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Yeah. Holy balls. So Ellen's murder on New Caprica lead to a resurrection that only Cavil knew about. He kept her locked up for a year and a half, with only himself and Boomer for company, and they discussed everything: where the skinjobs came from, why Cavil's such a dick, why there's no Number Seven, and who invented the One True God. Once this story -- modeled on Sartre's eponymous play, naturally -- catches up to us, Cavil decides to vivisect Ellen so that he can rebuild the Resurrection Hub; Boomer finally pulls her shit together, realizes Cavil is creepy and awful, and escapes with Ellen, returning her to the Fleet in a Colonial Raptor. (Where Galen is. Wifeless. And still adorable. And a Cylon. And OMG.)
The damage to Galactica is way worse than we ever thought: tiny hairline fractures through every single bulkhead and beam. Chief offers to apply Cylon tech -- a biological agent that will bond with the metal and strengthen it as it matures -- but Adama is not interested in desecrating her broken-ass bones that much. Then he gets super duper drunk and realizes that having his ship come apart around him would be way worse, so he says yes: Galactica herself will become the ultimate jury-rigged cybrid. The best part about this sequence is when Chief says he can fix the old girl, but Bill better forget about jumping her again anytime soon. Laura's not gonna like that!
What she does like is Lee, and the idea of having no Quorum at all, because the whole concept is dumb at this point. She says she'll stay in office for the time being, but he'll be the puppetmaster, and can invent whatever system of democracy he feels like. I agree in theory, because that's exactly what they should do, but it's the kind of thing you don't want Playa Palacios finding out about. You know?
Caprica's son kicks for the first time, and she and babydaddy Saul are way too happy about it. On any other show, you'd think that this was because Ellen is coming back, and their love is a forever love, and hot blonde catfight, and Caprica has to be a single mom, and she and Gaius can be mommies together. But because it's this show, it seems way more likely somebody's going to come along and kill the shit out of that baby, and then Caprica Six is going to destroy them into particles.
Meanwhile, that bullet in Sam's head is pressing on his Earthly memories -- and causing him to quote entire passages from Paradise Lost, naturally -- and he remembers everything about the Final Five, where they came from, where they met, and why Cavil's such a dick.* He fills in the blanks for the Dylan Four, while getting hit with harder and harder seizures, until Kara finally wigs out and -- against Sam's screaming wishes -- lets my buddy and Resident Expert John Hodgman operate on his sexy brain. So of course, because Kara actually had a rational thought and tried to do save her husband's life, Sam is now in a braindead coma and can't answer any more questions at all. And boy, the Q&A of this episode is intense. Normally this is where the recaplet would end, but instead the explanation part is longer than the actual account of what happened, is how intensely explainy this was.
If I actually have this straight: Thirteen Tribes set out from Kobol, and the Thirteenth (Cylons) settled on Earth, where they stopped resurrecting and had babies instead. They created robots, I think, who went crazy on them and threw them a big old war just like ours did. Luckily, a group of five scientist-types were able to rediscover resurrection technology, and download themselves into new bodies at the moment of their holocaust. (After being warned by mysterious and invisible Sexy Chip People, no less.) Tory and Galen were the hot young couple, Saul and Ellen were the hot old couple, and Sam was apparently like what if Bob Dylan hung out with Watson and Crick. So they took a sublight voyage backwards along Athena's Arrow, to find the other Tribes and tell them in no uncertain terms, Do Not Fuck With Robots.
Sadly, the robots did not go unfucked with. The F5 got here too late, but forged the Armistice out of promises to help the Centurions create skinjobs. This they did: eight humanoid models, to further the toasters' goal of becoming more like their creators (as seen in the whole Hybrid lineage). Yes, I did say eight models. For a total of thirteen, at the fulcrum point of which is Seven, a model named Daniel that never made it off the production floor (except for the one that knocked up Socrata Thrace, I will bet you one trillion dollars) because Cavil, the firstborn son, was jealous of him in an insane Biblical grabbing-the-foot kinda way. Then he murdered and boxed the F5, and released them every few years into the population until the holocaust was ready to go. Which is where we came in.
The reason that Cavil is such a dick, though, is because he resents the Five, particularly Ellen, for creating him in such an old, creepy body. They seem to agree that the F5 made the human bodies and weird hormonal imbalances we've grown to love in the Significant Seven because the One True God would approve of that -- but then also, the OTG seems to have been invented by the Centurions in the first place, which makes no sense. Even Chief finds that weird, so I'm sure there's more to it. (Like, maybe a whole series coming to your screen fairly soon, with a writing staff including but not limited to Jane, the wonderful fellow who wrote this episode, and Michael Taylor.) So Brother John Cavil gives a fairly moving and convincing speech for why he's so pissed off, and you finally get Cavil: he's basically like Pinocchio going, "Really? Lederhosen? Fuckin' forever?" Only instead of singing a little song about it and kicking Ellen in her shapely Gepetto shins, he knowingly and nastily:
Destroyed utterly the life and civilizations on twelve planets, burnt the knowledge of their creators out of his brothers and sisters, killed Daniel and boxed Three, wiped and boxed the Final Five just to make sure they ended up in the holocaust, had a day-long conversation with Chief about how he wasn't a Cylon even though he totally was, tried his best to kill off the idea of God(s) Himself(s), plucked out his father's eyeball, and fucked his own mother while she was in mortal mode on New Caprica. Moral of story? You Never Fuck With Pinocchio. Welcome to the last act of the last season of the very best TV show of all time, and here's your Dramamine.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!The first layer is this: Life here began out there: Kobol, the birthplace of mankind, where the Gods and men lived in paradise, until the Exodus of the Thirteen Tribes after one jealous God began to desire that he be elevated above all the other Gods. That's how the war on Kobol began. And the blaze pursued them, and the people of Kobol had a choice: to board the great ship, or take the high road through the rocky ridge. And the body of each tribe's leader was offered to the Gods in the Tomb of Athena, after she threw herself down onto the rocks below Hera's Gate, out of despair over the Exodus of the Thirteen Tribes. And the great ship was the Galleon that departed from there, and it took the founders of the Thirteen Colonies to their destiny. And those that didn't board the Galleon took the high road, a rocky ridge that lead to the Tomb. And when the Thirteenth Tribe landed on Earth, they looked up into the heavens and they saw their twelve brothers...
It's a basic function of history that lives become stories, and stories become legends, and legends become myths, and myths become religion. There's you, and then there's George Washington, and then there's Jesus, and then there's God. You're looking at one fight -- polytheism/monotheism, pluribus/unum, master/slave -- from those four angles, at each of those four layers, repeating over and over. Before the first Cylon War, there was a monotheist undercurrent in the Colonies, and before that there was the Jealous God of Kobol; after Earth the Final Five took on that belief, and Gaius Baltar is riding that wave even now, at the behest of his angel. What do Akhenaten, Moses and Muhammad have in common? That little angel in their ears. The political component of monotheism is simple: Allah akbar, my God is bigger than your God, no other Gods before me. No prophet of the OTG ever acted in a political vacuum.
I've been round and around and over deadline trying to get here, because this episode -- well, you saw it. Unholy mess. And especially tough because in the middle of all that mythology, and answering all the questions that there are in preparation for the final act, there's all kinds of wonderful literary stuff: Milton, Sartre, Wolfe, even some Shakespeare. Which I can't talk at length about, because this recap would be too long even for my stomach. And neither the mythology or the references really matter, because what matters is how everybody acts about it. So let's get the mythology out of the way, and then I'll give you a little bit of a recap as far as the things that actually happened in the episode, and then you can be on your way.
