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
In the surveillance booth you can see her, standing, challenging him. Caprica. "...But you never ask questions anymore." He just looks at her and spits his nastiness and leaves again, afraid to ask the question, afraid to show too much. The look in her eyes, if she recognized him; how they would cry out, and fall on him with their guns, at one word from it. How Bill would turn away, from this last disappointment, this final embarrassment, and he would die.
"Is there something that you want from me?" Ellen asks, and becomes Caprica again. "Is there something that you need?" He's shaken. There are two people on Galactica who could talk him through this, show him forests and cathedrals, take him out of this world and into a better one, and they're the two people he'd never think to ask. So he jerks back, as if from fire, and blurts it out: "Stay back!" Caprica is confused and hurt, put off by his sudden rudeness as only Sixes can be. "...See you tomorrow, Colonel." She backs slowly away from him, ever the gracious host, and he's gone. He'll deny her twice more, before the fire comes.
Nicky's crying, surprisingly enough, as Tory and Saul push through the hatch and into Galen's house, paranoid and shaky about his weird funeral behavior. As if anybody noticed; as if the bereaved don't get a pass. Saul notices the crying, and Galen offhandedly notes Nicky probably needs changing. Without a pause, Saul goes off to take care of it. All though the scene, he murmurs and coos at the boy, until he's happy again. I think fatherhood would have changed Saul's path drastically, I think it would have made him a better man, but I think we already know he'd be a good dad. He's so full of love -- for Bill, for Ellen -- that it cripples him, and that's a good first step. Kara turned out okay.
Tory feels around the grief, tries to figure out how much is guilt; her first question isn't how much it hurts, but how much he blames himself. She knows how much of what she's feeling is guilt. It's her grief for Galen that drives her to ask. "You think Cally killed herself because of you, don't you?" He does, of course: she thought they were having an affair, she went crazy and tried to kill him, and offed herself. Not the first time that story's been told, especially with a love so compromised in the first place. Tory tries to assuage his guilt, and thus his grief, and thus her own: "But we weren't." So if the facts assembled say there is no guilt, if Cally misapprehended the facts and acted on fantasy and madness, then all that's left will be grief. And she can let this go.