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
Neither does Bill; he never read the ending. Bill doesn't do endings. He lets things fade, or blows them up in a drunken crazy spree, but he can't sit quietly through endings. He feels them too much; he destroys his favorite things when he's forced into endings, he bitches about the protocol of funerals, he speaks with the dead every single year, but Bill doesn't do endings. Not when he loves. Bill Adama is asking a woman to share a new frontier with him: an ending, to his favorite story. His favorite story ever, he is willing to build cabins in its end, for her. With her, alone. And of course, Laura doesn't get it. "You're kidding. It's your favorite!" He smiles sweetly, his eyes alive: Yes. It is.
I want you to know what I like.
"I like it so much, I don't want it to be over. So I'm saving it." Nobody's going anywhere.
Laura blithely suggests she should wait, too. For that day in the alluvial deposits, maybe; she can wait as long as he can, so it won't be over. So she won't be the one to bring him to the next ending, the story that he loves so much. One look from his beautiful eyes, the way this careless wish astounds him and breaks his heart, and she's ashamed. He was offering to share something precious, and she offered to share its absence, and rubbed her death in his face. He likes it so much he's saving it, for her. To build something secret and precious between them, to remember every year. She keeps fucking it up. He keeps bringing her so much strength, so much hope, that she forgets who and what she is, where she's going, what it's costing him. His love is glory, and her illness is pain. And when she ricochets between the two, her hair isn't being plucked one strand at a time, but all at once. She apologizes without apologizing, ducks her head, fidgets with her bag. Which he takes from her, and carries. Which she lets him do.
In the corridor, they discuss Gaius. "Baltar's back at home ... in the brig. Again," Bill grumbles, and Laura shakes her head. "Desecration of a temple. It's his revenge for what happened to him this morning." Bill acknowledges the brutality; he's tracking the Sons, but nobody's talking. Laura's hand is warm and weak on his arm, as they walk. "The thing is that Baltar knows that there are religious hardliners in Dogsville, but he continues to provoke." (This is kinda cool, watch: He just said it's a problem, and she said it's Gaius being a shitstirrer.) Bill shakes his head: "I just can't have a religious war in this Fleet." Not after what his family went through last time. Laura almost laughs: "Oh please, no! Then the whole damn thing will become our frakkin' responsibility, yours and mine. Seriously, Bill, we have thirty thousand people left and they're not happy unless they're kicking each other's teeth in. This is what we've become?" Bill shakes his head -- she just said it's a problem, but he's about to say it's because Gaius is a shitstirrer -- "No, it's him. Baltar has an uncanny way of stirring up all the crap." And I mean, thank God or the Lords of Kobol for that, at least. Just because nobody's stirring the shit doesn't mean the shit doesn't exist.