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In terms of plot, this is easily the longest episode ever. All it is, is just stuff happening, more stuff happening, and all of it is awesome. The Basestar/Raptor combo jumps into the Fleet -- minus the Demetrius, whose FTL fucks up just at the most awesome time -- and is saved by... Saul Tigh? Yeah. They will not harm their own.
Except when they do: Cottle has to take Felix's leg after all. He spends the episode singing counterpoint to everything else going on. Gaius, Lee and Laura all listen in, as well as Sam, who is changing faster than you can see. The whole thing is quite beautiful, actually. If I hadn't already forgiven him, this would have done it. ♥.
Natalie rocks a debrief with the Prez and the Admiral, and then a sweet effing conversation with Lee convinces Laura to bring her in to speak directly to the Quorum. Which she also rocks. Her plan: unbox Three, and destroy the Resurrection Hub. Not Ship, you understand, but Hub: death for everybody. End of line. Both sides plan alternate double-crosses, a la Cain/Adama, but Natalie eventually realizes it's bullshit, and tries to do something like the right thing. Doesn't really matter, since Athena blows her ass away.
...What? Yeah. So you know how in every SF show there's a point where the little kid starts acting fucked up and weird? Hera just figured that one out. She welcomes Mommy home with a super-creepy "Bye bye!" and draws a bunch of pictures of the Opera House Six, scaring Athena even though she was there too. Hera runs into Ambassador Natalie -- getting Marine-marched down a corridor -- and it's instant love. Athena freaks, causes a massive standoff, Galen whisks Hera out of the way, and Athena Cally Tyrols the shit out of Natalie. I cried a bit.
OMG what else. Oh, so Laura whores Tory out yet again to Gaius because he's been broadcasting about her Opera House mojo, then has another sweet convo with Kara, who confirms the legititude of both the Hybrid and Laura's visions. Laura snags Gaius and drags him to the Basestar, where they reconnect the Hybrid, and the first word she says is: Jump.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!THAT SHE BE SPARED THE PAIN
(III: Difficulty In Beginning.)
"Now I have learned from unimpeachable sources that President Laura Roslin has for some time now been sharing hallucinogenic visions with two Cylons within our Fleet: One, Sharon Agathon, sent on the classified Demetrius mission, and the other, a Cylon prisoner being held aboard the Galac..."
His lover. The girl who waits on the other side of the wall. Laura listens to a reel-to-reel, eyes closed. Lee watches her, one more bird head brought to the master, as her eyes roll back. Her wig remains steadfast. She opens her eyes, and turns it off. Lee and Laura, the Delegate from Caprica that no longer exists, and the President of a Rag-Tag Fleet of what was once a collection of Colonies: They don't know about her. They know all about her but they don't know about her. Wouldn't really care if they did. This is war.
"Uh-uh. It's not that easy, Madam President." Roslin tells Lee to try it sometime. When the world rests on your shoulders, sometimes it is that easy. Because it's not forever, it's just a few seconds in the cabin before you head out again. "Most of the population has heard that broadcast," he says, but she knows that. It's the point of broadcasts. The Colonies are no longer 2.0, they don't know about niches, about our little websites. "Look, I take no pleasure in putting this before you. In fact, they practically had to push me through that door..." A door against which he's been pushing against since his appointment, and beyond which, Laura points out, he's surely more than happy to stay. The inner sanctum: he's finally earned passage, with a dog-eared novel Emily already read her.
"I can't put one foot in front of another without someone blocking my path asking me what the hell is going on!" Lee starts to lecture her about the welfare of the Fleet, as is his wont, and she cuts him dead. As is hers. "-- Excuse me. As long as I am in this office, the welfare of this Fleet is not something you need to worry about." Captain Apollo's not going down without a fight, and tells her she owes the people. We the people. Her people. She owes them.
"What if suddenly all your beliefs were called into question? Up is down," she says over his protests. "Black is white. Scripture is fiction. Home is thin air, instead of solid ground. Et cetera." These aren't questions. This is rhetorical. What if you had your life turned upside-down, and then again, and then again, and then in one final irony, once more? He tells her he's sorry for all she's endured, but it's nothing less than anybody, and she knows that. Not the point. "What would you do if I told you the truth?" she says. Telling him the truth by talking about telling the truth.
"What if it were you instead of me, and all that's left of humanity has just been told that you are sharing visions with the enemy? What would you do, Mr. Adama? Would you think that the Gods were testing you?" And how would that make it any different from any other day? He asks twice more, even though she's answered him, because he's Lee Adama. Because the thing that makes you awesome is the thing that makes you suck. And she looks him right in the eye for the same reason, and for the same reason her response makes his eyes pop out and roll across the desk, and for the same reason she gives him her honest response, and for the same reason that response is: "Yes."
In the absence of the Hybrid, a Colonial Raptor has become the heart and the mind of the Rebel Cylons' Basestar, which burns inside and out and carries inside it a crystalline Colonial heart. Athena tells them they have five minutes, and keeps working. Happy little warrior. Kara tells Leoben some truths. That's what she does now. "When you came knocking with that Raider and asked for our help, you gave away the future of all the Cylons aboard this ship. You know that, right? ... Save it. No guarantees. When we meet up with the Colonial Fleet, I don't know if they'll feed you or frak you, all right?" (HA! Or lie to you about Earth!)