It gets misty going back that far, talking about Kobol, but basically the Jealous God caused a war, and the war led to the Exodus of the Thirteen Tribes. The final tribe were, in some fashion, Cylons. Incarnations of immortality, they used synthetic bodies for human souls. (The truth is that we have no more idea of the level of technology at play on Kobol than we do about whether the Egyptians had spaceships, not really.) But the Twelve Tribes went to a star system with twelve planets and started the Twelve Colonies, and the Thirteenth Colony went to Earth, and life went on, for maybe thousands of years. The Colonies fought and allied and backstabbed and generally acted like the European states for thousands of years, and built robots for their warriors and labor; Earth did the same.
Five scientists on Earth, descended from the Cylons of the Thirteenth, came together to reinvent resurrection, and create synthetic bodies like in the olden times, pushed and shoved and manipulated to do so by angels. When Earth's robots rebelled and blew everything to hell -- just like the Colonial ones did fifty years ago -- these five scientists downloaded themselves into bodies on a wondrous ship off-planet, the Colony, and set out to the Colonies to warn us not to make the same mistakes.
They traveled back along the route the Thirteenth Tribe took, including stopping off at a temple the tribe had built along the way -- the Temple of Hopes. At some point they became monotheist, listening to those little angels and learning about faith from our Centurions. Not sure about the timeline there, but I do know that in the Sacred Scrolls of Pythia, the Temple of Hopes was called the Temple of Five, and believed dedicated to five priests who worshiped the One whose name cannot be spoken." That seems like an imprecise mythological gloss to me, but we will see. Pythia is like the ultimate unreliable narrator if you're looking for facts, but then, that's not how oracles ever work. Confusing the layers, imminent to historical to legendary to mythic, is a good way to end up with a Laura Roslin, or talking about intelligent design: a good way to miss the point entirely and rape religion of what little use it provides.
Of course, by the time they finally got to the Colonies -- around fifty years ago -- things had gone impressively to shit. Our robots, attempting to resolve a basic binary problem we'll talk about later, had come up with the OTG on their own, and started a war on their creators. Part of this war, because every war has an ontological component that is either about becoming the enemy or not becoming the enemy, was the pilot program of the Guardians to create human forms for themselves. This is where the Hybrids came from; even after it was abandoned, they kept going. The Earthling scientists -- the Final Five members of the Thirteenth Tribe -- in attempting to halt the destruction of the other Twelve Colonies, struck a deal with the Centurions: human bodies for peace. That's the moment of the Armistice, when Husker saw the Guardian ship take off forever. It worked.
Until it didn't. The eight models the Final Five helped the robots design were as close to human as they could get them, which always causes issues. The firstborn, John Cavil, was the favorite. He glimpsed the possibilities that had been denied him in his design, and that jealousy grew into a seed of rage, and that seed blossomed into horrors. First, jealous of the seventh son, Daniel -- named for a red-headed forefather of the Centurions themselves -- he wiped out every body and copy. Jealous of the stars and hating his own body, he gathered his Five parents together, and killed them, and when they downloaded into new bodies, he made them sleeper agents. Not like Boomer, not set to destroy, but simply to watch, from behind their bodies' eyes, as he took their lives apart. He rewrote the programming of his six brothers and sisters so that they would forget where they came from, and went behind the curtains of his own life, pretending to know no more than the others. He even rewrote himself, so that he'd never sleep or dream again.
Jacob is not a Wiki and I'm wrong as often as I'm right but this is fun. Let's follow it, so there's less to explainytell later. I've already written and rewritten this recap about sixty times, which is why it's late, but it turns out the first instinct was the best, like a fractal, telling it sequentially over and over until it's done. If you're a plotasaurus this is all you care about anyway, and have you heard about this show Lost because I think you might like it. So the first of John's parents to come back into the game was Saul Tigh, a drunk in a wig who fell in love with the first man who ever showed him kindness. Then came Ellen, the gazelle, the artist, in a body made for destruction. Galen Tyrol and Tory Foster, and Sam Anders, came : the son of priests and oracles, with a gift for machines; the repressed pollster who cried in bed; the revolutionary jock.
Not sure, but I think then Brother John put his sister Sharon into a person they called Boomer to watch Adama, and sister D'Anna to tie up loose ends like Hera, and sisters Six (Sarah? Natasi?) into Caprica Six and Gina Inviere to facilitate the plan. Which was then carried out, resulting in the miniseries. So then, I think when Ellen got caught on Picon, he used other sleepers to get her onto Galactica. Obviously at that point the people to watch -- being the three leaders of mankind not stuck in the Colonies -- were Roslin, Adama and Cain. He couldn't have foreseen Adama's relationship with Tigh, which has always been a pivot point for the entire show, and will now save us all; he couldn't have seen the action of angels on Laura Roslin; he wouldn't have cared what happened to Gina. But that's what I think the Plan was. I guess we'll see a whole movie about it.
What excites me, before we get started, is the way the layers are starting to coalesce. The whole mono/poly thing, from another angle, describes the differences between these two great races: people who are in one place and are one person and then die, and people who live in many bodies and places and never die. From another angle, it describes the heart of politics, Colonial or otherwise, and that's why Lee's always been my favorite -- and Laura's, even though we don't like to admit it -- because he embodies that tense balance between the one and the many -- political as personal/personal as political -- the same way I used to talk about Cally and Barolay embodying viewpoints.
And off the political angle and into the religious one, of course, we have a classic Gnostic (Yeah, sorry, but I actually have to this time; "Maelstrom" pretty much directly stated that this is a Gnostic -- specifically Valentinist, actually -- story, and it's an area of my paltry expertise, and helps codify this episode a great deal) trinity where Archon (Fake God/Model One) Brother John Cavil the One thinks he's playing dice with the universe, but the Demiurge (Real God/Number n/zero/infinity), acting through His Angels, is gaming the table. The major political jump made by Jesus -- monotheism 2.0 -- was to eliminate the intermediaries of the priesthood and express the personal connection we each have with God (which was immediately rewritten by the Apostles after his death, to retain political power in the form of hierarchical priesthood), which is where the Gnostic heresy comes in. In this story, that role is played by Leoben (Two, note, the thing after One), who tells Kara again and again -- both in real, rapey form and in angel form at the Maelstrom -- that she's there already, touching the divine Real God(s) and painting the sky, and by the Hybrids, who can't squash their perceptions down to three dimensions just like Sam in this episode and just like Cavil is pissin' him panty about, like the bumberclot he is.
And then in this episode, Bill conflates the me/you question with Laura's illness, but still manages to transcend his own hardness once again. But the most interesting angle right now, characterwise, is Laura Roslin, because she's bridging the gap between opposites on two layers, both religiously and politically, and it's breathtaking to watch: her hardness arose equally from her religious certainty and her task of saving the human race at the cost of its own humanity. An angel wearing Elosha's face, arising from the Hybrid's song; Emily Kowalski on a barge, listening to Baltar's. And watching Laura so gently surrender both of these, out of her own dignity and capacity for love, prodded by her better angels and those of God, has been an incredibly beautiful theme throughout the season. I thought Ellen and Adama would be the ultimate OTP opposition, fighting over Saul, but it may be a MILF war after this week, just considering where everybody's ended up. I've always believed that it matters less what you believe or where you start than the fact of changing, because by crossing any bridge you get to be both. You get bigger. And as kind and wise as this Ellen is, she fucked up just as badly as Laura did, and they both did it for the same reason: love.
