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selenakLooking back at BSG with some distance: a couple both remarkable for what they aren't and for what they are, and still very unusual in any fandom. Let's start with what they aren't which will make it clear what I'm getting at. In the original Battlestar Galactica, Baltar is an unambiguous megalomaniac villain, selling humanity out for power to the Cylons, who are just as unambiguously bad. There is no Six; there is the discreetly named Lucifer, who is most certainly not in love with Baltar.
Now, the reimagined BSG casting Baltar with a young and attractive actor like James Callis and the main Cylon in his life with Tricia Helfer would not necessarily have meant anything interesting. It simply would have added sex. What makes all the difference from the get go is that these new versions aren't, from the get go, written as an evil glamour couple. (Which would have been the obvious choice.) Think Spike and Dru as they were originally introduced in s2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example. Gaius Baltar in the new BSG is as far from a cool villain as it possible to get. For starters, he keeps ending up in uncool and embarrassing situations (of which getting caught with his latest one night stand by Six in the opening BSG miniseries is just the first of many, and downright dignified to later events). He flairs. He fumbles. He's also, very ironic for someone who at one point in the show is President of what's left of humanity and at another a cult leader, singularly uninterested in power. Gaius Baltar's brand of ego and selfishness works in other ways, but "ruling the world/universe/whatever" isn't what gets him going. (He likes to be liked and admired, though. This is not an uplifting character trait to have when you're about to become most hated person in the fleet at one point.) He's also, very atypical for someone whom the preceding narrative had conditioned people to expect to be a villain, and very rare in the actual narrative he's in, not into hate. (Which isn't to say that he can't have grudges: running against Roslin for President in later s2 is basically all about a grudge, though not a hate-fueled one. Characteristically for Gaius B., it's about Roslin not appreciating him. Dammit, Laura, why won't you like me? And did I mention I saved your life lately?) In a show where almost all other characters, be they heroic or villainous (or both), at some point succumb to an "us versus them" mentality and/or blaming one particular other character for their miseries (rightly or wrongly), this is highly unusual. Now you could say that since he's one of the key causes of why the Cylons managed to wipe out much of humanity at the very start of the show, Gaius is not in a position to hate on anyone else, but having their own horrible track records certainly never stopped most other humans or Cylons, and it's not like Baltar, survival artist that he is, doesn't still go through hell in the course of the show as much as your next hero or villain. He gets tortured by Cylons, he gets tortured by humans, he gets put on trial by both, too, but not only is he the first character to call the "you wrong us so we wrong you so you wrong us" cycle stupid, but he never, through four seasons, takes that emotional out of hating a group or an invidual representative as the result of his miseries. Meanwhile, the narrative is careful not to paint him as a misunderstood hero, either. His reaction to finding out that humanity is about to be hit by an attack due to his inadvertendly having helped the attackers to take down the defense main frame is to immediately call for his lawyer. When he does save people, as in Fragged (by shooting the trigger crazy lieutenant) or Epiphany (Roslin and Sharon's embryo at the same time), it's usually because of enlightened self interest, i.e. his own survival is at stake. When he does end up President for entirely petty reasons (see above, re: Why Don't You Like Me, Laura, So There!), he fails humanity long before the Cylons ever arrive at New Caprica by treating it mainly as a source for pills and hedonism. It takes his former most fervent admirer Felix Gaeta pointing a gun at him for Gaius to notice that maybe he's ruined the man's life by this. And I haven't even gotten to the part where Gaius Baltar, while male, usually is paired with women who are physically stronger than him, and not just because they're Cylons. The show never makes any attempt to disguise James Callis is shorter than Tricia Helfer. Or Lucy Lawles. (Or Tory's actress. Or, if we include non-Cylons, Katee Sackhoff.) He falls out of both the villain and hero parameter, which makes his story so unpredictable.
Six early on seems to fit the expected "sexy villain" parameter better; the signature red dress in her very first appearance seems to establish this, she's the main Cylon voice advocating humanity's doom in the first season, plus we don't get to differentiate between Head!Six and Caprica Six until later season 2 (more about Downloaded in a minute). But even so, the miniseries also includes an early hint of what's to come. I've said it before, I'll say it again: BSG has to be the only show where a scene where a woman killing a baby actually makes her less evil and more layered. It's the way Tricia Helfer plays it, of course. I know I sat up and started to be intrigued there, because Six comes across as utterly unmalicious there, and not doing it because she can, either, but because she knows what's to come (the global burning) and doesn't want the baby to suffer. And then there's her atypical-for-the-cliché reaction to Gaius' desperate need to survive. She's just accomplished the mission she was sent to Caprica for, and he's presenting himself at his most flawed in his panicked concern for his own survival. But that's when she decides to save his life. She's in love with this very flawed, unheroic man.
