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Three holds everybody's ass hostage until the Dylan Four swing by the Basestar and hang out with her. Everybody is surprised by this terrorism, I guess because they forgot how she is, due to her being in storage for the last year. Laura sends Bill back to the Fleet with Three to pick up the Four, but sexily whispers in his ear about how he should blow up the Basestar and kill her and everybody else if it looks like Three is winning. Earth = Humans ONLY.
Back in the Fleet, Three stares meaningfully at the Four before she even gets off the Raptor, because of course they are there standing directly in front of her so she can do this, instead of being on another ship entirely like they should be. She says whoever they are, they need to come with her, and Tory takes about one hot second before coming with her, because Tory is such a toaster she's chock full of strudel now, so back on the Baseship she tries to be happy about hanging with her robot brethren and sistren, and then hands Laura a tiny bottle of pills and a giant steaming mug of attitude, because... I am finally able to admit that possibly, just maybe, Tory Foster is losing it..
Then Three and President Leland have a big ol' pissing match for a long while. Gaeta is legless, but on the other hand I think he's fucking Hoshi, so that's fun. Dualla is still sadly pointless. Tigh decides that all President Leland has to do is stick him in an airlock, and Three will roll over. (Three will never. Roll. Over, people. God. On the other hand, how cute is Leoben's new haircut?) Of course, this plan makes no sense unless he first comes out of the chrome closet with re-Admiraltied Bill, who subsequently and completely loses his shit. Completely. It's seriously fucking brutal. Like, at one point he's so drunk and depressed that he drools on Lee a little bit. (A lot.) So everybody spends the rest of the episode feeding him mashed bananas and babytalking him like Helo, while he wanders around in a bathrobe like R. Crumb's brother.
But also, this does not cause Three to roll over, because Three will never roll over, so President Leland gets Tigh to tell him about Sam and Galen. They, too, go into the airlock. Then Three executes one of her hostages --because she is still not kidding, you guys -- and President Leland decides to take Sam and Galen back out of the airlock -- it's like a party game, but with war crimes!-- and kill just Tigh, for breaking his Dad's brain open and the drool that came out. Except the Four have been hearing the music again, and this time it leads them to Kara's Shiny Undead Viper, which is now picking up some kind of signal from Earth.
Kara gives Lee a speech about God and how there's magic, so he's convinced. Gaius gives Three a speech about God and shit, so she instantly chills. Laura massages Bill's shoulder for five seconds, so he pulls it together. President Leland gives a speech about how everybody should stop being assholes all the time, so they do. And that's literally the only thing he actually does as President. But re-Presidented Laura reminds him how she totally has cancer, so don't go anywhere. He's like, "That is awesome of you to say that." I was so excited by the idea that Lee would stay Prez and Laura and Bill could maybe take like a short nap or something, but no.
So Kara saves the day with the new headings, and suddenly there's not anything left for the Colonials and the Cylons to fight about (beyond the obvious) because nobody actually needs the Final Five for anything now. Except to look at them and think about how hot they are, I guess. Then -- Boom Boom Boom -- everybody reaches Earth.
EARTH. They celebrate, hoot and holler, and get all religious. But once they're actually on the ground, the only pretty thing is the way it's filmed. Because Earth? Is a shithole. Specifically, an irradiated bombed-out climate-fucked shithole that is quite possibly worse than the Twelve Colonies they left behind. Deal with that.
It looks like The Day After Tomorrow, all ruins and stuff buried in sand and under the snow, the Brooklyn Bridge all broken and yucky. Everybody stands around looking totally sad and grossed out: the Fightin' Agathons, Gaius and Laura and Bill, Sam and Kara and Lee, Tigh and his hottie girlfriend robot, everybody. This part is absolutely breathtaking, and heartbreaking, and hard. There's a neat callback to the beginning of the episode, having to do with Lee and Kara walking the halls of Earth buildings together, and then it's a little rough because this is a show about 9/11 so where else on Earth could they have landed but it's still rough, and Roslin says Earth the way she used to say Baltar, and that's the end. So either Earth got bombed by robots too, or we just did it to ourselves, or maybe Al Gore was right. That's really... inconvenient.
So ♥ and I guess I'll see you year for the back half of the season, in which I think: the Final Final will be revealed but nobody will care, everybody's magic baby will do magic baby stuff, Caprica and Saul will cope with parenthood, Laura and possibly everybody will bite it, Kara more than likely will come up with a whole new Special Destiny for herself, Boomer will get her act together once and for all, Tory will start wearing antebellum dominatrix gear and eventually blow herself up on the moon, President Leland will do a second thing in his second term and it will involve a speech, Gaeta and Hoshi will move to Post-Apocalyptic California and have a big gay wedding like on TV, Gaius will get to be happy or die, Galen will get to be happy or die, Sam will get to be happy or die, and Bill will finally get laid. Then die.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!TELL ME CHAIR
Lee flips through a bound copy of the Pythian Scrolls, in his father's office. His father is dead. Laura Roslin is dead. This room is a museum, and a tomb, and a box of mysteries; it contains many things. It contains responsibility and sadness and loss, but also hope: one page, like a theme park brochure, lays out the cubits and the furlongs of the Promised Land, as imagined by a long-dead Oracle. Here, the path of the righteous, there, the path of doom and iniquity, both accessible by the same road. On Kobol, some took the high road and the rocky ridge, while others boarded the galleon. We're all going to the same freaking place. From the altar to the temple.
"The large executive chair elevates the sitter. And it is covered with the skin of some animal, preferably your predecessor." -- Emilio Ambasz
Kara enters, in uniform; the Captain of the Air Guard. She comes around to look at the Scrolls over his shoulder: in the middle of the paths and roads, the Temple of Aurora. A beautiful cathedral dome, in whose arms the faithful will gather, and sing praises to the dawn, to a fresh wind and a new start. Pythia saw many things. She took the formless form of the sight and turned it into words, and those words were turned into pictures, and journeys, and lies. "Temple of Aurora," Kara says, and Lee sighs. "On Earth. At least the way Pythia described it." Kara promises him they'll get there, they'll walk those halls together. She's not wrong: they have walked from the altar to the Temple, and it is within their grasp.
"Yeah, pretty to think so." Lee puts the book away; puts it all away. The world, the universe, is stark tonight. In the absence of our leaders and our loved ones, with half the air wing gone forever, home becomes a fiction. There is no home.
"Praying is like a rocking chair. It'll give you something to do, but it won't get you anywhere." -- Gypsy Rose Lee
Kara watches him, sad. "This Roslin's stuff?" All the toothbrushes and books, all the signs of their love, brought like smuggled bodies in luggage and overnight bags. The cabins they were building. He sighs.
"Always design a thing by considering it in its larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." -- Eliel Saarinen
"It's weird for them to not be here," Kara says tentatively, crushing down the crushing enormity into a simple understatement. Weird is not what it is, but there's not a word for it. It's bird speech, Oracle language, to talk about this feeling:
Tell me "chair." Any chair at all, imagine it and describe it to me: four legs and a back, provides comfort, provokes memory. But a chair is not chairness; it is not every chair at once. It is a singular entity in the universe, with a singular story to tell, all its own.
Lee looks at a chair. The chair Bill brought with him from Caprica; the chair he sat in, building and rebuilding a family with his hands, setting Aurora at the helm. "No one sits in his chair. Tigh can't even look at it. You know the scariest thing my Mom used to tell me when I was a kid? 'Your father is waiting for you in the study.' I'd knock on the door, make the long walk across the room. To that desk."
Bagpipes sing his memory: the memory of fear, memory of youth, when Father was a booming sound across the deck, mythical Zeus towering, blue eyes thundering. The memory of logos, when every word from Father brought the world into meaning. Father says, "I know where it is, Earth," and he does, he breathes it from the clay. Adama means Earth. Every father is a God, until he is outgrown.
"You know, Leoben said something to me when he was holding me in that dollhouse on New Caprica." He can barely hear her. Gods shouldn't die, shouldn't drag their old bones out into the black and sit waiting for dead Goddesses; shouldn't give up anything so easily, or abandon. "That children are born to replace their parents. For children to reach their full potential, their parents have to die."
The chair is empty.
THREE SMILES & A SHIVER
Three smiles greet each other as the rebel Basestar jumps in, another trip from who-knows-where to home. Centurions crowd C&C. Leoben is excited: "We rejoin your Fleet in less than an hour." Laura promises she'll return the Final Five to their worshippers; it is a lie. "Four," says Three. "There are four in your Fleet. Four." Laura asks where the fifth, the Final Final, must then be. Three smiles once.
"I want the four in your Fleet." Bill, still in his jumpsuit from the Raptor, allows as how it would be easier to get everything done and squared away if she'd just tell them who the Four are. Three's like "Yeah, easier to kill their asses."
