Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C- | 3 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Breakaway Song
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 20 | Aired on 03.24.2007
"Gods," says Tory. "What are we gonna do?" The Four stare and stare; Tigh reaches higher. Saul Tigh begins to rise. When you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. When you don't know where you stand, you have to find the ground for yourself. That's the one thing you always own, no matter what they take from you. The road he's on... Not to belabor, but... When Saul falls, it's on the road to Damascus. God appears to him and says, "I am Jesus, whom you persecute: arise, and go into the city." And Saul is blinded, like Odin, and he sees the unseen and learns to speak the language of angels. He becomes somebody new. (He dies and is reborn. We just do it differently, on our side of the salt.) And all the things he thought he knew, all the people he thought he could hate with impunity, all the scapegoats he could kill, all the monsters he fought for forty years were just him. Looking back at him through God's eyes, singing a song only he could hear. This was never Gaius's trial; of us all, he's the only one who was never on trial here. And Saul is forgiven. You have to laugh. There is infinite grace in this: "The ship is under attack. We do our jobs. Report to your stations!" When the smell, the song, the sound is coming from you, then the song is all that matters. The rest is up to you. This whole season has been just one question: when we preserve humanity, what are we preserving? When they take away everything that makes you, when your entire self is taken apart in the unfolding, when the angel shows you the door and begs you to walk through, you have only one choice. It shines bright as five stars, and burns twice as hot: "My name is Saul Tigh. I am an officer in the Colonial Fleet. Whatever else I am, whatever else it means, that's the man I want to be. And if I die today, that's the man I'll be."
The song begins to play for us now, without static, without confusion, without anything but the message, burning five by five: it's a breakaway song, but only by the rules of logos, the laws of war. We know a better song; took twenty episodes, took fifty-three, took ten thousand years, and so much salt, to hear it clear enough. But we know a better song.
Cally, adorable: "Where the hell have you been?!" Chief shakes his head: "I'll tell you later." She is going to have a full-on fucking litter of cats at that point, isn't she? That's going to be hilarious, and really really sad, and Athena best watch her hot little ass, because Cally doesn't like anything in the middle of her "us." Cally needs to interrogate seriously her concept of "us," but I've only said that like a billion times already; her concept of "them" is a Maelstrom all its own. I don't envy her. Saul and Chief lock eyes. The link. There is nothing terrible in connection: Cylon or not, it's only relief. Learning to be human is learning to own the ground on which you walk, and learning to be Cylon is learning to believe in an "us" bigger than you can imagine. Bigger than the universe. Learning to be a deckhand is learning to get your hands dirty; being part of the "emerging aristocracy" is learning to get your hands dirty, too. The Olympic Carrier will always be with us; so will the Pegasus. The only thing worth anything, human or Cylon, is the link between the nation called you and the nation called me: it's the engine where God is made. It's the engine angels must machine.
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