Nuriko's Land

I have the chance to study BSG for the college but I need more Felix Gaeta post or Gaeta/Hoshi fics if Llsmutant can help me! I need some news about them.

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I should probably preface this response by saying (a) this is very lengthy, so please, read only if you’re truly interested; and (b) I sympathized with Adama and Gaeta equally. At all times. Throughout the series. And along those same lines, I think the single best exchange in all of S4 was this bit from “The Oath”: 

Adama: You swore an oath to protect and defend the people on this ship. 
Gaeta: You swore the same allegiance! What happened to your oath? 

Why is this the best exchange? Because they were both right, and they were both wrong. Each man had, in a way, broken his oath in an attempt to uphold it. Adama believed an alliance with the Cylons was necessary to ensure humanity’s survival, while Gaeta believed trusting the Cylons after they committed two genocides in as many years was tantamount to suicide. Both courses of action — alliance with the Cylons and staging a coup — were insanely risky and had a very low chance of success, but the fact is, hail-mary passes were the only options left to anyone at that point in the series. If we were dealing with the Adama of Seasons 1 and 2, I’d say Adama would be the safer bet as a leader, but in Season 4 both Adama and Gaeta had begun to come unraveled. (Although, interestingly, Adama and Gaeta were perhaps the two least bloodthirsty people during the mutiny, in sharp contrast to the behavior of Zarek, Roslin, Starbuck, Tigh, Conner, etc.) 

The OP made the point that Adama himself was a mutineer, and one responder argued that Adama’s mutiny was noble and necessary while Gaeta’s rebellion was not. I don’t think any of it is as clear-cut as all that. Was I in Adama’s corner when he mutinied against Cain? You bet, but his actions might very well have made things worse for everyone, and I’m not even talking about his plot to assassinate Cain. I’m talking about launching vipers against the Pegasus in an attempt to make Cain back down from executing Helo and Tyrol. In the commentary for “Resurrection Ship Pt. 1” Ron Moore points out that if any shots had been fired during that conflict, everything would have gone to hell. And the only reason it never got that far, in my opinion, is that Starbuck just happened to return with the resurrection ship intel when she did. Dumb luck defused the situation. 

Compare that with Gaeta’s mutiny, and we see what might easily have happened between Galactica and Pegasus. Throughout the mutiny arc, whether you love him or despise him, it’s pretty apparent that Gaeta didn’t want any bloodshed. But then Zarek killed Laird, a trigger-happy mutineer shot Pvt. Jaffee, Roslin made a run for the (heavily armed and, from Gaeta’s point of view, potentially hostile) Cylon base ship, and Zarek executed the Quorum. After those events transpired, there really wasn’t any going back for Gaeta. Adama backed down from killing Cain because he still had that option. Gaeta would have preferred not to kill Adama (look at how devastated he was in that scene when he gave the execution order), but even if it was nominally his call, his hand was ultimately forced, especially once the Quorum were dead. 

One could argue — correctly — that Gaeta should have made sure he had better control over his fellow mutineers before setting the whole thing in motion, but did Adama have any better control over his pilots when they launched against Pegasus? Several of them, like Kat, were getting awfully itchy trigger fingers, and the Pegasus and Galactica crews already hadn’t been getting along very well. My verdict: Adama was in many ways a better leader than Gaeta could ever have been, but in the end they both made the same fundamental, understandable, but very rash decision to mutiny against a superior officer they believed had lost the ability to lead responsibly; only the outcomes differed, and that came down mostly to a difference in luck. 

In the end, yes, Adama was justified in executing the mutiny’s ringleaders, simply because the mutiny did too much damage for him to let them off the hook. It’s also valid to say that Gaeta’s intentions didn’t excuse the effects of his actions, though that’s veering awfully close to a “no harm, no foul” defense of Adama’s mutiny against Cain (and Helo’s sabotage of the virus mission, and the mutinous behavior of Lee (“Kobol’s Last Gleaming”) and Tyrol (“Dirty Hands”)). 

But I also think Gaeta is an unfairly maligned character. He behaved like a jerk at times and did some indefensible things, but no more so than anyone else on the show. I think he’s been judged according to a double standard, one by which fans readily forgive the unattractive behavior of the lead characters and the alpha males and females (Adama, Roslin, Starbuck, Tigh) while loudly condemning secondary, less alpha-ish characters like Gaeta for engaging in the same behavior. Notice how often Gaeta-haters use the word “little” to demean him? Notice how they take at face value Starbuck’s assertion that Gaeta’s just mad because he lost a leg (whereas no one criticized Tigh for his anger at losing an eye)? Sure, the leg thing was one of his grievances, but anyone who thinks that’s why he started the mutiny clearly was not paying attention during “The Face of the Enemy.” 

The reason Gaeta is a tragic character, and NOT a villain, is that he committed his greatest sins out of a sense of shame for things that weren’t his fault. The Eight he thought he could trust ended up screwing him and his friends over to a monstrous degree, and then she chastised HIM for daring to hope she would help him the way Athena helped Helo and the others. After that experience, I think he was determined never to let the Cylons get the better of him again, and sadly he reacted by swinging too far in the opposite direction. Yet even though he earned his fate, he also earned the redemption he sought — by forgiving Baltar, by forgiving Adama, by forgiving himself, by ordering that final “weapons hold.” So I, for one, love Felix Gaeta and his character arc, and I was sad to see him leave the stage.”  Emperor Rawk the Chicken 

For Me, Gaeta would able been able to be the successor of Bill if he had not rebelled but we didn’t write the story ^^.

Oh, it’s an echo with this article.