This entry, according to my post advertising my July blog challenge, was supposed to be best promo picture, but after hours of scanning through promotional art, I couldn’t really find one that really spoke to me, except maybe the Last Supper. You know the one:
It may or may not be my current desktop background as of this writing, but I don’t think I can interpret it any better than anyone else has. But it is an excellent segue into what I’ve chosen to write about today: my favorite Head-Six moment in the entire series.
The Six in the center of the image is how she’s been displayed prominently since the beginning of the show: sexy, done up, looking all Tricia Helfer-y. Not that I’m complaining. The woman is absolutely stunning. But when she shows up in “Home, Part 2” dressed in sweats*, I was intrigued.
Before this moment, Baltar is deeply questioning the existence of Head-Six. He’s fed up with her cryptic messages and offerings of virtual sex: “You’re not my fantasy, anymore.” This sort of thing, of course, has not always gone well for Baltar (does he not remember what happened in “Six Degrees of Separation”), but instead of disappearing for the entire episode and then showing up again when Baltar regains his “faith,” she morphs out of her nakedness into a T-shirt and sweat pants. She completely drops her sexy persona, even to the point where her voice is different – no longer the sultry cooing that we’ve grown accustomed to at that point – and even displays emotions that Head-Six never does. She laughs hysterically with and at Baltar, and she outright mocks him with a sarcasm that really does get you wondering if she is indeed simply a manifestation of Gaius’ subconscious, “frakking with his mind.” She encourages him to “wake up and smell the psychosis already,” a clarity and directness that Baltar both appreciates and fears.
At the encouragement of this hostile version of Head-Six, Baltar requests Doc Cottle** give him a brain scan, hoping to find a chip that would explain Head-Six’s existence. He desperately wants her to be Cylon technology, therefore easy to explain, just so she won’t be the “latest version of [the] little voice” inside his head. She messes with him while getting the MRI, touching him in his special place and causing him to instinctively jump, prompting Cottle to yell, “Can you stop going crazy in there?” Of course, nothing turns up, although Cottle says Baltar can stare at the scans all day if it makes him feel better.
What makes this sequence of scenes my favorites are that they’re so different from the other astral interactions. It really makes you start wondering if she’s a figment of his tortured imagination or an actual messenger from God. Perhaps it’s his strident attitudes toward religion that made Baltar a perfect candidate for Tool for the One True God, who knows? But it seems like this, especially after Baltar discovers that Helo and Caprica-Eight are going to be parents to a prophesied child, is when the logical scientist finally begins to truly believe in something other than himself.
* For some reason, I simply cannot find an image of Six in her non-overly-sexual outfit, and I’m way too lazy to do a screenshot of my own.
** By the way, Doc Cottle is probably one of my favorite secondary characters. His little sarcastic quips and complete refusal to quit smoking while caring for his patients just makes me laugh.
a little more juju 
