There's Beauty In The Breakdown

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Wow. Um. Fourth home run in a row, mapping the weird S&M current running through this show onto religious absolution, and there's this whole part with Raptor 289 exploding again, and ... I'm kind of speechless right now, actually, so let's just do a roll call, I guess.

No news on Boomer or Natalie, but we live in hope. President Roslin is totally awesome again, between her relationship with Adama going deeper and further than ever before, sexy new hairdo, and balls-out reevaluation of the Baltar situation. Adama is not doing well with her illness, but is changing just as fast as everybody else.

Chief gets fired and tossed off Galactica by the Admiral himself after pretty much losing his entire mind in front of everybody like six times. The funeral also causes Tory and Tigh to go majorly nuts in different ways: the former trying desperately to turn into a superhero/robot as quickly as possible and the latter by, well ...

Tigh's shit just got complex. He and Chief both start projecting like crazy, whether out of human guilt or lack of experience with their Cylon abilities, and Tigh spends most of the episode confusing Caprica Six with poor dead Ellen. Things end with a particularly brutal -- yet sweetly intentioned -- fistfight, in the middle of which Caprica realizes actually what she needs to do is make out with him. And this is the least weird thing that happens in the whole episode. It's awesome.

Meanwhile, Baltar's cult gets hit by a fundamentalist group, so Chip Six puts Gaius through one wringer after the other: causing him to throw a huge hissy in the middle of a service to the Gods, get thrown in the brig, and finally physically picking him up and hurling him at the Marines in such a freaky, miraculous way that like even Lee is starting to wonder if Gaius isn't onto something. Then Gaius gives one of the most beautiful speeches about religion I've ever heard, cementing Tory's cult status and pretty much giving Six the best birthday ever.

Oh. And Sam's about this close to coming out of the chrome closet with Kara.

Want more? The full recap starts right below!

WILL IT BLOOM THIS YEAR?
(Guilt and Grief become confused; two Men seek absolution in Negation.)

Persephone stands on an altar, holding her pomegranate, holding service for the dead, bearing witness to Galen Tyrol's lament.

"I couldn't keep you safe from harm, my love, but I kept you in my heart."

Artemis holding her bow, Zeus holding his lightning, his phoenix, his Battlestar insignia, his Cylon Raider.

"You were the breath in my lungs, the blood in my veins, the light in my eye, and now that breath is gone."

Saul thinks of Ellen, the service she never received. Enemy of the state, collaborator, futile victim of the Circle and a battle still waging in his heart, behind his eye.

"That blood and the light are gone."

Tory and Lee are there, the President and Admiral to them. This is a state ceremony, as befits the wife of the man who keeps every engine running, the heart of the Galactica. He doesn't wear a uniform, except for the grease on his face and the dirt under his fingernails, but today he is clean, and beautiful.

"Now I am left, a voice. And the Lords of Kobol, as many and as varied as mortal men, must bend down and lean low to hear that voice and hear my lament."

He steps away, after silence, and the Gods lean down.

"With all our thoughts and love, Calandra Henderson Tyrol, we send your spirit into the universe," says the priestess. "So say we all." And Persephone hears, as the mourners say amen, and weeps for the end of a world.

Laura leans into Bill, whispering. "I liked that service." He responds casually, lightly. "It's not for me, I'll tell you that." She smiles. "I know. But I want you to know what I like." As lovers do, sharing likes and dislikes. As widowers do, planning last rites. She won't meet his eyes, because she knows what they're saying: you've just put me at that altar beside him, mourning a cabin in the wilderness that never was allowed to be built. You've just made this funeral real.

We mourn alone. That particular numbness, that animal need to do it, as quietly as praying in a closet. Mourning is hard because everybody looks at you, and inside themselves you see them fighting: how much is caring, how much theatre. Human psychology is based on projection: You look into their eyes to see if they are hurting in the same places and for the same reasons you are. They never are. We mourn alone, funerals are for everybody else. Adama murmurs nothing words at Galen, Tory complains quietly to Laura. "Why do they have to do these things at dawn?" They're always like this, those two. Laura doesn't even worry about it; the mysteries of mystery. "It's all right. They do because they have to."

Galen stands in a receiving line, hearing half-heard well-wishes, sees half-blurred faces, touches half-faded hands, nods at half-felt sympathies. None of them along the line have an idea what it was worth; nobody's seriously questioning whether this is a purely social duty or a purely religious one. And when Tory comes along the line, he grabs at her hand like a drowning man, and won't let go. He snatches at the Colonel with his other hand, the Colonel who sat through this service like his skin was being flayed off, he snatches at him, staring. The link. Tigh breaks it, coughing. "Yeah. Sorry about your loss?" Tory apologizes too, and they take off. "What the frak was that?" Tigh's still shaking. "Get us all killed," Tory murmurs. Galen stares into nothing as Lee approaches, trying desperately to find his eyes, and finally stammering out his own apology, but Galen doesn't really see or hear him.

Saul goes straight to Caprica's cell, on fire with Ellen, the murder he tried so hard to justify, to himself and to his hate, now empty and sour. The Marine at the surveillance console tells him she's the same as ever: "Sleeping, pacing." Saul muses, wondering how it doesn't go nuts. Locked in a room with thoughts of murder, singular and plural. Every Cylon must feel guilt for the death of humanity, he thinks, even the Final Five. An infinity of guilt. And for Saul Tigh, infinity plus one. "Probably turns its brain off," the Marine spits. "Frakkin' toaster." Locked in a room with pain and madness and futility and blood on your hands; knowing that you're capable of more, never knowing when the snake in your gut will take out someone else. Wouldn't it be better to be a machine, in those hot nights? He's not human. Like, he's stronger. So can they turn their brains off?

Caprica's up against the wall when he comes in, and greets him as politely as only Sixes can. "Your request to see the child Hera Agathon has been denied," he grits. "And you felt the need to come all the way down here in person to tell me that again?" To look the thing in the face, analyze its movements. Like looking in a twisted mirror: It does that, do I do that? It does this, can I do this? What it tells him about the man he's trying to be, what to watch out for. He scoffs and sarcastically asks if she honestly thinks he wants to be there. "We're done."

"I think we're not," says Ellen Tigh, in Caprica's black dress and platinum curls. "You come every day."

In the surveillance booth you can see her, standing, challenging him. Caprica. "...But you never ask questions anymore." He just looks at her and spits his nastiness and leaves again, afraid to ask the question, afraid to show too much. The look in her eyes, if she recognized him; how they would cry out, and fall on him with their guns, at one word from it. How Bill would turn away, from this last disappointment, this final embarrassment, and he would die.

"Is there something that you want from me?" Ellen asks, and becomes Caprica again. "Is there something that you need?" He's shaken. There are two people on Galactica who could talk him through this, show him forests and cathedrals, take him out of this world and into a better one, and they're the two people he'd never think to ask. So he jerks back, as if from fire, and blurts it out: "Stay back!" Caprica is confused and hurt, put off by his sudden rudeness as only Sixes can be. "...See you tomorrow, Colonel." She backs slowly away from him, ever the gracious host, and he's gone. He'll deny her twice more, before the fire comes.

Nicky's crying, surprisingly enough, as Tory and Saul push through the hatch and into Galen's house, paranoid and shaky about his weird funeral behavior. As if anybody noticed; as if the bereaved don't get a pass. Saul notices the crying, and Galen offhandedly notes Nicky probably needs changing. Without a pause, Saul goes off to take care of it. All though the scene, he murmurs and coos at the boy, until he's happy again. I think fatherhood would have changed Saul's path drastically, I think it would have made him a better man, but I think we already know he'd be a good dad. He's so full of love -- for Bill, for Ellen -- that it cripples him, and that's a good first step. Kara turned out okay.

Tory feels around the grief, tries to figure out how much is guilt; her first question isn't how much it hurts, but how much he blames himself. She knows how much of what she's feeling is guilt. It's her grief for Galen that drives her to ask. "You think Cally killed herself because of you, don't you?" He does, of course: she thought they were having an affair, she went crazy and tried to kill him, and offed herself. Not the first time that story's been told, especially with a love so compromised in the first place. Tory tries to assuage his guilt, and thus his grief, and thus her own: "But we weren't." So if the facts assembled say there is no guilt, if Cally misapprehended the facts and acted on fantasy and madness, then all that's left will be grief. And she can let this go.

"I don't even know what I am anymore. I don't know which of my memories are real. I don't know that I've had one action in my life that isn't programmed." He's the only one who had anything to lose. Sam's with Kara, and Tigh killed his wife long ago, and Tory is dealing just splendidly. The only one the show could take anything away from was Galen, so it did. Tory kneels and begins to spin a web, talking to herself as much as to him. Telling him wishes and willing them true. "Galen, you're perfect. You don't need guilt. We were made to be perfect." Tigh, having dealt with the baby, asks her if this is more of "Baltar's crap," and it's not. Not yet, anyway: This is all Tory's crap we're dealing with, at the moment.

She stands up again, and Galen asks for more lies: "So... You just live without guilt?" Her response is barely a statement, nearly a question, advice she wants desperately to take for herself: "Just ... Shut it down." Galen disagrees: "The man you want to be, 'til the day you die." He begs them to tell him that they're the same people they always were, but what he's really asking for is confirmation that those people were ever real. Saul tells him that of course they are, even though he's more afraid than ever, spinning lies and wishing them true; he tells Tory to shut it. But Tory knows that's not the same as human, and never was: "Like, we're stronger. Right?"

