Spoilers ahead!

In "The Oath," a young tactical officer named Felix Gaeta lead a rebellion against Admiral Adama's leadership, challenging the military government's choice to ally with the Rebel cylon fleet. Though Gaeta has been living in an ethical gray area for a while, many were taken aback by his sudden flare-up of evil.

His transformation, however, represented the culmination of several plot lines stretching all the way back to the Fleet's encounter with the fascistic Battlestar Pegasus, whose violent, military leader Admiral Cain was a dark foil for Adama. If you were a dork like me and watched the DVD extras, you'd have seen a plucky, cute side of the early Gaeta. In one extra scene, the young tactical officer meets with officers from the Pegasus, who say they can transfer to him all the data on their shipboard computers, including some kind of futuristic mega-Wikipedia that contains all human knowledge. Gaeta smiles and says, "Hey, do you have any porn?"

We know that Gaeta served with Adama for a few years before the Cylon attack, and his talent with techie tactics has helped the Fleet out of several scrapes. He's also often held the ship's leadership to a high moral standard, and has a history of acting on his convictions. He's the guy who uncovered Tigh and Dualla's plot to rig the election when Baltar is running against Roslin. When he refuses to keep quiet about this perversion of democracy, he's rewarded by new president Baltar with the position of presidential aide.

And that's when our plucky, idealistic young Gaeta started to go bad. Baltar decides to bring the Fleet to New Caprica, which is soon occupied by a cylon force. During the cylon occupation, Gaeta tries his best to retain his strong moral center. When he discovers that resistance leaders are being executed, he betrays Baltar and begins secretly passing information to resistance leaders. Without his aid, it's likely the human resistance would never have succeeded. But when he returns to the Fleet, after risking his life repeatedly to save it, he's spit on by the people he saved.

Nobody believes that he was part of the resistance, and Starbuck's secret court almost has him airlocked. He's treated like a pariah, beaten, and nearly killed for a crime he did not commit. At the last minute, he's able to prove he was the resistance mole and Starbuck lets him go. Eventually, his role in the resistance is widely-known and he's given proper credit by the Fleet. Even after he's reintegrated into the fleet, however, he's still punished. He loses his leg in a clash between Helo and Starbuck during their search for Earth.

Still, as we learned in the webisodes "Face of the Enemy" that took place between the first and second half of this season, Gaeta has a lot on his conscience that we didn't know about. When he was working with the resistance on New Caprica, it turns out he developed a romantic relationship with a Number Eight Sharon model cylon whom he thought was helping him to sneak prisoners out of the cylon jail. But in "Face of the Enemy," his Number Eight reveals that she was, in fact, killing many of the prisoners he'd asked her to release. And then she kills more humans when they are stranded in a space capsule together, arguing that they had to die so he would have enough oxygen to survive. Worst of all, she blames Gaeta for the deaths of the prisoners back on New Caprica, claiming he suspected what she was doing and had done nothing to stop her.

At that point, it seems that all of the pain Gaeta has endured in his efforts to help the human Fleet comes crashing back into his brain. He's lost everything, now. All the sacrifices he made on New Caprica, and all the horrors he endured when he returned, seem for naught. Perhaps he really was the evil collaborator that Starbuck believed he was all along. In a fit of rage, he murders his Number Eight right before the Galactica rescues him.

It is this Gaeta who returns to the Galactica and begins the insurrection as the second half of season 4 begins. His confidence in his own moral goodness has been shattered, and his one positive relationship with a cylon has turned to terrifying betrayal. Though he hates Starbuck, he suspects that she may have been right about him after all. What happens to a person who believes they have been doing good, but then learns they have been collaborating with evil?

I think we have to regard Gaeta's actions in "The Oath" in this light. We know that the once-carefree and idealistic tactical officer has a history of speaking truth to power. He may not be one of the most powerful people in the Fleet, but he wasn't afraid to call shenanigans when Tigh tried to destroy the Fleet's nascent democracy by rigging the election. And he also wasn't afraid to challenge both Baltar and the occupying cylon fleet's power by passing intel to the human resistance. Throughout these trying times, Gaeta has kept himself together by believing that he's upholding moral principles and protecting the Fleet from abuses of power. He's the quintessential little guy who stands up to the Man.

The problem is that when Gaeta challenges the Man, even on legitimate moral grounds, it always makes things worse. When he challenged the rigged election, he wound up putting the weak and corrupt Baltar into power. And when he challenged Adama and Lee's alliance with the cylons - whom he knows from experience cannot be trusted - he allied himself with the power-hungry Zarek. While Zarek's intentions may have been good at one point, he long ago became a classic Machiavellian politician who uses people's idealism to manipulate them.

Unfortunately, the shattered Gaeta falls for Zarek's manipulation completely. Gaeta is still an idealist at heart, and he believes that the military's alliance with the cylons is yet another instance of corruption of power on Galactica. He's just discovered that cylon allies may not be what they seem. He sees the Zarek mutiny as the only way to save the human Fleet from the same fate that met those prisoners on New Caprica, the ones whose lives he trusted to a Number Eight.

If you consider Gaeta's actions from the perspective of all this history, it makes perfect sense that he tries to save the Fleet by taking out its most powerful members. And it also, tragically, makes sense that his efforts result in a situation far worse than the one he's trying to fix. Instead of saving his human brethren, he turns them against each other. Instead of saving lives, he destroys them.

It seems that Gaeta is beginning to realize this when Zarek kills an innocent bystander at the beginning of the episode, but at that point it's too late to turn back. Zarek has become a new version of Gaeta's Number Eight - an ally whom he trusts to save humanity, but who is actually bent on violently controlling it.