Now because until Downloaded, the Six the audience gets most familiar with is the version in Baltar's head, and until Downloaded, there is no reason not to believe this is in fact the one from the miniseries whom he was involved with on Caprica - Gaius certainly believes it until Caprica Six walks towards him on New Caprica at the end of s2 -, there is far less canon on Caprica Six than there is on Gaius Baltar. Not to mention that in seasons 3 and 4, when Caprica Six is around as her own character, some of her key scenes (like Roslin interrogating her once she's on the Galactica) ended up cut and only on the dvds as deleted scenes. But there is some, and the comparison to Head!Six is quite instructive, especially since you can compare her Head!Baltar with actual Gaius as a parallel. The Head!versions are sharper in every sense - more sarcastic, smarter, more determined, never changing their opinions. They are "cool" in the way the "real" versions aren't because they're utterly lacking their vulnerability, their awkwardness. And while Caprica Six isn't prone to the occasional literal or metaphorical pratfall the way Gaius is, this is true for her as well. She's not into power, either, or the type to direct events. The nameless Six whom Helo spots in the first season seems to have had a leading position, and Natalie will briefly later, but the one time Caprica Six, together with Boomer, gets into a leading position within the Cylons and affects their policies for a while, she's quickly outmanouevred by the Cavils. In the third season, she both betrays Gaius (when she agrees to him being tortured by D'Anna) and is betrayed by him (when he leaves her behind for D'Anna). Her decision to come to the Galactica with Sharon is on impulse, not a thought out plan, though it comes from something that started earlier, because Caprica Six from the miniseries onwards has shown a fascination with the humanity she was sent to extinguish, and the impulse to fall in love with them.
I said earlier that Baltar probably doesnt distinguish between Head!Six and Caprica Six until Caprica shows up in his life again (and I would argue there's emotional spillover even after this). But the first time he mentions the word "love" (I'm not counting the time in season 1 when "Shelley Godfrey" made him afraid for his own life) in regards to what he feels for either and sounds as if he means it he's not talking to either of them, he's talking retrospectively, and the woman he's talking to is yet another version of Six: Gina. The mid season 2 trilogy around the Pegasus and its crew for the first time confronts Gaius with another Six, and it's one who both did exactly what Caprica did - Gina, too, infiltrated human society and used her romantic relationship with one particular human to help engineer global genocide without this human knowing - and one whose lover in reaction to this condemmed her to a terrible fate just the opposite of Caprica's. Gaius will eventually fail Gina, but in the Pegasus three parter his actions regarding her come across for the first time as not being driven by self interest, but by the horror of seeing a woman systematically abused and tortured, a woman who is the doppelganger who decided his own fate. To clarify: if Gina had been an Eight or a Three, I think Gaius would still been horrified by what she went through and tried to help her, but I have my doubts as to whether he'd have risked his life freeing her. Imo that one depended on her being a Six. Then again, if Gina hadn't been a Six he might not have made the catastrophic mistake months later to treat her as if she were Caprica. That she ended up killing herself (irrevocably, since there was no Hub nearby), by means he had given her, and by means which allowed her to kill a lot of other humans besides, is something that no one but Baltar ever knows, and that adds yet another layer (of guilt) in the way he relates to the Sixes. S3 in many ways demonstrates the impossibility of Gaius and Caprica Six as a couple - living together among humans on occupied New Caprica is a disaster (he's a despised traitor, she's the symbol of his betrayal), living together among the Cylons is a disaster (now he's the symbol of failed Cylon politics, and definitely not one of them), and when they end up, separately, as prisoners among the humans, there is no attempt anymore for connection (save by his lawyer who needs Caprica not to testify against Baltar). And yet their story turns around again.
