Episode Report Card Jacob: A+ | 562 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT There's Beauty In The Breakdown
By Jacob | Season 4 | Episode 4 | Aired on April 25, 2008
President Roslin opens the door to Baltar's cell with a crash. He's getting some beauty sleep against the wall, perhaps pressing against it, wondering if she's on the other side. "Were you asleep?", she fairly snickers, and Gaius tries his best to be bitchy: "What is it this time? Here to strip-search me? Or could it possibly be that your presence here means that the President has been made aware of my situation." She assures him, hard as diamond, that it's being looked into, aggressively, and then does one of her suddenly intimate moves, sitting close to him on the floor.
(Jane doesn't really talk about cancer, and neither would I; I only know that she knows this part of the dance because of a very awesome book. I mention this only on the way to telling you a short little story that got to me even more than the episode, which is lots, and because of what it tells you about the writing here, and more because of the way our blood gets into our stories. This is the point at which my very greatest writer friend and cheerleader Karen Novak-famous-novelist, who out of a certain sisterhood with Jane, and Laura, spontaneously turned to her husband at this point in the episode and said: "This is where she tells him she's wearing a wig.")
"I want you to look at me, Gaius. Just look. This is a wig. I'm dying. Now, if you look in my eyes..." She takes off her glasses. "Go ahead, look. You can probably see it." He apologizes, but not really, and she doesn't need it anyway. She is burning with truth. She's Laura the way I've been hurting to see her, with glimpses, since New Caprica: on fire with revelation, full of truth and compassion and steely rage. A schoolteacher, who has spent years becoming a soldier, a queen, a savior to us all. The Laura the show trusted us enough to love and doubt without devoting whole episodes to how scary she was, then sidelining her for months at a time: "No no no no, I don't want your pity, I'm still doing my job. In fact, I'm gonna aggressively pursue the men that attacked you, and I'm going to limit the size of public assemblies to protect your people..." He nods, he has no idea what that means, or how good she's gotten at this game. He's smart, he'd catch it in a second, but she's so busy throwing thunderbolts of beauty and acting at him he doesn't have time.