Laura points out that Three's wartime strategy and tactics are obsolete: the Colonials need the Five or Four just as much as the Cylon, now. We swim through the detritus and the debris and the pain of war, every single day. It goes on, burning, just outside your house. At the moment of the Cylons' greatest triumph, at the moment they took of that fruit, and ate, and began to die, Three was years behind. She's still years behind; she has awoken not to one war but to many. She is a one-woman army, a third side in the conflict; Gaius taught her that.
Imagine a stone, black. Imagine a stone, white. The space between them is a story.
The Final Five are many things at once, to a splintered race and their splintered half-allies in a splintered alliance. To Three, they are the solution to a complex problem. To Six, they are the solution to a personal problem and a bastion against futility. To Leoben, they are the latest Quest; the latest gift of the Hybrid. To Eight, they are new brothers and sisters, to love forever. To the 2368s they are a new dawn and a fresh wind, now that they've lost immortality; now that they're looking toward their first sunset, they need a fresh dawn. To Cavil, they are the embodiment of the limits of reason, his own personal apophatic God. To the 145s they are a political keystone, the sign of Three's rise in Natalie's absence; a thorn and a terror and a threat. To the Colonials, they are a tool and a fifth column, breaking hearts and turning them to stone. To themselves, they are variously the possibility of rebirth, the threat of something terrible, the chance to be both terrible and wonderful, and the sign that apocalypse is always personal and neverending.
But tell me chair: tell me about Tory. She is a woman, Indian, beautiful; an adept liar, allergic to the rules when her loyalties are questioned. She is of a certain height, a certain weight, and her hair is a certain color. She replaced Billy, kidnapped Hera and an election for the woman she loves most in this world, and had her heart broken. She made love with Sam and with Gaius as she danced herself apart, to the sound of beautiful unearthly music. She put her heart back together when it was broken on the wheel; she spends every second praying that this last hump was the last hump. These are all qualities, a list infinitely long and infinitely beautiful, fractalizing on past and present and future; these are all qualities but they aren't the point. They begin to contradict themselves, even: She is a member of a dangerous cult/She has discovered a bedrock of faith that will take her on the step of her journey, past fear and hate and into glory/She is a dangerous member of a cult. Tory is a cat in a box and that is her chairness and yours, and mine. You and I are many things at once. The Final Five are many things at once.
"We need them," Laura says, and Leoben nods. "She's right. We all want the same thing. If we cooperate..." Three smiles a second time.
"-- We cooperated on New Caprica, brother. It didn't work out well." It's all she remembers, drifting in the memory of war, alone in the universe. A singular Three, with no sisters at all. "I'm going to hold your people hostage until the Final Four are safely aboard this ship."
(But follow the line of blood, the intricate and interweaving cubits and furlongs of blood: Cally kills Boomer, takes her out of a fantasy story and puts her a horror story: lost among aliens, threatened with extinction in the desert of the real. Boomer and Caprica drive each other crazy; it all comes to a head in a Starbucks parking lot, and Caprica kills Three to save Sam. In that moment another story is born: the Lie of LOVE. The story falls apart on New Caprica, it still stings; Three is left holding the shards in her hands. A meeting with a human Oracle gives her a new path. Hera and Gaius conspire to teach her the reality of love. In a moment of extremity, her life is introduced: a vision of the unthinkably scattered tribes of the Cylon, gathered on the wings of an angel into God's unity. She is martyred to this cause, a one-woman army, a fifth column in Cavil's world. The Plan changes in her absence, thanks to Sam and a distant unnamed Raider, and when she comes back, her Plan has transcended religion and become political: her people must be gathered in, the Cylon Diaspora must be resolved before they drift even further apart. This is only an extraction, a rescue of her people from their jailers, in a time of war. Holy or not, saints or demons, the Cylons are her people. Her people. This is only an extraction.)
And just like this -- Centurions step forward, the Marines and Helo draw on them, Bill draws his gun on Three -- she puts us all back into the war from which we were just beginning to wake. Laura begs Bill to stand down, to save this broken alliance, to respect the extraction as far as they can, but she's caught in the war too. Three has pushed them all back into the fog. "Come on, trust me," she whispers, and he lowers his gun, angry. He orders them to stand down; Three smiles for the third time.
"I've already had an Eight prepare a Raptor, so we'll launch as soon as we come out of the jump. Oh, and Admiral, you'll be coming along with me to Galactica." She moves them around like a President, using Eights as Centurions like Brother Cavil, running the show. She has returned from the dead to accomplish two things in one: the realization of a prophesied connection with divinity, and the rescue of her brothers and sisters from enemy lines. When Boomer came home, shackled and shaking in the waters of resurrection, Three rejoiced, in tears.
"I'm not going," Bill grumbles, like a sleepy boy. "Bill, go," she says, and holds him close. And in that embrace there is a snake and a harsh whisper, because she has returned from the dead to accomplish one thing.
"If the Cylons get the Four, they get Earth. You can't let this happen. Even if you have to blow this ship to hell."
He looks at her, stricken. She stands in the darkness and she shines in it. He's still learning to walk those halls, still surprised by the edges and the glints of her sometimes; the clarity with which she sees, the way she knows this alien woman, is a mystery and a clue to the mystery; every love story is, first and foremost, a mystery. He shivers.
EXTRACTION TACTICS
On CIC the pain and phantoms still have Felix; he drops his pills and groans, reaching for them. Muttering profanity he hobbles on a single crutch toward the bottle, and Dualla grabs it for him. He thanks her and retreats; she smiles kindly but is worried for him. She backs off. The Colonel asks if he wants a break, but he just pounds another Crimson Tauron and returns to his console. Dualla nods, all sympathy; the dradis beeps.
"Cylon Baseship. Another contact, same bearing. It's a Raptor. Our people are back, sir."
Lee and Kara run down to meet the shuttle from the Basestar, joining Tory and Tigh and Sharon, hoping their Zeus and Athena are aboard. Galen and Sam wait upstairs, on the balcony. Galen's spent a lot of time on that balcony, in his life and in his dreams, waiting for the story to end. Adama comes out onto the Raptor's wing, followed by Three. Anders hopes she won't recognize them, but Galen knows better.
Bill grabs his son firmly; Lee nearly hiccups with joy. "Gods, it's... It's good to have you back." Bill touches his face. "It's good to be home." Galactica. My home.
Three locks eye with Tigh, then Tory whose eyes slide away; out on the wing she catches Sam and Galen's eyes. The link. This is only an extraction in wartime. This is only the division of the people, intermixed and fearful, back across the lines of salt. This is for safety; for safety I reduce you to a chairness. My people are your hostages, willing or no; your people will be mine until an equitable trade is accomplished, and this is right in war.
Adama faces her, standing beside his son, and she speaks to the gathered Colonials. "The good news is that your President, Laura Roslin, is alive and well. As are your crewmates." Muscles relax, and faces. "She wants the four Cylons that are in this Fleet. She's gonna hold our people hostage until she gets them." That's the bad news; she spins it. "You don't have to do anything except stay out of the way. I'm already in contact with them. Now that they realize there's nothing to fear and that we only want to love and protect them, they should find a way of joining us. I just ask that you don't interfere with any of the shuttle traffic in the Fleet."
This is only an extraction, she's saying. You have our people, and you cannot be trusted with them, because the blood of twelve planets soaks the ground and you will never forgive. Cylons change their minds and Plans like so many ones and zeroes into the Recycling Bin, but humans need more time than that. And they will tell their children, and their children's children, to hunt the Cylon and to murder them, in recompense, long after all these plans and pains and stories are dust, locked in scrolls nobody even remembers. And still the echoes in her, of war and the time before, and the time before that. Her New Caprica plans: "We will love them and take care of them. And like God, our infinite mercy will be matched only by our power and complete control."
"So your plan is, you take these four Cylons and then you head off to Earth, leaving us behind?" Three nearly grins at Lee, because he doesn't know the Plan. She's only just thought of it. They are revered; she will not harm her own. What happens , with the information the Four somehow possess, is entirely up to them. Share or do not share, war or make peace or find the 145s or lie down in the road: up to them. "All right," says Lee, hearing her finally. "If these four Cylons want to come to you, they're free to do so. I will not stop them." Bill agrees to this; Bill does not agree to this, and will kill every one of them, because he must shine too. "Then I will await them on the Baseship!" Three says happily, and turns to go. A voice rings out.
