Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 1 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT Queen Me
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 15 | Aired on 02.13.2009
"We gotta drill holes in his skull and drain it. Then when the swelling goes down, I'll bring the brain guy over from Inchon Vale and we get a look and see how we can get at that bullet." While Kara and Cottle fight over the fevered state of Sam's holy brain, he starts quoting the central text of the twenty-first century, disordered, remembering the Hub and Caprica and the Hybrid, the Opera House and the Colony and the war at the Temple: "The infernal serpent: he it was whose guile, stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived the mother of mankind... A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n..." Who painted the sky?
Milton: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n... Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell..."
Sartre, among works including No Exit: "I am mean...I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished... Cowardly or not, as long as he is a good kisser... So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! The farce. There is no need for torture: hell is other people."
Pluribus/Unum. "I myself am hell"/"Hell is other people." Milton/Sartre. I am one/I am many: Human/Cylon. The political is personal/The personal is political: Laura/Lee. Laura/Bill. Lee/Bill. I am hell, says Milton's too-early existentialism/You are hell, says Sartre's too-late responsibility. Neither one the whole truth; playing black and white on a table without color or feature or quality, fighting always for prominence, Gaius and Laura as its pawns. We create war in the mistaken idea that these are two differing statements; Kara Thrace has been torn apart in the vacuum between these two differing statements, again and again. But where the place for love?
Here. "We'd been to that beach too," Sam smiles. She was like their mother, their folk singer mother, the artist that touched their dreams into life; the intuition that sparks life into machines and machines into life: "Yes, we'd been to that beach. Sometimes Ellen would be there too," he smiles, Kara watching confused, "Because she loved the water." Kara turns away, crying, but he continues to remember, the machine of his body sparked into memory: "She loved the water."
Eighteen months ago. [That Kobol Stonehenge, champagne supernova, Laura's Hybrid humping, Kara's Maelstrom, Sam drunk and mourning, the Opera House, the Rebel Basestar jumping, Ellen and the Maelstrom at once telling truths we can't know yet. I can't shake the feeling that this episode is intended to help me shut the fuck up and enjoy the show.] John pulls up a chair and watches her come back to life, down in the goo; Ellen greets him without opening her eyes. She calls him John, he hates it, she reminds him he was named for her father, he reminds her in turn he doesn't care for that name: One, or if not, Cavil.
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