Leoben knows he put their future in the right hands; Kara Thrace has hands. Natalie and her Eight look at each other, and get more and more frightened. A jump into the heart of enemy territory, where there are dragons. Where we lay ourselves down in front of the dragons, and tell the dragons we've finally learned. After all those false starts and promises we've finally got it, dragons. Please don't eat us alive.
"Since you've been calling the plays up till now, I'm assuming you're doing the talking?" Natalie and Leoben look at each other; she nods to Kara almost imperceptibly. But there's so much encoded in that little look. "Leading" isn't leading. "Calling the plays" is as simple as a vote that takes as long as a species-wide thought, and a simple nod. We're mechanized copies; nobody has ever voted against their model. A few minutes ago Natalie voted against her model, once again with the barrel of a gun. When you're a Cylon and they tell you to lead, they're not talking about white raincoats on Caprica, they mean lead as in lead. As in be Natalie, Natalie the Six, for the first time in your life. "Natalie" means "birthday." When she nods, that's what she's saying. This is her birthday; this is Kara's doing. Birth is the domain of Artemis. It's a Six that steps up to the salt: it's Natalie that crosses it. She will lead her people.
"Good. Gods help us." Eight looks at Natalie; Natalie is afraid. It's her birthday. "Sysops of both vessels are synced," says Athena. Finally. All it took was a Dance and a death or two, and a birth or two: FTL fault corrected. "We're as ready as we're ever gonna be." Kara reminds her to remind Demetrius to set the board to green: "Unless both ships jump in together, Galactica will blow us out of the sky." If you explained the jinx concept to Kara, how much do you think she'd do differently?
On creaking Demetrius, Helo checks on Gaeta -- shivering and grey, leg like a Hybrid -- and calls the same song: "Sublight. Helm. Tactical. Nav. FTL... Board is green." I like it when they do that; I like the ceremony of it. All systems go.
Athena catches Natalie looking at her; Natalie smiles kindly. Sweetly. She'll lead her people and she'll start with this sister. "I was just thinking how beautiful she must be." Athena stares. "Your daughter, Hera." Sharon asks how Natalie knows her name; Sharon didn't even know she was alive, all that time they were throwing parties on the Basestars. "We all know her name. You were blessed." The fucking innocence, the disgusting and ingenuous smile upon her face: Sixes love God and children, but they understand little about either, and even less about anything else.
Because here's how fucking blessed Sharon Agathon is. She spent a season on doomed and rotting Caprica, chasing a boy through the forest, trying to make him fall in love. She found out how rarely you stay clean when love comes up. Got pregnant. Got a gun held to her head approximately eleven times before she ever got back to the scariest place in the universe. Was threatened with an eleventh-hour abortion by the first and most powerful of all humans; was operated on to keep that queen alive. Her child was born, and died in the cradle: all the hopes of two great races, dead. With fingers no larger than a thought.
They locked her up for a year, chained and screaming. And at the point of her greatest humanity, when she and Boomer truly switched places -- she became a Cylon in human skin rather than Boomer's human in Cylon skin -- her most broken sister told her a terrible secret. "The enemy has your miraculous child, who was stolen. And they are killing it." She committed complicated suicide, risked her life, watched her sister die, and brought the child back. That was months ago. She was blessed? She was fucked. Again, and again. And we're not done yet. The clock is running.
Athena counts the jump; Helo counts the jump. The Jumpin' Agathons. And of the two, you'd place more faith in a Raptor than a Basestar, even with Racetrack at the helm. But that's not what happens. They both blink out, but the Demetrius blinks back, the giant gorgeous Basestar a whole jump away. Alone, in the sky.
"Sir, we had a problem with the sync points and the jump coordinates," says Seelix. This is what happens when you fly with anybody but Kara Thrace. ...Or also with Kara Thrace, come to think of it. "It'll take a few minutes to spool up the FTL drive again..." Helo curses as the Baseship jumps, a billion miles away, into the middle of the Fleet.
Adama and Tigh do their usual: All hands to battle stations, Condition One throughout the Fleet, launch alert five, birds in the air, gun batteries on standby. Vipers scramble around the Basestar, which sits embarrassed in the middle of humanity; a spinster at the kids' table. Athena calls her husband, again and again. "Demetrius, Athena. Report. Demetrius, Athena. Report." Adama hoshis for an emergency jump, but the President's shuttle Raptor is still en route. It hits, bouncing a bit, in bay one, and the Fleet jumps away a ship at a time. And Athena calls home. "Galactica, Athena. Galactica, Athena... "
Under her panels in the Raptor, which is the heart and the mind of a Basestar now, the wireless is cooked. No comms. They're in the middle of the party and nobody can hear them. No Demetrius to explain, no STARBUCK painted on her giant hull. Just the face of death, smiling and floating, unmoving, in the land of dragons. The Fleet's almost gone; the battle can begin.
"Galactica's scrambling Vipers," Athena reads. "They're going to shoot us down." But on CIC, Saul's noticing something. His eye angles sharply and he speaks quietly to himself. They will not harm their own. ""Eight Vipers inbound," Athena calls, as the Colonies jump away. As the innocents make a lateral move. "Entering firing range..." The Demetrius is nowhere to be seen.
"Something isn't right," Saul says to himself, as the gunneries report: "Firing solution correct. Main battery standing by to fire on your command." Adama counts them down as they aim, and just before he speaks the word, Saul calls for a weapons hold. Bill stares at his oldest friend, just as the first Viper nears the Cylon ship; Demetrius jumps directly between them.
