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Adama totally kisses the President. But that's at the end. We open on Apollo, ejected and drifting in space and watching the big fight against the Cylon fleet go down, which gives things a dreamy vibe. Then we jump back to where we stopped, basically, and follow up all the threads from last week. They're all pretty sad. This is a gorgeous, beautifully-shot, wonderfully acted and scored mess of hurt feelings from beginning to end. The fight with the Cylon fleet goes swimmingly, although the Blackbird sustains some damage, and we're treated to the haunting image of "tens of thousands" of Cylon bodies floating out as the Resurrection Ship finally goes down in flames. Admiral Cain -- doing a spot-on impression of Starbuck's abusive mother -- specifically tells Starbuck not to screw up or flinch when it's time for Starbuck to kill her. Apollo gets his own death wish and goes all spooky nihilist guy when he learns from his dad that Roslin is behind the assassination order. This is somewhat out of the blue, since he hasn't even talked to her in half a season, but it's Apollo: he's dramatic. Gaius Baltar sells out ChipSix for emotional ammunition with Gina, and she disappears, maybe forever. Boomer asks Adama why he -- or humanity -- even deserves to live, throwing back in his face that weird rambling speech he gave in the miniseries, and ultimately giving him the necessary ethical stuff to keep from giving Starbuck the kill order. Cain responds by not giving her XO the order to kill Bill, everybody cheers and hugs, then Gina escapes and surprises Cain in her quarters, killing her in as ignominious a fashion as possible. Starbuck's eulogy for Admiral Cain is creepy and vastly uninformed, and seems to presage lots more stress between her and the Commander. Who is now an Admiral! Roslin gives Bill a promotion, Fisk is the new captain of the Pegasus, and Adama pulls another bizarre ad lib out of his bag of tricks, planting one on the President and then stumbling back home in a fuss of tears and really intense smiles. It's pretty clear she is going to die in the five minutes. Starbuck and Apollo process things at the end of the episode, with Dualla listening outside the door and feeling all kinds of emotions that indicate Apollo is really screwed. So: Apollo and apparently Starbuck are going to be weird and angry for a while, Billy's clearly screwed, Cain's really dead, the Pegasus is now part of the Colonial Fleet, Chief and Helo are of course pardoned (after getting assaulted by the rape-happy guys from the Pegasus, whom we assume-slash-hope will be getting spaced to hell under Fisk's new command), Chief bows out of Helo's love life, and Boomer cries with joy to see them both still alive. Such an intense episode -- and a good capper for a very, very intense three-parter several months in the making. week: Baltar invents Toaster Stem Cell research, and everybody gets crazy uptight about it. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Okay, seriously, every week. How do they do this? I mean, "Final Cut" wasn't that bad -- I liked it a lot, actually, and it's still better than most things you can see on the TV. If you continually reset the bar for yourself...I don't know what happens. I guess there's always room for improvement, but I don't understand how this show keeps getting better and better. Like week. The only way week could suck is if they kill Roslin, which is totally unlikely, and would in fact be so awful that it might turn around to good again. I don't know...it's just nice. It's nice to love something that is very, very excellent.
We open on Apollo, floating in an open lake with cliffs in the distance. You thought that maybe the cliffhanger would enter into this, didn't you? The whole thing where half of the cast is about to kill the other half? You were wrong. However, if the idea of a mostly naked Lee Adama floating around works for you, you're in luck, because that's half the episode right there. He stares up, and there's that zooming bomb Doppler sound coming out of the somewhat cloudy sky, and something plunging down from out of the sun, which then swerves at the last second to become a Raider in the middle of the assault on the Resurrection Ship. It's a very tricky little shot taking us from a nearly silent, calm, and sunlit place to a pitched battle in the middle of black space. Nice and jarring. We come back around on Apollo in his Viper suit, strapped into the Blackbird seat, having obviously ejected, watching the huge fight going on between the Vipers and Raiders and the Battlestars and the Basestars.
Jump back forty-eight hours, with Apollo and Starbuck discussing her planned (and seemingly suicidal) assassination of Admiral Cain. "They say shoot," she justifies, "We shoot." Apollo has trepidation to spare, and Starbuck's almost irritated that he's bringing her down out of the necessary military hoo-wah zone she needs to be in right now. "I could use some backup. I'll understand if you can't," she says, and you have to give her points for not sounding half as snitty as she could have. Apollo chides her that she knows better, and yeah, she knows he's got her back: "People have to have this, Kara. Trust. Your word and my word." Her eyes track his face. Maybe she's looking for the anvils, considering that this line works a lot better in context than it would if Apollo wasn't about to have a whole crisis of faith and trust, and Adama wasn't about to have a whole epiphany about the difference between Us and Them. "We don't have this, then we really are no different than the Cylons," Apollo adds. He turns away, bummed but resigned to saving Starbuck's crazy ass yet again, in the middle of the Pegasus and its whole armed and hair-trigger crew, after she shoots their captain. She grabs him awkwardly and they embrace like adolescents about to head into the fray. It's devastating. One of the things that doesn't really hit you right away about this is how totally about to die they both are.