Tory is mournful and full of thoughts, but she still steps forward. She is perfect now, as she is, but how perfect can she be when at any moment she could become a prisoner of war? Not in name, not like now, but locked behind bars, hearing the music and desperate to follow? Best to make the jump now. It's what she said she wanted, isn't it? Brush all those niggling questions and fears and doubts and guilt into the bin and leave it all clean, a fresh start, a sister among her people, a saint among her brothers. The universe has asked, "What will you be?" And she responds, "I will be what I am, to the best of my ability, with every fiber of my being. I will turn my skin inside-out, and let go the burden of my guilt and shame and impatience, and the Cylon will tell me what I am and how to be it."
"Laura Roslin needs her medication." Three is impressed, and turns. "And I need to make sure that she's all right. I'm gonna go with them." Tigh calls out immediately, like a sock to the gut, and then covers: "...We can't give them any more hostages." Lee agrees, but sad and scared Tory pushes on, and on. She never lies and she never tells the truth; this is why she is in politics. She does love Laura Roslin, and Laura does need her medication. Those are facts on the ground. "I served under Roslin for two years. My place is by her side." Bill suggests that another hostage won't really change the equation, and Lee gives her leave to go. She thanks him; Galen looks at Sam as they board; Three smiles at Tigh: a challenge and a gloat. He leaves, too close to something.
BROKEN PLACES
"I backed your play, now what?" President Leland stands in Adama's Offices with Kara and Tigh and Adama, looking at his father, drinking him in. "Starbuck goes to work on a plan to get our people back by force." Bill tells them what Laura said, about blowing the Baseship if the Cylons manage to get the Four free and clear. "Half our guys are over there!" says the Colonel.
But tell me chair: tell me about Saul. He is a man, strong accent, beautiful; a man most comfortable as a frak-up, weak and strong, unable to hold power in his hands but the greatest in its service. He is of a certain height, a certain weight, and his hair is faded to silver. He replaced Bill briefly; threw a military coup and nearly divided the Fleet forever for the man he loves most in the world, and had his heart broken. He made love with Ellen as she danced herself apart, and put the cup into her hand. He put his heart back together when it was broken on the wheel; he spends every second praying that this last hump was the last hump. These are all mere qualities, a resume less grand or honorable than the heart that beats within him; these are all qualities but they aren't the point. They begin to contradict themselves, even: He is a member of a dangerous society/He has discovered a bedrock of strength and power that will take him on the step of his journey, past fear and hate and into glory/He has entered into a dangerous fraternization with the enemy/He is the enemy. Saul is a cat in a box; he is many things at once.
"It's your call, Mr. President," says the Admiral, as he reclaims his wings from Saul. Lee is surprised, but after a moment's thought he speaks through clenched jaw: "Roslin's right. We lose those Four, we lose Earth. If everything goes south, we destroy the Baseship and everyone on it."
Imagine two stones, black and white. The space between is the story we make. When you have two groups at war, or in a cold war, which is what this has become, and an equitable trade seems unreachable, who makes the call? Lee and Three knew, even if Roslin supersedes the truth: the only people who can make the call, ethically, are the ones in contention. But indecision is decision: this is a cold war balanced on the heads of three men, one of whom is in this room, one of whom is participating in an arms race that could end humanity forever.
But Saul's heart lies in the Fleet. It's sitting in this room. The Fleet's heart is Saul, sitting in this room. Tory jumped across space into darkness, but at least she jumped toward something; at least she defined it for herself as extraction. Tigh's always compared himself to Boomer and soon he will again, but that's the story: from home, from Bill and his miraculous child with Caprica, into the abyss. Locked in a strange cold world with aliens and no love ever again. This cold war is balanced on the tip of his nose, like a dog starving, and his only absolution -- for the things that he's done and the thing that he is -- has now maneuvered itself into the worst place imaginable. He is either the savior of the Fleet or its weak link; this has always been true. The cold war breaks on him one way or the other. His heart begins to tear; Saul is too many things at once.
(A Farewell To Arms: "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure that it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry." Saul Tigh is many things, including all of these and infinite numbers more; they are qualities.)
Galactica-Tactica. Athena points at a schematic on the screen while the others move their little boats around on that table I love so much. "So the prisoners were here, but D'Anna has to know that you brought me in on this... If she's moved the prisoners, it'll mean a compartment-by-compartment fight." Lee and Tigh point out that, if anything goes hinky on the trip, they could just open fire on the civilian Fleet and actually end humanity. "That's why we need to make sure that our Raptors are already out there with their nukes cocked and locked," says Kara, and Tigh prays again for other options. He knows what they are. So does Kara, although she tosses off the answer in bitter disbelief and irony: "Yeah, those frakkin' Four could give themselves up."
She tells him what she doesn't want to hear. There was a time when he hated her for that.
THE TRUTH YOU HAVE LEFT
Tory walks through the Basestar like Alice, staring at the strange and brave world she's just now named her home. The weird lights, the Centurions standing guard. She is attended by Three and an Eight (Twinset?), and brought with a fair amount of pomp to C&C.
"Brothers and sisters, this is a great day for us. One of our lost siblings has arrived." They stare at her, the Leobens and Sharons and Sixes; they want to reach out. Now that the moment has reached its crisis they have lost their goofy laughter and their childlike excitement, because Tory Foster is many things at once. She is a lost sister, yes, finally coming home. But until recently she was also one-fifth of a taboo, an entity so sacred they weren't allowed to think of her, or to see her face in their minds' eyes, or to admit it when they felt her near. She's so small, they think. She is lovely, they think, but she is small.
They stare and she smiles, telling them the lies she's told herself over and over, and to anyone that would listen: she is home. This is her home. These are her people. This is an extraction.
It's just that easy.
And sometimes, you know, it is. Laura sits in her makeshift office, a hostage with a private room, bandaging a very undressed, very bashed-around and vulnerable Gaius Baltar. She wraps new cloth around his fragile body; her hands are tender and her touch is soft as she ministers to him. "Laura... there's been something I've been meaning to say to you. I wanted to thank you." She busies herself; fuss fuss fuss. "Um, for what?"
Gaius has a way with words, doesn't he? "Essentially for not murdering me." She looks down, grimacing as she works. We don't bring up the moment of each other's ugliness and salvation, not now in the alien sunlight of a new day on the Basestar. It offends her sense of etiquette. "That can't have been an easy decision to make. But I love living." So does she. The conversation hops the tracks; they love living. They are two people who love life, and living, and between whom there's a space that tells a story. The space between them used to be infinitely wide, and full of hate; now she wraps her arms around his body and tends his wounds. This is a new conversation; no ceremonies are necessary. She looks into his eyes.
"I love living, and I wanted to thank you for saving my life." She's... touched. Mystified by herself, still, sometimes; she finds herself touched. Gaius Baltar is many things, the chairness of Gaius Baltar is as wide as the universe and as contradictory as it is extreme. Six knew: you love Gaius Baltar, you love all of it. You wrap yourself around the ego and the narcissism, the madness and the sanity, and the righteousness and the selfishness and the brilliance and the ability to love completely that which he is looking at. And if you accomplish this, you become more. Caprica became something the Cylons had never seen; Laura is becoming something better than she could have imagined. She takes a breathe and get it together, to force these Baltars into a Magic-Eye approximation of a chairness, and finally must sit with the effort.
So. This is a new conversation. If Gaius Baltar is a man and a person, a tree in the forest, he must be treated as such. To respect those parts of the chair that are respectable. That means honesty. Even as it turns in her hands -- Imagine, to be ashamed in front of Gaius Baltar! To feel embarrassed to tell him of your plans! Imagine, to stand before Gaius and need a moment to find the right words to say something. Honesty.
"I wouldn't... Be so grateful, if I were you. You should know that I told the Admiral that if D'Anna doesn't back down, he should blow the ship to pieces."
Tears in his eyes, Gaius whispers his confusion. Before they can continue, there are voices in the hall. "She's in here," says a Six, and conducts the First of the Five into the room.
"Madame President," says Tory formally. "Gaius." She nods. Roslin breathes, tears in her throat. "Tory...!"
"Sit down," Tory says, lightly and firmly, setting the rules, giving the orders. "I brought you your medication." Roslin is impressed; amazed, as she always is, at Tory's strength, her ingenuity, her complete dedication and loyalty. The things that are impossible, that are accomplished should Roslin need them. The two years they spent on New Caprica, in Laura/Tory Lockdown, depending on each other for everything; how the only time Tory failed her was in the last minutes of the Second Exodus, when the baby was taken away.
"Oh my Gods. How did you do that?" Tory looks at her, this woman who once seemed so eternal; Tory loads her eyes, her face and posture, with as much cold steel as she can muster. "I came back with D'Anna. To be with my people." Say it to Laura and it becomes real; before the Nebula Tory's "people" were Laura Roslin, and through her the Fleet. Even after the Nebula, after the world fell apart, the only human Tory could admit that she loved was Laura Roslin. Even after Laura pulled the final brick out of the wall, and called her a whore, and her love was worth frak, she loved.