I think what's brilliant about "The Oath" is that Gaeta's perfidy may have the unintended consequence of saving the Fleet, just not in the way he expected. In the face of his mutiny, many of the characters who have been wallowing in ethical ambiguity suddenly sharpen up and remember their true duties. Starbuck returns to heroic soldier form when she rescues Lee from mutineers. Adama and Tigh reaffirm their bromantic love for each other as they fight side-by-side for the freedom of the Fleet - and for peace with the cylons. Even the tormented Tyrol returns to form, aiding the resistance against Zarek and Gaeta, risking his life to save president Roslin and Baltar.

Indeed, one of the most promising results of Gaeta's mutiny is the return of Roslin to the role of strong, decisive leader. She's been wanting to step down, enjoy her new romance with Adama, and slowly fade away. But when push comes to shove in "The Oath," she thinks fast and takes command, guiding Starbuck and Lee to Baltar's quarters, where she knows Baltar has a secret wireless communications system she can use to entreat the Fleet to resist the mutiny.

She delivers a stirring speech, begging for peace, and forges what I believe will become an important alliance with Baltar. Even Baltar, the whiny, greasy, morally blank fake religious leader, is redeemed by Gaeta's mutiny. In a pinch, he aids the president and Adama, despite their long history of animosity. And he tries to convince Gaeta to stand down, in a scene that's taut and moving.

For the first time in his life, Gaeta's efforts to save the Fleet may have worked. Just not in the way he intended.

(In case you missed it yesterday, all of the webisodes, except for episode nine, were leaked early on Amazon, and should be easy to find elsewhere now as well.)

The thing that won me over about "The Face Of The Enemy," despite a bigger-than-usual dose of melodrama, was that Gaeta changed as a result of these events. And also the fact that Gaeta didn't have to view these experiences the way he chose to.

Here's what happened: a few days after the fleet found Earth, some of Cavil's Cylons showed up. (Can we call them Imperial Cylons, as opposed to Rebel Cylons?) The fleet jumps away, but one raptor, containing Gaeta, two Sharons and an assortment of redshirts, gets lost. They're running out of oxygen and the jump calculations to rejoin the fleet have gone "non-linear." So it's basically the classic lifeboat situation.

People start dropping dead, and it soon becomes clear there's a murderer aboard. Everyone suspects the one remaining Cylon, but Gaeta had an affair with her back on the planet of New Caprica, when she helped him save people from the prison camps. Oops, it turns out the Sharon really is the killer, and she also didn't help Gaeta save people — she took his lists of people who needed saving, and made sure those people got executed instead. Gaeta kills his ex-lover, and prepares to die alone, covered with blood and surrounded with corpses.

But there's a happy ending! Gaeta's current lover, Hoshi, has been searching for Gaeta in another raptor. And even though it's hopeless, and he knows he's just wasting time (and precious fuel), Hoshi refuses to give up. And he finds Gaeta, with minutes to spare.

So you can look at this story and derive a few different morals: True love conquers all, since Hoshi's love saved Gaeta. Or, be careful whom you trust, since Hoshi was trustworthy and Sharon wasn't. Or even, some Cylons are nicer than others, since this Sharon killed for the occupation while Athena was fighting to destroy it.

Instead, the emotionally scarred Gaeta leaps for the bleakest reading: you can't trust any Cylons. And love is a luxury he can't afford, because the Cylons are about to hit the fan.

At least, after Gaeta goes and bitches out poor Saul Tigh for being a Cylon, and demands to tell Admiral Adama that the alliance with the Cylons was a mistake, he then has a conversation with Hoshi where he appears to dump him, and tells him to keep his head down. And reading between the lines, it sounds as though Gaeta is on his way to meet with Tom Zarek about fomenting revolution against the Roslin/Adama regime.

(By the way, how can anyone think the Cylon alliance was a bad idea? The humans got to destroy the Cylons' Resurrection Hub, preventing the Cylons from resurrecting ever again, assuming the Cylons were telling the truth. They found out who four of the final five were, eliminating a potential security risk. And they found Earth, whose condition wasn't the Cylons' fault. The humans got way more out of it than the Cylons did.)

In any case, if this had been a regular episode of BSG, instead of an episode-length story split into ten bite-sized parts, it would have been a middling installment. Pretty good, not great. Better than "The Woman King" and the episode that killed off Kat. It definitely gets a bit too melodramatic, and the bit where the evil Sharon tells Gaeta "You HAVE to face reality. You HAVE to see the world for what it is," wasn't Grace Park's finest moment.

As for Alessandro Juliani, he does a pretty great job, especially in the last webisode, where he has to carry the whole thing without any dialogue for a bit. (Except more of that singing, of which the less said the better.) The whole sequence where he covers his face with blood, surveys the corpses all around him, and almost kills himself but then doesn't, is pretty awe-inspiring. The rest of the time, he has a bit of his usual deer-in-the-headlights thing going on, but he mostly carries the romantic lead pretty well.

I have a feeling, from the clips we've seen so far, that these webisodes will add to your appreciation of the show's final episodes, even though they were added afterwards. We've already seen a clip of Gaeta lecturing a slightly scared-looking Baltar about his restaurant ideas, and we know that Gaeta and Baltar have unfinished business.

Oh, and the consensus online seems to be that Gaeta's chances of being the final Cylon have gone down considerably after these webisodes. (Bear in mind, they could be a deliberate misdirection, and he could still be our guy.) But if he's a Cylon, he definitely doesn't know it yet, judging from the venom with which he talks to Tigh at the end. Poor Tigh — he's pretty much the only person I feel sorrier for than Gaeta.