Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A | 2 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT The Girl With Her Hand In A Lion's Mouth
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 6 | Aired on 11.02.2006
"Is it aware of us?" asks Gaius, and Caprica considers him. "Of course. She's aware of everything aboard." The Hybrid continues: "... End of line. New paragraph. Pancreatic fluid at one with the continuum of evolutional matrix we're here to experience evolve the little toe reduction occurs stepwise though the essence is all one full stop. New paragraph. System check... " Gaius asks if she has any idea what "it's" talking about. Like this show would exist if she did. If any of them could. "No. Most Cylons think the conscious mind of the Hybrid has simply gone mad, and the vocalizations we hear are meaningless." But not everybody, Gaius wonders. "Thank you Genesis turns ... " Caprica tells him that "the ones you know as Leoben" believe every word from her mouth "means something," that God literally speaks through her. I swear to you that I will not talk crazy again for the rest of the recap, but: word. "She sort of controls the baseship, does she?" asks Gaius, his mind blown. He's a scientist, he has nothing like the capacity for this. "Well, she is the baseship, in a very real sense." He stares down, weirded out and with maybe a little bit of undeserved pity. "Mind gone mad." The Hybrid continues to talk the whole time, by the way, but it's more of the same: the answer, if they could hear it, over and over forever. "She experiences life very differently than we do, Gaius. She swims in the heavens. Laughs at stars, breathes in cosmic dust. Maybe Leoben's right. Maybe she does see God... " Can you give me a better description than what you just said? Six gets that religious look she has, and they stare down. "...they cry for succor in the dark of the light." Caprica snaps out of it. "We're wasting time." And the Hybrid screams: "... Jump!" She shudders orgasmically, for reasons which should be obvious by now: if projection is weaving memory and thought and personality, jumping is weaving the stuff of the universe itself. With your mind and your body, on a level we can barely theorize about. If she didn't look so fucked up and scary, that would be the best job ever.
Gaius's borrowed Raptor heads for the infected basestar, enters its bay with some directional jets, and he steps out onto the deck. In a full spacesuit, of course. The white and red and black on our basestar is darkness, blueness, sickly green. On the floor, a Three gasps for air; there are sick bodies everywhere. An Eight vomits. Gaius calls it in on comms, stricken. He drops his flashlight, taking pictures of the fallen Cylons everywhere, and notes on the floor a strange device, the size of an oak barrel, made of flanged metal. "What the hell is that?" As he investigates it, a black-haired Six on the floor grabs his ankle. He rushes to her side with a first aid kit. "You're severely dehydrated. You must drink some water." She begs him to kill her, and he balks. "You don't understand, there is no resurrection ship nearby. You will not be downloaded into a new body. You will just be gone." She weeps, desperate, barely breathing. "I saw how they died. Please -- please, I can't bear that." Gaius begins to panic. Like to an impressive degree. He takes a blood sample and she screams; he promises to bring back a treatment. She coughs; he begs her to breathe. "Please. Please take some water." Six focuses on his face. "You're -- you're from Galactica." He declares seriously: "No. I'm from a baseship." He waves toward the metal object and asks what it is. "We found it floating at these coordinates. Must be some kind of beacon, or marker." He muses that it looks very old. "Must've been left by the Thirteenth Tribe," she exposits. "Infected, poisoned. Left by some humans like you, to destroy us." She is pathetic and sad and gross. "A human device filled with a pestilence. You sent us to this place." He shakes his head, protesting, but she keeps going. "You know we'd bring it aboard." He begs her to stop: "You don't know what you're saying. This is the disease speaking through you. Calm down. I am going to bring help... " She shouts that he knew it was there, that he, and the other baseships even, knew it was there. He begs her to be quiet, to calm down. "I would never do anything to hurt you." She continues to scream, accuses him of lying, of bringing the Cylons to their doom, that he's going to bring them all there to die, and he keeps screaming at her to stop. Begging her to keep quiet. "You're gonna infect all of us!" She screams, and he finally freaks out, crushing her throat with his boot. "Gaius," comms a Doral. "Do you hear us? Gaius, do you read? Is anyone alive? Speak to us. Do you read? What do you see? Are any of them alive?" Gaius reports back. "This is Gaius Baltar. I'm returning to the baseship." And what does he see? Staring at the beacon, already turning on another race as fast as he can, already looking for heroism again: "I see nothing. Nothing of consequence. There's nothing left to do here."