Caprica Six/Tigh is probably the most underwritten and undersold relationship on the show, which is saying something, but the one reason why I'm glad it's there is because it gives Caprica a relationship with someone other than Gaius, which means that when they eventually find each other again, it's not because he's the default option or she could never envision anyone else. (And, you know. If Caprica has a type, it's the flawed beta male. Even if Saul has no other thing in common with Gaius.) For his part, Gaius has been seeing less and less of Head!Six, and not so coincidentally been observing Caprica as she 's now - not the seductress in the red dress, always perfectly styled, but the pregnant woman trying to make it in (rightfully) resentful human society. A real woman, not a fantasy. This is the one he (with foot in mouth the first time) tries to get back into any type of relationship with. But then, as the finale flashbacks demonstrate: wasn't it the very element of reality among the fantasy that clinched their relationship at the very start as something other than honeytrap/seduced dupe?
At this point of the show, its very end, you'd think there was nothing left to say, backstory wise, about Gaius and Six, but it turns out there was. Not how they met - the show doesn't bother with that, and it's incidental, we all know what happened, she was pretty, he noticed, as he was supposed to. No, what came after. When their predictable flirtation/foreplay was interrupted by him being called because of the latest disaster with his father, and his entire self created persona, the person whom he wants to be - Gaius Baltar, suave genius scientist and Caprica playboy - falls apart right in front of her. That argument with his father is him both at his worst and best. (And, as always, utterly uncool.) It's childish to get into a shouting match with a senile old man. It's also utterly un-selfish, un-Baltar like to have said ranting senile old man with him instead of leaving him on the agricultural planet Aerolon, the home Gaius tried to desparately to escape and leave behind. (This is also when a first time watcher realises Gaius didn't lie in season 3 when telling Tyrol where he originally came from.) Now remember how the Cylons, with the exception of Cavil who knew the truth and was responsible for the falsehood, saw themselves at this point: as humanity's children who were badly used and were coming home to judge and avenge. (It's another reason why Caprica Six originally is fascinated by the sight of the baby and mother in the miniseries - parent/child relationships are of deep interest.) It's a metaphor they use again and again. And here Caprica Six sees a human evidently in a bad relationship with his parent - but without the human, who is in no way heroic, who is greedy for all that life has to other, discarding said parent. This is simply new and outside the parent/child parameter she's been taught.
Meanwhile, Gaius asks her to go because this has been utterly humiliating, and she's no longer a fantasy-fulfilling sex pot, she's someone who has seen the Gaius-from-Aerolon he really really doesn't want to be anymore. And then she turns it around by finding a solution for his father. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think she does it for love - after all, she needs to get Baltar to allow her access to the defense grid, and he's far more likely to do that if she can become his long term girlfriend instead of a one night stand, and in order to become a long term girlfriend she needs to somehow impress him. But from his pov, this is new as well. Someone responding to the reality, not the fantasy of his life (and very efficiently so), someone managing to be somehow both, fantasy and reality at the same time.
It's those flashbacks that ground and prepare the very last scene of Gaius and Six (well, other than their head!selves who get a scene even after that) and sell me emotionally on it. If you watch the miniseries and the first season, I'm sure that of all the couples and potential couples introduced there, nobody guessed that Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six would be the ones to end up with each other by the time the show ended. Note I avoid the term "happy ending" , though on one level it is. But what also makes it is that it's both the best and worst thing that can happen to them. They've both been guilty, in different degrees, of a genocidal war, and there always had been the question of whehter there would be narrative punishment (and what could be aequate punishment for the fate of the twelve colonies?) or atonement via death. In the end, it was neither. They're on a primitive planet and soon without any access to modern medicine; it's exactly what Gaius had been running from all his life before the apocalypse ever started. It's a fixed reality, where the Cylons, as we found out in s3, were able to project the environment they wanted around themselves, not having to see the one they were actually in. (Caprica chose trees, and so, as we later see, did Natalie.) No more. And yet they are able to be together, of wanting to be together, without any pretense. Composer Bear McCreary when talking about the music he used for their "I know about farming"/"I know you do" exchange said that "I know you" (also used, he pointed out, by Gaius to Felix Gaeta in a scene earlier this season, during their last meeting before Gaeta's execution and in reply to Gaeta's "no one will ever know who I am") to him was the most profound way to say "I love you". And they do. Neither the villains nor the heroes in the tale they were in, they know each other completely.