Helo and Chief are still in their cell in the Pegasus brig. The doors on the other side of the glass whoosh open, and Helo closes his eyes exhaustedly. "Looky here. The Sunshine boys are here." By "sunshine," he means "psychotic rapist," by the way. It's the guys who grossed out Cally with their rape talk, Vireem and Gage, and some armed Marine guys as backup. Gage bitches at them about how awesome Thorne was, and calls Chief and Helo "miserable fracks," and Helo demands to be called "sir." Gage obliges, and Vireem -- who you'd think would have figured this out like three episodes ago -- finally figures out why Helo and Chief were so into defending Boomer. He's gross. Right around "filthy little robot girl," which is the least offensive part of what he's saying, Tyrol makes a perfect James-Dean-with-a-migraine face, the one that's so sad and adrenalized, and jumps up: "I'm sorry. I don't think I quite heard that right...Why don't you open the door, come in, and we'll talk about it in here." He fronts at the end there so that they know he's being sarcastic and actually wants them to beat him up. Helo's actually a little surprised that, after everything -- the death sentence and temporary amnesty and all -- these guys are still boring and creepy and macho and crazy and caged enough to come in and do this. They come into the cell with a bunch of guns, and Tyrol and Helo both try to calm the situation down. As they're tying our guys' ankles together and turning them roughly around, Gage again starts with the "sir" stuff: "Don't worry, sir. We'll take it real slow, sir!"
Credits. Yeah. I don't know what it's a testament to, exactly, but for some reason I think it says something about this show that you assumed what you assumed right there. Maybe if you're watching like Oz or even SVU, you might not blink about a little trip to the analrapist every now and then, and it's not so much a selling point per se, but still. It's real. 49,604 souls in the Fleet, counting these assholes but plus Gina, Boomer, and six to eight robots what look like people.
Tyrol and Helo are strapped cruciform to their bunks, facing out. Vireem keeps pacing and creepily sniffing this bar of soap. Gage and Vireem explain that, per Thorne, the "gut" is a "vulnerable area," and that if you want to do damage without leaving a mark -- but still get your brutal homoerotic kicks -- you should wrap a bar of soap in a towel and then smack people with it. Inventive. Is it still called a "blanket party" if there's no blanket? They make weird sex faces and hit our guys a couple of times, and when Chief calls them cowards, Gage takes back his offer of going "slow." He's the one for whom rape comes in second to alcohol, by the way. They don't actually hit them very many times, but the camera goes so crazy and it's so ugly that it seems to go on forever. Finally, XO Fisk appears and calls Gage and Vireem out of the cell, "standing tall," and dresses them down based on the fact that our boys are wearing Colonial uniforms. Vireem starts to protest about how they killed Thorne, and Fisk cuts him right off: "...you're both subject to charges of assaulting a chief and a lieutenant under cover of authority in a time of war. Which, if I'm not mistaken, carries a penalty on this ship that is quite severe." It's the first time you see Fisk sober and in charge, and he's quite commanding. This is good acting and good writing, getting to see this other side of him, when all we've seen before was his vulnerability and intense anxiety with Tigh. Fisk throws the Marines and Sunshines out, and answers our boys' thanks with a curt "I don't want your thanks. I owe Lieutenant Thorne my life, as do many people on this ship." Again with the disinterest in protestations, this time to Helo complaining that Thorne died while trying to rape a prisoner, and Fisk goes dead and cold: "You can't rape a machine, Lieutenant." He leaves, and Chief and Helo just stare at each other, hurting.
Admiral Cain's in her office, wondering if Starbuck drinks. Starbuck: "Only to excess, sir." Cain laughs. "Learn that from Colonel Tigh, did you?" Starbuck's answer is very telling: "Not exactly." Considering the ongoing mother stuff under the surface with Cain, I wonder if this isn't an oblique reference to another thing on the list of stuff making Starbuck's mom a dick. "I understand you belted him once," says Cain, not-quite-conspiratorially. Starbuck gets sheepish: "Yeah...That was something that I did without really thinking." It's more embarrassed than you might think, this. "Don't apologize," says Cain. "From what I read about your XO, maybe he needs to get popped in the mouth every once in while, hmm?" Huge word from yours truly, of course, even though I've liked him more in the past few episodes than ever before. Starbuck doesn't answer; she just drinks. Deep.
