February 13, 2009

Was Zareck right?

Duelling op-eds on the recent coup attempt here, here, and here. (Massive spoilers behind the links, of course. Don't read if you aren't completely caught up.)

3 comments:

Unknown said...

The beauty of BSG is that no one is right. Except Helo, apparently. To me, one of the thorniest political/ethical questions is what justifies armed rebellion. I'm a big fan of the rule of law, and working within the system, civil disobedience, etc., but history shows that there are situations where that is simply not enough.

I'm willing to concede that Zarek and Gaeta had a legitimate point, but that's as far as I go. I think their mutiny/coup was far worse than anything they were complaining about in terms of tyranny and abuse of power, and not just because Zarek killed the Quorum. As insistent as Gaeta was that Adama face trial, he didn't seem to mind at all that the trial was an utter farce.

Jason said...

Zarek was clearly wrong in the killing of the Quorum. At that point it turned into a move for absolute power not a move for the better of the fleet. That being said, I think that the Gaeta/Zarek mutiny definitely had some valid reasons.

In their view the Admiral and President were not only compromising with the enemy but giving them the same privileges (if not more) than the rest of the fleet. The viewer is given much more depth in terms of the cylon/human relationship but to the average member of the fleet the cylons are still the enemy that is responsible for killing billions of people. The fact that the enemy is not only being welcomed into the fleet but ordered onto ship to "fix" them must have been an awfully hard pill to swallow.

If I was just a regular member of the fleet I am not sure which side of the mutiny I would have sided with.

MosBen said...

Yeah, Jay makes a good point. As the audience we're getting a much more complete and sympathetic view of the Cylons than the average member of the fleet. On the other hand, Adama and Roslyn have gotten the fleet out of many extremely serious scrapes in the past, so it's possible that the average member of the fleet is more willing than the audience to be blindly loyal to them.

I think the show did a fairly complete job of undermining the revolt's moral authority both through the killing of the Quorum and the illegitimacy of Adama's trial.

I think Adama and Roslyn's biggest problem from the start of the series was bad communications. I know that there's a concern about Cylon agents in the fleet, but if there was a way to better express the dire situation they were in to the public I don't think there would have been a revolt. Also, Adama really needs to make sure that his marines are always totally and completely loyal.