Movies - Gaius Baltar

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	Movies - Gaius Baltar

In the Battlestar Galactica remake series, Gaius Baltar is the current President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, as well as a brilliant scientist who is a key player in the Twelve Colonies' defense research. At the onset of the miniseries, Baltar is involved in an intense sexual relationship with a beautiful blonde woman. Believing the woman to be an employee of a rival computer corporation, Baltar slips to his lover certain computer secrets from his defense work. The woman (known as "Number Six") reveals to Baltar that she is in fact an advanced version of Cylon, and that the Cylons will use the computer secrets that Baltar has given her to infiltrate the Colonial defense systems, disable the Colonial military and attack the Twelve Worlds. That day the Cylons launched their attack and destroyed most of humanity.

Having thus recklessly (although unintentionally) brought about the near-annihilation of the human species, Baltar manages to flee Caprica (Helo gives up his position on the ship to save Baltar), finding refuge with the Galactica and its refugee fleet of civilian ships. There Baltar endears himself to Laura Roslin, the new President of the remnants of the Twelve Colonies, while nonetheless continuing to look out for his own interests above all else -- particularly his interest in preventing knowledge of his role in the genocide of humanity from being revealed.

Baltar is haunted by visions of Number Six, with whom he converses often. It is intentionally left ambiguous whether these visions are the product of a computer chip that Number Six implanted in Baltar's brain while they were together on Caprica (the explanation originally given by a Number Six vision, but which she later refutes); or whether the visions are a manifestation of Baltar's own mind, as Baltar grows insane from the guilt that he feels over his unwitting role in the genocide of humanity.

The vision of Number Six manipulates Baltar through his fear of anyone discovering his betrayal -- such manipulation may represent the Cylons influencing Baltar to work to their ends, or it may represent Baltar's own subconscious desperately seeking to avoid a discovery of his role in the Cylon attack.

In a twist of events, Baltar was later voted in as Roslin's Vice President. In the second season episode "Home, Part II" Baltar underwent a brain scan similar to an MRI which revealed no sign of a computer chip or any other foreign object in Baltar's brain. While this briefly led Baltar to think that he had truly gone insane, he then realized that the vision of Number Six he sees could not possibly be a hallucination generated by his subconscious mind, because she is aware of facts that his own mind could not possibly know. Number Six told Baltar that the first Human/Cylon Hybrid would be born in the ship's brig, and soon after the Caprican version of the Cylon Sharon Valerii (pregnant with the human Karl Agathon's child) was imprisoned in it. When Baltar confronted Six with this, she admited that she was neither a computer chip nor a hallucination produced by mental instability. When Baltar then asked just who or what she was, she simply replied that she was "an angel of God sent here to protect you, to guide you and to love you."

Recently, Baltar's relationship with Six was troubled by the appearance of Gina, another Six copy who had been posing as a maintenance worker on the Battlestar Pegasus
. After discovering Gina, who had been repeatedly tortured and raped by Pegasus crewmembers, Baltar grew fond of her, making the illusory Six rather jealous. He eventually helped Gina escape from the Pegasus and arranges a place for her safety. Gina later forms a pacifist movement within the fleet, though it is noteworthy their methods are not always peaceful, and Baltar is initially reluctant to support the organization despite his affections for her. Later however, after saving President Roslin from terminal cancer, he reads the letter (a custom performed by all presidents, written to their successors) she had left for him to be opened upon her death which notes his "selfish nature" and asks that he overcome it for the well-being of the fleet. Angered by this, he gives Gina and the movement the nuclear bomb Adama afforded him in an earlier episode, which Gina later detonates amidst the fleet to inform the Cylons of the location of New Caprica.

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