helenacains:

fangirl challenge: 5 male characters  [4/5] - Gaius Baltar (Battlestar Galactica)

Struck a nerve, have I? Which I find rather impossible to believe! You think this is over? This is not over! You have not heard the last! No more Mr. Nice Gaius!

There was a post about this scene in the BSG tag and I started on a WHOLE THING about it which got long, so….

CAN I JUST. One of my favorite moments and I don’t think enough people fully appreciate it.  On the one hand it is the absolute darkest his character has ever gone at that point - probably one of his darkest moments ever. It’s so chilling and contrary to anything we’d expect to watch him encourage her *toward* killing herself, with a gentle tone and a kiss on the head.  You can’t get away from the creepy, manipulative feeling of it all, and the Gaius-ly way he is primarily trying to keep the blood off his own hands.  Even Six is just watching him like “…wow, dude.”  Six.  The gun goes off behind him and they just pause a second and keep walking in uncomfortable silence.

But the thing is? That is his one attempt at saving her.  And himself, of course, and the fleet — he is very convinced at that point that something bad is about to happen, between Six’s warning and Boomer talking about her ~dark thoughts~, he knows something about her that no one else does, even she is incapable of really admitting to herself.  And he never told anyone, and now he’s suddenly confronted with that again and has this responsibility in his gut that he finally acts on.

And the action he takes is to reach out to her like she’s a person. A special case of a person, certainly - under normal circumstances, nobody would tell a suicidal human to go ahead and follow their heart and embrace death. He’s also not being as *honest* with her as he could be, though at that point there’s not many ways she can interpret what he’s saying. But Sharon’s about to do something terrible, because of programming and forces out of her control, and she’s fighting against it so hard and so admirably and Gaius Baltar sees that and wants the resisting side of her to win. Even if winning means turning the gun on herself. There are worse things, for all of them, including her.  In his own strange, indirect, duplicitous way, this is the most heroic thing he tried to do in the entire first season. For better or worse, this is Baltar when he gives a shit.

(“You will believe me when I tell you, there are far worse things than death in this world.” Which is *so contrary to how he lives* but such an ironic peek into his psyche. He has to see himself in her; he has to think - or wish - that he would stop himself if he could have, from letting a catastrophe happen. BUT HE NEVER DOES, does he? He tearfully tells her there are far worse things than death and he means that, he *lives* that by season three, arguably he’s already living it, and yet he still can’t choose that for himself, he always backs away and loves living too much.)

Anyway, he clearly doesn’t *feel* heroic about it, and cries even as he keeps talking and soothing her.  Which y’know, it’s Baltar, he cries at the drop of a hat, but *most* of the time it’s for self-involved reasons - his fear, his self-pity, his guilt. This is not one of those times.  He feels worse about this situation than most humans on the show would, for a Cylon he doesn’t even know all that well. He doesn’t see her as a “thing” — a person he’s willing to talk into harming herself for (at least partly) self-motivated reasons, yes, but he does it through her emotions and he doesn’t do it lightly.  Maybe it’s the kinship of being two would-be villains who are deeply in denial, but he has so much empathy for Boomer, and is so aware of what she’s feeling and what he’s saying. It *kills* me sometimes we didn’t get more of a relationship between Gaius and Eight, either Boomer or Athena since he had interesting parallels with them both. But we got this scene, and I love it.

tl;dr Gaius is not on anyone’s side but I will goddamn fight anyone who says he cared about no one.