Then things get crazy intense. Cain: "I know you're very close with Adama. And I know he's a good man. And I know he's had to make some very hard choices over the last few months. Lord knows I have." Starbuck seems about ten seconds from bursting into tears, but still has enough in her to complain that this should help Cain to understand why Adama went so nuts about getting Helo and Tyrol back. "Let me tell you something," Cain begins, angry and fierce -- no blinking, totally edge, doing the slow burn. "I've had to watch a lot of kids be put into body bags. They're covered with flags and they float out that airlock. You think I don't understand [Adama's] feelings towards his men?" Starbuck stares at Cain, who goes on: "Sometimes terrible things have to be done." She looks away, only briefly flicking her eyes back to Starbuck's. "Inevitably, each and every one of us will have to face a moment where we have to commit that horrible sin. And if we flinch in that moment, if we hesitate for one second..." Starbuck's almost crying but I'm long since. There's absolutely no reason for her phrasing to go this way. She knows. She's got to know. "That horrible sin"? Huge flip from what she's supposedly talking about, the thing with our boys, which she did by the book every step of the way, and thus involved no sins. Cain's exhausted. "If we let our conscience get in the way, you know what happens? There are more kids in those body bags. More kids floating out that airlock." Cain's almost crying by this point. What a wonderful actor Michelle Forbes is. What a serious woman Admiral Cain is. Remember last week when I said that I retroactively respected Cain more in the episode before? I'm almost nearly okay with her at this point. "Now, I don't know why," she tells Starbuck, "but I have a lot of faith in you." She nearly smiles, behind her eyes, but it's not a happy smile. It's a sad one. "And I want you to promise me that when that moment comes, you won't flinch." There's a softness in her voice at the end there. We cut to a radically focused shot of Starbuck's profile in the foreground, Cain blurry behind. Watch for this shot again a few times later. "Do not flinch." For a second I could love Cain almost as much as Roslin, honestly. Starbuck drains her drink.
Apollo enters Adama's quarters with some MacGuffin paperwork he's couriering over from the Pegasus. Inappropriately, Adama ribs him about being an errand boy, and Apollo admits that he asked for the trip. "Kara told me about her, uh...her mission," he begins, in a somewhat accusatory tone. Adama wonders if Apollo's come to change his dad's mind, and Apollo -- ever the straight shooter -- goes to the guilt place: "Just wanted to hear it from you." Militarily, he's very much "at ease" -- thumbs in his belt -- but emotionally, he's about an octave tighter than is even normal for him. Adama tells Apollo that the decision is made, and Apollo starts pacing: "Assassination. That's your decision. That's how you resolve your differences with your superior officers." (Right up there with terrorism and sedition, Captain -- sorry, Lieutenant -- Hypocrite.)
Adama again reiterates that Apollo has the option of not backing Starbuck up, just like she did, and it's a nice mix of several things. First is the way Olmos plays it, which is heavy on the disappointment because he was so happy to see his son a second ago. Second is the fact that of course his father and Kara know that this is the #1 way to shut Apollo up -- giving him the opportunity to back down, because he cannot. And third for a reason we saw at the beginning of the episode, which will become clear in a bit. Suffice it to say that Apollo would never admit that he actually does want to opt out of going on a kamikaze assassination run. Adama's a little embarrassed as Apollo continues to protest ("It's not about me watching her back!"), but tells him it's not up for debate: "I think the President's right. This is the best way to safeguard the Fleet." Apollo starts stammering, and I can't help but wonder if that wasn't a little bit below the belt, even given the circumstances. Normally I'd say that Adama assumes Apollo knows that Roslin was in on it, but it's Adama; you can't trust him with your heart. If Apollo did know Roslin was in on it, he'd be at the Colonial One right now, because he knows Roslin and Adama are good at changing Adama's mind as a team. Therefore, he didn't know it was Roslin's idea, which means that this was a total sideswipe guaranteed to freak Apollo out, put him on the defensive, even force him to acquiesce, given his belief in the President. (Yeah, Lee and the President are close; you might have forgotten that, given the fact that the show has too.) Bill Adama is sometimes a bad, bad father, but he's very good at doing his job, which is saving humanity. Lee stutters and nearly starts crying for real. Adama concludes, "She's made of sterner stuff than people give her credit for...Is this all I have to sign?" Adding insult to injury with the whole Oedipal "Maybe I know Roslin better than you do" secret club of Mom and Dad crap. Bill's an evil genius. Apollo thanks him with a hundred "sir"s and really sells the entire scene. "Lieutenant. It's good to see you," Bill says dismissively. I don't often feel this sympathetic toward Apollo. He gets jerked around so, so much though.
On the Pegasus, Fisk is prepping his assassination Marine squad while Starbuck puts on her flight suit. How much would it suck to be like, "After this space battle, I have to do this whole other horrible thing. Hope I don't die any of the thousand possible times I'll probably die today." Starbuck looks in the mirror several times, like she always does. That's a good character tic. The whole time this is going on, the Tacticals are on the PA, so it ramps up the excitement considerably, all ongoing orders and alerts and whatever. Starbuck sets off down the corridor toward the bay as the announcements are going, "Set condition one throughout the ship." As Fisk marches his Marines toward the shuttle, she jogs past him. "Good hunting, Captain," he says. "You too, Colonel," she says. They both look grim, but I love the plausible deniability of this oh-so-dramatic line, because of course they're also wishing each other luck in the battle itself, like, you could say that to anybody you met along the hall. It's kick-ass for the story, though, mostly.