Stronger than what? Look at them. Listen to Saul. "Chief, what you're feeling is what a man feels when this happens. It's normal, and it's human. And it's not gonna end anytime soon. It'll be there every day. You'll see her every day. You'll see her..." In the face of everyone you meet, in the face of the devil herself: Our psychology is based on projection. Galen stares at him, worried, and Saul looks from each to each, and snaps out of it. This is not their problem, and he won't be the weak link in this family. He's been that too many times to count; he's finally found an army he can command, even if the only orders he gives are to be brave, to be strong, to be unafraid and to contribute to more life, and not less. To take those demons and stow them somewhere safe, before they take control. "Be a man, Chief. Feel what you gotta feel. But don't risk us." He tells Tory they're leaving, and she begs Galen to think about it, "...What we are, what we can do," and Saul stands at the hatch, looking at the Chief: men who have lost something.

39,675 souls in the Fleet.

FRAGMENTS I HAVE SHORED AGAINST MY RUINS
(A Man and Woman nearly get it right, but get it wrong; Revolutions result.)

On Deck 8 the men and women are cooking, praying, laying out strings of beads. The shrine has grown, enormously. Gaius lies on his back, naked, in the back of the compartment. Tory comes to him, removing her scarf as she goes, and lies beside him, and plucks one single hair from his head. He wakes calling on the Gods, and she admonishes him. She plucks another; he cries out and laughs nervously. "Intense, isn't it?" He agrees. He's done this before, watched girls play out their explorations on his body and their own. "It happens at the same time as a pleasurable touch...?" She touches him and he moans; she plucks another hair. "Signals get crossed, don't they? It's hard to tell the pleasure from the pain."

That sick feeling of discovering your power, the absolute glory of it; the signals get crossed, when you lose your signposts. The bizarre responses of a body unused to new sensations, pleasures, pain: the kind of body that would take a monster to bed, and then burst into tears. This is Tory's life, now: glory, and pain, in rapid succession. Ecstasy and the sharp pain of hairs torn out one by one. Power and submission; Cylon strength and human weakness. These are the limits of existence, of the body; she's defining them, for herself and for him, and asking for an answer.

The last time anybody tried this shit with him, a messianic cult resulted. He doesn't like the feeling of being powerless, and starts to sit up; she shoves him down again with Cylon strength, startling him. "You're very strong, aren't you? You really..." She licks his face. "I think I preferred it when you cried," he says. And somewhere Tory smiles: this is, actually, vastly preferable.

The Sons of Ares paint their faces and charge down the corridor, toward war.

"If you assume that God forgives you, then it's gone, right? Erased? Forgiveness. You must consecrate the sin. Make it benign." Her hands coax out agreement; she's missing the point. Not the assumption of forgiveness, but earning it. Most importantly, remembering it like the Olympic Carrier; by writing it on your heart, and in that pain, learning from it. That's the consecration: when you take it into yourself, and it becomes a part of you. By this, we are consecrated. She's so close. "Bad becomes good...pain becomes pleasure..." She grabs his balls and he screams.

The Sons of Ares charge the halls; young men and hooligans, devotees of war in an age where war is all there is. Nicky was consecrated to Ares, just like these boys. Maybe, in an age of war, we all are.

"And doesn't that mean, if you really become one with God, you can never do wrong?" God stays God, and you stay you. Forest and trees. Being a Cylon must be like touching God, and Hybrids really do, but we're all just human in the end. At this juncture, Tory's spinning dreams and wishing them true: what if this burgeoning power, this freedom from morality, this complete lack of list, this newfound glory, is all God? What if the Cult came at the perfect time, to show her the truth of her life and who painted the sky, and it is Tory, caught in the web of her own inflation. Can he give her that? We were made to be perfect.

(And Laura Roslin reaches down, in one movement, marveling at the girl before her and the words coming out of her mouth: "They made you perfect, didn't they?" Fixed is not unbroken. They made you perfect, too.)

"Well, no, um, not really because that would, uh...that would more than imply that we're all perfect." Which is the one thing, Gaius Baltar knows, we are not. Guilt and shame are the skin he wears, and on top of it the clothes of a President and a prisoner and a messiah. Surely we're not perfect; surely we can't imply that. Of all the humans who live or ever lived, of all the burnt and dying orphans of the Colonies, we can agree that Gaius Baltar is imperfect. A selfish man, a coward, the Man Who Sold The World -- twelve worlds -- for a blowjob from a supermodel scientist, a man who signed away 200 lives and millions more. The most hated man in the Fleet, whose first steps toward a life of peace, whose first days as a savior, are consumed in sex and blasphemy.

We will all be redeemed, but not Gaius Baltar. Because, well, we don't like him very much. Gaius Baltar least of all. Least of all: Gaius Baltar.

"Perfect, just as we are," she hums, heading south, and he gets angry -- even as the Sons of Ares are tossing their little gas bomb over the transom and into a church, even as the women begin to scream and run and pray -- and shoves her again. Not Gaius Baltar, not anybody; Gaius Baltar is not perfect. Nobody wants the embarrassment of absolution.

The Sons of Ares storm the compartment, and Gaius's screams join everybody else's, and everyone's a heretic and everyone's screaming, and a praying woman -- beautiful, humbled, on her knees -- is bashed and thrown, the angry Sons of Ares are smashing them two at a time, tearing down icons and destroying shrines, clouding incense with their gas, counting out their time; one boy shakes two women by the hair, demanding Gaius's whereabouts, and they swear that he isn't there; over the PA there's a voice calling for Marines, for order, for peace, and the Sons of Ares move out, sparing one last kick at Tory, who lands on her face with her flats in the air, who pushes herself up and looks back and sees a naked little man, hiding behind a pillar, terror in his eyes, as the smoke begins to clear and the faithful weep, and begin to tend their wounds. He shivers in fear, and absolute cowardice. How can you look at him, this beautiful, selfish boy; this naked fear, this self-preserving savior, who abandons his faithful flock to the fists of angry men, and think he could ever be perfect?

FEAR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST
(In which Humans are allowed things Monsters are not.)

Chief says "Frak." That's the first thing that happens, and it feels like a sock to the gut, that one: Before the Nebula, before Callandra Henderson Tyrol died, I think maybe until just now, he never used words like that. He's a good boy. His father was a priest, his mother an Oracle.

But were they?

The Chief fumbles under a Raptor, trying to finish the relays, shoving burnt capacitors in his pocket. Around him could be forests, the fields of Geminon, the Temple of Five lit with holy light, but he doesn't know yet, so he must be contented with awful, vicious memory. We mourn alone. He lay upon her womb and guessed it was a boy; he was right. He begged to start again, on New Caprica, and when he was denied he wept, and when he was allowed to go, he wept again. Every surface, she glints and reflects from. She was his crew as long as he was on Galactica, they loved each other before he loved her back, as family. Every tool, she's touched; every Raptor bears her mark. The deck breathes with her, smells of her. And she is gone.

Hephaestus dreamed of suicide, in despair for the exodus of humanity, and before he'd woken, he had broken her. His fists came down on her, again and again and again; he put her between himself and the darkness. And she forgave him -- Imperfect Galen Tyrol, toasterlover, woman-beater: Someone loved Galen Tyrol, after Boomer, and forgave him for it all -- and now he's broken her again, forever. The thing inside him, that makes the world sick and queasy, has killed the first of his family.

Racetrack comes for her Raptor, and she and Skulls go out on CAP, laughing and trading insults with Redwing, once Hotdog's wingman. He compares Raptors to school busses, and he laughs off her retort -- that they're bicycles in comparison -- explaining that Vipers are racecars. They joke and crack on each other, and as good old 289 lifts off the deck and out into the Fleet, something goes bad. (Knowing Jane, and 289er, it's gonna be the RCS thrusters.) Skulls shouts from the ECO jump seat, and Racetrack radios in: "Galactica, Racetrack: I have no control in my port rear lower RCS thruster." (Bingo.) She tells Skulls to get his ass up front and tells them to clear the landing deck, and they do. She counts it down, adjusting as she goes, on the edge of a knife: "One, two, three, four.... One, two, three... Coming in hot... Too hot!" And I never wondered what it would be like to see a Raptor get totally fucked up, nose over ass in a ball of fire, slamming itself against seemingly every wall, gorgeous in its destruction, but now we know what that's like. Considering there's not a scratch on either of them -- so don't worry, she's okay -- I can only assume they've been drinking Sparks at the FX house again and nobody told them not to make it completely, totally, frighteningly awesome.

"Where's the Admiral? Where is he? And what are you doing? Taking notes, standing here, Mr. Officious? You should be out there, right now, trying to find the people, whoever they are!" Mr. Officious is like, "Whatever you say, sir." I love how a nutcase crackpot is a nutcase crackpot, and a bureaucrat is a bored bureaucrat, no matter time and space. Six directs Gaius's eyes to the wall, where the Sons, as boys will, have scrawled their name across the wall: "You can read the old text, can't you, Gaius?" He sounds it out: "Sons... arras? Ares. Sons of Ares. They're the people who committed this attack. Obviously a fundamentalist splinter group. Although, all they're doing is trying to protect the old Gods..." To whom you still cry out, even now, even though you've been the hand of God for years at this point. They're only trying to protect their faith, while you work -- at the behest of your angel and your anger, to destroy it.

