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
"No, no. I didn't know. I didn't know. So I buried my head in the sand and I took it and I settled! I settled for that shriek, those dull vacant eyes, the boiled cabbage stench of her. And why?" Because you are a dirty boy. A Fool. A boy unable to admit the difference between love and guilt. A boy so full of hate for an idea that he couldn't love the reality; a boy driven sick and mad with dissonance. A boy willing to take what he was given, because everything he was given was taken away. A boy who thinks love means building bars. A boy who engineered his own sadness and pain out of loneliness and obsession and fits of rage and violence. A boy who'd barely learned the world, before it was destroyed, and spent every moment trying to put it back together in a way that makes sense, a boy who tried to machine the engine of the world and make it run again. A person, like you and me, and Tory and Boomer, and Cally. Because you are a good boy, who deserved none of this pain or fear or confusion, but must somehow bear it. Just a boy, who deserved to be loved.
"Because this is my life! This is the life I picked. And it's fine! But you know what? It's not. I didn't pick this life." He has never needed his wife more than at this moment, and she doesn't know, and she can't know. He is begging, and it sounds like lies. He even slams a fist upon the table, scaring the Admiral, hoping to shock a glance from the Gods. And everywhere in the bar, people are staring, growing disgusted. "This is not my frakkin' life." The Chief says "Frak." The Admiral, shaken, asks him WTF is going on, why he spits on her memory, why he tells these lies and asks Adama to tell him they're true.
And again it's grief, and not guilt, and not the song, that speaks: it's every widower. Ever since the attacks, we've been begging for somebody to do this: do it publicly, do it loudly, take five seconds out of their day and just scream. To say that the dead can go frak themselves, that we're better off without them, that their absence hurts too much to bear and so we must debase them. Mourning is too lonely a thing to do on our own. But the halls of Galactica are too quiet, and the faces that we wear are too important to risk, so we go on crying in silence, begging for the scream. I wish it weren't him; I love him too much. As wishes -- and loves -- the Admiral, more fervently than ever. He asks the Chief again and again to go home with him, put it away, button up, because she's dying in front of his eyes for the second time and all he has is paperback pulp novels, and he can't afford to scream like this. All the sickened faces in Joe's Bar: How much of their horror is just jealousy?