Episode Report Card Jacob: A | 85 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT That Old Song They Used To Play
By Jacob | Season 3 | Episode 19 | Aired on 2007.03.18
"Madame President, aren't you alive today because of Gaius Baltar?" She looks at him with that smile, the one that barely reaches her eyes but still comes off so soft. "I'm alive today because the insurgents managed to stop the execution." Right, from the firing squad, but: "Wasn't it Baltar who saved your life when you were dying from cancer?" The prosecution asks for relevance, and Lee begins to flounder (Bamber is fucking excellent in this scene; he always is, when he plays against McDonnell), so Lampkin mentions how Laura's a hostile witness, and asks for lenience. Adama spits actual bullets, but Franks again allows it. Lee stumbles to the point. "Um...did Gaius Baltar save your life when you were dying from cancer?" She admits that "Dr. Baltar" (and don't think her emphasis on his title -- not President, not Mister, but the thing he was at the time he was saving her -- is unintentional) and his "scientific knowledge" did save her life, indeed. Lee asks for specificity. "How did he save your life on that occasion?" The gallery is shocked into murmurs by her response: "He injected me with the blood of a half-Cylon, half-human baby." I still don't know if the Fleet knows about Hera, but I'm guessing they would, at least by the time Sharon was commissioned. They seem to have dealt with that well enough; if not, Helo's going to hurt Lee later, which will be nice. "And your cancer vanished." Completely. "During your illness, what sort of medication were you on?" She gives her best press conference grin, the one that says you and I both know and you're going to get a fight. It's her scariest grin, but in some ways her most beautiful: this is how she does warfare. This is when she's Adama's equal on the field; Athena is a goddess of tactics and strategy and justice. That smile is the schoolteacher leaving, the lioness coming in. "You know [the you little shit is implied], I was taking a lot of medications at the time, and I don't remember all their names." And did she take chamalla extract? That little hum, the little "hmph" she does, the one that means, "Here we fucking go." The one that means "another part of the world's about to fall down."
The gallery mutters some more, as Lee asks about the hallucinations that are -- from the disquiet -- well-known side effects of chamalla; Laura agrees that she's heard that, that they're possible, that there are all kinds of possible, if improbable, side effects. She's getting better and better at this. I'm proud of her but I hate it too. I think the reason she scares me so much this season, why I've felt so much less connected to her since the Second Exodus, is because A) she hasn't been around, but mostly B) I can't tell when she's lying anymore. "Isn't it also true that the visions that you once described as messages from the Gods were actually the result of a pharmacological reaction from taking chamalla?" Roslin splits the hair, but it needs splitting; words are her realm: "The chamalla did enable me to see certain things that were foretold by the Scriptures. Things that will help this Fleet find its way to Earth." And back to the original hair-splitting, the first line of salt: "You of all people should know that, Major." It's a plea and a warning, and he can't hear either; his senses are deranged by the need to prove something very complicated. "Mr. Adama. Where are you going with this?" Lee asks the judges for just one more question, and draws close to her in the stand. She's so small sometimes.