Episode Report Card Jacob: C | 43306 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT When Will The Work Be Done?
By Jacob | Season 4 | Episode 20 | Aired on 2009.03.20
"It reminds me of you."
2009
Hera walks down the hill, with her father's walking stick. She looks up at the sky, and the wind rushes over her, across the grasses and the sands, the oceans and islands and forests, and the rises on New York City. It's 150,000 years after Earthfall.
"At a scientific conference this week at the Smithsonian institution in Washington, the startling announcement was made that archeologists believe they have found fossilized remains of a young woman who may actually be Mitochondrial Eve. Mitochondrial Eve is the name scientists have given to the most recent common ancestor for all human beings now living on Earth." It's Angel Six, reading over Ron Moore's shoulder; both angels are delighted by this, although it's not quite as meaningful as it seems: it means not that she is the mother of us all, but only that we carry her mitochondrial DNA, which passes down only from a mother to her children. I'm proud, then, to have a little Athena in me, but more excited by the spark of Cylon we all got to have. "She lived in what is now Tanzania, over 150,000 years ago..."
"Along with her Cylon mother, and human father," Chip Baltar grins at her, as they walk away through Times Square. She gestures around them. "Commercialism, decadence, technology run amok. Remind you of anything?" Chip smiles. "Take your pick! Kobol, Earth -- the real Earth, before this one -- Caprica, Before the Fall..." Their arms around each other are comfortable and affectionate, like twins. "All of this has happened before," she muses, and he wonders if it really does have to happen again. She smiles.
"This time, I bet no." She plays dice, with the universe. "You know," he says, "I've never known you to play the optimist. Why the change of heart?" She lays it out in math: "Law of averages. Let a complex system repeat itself long enough, eventually something surprising might occur. That too is in God's plan." He leans in, over his sunglasses, with a darker voice. "You know It doesn't like that name." She makes a face; it doesn't like any names at all. It doesn't need them. It is immanence. It's the singularity, already and always. He puts his hands to his temples, smiling. "Silly me. Silly, silly me..." God is wild magic, nameless and implicit in us all: as the angels walk past a panhandler, none the wiser, his radio starts playing Jimi's "Watchtower." And up above him on the news, Aibo does the Macarena, and another robot, and a small army of obstinate tin soldiers, playing fife and drum. Two children kiss another model on its brightly colored face. That scary Japanese woman one makes her faces. The angels walk away, through the crowd, to find the next thing.