Episode Report Card Jacob: A- | 1 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT The Engine You've Built With Your Blood
By Jacob | Season 3 | Episode 16 | Aired on February 24, 2007
Seelix deals with my Danny, as everybody stares. Children. Chief. Fenner, talking loudly through it, and they lay the boy down upon the floor, his arm half gone, and Chief looks at him, and looks at Seelix, and looks at Xeno Fenner. Chief thinks about machines, and people, and war, and mutiny, and how solving problems is not the same as keeping them alive. And Chief stands up, as Seelix is shouting for gauze, and he meets Fenner's eyes -- it only takes one look -- and the two of them make their way down the line. Down past the belt, and the smelter, and the engine, and the motor, and the fire, and the sparks, and the ore, and everybody watches, stares. And Galen Tyrol looks at the lever, and at Fenner, and he does the math.
Xeno's Paradoxes are twofold: the second paradox ("You Cannot Even Start") illustrates how if a Geminon wants to reach a Caprican freighter, even if it's stationary, he has to go half the way; before he gets half the way, he must go a quarter; but first, one-eighth; but before then, a sixteenth. The first states that if you have a Caprican and a Geminon, the Geminon has to take a certain amount of time to reach the place where the Caprican already was. In this time, the Caprican has moved forward: the Geminon has to break that glass ceiling and move forward again. Whenever Achilles reaches a place the tortoise has been, even over generations, he still has farther to go. (Even though it's shitty to call the estate tax "the death tax," that doesn't change the essential shittiness of not having an estate tax at all, because money is changing hands whether it's earned or not; graduate education is the secret magic hacker codes of the world that rich white men hand down to their rich white sons, along with their money, and everybody else can suck it.)
Chief pulls the levers back, at the head of the line, and the line stops. He hops up jauntily on a hatch ladder, swinging like Curious George, like a member of the Miserables chorus, like a perfect idiot, and calls out: "This plant is off-line! We're on strike!" A thousand dirty hands raise into the air, pound against the belt, against the line, and into the air again.
Back on Galactica , the deckhands are having a great old time, playing cards and giggling, as a grip of Pilots come storming down the stairs, ready for bullshit. At their point is Starbuck, making a face that can only be described as scary as shit. Pollux -- looking like Cally's white-trash aunt who's actually just a couple of years older than Cally, and they gossip about the family on their breaks, only probably their families are dead so the metaphor kind of falls apart, but you know they smoke cigarettes -- looks up from her game, all, "Need somethin', Captain?" Now, I can barely even remember who Kara is at this point, but I know you don't fucking talk to her like that. I was reading the old recaps the other day, and I was kind of horribly surprised by this whole speech about her during the Occupation, how she had to be in Leoben Stir because otherwise she would rock out so hardcore nobody would survive and the Occupation would never have happened. I can barely remember loving her that much. (This episode helps.) So she's like, "Fucking A?" And Pollux, not without grace, apologizes that they're on "vital missions only" and that they've sent the CAP out, so they've done it. Racetrack asks what the hell she means, and Pollux admits that Chief, via Cally, has put them on strike. And I know it's kind of lame and story-ordered, but damn if I didn't cheer right then too, thanks to little Danny Noon. He's like my new Billy, I might be bringing him up without warning for years now.