Over in the Galactica bay, Fisk is apologizing to Tigh (calling him "Saul," which is a nice nod to the fact that they are buddies now, in a very awkward position -- although only Fisk knows just how awkward) about having to be in charge of the Marines instead of just giving them to Tigh. The cover for all of this, plot-wise, is that the Marines are necessary on both ships in case the Cylons board, but we and Fisk know that it's really to kill the entire CIC. Tigh: "Be sure your Marines and our Marines are aware of their areas of responsibility...The last thing we need is Colonials shooting at each other." Fisk sighs an "Amen" to that one. Jack Fisk has, like, a Ph.D. in Foreshadowing.
Adama's naked and staring in the mirror, tracing his scar from when Boomer shot him, which goes all the way from here to there. This is so creepy, because of the obvious assassination stuff, but also because it's like seeing your Dad do this, naked, but then it's double creepy because the Marines are bringing Boomer to visit him. He sends them outside, and Boomer is unshackled somewhat. They sit, wary, Boomer giving off shades of being put-upon, being scared, being tremendously sad, and being a little angry, but mostly icked out. "I've asked you here to find out why the Cylons hate us so much," Adama says. Because now's the time? I don't exactly know the character reasons for this, except for how it contributes to the denouement, but that makes this whole scene uncharacteristically clumsy -- retroengineering the entire scene so that Boomer can change Adama's mind about some things. Well, I'm willing to give the show the benefit of the doubt, though, so I prefer to think that, between the upcoming genocide and assassination, Adama's feeling more grossly sympathetic with the Cylons of late, and maybe this is actually the first time he's wondered. Survivor mode again. Like, he knows why we hate Cylons so much, but the opposite might suddenly be of interest. He is very scowly though, so I can't read him so well right now.
Boomer takes a moment: "I'm not sure I know how to answer that. I mean, 'hate' might not be the right word." The right word, I think, is "patricide," right? But it's only ever the Tom Cruisier of the models that talk about that religious stuff, your Leobens and Sixes. Adama: "I don't want to fence with you. I just want to know why." Boomer's great here, giving off equal parts wanting to answer the question, yearning for her old relationship with Adama and knowing that's totally gone, and being generally "it's so obvious, duh" smug about the awesomeness of Cylons. "It's what you said at the ceremony before the attack, when Galactica was being decommissioned. You...said that humanity was a flawed creation." Close in on Adama's sad face. He remembers that speech, making it up as he went along, how it made no sense and was creepy, but got the slow clap anyway. "And that people still kill one another for petty jealousy and greed. You said that humanity never asked itself why it deserved to survive." So basically, the fact of comparative Cylon perfection is the reason -- and I can see the point, because one thing the Cylons have never, ever done that I can think of is been cruel. Manipulative, inquisitive, destructive, yes. But not for reasons of pettiness or jealousy or greed, or cruelty. They're scary for that reason, just like robots are always scary for that reason. (And before you email me about that damn baby, yes, I'm including that and I'm not inclined to fight it out -- that's the most profoundly sad Six had ever been. Before Gina, before Thorne. Before Pegasus.) The same shot as with Cain: his face in the foreground, blurry Boomer behind even though she's the one talking: "Maybe you don't." The intonation there is brilliant -- technically impossible to do a decent line reading on, actually -- but she sells it so well. As generally hateful as that sentiment is, coming from a Cylon especially...she's had kind of a week. You know?
Back at the fight, in the now, the Battlestars are blasting apart one of the Basestars, and it is awesome, and Gaeta's talking about how the Resurrection Ship is firing up FTL, so Apollo flies up close in the Blackbird -- "Don't anyone look out of the window right now, please" -- and then summarily blows the FTL engines apart. Starbuck acknowledges, and something -- a Raider, I think -- crashes into the Blackbird Laura, splitting her into many flaming pieces. I hope that's not a metaphor.
Dualla registers the Blackbird's distress beacon, and Adama snaps shut like a box. "Alert the search and rescue raptor. See if he had time to eject." The Pegasus and Galactica launch their squadrons, Starbuck gets all CAG, and Fisk signals the Marines to take their posts. Endgame for the Battle of the Resurrection Ship commences, Fisk gets crazy nervous, looking at his Marines all over, and Adama gaetas, "Order batteries alpha through echo to switch to salvo fire." I assume they do so.
Grand, wonderful, sad and angry and terrible music -- second best to the stuff at the end, probably equal to the music on Kobol -- plays as Apollo notices a leak in his suit, checks his rapidly dropping oxygen levels, and puts his hands over the hole. This probably isn't intentional, but it somehow makes total sense that Lee's always about to die from oxygen loss. He never learned to breathe. He watches the whole battle taking place around him, in reference to that guy at Midway that sat in the ocean. It is beautiful, like a wonderful, terrible dream about things so big they make you an amoeba just watching them. Space battles don't actually do it for me very often. This is one of those times. I wish all space fights had really pretty music and lots of orange fire and silver exploding in middle-speed time, and a tiny third-party participant losing oxygen.
