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
From great noise, the groaning of a great lady dying, the sound of nuclear annihilation, off just one word, to gorgeous silence and the clinking of their shot glasses. Well done, all of this, well done. Lee smiles at her, across the table. It's an open plan; Zak is just a step down and a few across, sleeping deeply on the couch: "You're tempting fate," Lee says. She laughs, adorable and so young, leaning on the table. "If I have a fate, then it is set. And thinking about it isn't gonna make it happen any faster." She's heard it a million times, every day of her life. It keeps her moving, fast. "Okay, fair enough. But flying when you're thinking about dying and... It's a bad way of doing business. You're gonna get scared, and you're gonna start second-guessing yourself." Climb into the cockpit with ghosts and you don't come out.
"I'm not scared," she says, shaking her head, trying to get it across. Of course she thinks about dying every time she gets in a cockpit. That doesn't make it scary, that makes it real. "Yeah, but it doesn't scare me. Like, that's what you don't get." Lee doesn't get it. He won't get it, until after she's dead and come back. "What, so it's um, Kara Thrace the fearless warrior? Right?" She laughs and drums the table. "No, I... know fear. And I get scared. Just... Just not of dying." Can't be Kara -- can't be Starbuck -- without that on your side. So what scares her? He leans forward, lips parted. He wants to know. She pours another shot, splashing his hand and grinning; she raises it, to that girl and in her honor: "Being forgotten." The awful daring of a moment's surrender, to be honest for just one moment, about what she depends on. All that notoriety and all those desperate grabs for attention: that was her fighting off true death, all along. We leave so much more than footprints behind us when we go. Jump.
Her back breaks; she's ripped apart. The flight pods jostle, pieces rip themselves away from her skin. Compound fractures of steel beams, thrusting through ceilings and walls. She groans.