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
So that's the history. As far as the episode itself, it's pretty simple: Cavil's been holding Ellen hostage since Saul killed her on New Caprica, and they have an 18-month long fight over Boomer's soul which involves explaining the entire show, above, and being super skeevy. We check in with them at various points connected to major show events: the Second Exodus, the supernova at the Temple... And the destruction of the Hub, at which point Cavil goes nuts and starts threatening Ellen with a lobotomy if she doesn't rebuild resurrection tech using the Colony. Of course, she can't do it alone, but he won't listen.
Meanwhile, Sam has a bullet in his head from last week, which is pressing on his brain's "vascular ring" -- what I believe we call the Circle of Willis or Willis Polygon -- causing him to quote Wolfe and Milton and filling in our history of the Final Five in fits and starts. It's fun looking at what one part of the narrative "knows" and the other part doesn't, because of the five people necessary for this to happen, of course there are three Final Fivers who haven't accessed anything at all yet, there's Ellen, and then there's Sam who is only remembering random shit.
So you have Ellen in one moving timeframe, speaking with a clarity no Oracle ever knew but throwing in ellipses because John was there too, and you have Sam in the "current day," half-human and half-Hybrid, trying to negotiate the dim shadows of his life before, his life as a F5er, his life before the Nebula, and his life now, while in the throes of major medical trauma. Which is exactly what it's like to be an Oracle, which is why Dodona Selloi and Yolanda Brenn and the Hybrids and the Angels (Chip Six, Chip Gaius, Jump Elosha, Maelstrom Leoben) and every other prophet are so annoying. You're not made to know everything at once and neither were they.
So Sam plays out his time like the Hunger Artist, and Kara's trying to get him into surgery -- which might turn off these new memories -- while the Dylons are trying to learn about themselves. Secretly, though, she's also hoping for an explanation for her own shit, but of course she can't say that because nobody knows she found her dead body on Earth. In the same way that the Ellen/Cavil story is kinda really about Boomer -- and the Chief/Bill story is kinda really about Laura -- the Sam/Five story is really about Kara, in a way, because it's one of the more clear-cut moral dilemmas our girl's ever faced: let him talk himself to death in the vain hope that he'll spill her destiny (and thus absolve her of both her implication in the Harbinger of Death deal and her existential horror in being a third Thing) or save his life to the detriment of herself and the three Dylons.
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