"Galactica, Demetrius. Do not fire. Baseship is disarmed and under Colonial command. Officers aboard." Dualla demands authentication, in a harder voice she's used lately. If we knew what kind of voice she'd been using lately... "Galactica, Demetrius." Helo authenticates both, Bravo Tango 8. "Do not fire. Starbuck and Athena have control of the Baseship." Bill and Saul stare at each other. How much of this is theatre? If the ties that bind us are stronger than those that would tear us apart, how far down do the lies go? It's been two months. Will they ever see those kids again? Are they seeing them now?
MAY IT ALWAYS STAY TRUE
(XL: Taking Apart.)
39,673 souls in the Fleet. Give or take a Baseship or two. Raptors scramble to the recovered beasties, the Demetrius and the Basestar; Marines flood out and into her. Tigh leads them through halls he's never seen before. He sneaks glances here and there, careful to escape notice as he does so. What if just being here starts the music playing again? What if the music is inside the ship? What will he become, if he stays here a second longer? Two seconds? Five? How long before it creeps inside his bones; will he feel it, when it happens? When he stops being the man he chooses to be, and becomes the man who kills Bill?
And at the end of those halls, the motley crew is worried. They should be. Not one human left in the bunch. Kara stands at the head of her newest mutiny, her new rag-tag band, her new sisters and brothers, and speaks to Tigh. "Colonel, they're with me." He stares her down; looks around at Natalie, the Eight, Athena, Sam. Barely, Sam. "So which one of them shot Gaeta?" They will not harm their own, but "they" sure as shit are the ones that hurt Felix.
Who's being wheeled into Sickbay as we speak, from the Demetrius, and Cottle's prognosis is not good. Which is to say, the leg is coming off. Which Karl already knew, and Felix did too.
Natalie sits in a chair, surrounded. There are Marines against the walls, and along the table facing her: Tory and Tigh, perched like rooks, with the king and queen safely on the inside. Bill takes notes as she speaks.
"We became divided according to models," Natalie explains, still scandalized by it but reporting as clearly and succinctly as you ever could, explaining an alien race. "The Twos, Eights, and Sixes have come to believe that our destiny lies in seeking out the Final Five. The Ones, Fours, and Fives violently opposed such action." Bill asks why she's only named six models, when we know there are Seven of Twelve in play. Athena -- in the corner, a knight -- speaks up. "The Threes. The D'Annas? They were boxed after the battle on the Algae Planet." Tigh looks up: "Boxed?" Sounds bad, especially when you're learning what you are; what your people are capable of doing. It's worse than it sounds.
"Her entire line was punitively deactivated," Natalie says; she catches Tory staring too, but she looks down immediately as Natalie speaks. "Her consciousness placed in a boxing facility... D'Anna saw the faces of the Final Five, which was forbidden. But if we unbox her, she can reveal their identities to us." Tigh's timbers do some shivering. Kara stands opposite Athena, against the far wall. They are knights, but their colors are changing too fast. We don't have words for the color Kara's painting. She looks so beautiful. "The Final Five have been to Earth. If we help find them, they can help us get there."
"Our ship can heal itself," Natalie explains, "But most of our Raiders were destroyed in the ambush. We're asking for your help here. We can't do it alone." Laura asks, with only a hint of snideness, what we the people could possibly want from them. Beyond the simple fact of helplessness, beyond honesty and trust, what can the enemy give us to prove their helplessness, their honesty and trust?
Everything.
"The boxing facility resides within the Cylon Resurrection Hub. This Hub controls the functions of every Resurrection Ship in existence." Athena nods. "It protects itself by periodically jumping to a new set of coordinates and then relaying them back to the Baseship..." Natalie stands; she thinks this is a conversation. She always fucks this part up. The Marines pull their weapons and she gives them all that classic Six look: how rude. "Madam President, you asked for a reason to help us? Vengeance." A word ugly enough that even Laura Roslin must look down.
"You destroy the Hub, Cylons lose their ability to download." Natalie's scared, shaking. "All of us." And why, asks the Dying Leader, asks the woman capable of genocide, "Would you be willing to lose your ability to resurrect?" Natalie's sadness is infinite. It must become finite. She is a leader now. "We're rebels. We can't go back. What matters most to us is being with the Five." Tigh stares, but Laura gets it. There won't be a resurrection for Natalie, or for her rag-tag band of rebels. This is already it: the undiscovered country, from whose bourn we'll never return. And when you stand at the edge of that river, you start looking for somebody who stands in the place between death and rebirth, who brings life to the river and water to the shore. Somebody to walk you across that river, and hold your hand. Heaven for everybody. Six of one.
"D'Anna will be able to identify them. We'll take you to the Hub if you help us unbox D'Anna." Laura's suspicious; black is white and scripture is fiction. Adama asks for fact: "Give us the coordinates of the Hub first." Natalie can't. "I said we would take you there." Bill orders her out, and the Marines march her to the door. She turns, asking for his word. Trust starts somewhere. She'll lead her people.
"I'll give you the coordinates. But I want your word." She steps forward, and Bill looks into her eyes. He loved Boomer, loves Athena; loves whatever Kara's becoming, and his President. He can take the measure of a man. He rooted out the first Cylon we ever rooted out. "Once their identities are revealed and we come back here, we'll be free to leave your Fleet with the Five?" Laura jerks. "Yes, they're here with you." The song begins to play, the one only we can hear; Tigh stares at her. "The Final Five are in your Fleet. That's why our Raiders turned back the attack in the Nebula." Tory looks away, and Tigh does not, but they're both thinking the same thought, and it's a thought you just don't think.
