Honestly, I don't think you've really even seen a single episode of BSG.
I could say the same, but I realize that art is subjective and my critical opinion isn't fact.
Not really. In fact, prior to the mutiny, it's only Gaeta and Zarek who show any dissent.
Wait, what? In the episode before the Mutiny, we're shown/told that at least a third of the fleet is refusing to have the Cylon jump drives installed. The last third of the episode is about the Tyllium ship jumping away to force Adama's hand.
I'm not sure if refusing the Cylon technology is the exact same. Certainly amongst the crew you don't see any hostility, even when you have outed Cylons reassuming their rank and position. And the Tylium ship was manipulated by Zarek, wasn't it?
Besides, both are given pretty unsympathetic treatment by the show. Zarek especially (who sadly turns back into a 2-dimensional cartoon for these episodes), whereas Gaeta is more treated as a naďve fool.
Zarek wasn't a two-dimensional cartoon. He was a bad person. In fairness, the show wasn't sure what they wanted him to be, but he definitely wasn't unrealistic.
Bah, Zarek's turn in the fourth season really annoyed me. He started out being a transparent villain, albeit an entertaining one, but the shading he got in the third season made him a really interesting character. Having him turn back into a scenery-chewing villain with no redeeming qualities, looking out for only himself was disappointing. It illustrates the show's bad habit of manipulating characters for the purpose of plot that happened a lot in the fourth season.
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The end of the mutiny is especially galling, because it ends up abandoning any pretext to there being two sides to the issue. Adama's cause is so righteous that all he has to do to end the mutiny is literally walk down a hallway.
It's not just Adama walking down a hallway.
A major theme of the mutiny episodes is that while Zarek understands the practicalities of what they're doing better than Gaeta, he also goes too far. You have to remember too that the Mutineers were in the minority and that Adama generally speaking was very well liked. Within the context of the show, it made sense. He didn't just walk down the hallway. A whole anti-mutiny movement was happening around the CIC, and it came a-knocking.
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While the mutineers may have been a minority, they also had widespread support, both explicit and tacit. There's simply too many people involved.
I agree that it could have been better. It was probably for the worse that Gaeta didn't know what he was doing, because it made him so much less credible. It also would have been good if Adama had gone too far in some way. Everyone needed to have the jump drives. Period. It was more unreasonable to refuse the drives than it was reasonable to fight against them. You didn't need to think the mutiny was right, but you needed to think they had more a point than it did.
One could very reasonably argue (as Gaeta did) that Adama had gone too far previously. Remember when everyone was obsessed the concept of democracy and having a civil society? At this point in
BSG, things are very much an autocracy, and Adama ordering civilian ships to accept tech they didn't want, without giving explanation or choice, represents this.
What I mean is that previously,
BSG had gone through some lengths to represent both sides of an issue (hell, they even humanized the fucking Nazi-collaborators in the Vichy that was New Caprica). With the mutiny, the show was very much on Adama's side, portraying the mutiny as both completely unjustified, and its leaders as a bloodthirsty madman and fool respectively. It felt like a cop-out.
Topic: All things Battlestar Galactica (Read 165783 times)