Even after Laura bade her play the prostitute -- used her, I mean to say, to fight against lies that were not lies, to cause herself to doubt, to play her against her lover as though they were lies while admitting to Lee that they were the truth -- she still stood in that hangar, with the other three begging silently and in shouts for her to stay, she knew that Laura Roslin needed her medication. But Laura is no longer her people; Laura made sure of that. We are all orphans, in the Fleet.
Roslin gapes and Gaius gibbers. "Because you're one of the Five. You're one of the Final Five." The Six nods, telling Laura that Three saw her in her vision. Baltar babbles, hilariously. "I knew it. Maybe not on a conscious level, but subconsciously, I always knew there was something..." Laura swallows and remembers every unkind word.
"You had no idea. Did you?" Laura admits she didn't, pleads with her eyes for a moment more to think. She stares at the Six, and back to Tory. Tory turns her back. "Might be worth pondering what else you've been wrong about." But that's all she's been doing since Tory showed up. And now she's a woman with two goals, because she knows she loves Tory, and she knows she loves living.
"Tory, wait. You're right. I'm wrong. Okay." Good but not good enough. Why does Tory need your apology now? You're the Dying Leader of a dying nation; she is the saint and sister of a perfect race of superheroes. The Final Four theme softens, to sing her memory and her pride: When Mother was something to behold, at the head of a classroom or before the Quorum, holding onto strength she never knew she had, mythical Athena towering, grey eyes thundering. The memory of service, to her President and to their Fleet, together. To their nation. Mother says, "This is the shape of things to come," and so it is; she breathes it into the sky. Every mother is a Goddess, until she is outgrown.
"You are one of the revered Final Five." To the Six: "And as such, the Cylons will listen to you, is that not right?" The Six nods, slowly; Tory's body shuts them out. A request now, at the bottom of the well, after so many indignities. The President doesn't ever stop loving, but she knows when to withhold it. "So Tory, please go to D'Anna and try to convince her to back down and release all the hostages." Tory looks up and says, kindly and softly as she can, looking straight into her eyes: "I'm done taking orders from you."
Her back is straight as she heads out, into the nightmare she'll try desperately to unbend, into the strange and brave world the Cylons built. And will she be brave enough? And will she be strange enough? And is she right or wrong, for jumping out into the night? One thing is known, and Laura knows it too: she helped bring her to this place. She was the last wall, the last part of the world that was left, and she has been for years, and she fell down, and there was nothing to hold Tory here anymore. Not the Four, not Laura, for sure not Gaius Frakkin' Baltar. Just a mother, bitter, turning her back like Socrata at her end of line; like Kara, flying out into the world. Just the realization that you're growing up, finally, and meeting what comes .
The President of the Twelve Colonies stands between her people and darkness. And when she fails, perhaps, sometimes they stop being her people altogether. Imagine two stones, one white and one black. When faced with untenable alternatives -- Up is down, black is white, scripture is fiction, home is thin air instead of solid ground, etc. -- your only imperative is the truth you have left. The truth is that Tory Foster is a Cylon, and she is home, and we can thank Laura Roslin for that. The truth is that we are orphans, and that the forgotten and the unforgiven must simply leap, in one powerful movement, out into the darkness. And whether they find gold at the bottom of the well, or a place to stand; whether they learn to shine for themselves or are extinguished, the duty remains: to try.
ALL THE ORPHANS & THE RUNAWAYS
We are all orphans, in the Fleet; in our minds we carry a place called Home. Adama decided to call it Earth. During the strikes Galen suggested we should begin to treat the Fleet as Home, in case we never got there; during the strikes Cally suggested the rough parts are all we have left. They were both right, in their way. Took Laura Roslin a walk with God and the moment of her own death to realize where her Home really is, where it always was.
The Cylon have a word for Home, too; it changes definition just as often. The Plan was simple: kill the Colonies, kill their parents, take their place. Live in their irradiated ruins, find a way to become parents themselves: Home. Once we'd begun to fracture them, Home became New Caprica and DEMAND LOVE: a way to repent for their childish sins, their murder and rapine. (And if you balk at "childish," there, go out into the world tomorrow at noon, and there on the street, on a sidewalk or in a naked field, you will see a child with a magnifying glass, and maybe that word will change definition too.) And now Home is all of them together -- the ones she could gather -- searching for Earth, still following in their parents' footsteps, because nobody ever told them something better.
But the Colonies and the Cylon, all these orphans, they're not the only ones looking for Home, are they? Ever notice how often the Big Rock Candy Mountain turns out to be all rocks, no candy? Ever notice how the milk goes sour and the honey gets hard and you start eating locusts and grasshoppers and those bugs like on TV? Joseph Smith talks to angels, too, and strikes out for Home, and when he gets there even the water tastes like tears. Every Promised Land is a Lie. These are just two parts of an unending series of scattering that has happened before and is happening right now; the Promised Land is always a Scar, never a Garden. Ever wonder why Jews are constantly looking for any excuse to plant trees?
The point we're at in the story, we were brought there by the actions of scores of people. Mainly how they got there was by getting confused about whether they were living inside a story or outside it. The Cylon thought they had to make stark reality out of cold metaphor, so they killed their parents and set about in their sad, broken image. The Colonists thought they could stay in their Twelve separate boxes, in Twelve separate stories, under Twelve separate flags, and never admit what a small number 50,000 actually is. Boomer went from one lie to another. Adama led us from the brink of one lie to the crest of another. Caprica and Athena and Laura and Hera are caught in a madness of their own. Laura and Gaius tried to be mythology and ended up nearly damned forever.
The exit point for this story is when we realize that the opposite is true, and much less struggle: that your life is a story being told by nobody but you. When we talk about killing our parents that's really what we're saying: letting the Admiral and the President step down from their pedestals and walk around like human beings for awhile. They deserve the rest, and so do we: it's exhausting trying to climb inside somebody else's story. Especially when you're just projecting it anyway; whether you're Lee trying to make up for Zak, or Caprica and Three trying to redeem how badly they fucked up their midrash in God's absence: that's all on you. That's the story you've been telling yourself, and trying to fulfill.
There is a comfort in being a victim, and there is a comfort in living out a narrative you don't control, but it's childish to stay there.
It looks like it hurts, and it scares everybody else, but that's the truth and the Maelstrom of the truth. It is also necessary: there comes a time when the projections fall away, and all you see is the stark scar of truth, the blankness of the screen you've been projecting on. It burns bright as stars and it burns just as deep; change feels like dying because it is. It is also the only thing that can happen , unless you want to sleep forever. And that? The horror of that? That's the good news.
Waking from the dream that controls you -- and finding a dream to guide you -- is waking from a garden to a scar.
THE MAN WHO KILLED THE ADMIRAL
A body vents from the Basestar; a single Viper pilot makes the leap for the last time. That's one name on Saul Tigh's heart, and on the heart of the President of the Twelve Colonies, who hears about it first from Three.
"Oh, Mr. President, there has been a change of plans. I've just executed the first of the Colonial hostages. Another will follow every quarter hour until our people come home." Lee begs for a chance but she's already rung off. He slams down the phone and meets his father's eyes. "All right then Admiral, you're a go for the rescue mission. If it fails... " He is full of regret. This already is the bad step on the ugly path. "...Destroy the Baseship." Tigh shivers. The Admiral accedes. The Colonel is already singing his Breakaway Song, and nobody can hear it.
Chief Laird cobbles half a wing together; Figurski grits at Galen but he can't hear anything anymore; the music's got him too. As Starbuck and Athena brief the pilots, it reaches Sam. Tigh stands on the bridge, caught between knowing and not knowing, when the music catches up with him. Dualla stands near him and hears nothing at all. And on the rebel Basestar, home, Tory falls back against Leoben, swooning, her body alive with it.
The three that are left converge on Kara's shiny Viper in a storage room off the hangar deck; Tigh as usual gets us on the right track immediately: "All right. Anyone know what the frak we're doing here?" Sam touches it; he doesn't know. It was a compulsion. Something has changed. Galen can't figure it. Sam wonders if Kara can help them, and Tigh makes the call. "Well, go find her. See what she can tell you. But hurry up. A lot of good people are gonna die." He heads out. A lot of good people are gonna die. And Tigh knows who the will be.
And Tigh becomes what he's feared since the Nebula, and walks into it willingly, to save their lives.
I mean to say that, after all, Saul Tigh will be the man who killed the Admiral. It is the bravest thing he's ever done.