Six nods toward an old, lovely woman, indicating her with her eyes: "Old gods die hard. Even among your people." She worries over something in her hands, as he kneels before her. We've always known Callis and Douglas were classic, and lots of people got the memo that they were hotties, but I don't think until this episode I've really noticed how beautiful they actually are. And I don't mean it in a gay way necessarily, just -- the usual disclaimer about how men were never commodified so we don't have words for it -- but: like Olmos and Hogan (about whom we'll talk a bit later, because damn) often do, James Callis and Aaron Douglas spend this episode looking totally, angelically beautiful. And it's not really a big deal, because actors know this and hear it all the time, but it does lend certain scenes an extra gravitas. Like now, it's almost essential: Gaius kneels before her, looking as gorgeous as he possibly can, so the total devotion -- spiked with a little grandmotherly guilt -- in her eyes makes sense. You don't have to pretend, I mean to say, that this imperfect man could inspire salvation in anybody. It's right there on the screen. "I've seen you here before. Your name is... don't tell me, um, begins with M...?" She smiles sweetly, afraid to disappoint but mostly, simply, in love: "Lilly."

He opens her hand slowly, talking to her all the time: inside she holds a pagan medallion: Asclepius. The God of Healing. "I know you'll heal our people. But I thought..." Lilly swallows, and she's so adorable, so right and full of belief, so full of fear that he'll forget her, or denounce her, that even Six hasn't much to say, beyond, "The old Gods are fighting back." Gaius looks into Lilly's eyes, so full of belief and love, like the memory of something we've all forgotten. Imagine the eyes of something infinite and loving, that could forgive you anything. Not like a hound, not like a pet, but something brilliant, that saw all your angles at once, the dark and bright sides, all the facets, and loved you anyway. Like music, across the water. Something switches on, inside Gaius. The old Gods are fighting back, but he's got something better. He's going to save them all, for the love of this old woman. A gift, to replace all the things the Cylons and New Caprica took from her, and all the things the Gods failed to protect. He will heal us all, save us all, fight until the medal in her hands is dust.

Figurski cautions the Chief that the capacitors on the remains of the Raptor are still hot; he doesn't know that the Chief can't be burned anymore, but he still lends him his gloves. The Chief finally figures out that it's the wrong capacitor: lost in memory, projection, he switched them out wrong, put the new one in his pocket. A bad mistake, but one born of stress and mourning.

But is it?

Skulls is horrified -- "Was that in your pocket?" -- but Racetrack's first response is life, and love, and no harm done. "We don't have to do this." Skulls remembers who he's talking to, where they are, what happened here, and his voice goes soft. "You're right, we're okay. It's okay." Chief flips out: is it okay? Is this okay, no harm done, more life -- or is it a murder averted, the first betrayal? Is he Boomer, eyes full of water and mouth full of silence? Is this how it starts?

Racetrack calls him Galen, tries to calm him, but he won't be calmed. "I don't need to be patted on the head. You can tell me I frakked up." Racetrack, who has only a certain amount of indulgence to give people, who will snap on a bitch even if they're freaking out, if they eventually don't kick out of it, reminds him that he's only human. But Galen won't stop screaming at her, begging her to stop, begging to be told he frakked up, that he merely frakked up, that he should take his punishment for this, no softness for the mourning, no softness for anything, because his flesh is steel now and he will never be clean again. The best case scenario, he screams, is that this was just a frak-up, and they won't give him that. Racetrack, awesomely, turns on her heel and takes off, through the pilots and crewmen. You can only forgive somebody a certain number of times before it's not worth it anymore. She has no idea how badly he doesn't want to be forgiven, how much her kindness pierces his heart this time, for Cally and for the fact that she's looking into the eyes of -- for all they know, for all he knows -- her murderer. How cruel her absolution, how she twisted the knife when she called him human.

Only, merely, human. I don't know why, but at this point I kind of spaced out and started thinking about what this is like, on Galactica: these people save the world. Not just every now and then, not just when Doctor Doom comes tearing down Yancy Street, but every day. More than that: every second of every day. They are all the on the front, every second, between humanity and nothingness. And not in some bullshitty recappy Jacoby way, but in not-a-metaphor actuality, with fire and bombs and missiles and stuff. Pointed at their heads, and from their hands. I mean, no wonder they hold their "dances" and weep with gratitude when you offer them a chance to rest. "33" was a long time ago, but they still live in shitholes that smell like sweaty metal, they still fuck behind thin curtains while their brothers and sisters are reading NYMPH and playing Triad two feet away, and their asses are still going out on CAP twenty-four seven. Every second, like strong-armed angels around the Fleet, holding them together, waiting for the danger and the thing to hit, hoping that they're smart and strong and well-rested and fast enough to stop it, without knowing what it is or when it's coming or what vector it's coming on. Well, okay, I do know why: because Chief is the one that puts them there, between the darkness and the light; his 33 is always going to be longer than everybody else's 33, because he breeds and doctors the birds they ride. And now he's a part of the darkness, and can't trust himself enough to keep them in the air.

Figurski tells the Chief to chill out and take some down time, because clearly he needs it, but that's just more of the same: the Chief has a purpose, his purpose is Galactica, he'll have to work ten times harder to make up for it, and his world is disintegrating around him in ways they know about and ways they don't, and every kindness, every bit of forgiveness and comfort, is salt in the wound. Because he's not only human, he's not one of them: he's something else, trying desperately to be the man he chooses to be, and now he has to try a thousand times harder just to prove it, and every time he tries they tell him to go take a fucking nap. "Get out of the Raptor, Figurski," the Chief growls, in a voice we've maybe never heard. Figurski sighs, but he goes: and this too is a kindness, and so it hurts too. And the relay in his hand is burnt to dust.

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
(Certain Fears are spoken aloud, creating their opposite Effects.)

Six: "People have room in their hearts for one great belief. You or the old Gods: which one will it be?" Baltar's headache begs for relief: "Why can't I just be a man? Do I really need to take on the Gods single-handed?" And Six does a thing she often does, spinning wishes into truth, telling him one thing knowing the other thing will happen: "Oh! But imagine the kind of man you'll be when you do! Surely such a man must be magnificent. Larger-than-life, Godlike himself..." And at his response she grins her angel grin, because this is how she wins: by inflating him so far he's horrified. Feeding him the shit she always feeds him, until he chokes on it. In some ways it's the scariest grin yet, because as he outgrows her I think she loves him less and less, and uses him more and more.

"What are you talking about? It's not about that at all. It's about this." He stands, and walks among the faithful. As they reknit and repaint and string their beads, he calls them to attention: his army of the homeless and the houseless and the loveless and bereft; the thousand orphans of Gaius Baltar. "Stop! Stop. This is unacceptable. We have been targeted because of what we believe by those who answer to faceless Gods that bear no relevance in our world." Six is moved, perhaps, by this nod to her ascendance; by his love for her, even now. "They want us to be afraid. But I'm tired of being afraid. The time has come to make a stand. And that time is now." Gaius heads toward the hatch, and the faithful follow. And the first of them, beloved Paulla, cries out to him: "Where are you going?" But she follows. And where is he going?

He's going to trade our shirk for tawheed, always a dangerous political move. Shirk is the Islamic sin of polytheism specifically, but more generally worshipping other than Allah. Shirk is not a forgivable sin; dying subject to this sin means you never see paradise. Tawheed was the reason for Islam's early political struggle, because it denounced so much of what had gone before. So much beauty, and love, and control. There are two parts of tawheed. Tawheed Rububiyyah is the belief that Allah is One, without any partners or associates. Tawheed 'Ulluhiyyah says that Allah must be worshipped alone in everything, total obedience is owed to Allah alone in everything, from the spiritual to the political."

So central to Islam is this tenet, "no partners or associates," that mere discussion of the three daughters of Allah, allowed and negated by Mohammad's early pen, brings Rushdie death threats every Valentine's Day. But it's not just Islam that fought for our shared God's unity: Meanwhile, this same God, in both Testaments, insists on his unity and uniqueness, unto war and deaths innumerable; the Shema, the greatest of our prayers, whose recitation is a mitzvah, ends with Adonai Echad: "The Lord is One." Coke will always win over Pepsi, but nobody knows anymore if that's because Coke spends more on advertising than Pepsi, or if it's really better -- as if people's taste buds, or souls or experiences, have shaped them such that one really is better, if just for them alone. Monotheism makes sense in today's world, or today's world wraps itself around monotheism: either way, our God wins. God is Great, Elohim Gadol, Allah Akbar: either way, He's bigger than yours. And -- sorry, ladies -- He's male.

So the display that Gaius is about to play out, treading on somebody else's territory, putting guns of a sort in somebody else's Temple, dancing on the Gods he still doesn't entirely recant, doesn't really remind me of Jesus, in this instance. Jesus didn't have to fight polytheism, Abraham did that for him, and I don't see Gaius speaking out against moneychangers anytime soon. It does remind me, however, and beautifully, of tawheed. Muhammad's call for tawheed provoked the anger of the political authority, because they realized of the threat it posed to their society. They were right. Ja'afar ibn Abi Talib writes how he "summoned us to worship the One True God and to reject the stones and idols we and our fathers had been worshipping in addition to Allah. ...We deemed him truthful and we believed him, and we accepted the Message he brought from Allah." And it was good, and it was right, and dangerous as any other discovery.

The priestess lights incense for the Gods, and Gaius Baltar screeches outside, kicking in the hatch: "We want justice, not these stupid old Gods!" She points out, kindly, that they're having a service, but he's not interested. "Are you? But whom are you serving?" She asks him to leave, but he's off on such a tear. As the faithful scream, he defames their temple, laying waste to their worship, tearing down icons and destroying the altar, hurling Zeus and Aphrodite and Persephone to the floor. And he screams, pushing the beautiful young priestess to the floor, even as his followers join in the fray, even as the Marines arrive to take him away:

"Would you be serving Zeus? Apparently King of the Gods, who also happened to be, let me tell you, a serial rapist. Prone to giving birth out of his own forehead -- that's very likely, isn't it? -- Well, Gods? Strike me down. Oh, what are you going to do? Damn you, you ignorant witch, telling the people lies and stories. Maybe you want me to pray to Asclepius, who healed wounds with the blood of Gorgons? Or Aphrodite? Or Artemis Or any other of this rubbish? How awful! Out of the way, you hideous old witch. That's the kind of rubbish that you made! I will not be destroyed at this level! God! Haven't enough of us died already?" The question most of us would reserve until the war is at least underway, but it's Gaius: he is a drama queen. And he knows PR better than Pepsi and Coke combined.

