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Dualla gives Lee another speech about the Adama awesomeness, but leaves the squick out of it, as the Pegasus heads for Earth â¦or so you think! Saul Tigh poisons the hell out of Ellen Tigh, but as per usual with them, it's actually the sweetest -- not to say most romantic -- part of the season. They're so sad and weird. He cries a lot and it's very awful. The Cylons watch New Caprica burn from Colonial One as the insurgents start to fight and the non-combatants begin their evacuations; Laura Roslin takes back Colonial One, awesomely. Gaeta tells Gaius he's going to shoot him if he doesn't get rid of the Cylon nuke on New Caprica, and you can tell he means it. Galactica jumps into the atmosphere surrounded by Vipers! But immediately four base ships attack, and Adama is just about ready to die when the Pegasus arrives, and gets destroyed saving Galactica. Weird, weird, weird stuff happens with Anders, Kara, Leoben, and Kacey, but basically: Kara says she loves Leoben but it's clearly a lie, Anders says he loves Kara but she's clearly crazy, and Kacey is a red herring, of course. Speaking of: Maya is dead and Three ends up with Hera, just like Plummer Selloi said. Knowing that their concentration camp has been ruined for good, the Cylons take off, leaving a Three behind to nuke the whole planet, but she ends up linking up with Gaius, the only person on the literal planet who's crazier than she is. Oh, and the pornstache is gone! Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously: God told every single person on the show that baby Hera was alive, but forgot to mention to anybody that Gaeta was obviously the administration mole; Ellen Tigh was a saboteuse, and Adama was a captain of futility. Now: Dualla and Lee are getting things ready on Pegasus for the search for Earth. Map coordinates with Hoshi, questions and concerns with the Civilian Fleet, et cetera. The thing that Lee can't seem to get together? His lack of concern for his dad's latest suicide mission. "I know," says Dualla. "But we have to push forward. Keep the Fleet together. Find Earth." They agree that this is their duty, and Dualla points out that the Admiral has pulled off miracles aplenty in the past. Lee is so mesmerized by his wife's feel-good mantras that he randomly assents that he has not given up hope, and Dualla zeroes in for the kill: "Yes, you have. I saw the look on your face when you came back from the Galactica. Like you were never gonna see him again." Oh, that look. Between the fact that Lee Adama whines his way through all his waking hours anyway -- not to mention the bizarre obesity prosthetic -- I thought it was just noodles repeating on him. Lee reminds us of the stakes and the breaks: "He's taking on too much for one half-strength Battlestar to handle. And that's not opinion, that's military fact. He's not coming back from this. None of them are." Dualla admits that, and says they should just totally ignore the deaths of the crew of the Galactica that have not yet happened, and focus on moving the Fleet to safety, like Lee was saying last week before those noodles started in on him. Well, the goodbye last week was pretty heartbreaking so maybe that is what's doing it. The other thing is that this is the only Dualla I like, no matter how repetitive it actually gets: "You can do this. You can get us there. You are Commander of this Fleet, and you will guide us to safety. And you will do it no matter the cost. Because you're an Adama." She's the voice that brings them home, still. Lee, feeling like a man again, tells her he is proud to serve with her, and also to be married to her, and then gets back to business.
Down in the insurgent bunker, Anders is having his fifteenth nervous breakdown, and as usual, he's got a good reason. Specifically, three insurgents dead -- "and if that Marine Sergeant wasn't on her game, they'd have killed us all" -- thanks to Lady MacTigh. Saul Tigh is so not feeling this, but he knows Anders is right. Anders is not taking Shut Up for an answer, though: "You 'get this': If Sharon had been killed, not only would we not get the launch keys, but the Cylons would know that we were in direct contact with Galactica. Now this whole plan, the fate of this whole city, would have fallen apart. Get it?" Tigh's like, "Get it? I invented it." But they already had the whippersnapper conversation a couple weeks ago, and Anders defeated him with the one-two punch of A) You guys left me for a year on an irradiated planet full of rape farms, and B) Now my wife has been abducted and/or killed. So I think Anders is actually trying to do the right thing here, and maybe putting on a fair amount of bluster in order to make the point. Meaning I don't think he's as wild nuts as this scene might make him seem. We've seen Tigh do it and we've seen Kara do it too, yell louder than they mean to so other people will shift their asses, and the three of them are like the same guy at various points in life. A Portrait Of Drunk Jenny. But what's he being so hardcore about? What's the point? "If you don't want to do it, I understand. But believe me, Colonel, someone is gonna do this. Now, it would be better for her sake if it was you." And there's Ellen, standing in the back of the shot, as Anders takes off. Credits. Damn.