ANGRY AT THE SNAKE
The Final Four song goes totally awesome crazy as Saul makes his way through the corridors, that heavy-metal riff that played us out as Kara came back from the dead now plays out in massive drums. It's fabulous. It should be. Saul Tigh is a man who pulled his own heart out of his chest and killed it, to save the woman he loved. He's spent every moment since then disgusting to himself; even after he learned what he was he couldn't have hated himself more. If the only thing that kept Tory even slightly hinged was Laura, that was only for two years; think about how much longer this bridge has been built. See how it has to burn.
You know the scariest thing Carolanne used to tell Lee when he was little? "Your father is waiting for you in the study." And he'd make the long walk, from the temple to the altar, and stand before that desk, and that chair. Tigh couldn't even look at it, when Bill and Laura were missing. And now he's come to stand before it.
His heart -- what's left of it -- is in his throat -- what's left of it -- as he enters Adama's quarters and tells him immediately to scrub the rescue mission. "The Cylons will kill every Godsdamn hostage before we put one pair of boots aboard their ship. Laura Roslin will be the to die, Bill." Adama shuts off the wireless and asks Saul for options. He's so sad, and so scared, and so much stronger than anyone knew.
"Yeah. I should've told you when I first found out, but I didn't have the guts." He falls silent, disgusted with himself on both sides of this truth. Adama asks now, worried, what's wrong. Saul's ashamed; he loves him so much. There is a snake in him, about to strike. "Remember back at the Nebula when I told you about that frakkin' music? I thought it was in the ship. I was wrong. It was a signal. Some kind of crazy, frakked-up Cylon signal. Switched me on." Bill stares. "I can't turn it off."
Bill takes off his glasses. "Switched you on." Tigh nods. "Like Boomer. I'm one of the Five." Bill gets angry. Not at Saul, not at Saul's weakness or his lack of judgment or the fact that toaster sex seems to drive everybody crazy, but the craziness itself: Bill gets angry at the snake coiled in his best friend's guts. "The Five." Tigh agrees; Bill stands up, pissed as hell. "Quit frakkin' with me. Colonel, I've known you for thirty years..." Nothing, until the Nebula. Bill comes around the table, moved already to bargaining. "Think about this. When I met you, you had hair. I never heard of a Cylon aging." This will be a checklist, because it's a Weddle/Thompson script, all tell no show, so any doubts you've ever had, now we list and ignore or explain them. "Doesn't mean they don't. Before the attack on the Colonies, we didn't know skinjobs existed. Turns out there's another kind of Cylon we didn't know about. And I'm one of them."
Saul's voice is getting confrontational: This is hard enough without you helping it to hurt. It kills me to say it once, let alone repeating it again and again. The enormity of saying it: I am a Cylon. I am a Cylon. I am a Cylon. How dare you make me say it?
"On New Caprica, you were in captivity. They did something to you, they... An implant, a post-hypnotic suggestion that makes you feel this way. Let's go talk to Doc Cottle." Saul puts his hands on Bill's shoulders and looks him in the eye. "Listen to me! It is not a delusion. It is not a chip in my head. I am a Cylon. I've fooled you for months now. I didn't want to, but I did." Bill growls at him to remove his hands, and he does, instantly; empty palms, held out.
"If I had the guts to airlock myself when I first found out, we wouldn't be in this mess. But that's the way out, not this suicidal attack. I am one of the Final Five." His arms are thrown out, like Tory with Cally and Nick. "D'Anna will back down if you threaten to flush me out an airlock."
And this last with so much pride: that's the narrative controlling him now. He will save them, and in this is redemption. For the man he was, and for the thing he turned out to be. The snake in the garden.
UNTIL YOU LIVE THROUGH THIS
Saul is marched by Marines to the airlock. His back is strong.
Bill stands all alone in his offices, at his desk, suddenly claustrophobic. The space is too small. Space is too small. He stares at the ceiling in silence, and erupts in a guttural shout. He sweeps everything off the desk in one spastic movement and begins to weep.
Saul walks. Every movement a study in control. He's been waiting for two things: to be a hero, and to die.
Bill loses control; the enemy is pressing in. On all sides. They look like us now. Down to our blood.
Bill stares at himself in the mirror: a double, a face he knows from every single day. Bill drinks scotch straight from the decanter in great galloping mouthfuls, feeling it burn. Bill stares at himself in the mirror, and strikes out: a double. A face he barely recognizes.
Saul stands in a circle of light, surrounded by Marines. He is calm, and he is beautiful.
Lee gathers his father, ungainly, in his arms on the bathroom floor, murmuring nonsense. Lee is pinned against the doorframe with his father in his arms, in his lap. "Okay," he says. As though anything can ever be okay. As though Saul didn't just kill them both. For children to reach their full potential, their parents have to die: you're not a man until you've seen your father, naked, off the pedestal and crying on the bathroom floor. Until the projection dies and you're looking at the blank, tired screen. Until you live through that. Bill weeps in his son's lap, flapping useless arms; his sobs rage from so deep a place they sound bloody.
"Dad, Dad. Dad, listen. No one suspected. No one. Not with his record, what he did on New Caprica. His eye, his... What happened to his wi... Come on, let's get up." He slides out from behind Bill but there's no stopping Bill now. He falls against the jamb uncradled. "What have I done? All the people I've sent to die. For what? For what?" For Earth. Bill laughs, almost, through the tears: "There is no Earth. It's a frakkin' joke. There is no Earth."
(You're right. There's no Earth. It's all a legend. Then why? Because it's not enough to just live, you have to have something to live for. Let it be Earth. They'll never forgive you. Maybe, but in the meantime, I've given all of us a fighting chance to survive. And isn't that what you said was the most important thing? The survival of the human race?)
Saliva drips from his father's mouth, onto his hand. Until you live through this you will not be a man. All fathers are Gods until they are outgrown; until they are rescued by their sons: This is the secret and the meaning of the Fisher King. He brings life to the river and water to the shore. Watch it go around and around.
You can't be a man until you live through this, and the reason is very simple: you must subtract the story from the person -- as Bill and Laura both just so recently discovered -- and see him as he is: just a man. A man who wasn't built for this, because no man was built for this, nor woman, nor child. Because when you subtract your Quo Vadis from your Status Quo, you arrive at What Just Is. And you realize Cally said the truest and the hardest thing: the rough spots are all we have left. They're all we ever had. There is no one last hump and then it's golden. There is no Lie that earns your rest. It's not a vending machine.
Lee takes his father's face; blue eyes on blue. "Okay Dad, listen to me. Listen to me! Pull it together." Bill begins a litany that Lee doesn't understand: " I can't. I can't. I can't. I can't." Lee swears that he can, but he hasn't reached the end of the sentence: "I can't. I can't kill him. I can't kill the bastard. I can't. I can't." And he can't. And he shouldn't have to.
Imagine two stones, black and white. Concentrate on the area between them, the space where nothing is. I move them closer together, further apart -- See how it changes? This is no conjurer's trick, it's just two stones and the space between them -- and the area changes in kind. Everything you need to know is there.
Lee caresses him, holds him to his chest like a pelican. Holds his father like a baby.
"It's gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay. I'll take care of it."
He kisses his father, blessing him.
"I'll take care of it."
He is a man.
THE LAST THING IS A BULLET
Lee marches straight into the airlock, professional clip-clop, and punches the hell out of Saul Tigh. Maybe last time you were the interrogator, and I was the prisoner: at the Trial, Bill disowned Lee for breaking Saul, and now Lee will kill Saul for breaking his father. For forcing him to live through that. "You motherfrakker. Who are the others?" Saul looks him in the eye, sad. "Where's the old man?" he asks, worried. "Right where you put him," Lee spits. He's not wrong.
Lee gets a call from Three and heads into the control room; he stares through the window at Saul in the spotlights. This is what it was like for Tory, watching Cally wake. "This is the President," he says, and Three taunts. As is right and just in war. "Mr. President, you're running out of time." Lee explains that actually, Three's out of time, and it's best to just listen. "If you harm another one of my people, you so much as blacken one of their eyes, and I flush Saul Tigh out of a launch tube."
Three considers her imperative and commits a patented Cylon about-face: "...We have no wish for further bloodshed. May I speak with the Admiral?" No. Lee's a man now. "You have ten minutes to release my people or you can kiss one of your precious Final Five goodbye," he spits, and hangs up. Over the intercom, he explains. "You want to save the Fleet? I need the others, and I need them now." Escalation, using the only leverage he has.
Will he trade Earth for the lives of the people on that ship? Honestly, do you think he can do that? Tory doesn't, but somehow that seemed to come off as yet more proof that sexually active and beautiful women are all crazy assholes and whores. Hostage stuff, terrorism like they're both doing now, makes no sense to me at all. So if Three kills Laura, and he tosses all three of them out an airlock, what then? War. No matter what, all you see is death. Maybe there's something I'm not getting. Maybe it's just an awkward third-act justification for the rest of the episode -- which I mean, talk about needing narrative justification -- with a lot of that Weddle/Thompson running around and yelling they like so much, so it doesn't actually need to make sense or be particularly subtle. Maybe it's some kind of metaphor or something about how war is stupid. Because this ... seems really stupid.