I THINK WE ARE IN RATS' ALLEY / WHERE THE DEAD MEN LOST THEIR BONES
(Masks come off; Walls come down; every word is a Lie.)

When Bill gets to Sickbay she's already packing her stuff. "Am I that late?" No, it's not that. This ritual he's created -- we just do prayer differently, on Admiral Atheist's side of the salt -- doesn't signify, because it wasn't a treatment she was in for: just a blood test. And now they can spend the afternoon together, and play out the ritual in a better temple. "You brought a new book?" Yes. "A classic," he calls it, before admitting the truth: "My favorite." His favorite. How much time does he give her now? After the funeral, how much time is he willing to waste? Laura knows it on sight -- of course she knows it -- and exclaims happily. "Sea Rider Falcon! I haven't read it in years, I don't remember how it ends."

Neither does Bill; he never read the ending. Bill doesn't do endings. He lets things fade, or blows them up in a drunken crazy spree, but he can't sit quietly through endings. He feels them too much; he destroys his favorite things when he's forced into endings, he bitches about the protocol of funerals, he speaks with the dead every single year, but Bill doesn't do endings. Not when he loves. Bill Adama is asking a woman to share a new frontier with him: an ending, to his favorite story. His favorite story ever, he is willing to build cabins in its end, for her. With her, alone. And of course, Laura doesn't get it. "You're kidding. It's your favorite!" He smiles sweetly, his eyes alive: Yes. It is.

I want you to know what I like.

"I like it so much, I don't want it to be over. So I'm saving it." Nobody's going anywhere.

Laura blithely suggests she should wait, too. For that day in the alluvial deposits, maybe; she can wait as long as he can, so it won't be over. So she won't be the one to bring him to the ending, the story that he loves so much. One look from his beautiful eyes, the way this careless wish astounds him and breaks his heart, and she's ashamed. He was offering to share something precious, and she offered to share its absence, and rubbed her death in his face. He likes it so much he's saving it, for her. To build something secret and precious between them, to remember every year. She keeps fucking it up. He keeps bringing her so much strength, so much hope, that she forgets who and what she is, where she's going, what it's costing him. His love is glory, and her illness is pain. And when she ricochets between the two, her hair isn't being plucked one strand at a time, but all at once. She apologizes without apologizing, ducks her head, fidgets with her bag. Which he takes from her, and carries. Which she lets him do.

In the corridor, they discuss Gaius. "Baltar's back at home ... in the brig. Again," Bill grumbles, and Laura shakes her head. "Desecration of a temple. It's his revenge for what happened to him this morning." Bill acknowledges the brutality; he's tracking the Sons, but nobody's talking. Laura's hand is warm and weak on his arm, as they walk. "The thing is that Baltar knows that there are religious hardliners in Dogsville, but he continues to provoke." (This is kinda cool, watch: He just said it's a problem, and she said it's Gaius being a shitstirrer.) Bill shakes his head: "I just can't have a religious war in this Fleet." Not after what his family went through last time. Laura almost laughs: "Oh please, no! Then the whole damn thing will become our frakkin' responsibility, yours and mine. Seriously, Bill, we have thirty thousand people left and they're not happy unless they're kicking each other's teeth in. This is what we've become?" Bill shakes his head -- she just said it's a problem, but he's about to say it's because Gaius is a shitstirrer -- "No, it's him. Baltar has an uncanny way of stirring up all the crap." And I mean, thank God or the Lords of Kobol for that, at least. Just because nobody's stirring the shit doesn't mean the shit doesn't exist.

As they head into their quarters, Bill muses whether Gaius would be willing to stay in lockdown indefinitely, "for his own safety," and Laura laughs. "And make a martyr out of him? No way. Those girly, groupie, sex-whatever-they-are, they already think he's a God." So then, kick him off Galactica? No other ship will have him. "No, I want him close," says Laura. Thank God or the Lords for finally bringing Laura back to us. She's still doing the same shit, but it makes so much sense this week. I never stopped loving her, but I missed liking her. She makes more sense than anybody but her rapidly decaying Chief of Staff this week, as it's meant to be. Nobody makes more sense than Laura Roslin. She thinks a bit, there in their home at the end of the world, and cocks her head. "I'm going to the brig." Bill can't believe she really wants to see him, but Laura cocks her head cutely: "I want him to see me."

Beautiful boys need their sleep. Even Zeus has gotten slapped a few times too early in the morning, and he wasn't doing shit like pulling out their pubes one at a time in order to illustrate some creepy fucking made-up Dark Phoenix Cylon 101 shit. So we can't blame Gaius for getting all the sleep he can, because he has had a rough damn day. But elsewhere, rooms or walls away, a woman who thinks of him when she's not sleeping is facing the wall, waiting for her visitor. And when he comes, she doesn't turn around. "Oh, we didn't even make it to tomorrow, did we?" Saul is disgusted by himself for returning, for asking, for looking and watching, for hoping for one more beautiful vision or nightmare, for watching himself pull out one hair at a time, spinning wishes to pretending. For asking a murderer how best to forget murder. "You asked what I want. I want to know how it feels to have killed billions of human beings, to have all that blood on your hands. Think it through. Because that's what I want."

Caprica turns, offended as Antigone. "I feel it, do you really think that I couldn't?" He asks, the lie of hate in his voice masking his need, if she turns it off: "Is there a switch in your head that you turn off?" Not stronger, not smarter, not faster: just harder. That's the only Cylon gift he craves. "You talk like we're different, but you know we're not." She's talking metaphorically, but sister, let me tell you that nobody wants to hear how the Cylon and humans are more alike than different. Her hate mail this time takes the form of Saul, scared to death by the words and not the sentiment, his nightmares of recognition coming true, orders the Marines to cock their weapons without a fault. And Caprica stares around, worried and upset, standing in the scariest room of the scariest place in the universe, her only visitor an angry an old man full of hate, knowing she's thrown her lot in with nobody at all. That she's delivered herself into the enemy's hands, without hope of parole or love, without Hera, without anything but the promise that today, this second, the beatings haven't started yet; without anything but her life, in these monsters' hands.

Escape velocity is the initial speed required to go from a given point to infinity, with a residual velocity of zero. That's one definition: from somewhere to everywhere at once, without anything wasted. From somewhere to another place, without anything holding you back. These are the lies we spin and try to get everybody to agree with and validate, so we can pretend that they are true. Every word in this episode is a lie, except for the most surprising ones. Chief solders behind a mask on the hangar deck, putting in his billionth hour, trying to make up for his mistake and prove once and for all the man he chooses to be. Who, he now realizes, is a lie. Figurski arrives for work and jokes, "Working late or up early, Chief?" He waits for a response, and assuming he has none, heads off. But the response is this: the Chief's 33 is longer than anybody else's because it goes around and around. Is he working late, or up early? Has he gone too far over the abyss, or is he trying too hard? Ultimately it's meaningless, because these questions operate on the axioms that he has any choice at all, or ever has. The Chief removes his mask. He removes his gloves, first the left and then the right. He removes his apron. Everything that makes up the Chief, every second of the 33, he will remove one by one. And then he will be clean.

Caprica holds out her arms. "You act like you think I'm made of switches and relays. Look: veins, not wires. We're the same." Ellen takes over, shocking him to silence: "Do you see we're the same?" Do you see, Caprica's saying, that we are the same? Do you see, Ellen's saying, that we're both collaborators, future suicides, dangers to the Fleet by virtue of what you are? Can you repent for my senseless murder by admitting that you're on the side of the Devil worse than I ever was? He begs her to tell him. "Tell you what?" To tell him how she lives with what she's done. How she copes, as a secret snake in the garden, as a killer and a contributor to the destruction of mankind, as a conspirator with darkness: now that he is one, how did she cope, then and now?

It's Ellen who steps closer. "Saul, are you asking for absolution? Forgiveness? I can give you that." But if it were Caprica, calling him Saul, after all this time, with love. And it is, don't forget this is a projection: two scenes at once on a single screen. She knows what he did, she knows who Ellen was, she knows he comes down here at least once a day looking for something. It wouldn't be the first time a prisoner of war intuited this need from a soldier. It's the first thing I, for example, would offer, because it makes the most sense. And especially for a Six, who lives for this shit. Please, tell her she can give you absolution. Anything! Especially if it sounds vaguely religious! Because it is her nature to give, even when it's fucked up from our angle, she gives and gives. Ask and it shall be given unto you, and Six will give until her dying breath. It's so hard trying to read their human faces, across the salt: to delineate what they need most. But nobody wants the embarrassment of absolution, and she's a fool to offer it. She always fucks this part up.

When Saul tells the Marines to stand down and step outside, she's still Ellen. But when he turns back, it's Caprica, and she's still begging to help. Imagine the eyes of something infinitely hard and infinitely loving, that could forgive you anything. Something brilliant as diamond, seeing all your angles at once, and wanting most to give you succor anyway. Like music, across the water, directed without regard to your perspective or imperfection. That was created to be loved, and offers that love in return. Imagine how sick that song would sound, if you knew you were just like her, filthy, composed of lesser grace: "Just tell me what the trouble is," she begs, but he's disappointed, nearly weeping, because she's fooled him again, turned back from Ellen to the enemy. "You have nothing to offer me. We're not the same." He stalks off, crippled with betrayal, going insane, resisting the call of that pain, and the glory of every question answered.

