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
Laura looks down at the fragile frakking body of Laura Roslin. I am glad I told the good story of that body last week, about the Mama Bear and staring at death, because that's what it is. If the world defined and limned and delineated a symbol of your personal death, if you flipped the Death card and saw your own face -- not some change-of-pace royal-blue-haired girl on a pale horse, not some Goth hottie with an ankh, not the beautiful and ravaged face of Emily Kowalski -- wouldn't you take it seriously? Death is kind of a bully because God is kind of a bully, because Laura Roslin is kind of a bully.
Laura's Ego, the thing that makes her Laura, is the Presidential Suit. And what it's been subverting is the Id, which is love. The Teacher. And all Elosha's trying to do is crack open the President Suit by destroying its sine qua non at the root, so Teacher Woman Laura can come out and play, and Laura can combine the two. Because nobody makes more sense than Laura Roslin, but if that's all you are, you're fucking it up for everybody. Presidents don't build families; women do. Without that, you're just the product of a Lie that never ended, trying desperately to understand that somebody, somewhere, sometime, loves you. You the woman, not the dying shell around it or the sick strongwoman ruling by fiat; not the vicious aberration or the bitter disappointment, but the girl you forgot. There's a reason Elosha only speaks to her dead body, as her beautiful soul stands watching.
"Don't you just hate these people?" The dying leader croaks it out -- as Laura is forced to watch; separated horribly from that future wreckage, that unassailable façade, like a widow from her lover, like a bride divorced of God -- "No." But how much of death is theatre? "Oh, but you don't love them either. The people in this room are the closest thing you've got to family, and you... You've been their President. " And the tone, the disgust, the loving way Elosha is appalled, it could fell even her. Their President. The President of her people. Her people. And she shows them this face.
Lee holds Kara. The Twins fall apart, together. A mother who stopped hitting; a mother's cancer. Bill shakes. A lover who let down the walls and lived, for a moment, on a dead and filthy heaven, once upon a time; who lay upon his bed and laughed, and is now dying. It's a funeral for a woman who already died; who dies alone, with her family all around her. Who never let them be her home. It's a funeral for a woman who died alone, without a family or a home, by her hand and by her choice. Not a razor, but not unlike a blade. A woman who, given infinite time, given a lifetime just like us all, couldn't find the time to love, when the unassailable façade came calling. After a thousand reprieves, after a thousand Gods leaned down to hear the lament, she still managed to fuck herself out of time for living, because she was too busy killing trees to save the forest, and burning off what didn't help.
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