Kara looks at Galen and Sam and wonders WTF is wrong with them. "It's sitting here the same way it has been for months. What made you think something was happening?" They stare awkwardly at the shiny Viper; Sam practically starts digging his sneaker into the ground. "Hard to explain, you know. It's... it's just a feeling?" Kara nods sharply. "Yeah, I've got a feeling too. You're both out of your frakkin' minds." Rimshot! Sam takes the offensive. "You know, you had a feeling you could find Earth. I trusted you, backed you every step of the way. Now I need you to trust ours."
And probably, she would have, because weird magic shit is kind of her thing at this point, and there is something undeniably shiny about the Viper, but just then a Marine squad enters, guns drawn, looking hardcore. "Ensign Anders. Specialist Tyrol. Slowly put your hands on your heads and face the Viper," says Sergeant Brandy Harder. She was the one who let Roslin go during her very first mutiny, so long ago; she was the one Kara beat the crap out of in the Hall of Remembrance and who didn't care if Tigh raped Caprica, more recently. She doesn't like Cylons.
Kara is bemused. Sam is freaked out. Galen just laughs, because the chairness of Galen is irony and there's no antidote for irony so he laughs. Harder tells a very angry Kara that they're Cylons -- "just like the XO" -- and Galen (once again up against the wall, just like the good old days when he was getting court-martialed for killing Thorne) exhales loudly and hilariously. This joke of his.
Kara stares in their direction, but can't look at Sam. She says his name, softly, and his eyes dart to Galen's; with black humor he just nods. "Go ahead." Sam is ashamed, and quiet. "It's true, Kara."
Imagine a black stone, and a white. Look at the space between them. Examine it carefully.
The Marines take Sam and Galen away, and as he goes -- remember Antigone, how Kara screamed over her shoulder at every opportunity -- Sam begs her to check the Viper. To find the thing that's changed. But she knows the thing that's changed: it's her. Because the last thing she was thinking just now was about a bullet between Sam Anders' eyes. The very last thing.
THIS IS A WILD GUESS
Ugh, these people. So the Centurions are herding hostages through the rebel Basestar, and Hotdog's screaming, and the Eight's offering to shoot him where he stands, and meanwhile in the airlock Sam and Galen are having a Deadpanning Bee about who can whistle loudest past the graveyard as their shackled forms are pushed into a row with Saul, and Sam's winning because he manages to ask Saul, "This is a wild guess, you told them?" with a straight face, and Saul -- this is a very Cylon thing he's doing these days -- totally goes, "We should've done it day one," I guess that was sometime between pretending nothing was wrong and putting the gun and liquor on the table and calling for a four-way suicide pact and prostituting Tory and holding constant meetings about how they shouldn't be holding so many meetings, they could have fit that in, and Lee duallas for the Baseship and she hoshis in turn for the Baseship because what if they held a pissing contest and nobody came.
Meanwhile, Kara gets in her magic shiny Viper for the first time in months.
So Laura and Gaius notice the screaming hostages getting herded past but apparently they have special privileges and aren't really hostages or prisoners so much as valued guests who can't leave and even Leoben and his adorable new haircut are getting worried due to Three's whole unreconstructed retro-warfare Cylon vibe and Laura decides enough is enough and asks to go visit with Three, but Gaius points out that Three thinks Laura is just adorable, "sweetie," but isn't about to parlay with her about this, and asks to go instead because he was there in the Temple of Five when she saw the Final Five and went blind and died and all that, and really if you think about it he's to blame for everything that happened with her, maybe still is, and part of that has always been that she associates him with God for some reason and I mean, look at him now, so Laura agrees that this is a smart plan and that Gaius is a man and a human being who can actually do something useful, and sends him off to C&C and then just sits there vibrating with worries, and over on Galactica Three and Lee are still pissing and he lets her know that Galen and Sam are in the airlock now too, which freaks everybody out, even Supertoaster Tory Foster gets a little cramp in her strudel that time, and needless to say Leoben and Six are shitting it, and Lee presses his advantage.
Kara turns it on, her bird; it starts to spin up all its systems. Like something coming alive.
Tory points out that nobody, especially President Leland, would actually airlock the Fleet's chance at Earth -- any more than Three would let him airlock her Final Three of Five, so like, is this still stupid or what? -- and tells Three to keep going and push him, because she doesn't know that Adama drooled on him a second ago and now he's a grown-ass man, and Three points the Basestar's nukes at the civilian Fleet -- tacky -- and Gaius enters with Leoben, and sunlight breaks out all over her face, because she likes Gaius and when you like Gaius, sure, you can take some time out from exterminating the entire human race for the third time in as many years and you know, just shoot the shit. Because the alternative is that we're being told that Three, despite being a genius and a bad-ass in every way, is so ga-ga for Gaius that it wouldn't really matter what he told her, because she'd just do it, because girls are dumb and dicks are magic. And I really don't think that's how this works.
Kara flips the comms on, spins the needle; the goes silent for a beat before a signal appears: One signal. One signal clear as morning, coming from a single unmistakable bearing. She stares, and she thinks, but she already knows. That's the sound of the angel.
Gaius swears coercion won't work with Lee, because he's too similar to Bill now, and Tory repeats that he's bluffing, which my God you guys, they're both bluffing, there is no suspense here logically much less narratively, but everybody does get to throw around a lot of lingo so that's fun, and Gaius says "tinker's damn" which is always fun although less fun in context because the tinker's damn Lee does not give relates to three of our favorite characters who are just now standing in the strobes and the spotlight of an airlock that never seemed quite this... disco à go-go until this episode... and he swears that Lee will kill them, 3/5 of the Final Five, and of course this offends Three, who points out that the entire human race will die with them, which honestly I think would be a fair trade if we were ourselves meant to give a tinker's damn about any of this running around and yelling.
Well, the Starbuck part is cool because something is actually at stake, plus there are ancient Colonial war-chants written by Bear and translated into Samoan. Samoan, of course. Togiola ina ia ola, go the voices: "Sacrifice to live." Ola ina ia oti, they pound in her ears: "Live to die." So now you know some handy Samoan phrases that should help make your stay memorable.
The Baseship nukes go hot and Lee and Dee talk about how if the Fleet starts their FTL drives spinning the Cylons will just blow everybody to hell, but with a lot more words and bad-ass talk around the subject that there is nothing actually happening here, because that's how it works when you give the best stories ("Maelstrom," "Scar," "Downloaded," "Rapture") to the least subtle writers, and do you ever wonder why it takes twice the men to do half the work and just blab it all onto the page without any moments to breathe at all, or at least why it takes twice the men to make a single twelve-year-old boy, because that's what this is like, talking to a particularly awesome military-minded child, which is why I don't watch Stargate, and why I hate science fiction anyway, so like I'm even qualified to have an opinion.
So Lee moves everybody around like it's musical electric chairs and so now Tigh's in the tube and the boys are outside, and meanwhile Three is looking all sad at Gaius for asking her if she for-real honestly thinks "God brought you back from the darkness for this," and her smile falls: "Maybe He brought you back for a different purpose. To end this peacefully," Gaius asks. And Three -- because she wasn't there for the Dance, because she doesn't know about the Shape of Things How They Are, how she's retro-psycho-obsolete in her own way, says the thing that somebody has to say between now and the big reconciliation, which is that: "They will never forgive us for what we did to the Twelve Colonies, never." And that is the narrative of lonely Three, because nobody told her anything better. "Proceed." The missiles do ... missile things, and on Galactica the airlock door begins to close.
Kara runs, memorizing yet more helpful Samoan phrases for the single traveler. Tu'u atu lou ma:navaga mulimuli: "Give your last breath." Mo le fatu o le taua: "To the seed of war." Ta:tou fai fa'atasi 'uma: "So say we all."
The door closes on Tigh, inside the launch tube; Galen nods at him, all black humor wiped from his sad, young eyes: Keep the faith. Tigh faces the closed door, his back to the night and to the firmament and to his death. Lee watches him silently.
Up in the sky, Gaius tries to get through: "Brute force did not work for you on New Caprica. It didn't work for you on the Algae Planet. So why is it gonna work for you now?" Three thinks, and mourns; the pain is how we learn. "Imagine a black stone and a white stone," he's saying, "And the space between them."
In that space, Kara runs.
Tigh waits. Lee swallows his heart. "Give me the key," he says, and Dualla does. The board goes red. The lights flash. Tigh doesn't look; Lee nearly weeps.
Kara runs. She should be in like Georgia by now.
