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The first order of business for the new Quorum's Cylon delegate (Sonja Six: Demand Boomer's extradition to the Baseship so she can be killed for her role in the civil war.) Laura signs the papers with a flourish while Chief's mewling about it. His sleepytime visits to the brig have turned into incredibly gross shared projections of their onetime future together. Since she's now the scapegoat for two entire wars and neither the humans nor the Rebels are interested in her mess, Chief beats the shit out of a random Eight and hides her in the brig, sticking his girlfriend in a Raptor bound for Cavil's side of the war.
Of course, he does this without knowledge that: Boomer has been forced to knock the shit out of Athena and handcuff her, then stuff her in a locker so she can watch Boomer fuck Helo. Or that she has gone to daycare, snatched and drugged Hera, put her in a box, and loaded her onto the Raptor, presumably as a bargaining chip to get back on Cavil's good side. Boomer jumps, about a yard off Galactica's outer hull, killing people and wrecking all that nice work they've been doing with the Cylon Goo. Hera's thousandth kidnapping sends Laura into some kind of arrest, and Athena's not having a great day either.
Playing extraordinary renditions of her own -- both "Watchtower" and "Metamorphosis 5" are taken out for a spin -- is Kara Thrace. Wouldn't be a Starbuck episode without Weddle & Thompson, who manage to spend yet another episode running around yelling without actually accomplishing anything: Hera gives Kara a picture of thirteen stars she's drawn on a piece of paper, then Kara hallucinates and heckles some dude in Joe's Bar, where none of the other alcoholics find her behavior noteworthy. After rudely turning down a box of her old pre-death stuff Helo's managed to track down, Kara wanders around with an old recording of her Dad's -- Dreilide Thrace At The Helice Opera House, yeah you heard me -- and helps Slick the Piano Man work on his newest composition.
Eventually, Kara and the imaginary unshaven Days Of Our Lives man grow close enough to... pull some kind of retarded Goonies shit where the picture Hera drew goes over some sheet music, which reveals Chester Copperpot's home on Long Island or some shit. She plays the resulting four-hand song with her invisible Ghost Daddy somehow, and you realize she and Hera have just managed to write the Sam Anders version of "All Along The Watchtower" by way, I think, of the Philip Glass piece from Delphi. That -- despite the weakly symbolismistic emotional closure Kara apparently gets from playing an imaginary song written by a freaky three-year-old on a piano with nobody whatsoever -- is a legitimately cool moment that redeems much of this, as much at least as Athena's horrific response to Boomer's latest abuses. There's a sweetness to Kara having learned "Watchtower" at her father's knee, no matter what it means. So that's five minutes out of seeming hours that leads to an impossibly and pointlessly cheap Sixth Sense-style gotcha.
I can overlook the fact that projection has never behaved this way before -- the Vancouver condo with all the natural light puts it closer to the Gaius/Caprica/Angel shit -- and the Boomer stuff is sort of tightly ironic, given that the show started in the first place with Athena pretending to be Boomer. But the fact that her heel turn -- and random cruel rapey Helo-fucking -- basically comes down to the umpteenth fracking Hera Amber Alert? Or that Laura's cardboard Madame Airlock persona can once again thank her cancer for providing no depth to the character other than moving the plot along? Or the fact that Kara is once again just this corkboard for God that does nutty things for no reason so the grownups can interpret it? Or having Starbuck tell her imaginary father -- that is to say the actual father that she is imagining -- "My Gods, you're just like my father?" I mean, really. Or the brutal rewriting of having Helo (and Hera, for that matter) suddenly unable to recognize who his wife is and is not, i.e., basically to accomplish something that Chief was able to pull off with Boomer last week despite not having seen her in years?
