Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II

"Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II" An episode of the Re-imagined Series
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Overview

Everything turns on its head as the survivors vote for a new president -- and vote for their fate.

Summary

On Caprica

• Starbuck, the marines, and the resistance continue to take fire from Cylon centurions and artillery. They make their way up a hill, and hold their position.
• The Cylons hold fire, and Sharon remarks that the Cylons will attempt to capture them with non-lethal weapons, such as gas.
• Eighteen hours later, they emerge to find that the Cylons have disappeared. Cavil -- who suddenly appears behind them -- announces that the Cylons have left the Twelve Colonies and that humanity was spared.

In the Fleet

• Cally is cleared back to work by Dr. Cottle, despite having her jaw wired shut. Chief Tyrol visits her, apologizing for the attack. Cally forgives him, saying that she's always cared for him.

• Dr. Baltar continues to gain in the polls. On Colonial One, Tory mentions there's always a victory plan. Roslin later calls a private meeting with Dr. Baltar, asking to deliver a joint statement of tabling the issue of colonization until after the election, which Baltar rejects.

• Roslin, fearing that she has indeed lost the presidential race, confronts Baltar on whether he was with Six on Caprica before the Cylon attack. Baltar avoids answering the question & states that he may have saved her life, but he will not save her political life.

• Starbuck returns to Galactica, with the resistance fighters, much to the delight of Admiral Adama. She mentions the fact that the Cylons have left Caprica, and a man appearing to be Brother Cavil confirms it. He also says he has a message, but is attacked by Chief Tyrol, who declares a "Code blue," claiming Cavil is a Cylon. Both Cavil and Caprica-Sharon are escorted to the brig under marine guard.

• The other Cavil (from last episode) is also taken to the brig, claiming he's not a Cylon, but changes his tune upon seeing his "brother", as he calls him. Both Cavils then talk about the fact that the “war heroes” (Caprica Six & Galactica-Sharon) have talked about how the attack of the colonies and the pursuit of the fleet were mistakes. They were told to relay the message that man and Cylon will go their separate ways. Both Roslin and Admiral Adama are less than trusting regarding the message.

• In the brig, Caprica-Sharon is completely disillusioned and nihilistic, declaring that since her child's death, nothing - not Adama's trust, not even Helo - matters to her. A frustrated Helo insists that he's not giving up on her, but she seems disinclined to listen.

• Starbuck and Anders are getting extremely drunk when Apollo comes in to welcome them back. Starbuck makes a snide remark about Apollo and Dualla and goes back to drunkenly making out with Anders. Apollo, clearly upset with Starbuck, leaves without saying much.

• Election Day has arrived and Baltar has an apparent five thousand-vote lead over Roslin with only a few ships left. On Colonial One, Tory makes a call to Galactica, putting a plan into action.

• Amazingly, Roslin initially appears to have retained the presidency. While most are celebrating, Lt. Gaeta makes a startling discovery regarding the votes, and informs the Admiral that Col. Tigh may be involved in a conspiracy to throw the election.

• Admiral Adama confronts Roslin regarding the conspiracy, saying he has a confession to rig the vote. Roslin admits her involvement and Adama is disappointed.

• Baltar is informed of his election as President. He's less than pleased, vowing to have full investigation in time. President-elect Baltar then orders a course for “New Caprica”.

• Gaius Baltar is sworn in as the new President of the Twelve Colonies, and orders the immediate colonization of New Caprica.

• Cloud 9 is destroyed by a nuclear blast, Gina being present before the explosion; in addition to the Cloud 9, at least three other ships are destroyed in the blast. Admiral Adama reports to the president that this may be a Cylon attack, but Baltar ignores him and presses forward with colonization.

One Year Later

Kara and Cottle on New Caprica.

• Mr. Gaeta is reporting to the President regarding a Union issue aboard Colonial One, now down on the planet. Baltar is upset, saying there have been no Cylon attacks but the people still complain. He has regressed, turning to alcohol, medication, and womanizing.

