Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT All My Darling Daughters
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 18 | Aired on 03.06.2009
"Oh, Saul," she grumbles, crouching down before him: "You're a pip. You really are. 'Old man'? Old compared to who?" She touches his face, begging him to remember how they were married two thousand years before he even met Bill; he tries to get her to understand how meaningless that actually is. "You're a Cylon, Saul," she says, and there's such hate in his eyes for a moment that it's almost shocking. "Whether you remember that life or not, at least you must understand what we were trying to do," she says with tears in her eyes: to end the cycle of war. "That was a bust," he grits out; he is sexy when he's mad, she's right about that after all. Ellen admits they failed, but points out that it's all about Hera now. "Without her, our children are going to die off one by one," she says; just like they're dying right now in Cottle's sickbay, just like Liam, with his eyes wide open. Saul flees into his pain: "I had a child. He died." Like Hera's gone and now he and Helo and Bill are a brotherhood of three; like the Cylon daughters are a metaphor, like their deaths don't matter. It isn't a metaphor; Ellen leans in: "You're wrong, Saul. You had millions." She hugs him, wraps herself around all the pain left in him, and he sighs in her arms, and says her name softly. But she's still crying, and she's still alone. Getting back to the Final Five was her Earth. Getting back to Saul was supposed to be home.
Boomer tries to get Hera to eat something awful from the long-term rations, but she won't. Too sad. Boomer starts talking to herself, out of boredom. This is what's on her mind: "Do you know what I do sometimes when I'm sad? I go to this special place. A house where I wanted to live. With a man that I loved." She projects herself into the house on Picon, and when she looks down, Hera's there too, reaching for her hand. She woke up screaming, remember, that night in sickbay, when all four of them were there together. Boomer's shocked, but Hera just holds up the algae crap, which is now a wondrous cupcake. Not for nothing do I keep bringing up the old faerie tales. Hera stares up at Boomer, who's intrigued but still trying to be a machine; in this house, she is different.
Gaius shaves in the head, praying nobody punctures or stabs or slices his neck this time. The image originally was to have Six shaving him, but given the scene as a whole that's not going to work. So instead she perches. Also perching: Kara, on a toilet, with the stall door open, watching him shave. Apparently dying makes you tacky. No, actually, I take that back: it's the most Starbuck thing she's done in months. She grins at him in the mirror and very pointedly pisses. Gaius is, of course, appalled, and tries to ignore her. She asks if he even believes the "bilge" he was spewing on the radio before, about the angels: tellingly, she phrases it "The angels that bring out our better nature, blah, blah, blah."