Ellen sits to her husband, distraught but calmer now. "I had to do it, Saul. I had to. It was all for you. And I want you to know that I would've done anything to save you." He assures her that he knows this, and that everything's going to be all right. There is more love in his one eyeball than in most people's whole bodies. Ellen comes clean about all of it: boning Cavil to get Tigh out of detention, the whole bit. She is very very intense and very sympathetic the whole time. She curls up against him, protesting that she didn't want anybody to die as a result of her actions, and then she looks him dead in the eye. "I could use the drink." She takes a cup from his hands with a sad smile, and looks into his eyes with a stunning amount of love and grace as she takes a drink. "You've always been there for me when I needed you," she mumbles. "Oh, I'm exhausted. I feel like I could just curl up here." She falls into his shoulder and he puts his arm around her. "Should've listened to you, Saul," she laughs. "Should've stayed on Galactica." He tells her not to worry about any of that now, and just to try and sleep. She murmurs that she is indeed tired, and her eyes close. The cup drops to the floor. And Tigh begins to sob. "I love you, Ellen. Do you hear me?" And Saul Tigh lays her body softly down on the bunker bench, and weeps.
On Colonial One, Gaeta's boredly drawing a Cylon being hung or murdered or something as Baltar waxes bitchy at the Cylons about how they should have listened to him: "Too comfortable in your predictions of success to even consider the possibility of defeat," he says, which is ironic considering that's like his theme song. "And where are we now? And more to the point, where's Laura Roslin? Where's Tom Zarek? At large. Whereabouts unknown." Three and Simon roll their eyes but don't speak. "Probably with Colonel Tigh, solidifying the insurgency's hold over the public's imagination." Finally Three speaks up and asks what the hell he wants from them now, then. "Leave. Pack up your Centurions and go," he says levelly. "Please, go." And then Three says something interesting and not that sympathetic, even for a Cylon-lover like me: "And then what? What would you do if we really just left you here? You'd live out your lives in peace and never trouble yourselves with thoughts of us again? Or would you raise your children with stories of the Cylon? The mechanical slaves who once did your bidding only to turn against you. [True.] Killers who committed genocide against your race. [True.] And occupiers of this city [True!], until we just ran away [Give it a shot!]. Would you tell them to tell the story to their children? And to their children's children? And nurse a dream of vengeance down through the years, so that one day they could just go out into the stars and hunt the Cylon once more?"
Which... I guess so? But that's not actually the problem, so she's really just kind of taking a stance. She's not in this because she's afraid that, ten generations from now when humanity is viable again, they're going to do something; she's in this because... They Have A Plan. I mean, she's right, but that's not her argument, so what the hell. It's a good speech and one that would work if she hadn't already expressed her own feelings on the subject, and an important thing to say. I fully agree with the speech in theory, but it feels shoehorned into her mouth. Gaius says it's blood for blood, but that it has to stop one day, which is something you get in Greek stories a lot. Iphigenia to Cassandra to Clytemnestra to Orestes and then you get Athens. Blood for blood. Three just smiles and thinks about how she's already crazier than he can deal with, but just then Gaeta looks away from his cartoon and notices how all of New Caprica is on fire, down below them. If this were about the Middle East, you might think the fires everywhere looked like oil wells. But also: "Hunt the Cylon once more"? When did that happen to begin with? Before the original Armistice? I don't know, Benjamin Franklin said there was never "a good war or a bad peace," and I have my theories about the Armistice and the confederation of the Colonies to begin with, but I think that what we're seeing is the reversal of that for once: the Bad Peace of Season 2.5, when the Fleet turned on itself, becoming the Good War of Season 3.0, when everybody got their shit together. (Which is, coincidentally, the subject of my essay in this book, So Say We All, coming out from BenBella Books this week, edited by Tom Zarek himself, so go read it.)