So that's the history. As far as the episode itself, it's pretty simple: Cavil's been holding Ellen hostage since Saul killed her on New Caprica, and they have an 18-month long fight over Boomer's soul which involves explaining the entire show, above, and being super skeevy. We check in with them at various points connected to major show events: the Second Exodus, the supernova at the Temple... And the destruction of the Hub, at which point Cavil goes nuts and starts threatening Ellen with a lobotomy if she doesn't rebuild resurrection tech using the Colony. Of course, she can't do it alone, but he won't listen.
Meanwhile, Sam has a bullet in his head from last week, which is pressing on his brain's "vascular ring" -- what I believe we call the Circle of Willis or Willis Polygon -- causing him to quote Wolfe and Milton and filling in our history of the Final Five in fits and starts. It's fun looking at what one part of the narrative "knows" and the other part doesn't, because of the five people necessary for this to happen, of course there are three Final Fivers who haven't accessed anything at all yet, there's Ellen, and then there's Sam who is only remembering random shit.
So you have Ellen in one moving timeframe, speaking with a clarity no Oracle ever knew but throwing in ellipses because John was there too, and you have Sam in the "current day," half-human and half-Hybrid, trying to negotiate the dim shadows of his life before, his life as a F5er, his life before the Nebula, and his life now, while in the throes of major medical trauma. Which is exactly what it's like to be an Oracle, which is why Dodona Selloi and Yolanda Brenn and the Hybrids and the Angels (Chip Six, Chip Gaius, Jump Elosha, Maelstrom Leoben) and every other prophet are so annoying. You're not made to know everything at once and neither were they.
So Sam plays out his time like the Hunger Artist, and Kara's trying to get him into surgery -- which might turn off these new memories -- while the Dylons are trying to learn about themselves. Secretly, though, she's also hoping for an explanation for her own shit, but of course she can't say that because nobody knows she found her dead body on Earth. In the same way that the Ellen/Cavil story is kinda really about Boomer -- and the Chief/Bill story is kinda really about Laura -- the Sam/Five story is really about Kara, in a way, because it's one of the more clear-cut moral dilemmas our girl's ever faced: let him talk himself to death in the vain hope that he'll spill her destiny (and thus absolve her of both her implication in the Harbinger of Death deal and her existential horror in being a third Thing) or save his life to the detriment of herself and the three Dylons.
Sam keeps going into weird seizures and losing track of shit and going aphasic, and just when Kara (as his legal tattooed wife) is done watching him slowly bleed to white and sends his ass to surgery, he mentions Daniel, Number Seven, which holds special significance for her. Afterwards, he wakes up brain dead, meaning that once again Kara has fucked not only herself, but also the Final Five, humanity, the Cylons, and generally the entire blueprint of whoever's pulling these strings. That's our girl!
In other news, Chief gets his job back and reveals to Bill that the Galactica is falling apart on a much more basic level than just weakened beams and struts, and offers a biological compound from the Baseship that will heal her, while also making her Cylon. Bill of course balks at this, but eventually comes around. And on Colonial One, Laura and Lee mourn the dead Quorum and decide to reboot representative Colonial government by ignoring the obsolete Twelve Colonies altogether and going with the Ships' Captains system . She also makes him the de facto President, secretly. Three decisions by Laura and Bill that I completely agree with, personally, but could have massive PR consequences.
And that's the recap. Even with the Gnostic rant, that wasn't so bad. Now comes the crazy. Fair warning. Just be glad that around the fifth draft I deleted my six pages of Sartre and Milton and Wolfe quotes. Slimmed that shit right down.
Have you read Neuromancer? The creation of a unity explodes into multiplicity, as things tend to do. Monoculture begets polytheism, temporary autonomous zones, locative representation, Big Bangs. And then before you know it, things get burnt off and unify again. The edges between us get fuzzier and fuzzier until we understand the joke, and who painted the sky. Of course, and I'm code-switching really bad and I apologize, but in physics, by the Hartle-Hawking wave function, this never actually happens because the universe is precisely as big as the universe at any given time, but we've already talked about how psychologically and thus mythologically you have to pretend it's real. And in any case I'm more comfortable with a universe of flux than I am with anything else, because we're all just sine waves when it comes down to it: sometimes up, sometimes down. And when you're down, you dream of heaven, and when you're up, you dream of hell, and if you add the four things together, that's God, the universe and everything. The entire job of the unconscious is to know the stuff you're too busy to know right now, and send you little hints and notes in your dreams, which means every human mind is the sum total of stuff you think and stuff you don't know you think, which is also the sum total of the universe.
Even Cavil knows this, and when he says he hates dreams what he means is that he hates his soul, because it tells him contradictory stuff that's too hard to know all at once, which is what he seeks: everything at once, laid out on the table. If Cylon culture is isomorphic to literary history, then Cavil is modernism, and thus very angry because the universe resists Aristotelian unities exactly half the time. On the other hand, it's what Kara saw in the Maelstrom, it's what the Hybrids see all the time, it's what Leoben aches for and what blinded D'Anna. It's also what influences the politics of Lee, Laura and Sarah Porter: everything at once, which you can't ever look directly at, but which you simply must posit and fit your life around as best you can. And it's what the Final Five Earthlings learned from the Colonial Centurions, whose faith is just as valid as anybody else's, because that's what faith is: belief for no reason at all, that manages to shape your soul heavenward regardless.
Shiny special opening sequence: "This has all happened before and it will happen again. [Bombed-out shitty Earth.] The Cylons were created by man. [The Guardians, interestingly; Centurions acting all rebellious like they do.] They rebelled. Then they vanished. [A Raider, blocking out the sun over New Caprica.] Forty years later they came back. [Caprica Six, just after snapping that baby's neck, feeling bad about it and just starting to grasp why.] They evolved. [Fighting in space; a mushroom cloud over Caprica, shadowing Gaius, shadowing Athena and Helo.] 50,298 human survivors [Galactica and the Fleet; Raiders pouring out of a Basestar; more and more fighting] hunted by the Cylons. Eleven models are known [Six, Leoben, Doral, Athena, Simon, Three, Cavil; Chief, Sam, Tory, and Tigh.]...
"One was sacrificed." New Caprica, 18 months ago. Ellen takes the cup from Saul's hands, and looks into his eye as she sips from it. "You've always been there for me when I need you." And he always will, and vice versa. There are only four relationships I still believe in: Saul's with Ellen and Bill, and Sharon's with Galen and Karl. Bill and Laura, and Lee and Kara, are better in flux, but I believe in them too. Ellen nestles into his arms, so exhausted, and falls asleep, dropping the cup.
Resurrection memories: the flashing white lights of death, a red matrix. Ellen dying on Earth. A wormhole of red Cylon stuff. The Resurrection Ship. Ellen smiling on Galactica, once; Ellen smiling on New Caprica. "I'd do it all again..." she says, and burns the maps the night she earned her death. She wakes in the waters of resurrection, screaming and flopping around; lost in the province of demons and monsters, hedged in by black tubs and white goo and monstrosities. A Centurion watches her as she screams and cowers, kidnapped, terrified, delivered from horror into worse horror, freed into nightmares. She can't stand, can barely move. Her cry is that of an infant when the first cool, harsh breeze caresses her face. Ellen looks around, sobbing, shaking like a fevered thing, and then she shakes her head. And remembers.
(All Pawns become Queens, if they live long enough. They always were. Redemption is primarily an act of memory, not agency: remembering you already were redeemed. When you hit that end of line, when you become Queen, you realize the boards all at once, and can see in every direction. Ellen's the first -- since Kara forgot what she learned in Heaven, and Boomer's still ricocheting around the board -- but she won't be the last.)