Three is stricken; Eight is unsure as she confirms weapons lock on the civilian ships. Three is worried; the launch tube board is green. Tigh finally looks at him: "What are you waiting for, Apollo? Do it!" And Kara finally runs in, breathless and terrified, for all of them, and all of us. For Saul and for Sam and for Galen, she has run. "Lee, stop! Stop, stop!" She turns the key in his hand. "Those three frakkin' Cylons just gave us Earth!"
They stare at Saul through the glass; Saul stares back. Tell me chair.
JUST GET CONVINCED ALREADY, PART 1
On the hangar deck -- while, I guess, the Cylons just kind of sit tight and think about some stuff, or just chat about stepping back from the brink of a fourth nuclear annihilation of humanity, or like answer their emails -- Lee watches the Viper's needle; how it goes around and around. "Well, it's a Colonial emergency locator signal. And no other wireless in the Fleet is picking this up?" Kara nods: Gaeta confirmed it, the channel's otherwise empty. "It's gotta be a signal from Earth," she says, which Lee pronounces "reaching" because suddenly he's going to Scully of all people Kara Thrace. I mean, I guess I can see that now that he's pretty much the President and the Admiral for the hour or two he's getting hardcore and suddenly empirical or whatever, but maybe that's reaching too.
Then, then, the thing I hate most in the entire universe of television, where it Makes Sense Don't It, and basically what I am not recapping in this paragraph as Lee climbs down out of the magical mystery Viper is Kara recapping the entire torturous history of her whole thing with the dying and the Earth and the visions and the painting and the Hybrid and whatever, and Lee -- again, out of nowhere -- goes, I'm not kidding: "And now we're starting to get messages from the beyond." All snide. As though he has never seen one second of this goddamn show, he says this. Dude, we've been getting "messages from the beyond" since before the show started, and you know that. You committed sedition and led a mutiny that split the Fleet in thirds and turned you against your own father because of them, you visited Kara in the brig a few episodes ago to congratulate her on them, and then admitted your own self that you were leaving the military and embarking on a political career out of nowhere because of them. Of all the bastards on this show to be the straw-man for this scene, I ask you. For being such a good Apollo episode this sure is a shitty Apollo episode.
Then Starbuck says, "You heard the signal. The final Cylons led me to it. If it's Earth, they've given us the home of the Thirteenth Tribe. Just the way the Hybrid said it would happen. Like it or not, Lee, something's orchestrating this for a purpose." And because sometimes this show just goes ahead and cooks and cuts and then eventually chews your meat for you, what she means is: "The final Cylons led me to it. If it's Earth, they've given us the home of the Thirteenth Tribe. Just the way the Hybrid said it would happen. Like it or not, Lee, something's orchestrating this for a purpose." And he goes, "A higher power." And what he means is, "A higher power?"
So Kara's all, "Call it whatever you want, but it seems to want us to find Earth. With the Cylons." And what she means is, "We have a limited amount of time left in this episode, so just get convinced already, for no real reason at all, even though you were fighting me on this also for no real reason at all, immediately after getting into a cold war hostage situation with real live nuclear weapons for no real reason at all and a threat level of zero." So he does. He just... decides that there is magic and that messages from beyond really do exist and that Kara knows what she's talking about. Or, you know, all the things he believed immediately prior to the beginning of this stupid scene.
JUST GET CONVINCED ALREADY, PART 2
Speaking of stupid scenes, hey, here's the one I've been wanting since like 1999 when this show started, as performed by felt figures of your favorite characters being moved around in stop-motion photography on a felt background like everybody in the high school grades got the mumps so you have to go to little-kid Sunday School and deal with effing felt. Well, the music is really good, and of course the acting, and some of the shots are quite artful, so I shouldn't pretend it's anything other than a writer thing. Three and her Eight, and some Centurions, come onto Galactica and confirm the readings in the shiny Viper while Marines stand watch. Three compares it to a needle in a haystack, this signal, and then asks the Four if they agree that it's the way to Earth. They're like, "Lady, we don't even know which side our bread is buttered on, or where to stick it."
Lee explains -- as though he, Three, and we were all just visited with massive head trauma -- that the Colonials could've jumped away with this info and left Three and her nukes behind, but that would've led to another confrontation, another standoff. Three responds, because apparently she has suffered some kind of brain injury, "All this has happened before..." Which is the perfect opportunity for President Leland to switch it up and explain that, contrary to hoary old colloquialism and all-purpose spiritual saying, it doesn't have to happen again.
Now I know you're asking yourself, "How can this be?" Didn't Three just say a second ago that she doesn't trust the humans as far as she can throw them, because she expects them to hold a grudge about the whole genocide/rape camp/space chase/concentration camp/as-recent-as-five-minutes-ago nuclear attack thing? And wasn't she kind of right about that? And, um, doesn't humanity kind of have a point about how all that stuff happened and the Cylon still don't really seem to grasp why that's a problem? Well, let me tell you: it is not a problem. Simple as that. Thank gosh for Lee Adama, who is here to explain that to us, in short words that are easy to understand.
"Not if we make up our minds to change. Take a different path. Right here, right now. You were afraid we'd kill these Four, and yet, here they are standing behind you. Free to go. Or stay. I've granted them an amnesty. So the question is, where do we go from here?"
I don't know. Hell? You can both go to hell, a little bit, for turning from characters who made sense even earlier in the hour, to cardboard answers to a question nobody needed to ask. I mean, I actually made it unspoiled this time so I was of course blown away by the story, and pretty much stuff I'd resigned to getting to finally see -- like this scene, particularly -- when I was old and gray, so I was absolutely thrilled to see what I thought would be the last ten episodes, crushed down into a single act or two. And I love the idea that, even with some straggling pain and messy loose ends, the thrust will change again. That didn't occur to me. But I knew what I was getting, and what it was made out of, and it's disappointingly cheap to get it this way: "We have a limited amount of time left to get to the big shocking WTF reveal, so just get convinced already, for no real reason at all, even though we were fighting each other on this moments ago for no real reason at all, to the point of getting into a cold war hostage situation with real live nuclear weapons for no real reason at all and a threat level of zero."
So she does. She just ... decides that there is magic and that humans actually don't have any issues with getting murdered and raped by the millions and that Lee knows what he's talking about. Three looks at him, wanting to believe, across the chessboard. She locks eyes with Kara. who looks across at Sam, who looks away, and then to Tigh, who is lost. It's not that he can't make it without Bill; it's just who would want to? "All right," she says, "I'll release your crew. We go to Earth together." And Lee comes forward -- worrying the Eight -- two steps, with a hand out. She takes it, in the light.
END OF THE LINE
Adama is in a bathrobe looking a hot mess while Lee points at a map on the table. "We've projected a course toward the signal. It'll probably take some revising as we go, but...this is our destination right here. Earth. So... What are your orders, Admiral?" Bill can barely form words, much less a thought. Much less orders. "Are you ready to take us to our new home?" His great head nods, nearly down onto his chest. "Hmm. I don't know."
"You don't know what, hmm? What don't you know about?" Laura sits down beside him, looking at him, full of love. He smiles like a broken boy. "It's good to see you." His head hurts; he gathers his robe tighter. She steels herself and looks into his eyes. "Bill... This is it. This is it. This is everything that we have been working for. I want to see you pick up that first fistful of Earth. Come on." Just get convinced already. So he does. He looks from her, to Lee, and thinks a moment. "Be back," he grunts, and shuffles off.
Laura's grim: "I see." Lee nods, and thanks her. She thanks him back, for calling her. For bringing the family to bear on the situation. They sit with that. "Anyway, I'm glad to see you again, Madam President. And so is the Quorum. And I guess I just finished the shortest Presidency in Colonial history!" She tells him not to look so relieved: "You were dealt a crisis and you knew exactly what to do. You faced it boldly. This Fleet is going to need that kind of leadership in the days to come, so you are not off the hook yet." (Or as Captain Apollo once said, "Don't get too comfortable. This old junker I'm in was meant for show, not combat.") But because we're still working the felt projection, he starts crying and thanking her for saying that, or for having cancer, or whatever. Bill suddenly springs into the room completely dressed and snazzy and frisky, talking about "You gonna sit here flapping your lips or are we gonna go find Earth," and Lee and Laura smile at each other smarmily about this newfound, totally contrived lease on life he's got, which wouldn't seem so fake if his breakdown hadn't been so drama-queeny in the first place frankly, or if all of this hadn't felt like a checklist of things that needed to happen getting checked off as they happened, or as good as happened, or by the end of the episode happened by virtue of the show slapping you around the face and telling you what was happening instead of letting it happen like the very clearly labeled food in Repo Man, and Lee brings up recon for Earth and Bill tells him to frak it.