Down in the city, Tory Foster's addressing her block captains and wowing at Anders's awesome explosions everywhere. She administrates the evacuation, reminds them of their drills, and sends them with the blessing of the Gods. Maya comes up with Hera in her arms, asking Tory to thank Laura for taking care of her and the baby, but Tory doesn't have time for Maya's mess: "Tell her yourself when this is all over." She smiles down at peaceful Hera and wishes "we" (meaning "Maya" and also "all the refugees") were as chill as the baby. She sends Maya off with the block captains and runs around issuing orders and generally being so freakin' awesome. This is by far her best episode so far; I can't wait to see what goes down with her.
Anders and his insurgents unearth their weapons from under the Pyramid field in the square and exposit that they're going to hit the detention center and free all the people.
Up in space, Kelly (the current Gaeta, I think) is talking about the "decoy squadron," and then Kat is in space doing that horrifically obnoxious "NOW NOW NOW" stuff some more. Kelly confirms that the drones her squad is dropping match the signatures of a Battlestar, so the Cylons will be reading two Battlestars incoming in the scene. Which will cause them to freak out.
Up on Colonial One Gaeta is yelling into the phone about evac (for the Cylons? The administration? Not sure, since he can't know about the civilian evacuation in front of them) while Caprica attempts to comfort poor Gaius, who's realizing that his year and a half of bullshit was even less pointy than he even thought last week, since it's all going to hell now: "We'll start over, Gaius. A new city to rise out of the ashes." Gaius isn't buying; he's pretty sure New Caprica will be "buried like the cities of old" and "consumed by the wrath of God" and things of this nature. It's pretty bleak, but also kind of his dream come true, at this point. If it can't be a monument to his heroism and leadership, which, clearly that's a bust, let's just forget it ever existed. Boomer comes in with the fake news about how two Battlestars just jumped into orbit. "Adama's back."
Racetrack and Kat, out in orbit, confirm that two basestars just jumped in and started launching Raiders, so they've done their job with the drones. They head back to Galactica.
Up in Kara's apartment, Leoben's worried about the insurgents and wants to go find out about the deal. I'm confused because none of the other Cylons seems to be aware that Leoben even exists, and he's never at the meetings, and so what help can he possibly be? Kara is not interested in being left and trapped in the apartment during a civil war, but, like: he's not got a whole lot of options, so he tells her to stay put. She responds by jumping on his back and trying to beat him up, and he knocks her out and leaves her on the floor. Kacey is like, "She can't even pee without me knocking myself senseless, but apparently it's cool to leave me with her unconscious body?"
Dirty insurgents and refugees run all over the place and go crazy, and Laura and Tom Zarek are... very close these days. She sends him to the shipyard, where I guess the launch-key ships are, and he's like, "You coming?" She points up at Colonial One and grins a tiny bit. "My ship's up there." She is so awesome. I love that Laura Roslin will take a minute out of her busy citywide riot to go looking for Cylons and Baltars to smack. Zarek admires her flair for drama and grabs a random guy... who turns out to be a very defensive Jammer. Zarek's like, "I don't know about any self-hating SS officer mess, but go with Laura." They wink at each other and give a quick hasta before heading out to their separate evacuation points. I wonder if Laura cleared the whole Colonial One thing with Tory Foster. Tory Foster HATES a flair for drama. Remember the debate? "Cutesy pantyhose bullshit is one thing but we've got press to deal with."
As Galactica gets ready to actually get involved for real -- Can we talk about Helo's hair? I love it! He looks like a waiter at the best restaurant in the universe -- Three figures out about the drones. Leaving one question, which is Simon's, since he didn't get to talk yet this season: "Where's Galactica?" Baltar stares.