Gina and Gaius sit on the floor in the brig, facing each other. Six crouches behind Gaius, not digging the closeness. Gaius -- proving that you can always be crazier -- plays Six and Gina against each other, which is crazy on many levels. First of all, only one of them might exist. Second of all, one of them can't see the other, and doesn't know that other exists. Third of all, Sixes don't like getting fucked with. And finally, that's like stringing along a crazy giant shark and another, crazier giant shark -- either way you're going to lose a fucking arm. Six -- who has comparatively little to lose, since she doesn't exist -- is ranting that "tens of thousands" of Cylons are about to die. She repeats this number like it matters, compared to the destruction of all twelve Colonies: "God will not forgive this sin." Gaius asks Gina if she thinks He will, and her reply, "God forgives all," is troublesome, because the Six model is all about righteousness, but if any Six were going to lie about this particular sin, it would be Gina. Her religion doesn't seem to be intact, so much. The really messed-up thing, though, is how Gaius is doing his usual shit -- playing one conversation against the other -- only usually Six turns this to her advantage, dicking him around hilariously, and now he's doing it to her, plus herself, and it is not funny at all. He's so weird and bad. Six: "Don't listen to her. You think she can help you? You think that that broken woman can offer you even a fraction of what I can? I know God's plan for you! I know how to help you fulfill your destiny!" I never really thought Gaius would keep sucking on that one forever.
Gaius: "Do you know what I miss most? You're going to laugh when I tell you this..." He begins to repeat Six's speech from before, word for word. Six realizes what he's doing and begs him to stop. Gina just watches his face. He's nearly more upset than Six is, which makes him interesting to look at, because as far as Gina knows, he's just telling a story. His eyes are filling with tears, and Six just gets more and more resigned to what's happening. Her heart is breaking, sure, but Gaius is breaking his own heart, which is harder to do. I mean breaking it open, so that he can take the red pill for once, and he's a bastard for doing it because Six is awesome and Gina is a fucking mess, but it's still hard to watch him do it. "...Let the emotion of the crowd flood over me. Waves and waves of it. Like electric current." Gina's awed, thinks it's beautiful -- as she should; it's her story. This is like that little pissant in Eternal Sunshine that took the most romantic moments of Kate Winslet's life and used them like some kind of creepy memory rapist. Gaius heads into the home stretch, Six begging at every turn for him to stop: "And I always had two tickets. One for me...And one for you." And Number Six disappears. I don't like it. I mean, I like it because I like this Gina story, and the actress is excellent in both roles and we'll still see her bossing them all around back on Caprica or wherever, but I forgot that it would mean no more Six, whom I love. Gina meets Gaius's eyes and takes his hand. I can't believe Tricia Helfer had to explain to the writers why Gina would not commence making out with Gaius at this point, but I guess the Kate Winslet angle makes it a bit more understandable -- as far as she's concerned, they just kind of fell in love.
Dualla calls to Apollo, over and over and over: "Apollo, Galactica, do you read? Can you say your position? Apollo, Galactica, are you reading this?" Over and over, into space, as we watch Apollo hanging there, staring, not moving. "Are you out there?" Dualla's voice breaks. Apollo stops pressing on the space leak, and doesn't reply. She keeps calling, and we fade to Apollo, floating in the lake, Dualla's call echoing out almost into silence. It's very cool because the cliffs and the lake are so calming and silent and natural, and the radio's so scratchy and lossy and technical-sounding. Neat effect. Dualla's eyes close briefly in fear and sadness: "Are you out there?" I think she hears Apollo say: "I'm sorry, Kara." Which makes me wonder: on top of the suicidal depression they are all feeling in different ways, and the major disappointment of both Roslin and Adama being in on the assassination, is this also Apollo not wanting to be a part of it? Is he apologizing for being weak and not saving himself, or is he apologizing partly for making a choice not to cover Starbuck?
The Battlestars, having taken out one Basestar, move to the other as the Vipers launch on the Resurrection Ship. Apollo lets go and sinks into the water as the Vipers blow the Resurrection Ship up for good. Thousands of Cylon bodies drift in the flames as Apollo sinks deeper and deeper. In space, he forms a word, losing consciousness and dying. I hope he's not a Cylon -- he just lost his ticket home. A Raptor arrives just after Apollo dies, bright searchlights filling the screen with light.
A Pegasus Tactical Officer informs Cain that the Resurrection Ship has been destroyed, and she slams her podium in celebration, grinning and staring and nearly crying, exactly like a figure skater at the precise moment she gets her score.
Racetrack shocks Apollo back to life in the rescue Raptor, radioing to Galactica CIC, "He's all right. He's a little shaken. But I say again, Apollo is all right," and Dualla and Adama smile and nod quietly to each other. Adama knows all, dude. The cheering starts, and Fisk looks nervous. Gaeta reports that all the rest of the Cylons have jumped, and that the fight is over. Adama congratulates everyone, and Fisk stares at him, the Marines waiting for his command.