Ellen goes calm and still, and slicks her hair back, and looks kindly on the Centurion watching her, in this secret tank room. "Will you help me up, please?" It's nervous; this is one savior, the primary savior, of his race. Her race. Its race. "It's okay. You can do that much." It walks to her and holds out one toaster hand, fingers like needles, meant to injure like a razor. She looks on them, gently remembering, and he curls them back, embarrassed, into soft human digits. "Thank you," she smiles. "You're very kind." She takes its hand, this recapitulated human form, the story in miniature from both sides -- soft now and chivalrous, all war forgotten -- and stands. Like a queen.
Eighteen months later, the man (once a loving friend, who played songs for her across eons, who spent days on the beach with her because she loved the water) who ordered her death lies in sickbay, brainwaves wigging on the screen, head shaven, lines drawn for a surgery that John Cavil recapitulated for Ellen. In both cases, we crack the skull and draw out what we need, rendering the vessel of revelation silent and dead, for what he knows and can't stop saying. Because we view it as a sickness, okay? To tell the truth, on this layer, is to risk being called crazy or worse. Kara knows, and it's just one of the things Sam will scream at her before this is over, but think about this: Cavil's convinced himself the truth, the soul, our joined history, is a psychosis. And Cottle and Gerard, even in this context, have a medical duty to react the same way even though they basically know -- like Cavil, but for different reasons and in a different context -- that this shit is for real.
(Here's Tom Wolfe, who has provided prophetic episode titles for us before, from Look Homeward, Angel, the title of which alone could be the subtitle of this show ... but which is even more fucked up when you think about the fact that its title comes from a poem by Milton, whose Paradise Lost provides a narrative map to this episode, this show, most stories and shows in the last hundred years or so, postmodernism/poststructuralism, Gnosticism, Ellen's life, Kara's and Cavil's relationships with their respective mothers, and who influenced Sartre more than he would ever admit), and which Sam is, in parts italicized by yours truly, quoting, but whose every word was a mystery and a door:
"A stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother's face; from the prison of her flesh we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth. Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father's heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone? O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again..."
I mean, that's this show. I love Wolfe, but that particular passage is not only Jacob catnip but also this show. That's Cavil talking, and Kara talking, and the Hybrid, and Three at the moment of her crisis, and Gaius at his, but also Sam, right now, talking literally, saying these words. I'm not making it up, folks; it seemed obvious to me that I never was. And all this shit is implicit. Real but implicit, and for once I don't feel guilty about spending so much time on it, because for once I actually get to know for a fact that it's not entirely masturbatory. What interests me about this story is not the factual shit but what everyone's going to do about it. The intertwining relationship between Ellen and John, MILF/SILF/MILF, and Boomer getting queened; Kara and Sam playing Pyramid defense against the clock one last time; Laura and Lee, Chief and Bill. Those are the building blocks of this last act; this information is just what we need to go there. And I hope that I can meet the challenge and remind us of the eight to ten pages of chronology this recap started with, when it's time to toss that data into the moving parts of this show, because this engine is spinning up and it'll take a hand if you're not careful.
"Among bright stars, I'm lost. [The nova, bombs; meeting Kara on Caprica; kissing her saint to redeemer, watching her fly away again; getting shot in the mutiny; Sam's eye telling the Raiders to leave him be.] Kara assures him he's not lost; doesn't know he's quoting. "...There's a new tide. And all the forgotten faces, all the forgotten children... We seek the great forgotten language. [Our Hybrid; the war; brief happiness on New Caprica; the day he heard the song; Three looking up at the Final Five, seeing their faces.]" Kara tells him it'll be safe, they got through the mutiny, and Cottle reminds her he's got a fucking bullet in his head, pushing on important shit. "Then take out the bullet!" she says, not yet shouting. "The Colony never forgets," Sam says, as Cottle points out the massive hematoma-slash-bullet pressing on his brain:
"We gotta drill holes in his skull and drain it. Then when the swelling goes down, I'll bring the brain guy over from Inchon Vale and we get a look and see how we can get at that bullet." While Kara and Cottle fight over the fevered state of Sam's holy brain, he starts quoting the central text of the twenty-first century, disordered, remembering the Hub and Caprica and the Hybrid, the Opera House and the Colony and the war at the Temple: "The infernal serpent: he it was whose guile, stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived the mother of mankind... A mind not to be changed by place or time. The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n..." Who painted the sky?
Milton: "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n... Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell..."
Sartre, among works including No Exit: "I am mean...I need the suffering of others to exist. A flame. A flame in their hearts. When I am all alone, I am extinguished... Cowardly or not, as long as he is a good kisser... So that is what hell is. I would never have believed it. You remember: the fire and brimstone, the torture. Ah! The farce. There is no need for torture: hell is other people."
Pluribus/Unum. "I myself am hell"/"Hell is other people." Milton/Sartre. I am one/I am many: Human/Cylon. The political is personal/The personal is political: Laura/Lee. Laura/Bill. Lee/Bill. I am hell, says Milton's too-early existentialism/You are hell, says Sartre's too-late responsibility. Neither one the whole truth; playing black and white on a table without color or feature or quality, fighting always for prominence, Gaius and Laura as its pawns. We create war in the mistaken idea that these are two differing statements; Kara Thrace has been torn apart in the vacuum between these two differing statements, again and again. But where the place for love?
Here. "We'd been to that beach too," Sam smiles. She was like their mother, their folk singer mother, the artist that touched their dreams into life; the intuition that sparks life into machines and machines into life: "Yes, we'd been to that beach. Sometimes Ellen would be there too," he smiles, Kara watching confused, "Because she loved the water." Kara turns away, crying, but he continues to remember, the machine of his body sparked into memory: "She loved the water."
Eighteen months ago. [That Kobol Stonehenge, champagne supernova, Laura's Hybrid humping, Kara's Maelstrom, Sam drunk and mourning, the Opera House, the Rebel Basestar jumping, Ellen and the Maelstrom at once telling truths we can't know yet. I can't shake the feeling that this episode is intended to help me shut the fuck up and enjoy the show.] John pulls up a chair and watches her come back to life, down in the goo; Ellen greets him without opening her eyes. She calls him John, he hates it, she reminds him he was named for her father, he reminds her in turn he doesn't care for that name: One, or if not, Cavil.
"And you made me in his image," Cavil bitches. "Thanks a million for that." Because he's the only person in the universe ever to mourn his genetic betrayal. (I got three words for you: man-boobs and insulin resistance, bitch.) It's weird to be born looking like the Boy with Green Hair 120 Years Later, yes, but on the other hand, you get more and better tail than anybody on this show besides Bill Adama, so grow up. Ellen immediately asks him for a drink, because the only constant in this show besides iterable return is that Ellen and Saul are fucking alcoholics.
The first thing she does is ask for a drink, which is the smartest thing this show ever did, because it answers and ignores the central Buffy question upfront: vampires come back they're a variable percentage, the whole point of Dollhouse is that they should come back zero percentage and don't, but here: if Cavil didn't block it, it remains. Which I love because it fits the story, and also makes sense in the overall. Two things remain about Ellen: girlfriend loves Tigh longer and harder and brighter and hotter than five stars and vice versa, and girlfriend loves a drink. (Neither of which spell happy nights to happy days for Bill, if he's going to play Mercutio in their little drama.) Ellen and her son John talk about how Saul just murdered her but she gets it, because she betrayed the Resistance.
