Wow, we sure had a lot of things come out of nowhere this week. While there have been a few grumblings of separation between the classes previously, we never really had anything to suggest this level of class tension. Nor had we been given much indication that careers were heavily based on colony of origin. Sure we knew that the Sagittarons were looked down upon by people from all the other colonies, but, outside of that, there’s never never been much evidence of tension amongst colonies, nor jobs based primarily on the colony of one’s birth, yet both the class and colony tensions were in abundance this week.
Roslin’s behavior was pretty uncharacteristic as well. Granted, she does tend to change a lot from week to week as the requirements of the episodes dictate, but she was really hardcore for the first half of “Dirty Hands”. First she arrested someone for quoting from a book, and then, when the Chief kept coming to her detailing all the problems the refinery works were forced to face, up to and including, child labor, she pretty much blew him off.
So for the first half of the episode, Roslin was a total bitch. Then Chief asks if his son is expected to be a deckhand for the rest of his life, like his parents, and all of the sudden Roslin’s all with the sympathy and understanding. She even encourages Tyrol to negotiate on behalf of the refinery workers at the end of the episode. Her sudden change of heart would be tough to swallow under any circumstances, but when you consider the Chief pretty much just used the ideas from Baltar’s book for his argument, it’s even more unbelievable. Early in the episode, Roslin instantly recognizes a quote from Baltar’s book when the refinery ship foreman brings it up, so she’s obviously quite familiar with the reasoning contained in Baltar’s book. If the arguments didn’t sway her then, there’s no reason she would change her mind when the Chief rehashed those same arguments.
I did like the idea of Baltar having written a book, complete with smuggling it out of prison. It not only plays into the fantasy image Baltar has created for himself as part misunderstood genius, part messiah figure, but it shows Baltar is trying, in his own way, to make up for all the harm he has caused humanity.
I’m curious about the legal position on Baltar’s book. Obviously he is forbidden from distributing a book in the first place, given that he had his lawyer smuggle the book out a few pages at a time (which really makes Baltar look like an oppressed political prisoner). We don’t know if it’s actually a crime to read Baltar’s book, or if Roslin was just pissed off and decided that, along with the foreman’s comments about machinery breaking down, she had enough reason to arrest the guy. Judging from the fact the Chief just happened to find a copy laying around, I’m guessing it isn’t officially a banned book, but it’s obviously something the government frowns upon.
Given the events of “Dirty Hands”, I’m curious about all the civilians living on Galactica. At one point Roslin says that people are busy, pretty much across the whole fleet. And yet, from what we’ve seen, the civilians living on Galactica don’t actually have jobs. Granted it’s possible they are ferried back and forth to other ships where they do their actual work, but that’s certainly never been established. So there may well be an untapped labor pool on Galactica itself.
An odd thing with this week’s episode was the small number of cast members who were actually in the episode. There are quite a few episodes where a few cast members don’t appear, but there seemed to be more missing than usual this week. There was no sign of Apollo, Dee, Athena, Helo and Colonel Tigh (the absence of Apollo and Tigh seems particularly unusual) and some of the others, like Six and Starbuck, had rather brief appearances.
After I finished watching “Dirty Hands”, I realized it was actually the 16th episode of the season. So there are only four more episodes left this season and, if the synopsis for next week on the Space website is accurate (we only got a generic preview this week for some reason), we’re in for yet another filler episode next week. Filler episodes aren’t necessarily bad; apart from Roslin’s inconsistency and the lack of build-up to the class issue, “Dirty Hands” was a fairly good episode. It’s just that when you have a chain of them in a row, it starts to feel like the writers are just killing time before getting back to the real story.