Out in the corridor, after the prisoners and friends are gone, Bill asks Saul what the weapons hold was all about. And even though he was acting sketchy for like a page of dialogue, his shrug is eloquent enough to believe: "To be absolutely honest with you, Bill... I didn't. What can I say? We got lucky." Lucky us! Bill tells him to get a Raptor out to the Hub for some recon. "Maybe we can get lucky again." And because we haven't seen these two in a while, they do a whole salute and turn and patented Bill Adama "Tigh! ...Thank you," and they nod and whatever hilarious shit straight guys do when they secretly want to hug each other super hard in front of everybody and never let go.
289er floats near the Hub. I love how the further we get, the more the stories are about Raptors and not Vipers. Have you noticed that? It's always Racetrack. I kinda thought that would start to happen a little more after Kara showed up with gallons of Raider blood all over her shit. "Lords of Kobol, shield your eyes. Get it with the gun camera..." Skulls notices how beautiful it is: it's like a cross between a Resurrection Ship and a Basestar: rather than parallel ribs it's a polygon, pointing in towards the middle. Ushering them home, in every line and angle, like Dualla on the wireless. "Tell it to the Fleet!" Racetrack laughs, and they jump back. It was beautiful, as all Cylon artifacts are; it was eternal life, and soon it'll be eternal death. Heaven for everyone.
The line of knives and scalpels and saws and things seem endless. Felix asks Cottle not to put him under -- as you would normally do, um, when cutting off somebody's fucking leg -- and Cottle calls him son. "Just do it... I don't want to wake up with my leg gone." Too much like every day in the Fleet; every day on New Caprica. To wake up to a new day only to find something precious is gone. Too much like walking down the Hall of Remembrance and seeing all the goodbyes you never made. Too much, to feel the ache of something that's not there anymore.
Cottle marks the incision. Sam stands behind a screen as Felix shudders in fear. The saw wakes up, whirring and spinning horribly. Felix stares past it, then shuts his eyes just as Sam turns away. He never even knew he was there.
A DARK & LAUGHING RAIN
(LII: The Keeping Still.)
The Fleet jumps in, all around the Basestar, like a backwards homecoming. It dwarfs them. In Bill's office, Helo explains the op. "If we go in on our own horse, we won't last five minutes. But we go in with that Baseship parked out there, nobody's gonna notice us for awhile." Tigh notes that their Raiders are frakked, but Helo tells him to commit Vipers. Half the wing. Bill's surprised, but like, think about it, Bill. You won't need half the Vipers if you wipe out 90% of them in one blow. "Yeah. We'll sneak them in on the rebel Baseship. Hoshi did some calculations from Racetrack's photos. We take out the FTL, and the Hub's stranded." Vipers on an alien deck. Did you ever think you'd see that?
"We blow the Hub... billions of skin jobs lose their bath privileges," Tigh grits. Laura muses on it, like this is English class: "Mortal enemies." Helo reminds them they need a separate team for unboxing the Threes, and Saul points out that actually, they don't: "Maybe we just forget the Godsdamn boxing facility." Bill's grossed out. Trust starts somewhere, but Tigh's in a club he doesn't know about. He's not asking the right questions. "Well? They're lying to us. The skin jobs said their Raiders won't fight because the Final Five is here? We tangled with those slit-eyed black bastards for three years now, and they haven't turned back before. Why now?" (I guess we should be grateful that he didn't throw some gun/cannon relation to "limp-wristed" in there with the rest of those slurs, but whatev. I never expected Saul to be the one most likely to get all chrome-closet self-hater about this whole thing.) "What if they're telling the truth? What if the Final Five are here?" Tigh hasn't got an answer for that one. Or if he does, it involves an even less clever way of being offensive so he lets it slide.
"The Five could know the way to Earth," Bill points out, because of course Kara's crazy ass said it so it must be true, and Laura's like, "Why would they care when we destroy their entire resurrection capacity?" Bill hopes against hope that the Five are different, like Natalie's Rebels, and Laura wonders if maybe his bizarre hope isn't totally stupid and they're actually in the Fleet to kill everybody's ass like the rest of the Cylons in the Fleet have been trying to do for three years. Which honestly, Occam would say Laura is on the right track. This, of course, stimulates Saul Tigh to get even more crusty and weird and say that they should blow it up without care for the Final Five -- because after all, he has firsthand knowledge that they don't know shit about Earth except for a Bob Dylan tune or two -- and says we should stick with the Dying Leader. "The President's vision, her scriptures, her way to Earth."
But even Laura doesn't see the point in going that far, because she doesn't know that Saul is one, so she actually comes off moderate this one single solitary time: "Why don't we split the difference? Unbox D'Anna and find the Five. Keep the Five till we get to Earth, turn them over to the rebels." Meeting silence, she shores up her point: "They've waited this long... It'll be on our terms...?" Lots more staring. "It's all pie in the sky, gentlemen, until we know what's true and what's not." And that is that, of course, so Bill wraps it up. They're such a good team. "...And we put a lid on it. The real plan stays in this room. If the plan gets leaked to the Cylons, all bets are off. Have someone escort the rebel leader back to her Baseship, so she can inform her people they have a deal." It's her birthday.