I don't think they're in for a life time of bliss after the finale. (See above re: primitive planet, life time nightmare scenario, also, Gaius as failboat.) But I think, because of this knowledge, they will be more often happy than not, and will continue to defy narratives of heroes and villains by being neither for the rest of their lives.
December Talking Meme: The Other Days
Now, the reimagined BSG casting Baltar with a young and attractive actor like James Callis and the main Cylon in his life with Tricia Helfer would not necessarily have meant anything interesting. It simply would have added sex. What makes all the difference from the get go is that these new versions aren't, from the get go, written as an evil glamour couple. (Which would have been the obvious choice.) Think Spike and Dru as they were originally introduced in s2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for example. Gaius Baltar in the new BSG is as far from a cool villain as it possible to get. For starters, he keeps ending up in uncool and embarrassing situations (of which getting caught with his latest one night stand by Six in the opening BSG miniseries is just the first of many, and downright dignified to later events). He flairs. He fumbles. He's also, very ironic for someone who at one point in the show is President of what's left of humanity and at another a cult leader, singularly uninterested in power. Gaius Baltar's brand of ego and selfishness works in other ways, but "ruling the world/universe/whatever" isn't what gets him going. (He likes to be liked and admired, though. This is not an uplifting character trait to have when you're about to become most hated person in the fleet at one point.) He's also, very atypical for someone whom the preceding narrative had conditioned people to expect to be a villain, and very rare in the actual narrative he's in, not into hate. (Which isn't to say that he can't have grudges: running against Roslin for President in later s2 is basically all about a grudge, though not a hate-fueled one. Characteristically for Gaius B., it's about Roslin not appreciating him. Dammit, Laura, why won't you like me? And did I mention I saved your life lately?) In a show where almost all other characters, be they heroic or villainous (or both), at some point succumb to an "us versus them" mentality and/or blaming one particular other character for their miseries (rightly or wrongly), this is highly unusual. Now you could say that since he's one of the key causes of why the Cylons managed to wipe out much of humanity at the very start of the show, Gaius is not in a position to hate on anyone else, but having their own horrible track records certainly never stopped most other humans or Cylons, and it's not like Baltar, survival artist that he is, doesn't still go through hell in the course of the show as much as your next hero or villain. He gets tortured by Cylons, he gets tortured by humans, he gets put on trial by both, too, but not only is he the first character to call the "you wrong us so we wrong you so you wrong us" cycle stupid, but he never, through four seasons, takes that emotional out of hating a group or an invidual representative as the result of his miseries. Meanwhile, the narrative is careful not to paint him as a misunderstood hero, either. His reaction to finding out that humanity is about to be hit by an attack due to his inadvertendly having helped the attackers to take down the defense main frame is to immediately call for his lawyer. When he does save people, as in Fragged (by shooting the trigger crazy lieutenant) or Epiphany (Roslin and Sharon's embryo at the same time), it's usually because of enlightened self interest, i.e. his own survival is at stake. When he does end up President for entirely petty reasons (see above, re: Why Don't You Like Me, Laura, So There!), he fails humanity long before the Cylons ever arrive at New Caprica by treating it mainly as a source for pills and hedonism. It takes his former most fervent admirer Felix Gaeta pointing a gun at him for Gaius to notice that maybe he's ruined the man's life by this. And I haven't even gotten to the part where Gaius Baltar, while male, usually is paired with women who are physically stronger than him, and not just because they're Cylons. The show never makes any attempt to disguise James Callis is shorter than Tricia Helfer. Or Lucy Lawles. (Or Tory's actress. Or, if we include non-Cylons, Katee Sackhoff.) He falls out of both the villain and hero parameter, which makes his story so unpredictable.
Six early on seems to fit the expected "sexy villain" parameter better; the signature red dress in her very first appearance seems to establish this, she's the main Cylon voice advocating humanity's doom in the first season, plus we don't get to differentiate between Head!Six and Caprica Six until later season 2 (more about Downloaded in a minute). But even so, the miniseries also includes an early hint of what's to come. I've said it before, I'll say it again: BSG has to be the only show where a scene where a woman killing a baby actually makes her less evil and more layered. It's the way Tricia Helfer plays it, of course. I know I sat up and started to be intrigued there, because Six comes across as utterly unmalicious there, and not doing it because she can, either, but because she knows what's to come (the global burning) and doesn't want the baby to suffer. And then there's her atypical-for-the-cliché reaction to Gaius' desperate need to survive. She's just accomplished the mission she was sent to Caprica for, and he's presenting himself at his most flawed in his panicked concern for his own survival. But that's when she decides to save his life. She's in love with this very flawed, unheroic man.
