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BATTLESTAR GALACTICA | Dirty Hands | Season 3 Ep 16 | Get Frakked

🕑 Added 2025-02-18 18:01:06 +0000 UTC

Comments

Jonathan

I actually love Adama and Roslin in this episode, primarily for the 'read between the lines' stuff. Adama walks into the brig knowing Chief will be meeting the President. But he also knows he can't make it seem AT ALL like the strike action succeeded. Just like his threat to nuke the Eye of Jupiter, if your friends can't tell when you're bluffing neither can your enemies. Roslin's conversation at the end with Chief is great, but there's totally still an undertone of her manipulating him. She's obviously been plying him with drinks, and her line "the union will have to give ground" is almost verbatim from one of her conversations with President Adar when she was Education Secretary.

David Blau

I went to college for STEM and majored in math and computer science. In those fields, things really are black and white. I had binary opinions on almost everything for a number of years, until I went to law school and spent 3 years unlearning that worldview. But now I can understand both perspectives. This episode definitely highlights the tension: Adama and Roslin start out with a very rigid approach (we need fuel or we die), while Tyrol appreciated the human factors. The kicker is, they were both right in their own domains, but they were also both wrong: real life requires empathy and compromise. On that point, I agree with past comments that there's a huge lack of communication between just about everyone in this show, and it always fraks things up big time.

Nolan

Rarely are people lectured about having to change a life-long habit once and have it stick. Usually a person needs to learn something over and over. Form a new habit. Hard enough to do surrounded by luxury and ease, but add traumatic events and civilization spanning responsibilities, tendencies to fall back on tried and true habits increase. These characters are not infallible paragons. They were never written or created to be. They were written to be at best well-intentioned frak ups.

Troy Convers

Remember when Roslyn said to Adams about his responsibilities to the civilian population? He forgot that lesson very quickly, as did the scriptwriters.

Ricky

Yeah, this episode is so good. Seeing this episode after the pandemic made me reflect and see more of how things can be very grey. Working as a nurse, we were working 16+ hour shifts 6-7 days a week and really couldn't do anything about it because we had to. And this isn't in the military. We did that for a long time and consideration has to be made for how long that can be kept up. In BSG, this is such an indefinite situation, measures should have been explored to prevent this kind of thing because ultimately a catastrophic burnout will happen. And just for some real world context with my example, we really are in that kind of situation in healthcare. Not enough nurses. LOL, I remember being shocked with myself in the pandemic because I REALLY cried for the first time during my commutes to and from work because of everything. You just mentally and physically breakdown at some point. Everyone has a breaking point. If something happens again at that level, pandemic or something else, damn are we going to be screwed. Shows/episodes like this should really inspire more people to shine a light on the necessity to explore how various aspects of our society are performing and improve them for the welfare of others and not jeopardize very important societal foundations for an easy and temporary path.

Josh McPherson

Lister a Cylon? I'm sorry, I'm not buying this. I mean, who created him and why? And what's his mission? To rid the universe of chicken vindaloo?

Firefly24601

Honestly, I think Adama should have led with the whole "we'll all die if you strike" argument, and THEN threatened executing Callie. But I get it's a drama so they had to go this way.

Funny That

There were plots dropped which focused on the civilians in the fleet, and maybe this affected stories like this episode. (Also the previous episode is a bit of a jump in attitudes, though it did a better job of justifying it with Helo being on the outs after stopping the genocide). Could be that stories, which could have been spread-out a bit, maybe across episodes, ended up munged together. Though do love this episode. A story about strikes is still all too rare.

R. Chang

I was actually pleasantly surprised that you two recognized the difference between a civilian strike and a military strike. The latter is just not a thing. I'm not going to say that Adama's actions were great, but if he starts negotiating his orders with his subordinates, that is also a dangerous road to start down.