Some dude on New Caprica is like, "They've got us pinned down. We're trapped!" Which is the cue for... Galactica to literally fall out of the literal sky directly towards New Caprica City through the atmosphere. The reason these recaps are so short, not that you're complaining, but the reason is that the actual scripts are super-short. Every time Leoben or Kacey get involved, everything goes into slo-mo. Any time Cally's in trouble, slo-mo. Anytime spaceships do anything, the music goes crazy and there is space porn of explosions that goes on forever. Fabulous to look at, teeny-tiny on paper. It's not slow or lightweight as an experience, it's just a lot weighted toward the visual, which I really like. So if me saying that Galactica is actually falling out of the sky like God's giant fist onto the Raiders and Cylon bullshit spaceships, and shooting Vipers out of itself at a prodigious rate, if that doesn't paint the picture, I don't have a lot of options. It's as big as the sky and getting bigger and there are orange lights and fires all around. I think week will be talkier, but just as horrible to live through or more. Helo launches all of the Vipers -- Hotdog! Hotdog gets to say some pithy lines about how he's "rolling in hot" or whatever. I missed Hotdog! -- and then Galactica jumps away again. The forgotten chapter in The Art Of War that just says, "BOO!"
On the ground, Chief notices that there are suddenly Vipers everywhere, which means it's really happening, which means it's awesome, and also Galactica just did something beautiful and insane to look at, and now the Vipers are shooting all the buildings, and people are running for their evacuation ships, and everything is exploding, and everybody is running, and everybody is screaming their asses off, because it's awesome and scary.
In the detention center, Anders's guys blow a bunch of locks and cells open and mobilize the prisoners toward the shipyards. Anders finds Kara's apartment. Obviously Kara's apartment was in the detention center, but I didn't put it together, even with the whole "Let me out" scene. Or the myriad other clues, like the screaming torture victims. I don't know. I guess I just thought it was in a shitty part of town. I wasn't thinking. For some reason that makes it even creepier. He finds Kara on the floor, still knocked out, and is very happy and very scared all at once, and also very worried about what she's been up to in there, because he's already imagined even worse things than the very horrible things that have been going on in there.
Back on Galactica, Helo is firing spaceship words at a fearsome rate, and Kelly lets everybody know that two baseships have jumped in from the nebula. Which apparently they were planning on -- they can use the Galactica to lure them both away, and that'll give the evac ships enough time to get away. Except suddenly there aren't two but four baseships, which the Admiral readily admits is not doable. Sparks are flying all over CIC, like real bad, just shooting directly out of the equipment, and they're getting shoved to and fro, and Edward James Olmos is shouting nonsense, and Helo is like, "We can't maneuver, we're blowing up in these areas, and our jump drives are dead." Adama -- with pieces of his ship literally flying at his head and shooting sparks all over the place -- takes a deep breath and tells everybody it's been an honor.
It is silent in space as Galactica goes down. The baseships take heavy aim at her and she drifts, on fire all over, systems dead. Admiral Adama gets ready to die, the evacuation a failure, humanity's only hope is the Pegasus and her civilian Fleet. New Caprica and the Battlestar Galactica end here.
Except they don't! Pegasus jumps in, all shiny and awesome, and Apollo comms to his father: "Galactica, Pegasus. Let us take some of this work off your hands. Get your FTL up and ready, and we'll take care of the rest." Adama damns his son for breaking protocol and coming back, under his breath, orders Helo to get the FTL back online, and then thanks his son sweetly, and proudly, and under his breath.
In Pegasus CIC, Dualla and Apollo rapidly figure out that the basestars are herding them into the middle of their death voodoo formation. "Steady as she goes," says Apollo. "Take us right into the center." I take back everything I ever said about him. He's a good boy. Dualla notes they won't last long in there; he agrees. He's an Adama.