Cavil jokes that nothing goes quite so stupid as true love, and she shakes it off: "He did what he thought was right, that's all any man can do." John points out that he's not a man, any more than she is a woman, and Ellen tries to meet his bullshit with her own: "As someone with firsthand knowledge, I beg to differ." Except she's been fucking him long as she's been fucking her son John, chronologically, so this is just a gambit. They laugh together like it's a French existentialist stage play; she sits on the floor, naked. John calls his mother a machine, and Saul; she reminds him that this is entirely dependent on definition. The words for things.
"Your ancestors didn't crawl up out of the swamp." But their souls did, didn't they? "Personally, I'm rather proud of that." Ellen shakes her head, disappointed, and her son explains that he's improved on her design. She notes that he's still "the same confused and petulant little boy" she loved so much once, and pronounces it "sad." But he doesn't have time for sad. Reacting to her disappointed "high hopes," he condescends that he had the same: "Unfortunately, it appears you still stick to delusional thinking instead of accepting the reality of your life for what it is. Humans have a word for that, Ellen: Schizophrenia." She laughs at him for using her name, but it's all just power games. She isn't even wearing clothes yet, crawling up out of the stuff of resurrection, but she's already gotten pulled into playing games with a computer. She asks for clothes, and as a last gambit he reminds her it's nothing he hasn't seen before.
I love Camille Paglia for a lot of reasons but the number one I feel personally in love with her is probably the line she drew between the Marquis de Sade and Emily Dickinson. We think of de Sade as this individual who went around doing this fucked-up shit like some kind of sex supervillain; the fact is that most of what he wrote, he wrote in prison. Very lonely, but not unlike the similarly fucked-up shit Emily wrote in hers. His entire narrative purpose, even more than Emily, was to unmake the world from its basic building blocks; to start from the most taboo shit and work his way out. He was punk, which always means sex.
But if you look at Cavil's actions from the point he got pissed off, I can't think of a more applicable pair of people than de Sade and Dickinson, who tried to unmake the universe through the poetics of their universe, without ever leaving their cages. The difference is that Cavil had actual persons to play with, which is all that separates the poet from the murderer. Either way, Cavil and de Sade wanted to wipe their shit across the moon. The differences are two: number one that Cavil had no sense of metaphor, and number two that he accomplished it. Which is scary in that it misses the point, but not really that different from screeching insensate about intelligent design, because you've lost the ability to discern the layers. Still means sex, specifically the grossest weirdest sex you can come up with. And I submit to you that fucking your mother while wearing her father's skin is pretty much as far as you can go. In a story about the unhealthy bonds between child and parent, servant and master, that's still about as gross and unnecessary as you can get.
Meanwhile, Bill's all grossed out about the damage caused by Felix's mutiny, and once the dust settles he realizes that Galen's the only Chief Chief enough to fix everything. They have a whole moment where Galen calls Adama "Sir" and Bill acts like that's a big deal and reinstates him, noting that his XO is a Cylon so fuck it, and it's very bagpipey. Then over to sickbay, where Kara is all kinds of worried about Sam, whose spine she jiggled and joggled on the way here from lockdown even before his brain started coughing up all kinds of interesting stuff. He assures her it's okay, she replies in the only sentence she's ever said -- "It's about as far from okay as it could possibly be! If you wanna blame someone, blame me!" -- and he interrupts her litany of self-hate precisely long enough to tell her to shut the hell up and stop making this about her, if the Christmas tree of his lit-up face isn't enough: "Listen to me. A wonderful thing has happened. You have to get the others. ["What others?" she literally asks] Um, Galen and Tory and Saul and Ellen?" The last of whom, of course, is dead, so of course we can chill out and let her be confused by that. Most of this episode, in fact, we can excuse by Kara -- Friday the 13th! -- acting like somebody who didn't just lead two great races to their death on an imaginary planet only to find her own dead body there, except Kara's shown remarkable flexibility about impossible things until today. He smiles. "Of course. Of course, I know. There's too many layers... Just get the rest of them. Please tell them I remember everything. Earth. Why we're here. Everything." She stares. "I've seen everything." He is full of joy. 39,556 souls in the Fleet, after the mutiny; he's actually not kidding.
"There's no need to be shy! Tell her how it feels to be in the resplendent presence of one of the Fabulous Final Five." Ellen is as kind as a God can be: "He's taking a risk, exposing you to me. It's not easy winning his trust. How'd you do it?" Fucking -- "a certain rapport," which word, given the ugly payment she received on Galactica for her devotion to Adama, is entirely apropos -- and Ellen is as grossed out as a scientist can be. She and John fight over his "real" name, and she asks, bitterly, if John's taught her the Swirl yet. Not yet, but he's about to! The Twist, too. "If you'll excuse me, I have some people to kill," John coughs, and his mother laughs at him. "Why John, I think you're blushing!"
He turns this into a complaint about the human blood pressure of his human body, and tells Boomer to stay behind: No, no, no. You should stay. Stay and have a heart-to-heart with your creator here. You can ask her why she made you the way you are." She looks at Ellen. "Self-destructive. Hyperemotional. Torn apart by conflicting impulses..." Boomer makes a scary face, but it's borrowed rage. Some new dance to learn. "Tell her how extraordinarily happy this makes you." He leaves, but you know what? Boomer rocks. Sharon Valerii-Agathon rocks. It's Cavil that made her sad, put her into hell without any choices at all. What we are, what we do: very different options. Bringing her into his little one-person passion play is the best way of demonstrating just how many choices she has left.
From the platter she brought into the room, Ellen offers Boomer the apple. It's so much more than a simple recapitulation of the Eve story: Ellen is Sophia, another iteration of Eve herself, offering to share what she knows. "You know why he brought you in here? He likes an audience. Someone to nod when he talks about justice." She's only tying to help, to teach this model and love her into reality like she did so many times before: "Watch, Boomer. Make up your own mind." Boomer stares, terrified of just this, burned so many times she tried to do so; Ellen sits, bites into the apple, relishing it. Boomer does too but we can't see it yet: Queen me.
Kara looks down while her husband continues to talk himself into the grave, the rest of the Dylons standing watch like Boomer. "We all worked in the same research facility. You and Ellen, you were married then too. You two lived together," he says excitedly, pointing to Tory and the Chief, and even Galen laughs: "What, like roommates?" Hell, he looked gay to me too. Sam grins: "No, you were madly in love, you were planning on getting married." Kara laughs along with Galen; Tory's as nice as somebody could be once they've realized their life actually is a cosmic joke. Saul remembers what Ellen said, on Earth, about how they'd be reborn, and Sam nods. "Yeah, on a ship that we placed in orbit around the planet." They were "warned," he says, explaining that "organic memory transfer came from Kobol, along with the Thirteenth Tribe" but "fell out of use after our people started to procreate." They worked night and day to rebuild it; Galen's work was amazing, but it was Ellen "who made the intuitive leap that brought the system back online." Cottle worries about Sam's state, and takes him away over much protesting.
Lee enters the Quorum room on Colonial One, stricken. Laura's there feeling terrible and acting weird. "Look at this picture of Jacob, this is just a terrible picture, he'd hate it. I'm trying... I'm trying to find another one, because everyone will see it up on that Wall..." Lee -- in his maroon disco shirt of jurisprudence no less -- asks if this is the best idea, her being here where the senseless death is still pretty much all over the walls, and she's like, duh. "I definitely want to be here. It's such a... Senseless, horrible way to die. These people only wanted to try and keep us civilized. Sometimes I hated them, but I knew every one of them, and now I wonder who we are without them." As she flips through the photos, dropping the one of Jacob with Reza Chronides, Lee thinks.
