Thanks for another excellent, entertaining podcast–and a day early to boot!
I was very much in the same boat as Audra when I first saw “Dirty Hands,” feeling like Adama and Roslin were suddenly making uncharacteristically bad, callous decisions. The callousness is the part that still bothers me even now; both characters have made decisions that I’ve disagreed with before, but they always struggle with those decisions, whereas here, their bad decisions come through dismissiveness.
That said, I agree with a lot of what was said about this new attitude being the product of the turmoil both characters went through with New Caprica but that we didn’t necessarily see on screen. We know that Roslin and Adama were better at handling these sorts of problems earlier on; for example, Roslin even actually talked with the crazy “Cylons are Our Friends” people in “Epiphanies” the way she should have talked to the Chief when he told her about the safety issues. Most of the time, Roslin and Adama are good leaders, but here, they’re scared, they’re tired, and they simply screwed up, big time.
They ignored the problem too long because they were busy thinking about other things. Roslin is a wee bit obsessed with making sure Baltar pays for what he’s done, and I would argue that, in an interesting reversal, Adama has his heart set on Earth because he thinks he and his family and crew might be able to “live like people” again there. Once the tyllium problem became too big to ignore–only one jump’s worth of fuel left–they had backed themselves into a corner that felt way too close to being trapped like rats on New Caprica, and they decided they’d do whatever they had to for that to never happen again. Add to it that Xeno brought up one of the two subjects where Roslin’s logic has a blind spot (1: Baltar; 2: Cylons as deserving “human” rights), and events just started spiraling out of control.
ArkansasEngineeringGirl, the idea that Roslin (and perhaps Adama, too) might have found out about her cancer around this episode is an interesting one. In Crossroads, Roslin tells the press corps that she’s only known for about a week, and more time has elapsed than that, since Kara has been “dead” for awhile. However, for some reason I always thought Roslin was lying to the press then, that she’d known about it longer but didn’t want to look like she was withholding important information from the Fleet. Anyway, if she has just found out about the cancer, it doesn’t excuse the bad decisions, but it does make her dismissive, preoccupied attitude make a lot more sense.
And now for something completely different: I cheered when Sean said Iowa was “pretty cool.” The comment on there being two hills in the whole state is pretty accurate, too; I live on one of them, but there are most definitely parts of Iowa where you can watch your dog run away for several days.