• Admiral Adama, now sporting a mustache, is walking around the near-empty Galactica, which is quickly falling into disarray. Over half of the crew have moved down onto the planet, and they are running on such a skeleton crew that they barely have enough pilots to fly training missions, much less a good CAP. Adama has a discussion with Tigh about going down to the planet, which Tigh reluctantly agrees to do.

• Anders, now Kara’s husband, has pneumonia. Dr. Cottle is unable to treat Anders because there are no antibiotics available. He can only advise Kara to make sure Anders gets enough rest and with a little luck he "should" pull through.

• Kara runs into the Tighs as Tyrol, now a union boss, is making a speech to begin a strike, with a very pregnant Cally by his side. Saul mentions that Pegasus keeps the backup medical supplies and that Apollo would spring some for Starbuck. Starbuck disagrees, which prompts Tigh to state that Apollo should be "over that by now".

• Roslin is doing what she does best, teaching the settlement's children, and manages to find enjoyment in her new position. Maya is with her, as is the now one year old Hera, whom Maya has named "Isis".

• Kara calls Lee aboard Pegasus, requesting the antibiotics. Dualla, now an officer and most likely Lee's XO, notices something on the DRADIS.

• A fleet of Cylon basestars arrive in orbit around New Caprica. The Adamas discuss what to do in response, with Lee initially advocating that the fleet jump away, and Admiral Adama initially resisting the suggestion. However, Lee apparently brings the Admiral around to his way of thinking (or Admiral Adama comes to the conclusion on his own) when Helo asks if alert fighters should be launched. Admiral Adama keeps the alert fighters in and jumps the fleet ships remaining in orbit around New Caprica to an unknown location, vowing that he will return.

• Mr. Gaeta informs the President of the Cylon approach. Later, before his assembled staff, copies of Numbers 5, 8, and 6 approach the President. The Cylons declare that as long as there’s no resistance, no harm will come. President Baltar, after learning that the Cylons discovered New Caprica because of the nuke explosion set off by Gina, declares surrender on behalf of the colonists. As Cylon armies occupy the planet, Kara vows to resist.

Questions

• Who is Baltar's vice president?
• Has Gaeta's view of Baltar changed since Baltar's ascension to the presidency? If so, is Gaeta planning to do anything about it?
• What "number" is Cavil?
• Was Roslin's threat to put the two Cavils into space actually carried out?
• Where did the defense fleet jump to?
• Where is Caprica-Sharon?
• What happened to Zarek?
• Why is Leoben looking for Starbuck, specifically?
• Why has the population (until Tyrol's recent union speech) accepted Baltar's imperious rule? People were hardly so passive under Roslin. Indeed, Adama executed a military coup over a rather less important issue than giving a nuclear weapon to a Cylon agent.
• What were the workers being asked to do which was so "odious", "so sick[ening] at heart" that Tyrol was willing to call a general strike, and so important to Baltar that he was willing to use illegal imprisonment to break it?
• Are the Six and Eight that Baltar surrendered to Caprica-Six and Galactica-Sharon?
• Where did the Cylon fleets go, after they left the Twelve Colonies? Cavil was deliberately vague when asked if they simply returned to the Cylon homeworld.