Five clumsy Raptors fly them back to the Basestar, like ambassadors going home, with a coterie: coughing deckhands; sharp, nasty Vipers; sharp, nasty pilots, with death in their eyes. Humanity covers her glorious deck like an infection, swarming everywhere you look with their dead machines and stupid, silent motherboards; the beeping and the vulgar flashing and the words that blink across. They crawl across her flesh like a colony of ants, devouring. Grimy hands touch everything; they crash and muddle and take up space. Taking five to do the job of one or two, and always the screeching shrieks of them: Their conversations, inefficient, ring out across that smooth expanse in a thousand ugly voices, every one of them different. Every single one of them alone, calling out across that vast and lovely space to each other, like lonely, angry beasts in the night. And in the middle of that cacophony and jumbled, ugly movement, the three rebels are very small indeed. They've invited death into the only home they ever knew. It is very loud.
"In thirty-six hours, the Colonies will unite forces with insurgent rebel Cylons and their leader in an unprecedented joint military operation to destroy the Cylons' ability to download into... blah blah blah," Zarek smirks. He lives for this. The Quorum is shocked. Reza stares at Lee, and Zarek asks why the Quorum wasn't consulted. After all, Adama is the Delegate from Caprica. He's the Admiral's son; shouldn't he know? "I'm sorry," Lee says. Not "I am not in charge of anything" or "I am not a fucking lobbyist" or "I am not a spy," no: "I'm in the dark as much as all of you," he says, like a boy with a bright shiny medal, who just today told the President of the Colonies what it was all about. Who just forced out of her the biggest news Gaius ever blared. Zarek is kinda fed up. In the dark is not where Lee was meant to be.
Galen sighs, in the Tool Room. "You know, if they unbox the D'Annas, at least we'll find out who the fifth one is..." Tigh growls. "All that's gonna do is crowd the airlock a little more." The Colonel asks him if he thinks they're going to give him a bright shiny medal when they find out what he is. Everybody stares and thinks about how they totally promised not to have these meetings where they get together and act shady and talk about what huge fucking Cylons they are, and yet here they are doing it again. But this is special; Sam's back. "What about you?" Tory asks him, but Sam's a million miles away. "He sings, you know." Galen cocks his head. (Music. Did you say music?) "Gaeta. Whenever he feels the tingling, whenever he feels his phantom leg. Cottle says it helps him get through it." They will not harm their own. Sam stares at the wall. The others worry. Sam's home. "He sings."
Tory Foster bustles onto Colonial One, happy to be home. It's been so long. She wishes the President a good morning, bright-eyed, and pulls out her briefcase. "What is it about the Galactica that gives you such a glow? I come over here, it's like I'm going from one dungeon to the ." Like a snail. Tory grins and thanks her: she's glowing. She's beautiful. Perfect, just as she is. They get down to business.
"I want you to find out who's behind the shared vision rumors. Who's talking to him?" Tory nods. "With Baltar?" Not even thinking about it. "...You're sleeping with him, right?" The sudden sharpness, the gleam. Tory looks up, scared. She opens her mouth, and closes it again just as quickly: "-- Don't. I've just been informed that you've been spotted down there enough times to be a charter member of his nymph squad." Tory nods, and mans up. "All right. I have come to believe in Baltar's spiritual message. I don't know how or why. It just happened. I wish you knew how many times I wanted to tell you." She starts to cry; that old shame, failing Laura again. "Your friendship and your trust means..."
"-- Frak." Tory is disgusted and sad; Laura more so: "Clearly my friendship and trust mean frak. And I don't really care if you have to spend the night on your knees praying, or just on your knees. [Guess who wrote this one?] I want a name. I want to know who's responsible for these lies." Which aren't lies. And Tory's secret relationship with Gaius, which is neither a secret nor a relationship: that's a bargaining chip now. She turns her back on Tory and puts on her glasses, shuffles paper. "Madam President." Silence. "Laura." Nothing. "I am so sorry..." Laura doesn't turn. "You have a job to do."
Marines watch the three rebels from the doorway, sitting at a small table in a small room. "The humans are never going to allow us to have the Final Five and go our own way," Natalie says quietly, and the Eight stares: "Are you sure of this?" Almost; she wants to be wrong, but she's a leader now. It's her birthday: "We need insurance." Leoben swims in the stream: "Trust has to begin somewhere," he says, but Natalie swears it won't be with them. They are small, caught between two great races, no Resurrection Ship. You understand? The rock and the hard place. The temple and the altar. "It's our ship. When we jump, we take control of it with the Centurions. We carry out the mission as promised. But when we return, we take hostages. The humans on this ship stay on this ship until we have the Five." Leoben looks away, sad. "Look at me," she insists. "We've changed, but the humans haven't." Eight knows, and nods; nobody's noticed that this is the definition of not changing. "We've come too far to risk everything on their trust." So I guess we can write "TRUST" on the big board of shit the Cylons still don't actually understand. Not that we do either, but it's good to keep track. Leoben nods, and he and Eight reluctantly agree. Natalie hates it too.
Felix sings: "Alone she sleeps, in the shirt of man / With my three wishes clutched in her hand..." A man listens, a woman watches her husband sleeping. Laura listens. He gives them peace. "The first that she be spared the pain / That comes from a dark and laughing rain / When she finds love, may it always stay true ..." Lee enters her bedsit, and hears Felix. He stops in his tracks, transfixed. Such a voice, lying dormant in such a man, with such a broken and angry heart; such beauty born out of something so jagged and betrayed. You'd stand still too. Laura knows: "What a way to discover such a beautiful voice, huh?"