In the detention center hallway, Kara wakes up and immediately demands that her husband put her down. He's like, "It's cool! It's cool!" She's still a little wild, asking in wonder if it's really him. "Baby, it's really me. But listen, we don't have time. We're going to the ships, and we're gonna get the hell off this frackin' planet." She grins hugely -- she's game for this plan -- but asks what he did with Kacey. (Like, "Awesome that you're here... hey, where'd you stash my daughter while I was passed out?" It's very sad for some reason, because she's like, if all the dreams of four months are coming true, why would anything go wrong? She's imagined this way too many times for it to go wrong.) "Who's Kacey?" Kacey. She's my daughter. "Kara, who's Kacey?" he asks again. "She's my daughter!" Kara shoves him and runs back down the hallway, skipping and jumping past insurgents and prisoners, back toward her cell.
On Colonial One, Simon and Three agree that it's time to evacuate the ship onto Heavy Raiders. "I'll stay behind and set off the nuke," Three offers. I think she just wants to look for Hera. "You should go as well, Caprica," she says, furthering my hypothesis. "And you," she says to Gaius. "I don't think you'll want to be here after we've gone. There's a place for you, too." YES! Gaius on a Cylon ship! Fabulous! He's like, "For real?" She smiles enigmatically and says some more of that creepy machine logic she always says: "Well, you were right and we were wrong. Should be some reward for that." Caprica's like, "Totally!" But Gaius is still feeling the drama of how DEMAND LOVE was always a bad idea in practice, and he sold his ass knowing that. "I just wanna sit here and die," he moans, and even Caprica's a little bored by this, but then Gaeta appears out of nowhere and cocks a gun at Baltar's head. "You're gonna get your wish, Gaius."
Galactica CIC, where Kelly tells us that almost all of the civilian ships have jumped away. (Which makes the nuke plan make even less sense.) The Galactica FTL is back online, but Pegasus has been beat to hell. "I don't think she has a single plane in the air," he says, worried. Adama assures him that Apollo left the Vipers down there to guard the civilian ships: "He knew that was a one-way trip. He'll evac before the end." Helo asks if he's sure, and Adama SCREAMS at him. "Land our birds! Let's get the hell out of here." Helo follows this order with a grin. "All wings, Galactica. Come on home. Combat landings authorized. Repeat, come on home." Everybody gets ready to jump.
On Colonial One, there's an interesting thing happening. Remember last week, how Caprica was so totally polite with Gaeta and he didn't even look at her? And now he's calling Baltar "Gaius"? There are a lot of different kinds of jealousy. So Gaeta's got this severe drama happening with the gun to Gaius's head, and Caprica's trying to talk sense to him, but sense is not what he's interested in talking: "I believed in you. In the dream of New Caprica." Caprica is making calming gestures about how they all did, but Gaeta shakes his head. "No. Not him. He believed in the dream of Gaius Baltar. The good life. Booze, pills, hot and cold running interns. He lead us to the apocalypse, and I turned out to be --" I don't know what he was going to say there. "An idiot," probably. But also, it's a terrible thing to hijack an election, you know? So the "I" word that Gaius is about to say is the right word, but maybe in the wrong context. "An idealist. There's no sin in that."
So, but let's talk for a second about complexity, because it's kind of the same deal as the suicide-bomber stuff: Roslin was wrong to steal the election, but it so happened that Gaeta's actions regarding that huge misstep are the reason we're all here now. Gaius's "dream of New Caprica" was only as the quickest route to an election win. He filled in the blanks after the fact, but he ran with the New Caprica platform because he wanted to screw Laura over. Not authentic, right? But then there's Gaeta, whose idealism checked Roslin's rampant bullshit, which put Gaius in office, which put them on New Caprica, which is why Gina killed herself, which is why the Cylons came, which is why Gaius had no options but to surrender, which is how we all got to where we are right now. And where Kara is, and Ellen and Saul are, right now. When Gaius says "idealist," he thinks he's saying that Gaeta was too much of a pussy to play ball with the Cylons, so it hurt his feelings, but that's not really what he's saying at all: he's saying that Gaeta's assumption that everybody plays by the rules leads in a direct line to this moment. And not only that, but the most subtle accent to Gaeta's character has always been his hero worship of Gaius Baltar. He had the option of staying on Galactica, and chose to separate from military service and go with Gaius to the planet surface. The second that Gaius lost faith in himself -- when he signed the death warrants on the detainees -- is the second that Gaeta realized how bad things really were, and how bad they'd always been. Everybody gets what they want, in the ugliest and most twisted way possible. And it's still happening, and I think what Gaeta was going to say was not "idealist" but something like "I turned out to be the one that did it." Which makes me very sad, and very worried for Gaeta, between that and Chief's creepy choking scenario before, except that A) Jammer is clearly going to die horribly aboard Galactica, and B) at some point somebody's going to realize he was the mole, and probably C) everybody will realize that the Collaborator Witchhunt is a bad idea at that point, but Gaeta will still hold a grudge. That's my guess.
