In a podcast for season 3, he talked about all the trouble they've had with Lee's character - false starts and blind alleys, like retconning a pregnant girlfriend who died in the attacks, or making him fat then slimming him back down immediately. The character always seemed perpetually trapped between outright rebellion and strict military devotion - he mutinied and went on the run with Laura, but wouldn't sell out his father; he takes command of Pegasus, but only long enough to send it on a suicide mission, and compared to the other commanders we've seen on this show - grizzled Adama, stonefaced Cain - Lee never quite had the gravitas to make you believe he was command material.
Apollo is portrayed by Jaime Bamber, the most babyfaced actor in the cast (he's the one lead actor on the show who wouldn't look out of place in an episode of "Gossip Girl"). His actual English accent will occasionally slip into his dialogue, softening his already sanded edges (especially the way he lilts "Kara" ever so slightly into "Kawra.") He's a fine actor, but nowhere near as feisty as Katee Sackhoff and certainly not as charismatic as Edward James Olmos. In a funny way, Bamber's blankfaced, wounded, often confused nobility makes him the alpha male for the show. Because on BSG, men are all too often less powerful and more naive than women, and the people who seem like they're in charge often know the least of all. So Apollo, who looked like the handsome protagonist on the show, always knows less than anyone about what's actually going on (see: his confused, Marty-McFly-in-the-headlights glance as the Chief stares daggers at his Cylon brethren - "Like, ummm, sooo0o, hey Chief, ummm, what's up?"):
BSG gets alot of attention for the different chances it takes with its plotlines - on gamechanger season-finale viewerbait like shooting Adama, zipping forward one year, and revealing four brand old Cylons. But the reason it's such a great show - for my money, the reason why it's better than "Lost" - is all the chances it keeps taking with its characters. I should say, the lunatic chances they take with their characters.
Consider - on last week's episode, Roslin started wearing a wig to hide her hair loss, and then felt that she had to spell that out for Baltar, as if it wasn't obvious to everybody; Baltar's Jesus allegory hit full-scale xerox homage, when he broke into a Kobol church and wrecked all the Zeus statues; the Chief had not one but two loud tirades that would have been shrill in a bad-TV way if they weren't so painfully shrill in a bad-coping way (his line about Cally - "a shriek with dull, vacant eyes and a cabbage smell" - cut right to the bone, in part because you know he was trying to push away the good memories of her, and in part because you knew that part of him had always thought that about her); Tigh interrogated Caprica Six until she started beating him up until he was bloody and asked her to keep going, at which point she kissed him; Baltar got beaten up by a soldier until Lee escorted him to safety, at which point he gave a rousing speech that would also have been shrill in a bad-TV way if its overall theme - that everyone is perfect - wasn't coming from the most endlessly complicated, often evil, certainly traitorous man in the universe.
Those last two beatings were crosscut between Adama reading Roslin a bedtime story and, apropos of nothing else in the episode, Starbuck sleeping while Anders looks in. That these storylines all had vague thematic links didn't make the crosscutting any less jarring. This whole episode was jarring, bizarrely edited - it wasn't clear, when Adama made his comment about Cally knowing about the Chief's true identity, whether that was a hallucination or not; we knew for a fact that Tigh was hallucinating his dead wife, which gave Six's discussion of hers and Baltar's love a weird everything-is-everything comparison.
This episode was also, at times, incredibly obvious - you knew that the Chief, out of insomniac grief, was going to frack up one of his ships; you knew Adama was going to read Roslin a book with vague references to death and lost love (c'mon, man, she's dying!); and, in what had to be the most obvious deus ex machina in the show's history, who else could save Baltar but Lee Adama, sleeves rolled up like a politician looking casual for the cameras. "Hey everyone, the Presidential order has been rescinded!" Shouldn't a politician have people to make announcements for him?
Yet that meant that Apollo could be there for Baltar's speech, and although some have read the look on his face as worry - anxiety that he may have just rescued a zealot - I read it as something different. Call me crazy, but this philosophy of Baltar's - that everyone, and thus every opinion, is beautiful - holds some serious resonance for Lee, who has always been a balancing factor between his father's militarism (veering towards totalitarianism) and the President's idealism (veering towards blind faith). Can it be that Baltar has found one more follower?
In the second season, during the "Resurrection Ship" duet, there was a strange sequence. Lee, shipwrecked with a torn suit, stops trying to conserve oxygen and gives himself over to death; later, he tells Kara that he wanted to die. It was a strange subplot, given that Apollo hadn't been a focal character for a few episodes, and given that we'd seen no signs of either slight depression or outright. Indeed, when you put "Resurrection Ship" together with "Pegasus," you had one of the most epic tales in the whole "Battlestar" saga - Lee's sudden lack of resolve came out of nowhere, both in the immediate storyline, in the character's story arc, and in the grander sweep of the series.
This is a facet of the show which is rarely remarked upon - the way in which it conjures whole environments and emotional states of being and then asks you to believe that they've been there the whole time. The best example of this was Helo's episode last season, "The Woman King." At the beginning of the episode, Helo is in charge of Dogsville, the refugee camp in the lower decks of Galactica. We didn't know this before - they retconned it into the "Previously On," taking a page from the "Arrested Development" notebook. The commanding officers no longer have faith in Helo can cut it, and there is tension between Helo and Adama, and between Helo and Tigh - We haven't seen any obvious sign of this tension before. Much of the plot hinges on the peculiarities of Sagittaron culture, never mentioned in any detail on the show (Dualla, we learn in the episode, is a Sagittaron.) The plot of the show itself is a classic whodunit, but the whole set-up doesn't so much build on a previous episode as say to the viewer, "By the way, this has been happening the whole time."
This also true of another episode from last season, "Dirty Hands," which, like "The Woman King," featured no Cylon activity and instead focused on a secondary character (although the Chief has now become the bruised heart of the show) experiencing a crisis of conscience with everyone else we know and love (even his wife) standing against him. "Dirty Hands" featured essentially the first mention of a class structure in the show's history, with Baltar as an imprisoned Lenin figure. Many people called these episodes "standalone" because they didn't further the "mythology" of the show (and if any word has been dryhumped into anti-meaning by pop-cultists, it's "mythology").
Yet both feature such a wealth of material - information about Colony culture, ingrained rivalries, the hidden pasts of our characters, allegory charged with testosterone ("Dirty Hands" was maybe the first time since "Norma Rae" and maybe since "October" that going on strike actually seemed dangerous, and thrilling.) Above all, nothing about the way people act in the episodes seems out of character, so much as informing what we've always known. One of the best exchanges in the series comes in "Dirty Hands," when Baltar asked, "Do you really think this ship will ever be run by someone not named Adama?" (Season 3 was full of all kinds of dark allusions like this, which is why nobody liked it then and why it may just age better than any other season.)
What I'm trying to say is that "BSG" isn't just changing how television is written, but it's demanding that the viewer change how they watch television. Little "standalone" episodes like this give you the impression that there really is a whole pulsing environment, an actual community among the fleet. It's a kind of backstage continuity. It locates the story of the show - both an individual episode and the whole series - as just one tiny part of a grander world. "Lost" is certainly like this - we're only just getting a sense of the central conflict for the island. But "Sopranos" was also like this - steadily building characters over seasons at a time, so that Vito seemed to appear almost out of nowhere, except that he'd been there in the background for years.
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