Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | 5 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT When The Know-Nothings Get Control
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 7 | Aired on 11.09.2006
"You weren't on New Caprica. To my recollection, you didn't set foot there. So, out of respect for the hundreds of men and women on your crew who suffered through that snake pit, I'm gonna pretend I didn't hear that." She smiles and breathes and is terrifying and is right. "You would serve your Fleet well if you'd remember occasionally that the Cylons are a mortal threat to the survival of the human race." Still not the point. Helo bounces back after that unimaginable misstep: "I'm talking about right and wrong. I'm talking about losing a piece of our souls." Which somebody has said in like every episode, and remains true to this day. It's not that I love the Cylons so much, although I do, as that this main, central, crucial point keeps getting lost in the static: You have to deserve survival. You don't put guns in the Temple, you don't rape Boomer, you donât force Cavil to cut his wrists open on the ground for your own fucking enjoyment, and you don't strap a motherfucking bomb to your chest. And if you do these things, Adama was right all along: humanity doesn't deserve to survive.
It's a kindergarten motherfucking sense of entitled, playground morality that assumes just because A is an asshole, B is blameless. It's possible for B to grow the fuck up and act in accordance with a stable morality, instead of leveraging their evil based on some kind of flimsy "Mommy, he started it" excuse. At the end of the day, A is not your problem, because A is not your responsibility. Your behavior is your problem, and what you did to excuse it, because you are the person in charge of you. There are a lot of unanswerable questions here, but that is not one of them, and somebody should have told these motherfuckers when they were younger, because now they are grown up and I am ashamed for them. Your personhood doesn't go in the closet until things get easier -- that's like the one thing I disagreed with Tigh about, down on New Caprica -- it's there all the time. You can't write your bullshit self a hall pass to be "your worst" or commit atrocities right up until the very second that things get perfect and awesome, at which point like a wonderful jackpot prize you get to be who you are "at your best," and how one of these days, you'll get to be that you. As soon as nothing bad ever happens, nobody ever calls you an asshole, and everything is perfect and quiet and still. I'm not saying don't "wipe 'em out," I'm saying be really damn sure you know why you're doing it, because that's the only question that matters. Fucking... be better. It's the easiest thing of the world.