Now because until Downloaded, the Six the audience gets most familiar with is the version in Baltar's head, and until Downloaded, there is no reason not to believe this is in fact the one from the miniseries whom he was involved with on Caprica - Gaius certainly believes it until Caprica Six walks towards him on New Caprica at the end of s2 -, there is far less canon on Caprica Six than there is on Gaius Baltar. Not to mention that in seasons 3 and 4, when Caprica Six is around as her own character, some of her key scenes (like Roslin interrogating her once she's on the Galactica) ended up cut and only on the dvds as deleted scenes. But there is some, and the comparison to Head!Six is quite instructive, especially since you can compare her Head!Baltar with actual Gaius as a parallel. The Head!versions are sharper in every sense - more sarcastic, smarter, more determined, never changing their opinions. They are "cool" in the way the "real" versions aren't because they're utterly lacking their vulnerability, their awkwardness. And while Caprica Six isn't prone to the occasional literal or metaphorical pratfall the way Gaius is, this is true for her as well. She's not into power, either, or the type to direct events. The nameless Six whom Helo spots in the first season seems to have had a leading position, and Natalie will briefly later, but the one time Caprica Six, together with Boomer, gets into a leading position within the Cylons and affects their policies for a while, she's quickly outmanouevred by the Cavils. In the third season, she both betrays Gaius (when she agrees to him being tortured by D'Anna) and is betrayed by him (when he leaves her behind for D'Anna). Her decision to come to the Galactica with Sharon is on impulse, not a thought out plan, though it comes from something that started earlier, because Caprica Six from the miniseries onwards has shown a fascination with the humanity she was sent to extinguish, and the impulse to fall in love with them.
I said earlier that Baltar probably doesnt distinguish between Head!Six and Caprica Six until Caprica shows up in his life again (and I would argue there's emotional spillover even after this). But the first time he mentions the word "love" (I'm not counting the time in season 1 when "Shelley Godfrey" made him afraid for his own life) in regards to what he feels for either and sounds as if he means it he's not talking to either of them, he's talking retrospectively, and the woman he's talking to is yet another version of Six: Gina. The mid season 2 trilogy around the Pegasus and its crew for the first time confronts Gaius with another Six, and it's one who both did exactly what Caprica did - Gina, too, infiltrated human society and used her romantic relationship with one particular human to help engineer global genocide without this human knowing - and one whose lover in reaction to this condemmed her to a terrible fate just the opposite of Caprica's. Gaius will eventually fail Gina, but in the Pegasus three parter his actions regarding her come across for the first time as not being driven by self interest, but by the horror of seeing a woman systematically abused and tortured, a woman who is the doppelganger who decided his own fate. To clarify: if Gina had been an Eight or a Three, I think Gaius would still been horrified by what she went through and tried to help her, but I have my doubts as to whether he'd have risked his life freeing her. Imo that one depended on her being a Six. Then again, if Gina hadn't been a Six he might not have made the catastrophic mistake months later to treat her as if she were Caprica. That she ended up killing herself (irrevocably, since there was no Hub nearby), by means he had given her, and by means which allowed her to kill a lot of other humans besides, is something that no one but Baltar ever knows, and that adds yet another layer (of guilt) in the way he relates to the Sixes. S3 in many ways demonstrates the impossibility of Gaius and Caprica Six as a couple - living together among humans on occupied New Caprica is a disaster (he's a despised traitor, she's the symbol of his betrayal), living together among the Cylons is a disaster (now he's the symbol of failed Cylon politics, and definitely not one of them), and when they end up, separately, as prisoners among the humans, there is no attempt anymore for connection (save by his lawyer who needs Caprica not to testify against Baltar). And yet their story turns around again.
