Gaius and the Ten Hour Day

Laura and I finished our article on BSG – called ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Gaius Balthar’. We decided we have a whole other chapter on Gaius’s sex life, so we excised this bit. For the record: Robots are sexy – the False Maria, the pleasure-bot in Bladerunner, 7 of 9, and the seductions of Caprica 6 that lead Gaius astray. Gaius in the ménage, Gaius pining, Giaus as parent? Gaius is a flawed hero, and his exile amongst the Cylons after the attack on New Caprica a farcical consequence of his pathetic despot-like complicity. A puppet and play thing of his masters. Aboard the base-star his exile involves him pleasuring himself with his assigned captors, not one but two of the female fashion-mag ‘skin-jobs’ in a sumptuous bed. Gaius imagines he might be Cylon, he might be their leader (he is even more deluded than Louis Boneparte). He cavorts with the sex-bot machine girls in the idle fantasy of teen-male SF fans everywhere. Patriarchal and sexist, in the end we are all rooting for his downfall. Then he becomes a free sex cult god. Go figure. He’ll have to die ingloriously at the end (no, this is not a spoiler – we really have no idea how Gaius will end up, but I expect it will be bad).

[anyone wants to read the piece in draft, send me an email. It assumes you’ve seen as far as episodes in the third series. Our comments on series four are still in note form, and/or as yet undigested – but since this has happened before…]