When answers lead to more questions

Hoshi and Racetrack keep knocking, but nobody's home.

Battlestar Galactica’s “The Face of the Enemy” webisodes started out a few short weeks ago full of questions about who was killing the six occupants of a Raptor, one by one. But even now that we have had a confession by the killer, the nagging question still left is why did the killer believe there’d be no consequences? Yes, Webisode 8 opens with even more murders. Lt. Felix Gaeta rushes to tell the pilots Finn and Esrin that Eight has hooked up to the Raptor’s computer and managed to trace their steps back to their original jump point, and finds they’re dead with their throats slit. And with those last two deaths, no one is left on the Raptor but Gaeta and the Eight, so the jig is up. Gaeta realizes his little alliance with the Eight has been a grave mistake, since she’s been murdering everyone on the ship. The only answers left to find now are why and what is Gaeta going to do about it?

Well, we’ve got two webisodes left, so that must remain somewhat of a mystery. Not that we don’t get an answer at all from the Eight: She killed everyone but Gaeta to conserve the available air in the Raptor for herself and Gaeta only. She did it, she implies, because she still has some kind of feelings for Gaeta leftover from New Caprica. She did it, as she says to Gaeta in Webisode 8, to protect him from a tough decision she knew he couldn’t make himself but that she insists was on his mind as soon as their jump went awry. As you can imagine, the reasoning that he wanted to kill these people all along to save himself goes down like  a lead balloon with the idealistic, morally upright Felix Gaeta.

Oh, and it should be mentioned that in the meantime, back in the Raptor, Hoshi is having his own crisis of faith. He and Racetrack are coming to the reluctant conclusion that they are indeed looking for a needle in the haystack of space, and that any realistic person would give up this search and rescue mission by now. Ultimately, Hoshi agrees with Racetrack’s assertion that Felix would stop looking for Hoshi if the positions were reversed. If it didn’t make sense anymore to look, she tells him, Felix would stop. Hoshi looks stoically dejected, but gives the go-ahead to return to Galactica.

Back on the Raptor of Death, Gaeta is horrified and bewildered at the Eight’s confession. Frankly, I am almost as bewildered as Gaeta about it. Did she really think that Gaeta would fall to his knees and thank her for killing five of his people? Surely when they get back to Galactica (I’m presuming they do since there have been promos featuring Gaeta in Season 4.5), everyone’s going to blame either him or her for the obviously deliberate murders. Does she plan to confess to the murders when she gets back, to sacrifice her freedom and possibly her life for his, to get him home alive? Because she loves him that much?

Unlikely. Because while this Eight is in a mood for revelations, she also reveals to Gaeta that after all, she wasn’t actually liberating those prisoners whose names he gave her back on New Caprica during their affair. Actually, she had them all killed. Yes, deliberately. And just so we’re clear, we get a flashback of Gaeta asleep in his tent (which I presume we’re supposed to believe is a post-coital nap) and the Eight handing Gaeta’s prisoner names to another non-descript Eight, ordering her sister Cylon to “kill all the names on this list”.

Much like the bigger Cylon alliance seems doomed in Season 4.5, this little alliance of necessity between Gaeta and his Eight now goes downhill, at FTL speed.

In shock and anger, Gaeta stops her from connecting to the Raptor’s computer, at the same time that Eight is chiding him for naively trusting her. “There is a fine line between ignorance and hope,” she tells him. “You have to open your eyes. You have to see what the world is really like.”

And Webisode 8 ends with a cliffhanger of sorts, as one wonders if Gaeta will go over the edge and attack Eight, not to mention how he will ever be rescued now that Hoshi and Racetrack have stopped searching for him?

Webisode 9 premieres at noon Wednesday. It has some serious ground to cover.