Gina and Gaius sit cross-legged, facing each other, hands across. Gina asks him to send her soul "to God," and he looks freaked out. What if she died and then he had two of them following him around all the time? Like, one of them on one shoulder talking about God's plan and the other one on the other shoulder with the atheism and vengeance sprees? You can always get crazier.
Starbuck walks slowly to the Pegasus CIC, and she is sweaty as hell. She looks covered in an entire Gavin Rossdale of glycerin, oily and wet, and she's breathing slowly to herself: "I wish you were here, Lee." She shakes it off, and approaches the CIC, dropping puddles of flop sweat everywhere and the Marines follow behind her with those stand-up signs that say "Piso Mojado." In CIC, Cain is stretching -- her physical tension is a major factor in the rest of her scenes, which is cool, because you never even saw her blink before, but now that the Cylon Fleet is destroyed, she's allowed to have a crick or two. The angle as Starbuck's entering CIC is very Hitchcock, like, there's an officer in there who looks over at her, but he looks incredibly menacing, because we're scared of what's going to happen, and the fact that, Lee or no Lee, Starbuck's probably going to die in the five minutes. Cain is overwhelmed with fifty kinds of emotions when she sees Starbuck, but immediately clamps them all down: "I am so very proud of you." Starbuck just stares at her, covered intensely in a bunch of sweat. She may have space influenza.
Tigh steps down the alert to condition two and issues some orders. He and Fisk agree that it's a good thing they didn't need the Pegasus Marines. He's not sweating bullets, but we manage to understand that he's anxious. Dualla receives a call from Cain, on "the flagship." Cain and Adama congratulate each other, and it's almost a relief for a second, because they do sound fairly cordial and not like people about to signal each other's assassinations. The music gets more and more intense as Adama asks for Starbuck, and Fisk gets even jumpier. "Yes, she is [here]," replies Cain, looking Starbuck right in the eye. Starbuck smiles weakly and answers the phone, not taking her eye off Cain. "I've been thinking," says Adama, "about what we talked about before." She fingers her gun, and she and Cain continue to look at each other. It's quiet behind Cain's eyes, but she's clearly waiting for something. "It's not enough to survive," says Adama. "One has to be worthy of surviving. That's all." The drums stop; Starbuck takes her hand off her gun: "I think that's very wise, sir. Thank you." Her smile becomes more real, and Cain considers her for a moment before taking back the phone. She smiles a little bit, shaking her head slightly. It's almost a smirk, but the kind of smirk you give when you can't believe what somebody just did. Off the hook, Starbuck turns away and kind of mentally leans against a wall like she might faint. Cain asks whether Fisk is "standing close by." Fisk's eyes bug out as Adama hands him the phone. "Congratulations, Jack," says Cain. He thanks her, and we sit still for a million years of silence, as Cain thinks it out. "...That's all." Cain hangs up and nearly gets pissed at herself. Fisk hangs up and nearly pisses himself. Tigh looks at Fisk -- now sweating, but not anything so impressive as Kara -- and says he looks like he could use a drink. Fisk laughs and laughs, that same hyena crazy laugh from before, hysterical and terrified and adrenalized, and Adama just smiles at him, sadly, because Adama knows everything before it happens.
Gaius signals to a guard to let him out of Gina's cell, and then distracts him long enough for Gina to attack -- somehow moving really fast but in slow motion too -- and she flips the Marine and snaps his neck. One down, sweetheart; ca. 1,296 to go. Godspeed. She takes the guy's gun and hands it to Gaius, holding it to her jaw. That strange New Age music from "Pegasus" happens as Gaius protests a bunch. Gina explains that suicide is a sin, but that she needs to die -- I guess the unspoken assumption is that God hates Gaius either way, so it's no skin off his nose to kill her. "What you need...is justice," he tells her, and puts the gun into her hand. Is it so terrible that I cheered at this? It's not even her going after Cain, or being loose on the Pegasus, or that Gaius is setting her free -- maybe it's just the cheesy-yet-awesome line, or the fact that "justice" could mean a whole lot more of these fuckers than just Cain. If Pegasus is joining the Fleet anyway, how cool would it be to have an ongoing storyline where officers just randomly show up dead for a few episodes? Or like they could be pedeconferencing about this and that, or practicing their marching, and one could just disappear into the rafters every once and while, schlooop, and finally they would start noticing, like, "Hey, where did Gage go? He was just here! I'm thirsty." Anyway, Gina's got the gun, and she's looking pretty scared and pretty disgusted at the idea. I wonder how much of that is just her being used to her cell -- like, the fact that she's not actually going to die right this second presents a whole other set of problems. Gaius says he knows a place he can keep Gina and take care of her, where she'll be safe. "Why?" she asks. "Why would you do that?" He says it's because he loves her, and then gets shy and smiles at the floor. She touches his face, and then -- more Sixy than she's been at any point -- Sixes around him, 360 degrees around his body at a distance of less than an inch, like a snake, then staggers out into the hallway and disappears. Gaius...basically freaks out about how he just did that. And yeah. I mean, I think Six, Gina, and Boomer -- especially Boomer -- have a legitimate point to make; I'm not unsympathetic to a lot of their views, but dude, Gaius: you totally just took a deranged prisoner of war with a death wish and an all-out extermination agenda, put a gun in her hand, and kissed her goodbye. Bad form.