Caprica Six/Tigh is probably the most underwritten and undersold relationship on the show, which is saying something, but the one reason why I'm glad it's there is because it gives Caprica a relationship with someone other than Gaius, which means that when they eventually find each other again, it's not because he's the default option or she could never envision anyone else. (And, you know. If Caprica has a type, it's the flawed beta male. Even if Saul has no other thing in common with Gaius.) For his part, Gaius has been seeing less and less of Head!Six, and not so coincidentally been observing Caprica as she 's now - not the seductress in the red dress, always perfectly styled, but the pregnant woman trying to make it in (rightfully) resentful human society. A real woman, not a fantasy. This is the one he (with foot in mouth the first time) tries to get back into any type of relationship with. But then, as the finale flashbacks demonstrate: wasn't it the very element of reality among the fantasy that clinched their relationship at the very start as something other than honeytrap/seduced dupe?
At this point of the show, its very end, you'd think there was nothing left to say, backstory wise, about Gaius and Six, but it turns out there was. Not how they met - the show doesn't bother with that, and it's incidental, we all know what happened, she was pretty, he noticed, as he was supposed to. No, what came after. When their predictable flirtation/foreplay was interrupted by him being called because of the latest disaster with his father, and his entire self created persona, the person whom he wants to be - Gaius Baltar, suave genius scientist and Caprica playboy - falls apart right in front of her. That argument with his father is him both at his worst and best. (And, as always, utterly uncool.) It's childish to get into a shouting match with a senile old man. It's also utterly un-selfish, un-Baltar like to have said ranting senile old man with him instead of leaving him on the agricultural planet Aerolon, the home Gaius tried to desparately to escape and leave behind. (This is also when a first time watcher realises Gaius didn't lie in season 3 when telling Tyrol where he originally came from.) Now remember how the Cylons, with the exception of Cavil who knew the truth and was responsible for the falsehood, saw themselves at this point: as humanity's children who were badly used and were coming home to judge and avenge. (It's another reason why Caprica Six originally is fascinated by the sight of the baby and mother in the miniseries - parent/child relationships are of deep interest.) It's a metaphor they use again and again. And here Caprica Six sees a human evidently in a bad relationship with his parent - but without the human, who is in no way heroic, who is greedy for all that life has to other, discarding said parent. This is simply new and outside the parent/child parameter she's been taught.
Meanwhile, Gaius asks her to go because this has been utterly humiliating, and she's no longer a fantasy-fulfilling sex pot, she's someone who has seen the Gaius-from-Aerolon he really really doesn't want to be anymore. And then she turns it around by finding a solution for his father. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think she does it for love - after all, she needs to get Baltar to allow her access to the defense grid, and he's far more likely to do that if she can become his long term girlfriend instead of a one night stand, and in order to become a long term girlfriend she needs to somehow impress him. But from his pov, this is new as well. Someone responding to the reality, not the fantasy of his life (and very efficiently so), someone managing to be somehow both, fantasy and reality at the same time.
It's those flashbacks that ground and prepare the very last scene of Gaius and Six (well, other than their head!selves who get a scene even after that) and sell me emotionally on it. If you watch the miniseries and the first season, I'm sure that of all the couples and potential couples introduced there, nobody guessed that Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six would be the ones to end up with each other by the time the show ended. Note I avoid the term "happy ending" , though on one level it is. But what also makes it is that it's both the best and worst thing that can happen to them. They've both been guilty, in different degrees, of a genocidal war, and there always had been the question of whehter there would be narrative punishment (and what could be aequate punishment for the fate of the twelve colonies?) or atonement via death. In the end, it was neither. They're on a primitive planet and soon without any access to modern medicine; it's exactly what Gaius had been running from all his life before the apocalypse ever started. It's a fixed reality, where the Cylons, as we found out in s3, were able to project the environment they wanted around themselves, not having to see the one they were actually in. (Caprica chose trees, and so, as we later see, did Natalie.) No more. And yet they are able to be together, of wanting to be together, without any pretense. Composer Bear McCreary when talking about the music he used for their "I know about farming"/"I know you do" exchange said that "I know you" (also used, he pointed out, by Gaius to Felix Gaeta in a scene earlier this season, during their last meeting before Gaeta's execution and in reply to Gaeta's "no one will ever know who I am") to him was the most profound way to say "I love you". And they do. Neither the villains nor the heroes in the tale they were in, they know each other completely.
I don't think they're in for a life time of bliss after the finale. (See above re: primitive planet, life time nightmare scenario, also, Gaius as failboat.) But I think, because of this knowledge, they will be more often happy than not, and will continue to defy narratives of heroes and villains by being neither for the rest of their lives.
December Talking Meme: The Other Days