"How'd you find me?" Laura spits, and he says it was her Chief of Staff. ""...Needs to be horsewhipped." That's so Laura: this season alone she's pulled this routine with Lee and Bill, holding back the love she knows they're dying for, in order to move them back into place. To nudge them into position with a slap, without ever really letting go of them. Maybe even Kara. "If you came down here to kiss my ass to get information, save your breath." He shakes his head: the Quorum's considering a vote of no confidence. Felix's lament grows louder. "I won't compromise the success of this operation or the safety of this Fleet to indulge the neediness of twelve perpetually unhappy representatives. I can't." Felix rises, ever louder and more beautiful, and falls silent. Lee looks away.
"I was with them on the, uh, emergency jump. And I saw something in the faces of the Delegates. It wasn't anxiety from waiting, it went beyond that. I was anxious, it was my first time, but they... They were empty. The Quorum had given up." Laura looks away. "And then it struck me that after going through the same routine so many times, it was the only way that they could cope with the uncertainty. To presume the worst." She nods. She's seen it. She's seen it every time; written it on her heart. "You felt their suffering. Now try holding their lives in balance every day." But that's the one thing you never have to explain to Lee Adama: he feels it, even when he doesn't really get it.
"Talk to them. You don't have to tell them everything, I know how it works. Just talk to the Quorum. Let them put a face to this joint mission, let them hear from the Cylon leader, anything. Anything to put their fears to rest." Laura doesn't love it. But she loves him. She sighs. He's my favorite too.
ALONE SHE SLEEPS
(XVIII: Working On What Has Been Spoiled.)
Gaius looks over at Tory, in bed. She won't look at him. Won't even touch him. He might as well not be there. He gets anxious. "What's the matter?" Nothing. Nothing comes from nothing. "No, nothing. Nothing at all. We've been lying here doing nothing. What?" She looks at him, and before she can even accuse him of lying, he's grinning, in vulnerable-liar mode. "You've been lying about the President sharing visions with Cylons." By the end of the sentence, his posture has changed completely: not denial, but authentic and righteous rejection. "That happens to be the God's honest truth!"
She nearly weeps, again. How much of this is theatre? "Sorry. I can't accept what you've done." Laura/Tory Lockdown. Gaius is confused. "What... Where's this coming from?" The rumors. "I've seen what they've done to her." He shakes his head: she seriously believes that he's making it up? She looks away. "I am not saying I'm not capable, but why would I? Six revealed... Caprica Six revealed them to me... through my attorney in the last days of my trial, when a guilty verdict was a certainty..." Always making it a story. Oh, Gaius. Given the slightest license. "I suppose I could've gone public. Caused a stir..." Quite a story, isn't it? And such a hero. Such a saint.
"All this time you kept quiet?" He makes a smarmy face and tells some lies. He believes them. "I'm not saying I'm a saint, Tory. I'm many things, but I try not to be spiteful. Got no bloodlust to go get her. But she's a hypocrite. The lies, the secret missions. Co-opting the rhetoric of patriotism to keep everyone in the dark, including you. That's rather worrying, isn't it? So I had to speak. The truth is, no good ever comes from concealing it." He gets out of bed, having put Tory Foster firmly in her place. "I've got a broadcast." He clothes himself in his self-righteousness and takes off. That's my boy.
"The first that she be spared the pain / That comes from a dark and laughing rain..." Felix swallows, afraid to look. Ready to look; feeling something that's not there. "When she finds love may it always stay true / This I beg for the second wish I made too ..." Every day he'll wake up, from dreams of dancing, running, and there it'll be: the loss of something precious. He sings.
Laura stands weakly at the head of the Quorum. There's a tremor through her body, weak as four clipped corners, but there's no weakness in her voice. "I didn't come here to beg, or plead, or apologize, or to keep my job. You know me better than that. And I didn't come here to create sympathy by parading my illness in front of you. On the contrary, there are some that probably believe that along with my cancer drugs, I have inoculated myself against compassion." She smiles into silence. "That is a joke." Nothing. They've inoculated themselves against belief, with Zarek's smile and Lee's innocence as goads. She nods. "I am here because I want to tell you face to face that I believe in this mission and what it means for our future. I'm here to profess my trust in our new allies. I'm here to ask you to listen, I'm here to ask for your support. Bring her in."
Natalie enters, the black queen, with a thousand Marines surrounding her. She is unchained. The Quorum stares and murmurs, hatefully. Kara stands at the back of the room, a knight. Natalie looks at them, the hate in them. The fear and the hate. Trust starts somewhere. She steels herself.
"In our civil war, we've seen death. We've watched our people die. Gone forever. As terrible as it was, beyond the reach of the Resurrection Ships... Something began to change." Lee takes it in: the Quorum and their sudden stillness. Kara watches quietly. "We could feel a sense of time, as if each moment held its own significance. We began to realize that for our existence to hold any value, it must end. To live meaningful lives, we must die and not return. The one human flaw that you spend your lifetimes distressing over, mortality..." Laura stares at the table, sick of illness and sick of compromise and sick of this word most of all. These are toys they want to play with. She could slap her, in this moment. Happy birthday.
