Heroes And Villains
The latest issue of Entertainment Weekly has a piece about the top villains on TV today. They have most of the usual suspects--for instance, Vanessa Williams' Wilhelmina Slater on Ugly Betty.
One pick was Sylar from Heroes. I suppose that makes sense--if the show has a villain, it's him. Yet the show is new and it's not always clear who the good or bad guys are. (By the way, on the latest episode, the cop revealed to his wife he can read minds, and she was charmed. Wouldn't the correct reaction be horror?)
That's part of the excitement of a new show. You're not sure where things stand. I remember attending a Lost tribute a few years back. One of the producers asked if people thought Locke (my favorite character) was a good guy. About half raised their hands, including actor Ian Somerhalder, who plays Boone, a character who perhaps trusts Locke too much. It now makes me wonder if the producers knew.
The oddest choice on the list was James Callis as Gaius Baltar (my favorite character) on Battlestar Galactica. Sure, he (unwittingly) betrayed the entire human race, but I've never seen him as the villain. He's just a very troubled, brilliant and perhaps mentally ill scientist. (Imagine Dr. Smith if Lost In Space tried to be realistic.) If there are any villains--and the producers would probably say there aren't--it'd be the Cylons, but everyone is flawed in this show. Baltar's done a lot of foolish things, and mostly looks out for himself, but he's done some noble things too, and is the only human who's comes close to understanding the Cylons.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:17 AM
6 Comments:
I think it would be easier -- almost natural -- to think of Gaius as a conventional villain if the character were played by a lesser actor. Callis is so wonderful. Still, Baltar has betrayed everyone, sometimes unknowingly (humans) and at other times quite willingly (Six).
I definitely see Baltar as a villain, albeit a complex and very interesting one.
He has many strengths, but he has a weakness so huge that it's like a hole in his soul: he is completely incapable of acting in any way other than his own self-interest.
If indeed his role in the initial attack was accidental, he could have -- at any time in seasons one or two -- said "I want to call a secret meeting with Roslin, Adama, and Zarek," and then told them everything he knew. He would have been at their mercy, but more importantly his information might have saved the human race.
Instead, he spent all of season one and "2.0" still in love with Ghost Six, despite knowing that "she" was a genocidal monster. Would you still be in love with someone who had used you as an instrument to murder your own family?
Irene said that Baltar betrayed Six. True, but more specifically, he betrayed Caprica Six. We know that Caprica is actually the same person he loved before the attack, but in his mind, Ghost Six is the woman he loves.
And in recent episodes, he has remained truly loyal to Ghost Six. He escaped from Deanna Three's torture by promising love to her, and then he betrayed Caprica Six in favor of Deanna Three, and then he betrayed Deanna Three. But he did all this at the urging of his Ghost girlfriend, to whom he truly seems loyal.
(My tentative theory, by the way, is that Ghost Six really is an angel of God, meaning the Cylon's God, who is in fact a real being that will appear in the show someday. But maybe I'm being influenced by what happened in the original BSG....)
Baltar is certainly self-involved, but there was the time he saw real Six being tortured. He took pity on her and ultimately saw her to safety.
As to ghost Six, I've never been sure what to make of her, but I think the waters were muddied when the show decided real Six would have a ghost Baltar.
(By the way, I never watched the original BSG. In fact, its reputation kept me from watching the new version until about halfway into the first season.)
When we saw that Caprica Six had a ghost Baltar, I said, okay, all my theories about Ghost Six have just gone out the window.
However, IMO, you can't really "solve" these mysteries because they are inconsistent. In Season One, Sharon-on-the-planet (now Sharon Agathon) actually had some memories that belonged to Boomer Sharon. From what was later revealed about Cylon rebirth, this should be impossible.
Similarly, there was an actual physical Six who was on the Galactica in season one -- "Shelly Godfrey". There were some great comic scenes since Baltar assumes that the others can't see her, when in fact they can. But this episode sure seemed to imply that Shelly Godfrey and Ghost Six were in collusion, and yet I now think this is probably impossible.
Even more annoying is that the main Three character recently was named Deanna, when in fact Deanna Beers the reporter (the first appearance of Xena in the show) couldn't possibly be the same as this Three.
The silliest thing is why the Cylons thought that Boomer Sharon would be loyal to them. They gave her fake human memories and no Cylon memories at all. Why would she even consider being loyal to the Cylons? I find it unbelievable that she has drifted so close to Cylon orthodoxy by now.
I can only think of one thing from the Old Show that would be useful to know.
In the Old Show, Adama had two living children: Apollo and his sister Athena.
In the New Show, after the evacution of New Caprica, there is an episode ("Torn") in which Adama gets furious at Starbuck and tells her "you were like a daughter to me, but not anymore." In that same episode, Sharon Agathon takes the callsign "Athena".
So this must be a deliberate reference to her having replaced Starbuck as Adama's quasi-duaghter.
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