President Roslin opens the door to Baltar's cell with a crash. He's getting some beauty sleep against the wall, perhaps pressing against it, wondering if she's on the other side. "Were you asleep?", she fairly snickers, and Gaius tries his best to be bitchy: "What is it this time? Here to strip-search me? Or could it possibly be that your presence here means that the President has been made aware of my situation." She assures him, hard as diamond, that it's being looked into, aggressively, and then does one of her suddenly intimate moves, sitting close to him on the floor.

(Jane doesn't really talk about cancer, and neither would I; I only know that she knows this part of the dance because of a very awesome book. I mention this only on the way to telling you a short little story that got to me even more than the episode, which is lots, and because of what it tells you about the writing here, and more because of the way our blood gets into our stories. This is the point at which my very greatest writer friend and cheerleader Karen Novak-famous-novelist, who out of a certain sisterhood with Jane, and Laura, spontaneously turned to her husband at this point in the episode and said: "This is where she tells him she's wearing a wig.")

"I want you to look at me, Gaius. Just look. This is a wig. I'm dying. Now, if you look in my eyes..." She takes off her glasses. "Go ahead, look. You can probably see it." He apologizes, but not really, and she doesn't need it anyway. She is burning with truth. She's Laura the way I've been hurting to see her, with glimpses, since New Caprica: on fire with revelation, full of truth and compassion and steely rage. A schoolteacher, who has spent years becoming a soldier, a queen, a savior to us all. The Laura the show trusted us enough to love and doubt without devoting whole episodes to how scary she was, then sidelining her for months at a time: "No no no no, I don't want your pity, I'm still doing my job. In fact, I'm gonna aggressively pursue the men that attacked you, and I'm going to limit the size of public assemblies to protect your people..." He nods, he has no idea what that means, or how good she's gotten at this game. He's smart, he'd catch it in a second, but she's so busy throwing thunderbolts of beauty and acting at him he doesn't have time.

"But... I'm going to be slipping away from this life very soon, and I've gotten kind of curious as to what that's going to be like, and so I did some research. And there are some people who say that when people are getting closer to their death, they just don't care as much about rules and laws and conventional morality." Is she threatening him? By breathing, by looking fearlessly into his eyes, by taking the reins of her rage and her pain and urging them on into light, she's doing everything but. She's being as clear as she can.

"No, no. I'm just saying have a quiet life. And I'll die a quiet little death. And everyone will be happy. It's just that I'm not in the mood any longer to indulge you. And that's... all."

That's always been "all." Somebody always indulges his ass, and when it's not her it's the Gods, and when it's not Them it's God or His sexy majordomos, and when nobody's paying attention somebody's handing him nuclear weapons, or the Presidency. It's not that she is focusing on him now; it's that he's such a painful blot, such a shitstirrer, nobody can stand to look at him for long. The man who sold her world. God loves him, and I will always love him because he desperately needs it, but I can't blame anybody else for finding him vomit-worthy.

Laura Roslin stands, towering over him somehow, and at the door she turns. "And you are being released, so..." She slides her glasses back on. "Stay safe."

Chief drinks at Joe's Bar and wonders what his move is going to be. North, south, up, down. This life is done. It's a betrayal by existing, for sure, and it's ended twice in a month already. It's used up and bruised and worn out and too ugly to wear anymore. The Admiral sits down, a stool away, and nods to the bartender, and says hello. The Chief stares into nowhere; it's a nowhere the Admiral thinks he understands, a nowhere the Admiral is once again anticipating. It's a fraction of the darkness. "We all miss her, Chief. I understand if you need some time off, or even if you might need more shifts to keep yourself busy. No one knows how they're going to react to loss like this, or what they're gonna need." We mourn alone, he's saying. His meaningless words were for the funeral, but this is for what comes after. Chief doesn't look at him. "I don't need special treatment." Every kindness is a hair plucked from his head.

"I guess she just couldn't take it, huh? Being married to a Cylon? Being the mother of a half-breed abomination?" The Admiral takes a drink calmly, and the Chief stares, terrified. (At this juncture, I was about to ask, "What if Boomer was projecting all that time, and we never knew?" But we did know. Who the hell wrote CYLON on her locker mirror? It was never there. Human psychology is based on projection, and Boomer's more human than any of us, because it's all she ever had, after download. Just the fears he's thinking now, and knowing they were true, but feeling the memories anyway. At least Chief has the possibility of being real: that's what he's trying to find out.)

"Here you go, sir." The Admiral nods to the bartender, and tries again. "She was a good woman." Chief tells him that if he really believed that, he wouldn't have put her up against a bulkhead and threatened to shoot her, which shocks Adama: are we still going to go there? Now that we're mourning her, now that we're sharing a drink and the problem was solved? But Chief's just spinning dreams now, willing them to be true. Begging them to be true, to make sense. This is grief, not guilt, speaking now. Not the Cylon but the man.

"It's okay, though. I thought about doing it many times myself. Believe me." The Admiral begs him to stop, but he won't. Especially not now. "How many of us ended up with the people we really wanted to be with? Got ... stuck with the best of limited options? And why? Because the ones we really wanted, really loved, were dead and dying, or turned out to be Cylons and they didn't know it. If Boomer had... If I had known..."

The Admiral doesn't know. How can he? How can he stop begging the Chief to stop, stop breaking his own heart, stop shouting, calm down, go to bed, like Saul on those hot nights, how can he talk him down and make him happy, how can he prove his love when every bit of kindness is a hair plucked from the head? Last time, he proved his love with fists; he apologized with blood. This is not appropriate for a widower, not when his last apology was for ever letting their family go. He begs the Chief to stop, to go with him, but the Chief only shouts louder, drawing stares.

"No, no. I didn't know. I didn't know. So I buried my head in the sand and I took it and I settled! I settled for that shriek, those dull vacant eyes, the boiled cabbage stench of her. And why?" Because you are a dirty boy. A Fool. A boy unable to admit the difference between love and guilt. A boy so full of hate for an idea that he couldn't love the reality; a boy driven sick and mad with dissonance. A boy willing to take what he was given, because everything he was given was taken away. A boy who thinks love means building bars. A boy who engineered his own sadness and pain out of loneliness and obsession and fits of rage and violence. A boy who'd barely learned the world, before it was destroyed, and spent every moment trying to put it back together in a way that makes sense, a boy who tried to machine the engine of the world and make it run again. A person, like you and me, and Tory and Boomer, and Cally. Because you are a good boy, who deserved none of this pain or fear or confusion, but must somehow bear it. Just a boy, who deserved to be loved.

"Because this is my life! This is the life I picked. And it's fine! But you know what? It's not. I didn't pick this life." He has never needed his wife more than at this moment, and she doesn't know, and she can't know. He is begging, and it sounds like lies. He even slams a fist upon the table, scaring the Admiral, hoping to shock a glance from the Gods. And everywhere in the bar, people are staring, growing disgusted. "This is not my frakkin' life." The Chief says "Frak." The Admiral, shaken, asks him WTF is going on, why he spits on her memory, why he tells these lies and asks Adama to tell him they're true.

And again it's grief, and not guilt, and not the song, that speaks: it's every widower. Ever since the attacks, we've been begging for somebody to do this: do it publicly, do it loudly, take five seconds out of their day and just scream. To say that the dead can go frak themselves, that we're better off without them, that their absence hurts too much to bear and so we must debase them. Mourning is too lonely a thing to do on our own. But the halls of Galactica are too quiet, and the faces that we wear are too important to risk, so we go on crying in silence, begging for the scream. I wish it weren't him; I love him too much. As wishes -- and loves -- the Admiral, more fervently than ever. He asks the Chief again and again to go home with him, put it away, button up, because she's dying in front of his eyes for the second time and all he has is paperback pulp novels, and he can't afford to scream like this. All the sickened faces in Joe's Bar: How much of their horror is just jealousy?

"Know what? I'm sorry if I'm not gonna do this the way you want me to, or the way you might. But I will not make an angel out of someone who wasn't an angel. But I can see you have." The Admiral starts to break down; this is pushing it. When he's trying to understand her, the way she moves, the way she changes all at once, the way she keeps changing, too fast to follow. She's becoming a blur, moving faster and faster, like Kara into the storm. Mourning is too lonely. Don't tell me not to make her an angel, when an angel is what she already is.

"And now you've come down here to be in my club, but you're not in my club. You don't know what frakkin' club I'm in 'cause you never asked the right questions." Who could? Not even Brother Cavil saw you at the Cylon parties, and if you're talking about grief -- which you're not, but if you were -- that's a club of one. Apocalypses happen to people, not to nations. The political is only ever personal. "Chief, let's get out of here," says the Admiral, in that voice you know he means it. And Chief pushes, just that centimeter more that could break it all apart, destroy it all and make it dust: "No. Why don't you go? Take care of your precious ship." It's the tone, not the words, that jerks the Admiral's back straight. "Stop it. Stop all of this. 'Cause if you don't, I'm going to have to act on it, now shut up."

Escape velocity at a given point in space is equal to the speed an object would have if it started at rest from an infinite distance, and was pulled by gravity to that point. All the way from the temple to the altar, by vector and speed alone. He's never been headed anywhere but this point, he's saying. Dreams and fantasies or changeling monster, he's always had a destiny, and he is pulling a quick left. If it were Kara or Boomer I'd cheer, no matter how much it hurt, because he really doesn't know, and this is the only way he can know for sure, and you should always tell destiny to go fuck itself, even though the whole point of destiny is that it fucks you right back.