"Actually, I've been thinking. We need a new Quorum. Or something else. These... These old planets," he says, holding up his own bloodied CAPRICA nameplate, "That's not who we are anymore. We're a Fleet now, and our daily lives are defined by the ship we're on. We're not Capricans anymore, we're from Galactica. We're from Colonial One," he says. "Maybe we should acknowledge that." Roslin sits and agrees, motioning him to sit, and asks him to take over the "heavy lifting," moving forward, and to assemble the new system of government. It's not easy for her to offer and it's not easy for him to accept; her one worry as she takes off her glasses and they both begin to weep is that he's "so hell-bent on doing the right thing" that he sometimes can't do "the smart thing," but she knows he's the right choice and always has been. "Well then, um, I'll try and be smarter. And wronger," he jokes, and she smiles. Then she coughs. They look at each other over the dead place.
Chief segues from talk about the old girl to talk about the old girl. Beams cracked, struts cracking, the length of the ship. "Frak me," says Bill; "These big cracks, it's a good, clean break, I can fix that, you just... Just don't jump her for a while. I can squeeze some more life out of her," says the Chief. They share horror over how many corners the builders cut. Bill doesn't look at Galen when he demands that the crew making these repairs be all-human, given the whole mutiny thang, but he feels gross about it. It's not the call he'd make otherwise, and he knows that.
Sam explains about the Final Fivers' choice to run back to the Twelve Colonies and warn them -- "We needed to tell them 'Treat them well, keep them close,' but by the time we got to the Colonies, they were already at war with the Centurions. It happened again" -- and further explains that they missed the boat by thousands of years because they were traveling at "relativistic but subluminal speed," so while they lived and stayed young, time was not slowed down for everybody else. Not a brilliant plan. He seizes, and Kara holds O2 over his beautiful, haunted face, begging him to stop. "Kara," he says, "I'm fine. I have to do this. You remember the Demetrius. You know what it is when you have something that you have to do." She agrees that she did; at one point she did. "Kara, if I had the answers for you... all the answers about why you came back, what you're supposed to do, you would want me to tell you, right?" Kara dares to hope, for a second, but he puts her straight, offering that maybe if he keeps going her part in all this will become clear. It won't, she's in a whole other layer, but they don't have any reason to know it. Frankly, we only have my word that that's true. Sam mentions the eight models, and Kara flips out, hoping just like Gaius once that she's one of them, but it's too late. He starts to stroke out, everybody starts glowing, "Watchtower" starts playing, and he goes into arrest.
Ten months ago, the sky exploded over the algae planet; Three saw God and went blind, and Galen recaptured Gaius for the Colonies after a half-season away with the faerie. Ellen laughs at Cavil, showing her these pictures, but his purpose is at least threefold: to show her what's happening and ask about her part in it -- which is nil, she even evokes the OTG to explain why Three saw and apologized to her in her last blinding vision, resulting directly in her second-to-last death, the second of Cavil's siblings he murdered forever -- primarily, but also to tell us what's going on in the "real" timeline, and final- and most importantly to segue into his big-ass speech.
"In all your travels, have you ever seen a star supernova? No? Well, I have. I saw a star explode, and send out the building blocks of the universe: other stars, other planets, and eventually, other life. A supernova. Creation itself. I was there. I wanted to see it, and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull, with eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum, with ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air." Ellen protests that he was designed to be human, as close to human as possible, but he shakes his angry young head. "I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear x-rays, I want to... I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly, because I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me." Equal parts beautiful and raging and hilarious, just like Cavil; Boomer stares. "I'm a machine. And I could know much more, I could experience so much more, but I'm trapped in this absurd body. And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way." Ellen's sad; he stalks away more upset than we've ever seen him.
Boomer comes around, staring. Ellen, exhausted and without looking, asks what the heck she wants. Boomer, still trying to be Cavil's perfect robot girl after three turns of the season at least, asks for Ellen's apology: "Don't you feel the slightest bit of remorse for what you did to him? What you did to us?" But rightfully, Ellen's not playing. "No. Because he's wrong, Boomer. There's no need for remorse or blame. We didn't limit you. We gave you something wonderful. Free will. The ability to think creatively, to reach out to others with compassion. To love." Whoops! That's how he burned her, over and over again. "Love? Who? Humans? Why would I want to do that? Who would I want to love?"
...Chief in the corridor, moving back from his creepy meeting with Bill to the sickbay, waiting on Sam. Saul's wigging because they apparently taught the Centurions both skinjobs and Resurrection; Tory's staring into space because none of this is her problem; Chief's reminding him that the Final Five also singlehandedly ended the First Cylon War: "We bought time for humanity, right?" Saul remembers the Old Man's speech from the mini, about owning up to what we made, and says that like it or not, "what we made" in this circumstance means "the destruction of the Colonies." Tory bullshittily and prissily reminds him that the humans on Kobol made the Final Five (and possibly the Thirteenth) to begin with, which is just barely true, so it's still "them." Dang, Tory. Pull it together. Saul -- proving once again that he's well beyond anybody else -- says that playing that game just takes you back past Iphigenia to "some germ ... splitting in two," and he'd prefer to feel guilty for stuff he actually feels guilty for: "Maybe we share the guilt with the humans, but we don't get to just shove it off onto them." That's precisely half the answer.
Inside, Hodgman/Gerard explains how the seizure is good because he was able to find the bullet because it pointed to its lodging. Sam nods: "Mm-hmm, the vascular ring, that's what binds the thoughts in tight sheaves in the field, you need that." Metaphor is all he can do right now, but Kara can't see it. She comforts and hushes; Gerard explains his plan to remove the bullet and repair the blocked artery ("if it happens again, we're talking major hemorrhage, I mean, death within minutes"), but Sam fairly quickly realizes this possibly (or, on TV, obviously) means no more memories or visions, and freaks.
"No no no then we need to hold off until I that circle start and then then then the words are..." Gerard explains to Kara that the language center is being messed with, but that's not exactly right either; Cottle bottom-lines her that there's a bullet in his head and he doesn't think that's really a problem and could she exercise her marital rights and take care of this. "We why wait what no that's not the first opening that's not that's not the random motor that's frak it Godsdamn it," he says, and pulls it together: "Kara, I'm okay. I'm fine. Okay? I'm okay. Please, don't take this away from me. I need more time, okay?" He begs, with his eyes; her heart breaks. She tells them to prep for surgery, because she's not selfish. She isn't going to wait for the Truth about Kara if it means killing Sam. She loves him. Even Sam can't believe that, begging for more time, and she nods sadly. "You have until they knock you out." He nods, dealing with that, and she tries to will him into relevance: "You have the words, Sam."
She keeps using that word, over and over, because that's what she's been fighting since she died, and even before: not "words," not the pathetic squeezed-down guttural utterances, but the pictures and the feelings and the smells and the beauty that they mean: the red, blue, yellow eye of the storm, in Remembrance wax and painful childhood and drunken painting. The later painting, of the comet against the planet that was Leoben come back to her in the detritus of the civil war. Every single godsdamn thing that happened on the stinking Demetrius was words and how they limit us. This is what Cavil was talking about; this frustration and her understanding of it is how she reaches out to Sam now: not the knowing, but the words. Nobody understands the knowing, or acting on the knowing: they need words. Calm and patient words.