• Did the nuclear bomb ever get picked up by the fleet's radiological alarms?
• How many people died in the Cloud Nine explosion? (see Analysis)
• Were the Quorum of Twelve killed on the Cloud Nine?
• When Gina-Six was instantly vaporized due to being only two feet from a nuclear detonation, did she still transmit her consciousness? Was she even capable of transmitting considering that any internal hardware responsible for this task would have been instantly destroyed?
• Given Roslin's memories of Baltar with Six, why didn't Admiral Adama suspect Baltar of handing over the nuke to the cylons? If he did suspect him, why not act on it?
• Did the events of "One Year Later" actually happen, or were they a dream or vision sequence given to Baltar?
• Did Baltar's internal Six disappear at any point during the New Caprica year? If so, when and why? If so, did the events of her disappearance contribute to Baltar's regression?
• Why was it so easy for Adama to hide the collusion of the rigged election from the press, and why were there no consequences?
• If the Cylons really left the Twelve Colonies, leaving behind a nuked-out wasteland, what happened to all of the human captives in the Farms?
• Why have the Cylons returned after suggesting that they were willing to go their "separate ways"?
• Did the Cavils lie about the pursuit of humanity being a mistake? Or were they telling the truth?
• Will the Cylons resume their pursuit of the Fleet?
• How many people are left in the Fleet? (see Analysis)
• Will the Adamas resort to Cain's tactic of conscripting civilians to fill the gaps?
• What happened between Apollo and Starbuck?
• What led to Starbuck's reconciliation with Col. Tigh? The two had been in conflict since the Miniseries, what led them to bury the hatchet and become the close friends they now appear to be?
• Has it become public knowledge that Baltar killed Crashdown on Kobol? Now that Chief and Cally are Baltar's open adversaries they could attempt to use this information against him.
• When Adama informs Baltar that the nuke used to blow up Cloud Nine was probably stolen form Gaius' lab, why is he not suspicious about the fact that Baltar never reported that it was missing? Had it really been stolen from his lab, he would surely notice.
• Are the Cylons that appear at the end representative of the whole Cylon race, or are they a faction that broke off after the two "Cylon Hereos" began to speak out against the war on the humans?
• If it is true that the Cylons now believe the attack on humanity was a mistake, is the occupation on New Caprica viewed by the Cylons as an act of mercy and kindness vs. oppression from the human perspective?
• Could it be the intent of the Cylons to actually help the colonization of New Caprica, helping with the construction of infrastructure, new homes, etc, in order to make up for the holocaust?
  • If the Cylons intend to help, that would be consistent with Cavil's comment that the Cylon path to enlightenment is to be "the best machines the universe has ever seen". The purpose of a machine is arguably to assist human beings. On the other hand, the Cylons, if they are here to help, are presumably intending to do so in a highly authoritarian fashion.
    • Could the Cylons be wanting to maintain control over the colonials so that in some future the colonials would not be able to return and exact revenge on the Cylons?