How do you escape velocity, when all your velocity is speeding you toward something unknown and evil and terrifying? What do you do when you're stuck in a box with no way out and no chance at reprieve and no way of knowing if the box exists? Turn into something else. "Great! Do it! Please! For the love of the Gods, please demote me. Get me off your frakkin' ship!"

Everybody's freaked out, not least the Chief, but most of all the Admiral: "Specialist Tyrol, I want you off my hangar deck before you endanger another pilot. You're to report to Petty Officer Bassom tomorrow morning at 0600 for reassignment. Do you understand?" They shake, like men in their rage, and another part of the world falls down, and the Admiral leaves.

And Galen Tyrol sits at the bar, finally, after nearly barfing, almost hyperventilating, and the camera pulls back, back, back, until he's lost in the crowd, no longer the Chief, and a song plays that only he can hear.

MY PEOPLE HUMBLE PEOPLE WHO EXPECT / NOTHING
(Escape Velocity is attempted, but fails by wrongful application of Force.)

"Of course you have authority over emergency measures," quibbles the Caprican Delegate, "But you bulldozed this through after the session was closed!" The Quorum murmurs in agreement. And the President speaks quietly in response. "It's a crowd-control measure. I also authorized the repair of a cargo elevator. Do you want to talk about that too?"

I don't think her hairstyle is really that much like Cain's, even though she's been speeding toward the Cavil place; I think if she wore it with a lovely gold kimono dress, she could be the spitting image of a woman running through the Kobol Opera House, arms stretched out toward the shape of things to come. I think even if nobody knows it, Laura's wearing a reference to revelation. I almost think it could be a private joke, between Laura and herself. As long as I am the dying leader, I will look out here the way I do in there. Human psychology is based on projection.

"Crowd control?" Lee asks. "Looks to me like it was pretty well designed purely to stop Gaius Baltar's organization." She corrects him, "cult" being a better word than "organization," in this instance. With such political fire behind it, and more to come, it's best to be clear. Tory Foster looks at her boss, surprised by this vehemence. "Well, his 'cult' was attacked. And from what I'm hearing around the fleet, it was pretty brutal." Lee uses his father's words even now. "It was brutal. Exactly. And this measure is designed explicitly to protect those people. If they aren't gathering en masse, they aren't provoking resentment." Which, Lee points out, limits them while permitting "more mainstream worship." Tory keeps on staring, but it's interesting. You take all these different nations and squeeze them down into one people, while telling them you're not, and you watch them stratify while telling them they're not, and then...well, you can't act surprised when they come up with surprising ways to differentiate themselves. There have always been faiths beyond the Lords of Kobol, after all.

"Wherever Gaius Baltar is, violence happens. And if he doesn't cause it, he draws it. My job, Mr. Adama, is and always will be to keep the people safe." She's so intense you could almost miss the love behind it. She's not a stupid woman and she's not a woman given to falling into silly fights with cockerels. She knows damn well he's right, and that he's not going down without a fight. Every time he challenges her, he's trying to make her love him again -- to be redeemed, to be forgiven by this mother, to be loved. But redemption is the process of remembering we are already redeemed, and her love is something she withholds but never rescinds. Ask Bill. She adds him to the list, to the objects she's juggling, and the more she respects him the harder she'll hit back, and he will never, ever get it. Ask Kara.

Delegate Reza Chronides asks if this Provision 170 couldn't be used against other offshoot religious groups, and the President calmly explains that, as we all know, Gaius Baltar is a special case, which Lee points out we're doing by fueling his argument. (Laura lies it's because of everybody else, but means it's because Gaius is a shitstirrer; Lee points out that while Gaius is a shitstirrer, the problem is still everybody else.) "After all, is he preaching violence? Immoral acts?" The President scoffs that she would even know what the fuck goes on in his quote-unquote "services," kind of undermining her whole argument, and earning another look from Tory. "It's not that far from what some of our own Mithras followers believe," says Reza, and the Geminon Delegate pipes up: "We have Mithrasarries among the Geminese. Can this order be applied to them?" No! Gods, it's a special case. "Clear your heads. We are talking about Gaius Baltar. Everyone in this room experienced tragedy at New Caprica. Have we forgotten?" Reza asks if she'll open the provisional order to a Quorum vote and, denied, Lee reminds everyone that they can override that: "I cannot let this stand."

(Sol Invictus Mithras, the Invincible, is linked to Apollo, and his worship to the messianic Gods and demigods, including Christ. Ahura Mazda explained him to Zoroaster thus: "I created him to be as worthy of sacrifice and as worthy of prayer as myself." Invincible Mithras, perfect just as he is, partaking in the life of God and created by God to be loved, and forgiven, and unstoppable.)

President Roslin stands to leave. "You can override, and you cannot let this stand, Mr. Adama? Then you open it up to a vote. And if you strike this down, you can all go back to your constituents and you can tell them what you've done, and we, the people, will have triumphed. But think about what it's going to cost you. Because every single one of you remember what it was like when Gaius Baltar had political power." She's nearly weeping for them, in her rightness; Tory continues staring. "And you should be terrified to think about what this man will do with blind religious devotion. So go ahead. Vote." Disgusted, she stalks off, followed by Tory and her staff. Lee watches her go. He'll never know how much she loves him in this moment, the pride she feels in him. It wouldn't suit her purposes to let him.

Saul stares down at Ellen sleeping, so in love, so abjectly in love that he's lost ten years. To have her back, here, now, when he needs her most. Simply just to watch her sleep. Caprica wakes slowly, like an angel, slowly turning, angel back to nightmare. "Should I get used to waking up to this face?" It's not the first time he's looked at her like this. She looks around, notes the room empty of Marines: "You're traveling light." Like an old friend, as our jailers and our torturers always eventually become, known inside and out. She's not afraid. He offers an informal chat, just the two of them. "And the man watching through the cameras," she grins, through the surveillance cameras. He asks again for an answer to his question; to the question he keeps asking, and then running away before she can answer. "You want to know how I work? If I can turn off pain?" He begs her to say that she can.

Caprica sits up, shaking her head. "I want the pain, it's how I learn. I was instrumental in the destruction of humanity. But at the same time, I learned because...I fell in love. With a human man." Ellen speaks now, so loving: "And he was mortal, and...fallible. And he had this incredible pride in himself. He thought he knew everything there was to know. And I loved him with my whole heart."

And God, Saul Tigh is beautiful. He looks thirty years old, eyepatch and silver hair and all. He looks like a youth, in the very green of love. At this moment, he is beautiful.

"And then one day, I realized I wouldn't have him forever. I understood what I'd done. How I betrayed him, and humanity. And that pain taught me to understand death."

Ellen looks down, contrite, in love. Saul weeps. Is projection really so awful?

Yes.

"Baltar could die, and I loved him..." Tigh shakes his head, no. Ellen speaks with Caprica's voice, calling him back from the dream. At least Orpheus had a choice, to turn and look. They keep taking her away. He cries out again and again, but she won't stop: she doesn't know.

"Baltar's heart was ephemeral. Baltar's body was fragile in my hands..."

Tigh jumps up, denying her again. "No, we are not gonna talk about the fragile body of Gaius frakkin' Baltar! Door! Door!" She's left, once again, holding the bag.

Saul runs out to the surveillance Marines, shutting down the feeds and dismissing them. One of the Marines, jostled and hurried, wonders what he's going to do to her. Doesn't stop him, doesn't question him, just wonders what he's going to do to the toaster now. Leaves without a backward glance. The Pegasus is always with us.

When he returns, Caprica is afraid and desperate: "I can tell you how to turn it off." She's speaking to a human, not a Cylon. She's programmed not to think of him that way; she's programmed to smile at him, with infinite love, as she explains. "Pain is how I learn from the guilt. There's wisdom there. Clarity. You know yourself there."

"Pain?" he asks, sitting there with her, begging Ellen to come back, begging Caprica to give him the great Cylon secret, to live with what you are and what you've done. With what he's becoming.

"Our minds were designed based on your minds. We learned things about how you work that you've never known." She caresses his face; she becomes Ellen again in a tender touch. "When you're in pain, that's ... when you learn who you really are. That's when you focus, sharp as the point of a knife." Ellen removes the patch, his shame, and looks on that scarred place with love, touching his beautiful face. He looks at her, in the very fire of his passion and his love. "I can give you that clarity again," she says, and runs her hand across his face. The scars, the gaping blindness, the anguish and the pain written across his skin: he is made perfect again, beneath her hands, under the gaze of her love. He is perfect, for the moment, just as he is.

THE AWFUL DARING OF A MOMENT'S SURRENDER
(Escape Velocity is reached; clarity Burns like five stars; two Men are born again.)

The guard outside the Deck 8 church is apologetic -- not a Son of Ares, but perhaps a son to Apollo -- as he tells Gaius he can't enter: there are twelve people already. A quorum of worshippers, and Laura's Order 170 saying that's enough. Gaius nods. "You can count, can you?" The son of Apollo agrees, gun across his chest, and ducks his head again. From within, one of the Batshits shrieks that she can come out, if the guards will let her, and then Gaius will be able to come home. But the beauty of Order 170 is that it accounts for that. "We're asking everyone to stay inside for safety reasons." Gaius tish-toshes and pish-poshes, and the guard is mightily embarrassed, but he has his orders. "I live here, and so do some of these women," Gaius snots. "Where are we supposed to go?"

Six tells him now: this is the moment. "Gaius. Step forward. Make a stand." Has she like met him? Gaius explains tiredly that he doesn't want to be a hero, or make a stand, because his day started with Tory's nihilistic bullshit and ended in the brig, and he just wants to sleep. Somebody, meaning everybody, finally notices him talking to himself, like, even Paulla who invented this stupid cult is weirded out. "Look at me," Six lies. "I promise you: Step forward, and you will not be hurt." She repeats her promise, adding that once he pulls this off he can lie down. "Go in!" He walks forward, into the poor Marine kid, who finally has to smash him: "Stop, sir." Paulla and the ladies cry out.