Compress the world down into language, all those memories and truths into simple ugly utterances; simply accomplish that thing Gods and Oracles and Hybrids and Angels can't manage, and has almost gotten her killed every time she tried. That's all. She knows this part by heart. "If I can just complete the circle, I can get the words," he says as they wheel him away, trying to explain what's going on inside him; trying to use think science to talk about think reality. Thinking about thinking. Gerard's like, "He has a remarkably clear image!" He points at the scan, and her horrified face opens on him, like a flower.
Four months ago, the Hub goes down in a hail of fire; Boom joins John on his Baseship, the original one, where her Raptor still sits from before the civil war. He greets Ellen with a drink -- of all infinities, count on her love of liquor and Saul, two constants in a world of madness -- and stares down at her wigging. She takes him in, and looks over at Boomer as she clears the cobwebs away. "Something's happened," she realizes, and sits up in her bed, crossing her legs. She's been a hostage of hate for fourteen months; this is the first change in routine. She laughs at her son when he tells her what the 268s have done: "Begun contemplating your mortality?" She takes a drink; it belies her tone.
"More than that. Our extinction." She's sick of him now, reminding us that this isn't one long conversation but a year-plus captivity we're only seeing bits of, and hoping -- as they spend every conversation hoping -- Boomer's listening, taking it all on as she always does: "Always so dramatic!" Cavil gets as close as he's going to, to begging for her help rebuilding, reinventing resurrection, before this self-inflicted genocide finds them all. She's sick enough of him to wish him luck and grin.
"Don't need luck. We need your help. They destroyed the Hub, but they don't even know about the Colony. All your equipment is still there..." She tells him it takes Five, if it will work at all, and at his thrown fit promises she's telling the truth. "Don't insult my intelligence! Your children are dying, Ellen. And you won't lift a finger to save us? Why? Out of spite? Because I refuse to kneel to your orthodoxy?" God, she's so right, like the whole thing with Galen didn't prove it. Such drama! "Now you finally see the truth about your Final Five!" he yells at Boomer. Which is sort of sad, because even if I used to love Boomer I have to admit that going from getting your God's/Mother's approval to trying to get the most pathetic fucking person you know's approval is a drop indeed. Boomer's like, "YEAH! Tell us about ... that thing he is talking about!" Ellen's like, "To reiterate: I can't, you idiots."
Cavil starts screaming -- again, to poor fucking sadsack Boomer whose opinion wouldn't matter less if she was anything less than his fifth-iteration robot girl, if you can imagine that -- about how "see how she forces me?" and comparing her to "the humans that enslaved us," about which whole concept (God as despot) Sartre wrote at least five awesome plays I can't quote here because this is getting ridiculous, and threatens to quote "cut open your head." Ellen still loves him enough, as her son and creation, to be shocked by this. She says his name, once, quietly, catching up to what he's become. After all this, her capacity for shock is proof of her love for him, and makes me like her even more. Him, too: "The brain is a marvelous thing. It's a big electrical grid. Just lay it open, stimulate it in the right places, and I can trigger your deepest memory. Your deepest fears, your deepest guilt. And even the recipe for life everlasting."
Which the Colonials have done, without resorting to Simon's little drills and knives, by shooting Sam in his gorgeous head. Chief confirms that his old tormenter Brother Cavil was the first one they made, and Sam nods with no less love and disappointment than Ellen a moment ago:
"John. We treasured him. He helped us build the others." To be loved by one parent, much less five; to be treasured. Treasured. Poor John, to feel so twisted he would turn on that, to orphan himself. Poor anybody; poor everybody.
And they thought this was a good plan, Chief asks: "Building Cylons after we had already seen the cycle?" Ellen again, who thought the Centurion OTG they'd all come to love -- the OTG that treasured them -- would change the pattern forever. "If the Cylons embraced love and mercy then the cycle of violence could end." Chief's ears perk up, wondering as the son of an oracle and a priest at that, but Sam keeps going, as Ishay and Gerard and Cottle fix his tubes and keep him alive: "Cavil rejected mercy," he says sadly, recapitulating every myth we have -- and every myth they have -- on a new layer: "He had a twisted idea of morality. So he turned on the five of us. He trapped us in a... A thing. A... The pocket. It's a..." Layers. Find the word. Say the word. "Compartment. And then he took the O2 offline."
For John so hated the world that he killed his five parents, downloaded them into new bodies on the eve of their greatest peace and accomplishment. "He blocked our access to our books..." The word, say the word: "No, uh, our memories." Kept them boxed until the Plan was ripe, gave them false lives. "Introduced Saul first, not long after the War." Broken, drunk, self-hating, fighting memories of a war he never saw, hating a self he never knew. Playing the Kara card, right into Bill's heart, before Zak ever met her. Preparing the way: emulating all the qualities he'd respect. Telling Bill jokes, and he'd laugh at them. "And then the gazelle, the... the Ellen..." The Queen. Saul stares. "And back on Earth, the warning signs that we got, they looked different to each one of us. I saw a woman. Tory, you saw a man. Funny, no one... No one else could see them. Galen, you thought, you thought you had a chip in your..." Ishay shuts them down; playtime's over.
Kara jumps: "The Seven. Tell me. Please, please tell me." That was Daniel. Seven was the Daniel. "You sure about the word?" Daniel. "Yes. He died. Daniel died. He was Seven..." Kara nods, thinking she's put it together: "Okay, take him." Sam swears he's sure about that, and she nods, over Saul's protests. "Let him go now. Take him now." And as they wheel him away Sam screams to him: "Saul, listen to me. Saul, stay with the Fleet. It's all starting to happen. It's the miracle, right here; it's a gift from the angels. Stay with the Fleet! Kara, make 'em stop! I stood up for you on Demetrius! You owe me! Kara!" She feels terrible some more, but that's how this part works.
Saul goes home, mourning that Sam had more to say. Caprica wraps herself around him; he sighs and drops his head. They haven't had booze in their quarters since it started making her sick. I don't know when she moved in, but I'm guessing it was the second Bill found out she was pregnant; I can't know when she got pregnant but I'm guessing it was the day he fell in love with her, on his back as she was bashing his head in. That day, God was in more places on Galactica than He'd ever been before, and I know she felt it.
But now? She doesn't care anymore, about God or the Five; all that on Earth broke her as nicely and completely as it did everybody else. Her new hope is her miraculous body, the doomed destiny she's carrying within her. God and children: "Something new started. He's been moving, like he just came alive tonight." Saul's adorable and intrigued as she lays back. They wait for him to kick again, and Saul worries over the preparation of the way: cribs, "all the stuff that a baby..." Saul Tigh is so beautiful' never more so than when the child moves below his hand, and he gasps and giggles in childlike wonder. "I felt it this time! I did!" She nods, playing queen, overjoyed. "I felt my son move," he says, in wonder; he drops his head on her tummy. "He wants to come out and play," she chuckles, and Saul giggles, fifty years gone in a moment. They never existed. She teaches him to be whole. He kisses her bump, all over; a thousand kisses and a thousand joys. A gift, to replace all that New Caprica took. I don't think they'll ever know him.
Play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, and let the bells ring, let the bells ring! Play music now: play us a tune on an unbroken spinet. Do not make echoes of forgotten time, do not strike music from old broken keys, do not make ghosts with faded tinklings on the yellowed board; but play us a tune on an unbroken spinet, play lively music when the instrument was new, let us see Mozart playing in the parlor, and let us hear the sound of the ladies' voices. But more than that; waken the turmoil of forgotten streets, let us hear their sounds again unmuted, and unchanged by time, throw the light of Wednesday morning on the Third Crusade, and let us see Athens on an average day.