Cain stretches some more in her quarters, like her whole body is breaking now that it's allowed to. I wonder if that's not actually true, like if she's suddenly needing six months' worth of massage now that the battle's over and Galactica helped her kill the white whale. I think that's at least part of the reason she called off the hit: because Galactica not only proved herself useful for something more than spare parts and rape victims, but because with the trailer Fleet off their asses, she's allowed to think, and not just react, for the first time. I think that might be part of it, because there's a long shot of her unbuckling her weapon and placing it on a glass table, up through which we are looking, so that we can't help thinking about how unarmed she is. She starts to strip down and sees Gina, standing near a door, looking nuts. "Tell me, Admiral. Can you roll over? Beg?" Gina's still so weak, you can see it in her shaking hands, and her posture. There have been lots of questions and speculation about Cain's relationship to Gina, why she was so personally invested and simultaneously hands-off with Gina's torture, the whole "you ate our food and listened to our stories" thing, ranging from the idea that they were friends to the idea that they were lovers. I think it's somewhere in there, because at this moment, for a second, she just looks like her feelings are hurt. "Frack you," she spits, and Gina raises the gun. Cain is so scared, and so angry, and defiant, and strong, and sad, and doesn't seem to believe that this is actually how it's going to go down. "You're not my type," says Gina, and while it's a lame and distracting line, it's lame and distracting in a very Six way. Cain breathes in once, sharply, her eyes full of tears -- but she is absolutely not giving in, and that's so rough considering that she's finally getting to rest for the first time since the Big One, and all of a sudden she has to be indomitable again for a second. Gina shoots Cain, and I am...really quite sad. I'm a sucker for will power, and this lady had it in spades. She just kept making more and more sense and seeming less and less crazy -- even as her ship went to shit around her, and I recognize that -- and more and more...like, the Emperor Norton story, how his madness kept him sane. I think that's who she was. I'm going to miss her. I don't know that she was beyond saving, after all. But like I said, the last thing Kara and Apollo need right now is more bullshit guilt and craziness, and there's something poetic to Gina doing the deed.
There is a whirling shot of space and then Lee's eyeball, staring like this is Lost. Even pretend-dead, Apollo is crazy good-looking. I have no idea what that shot was about...
...except we cut immediately to Cain's funeral in the Pegasus bay, so maybe we're supposed to think Apollo really did die or something. Or maybe the layers are just getting confusing: they both wanted to die and have it not be their fault, just like Gina, and they were both chronically bothered by Laura and Bill's sneaky bending the rules all the time, and they both kind of wanted to bone Starbuck. And for that matter, they're both contributing factors to Kara's own freakout: if her concept of Truth and Justice has died, and her concept of Hardcore Survival has literally just died, she has no options but to go crazy. Just like Apollo.
Fisk: "...And she died knowing that her ship and her crew were safe and that her mission had been accomplished. Nothing was more important to her than her ship, her crew, and her mission. And as I take command of Pegasus, I pledge to uphold those values that made her such an effective and heroic leader." All true, technically. It kind of bums me out how true that is, like this battle was this huge symbol to Cain that she could relax and become human again. Fisk steps down, and he and Starbuck trade places so that she can speak. Things get weird: "I, um, only knew Admiral Cain for a short time, so what I have to say about her will be short. She faced things. She looked them right in the eye and she didn't flinch. That's something that we do a lot around here. We second-guess. We worry." She stares at nothing. "When I think about what she went through after the attack -- all alone, one ship, no help, no hope -- she didn't give up." I don't know if this is literal, like Starbuck honestly doesn't know about what happened to the Pegasus's civilian fleet, but a case could be made that she's just projecting all the Galactica stuff onto what the Pegasus crew went through. In military terms, after all, it was still only one Battlestar. I'm not sure that's true, but I'd prefer to think so, because Apollo has just demonstrated how badly one might react when faced with ugly truths about one's fake mommy, and I think Kara's about to go crazy enough without the added stress, frankly. "She didn't worry. She didn't second-guess. She acted. She did what she thought needed to be done, and the Pegasus survived." Profiles of Lee, Tigh, Bill, at attention, no reaction. "Might be hard to admit, or hard to hear, but I think that we were safer with her...than we are without." This, I totally get, because it's true. In terms of Kara's logic, that is completely true. Cain was a good military leader and she kept people alive in very bad circumstances. By doing horrible, dreadful things, true, but she's demonstrated that these things were not done in a cavalier manner, and a lot of her attitudes were stuff Kara's often found lacking in her Galactica COs. There's a shot of Bill, though, and it's backwards for symbolic reasons, as we see fading back into Starbuck's profile facing his like the two-faces v. vase picture. Oh, dear. Well, I guess he kind of asked for it when he ordered her to kill Cain, but boy.