"Get your frakkin' hands off me, you frakkin' freak machine!" Saul slaps Caprica's hand away, rudely, and she responds by throwing him across the room, as Sixes must. It's two whole punches before her smile breaks out, and she looks down at his bloody face, full of love and holy purpose. Her strength is like a freight train, like an animal, like a machine made for pain. "Can you feel it, Saul? Can you feel the clarity of it?" He moans wordlessly, his mouth full of blood, and she gazes down at him, smiling, finally able to help. Imagine the eyes of something infinitely beautiful and infinitely sure, that could give you any gift. Something hard as rock, seeing all your angles at once, and wanting most to love you anyway. Like music, across the water; created to be loved, offering that love in return. She hits him again.

Gaius vomits blood before them all. The guard tells him to stay down, or leave. Six tells him to do it, whispering to him. "The gain will outweigh the cost." He rises and falls, again, and again. She picks him up by the elbow; the viewers see only a puppet on a string, driven by righteousness, and scream. He falls again, and Six throws her arms around him, hurling him bodily into the air, supporting him with her own strength even as he's thickly complaining through a broken mouth. "I want to stay down. I really want to stay down..." But Six knows better. She puts her invisible weight behind him, and walks him step by step, foot by foot, toward the poor guard again. If you looked at the dust in the corridor, you'd see two sets of footprints. That's where she's carrying him.

In the arms of an angel, he tries again to enter the promised land; the guard drops him with another hit. "Stay down. Please, sir!" The kid's almost crying, begging him not to push it further. As he raises his rifle for one last bashing, wondering if this is the one that kills the nut, Lee Adama's voice rings out over the crowd. The Marine with him tell the guard to stand down, and he does so gratefully. "The Quorum has just met in an emergency session. Full right of assembly has been restored." The crowd murmurs gratefully. "You can, uh, you can go back into your home. No one will stop you." Clucking and caressing, they gather Gaius up and carry him toward their home. He stops at Lee, and hurls himself on the body of Adama, tossing an arm over his shoulder, supporting himself entirely on the Major's body. "Thank you."

Lee swears he doesn't do these things for Gaius, never intended Gaius to be the floor on which he seems constantly to kneel these days; none of that matters. "Your God compels you," he mumbles, and the ladies peel him off Lee and usher him away, and Lee stares after.

Nothing else matters. Lee's devotion to fairness, to the greater good, is the last variable in an equation started by Tory and Lilly. The possibility of perfection, redemption for even Gaius Baltar + platonic, agapic love, and the simple belief that he can save the world + the physical presence of an angel of God, sent to shepherd him in God's love toward salvation + the clarity of pain + Lee's knowledge, alone, that Gaius deserves our grace = The redemption of Gaius Baltar. In five easy steps. And Lee has no idea what he's done; even as he follows the crowd into the church, into their suddenly sanctified assembly, he has no idea.

"...Lee has no idea. He really has no idea." Bill's exasperated; they've clearly been at it awhile. He sits by her side in sickbay, and she's sitting up straight in her glasses and wig. "There are pragmatic realities he refuses to face." Bill takes off his own glasses. "Well, that's a problem, of course. He's doing what he thinks is right." And Laura, with Bill, now, can show all her cards, how much she still loves our boy, how much she always has, and in such a voice that it seems never to be under debate. "Well yeah, he's Lee." Bill's body relaxes a fraction of an inch; that's three-quarters of the family. Now if he can just work the Kara thing. "Thing is, it probably is the right thing," Laura recognizes, "But...sometimes the right thing is a luxury. And it can have profoundly dangerous consequences. And yet it's almost as if he doesn't want that to be true... Okay, I gotta stop this, I'm not supposed to get upset during treatment." She settles and turns it off. "Will you read the chapter?", she asks sweetly. He warns her that he's getting into the unknown part now, the secret part that only they share. She gets sexy in response, loving this, his little rituals and all the angles you negotiate, when you love someone. "Oh dear. Are you going to be able to continue?" She snuggles down, to watch him read, and quickly closes her eyes.

Chapter Seven

The raft was not as seaworthy as I had hoped. The waves repeatedly threatened to swamp it. I wasn't afraid to die.

He pauses, sadly; keeps going. This is the shape of the cabin as it builds itself. These are the secrets they share. This is what they like.

I was afraid of the emptiness that I felt inside. I couldn't feel anything, and that's what scared me. It came into my thoughts. It filled them.

It felt good.

Saul begs for more: more absolution, more skinned knees, more pain, more clarity. But this isn't clarity, this is just abuse. Caprica weeps for him, and denies it. Through a mouth broken by her ministrations he begs again, and she says no. "No, I made a mistake." This isn't what he needs. He's not in need of learning, of introspection; he's not inflated, high on grace, looking for deflation. There's no learning to be had here, just more pain without cause or purpose or result.

He was created to love, and be loved. But all he's had is hate. There's no learning there. He knows where he is blind, and where he is small. Saul Tigh isn't a man who needs more pain, to learn: He needs more love. Saul Tigh needs, and deserves desperately, to be loved. More, and more, and more love.

So Caprica bends down, enjambed upon his body, immortal, possessed of so many lives, older than he, and kisses him. He tastes of blood, and fear, and the quick spark of mortality.

In the face of such forgiveness, it's braver to accept than not. He kisses her back. She is bitter, and sweet.

THE FIRE SERMON
(The Redemption of Gaius Baltar.)

"I'm not a priest. I've never even been a particularly good man."

Paulla is still having a time. But look at him! Gaius is still totally bloody and gross, unable to stand, full of madness and pain, and clarity. There are people in the crowd who are in business suits. New people. Tory and Lee, yes, but also people drawn by the news, or the gossip, or the song, or the fighting. My Mom always said "You go to laugh, you stay to pray," which is how I have managed not to join a single cult in thirty years, despite being totally cult-susceptible by any measure.

"I have, in fact, been a profoundly selfish man. But that doesn't matter, you see. Something in the universe loves me."

He smiles at Six, standing invisibly to Tory, lit by Heaven. But he's not talking about her. Not just her. He's talking about Jeanne, and Lilly, and Paulla shaking as he speaks. He's talking about Tory, and most of all he's talking about Lee. About what Lee taught us, so beautifully, when Gaius was this far from the airlock. When I say I love Sarah Porter, when I said the law was my religion, I wasn't talking shit: Same trees, different forest.

"Something in the universe loves the entity that is me."

They look back at him and see a bloody little man, barely standing, with the holy light of absolution in his eyes; as the smoke begins to clear and the faithful weep, and tend their wounds, and add their love to his. He weeps in awe, at God's grace, and in absolute grace. How can you look at him, this ugly, forgiven boy, this murderer and sycophant, finally beaten into the redemption that was his all along, who finally accepts his own divinity and the beauty of his name, with a smile on his face, and tears in his eyes, and think you're possibly worth less? If God exists, and loves Gaius Baltar utterly, and weeps for his pain: doesn't that mean your own salvation?

"I will choose to call this something God. A singular spark, that dwells in the soul of every living being. If you look inside yourself, you will find this spark too. You will. But you have to look. Deep."

Galen Tyrol looks at Nicholas. Looks deep at nobody's fault, nobody's mistake, the little man that remains between the lies of love and the lies of hate, the only thing left after he tore down his whole life, the only thing that's still certain and sure no matter what man the Gods have chosen him to be:

"Love your faults. Embrace them. If God embraces them, then how can they be faults? Love yourself. You have to love yourself. If we don't love ourselves, how can we love others?"

On the Demetrius, Kara sleeps, sweating -- how hot is it on that sub, for real -- on her star charts, exhausted with destiny and revelation:

"And when we know what we are, then we can find the truth out about others. See what they are. The truth about them."

Sam leans down, as if to whisper in her ear.

"And you know what the truth is, the truth about them. About you. About me. Do you? The truth is we are all perfect, just as we are."

Paulla shivers, in the middle of passion and revelation, as Tory stares unblinking. Lee almost wants to believe, almost wants to leave, and can do neither.

"God only loves that which is perfect, and he loves you."

Tory and Six stand beside each other, lit by heavenly light. Tory finally smiles. God loves her. It'll all go wrong, don't get me twisted: this is going to go to shit faster than anything you ever saw, because the only thing more fucked up than Cylons are humans, but that doesn't break the beauty of this moment.

If absolution waits quietly at the door until it's opened, if salvation waits for the least and smallest among us all, then in a very real way we are all waiting for this moment: when Gaius Baltar realizes he was already redeemed.

"He loves you because you are perfect. You are perfect just as you are. We are all perfect just as we are."

And as Lee leaves, weirded out, and Gaius holds his arms cruciform, and the followers go apeshit, and Six looks over at Tory's face, and sees the beauty there, and smiles, because she's won, and Gaius comes back from the edge, from the clarity of pain, he looks down, covered in blood and the fire of a new world, and wonders what just happened, as prophets often do, and the screen goes dark again.

SWEET THAMES, RUN SOFTLY
(Prolegomena at one point, definitely Apologia now, but not Manifesto. Never that.)

Um. week the recap for Battlestar Galactica will be seven pages long, and chock full of "snark," and funny little nicknames, and comfortable jokes you've already heard a whole bunch of times before. Doesn't that sound fun? I can't wait to go over that sexy Starbuck's relationship with the towel guy one more time -- and did you know she's a girl? I know, so crazy.