Nolan

Personally, I learned to do that mouth sound back in the 90s as a kid so I could emulate a liquid being poured. Chaining them and slightly altering the harmonics. Had no odea it was part of a community. Anyways, glad you guys picked up on the differences between civilian's striking and military refusing to work. Many reactors miss that and think Adama is being increadibly unreasonable. I think part of the problem with Roslin and Adama this episode is that their characters are so focused on saving humanity, thinking about the overall Need to find Earth above all else, they haven't even allowed themselves to think of the Fleet as a way of life rather than a temporary hardship to power through until they find a home. They aren't thinking Earth could be a decade away, their thinking "only a few months to the next sign post to Earth, we're gonna get there." Not how do we make life in this unbearable situation better? At least without just finding Earth. Again it comes to their thinkong of "What are we gonna sacrifice in order to survive?" Roslin already chucked her principles out in S2 when she banned abortion and nearly stole an election. She now sometimes needs reminding of the lines she's about to cross because survival is all that drives her. As for Adama, he IS a military man, so hecomes at things from that viewpoint: "What needs to be done to accomplish the mission? What are acceptable losses?" Regarding Giaus, I know in present times it's a little hard not to relate him to current events, but tell me y'all picked up on the similiarity of the title of his book "My Triumphs, My Mistakes" to another certain work by another certain infamous historical figure? There are about 0.5 seconds of this show I personally have not seen, and it's Daniel Noon's arm when he comes out from under the belt. The music and tension is ramped up so well in that scene, I've never managed to get through the scene without looking away. I think getting body parts squished or torn off in machinery is a primal fear of mine. There's arguably more graphic, tense moments in the show, but that one I just can't. Heck, whenever my manager is on the skyjack at work, I keep having to fight off the intrusive thought of: "What if I just stuck my finger inbetween the scissor lifts as it was going down?" Eugh. Finally, just how far a head are you?

Troy Convers

*Insert Picard quote about blindly following orders*

Mike Connaghan

Excited? What? Us? No. No, never. *nonchalance intensifies*

Troy Convers

I think their close minded attitudes were totally believable. People can become entrenched to change, and softening two idealists who have tunnel vision over their overall purpose is just unrealistic writing. Tyrol had to provide a true disruption to the status quo to really get through to them.

Troy Convers

Another great episode and a long overdue focus on Chief Tyrol, and the not so revelation that the 'knuckle draggers' are being taken for granted, a fact that Daddy Adama only seeks to address once his precious Roslyn is put in harm's way. And the two of them treating civilians like near slaves, nay criminals (let alone the child labour angle) is bad enough without Baltar tweaking the strings from a brig. But well, Gaius is not wrong, even if his change of heart is self serving, which adds to just another morally grey day on the Galactica. Adama's ultimatum to Tyrol sounded no different to Cain when she shot her XO, and Roslyn adopted her customary parallax by resurrecting the New Caprica union. And we see something I would love to have been more of a focus: the cultural differences between the colonies; the inequity, the 'them and us' attitudes. And hot take: Tyrol is more of a good, moral man than pretty boy Helo is. Chief is a man that will sacrifice for the greater good, while Helo is a man that will put his arse on the line only when he has something to personally lose. Callis' little 'Citizen Smith' speech in his native Aerilon is just mesmerising and a nice subtext to escaping his origins. It reads like a general Yorkshire accent though it wanders a bit over the border towards Manchester. Still, not bad for a Hampstead boy.

Time Lord

At no point did we ever say anyone should be shot 👍 And we talk about how the people on the hanger deck are a part of the military and how a "general strike" does not work the same for them. But at no point did we agree on thinking anyone should be shot for this

Troy Convers

Gals, the workers on that refinery ship are NOT part of the military. You think they should be shot? Tighten the elastic on those masks, they're slipping...

Locoturbo

Really love this episode, but agreed on the "whiplash." The writing failed in how it characterized Adm. Adama and especially Roslin being so totally closed-minded in the early and middle scenes. If they could have just softened them a bit, they could have still presented the same arguments, but it would have been more believable.

R. Chang

One of the things I love about BSG is how it handles background characters like Seelix. Seelix has a real arc over the course of the show. She starts off as a redshirt in that crash on Kobol with the Chief and Cally. She survives and gets a name because she and the other extra in here scenes kept inserting them (the characters were "technician 1" and "technician 2," in the script, but the two actors decided to use the names Seelix and Tarn and it stuck). She gets to work on the Phoenix as an avionics expert (which is why they wouldn't promote her in this episode) and gets a scene where she signs her name prominently. She's part of the resistance on New Caprica and part of the secret tribunal in the aftermath. And now she's a viper pilot (or at least a nugget). That's a lot for a character who started as basically an extra. Watching those early episodes and seeing these characters that you know become more prominent later is just one of the cool things about being a part of this rewatch with you two. Also, I just love the smile on her face in that final scene. It’s perfect.