Episode Report Card Jacob: A+ | 562 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT There's Beauty In The Breakdown
By Jacob | Season 4 | Episode 4 | Aired on April 25, 2008
"And then one day, I realized I wouldn't have him forever. I understood what I'd done. How I betrayed him, and humanity. And that pain taught me to understand death."
Ellen looks down, contrite, in love. Saul weeps. Is projection really so awful?
Yes.
"Baltar could die, and I loved him..." Tigh shakes his head, no. Ellen speaks with Caprica's voice, calling him back from the dream. At least Orpheus had a choice, to turn and look. They keep taking her away. He cries out again and again, but she won't stop: she doesn't know.
"Baltar's heart was ephemeral. Baltar's body was fragile in my hands..."
Tigh jumps up, denying her again. "No, we are not gonna talk about the fragile body of Gaius frakkin' Baltar! Door! Door!" She's left, once again, holding the bag.
Saul runs out to the surveillance Marines, shutting down the feeds and dismissing them. One of the Marines, jostled and hurried, wonders what he's going to do to her. Doesn't stop him, doesn't question him, just wonders what he's going to do to the toaster now. Leaves without a backward glance. The Pegasus is always with us.
When he returns, Caprica is afraid and desperate: "I can tell you how to turn it off." She's speaking to a human, not a Cylon. She's programmed not to think of him that way; she's programmed to smile at him, with infinite love, as she explains. "Pain is how I learn from the guilt. There's wisdom there. Clarity. You know yourself there."
"Pain?" he asks, sitting there with her, begging Ellen to come back, begging Caprica to give him the great Cylon secret, to live with what you are and what you've done. With what he's becoming.
"Our minds were designed based on your minds. We learned things about how you work that you've never known." She caresses his face; she becomes Ellen again in a tender touch. "When you're in pain, that's ... when you learn who you really are. That's when you focus, sharp as the point of a knife." Ellen removes the patch, his shame, and looks on that scarred place with love, touching his beautiful face. He looks at her, in the very fire of his passion and his love. "I can give you that clarity again," she says, and runs her hand across his face. The scars, the gaping blindness, the anguish and the pain written across his skin: he is made perfect again, beneath her hands, under the gaze of her love. He is perfect, for the moment, just as he is.
THE AWFUL DARING OF A MOMENT'S SURRENDER
(Escape Velocity is reached; clarity Burns like five stars; two Men are born again.)