If all of man-kind was lost in a war, with the only really true ties to my heritage destroyed and was betrayed by a lover in the course of a week, I’d snap like a twig too.

Although, I don’t know if I could order the deaths of innocent civilians. She lost over 700 people in the initial attacks. She could afford to take them aboard and put them to work on the ship.

I do think Roslin was acting conscience of Adama. Regardless of military training, once you know you’re alone in the universe, you need something to guide you aside from your own logic. Everyone receives orders from someone in this world. Perhaps Adama was thankful after the initial conflict to have someone who wasn’t afraid of contradicting him.

As long as he was able to keep his own safe, she could work on rebuilding the little civilization they had left.

I don’t think I could doom innocents to death even if they were doomed already. I might hover like a vulture a bit, but not that path. You’d have to be a bit of both.

As for Adama, I have the feeling he didn’t need Roslin. I mean, they so broke out on the suvivors without FTL in the inital miniseries. Little girl in the garden getting nuked and all, but Adama tolerated Roslin, he really could have gone the martial law path if he wanted to. He was encouraged to do so. She was a school teacher and like 27th in line… yadda yadda yadda.

I think Fundamentally, we’ve seen with both of them, they were who they were before the attacks, and all the attacks did was bring it out in a less polite society, where you aren’t so mindful of the politics. I’m very curious how this Cult of Baltar is going to work out. Drive him to be the hero he could be or wallow in his own crapulance. Or start off good and end with his usual self destruction influenced by his own personal ‘Harvey’ (Farscape refrence).

As a thought, what would YOU do in Helena Cain’s position? Would you be the despot or the hero?

What would Adama have done without Roslin’s mediating influence?