Two days ago, Ellen drew his face, perseverating on her one single joy across thousands of years, when the instrument was new. "That's a little dated, isn't it?" Cavil laughed. "He needs a patch over his right eye." Ellen remembers him whole, prefers to remember him that way, and John laughs: "Sentimental till the end. The Simons are prepping the OR, I think you'll be impressed with the progress we've made in memory recovery. It might take a while..." She's sure that it will, and be painful as possible to boot; he swears as they always do that he takes no pleasure in this. Ellen's so over it she's under it:
"Oh come on, John. Of course you do, you're a sadist. Why not just kill us and be done with it? Why send us to live among the humans?" After eighteen months of real talk and common sense, of watching him dick with her and vice versa, Boomer's finally watching for his answer. It tastes like apples. "I wanted you to see what they're like up close and personal. So I gave you all grandstand seats to a holocaust." And made sure you lived through it: "But we didn't die. And then you decided that we hadn't suffered enough, so you picked me up, put me on a transport. Took Galen's confession, played Resistance fighter with Sam. Tortured Saul but didn't kill him." And to save my love, knowing you could save him with the snap of your fingers: Fucked me, wearing my father's face.
"You had a dozen chances," she says as Boomer paces, "But you wanted to wait so that when it finally happened, when we'd download back, we'd be ready to admit we were wrong and pat you on the head for giving us the right amount of suffering, the right amount of punishment, all weighed out." Blood on the scales. Seven's the middle of Thirteen; Seven is Libra. I wouldn't kill Eric Stoltz but I wouldn't mind roughing him up a bit; in any case John's not liking this. "Then we could give you the approval that you've always craved." Boomer is like wait, what? Because what Ellen just described is her whole life. All the world she's ever known: that's John that did that, right down to the desperation for approval. Not God, not Ellen: Brother John Cavil, lover and father, anti-Adama, Archon and devil, subtle serpent, monster. He just flipped her. Dark with excessive bright: the hell within him.
"You see, you claim to be a perfect machine, but you are driven by the most petty of human emotions: jealousy, and rage." She weeps, shaking her head: "I know what you did to Daniel." Cavil shakes his head, in pretense. "That Seven didn't thrive. Sad. And it's too bad we're not made out of something more sturdy..." He pretends to think, a snotty teen, regressing further and further back with every month she's in the cage: "Metal! That might be nice." It's all for Boomer. Ellen's been playing power games with him since she woke up; now she talks to her directly. "Daniel. Was an artist. And so sensitive to the world... I was very close to him. But John decided I was playing favorites. Maybe I was..." For sure you were. That's how Bible stories work.
"Someone contaminated the amniotic fluid in which we were maturing all the Daniel copies. And then corrupted the genetic formula. I knew it was John. Envious, sadistic." Cavil totally changes the subject to how he's a total sadsack and blah blah: "If I'm so irredeemable, if I'm such a mistake, if I'm so broken, then whose fault is that?" It's your fault, you stupid motherfucker. Even Kara Frakking Thrace has figured this out, and you're like this computer genius robot thing? "It's my maker's fault. And that's not God, that's you! This is on you!" All I hear is wah, wah, wah. ( Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay to mould Me man? Did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?) But not Ellen; she's still kind and still manipulative, he hasn't taken those things yet:
"No, John. God, no! You... You have done terrible things. But you are not a mistake. If you could just accept yourself as what you are, as the boy I made? You can be good. You can be anything. I love you, John, because I made you." His face is just completely shut down. "It's okay," she says, stepping forward. And it looks like it's going to work until she reaches out to touch his face. He screams, the mood breaks, and he takes off: "I've gotta scrub for surgery. I can't wait to see what perfection looks like on the inside." He turns and leaves. Boomer's wearing her flight suit.
Chief shows Bill the damage you can't see: CSI-glowing hairline fractures all through her bones. Like a cancer, creeping through her. Bill cries out in grief, and the Chief offers something from the Cylon ship: "It's this organic resin. It'll grow into the metal, make it stronger. It'll take the load as it matures..." We call it Herapoxy. It shoots you in the compromised structural integrity! Bill realizes that it's alive, biological, and shuts him down. He stomps away, and Chief feels bad.
Gerard watches Kara whispering to Sam as he sleeps. "Sorry. I'm so very sorry. I was greedy, I kept you too long. I thought maybe I was the Seven... I need to be something. I'll be here as soon as you wake up, and I'll give you all the time that you want. We'll learn all the secrets, okay?" Gerard starts the surgery and Cottle tells her to leave. In his quarters, Bill starts drinking at a phenomenal rate. There's a huge slash across the wall, over his bathroom door. He gapes and drinks more.
"How do you stand it?" Boomer asks Ellen in her lovely dress, looking down at the picture of Saul, thinking of the Chief. "Knowing that he hates you for the things you've done?" Ellen thinks maybe he doesn't; maybe he never did. "Love's like that sometimes." A strength and a weakness. Boomer hands her a white surgical shift, courtesy of the Simons, and Ellen smiles mirthlessly. "A prop, to legitimize John's final bit of theatre. No thank you. You should have brought a tumbrel," she muses, and blows off Boomer's uncomprehending stare. The Terrors. Witch hunts. This has all happened before. Boomer leads her away.
Tory sleeps against a bulkhead while Saul paces, outside sickbay. One surgery to quiet memories and another to awaken them. They talk about the questions still unanswered ("I wanted to ask him about that frakking song," Tory grumbles, stirring) and then Cottle brings Kara the bullet from her husband's head. He'll live. Kara asks when he'll wake up, and the surgeon wonders why he hasn't already. The words.
"Boomer," Ellen asks, "Have you really thought about this?" Boomer, a bit of that old Galen humor poking through, assures her that she has. A Centurion accompanies them; not guarding exactly and not herding, but something holding elements of both. "You're going to regret your part in this," Ellen says, not hysterical and not frightened after a year and a half of solitude and disappointment, but holding elements of both. Boomer nearly cracks a smile: "I'm sure I will." Boomer leads her mother onto a Colonial Raptor, with the Centurion standing by. What is she's doing? "Forgiving you." For all of it. For this life. Raiders break away to follow them, but Boomer's already jumping.
When you're a pilot you can see the ground curve away, the way the world goes around and around. The flat Earth goes round on you, and you've gained a whole dimension to play in. Pawns move this way and that way, hedged in by the rules -- sometimes diagonal, sometimes en passant, like sleepers -- but not queens. It tastes like apples.
Kara swears to sleeping Sam that he'll be fine; "You got a room full of rabid Cylon-types that can't wait to hear the chapter of their life story. Think they're hoping for a musical. So you better hurry up and get better. They're starting to look a little mean..." She smiles down at him sweetly. Ishay tells her not to bother: he's not in there anymore. And Bill, finally drunk enough, calls the Chief, with liquor dripping from his chin. "Do whatever you have to do to save our girl." The Chief looks around, and agrees. Tom Wolfe says it best, again, about everyone and everything we've just witnessed:
Now they saw it -- its newness, its raw crudeness, and its strength -- and turned their shuddering eyes away. "Give us back our well-worn husk," they said, "where we were so snug and comfortable." And then they tried word magic. "Conditions are fundamentally sound," they said -- by which they meant to reassure themselves that nothing now was really changed, that things were as they always had been, and as they always would be, forever and ever, amen. But they were wrong. They did not know that you can't go home again.
America had come to the end of something and to the beginning of something else. But no one knew what that something else would be and out of the change and uncertainly and the wrongness of the leaders grew fear and desperation and before long hunger stalked the streets. Through it all there was still only one certainty, though no one saw it yet. America was still America, and whatever new thing came of it would be American.