"Everything you say about me is true. Every word." And I'll say this: he finally at least gets that. After all the lies and the collateral damage, Gaius Baltar does understand just how shallow his identity actually is. What's weird is how totally sad that is. "But you have to listen to me. The Cylons have a nuke in this complex. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is getting off this planet alive unless I stop D'Anna." It's not that he doesn't want to be a hero -- he's constantly looking for ways to be a hero -- he's just... really incredibly bad at it. Caprica gasps that Three will kill him, but he's pragmatic: "Then she'll kill me. Or it'll be down to Mr. Gaeta. Either way, the human race dies with me." (This part is iffier, but I think that the show's done its homework connecting Gaius and only Gaius to nuclear power, meaning that he actually might be the only person that can stop her because he's the only one who can take care of the bomb, or something. Whenever there's a bomb, it's Baltar's, back through all the seasons.) Gaius takes Gaeta's gun and shoves it against his chin, and begs for Gaeta to shoot him. Things are tense and more than a little confusing for all three of them, and finally Gaeta shoves him: "You have one chance to put things right. Do you understand me? Get the frack out of here! Stop that nuke! Go!" (Except the Colony has already evacuated, so I don't know what the deal is there either, come to think of it. I guess maybe they wouldn't be able to jump away from it far enough to keep the Fleet from getting blasted? Or this is being told out of order and the Colony hasn't actually left, suddenly? Except Caprica is now dragging him out of Colonial One, and when they reach the ground everybody will have gone, so I have no idea. At the time, actually watching it, these questions don't really detract from the awesome, and you can't expect Gaius to know the state of the evac op at any given time, so maybe he's just being a drama queen, because wouldn't that be weird.)
Apollo gives final orders to the Pegasus crew and then commands everybody to abandon ship. "Good work, and I'll see you on the other side." It's a neat moment, but once Dualla clears out the last of them, and it's just Lee and his ship all alone, it becomes really very touching. "Thank you," he tells her, and leaves. She rams one basestar, is torn apart, and then some of the resulting space trash manages to take out another basestar. And that's the end of the cruel story of the Pegasus, who lasted longer than any of us thought she would: the ghosts onboard are just as much to blame for Gina as Gaius is, and now she is sacrificed to redeem humanity of New Caprica's mistakes. We only really knew her for a short time, specifically almost the entire time I've been recapping, so there's not that much to say. But she faced things. She looked them right in the eye and she didn't flinch, which is something that happens a lot on Galactica: they second-guess. They worry. When you think about what she's gone through since the attack on the Colonies, the blood and the screams not even Lee could entirely wash out of the floors and the walls: she didn't give up, in the end. She was more like them than they could admit. She didn't worry. She didn't second-guess. She acted. She did what she thought needed to be done, and she survived. Might be hard to admit, or hard to hear, but we were safer with her than we are without, no matter what her history. And they've become more like her, in the last two years, than any of us could have imagined possible.
