Ever since my girlfriend—call her Four (don't ask)—found her place among the Battlestar Galactica faithful, she's developed a tic. Whenever Gaius Baltar appears, she shifts in her seat and mumbles a snide comment or two under her breath. If the good (bad) doctor does or says something more grovelingly self-preserving or condescendingly self-inflating than usual, she'll even yell at the television screen. "C--ksucker!" is usually her invective of choice (we also watched Deadwood together).
This isn't customary behavior for the lovely Four. She's no shrinking violet, but before I came on the scene, she barely acknowledged the little 9-inch box she'd cabled into a shadowy corner of her living room to watch The Daily Show. (We've since upgraded. Romance blooms in funny ways, as Gaius would attest.)
It took a few worked-up conversations for me to understand the depth of her animosity toward Gaius, but once I got it, I began to connect some dots. Women—at least the ones I know who are BSG fans—generally loathe him. To Four, he's every fey, narcissistic jerk she ever dated before crossing paths with yours truly; to a friend who e-mails me after every episode, he's the show's uncontested villain—and a lachrymose one at that. (Even sci-fi icon Harlan Ellison, who's no slouch at showy self-absorption himself and certainly nobody's idea of a woman, opened a recent interview with Galactica creator/"re-imaginer" Ronald D. Moore by asking, "Will there be an episode where Dr. Gaius Baltar doesn't whine or cry?") Another female friend takes a pee break whenever Baltar turns up; she literally can't stand the sight of him.
To these women—and, I suspect, many others—Gaius is the very picture of arrogant, unctuous male duplicity who, by virtue of thinking with his dick, brought about the near-annihilation of the human race and, thanks to his equivocative acumen, got off pretty much scot-free.
Fair enough, but who hasn't been there?
That is, what man can't relate to Gaius' apocalyptic capacity for delusional self-aggrandizement, or at least his cosmically scaled ability to cover his ass? What commitment-averse lothario hasn't carried an impossibly pulchritudinous image of the perfect female around in his head since the first ugly throes of puberty?
Maybe I'm anything but the nice guy Four believes I am, but Gaius' moral flabbiness, unwillingness (or, more likely, inability) to reckon with the havoc wreaked by his lack of genuine self-awareness and puppyish enthrallment to controlling women all make perfect sense to me (Four notwithstanding on that last point). And his utter confidence in his craftiness to carry him through any situation—as well as conveniently around the truth—should be familiar to any man. As Four puts it, males tend to overvalue their abilities to the same degree that women undervalue theirs, and Battlestar Galactica's brutally honest grasp of this dovetails beautifully with its radical, take-no-prisoners approach to feminism.
That's just one function Gaius serves on BSG. The character also provides a showcase for James Callis, a versatile, wondrously schizoid actor previously relegated to second-tier British miniseries and—gods help us—the Bridget Jones movies; his scenes are guaranteed mood-lifters in even the weakest episodes. (Ironically, his predecessor in the role, John Colicos, was the best thing about Battlestar Ponderosica, the pimple-brained template for the current show.)
Gaius turns the sci-fi-movie trope of the savior-scientist soundly on its head, as well; about the only thing this all-purpose genius is intent on saving is his own hide. He also serves as BSG's self-righteousness safety valve: Whenever the temptation to view its Cylons as bloodthirsty machines—and, conversely, its humans as flawed but basically decent heroes—becomes overwhelming, he reminds us that not all soulless machines are hatched in goo-filled Jacuzzis on space-bound greenhouses.
And yet, as the Cylons try to suss out the combination Christian heaven/Buddhist hell that comprises their existence, and the humans work mightily to find a way out of their self-inflicted purgatory, it's Gaius alone who fully engages what the one species can't achieve and the other can't master, but which preoccupies both—love. He's easily the series' most counterintuitively sympathetic figure, then, and thus its most unequivocally human one. I think even Four might concede that much, but maybe not.
Regardless, it's clear that if Gaius Baltar didn't exist within the universe of Battlestar Galactica, it'd be necessary to invent him. And we know where that leads.