Analysis

• The events of the Cylon invasion of New Caprica closely parallel the Nazi invasion of France, with the fleet's escape a parallel to the Allied evacuation of Dunkirk and Baltar's surrender a parallel to Petain's surrender. If the parallel continues, Baltar will establish a puppet regime under Cylon rule akin to Vichy France while Colonials still loyal to humanity will establish a resistance movement.
• Baltar's arrogance seems to have led to corrupt rule during his year on New Caprica—he replaces Roslin's modest desk with a larger, elaborate one, replaces the population count whiteboard with a portrait of himself, and keeps a harem aboard the landed Colonial One.
• After a whole year, everyone is still living in tents. There is a vital shortage of medicine, the military is of no use, and labor conditions are apparently intolerable. Baltar's administration is apparently as incompetent as Roslin feared.
  • It is not clear whether these conditions are the result of admimistrative incompetence or the inherent difficulties of colonizing a marginally habitable planet.
    • Of course, it was Baltar's idea to settle on a marginally habitable planet in the first place.
• It's ironic that the obligations of duty keep Lee Adama aboard Pegasus while everyone else goes planetside—he is a reserve officer, and promised to build his pilots a bar as soon as they found a habitable planet.
  • Who says he didn't build a bar for them? However, despite building a bar, he would still command the Pegasus.
• Ron Moore has once again decided to play with viewer's expectations; in the podcast for "Resurrection Ship, Part II" Moore commented on how everyone assumed that Pegasus would be destroyed by the end of the episode, and thus he thought it would be a good twist to keep Pegasus alive as another ship in the Fleet. Here, many viewers assumed that the nuke that Baltar gave to Gina in "Epiphanies" would be used to destroy Pegasus this time, but it wasn't.
• 29 people died between this episode and the preceding one? One or two Raptors were lost, and some Marines died on Caprica, but that doesn't seem high enough.
  • Is it possible they took out all of the people who left in the raptors because they were not apart of the fleet at the end of the previous episode?
    • They didn't remove Starbuck from the count when she left for Caprica at the beginning of Season 2.
      • She left at the end of season one, before they started the count. But, they did not add her to the count when she returned with Helo, because the count rose by one.
  • Maybe more people died during the attack on Caprica than was shown.
    • Yet another possibility is the inclusion of the Caprica survivors in the count to offset many of the losses that had incurred in the rescue mission.
    • Although they didn't actually talk about the losses, there was a shot of a wounded person being taken away on a stretcher after the Raptors returned from the Caprica SAR mission.
  • There may have been a series of election-related riots or murders.
• The year gap for the Cylons to find the fleet at first seems odd. However, it was stated in the previous episode that the interference from the gas cloud surrounding it would hide the planet fairly well. The Cylons were slightly over a light year away, according to the Number Five. Searching something as large as the gas cloud likely is for a planet or fleet is, given the sensor range limitations, quite impressive to accomplish in months, even with general directional information from a light-year out. In addition, the radiation from the nuclear explosion aboard the Cloud Nine would, of course, only be traveling at the speed of light. Even a less catastrophic attempt to communicate the Colonial's new location would be limited to the speed of light. Of course, once the location was pinpointed, an FTL jump by the Cylons to pounce would be instantaneous.
  • Even though the Cylons were able to find New Caprica from the detected nuclear blast that occurred a year prior, the initial detection would have only pointed them in the right general direction. The planet would have moved from the location the inital blast occurred as it orbits around its sun. So the Cylons would only have been able to pinpoint the planet's last location a year prior. They could have used astronomical surveying to detect the planet or send their fleets to other positions using FTL ahead of the blast radiation to triangulate the nuclear blast. Then send recon elements to scout for the planet, which could have been the initial blips picked up by DRADIS by Lt. Dualla of recon Raiders. As soon as the planet was found the main Cylon Fleet would jump in from their staging areas.
• The population of New Caprica City is given as 39,192. There were just under 50,000 people in the Fleet before establishing the settlement, so that gives a figure of roughly 10,000 missing. It is uncertain how many were killed in the destruction of Cloud 9 and surrounding Fleet ships but this loss along with any births and deaths that have taken place during the year since the election, leaves very few military personnel in the Orbital Defense. This almost certainly means that both Galactica and Pegasus will be extremely short on crew, as many military personnel will have been left on the planet. There was clearly no time to retrieve even selected members of the crews before the Fleet jumped.
  • The figure is not 10,000 missing — it is 10,000 not part of New Caprica City's population. The figure of 10,000 is spread amongst those remaining up in orbit with the fleet's remaining ships, out in independent, peripheral, or small settlements not part of New Caprica City proper, and casaulties.
  • Watching the Fleet jump in slow-motion, you can count approximately 19 ships, which also gives a rough impression of the reduced size of the fleet. Other ships, including Colonial One and some Raptors, are landed on New Caprica and have presumably fallen into the hands of the Cylons.
  • It is not explicitly said that all members of the New Caprica colony reside in New Caprica City. There may be outlying settlements, though none are named. One reason for this would simply be as a safeguard to keep a single nuclear strike from wiping out all of the fleet survivors.
    • This would demonstrate Un-Baltar like prudence
  • Any "industrial" vessels — such as the mining ships, tanker ships, repair ships, agro-world ship — would have landed on the planet and been debarked, dismantled, or converted to form the foundation for industrial / production efforts. Some of the vessels in the fleet that left Ragnar Anchorage weren't designed for prolonged interstellar journeys, and were basically running "on a hope and a prayer", and would have been rendered promptly upon finding a more permanent home. The nineteen-or-so ships seen are, more than likely, the last spaceworthy vessels in the fleet that are not needed planetside.

