Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B- | 4 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT The Girl Kneeling By The River
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 17 | Aired on 03.03.2007
"They're waiting for me," she says, the joy and weariness fighting in her voice. Looking down at all the Karas, from above the Eye, looking at how all of them lead in a line here, and nowhere else, looking at this story from the new dimension, seeing how she'd been hiding from herself, around corners and under bridges, inside the bug room. You have to laugh. All that time masturbating and getting too drunk to walk, all that time lying and treating boys like dirt, all that time hating yourself: it's ridiculous. You have to laugh. This is a life seen from the eye of a storm, and where it leads is here, and she knew it all along. All around her the atmosphere is getting heavier as she descends; the water spattering on her canopy cuts off all other sound. What can you hear?
Whatever face the messenger wears, and I don't honestly think it matters, the message can't come clear, through all this dirt and fear and pain. Until you burn off what doesn't work, between stars and between your lovers and your lies, until you lay down the burdens of hate that keep you tied to the pain of your childhood, unable to see your way clear, you can't hear the message properly. Until the rain washes you clean again. You'll never hear it right, until you watch it unfolding and realize it couldn't have been any other way. I don't know if the Cylons can see time this way, but I know the Hybrid can, which is why nothing surprises her, or Leoben. But it's also the way Kara can write her own destiny, and have it written for her: this is just a story she's been telling herself, all along. It's the only way we can live. If we knew what was going to happen -- if we knew the pain and fear and ugliness that's part of our fate, if we forgot that it keeps the world turning -- who knows what we'd do differently? That's why the Oracle only has one eye, because this is not part of the physics: God and time work together to tell you this story, as many times as it takes, until you start paying attention. If it doesn't hurt, if it doesn't feel like death, you're just pretending to change. Burn sage and sweetgrass and get a haircut and move to another city, go on a diet and swear off men for six months, a year, the rest of your life: that's cosmetic. Nothing really changes until you close your eyes and jump. That's half the confusion right there. Take a drop of water, or mercury, and divide it: whatever face the messenger wears, the message stays the same. Socrata, the Lords of Kobol, the Oracle, Leoben, the Hybrid. The message stays the same, it's just that we keep hearing it wrong. Over and over again, until we get it right.
In the stillness and light, with the wind in her hair, a holy smile upon her face, lit from within by the fire of a thousand wrong turns suddenly and violently wrenched straight: all those mistakes weren't mistakes, they were just the way things had to go. They were just the unfolding, from a funny angle. Whether this has all happened before and will happen again is beside the point, that's just rhetoric: seen from above, this is all happening. She closes her eyes in the unfolding. The Kore child dances in the light of the abyss, her face clean and joyful, almost too bright to see, free of the constraints of time and what we see. She smiles in absolute peace: how can you look at her, this beautiful, calm girl, this gorgeous peace, this holy calm, this rightness, and think this is a mistake? I believe that Kara Thrace will lead the Fleet to Earth, just as I believe Three will stand and walk and love again, and Caprica will know God's love, and Gaius will know peace, and Gaeta will bone a dude. Just as I believe that until the bugs stop jumping, the war will never end, because fear and violence create more bugs and more fear and more violence, and the more frightened you are, the more likely you are to both act like assholes and forget that it's just a game, fail to recognize they're only toys. I believe these things just as I believe there's a day all pawns will become queens, and the Chips stop talking, and the angel rejoins what was broken, on a holy anvil that only looks like war, from this joke of an angle.