"This is the end of the line. We've got nowhere else to go. And if we give the alliance too much time it'll fall apart again. Gotta roll the hard six. We all go together. As fast as we can." He turns to go; there is more condescending and smarmy smiling; all these people are assholes and they deserve what they get.
DIASPORA ORATORIO
You should really read Bear's blog, especially this week. The way he talks about scoring is almost as moving as the scores he's talking about. The rest of the episode, save the last minute, is one five-minute-long composition that pretty much totally rocks. He describes an oratorio as "a composition for orchestra and choir that also features soloists" and thinks of the form as "an opera without the physical staging or blocking." That's fun. Also, it's the only time anything remotely happy or uplifting happens on this entire show, so it's kind of like hearing a whole other Bear.
Finis itineris
Journey's end. Galactica is surrounded by ships of the Fleet, flying up against a sun. In CIC, with Laura and Lee standing by. Dualla reports the Fleet is in jump formation, and the board is green. "Very well," says Adama, who needs to give lessons in trauma recovery. "Madam President, without you we wouldn't have made it." He means it in many ways, and has to wait it out a moment. "Give the order."
Viatores fatigati venientes ad litus longe distantem
Weary travelers approach a distant shore. Laura looks away, with tears in her eyes; she swallows the enormity. She is breathless with it. "...It's been a long time coming. Okay. ...Take us to Earth." They nod to each other, sweetly; Lee looks down. He is overcome. Dualla counts us down from five. Jump.
The Fleet jumps in, full of joy and the most beautiful music. Gaeta pronounces dradis clear, and Hoshi checks for all the Fleet. Bill tells Gaeta to take his time confirming their position: "Get it right," he says, almost mirthfully.
Collinae virentes superstant nebulam tristem
Verdant peaks pierce the melancholy haze. Laura gets the chance to hope. Hoshi rings the bell for the Fleet, all present and accounted for. Slowly, loving this, Gaeta turns as the music waits for him, in a single high note, to confirm the constellations from the Tomb. "Visible constellations are a match," he finally says, and the music goes wild again.
Earth lies in the sky, beautiful, with the Fleet beside her as the music rises.
Dies surgit unda matutina
The sky breaks like a wave. Dualla watches, touched, as Adama picks up the PA and addresses humanity. Gaius's people lift their heads, and hearts: "Three years ago, I promised to lead you to a new home." On the deck they listen carefully; they love him: "We've endured a difficult journey."
Omnes passi sumus multa
We have all suffered. Athena listens: "We've all lost, we've all suffered..."
Omnes superviximus
We have all survived. Hotdog smiles, in the racks: "And the truth is, I questioned whether this day would ever come." Kara shines: "But today, our journey is at an end." Lee and Laura: "We have arrived... At Earth."
Veniums Terram
We have arrived at Earth. One of his hands is already in hers; he puts down the phone and they embrace. Lee's tears well up, uncontrollable. A cry of joy and applause ring out across the Fleet. Hoshi and Gaeta rejoice, if you know what I mean. Lee climbs onto the CIC console, whooping like the mad dork he is, and whips his jacket off, over the assembled crew.
Fratres sororesque, inimici et amici, osculamini domum venimus
Brothers and sisters, enemies and friends: Embrace! For we have come home. A deckhand osculates Figurski's resistant face. The Daru Mozu men cheer, all along the tylium belt.
Iam plango
Yet I weep. Galen holds his son in his lap, and kisses him warmly.
The pilots go crazy. Hotdog is a little choked up. Athena and Helo kiss, with their child in his arms.
Iam plango
Yet I weep. Gaius leads his people; they raise their arms in thanks.
Non mortuos sed implacatos
Not for the fallen, but for the unforgiven. Tigh sits alone, in his rack, staring down another bottle.
Collinae virentes nos excipient
Green hills await. Kara stands in the Hall of Remembrance, looking at Kat's picture. Her only family left, beyond the Adamas and Laura. "We made it, kid," she grins sadly. And yet I weep. Sam approaches and stands by her, guilty and in love. She doesn't look, but she knows he's there. Tell me chair.
Roslin weeps, against the console; her form too small to hold its greatness. Lee and Bill embrace. Adama is quiet, and proud, tears on his cheeks: "We did it." But Lee knows better: "You did it."
Earth. Blue ocean, white fluffy clouds, drawing nearer as we fade.
Vento sequente caeli aperient
With wind at our backs, the heavens part
Approquinquantibus!
As we approach.
THE GARDEN OF THE SCAR
There's something I have to tell you. Come.
Lacuna. The ships drop through atmosphere, down and down, shuttles and transports and things, away from Galactica and into the atmosphere, tenderly supersonic, through fluffy clouds and blue skies, joyfully as they fly.
Kara Thrace will lead the human race to its end.
Bill Adama, hand bandaged, picks up a fistful of Earth. A Geiger counter held by a Marine croaks out its deathsong. He drops the poisoned earth to the ground, disgusted, dreams dead upon the vine. Laura stands beside him, staring out at the greys and blues of their blacks and white Home. "Earth," she says, in disgust and pain and fear and sadness.
She is the herald of the Apocalypse.
Three comes around behind, to stand with them. Her face is stricken; more pained and lost and bereft than we've ever seen her. She looks older somehow; she's lost something. She has lost something beautiful.
The harbinger of death.
Helo and Athena make their way down the coast, in a separate pain. Nobody speaks; nobody looks at anybody else.
They must not follow her.
They walk past Tory Foster, who reaches out to Sam and is rebuffed. His heart is broken. He believed.
Soon there will be Four, glorious in awakening, struggling with the knowledge of their true selves, the pain of revelation bringing new clarity.
Lee walks with a stumbling stutter-step past Gaius, who stares at the ground and sees nothing. No angel comes to comfort him; no dreams or signs of God's mercy, no trumpets. Just the black earth and the white sky and the broken cities of the distance.
And in the midst of confusion, he will find her. Enemies brought together by impossible longing, enemies now joined as one.
Caprica walks past Galen to Tigh, standing as he always does in the middle of the wreckage. She reaches out to touch him, but he doesn't turn. One more heart broken in the search for Earth; one more safe place ruined. Caprica doesn't understand entirely, what this means, what the Colonial word for Home means, because she's the one that took it away. But there is death in her bones now.
The way forward at once unthinkable, yet inevitable.
Anastasia Dualla stands alone, in her own pain. She is the voice that calls them home. Lee stares into the distance, and continues to walk the halls of a long-destroyed temple. Leoben looks at nothing at all. Kara is bedraggled and sad; she walks the halls of the Temple of Aurora and doesn't even recognize them.
You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace. You will lead them all to their end.
Helo and Sharon stare, at the furthest end of the tracking shot: A wasteland. Crumpled steel and broken spires. Sand and stones and rubble and snow, radiating death and sadness, a lost people, a dead civilization. The Apocalypse.
They might as well have fucking stayed on Caprica and died of cancer. Or Geminon, or Scorpion, or New Caprica after the bombing was done. But this is the end of the line: they couldn't make it back through the Passage now, not with Cavil and the 145s on the loose, not with a thousand ships or twice the civilians. The only allies the Colonies could use are now dying just as fast as we are.
You fight for something, like Jacob for Rachel; you work to earn it, you flay yourself, open up your veins and your skin and your selfishness and your cruelty and the greatest shames inside you, to earn a sense of worthiness. You work to earn your just reward. And when you get it, it is broken. They burned off the things that kept them blind and they walked one painful, bloody step from the Altar of the Colonies, on which they were sacrificed, to the Temple of Aurora, and when they got there it was broken.
I don't know how to communicate how sad that thought makes me. I don't know how to communicate how ... embarrassing it is. All that deceit and cruelty and hardening and Razors and pain and fear and suffering, and they might as well have stayed in the Colonies. To which, now, they really can't ever return.
They will join the Promised Land, gathered on the wings of an angel.
But I can tell you this. We move into the chairs that our parents vacate, but that's not the secret. The secret is our parents were never there. It was all an illusion: parents aren't Gods and never were. A story is not a house, and a story is not Home. When faced with untenable alternatives you consider your imperative: it's all around you. Laura knows, knows Galactica is her Home; that she found it, that she planted a tree and loved somebody and earned herself a Home. She knows the old joke, that even Cylons could conceive of chairness, when the ones they love best, the ones best for sitting, are right there in front of them. To think your life is a story being written by anybody but you.
And I can say this too. Imagine a black stone, and a white. Look at the space between them. Don't take your eyes from it: focus. Don't let anything deter you. It's absolutely essential that you block out everything except these two stones before you, and the space between them. And now, quick as a wink, I remove them both. I whisk them away as if they were never there.
Not an end, but a beginning.
Now. Can you see what's left?
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