Later, Starbuck watches Apollo pretending to be dead. She asks if he's okay, and the best he can muster is that he broke his word to her. Starbuck shushes him, and we see that Dualla's standing outside the officers' quarters listening in. "A close call like that," Starbuck tells him, "that would mess with anybody's head. All right? It turns out I didn't need you anyway. So...let's just be glad that we both came back alive, all right?" He tells her that he didn't want to, and she looks sad and sick, and we see the fickle Petty Officer Anastasia Dualla outside, looking horrified and distraught and just a tiny bit in love. I'll give Apollo a pass on the drama, because he did just actually die for a minute there, but the angsting about it might give me indigestion some episode soon.
Helo and Chief approach Boomer's cell. Chief stands back, and Helo steps up to the glass. Boomer rushes to meet him. They stare and smile, and Boomer goes nuts, laughing and weeping, so excited and relieved and exhausted: "I didn't think I'd ever see you again!" He smiles warmly and agrees, and they stare at each other, Chief in the background, totally ignored. "So," Boomer asks, "where do we go from here?" Chief, a class act all the way, gives a tiny sad smile and exits quietly. Wow.
On Colonial One, Billy looks on at Bill and Laura having a meeting. She's looking a bit better than last week, but she looks so tiny in her big club chair! Legs crossed primly at the knees. She is such a good actor that she seems to have actually shrunk a little, for this scene. Maybe it's just that she's so regal all the time that she seems to tower over everybody, and when she turns it off she gets tiny again. I will meet Mary McDonnell one day and then I will know if she is to scale. Here, though, she looks imminently frangible and it's very sad. She's asking how Gina got off the Pegasus undetected, and Adama notes the "chaos in the aftermath of the attack," which brings up the assassination. "Thank the Gods," breathes tiny, sick Laura, "you did not have to do what I advised. That makes me very happy." He agrees that the Gods should be thanked, and then changes the subject immediately, because she's just helped him lie to her that Gina killed Cain before Adama could get to her, instead of calling it off for mysterious Adama-type reasons. He asks how she's feeling, and Roslin says that she could sleep for about a year. "You, however, do not have that luxury, because you have a new job." Billy hands her a jewelry box, mentioning that it took some time to track down the guy specifically. "Rumor has it that I know very little about military protocol," she grins, "but I do believe that someone who commands more than one ship is called an Admiral." She giggles and shrugs cutely, and congratulates "Admiral Adama," handing him the box, which contains the Admiral insignia. She smiles over at Billy, so proud, as Bill opens it and thanks them both quite graciously. "I...um...I never gave up hope. I just stopped trying to get these a long time ago." She smiles and says it just goes to show that you should never give up hope, and calls him Bill. "Same goes for you, Laura." She gives that soft sigh that gets me every time, the "hmm" that always sounds like she's about to faint or like she just saw something incredibly beautiful and might cry. I hate it.
The whole hope v. cancer thing is too much for Laura, so she nods curtly: "All right." She puts out a hand and Adama grabs it, neither of them consciously, to help her stand. He looks at her face, touches her chin, and they smile at each other. There's a really nice, sweet, real mixture here of Mary and Edward and Laura and Bill, and the respect they all have for one another and the incredibly powerful acting vibes they are sending out, and it hits you in the deeply nonverbal part of your brain that's usually reserved for the visual arts. I don't know how else to explain it. It's a deep feeling. Olmos leans forward, off-script, and kisses her lips, and she looks into his eyes and smiles. It's the most profoundly romantic thing this show has ever accomplished, because there's so much in it, so much admiration and love and respect and comfort and acceptance. Laura does the "hmm" again, and I'm sure at least part of it has to do with how Edward James Olmos is amazing and he will totally rewrite your scene as it's happening to make it more awesome and ambiguous, and he probably doesn't know most of the time that he's about to do it and where or how the genius will hit. It's so candid and weird and perfect and sad. Billy takes Laura's arm, and we see her supported by them both for a second -- fully supported; she looks like a strong breeze might carry her off -- and then Adama watches Billy lead her off to bed, his heart clearly breaking. Maybe the best song ever to play on this show starts up and he looks down at his Admiral buttons and he cries, turning back to look at the door she's just walked through. Wow.
week: I don't give a fuck what happens as long as Laura gets fixed. I mean it. They could fully meet magical beings from the future with googly eyes and eldritch potions, I wouldn't care, she and Lee could bond over having beat the Reaper and become weird kamikaze freaks with Starbuck and just do intentionally dangerous adrenaline-rush stuff all the time, she can find some kind of nanotech bracelet in the hallway that kills cancer as long as she wears it and then have a farce episode where Ellen Tigh gets drunk and runs off with it and they get it back at the last second, she can run into Gina in the hallway and get shot only in the cancer, she can turn out a Cylon, she can download into another body that looks like Laura, harvest Boomer's fetal stem cells, whatever it takes, I don't care, I don't care. She can just wake up and be like, "The cancer was only a dream!" and Bill can be taking a shower. Fuck story logic. I need Laura Roslin.