"...Is the one thing... Well, it's the one thing that makes you whole. I believe it was no accident that we were found by Kara Thrace. It was destiny..." Kara starts to fugue out, because don't even say that word around her or else she will go nuts. "She asked me to lead my people, and I accepted. No matter what the sacrifice, even if it should mean my death..."
Thus shall it come to pass. The dying leader shall know the truth of the Opera House. You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace.
Kara sweats and feels crazy; she looks at the Dying Leader and realizes the story's coming true. Inside that woman's head, in her dreams, there is a house nobody knows about, that shines as bright as five stars and burns twice as hot; it's smaller than an inkling and larger than the universe. There is a dream in Laura Roslin. Gaius says so. But nobody knows about the Opera House yet. Except Kara Thrace.
"...Our destiny, our future, begins here," concludes Natalie. The Quorum sees her, for the first time. She is a beautiful, strong woman, scary like Sixes have to be. But she believes in what she's saying, and what she's saying is peace and the shape of things to come. There is hate but no confusion. She becomes a person. "Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak." She and Laura nod at each other; the theatre of respect. The things Laura has to do, in order to save the people she loves. The twisted lies she has to tell. The ways they untwist out and into truth. Bill orders her out; the Marines take her, and Kara follows, sweating like she's back on Demetrius but still looking like a million.
"But wish no more / My life you can take / To have her please just one day wake / To have her please..." This last so achingly beautiful I dare you to look away. The pain, the glory in it. He rides the edge of this pain without clarity, rides it up into falsetto; it twists up and up, into the stars. Gaius watches in the shadows, and nearly weeps; he feels the ache of something that's no longer there. "Alone she sleeps, in the shirt of man / With my three wishes clutched in her hand..." Felix starts the song again; it goes around and around. Something in the universe loves Felix Gaeta. He'll never know how many visitors he's had.
Laura dreams of the Opera House: searching the halls, calling her name. Athena joins her, mother and crone. Hera laughs as they spot each other, and begin to run. Caprica sleeps, weeping; she sweeps the child into her arms, and Gaius turns to see her. Laura wakes. Athena watches as Caprica enters the chamber with her bridegroom at her side, crying out; she wakes. Hera stands at her bedside, smiling broadly.
"Bye-bye," Hera giggles. Sharon shakes in the shape of things to come. This day was always coming; it's come a hundred times before. Sleeping and awake, Sharon's been blessed a hundred times before.
Kara watches Laura reading in Sickbay for awhile before the President looks up, and smiles. "I gotta hand it to you. If you are a Cylon, that was a great plan. Dangle yet another way to Earth, throw in the Hub, the Final Five, and the real kicker, put the Final Five on the Fleet. Even I couldn't pass that one up." Kara exhales, because whoa. Thank Gods it's the cancer making you scary because if you were this scary on a non-cancer day you really would be airlocking everything all the time.
"You are having those visions, aren't you?" Laura looks down; she looks down at the words but doesn't read them. Kara enters. "Thus shall it come to pass. The dying leader shall know the truth of the Opera House..." Laura stares: "What did you say?" Kara, flying blind, starts to repeat it, but Laura cuts her off: "-- The Opera House." Kara nods. "The dying leader shall know the truth of the Opera House." Laura stutters, and Kara explains about the Hybrid, what she said before they unplugged her. (Sorry: it.) "The Hybrid... How does the Hybrid know what's in my dream?" They wonder about that for a while and Laura finally shakes it off. "This has got to stop!"
"These visions, I've got to find out about these visions. I've got to know." Kara stares. "Will you help me?" Kara Thrace nods, joyfully. All she ever wanted. Laura sends her for Sharon.
PLEASE JUST ONE DAY WAKE
(XXIII: Things Fall Apart.)
Natalie returns to the rebels, again. "When I spoke to the Quorum, I could feel it. The contempt." Leoben nods: the Colonials aren't ready. "No, I was wrong. We're not ready. We're deceiving them." The Eight is like, "You just made me say that we were doing that for protection and necessity like five minutes ago. WTF." Natalie says it's neither of those, it's suspicion and fear. And because Natalie hasn't yet discovered existentialism, or I guess always lived there so is not ready for the crisis moment, she still needs a reason that's bad: "Why haven't the Final Five come forward? What if they're watching, judging us on our actions? We're about to resort to violence and coercion."
The Eight paces, in her sad fake-human Capri pants, as Natalie worries that the Five will refuse to even come with them. That's the saddest thing I've ever heard. "If we're not good, then God won't come live in our house! We better be good." That's like the Hunchback of Notre Dame but with God instead of a hot gypsy chick: still not the point. "It's too late," Leoben says, standing suddenly when she mentions the Centurions: "It's too late. They're committed." I love Natalie, but OMG Natalie please pull it together.
I realize you're creating a society with your own two hands and nobody will do what you're telling them to, including your robot servants, but like: !!! Everybody feels that way all the time! I even understand that it's your first day and you just got turned into Natalie and Kara told you to do this so you're going to do this, but chill! Have a fucking martini, bask in the irony already, and get the basics under your belt, or somebody is going to shoot you all to hell and let me tell you that of all the wonderful human experiences of death you're so effin' jazzed about, that's one of the least awesome.
But it's Natalie, so of course that's not the solution: "Then we have to tell the humans the truth." The Eight is totally horrified, for very sad Capri-pants reasons: "No, you can't do that! They'll never trust us again." No love, no family, nothing to call your own. "They already know the coordinates. They'll just go destroy everything..." Leoben sends Natalie to Adama: "Tell him anything. Anything but the truth. I'll deal with the Centurions." She goes; Leoben thinks; Eight needs a Valium or something.
