Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B | 3 USERS: B+ YOU GRADE IT The Garden Of The Scar
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 10 | Aired on 06.13.2008
"Dad, Dad. Dad, listen. No one suspected. No one. Not with his record, what he did on New Caprica. His eye, his... What happened to his wi... Come on, let's get up." He slides out from behind Bill but there's no stopping Bill now. He falls against the jamb uncradled. "What have I done? All the people I've sent to die. For what? For what?" For Earth. Bill laughs, almost, through the tears: "There is no Earth. It's a frakkin' joke. There is no Earth."
(You're right. There's no Earth. It's all a legend. Then why? Because it's not enough to just live, you have to have something to live for. Let it be Earth. They'll never forgive you. Maybe, but in the meantime, I've given all of us a fighting chance to survive. And isn't that what you said was the most important thing? The survival of the human race?)
Saliva drips from his father's mouth, onto his hand. Until you live through this you will not be a man. All fathers are Gods until they are outgrown; until they are rescued by their sons: This is the secret and the meaning of the Fisher King. He brings life to the river and water to the shore. Watch it go around and around.
You can't be a man until you live through this, and the reason is very simple: you must subtract the story from the person -- as Bill and Laura both just so recently discovered -- and see him as he is: just a man. A man who wasn't built for this, because no man was built for this, nor woman, nor child. Because when you subtract your Quo Vadis from your Status Quo, you arrive at What Just Is. And you realize Cally said the truest and the hardest thing: the rough spots are all we have left. They're all we ever had. There is no one last hump and then it's golden. There is no Lie that earns your rest. It's not a vending machine.
Lee takes his father's face; blue eyes on blue. "Okay Dad, listen to me. Listen to me! Pull it together." Bill begins a litany that Lee doesn't understand: " I can't. I can't. I can't. I can't." Lee swears that he can, but he hasn't reached the end of the sentence: "I can't. I can't kill him. I can't kill the bastard. I can't. I can't." And he can't. And he shouldn't have to.
Imagine two stones, black and white. Concentrate on the area between them, the space where nothing is. I move them closer together, further apart -- See how it changes? This is no conjurer's trick, it's just two stones and the space between them -- and the area changes in kind. Everything you need to know is there.
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