Kara races back inside her apartment, looking everywhere for Kacey. Things get very slo-mo and very creepy, as Leoben creeps, creeps, creeps down the stairs with the child. "I knew you'd be back. I saw it." Commercials and willies attack, and then more slo-mo creep, creep, creeping. He won't give up the kid until Kara "says the words." What words? "You know what I want. I want to hear you say them. And I want the rest of it. Just like I told you." She wrinkles her nose. "Fine. I love you." He leans in: "Say it again." She says it more solidly this time. It's a little more true-sounding: "I love you." And he kisses her. (And she kisses back. And if you don't know what that is like, that particular horrific surprise party you can throw yourself in those moments, that trapdoor into realizing you're basically pretty disgusting to even yourself, you're a lucky son of a gun indeed. Doesn't last long but it's got a hell of a kick.) She kisses him back, and asks with a hiss: "Was it everything you thought it would be?" That and more. "I'll never forget this moment," he says. She kisses him again, one last time: "Neither will I." And then she stabs him, and he drops, gurgling. Anders enters with a gun; Kara grabs Kacey, and they leave with him: "I'll explain later." Which, given that not even Starbuck realizes what just happened there, entirely, seems like a tall order -- not to say an empty promise. Poor Anders, thinking he bagged the "fun" kind of crazy. Poor Kara, thinking she's free.
Gaius, Caprica, and Three run around grab-assing and looking for each other and the baby, who you can hear crying. Three, ripping up I think Selloi's tent at one point, grumpy-grunts, "Fracking liar," which is hilarious. Finally, Gaius finds Maya on the ground, dead, with Hera in her arms. Chip Six kneels, having suddenly appeared for a moment: "It's her, Gaius. The first of God's new generation." Caprica arrives, so of course Six disappears, and Caprica's a good deal more secular -- besides leaving out the Crazy Six Baby Math -- only wondering at the miracle that Hera has been spared once again by God. Three approaches and asks to hold the baby; like a person not in charge of himself, or gripped by the power of this moment, hands her off to the Pharaoh's Daughter. She walks away with the child in her arms, and Gaius pulls out a gun, pointing at the back of her head. Caprica touches his arm. "No. She's not going to set off the nuke, not anymore. Come on, Gaius. We have to go." Man, that is one fucked-up family. Picture Gaius Baltar, Caprica, Three, and Chip Six, raising a baby, on a Cylon basestar. Where people apparently run around naked all the time. This is going to be the best season ever.
Tory Foster, Jammer, and Laura Roslin board the abandoned Colonial One. Laura seats herself at her desk -- I wonder if Gaius kept the Olympic Carrier note? I wanna say he did, if only because he wouldn't care -- and removes her diary from its wrappings, the biggest Olympic Carrier note of all, placing it squarely on the desk before her. "All right," she says, quietly at first. "I'm ready to go," she smiles. And Colonial One takes off. Did she just... elect herself President again? That is SO AWESOME. I love how her choices just get worse and worse, but you still have to admit she's better than anybody else at being President, and it's mostly because she does adorable shit like that. "I'd like to be President right now, okay? I'm not saying I'm necessarily going to airlock you, but I do have a certain persuasive regal air." I bet she got KILLER customer service back when malls still existed. Which is 99 percent of politics anyway.
Oh, hey -- this part's fucking awful, just so you know going in. I don't even want to talk about it yet so I'm going to make some lists instead. The first list goes like this: Saul Tigh. Kara Thrace. Felix Gaeta. The second list goes like this: Poison. Knife. Gun. And the last one goes: Ellen Tigh. Leoben Conoy. Gaius Baltar. The last list is of the people that took the thing that mattered most, and because of love, destroyed your heart. The people that you built your world around, because of love or because you had no other choice. The middle list is what you did , because you couldn't get out. And the first list is the people that have to go on, now. The ones that "survived."