The Razor recap was weird, because I laid out all my tools on the first page. I wanted to put down all the cards at once, because the ethics of the story were too complex and moved too fast to get tripped up in talking, and I didn't know a better way. I haven't gotten smarter since then. Or maybe I've gotten smarter, or more cowardly, or something else I don't know about yet. I've always been confused by complaints about the length of the recap in the first place: The page you stop reading is how long the recap is. Nobody will know, if you just go do something better. There's not like a quiz.

This is my favorite episode of this entire series, or any series, so I felt caught between not needing any hatemail this week, or regretting later that I didn't give such a beautiful piece of art the full-tilt boogie. It's a little shorter than I was afraid it would be, frankly. So I'm sticking this at the end, and you're free to go until week, or whatever. You're perfect just as you are, either way. But I don't think that my reaction to this episode is the most normal possible reaction to the episode, which makes me sad in a way, but also hopeful. Here's the justification, anyway, because it's obviously going to factor into everything this show pulls from here on out, so we might as well get it out of the way.

Matt. 6 basically comes down to this: "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth." The chapter is basically a repeated exhortation to avoid what some call "spiritual materialism." That is, debasing what is most beautiful and private -- our relationship with God -- by turning it into a showy performance of our own salvation (riya, in Islam). Matthew compares showy charity to conspicuous consumption, to making a big deal out of fasting, to letting your faith be decided by whether God answered your requests for a new bike this week. In each case, religion has become more about you than it is about God, which overlooks the entire point of God.

He corrects these childish missteps by the faithful to lock themselves in a closet to pray, defused and self-abnegated. The Lord's Prayer -- Matthew's example of proper prayer -- is a laying down of burdens, a recapitulation of Gethsemane: "Thy will, not mine." We begin every week in prayer, on this show: more light, more knowledge, more greatness of spirit. It depends on the necessity of something: something strong and big, the rock at the rock bottom, the flagstone on which you stand. We can call it "God" if you want. Gaius will, but that's his prerogative as usual.

Prayer means laying yourself down utterly, on your big stupid face, dropping your bullshit and self-importance and desire for a new bike, lover, or reason to go on living, and allowing yourself to remember for like one second that there's something greater than you, of which you are a singular and beloved part. God is the forest, you are a tree: that's humility, a virtue. Not that hard to swallow. But we spend 99.9% of our days and nights acting on the belief that it's our movie: that we're the only tree. It's perhaps the defining human characteristic, and the one thing the Cylon won't never understand, and it works 99.9% of the time. But it's a mistake. That's why prayer happens on your knees.

A major difference between polytheism and monotheism, then, is about prayer: about the difference between making deals, and staying quiet. We pray to Aphrodite and Erzulie and Hera for love, or a husband, to Asclepius for healing. The revolution of monotheism lies in asking people to do something that makes no sense whatsoever, which is to set aside your own needs for five seconds and simply connect with the divine, without getting anything material out of the deal at all. "Use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him."

It's self-correcting, as any stable religious system must be. In polytheism, the mystery rites are when you put yourself under the hand of God, stop asking for shit, let things stop making sense. This is the price the Gods demand: that you will, often enough for your own soul's upkeep, lay down the burden of your selfishness -- and, more importantly, your tiny little viewpoint, the Cylon would say -- and let the Gods do their work on you as they see fit. We serve the Gods, feed their spirits in temple and altar and song, go into their caves and get high. Whatever it takes to let that light in, occasionally.

And on the other side of the salt, every monotheist service -- whether it's the Big Three or Mithraism or Batshit Baltarism -- is essentially a mystery rite of its own. Down on the knees, up and sing a song, down again for the sermon, then onto your knees. Quite a workout. Not something most of us have time for, but fairly universal.

Also universal: We blow up. Our sense of importance, of unique existence, inflates us. It makes us selfish and sick, or convinced of our rightness, or our victimhood. And then along comes something, God or illness or a hot blonde with a wicked right cross, and knocks us down again, and we feel terrible. Those six seeds start burning in our throats, and we find ourselves in hell. It feels like dying because it is: that's something getting burned off. But in that pain, there's knowledge, because for a split second we can turn around and look at the whole of ourselves, and see what's missing. That's the only kind of knowledge that connects you to anything real, but it's also just physics.

When God created the universe, He had to exhale and get a little smaller, just to make room for Himself to look around and see what He made: ein soph.

Or when God created the universe and all His angels, He had to make room for humanity and free will, just to see if He guessed wrong, and when it seemed like maybe He had, He sent his only begotten son to reboot the game. That's two right there.

Or we're human because we committed a crime, during the war in Heaven: The angels upheld Allah's absolute authority, those who became animals rebelled but repented, the djinns believed that Satan could become a God, and the humans couldn't make up their minds, and weren't strong enough to stand on God's side.

We recapitulate it every single day, getting fired at work and seeing why it happened, or being betrayed by a lover and realizing our own history and faults: Kara painted the sky, but it took a lifetime of abuse, and worse, to get her to admit it.

I don't believe in God. The whole thing seems silly. But I've never found that to be an obstacle to having a strong relationship with Him. I've written a lot about faith and religion on this website and I do try to keep myself out of it, mostly. I was raised in an atheist and half-hearted polytheist environment, and I guess now I would call myself a Christian if I had to say. I know about as much about Mithra and Thelema as I do about Christ or Islam, which is to say not much.

But this episode is a challenge, because it balances all of these things against the tropes and themes of the series as a whole, and this season in particular, so finely, and in such a lovely and literary manner, that it's hard to respond without going into it a little. I will say that the show has always been about the contrasts and parallels between these two cultures: how they can possibly exist when they're so seemingly incompatible. But the orbits are decaying: The Cylon are looking for their saints, while the monotheist undercurrent in Colonial society is busily gaining strength.

(The only songs I make sure are on my playlist when I'm recapping this particular show are a whole lot of garbage (the band and the regular kind), and 1) a bunch of covers of "Umbrella," because it's easy to write when that song is playing, 2) a bunch of covers of Modern English's "I Melt With You" ("You should know better: Dream of better lives, the kind which never hate. Dropped in a state of imaginary grace, I made a pilgrimage to save this human race. You should see why I'll stop the world and melt with you: You've seen the difference, and it's getting better all the time."), and this way old song called 3) "Something Happened On The Way To Heaven," by I think Phil Collins, which contains my favorite lyric of all time: "You can run, and you can hide, but I'm not leaving unless you come with me." Sometimes when I was recapping The Apprentice and feeling really angry with America, that idea was all that kept me going: No matter how bad I fucked up or how bad you fucked up, or how viciously you repudiate me, I'm not leaving -- unless you come with me. If you leave this hellish relationship with me, we can hold hands and run somewhere better, called the future, we can ditch this war we're caught in and just hit the disco, or whatever, but no matter what I'm not going to be the one to fucking blink. I like that a lot.)

Put another way, the Cylon are developing civil fractures and individuated personalities at the same rate as the Fleet is hardening into social roles and groupthink terrorism, and abstracting its self-imposed self-definition out to a place where it doesn't even mean anything. At some point the question, "What is human?" stops meaning anything at all, because the only point, ever, is "What is redemption?" The orbits are decaying, and where they meet is the Promised Land, or the Apocalypse, but either way it's nuclear.

I think that Gaius's little speech is about fusion too: of human and Cylon, of the Gods and of God, of multiplicity and singularity, of democracy and autocracy, of Lee and Laura, of Caprica and Chip Six. The thing about nuclear fusion is that it's not necessarily bad. It could be awesome. It depends on how it's used. And I think the implications of Gaius's little sermon are scary as hell -- but only depending on how it is used. Because of anything I've ever heard, the sermon itself comes closest to my personal beliefs.

I believe that redemption is primarily the process by which we recognize we are already redeemed. I believe that only a God who could love even Gaius Baltar is a God worth serving, and the only God worth emulating.

I think that denying Gaius Baltar, or anybody else, a measure of salvation is grossly inappropriate: if he feels connected to that spark for even one second, we can be jealous, but trying to take it away from him just hurts us. I think you have to look in the grossest, sweatiest, scariest angriest places to tease out any piece of God at all.

I believe that a God worth serving, or loving, would laugh and smack you on the head if you even asked, because it's already done. I cannot believe that our bullshit is God's problem; your duty to grow is to yourself and you've got all the tools you need anyway. God sends a helicopter and a submarine and a lifeboat and a superhero, the last thing God wants to hear is that you're waiting for God to save you.

I believe that growth and strength and mercy and forgiveness and kindness are duties to ourselves, but not necessarily to God. I believe that only in fearless self-examination can we find understanding of others, much less the capability of loving them.

I believe that loving everyone that exists with the whole of your heart is the endgame; by recognizing that spark in them, but also by simply being able to acknowledge the inherent beauty in the fact that they exist at all.

I think to say, and leave it at, "Cylons/Tory/Cain are crazy/evil" or "Cally is worthless trash" or "Michael Angeli is a scumbag" is a really good indication of the areas of our blindness. Our hate, and what enrages it, tell us where we're small.

I believe everything that breaks comes from the things we don't acknowledge, not the things we do. I believe that everything that rises must converge, that every act of kindness or selflessness is a testament to God.

I believe that "perfection" is a loaded concept, because it can be made to imply exclusion: "never broken" is a very different proposition from "finally fixed," and fairly useless in this context. I'd be satisfied with "better." I don't believe I've ever met an evil person, in real life or on this show.

I think the people that love us are only capable of shining what was already there, but you can trust the people that hurt us to burn off the crap, if we let it. And I believe that our world, and ourselves, only get larger when we burn off what doesn't work. And someday it'll hold us all.