Episode Report Card Jacob: A+ | 6 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Six Of One...
By Jacob | Season 2 | Episode 18 | Aired on 2006.02.24
In the resistance base, there's a cigarette butt in a clothespin. Barclay explains that they're doing a test to see how long the burning cigarette will add to the explosives' fuse action: "Two or three minutes to get the frack out of there. Any longer and we risk them finding the charges before they go off." Anders wonders if Barclay can be any more exact, and they chat while they wait for the butt to say for sure. The third person in their party, a very itchy fellow, pulls a Tigh: "This is a risky operation just to nail a couple dozen skin jobs. I mean, we can't kill them. They'll just download into a new body and...I mean, what's the point?" Anders obligingly tells him the point: "That skin job with Starbuck -- 'Sharon' they called her -- she said that when they download, they remember everything. Right up until the end. These skin jobs are going to remember being blown into tiny little pieces." If anybody qualifies for combatant status, it's Anders. We've had almost two seasons to think of them as people, some of us, but for Anders, even skin jobs having coffee are really just enemy agents. There's no reality to them. He's not a terrorist -- not even a guerilla -- just a person who's been in a state of war for nine months. It's important to make that distinction, because he's about the only human left in the show who gets to believe that so clearly. "It's gotta hurt," says Itchy, and Anders is all, "Duh. Hopefully it hurts real bad, dude." Hilliard's beautifully into it. "Because sooner or later, the message sinks in. There is no safe place, not even a café. So if you want to quit living through hell and dying over and over again, then get the frack off our planet." The fuse trips, the sensor beeps, the verdict: three minutes, ten seconds. Anders: "Boom." It's all very hardcore.