Chief ushers people around the Galactica deck, doing what he does best, back where he belongs. Not stomping -- although I think the scary stomping will come back week and it's going to be hella bad -- and a huge smile breaks out across his face when he sees Kara and her daughter. "Oh, my Gods. Captain! I thought you were dead." She smiles carefully. "Yeah, so did I." (Brilliant poster on the forums who compared her to Persephone, spending half a year in hell with the man who stole her from her family.) Chief asks about Kacey, and Anders comes running up to ask as well, and Kara opens her mouth to explain -- that she's not alone, that there's a part of her that he didn't touch, that she has the option of redeeming her own childhood, that there are some kinds of love that are inviolable -- and a third person comes running up. A beautiful woman. And what she is saying is this: "Kacey? Kacey! Oh, my little girl! Oh, Mommy missed you so much! Thank you. Thank you! Thank you. When the Cylons took her I -- I thought -- but you saved her. Gods bless you." And Kara smiles with a huge amount of grace and pain, and hands the woman her child, and smiles awkwardly and can't speak. And the woman and her daughter Kacey disappear into the crowd, and all around them, people are reuniting with their loved ones.
Adama welcomes each new refugee aboard. Sharon Agathon, untroubled and untouched, walks through the joyful masses like any other crewman and throws herself into Helo's arms. Adama welcomes his son back to the Galactica: "I guess you didn't understand my orders, huh?" Lee quirks his neck at his father. "Never could read your handwriting." They smile proudly at each other. Saul Tigh's voice rings out across the deck, waiting for his welcome from the old man: "Permission to come aboard, sir." He clambers down from a Raptor's wing, old and infirm, on a crutch still. Bill doesn't betray anything -- the shock of the leg, the eye, the broken heart you can see just as easily -- as he grants Tigh welcome. He smiles at him fully and looks him in the eye, and they salute. "You did it. You brought 'em home, Saul." The tears come up and they go right back down. "Not all of them." Bill puts his hand on Saul's shoulder, and says, "I'm sorry." There is a moment of silence between them; how does he come back from this? Can Bill save him one more time? I don't know how this can work. It hurts. (How in fuck did my favorite characters become Colonel Tigh and Gaius Effin' Baltar? Seriously, I'm asking. Somebody's getting a letter.)
The deck hands, the pilots, the colonists sweep Adama up in their arms and cheer his name, over and over, hoisting him into the air, cheering his triumphant return. He watches Tigh wander away, crippled and slow. Kara feels a new hole in what's left of her heart, and realizes how alone she always was and how much more alone it's possible to be. Tigh walks slowly past the Chief, past Helo and Sharon, past Lee and Dualla, cheering the old man on. He looks so small. He gave them everything: his eye, his strength, his body, his heart, the love of his life, keeping them alive so that the Admiral could come in and save them all. Choked off the part that would shrink from the ugliest acts of war, in order to fulfill his purpose and keep the fight strong. And he did this willingly: he believes in Adama as much as any of them do. More, obviously. And now he is broken and small, and Adama's getting the cheers Saul has been working -- literally, working himself to death, for months -- to give him. And if he were strong enough, if he had anything left, he'd be cheering too. That's how much he loves Bill. The only other person with the capacity for that much love, the only person who would go that far for love, he killed earlier today. Maybe they were really the perfect couple, and all the fights and drinking and cattin' around, maybe it was just because their love would have burned too hot any other way. Maybe they were always the best of us, after all.
Weird, right? Not as weird as the other train of thought, which is about how, without Ellen in the picture, Bill's absolutely the only thing Saul's got, so Laura better hope for real that this impending (and awesome) hookup with Zarek I feel about 70 percent certain about is real, because you do NOT wanna be the Caprica Six in the middle of that particular fifty-year epic bromance. I'm just saying.
Tory comes to Laura on the Colonial One, prefacing with how they're still double-checking Fleet manifests, but that it would seem Maya didn't make it off New Caprica. And the baby? Tory breaks down, showing heretofore unexplored range and awesomeness. "I was there when the two guards left to take them to their ship," she says, voice breaking. "I don't know what happened. I'm so sorry." She looks at Laura, exhausted, close to breaking. Brittle. "I let you down. And I know that." Tory Foster weeps. Roslin summons a brave smile and shakes her head. "No, you didn't. It's not your fault. This is bigger than us." She looks down at a tattered, dear picture of Maya and Hera. "This is life."
And in Adama's quarters, he very deliberately shaves off his mustache, looks himself in the mirror, and heads out into the corridors of Galactica.
Forgiven.