Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 2 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT This Is Not A Love Story
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 9 | Aired on 06.06.2008
He is back there for a moment, he lives the story. The magnitude. Down in the water, when she tortured him, and his million burnt and burning children kissed him. Up in the head, when he finally understood how Kevin Connor could be seven years old, and nine, at once. As Jeanne's boy lay gasping in the arms of his family, in the presence of God. The magnitude. Try to explain it, it slips through your fingers like Hybrid speech. Try to share your salvation with a woman you've hurt this deeply, and it turns into riya. Because there is no relativity to sin, nor to guilt, or to redemption: you throw your salvation in her face, the one thing she can't have. Because even if your sins are washed away, those are still her people, still written on her heart, and her guilt is here to stay. Your salvation is cruelty:
"In that moment, I was saved. I was loved. By God. Looking back... I think I was rewarded."
"Rewarded," she says. So scary.
Well, a sober Gaius would probably have fucked this up even more, but yeah: rewarded. To reclaim your soul from your own self-hatred, to touch that divinity for even a moment: rewarded. For laying down the burdens of your own guilt performance for five seconds and realizing that you are loved. For hearing your master's command and snapping at that treat, finally, after thirty years; the sweet taste, and how it fades so quickly? Rewarded. But this isn't a love story; all she hears is hate.
"Pythia talks about the Flood that wiped out most of humanity. Nobody blames the Flood, a Flood is a force of nature. Through the Flood, mankind is rejuvenated, born again. I was another Flood, you see." Which is indefensible bullshit, putting himself as a non-metaphor, into a metaphorical space, to salve his own conscience. That's gross. We are not Floods, we are people. But part of the trip -- to Heaven, or Faerie, or wherever you go -- is that you don't bring it back with you. That's what Kara's been wrestling with all season. And more bullshit still -- Just go to sleep, Gaius! Stop talking! -- "I blamed myself. I blamed myself. But God made the man who made that choice. God made us all perfect. And in that thought, all my guilt flies away... Flies away, like a bird." ...wingbeats of a dove drown out the heartbeats of those who follow... "I can give you that peace, Laura, that freedom. Pray with me. Pray with me."
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