Helo's on point as they march Gaius to the Galactica hangar bay; he whispers something to Kara as Dr. Baltar boards a Raptor. He sees Laura just inside and nearly stumbles. "Of course..." he says, but she offers him a seat. She's got a copy of Searider Falcon in her lap; she takes him everywhere with her now. "We're going to settle this now." He tries to steely but ends up nearer Zoolander: "What's to settle? Your Chief of Staff is incomparably talented..." (Ugh.) Laura looks him right in the eye. "I've been sharing visions with Sharon Agathon and the Six." (Gaius is like, "So my invisible robot girlfriend wasn't lying? Because she's been acting up lately.") Laura nods. "The Hybrid on the Baseship spoke of an Opera House and a Dying Leader. We're going to talk to the Hybrid." Gaius thinks the visions are funny propaganda tools, not the word of God, so why bring him? "Because you're in my visions." Gaius is, for the first time in a good long while, good and gobsmacked.
Hera, who apparently has the run of the place all day, is sitting quietly at a table by herself coloring when Athena comes home, pats her head, drops her gear, sits heavily on the bed and strips off her Raptor suit. "What are you doing, baby? Are you drawing? Can I see what you drew?" Hera hands over the bound book she's been drawing in, with a cute smile, and Athena opens it: page after page of the numeral 6 over and over, identical blondes, a baseship, 6's, the blondes, page after page after page. Athena goes into meltdown, which I would too if my daughter were turning into, apparently, Kara Thrace.
"Oh, no. No! No! No! Why? Why? Why?" Um, because she's been dreaming about this chick since before St. Alia of the Knife was still fetusing up the spice? Which you know because you were there, and you saw her there, and you confirmed in front of Doc Cottle and the President of the Colonies that Hera was involved in it, while all four of you were awake? That's why? If I had the same freaky Cylon dream every single night and I couldn't even talk, or do much more than flap my arms and gurgle, I'd have a lot of art therapy to do too, once I could hold a crayon.
Hera bounces out into the corridor while Athena wigs out and refuses to think any of this through, because she's been blessed up the ass so many times by life, and they've taken her baby away approximately six thousand times -- a baby who was born, mind, from a sick breeding program in which Sharon started out a whore and ended up, I mean to say, the happy ending of that story has her as the biggest traitor on this entire show -- and threatened to take away her humanity even more times than that, and the one thing that keeps her tethered is a cord they keep cutting to a baby she only ever wanted to pretend was human, and now it's that cord pulling her daughter away into the night again. She follows, and loses control: the night and the day bleed together, projection and reality and vision and fear, the Galactica becomes the Opera House, and the missing child runs away.
Helo and Laura lead a squad of Marines and one tiny Gaius through the Basestar, toward the Hybrid chamber. Viper pilots stare as a Centurion makes his clumsy way between them; the peanut butter of his CGI does not taste so good with the chocolate of their shocked faces and jumpy movements, but that can't have been an easy shot to create, so whatever, the point is made. Fear will become fascination: Contact is inevitable, leading to information bleed.
Natalie sits on a Raptor, scared, heading back again to tell as much truth as she can. Tigh leads her toward Bill, as Athena searches the Opera House and Galactica at once, calling her name. She bumps into Dualla, who hasn't seen her, and keeps running. Natalie marches toward her; Laura and Gaius comes closer and closer. Galen's doing scut work, soldering, and without even a pause Athena tells him, breathless, "I can't find Hera." And with barely a pause, he follows her, concerned. The prophets of humanity come closer to the Hybrid. Hera stands alone in a corridor. Natalie and her Marine escort round the corner. Hera smiles.
Felix's song begins to play over the scene as Natalie stoops down, with a brilliant smile. She touches the girl's face, and embraces her. And in the Opera House, as Athena rounds the corner, Caprica's bending to her child, and taking her away into the future. Athena pulls a gun. "Hera! Get away from my child. Get your hands off of my child." Tigh cautions her, but she tells the Marines to stay back. Laura kneels at the Hybrid's side; looks down at her beautiful face. The water is still tortured, but Laura won't know that yet. "Plug it in. I need to talk to it." As the Eight reaches for the cable, Gaius quietly prays, "Let God's will be done." It will. "-- Shut up." No more metaphors. "It's time to get some answers." Helo stands to the President's side, a bishop.
Athena keeps her gun on Natalie, and quietly and calmly speaks to Galen: "Tyrol, will you come in here and take Hera, please?" Tigh urges him to get the kid out of there, and when he does, Natalie gets to experience what fear of mortality is actually like. "Is she gone?" asks Athena, without looking away; as the Eight plugs the Hybrid in; as Natalie's sad, terrified face becomes Caprica's, as the door closes with her and Hera on the other side; as Athena feels the ache of something taken away too many times, as she growls, "You are never gonna take my child," and Natalie swears they don't mean to, and Athena shoots her once, then again where she lies weeping, afraid and bleeding, dying in front of them all on the deck floor, on her birthday; and the Hybrid comes alive again, as the sparks in her eyes alight; and Gaeta sings, "To have her please / Just one day wake / To have her please / Just one day wake," and breathes until the pain returns, and he must sing again; and the Hybrid smiles, and breathes, and sings the jump; and Helo and the Dying Leader and the Chosen One are gone, in a flash of light.