Notes

• According to Ron Moore's podcast, although Scifi Channel was willing to air this episode as a 90-minute special, it had to be heavily edited down for international distribution; outside of the United States, viewers will only see a 1 hour version of the episode, which Moore regards as "almost incomprehensible". Many plot threads, such as the entire Cally/Tyrol subplot, were completely removed from the one hour version. This may not be the case in the UK however as Skyone (the channel that broadcasts the show in that country) previously showed the full 90 minute version of Stargate SG1 episode 'Threads' and may well do the same for this episode.
• Ron Moore's podcast for episode 13, Epiphanies, states that the Nuke given to Gina will come back in this episode, to the benefit of the Cylons.
• Admiral Adama watches Pyramid games and is a fan of the Picon Panthers.
• In RDM's podcast for the previous episode, he said that in early drafts of this special 90 minute long episode, the writers actually tried to make it a 2 hour special, but this was soon dropped (these times are including commercials).
• The election board appears to have a definitive list of the names of all of the ships in The Fleet (RDM). Not all of them are clearly visible, but this would seem to indicate that the writers do have an actual list that they get new ship names from. Ship names visible on the chart are: Demetrius, Diomedes, Embla Brokk, Enkidu, Epheme, Galactica, Gideon, Gemenon Traveller, Greenleaf, Monarch, Odysseus, Pegasus, Persephone, Prometheus, Swordfish
• The framed photo of President Roslin and Billy Keikeya was still on her desk during the election.
• When Roslin "won" the rigged election results, Roslin received 24,265 votes, while Baltar recieved 22,266. This means that the elligible voters in the Fleet number 46,531. In the podcast, RDM explains that he quickly came up with these numbers, to try to reflect roughly how many survivors are below the voting age.
• Toward the end of the episode, President Baltar refers to a government body called the "People's Council". This may be the proportionally elected lower house mentioned in by RDM in his blog post on January 30, 2005.
• Hera is seen on New Caprica in the same white cradle that Baltar had a vision of her being in in "Scattered", etc. According to RDM's podcast it's actually the exact same cradle.
• Tyrol's union speech is an almost word for word quote of Mario Savio's address during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964. According to Ron Moore and David Eick in the podcast, they even got permission from Savio's widow to use it (even though, due to the way copyright laws work from back then, they could have just used it without permission, they felt they should get it). As a result, it's even listed in the credits: "Mario Savio speech excerpted courtesy of: Lynne Hollander Savio". Actor Aaron Douglas (Chief Tyrol) actually studied film of Savio, so all of the hand gestures Tyrol makes when he gives the speech are gestures that Savio actually used.
• Baltar's portrait of himself does not have the 'cut corners' as seen in most (all?) other papers and photos in the show.

Noteworthy Dialogue

• Dr. Cottle decides Cally is ready to return to duty:

Cottle: You're done here. I'm kickin' you out of here and sending you back to work.

Cally: (muffled, because her jaw is immobilized) Work??? Like this?

Cottle: You gotta love a woman who can complain even with her jaw wired shut.

• "Would you mind telling me what's going on? I'm not a frakking Cylon, I'm not…(sees the other Cavil in the cell)…oh. Well, okay then."

  —Brother Cavil

• "Gods help us."

  -Admiral Adama over the objection of Edward James Olmos (podcast)

• Trying to bring order to a Union meeting:

Tyrol: Everyone, please be quiet. (crowd ignores him)

Cally: Hey! Shut the frak up! (crowd quiets down)

• Admiral Adama: We're leaving. But we'll be back.

• On Caprica:

Anders: You got any great ideas in that military brain of yours?

Starbuck: Do the same thing we always do; fight 'em 'till we can't.

The Cylons occupy New Caprica:

Tyrol: "What do you want to do now, Captain?"

Starbuck: "The same thing we always do. Fight them until we can't."

Official Statements

From the official site (http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/): When Baltar wins the vote, Roslin considers stealing the election because she believes he is a Cylon collaborator.

Guest Stars

• Richard Hatch as Tom Zarek
• Dean Stockwell as Brother Cavil
• Michael Trucco as Samuel Anders
• Kate Vernon as Ellen Tigh
• Donnelly Rhodes as Dr. Cottle
• Callum Keith Rennie as Leoben Conoy
• Matthew Bennett as Aaron Doral
• Rekha Sharma as Tory Foster
• David Kaye as James McManus
• Alisen Down as Jean Barclay
• Winston Rekert as Priest

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