that he is still vice president rather than president and dismisses him to deliberate on whether they should support the coup. Zarek then orders his henchmen to slaughter the Quorum, thus fulfilling his vow to appoint John Bolton as UN ambassador—I mean, thus eliminating legislative opposition to the coup.

Gaeta is appalled that Zarek has murdered members of the Quorum, but Zarek reminds Gaeta that he started it. Zarek suggests that Gaeta was naïve about what the coup would require and says that Adama must now be executed at all costs.

The Cylons tell Roslin that they see no alternative to jumping away, leaving Galactica in the hands of the junta. Roslin all but threatens them with hell if they flee, telling them that Adama will soon retake command of Galactica and will remember who stood with him and who did not.

In the meantime, Starbuck and Lee have broken into the brig to liberate the Cylon prisoners, except for Chief Tyrol, who managed to escape through a service access earlier in the episode. Tyrol emerges into a weapons locker and right into the sights of a mutineer. The two exchange wisecracks about how Tyrol is an alien and the marine is an imbecile, and then the marine lets Tyrol escape, demonstrating the shaky resolve of many of the mutineers.

Back in the brig, Lee is furious that his father is not among the prisoners. As the group flees, Samuel Anders is shot in the neck. Starbuck remains behind to tend to him.

Back at Adama’s "trial," Zarek is informed that the prisoners have escaped, but he lies and tells Adama that Colonel Tigh was shot. Adama refuses to speak to either Gaeta or Zarek any further, apparently wishing he hadn’t said all those things about Tigh’s wife being a total skank now that Tigh is dead.

As Lampkin is escorted away from his interview with Adama, he and his guard come across Starbuck and Anders. Starbuck tries to shoot the marine but is out of rounds. Fortunately, Lampkin stabs the marine in the neck with a fountain pen and then beats him to death. Starbuck pleads with Lampkin to help her carry Anders to the infirmary, and though the attorney refuses at first, he eventually agrees.

As Lee and his troops close in on Adama, the admiral is executed by a firing squad, but it turns out that this unlikely vision is only a nightmare in Baltar’s head. For the first time in his life, Baltar refuses to get it on with an amorous Cylon and instead expresses some remorse for abandoning his followers on Galactica in order to save his own skin.

Roslin maneuvers the baseship to fire on Galactica and orders Gaeta to surrender. Gaeta gives the order to execute Adama, but the marine who acknowledges his order has already been captured by Lee and the resistance.

Zarek taunts Roslin with the information that Tigh was shot and Adama has been executed, advising her to surrender. Roslin pledges that she will never surrender. “I will use every cannon, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon I have down to my own eye teeth to end you. I swear it! I’m coming for all you!” Roslin thunders.

Zarek urges Gaeta to destroy the Cylons, but Gaeta’s resolve is crumbling. He orders Galactica to jump away rather than fight. Just as the ship is about to jump, Tyrol removes an oversized spark plug, disabling the FTL drive. Apparently, traveling at faster than lightspeed requires engines bristling with oversized sprockets. It is also completely unclear why Tyrol’s heroically bruised knuckles amount to anything, because the coup soon falls apart.

Adama and the resistance sweep into the CIC, their numbers swollen with crew who had kept their heads down during the early success of the mutiny. The marines inside give up without a fight, and Gaeta and Zarek surrender.

Gaeta and Baltar have a final chat over cigars, with Gaeta telling Baltar about how he wanted to be an architect before he grew up to become a xenophobic murderer. Baltar seems genuinely upset by Gaeta’s impending execution. “I’m fine with how things worked out, Gaius, really I am,” Gaeta says. “I just hope that people realize, eventually, who I am.”

As Adama, Tigh, Lee, and Baltar look on, Gaeta and Zarek exchange wry glances before the firing squad, as if to signal, “Well, this was a bad idea.” Gaeta, whose stump has bothered him throughout the coup, looks down at his amputated leg and says, “It stopped.” The executioners fire their weapons, and the episode ends.

As the episode concluded, I found myself wondering what the point was of this diversion into coup immediately after the fleet’s discovery of Earth. After all, the show has spent only one episode actually down on the planet, and most of our questions about it remain unanswered. I think the best explanation is that the last few episodes reprise the rage of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. No really.

In the Iliad, the greatest warrior among the Greeks is the semi-divine Achilles, but he sits out most of the poem’s fighting with the Trojans after the Greek leader Agamemnon steals the temple priestess that had been promised to Achilles. Mad at losing another slave to rape, Achilles refuses to fight, and the Greeks are pushed all the way back to their boats. Finally, Achilles’ young lover (not cousin, as Brad Pitt would have you believe) Patroclus is killed by the Trojan hero Hector. Achilles returns to the field, sweeping all before him in a holy rage, until he has destroyed Hector and dragged his body around the walls of Troy, which soon falls.

Here, Achilles is Roslin, and her gay lover is Adama. She does not withdraw from battle for the sake of wounded pride, but rather out of bitterness and religious disillusionment. After going so far out onto a shaky limb in relying on prophecy to find Earth, Roslin is devastated by the discovery that Earth was long ago poisoned by nuclear war. Yet, the fleet could never had made it so far under any other leader, and her withdrawal from public life precipitates the coup. For all his redeeming qualities, the admiral is tone deaf and heavy-handed when it comes to politics, and Zarek’s ruse in “The Oath” that Adama is installing a military dictatorship is successful because it has the ring of truth. Only Roslin has the political instincts and the personal charisma needed to sell an expanded Cylon alliance to the citizens of the fleet. Typically, Adama does not even try to sell the alliance, but instead declares it a military matter not subject to debate.

Roslin’s withdrawal from public life gives Zarek the opening he needs to stage his coup. In many respects, Zarek is better suited to such action than is Gaeta, who still thinks of himself as an idealist. Gaeta repeatedly shrinks from taking the measures required to make the coup a success, and he is strangely relieved when Adama and his troops sweep into the CIC.

By the time the mutiny is reversed, Roslin has already been seduced back into politics, first by Adama’s jeopardy and then by his reported execution. Her fragmentary proclamations to the fleet surely give comfort to those resisting the mutiny, and each time she speaks, Zarek shakes his head, knowing that the coup’s chances for success diminish with her every word. The coup is over, and the top conspirators are dead. The most salient result is that Roslin is now fully engaged in the fleet’s fate once more. Under her leadership, the humans will likely accept the Cylon alliance, and the fleet can move on to unlocking the mysteries of ruined Earth.