It's not out of character because there is no "out of character": just the show you're watching. But it's not exactly enjoyable either, and heading into the home stretch as we are, a little more insight and subtlety in moving the pieces around the board would be appreciated. This just feels like slamming as many square pegs into round holes as possible, the better to make everything fit in the end, as unemotionally and literally as possible. Which is after all why I've hated every finale and demi-finale, which is worrisome moving forward. This particular writing team -- and thank God as usual for Nankin and the performers, especially Park and Sackhoff -- has always been better with plotting and action (and unceasing technobabble) than with believable or even particularly relevant emotion, but this one takes the cake: people doing things for no real reason, to no specific end, whilst yelling about what they're doing and why. There are some heartstopping moments, and a fair amount of interesting developments, but at this stage in the game it should feel much more like momentum than it does: four more hours, folks. Boom boom boom.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Slick the Pianoman unfolds the velvet over the keys of the piano in Joe's Bar and puts down his cigarette to play another tune. The lights come on in the racks and Kara Thrace rolls over; Hoshi on the PA says the same thing he says every day. In the mirror, in her locker, there's a dead girl in a flightsuit. It's like a waking nightmare, but on the top shelf of her locker, where she can't see them but she knows they're always there, are the dead girl's dogtags. She holds them in her hands every morning; they're burnt and scarred. The ones around her neck are shiny and fresh. The music sounds like a car, pulling away.
Observation lends existence. Nobody's paying attention to her. Her husband, her lover, her guide have left her, and nobody's looking. Her mission is the same this week as it was last week, and the week before: exist. Take a shower, get dressed. Cross off the dead planets in their star charts one by one, brief the pilots, sit with Sam, go to the bar, hold her hand against the flame of her lighter until she feels something. The whole Fleet had a trajectory, and it was taken from them on Earth. The something in the future was replaced with nothing, no place. Maybe the mutiny was just something to do.
The turkeys are flying CAP now; one of the Sixes raises a hand tiredly when called on. In addition to the CAPs they're also doing six-day rotations searching for planets. "The first one who sights a habitable rock will get this," Kara says in the briefing room. "It is the last tube of Tauran toothpaste in the universe. Gods know most of you need it." She can barely smile, now that she's made the joke so many times. Their mission is the same this week as it was the week before that, and the week before that. "Planet hunters, make sure to draw long duration provisions." The bins are big, plastic black things, heavy.
"If those clapped-out FTLs go down when you're out there, you're gonna get mighty hungry waiting for the SAR birds to find you." There aren't enough pilots, after the mutiny, for every Raptor to get an ECO. It's skeleton crews, six days out in the black. "Savor this alone time. But do not whack too much, we need you to conserve your O2." Kara practices that one, that joke about loneliness, in her rack. The repairs to Galactica will continue causing sporadic power outages. She repeats it to herself as she goes to sleep. "Our mission is the same this week as it was the week before that..."
Chief reports to Lee and Laura in Bill's office; even the Cylon goo will only buy a few more jumps. "But we're not ready to give up on the old girl just yet," Bill says, looking at Laura. Her hands shake; she pulls off her glasses with a headache, exhausted. Lee stands, anxious to get back to government, and welcomes the newly elected Sonja Six to the Quorum of Ship's Captains, who will be meeting week. She thanks him, but warns them all that their first request will be to pull Boomer from Galactica's brig, and take her back to the Baseship. Bill starts to get mad -- she did put two holes in him, and never seemed to feel that bad about it -- but Sonja explains. They don't want Boomer free, they want her tried for treason. Bill immediately understands, but she explains it to Lee: Sharon Valerii sided against the 268s, against the Eights, with Cavil. She directly contributed to his turkey shoot, away from the Baseship. The first sortie of the war. And now that they've lost resurrection, capital punishment means something. Chief can't even breathe: they're going to kill Boomer. Again.
39,556 human survivors in the Fleet, and it occurs to me that while I felt great sympathy and love for Boomer, for a very long time, I don't actually know if she ever did anything worth liking her for. She hid from herself until she couldn't anymore, lost among a world of enemies, and then tried to kill herself. When she was resurrected on Caprica, she did the exact same thing. She would have died, too, if it weren't for Caprica and Chip Gaius giving her the option of saving Sam, and telling her she had a chance to redeem herself. That led to DEMAND LOVE and New Caprica, which were pretty terrible ideas in hindsight. You know what they say about good intentions. And after that, she was a bitch to Athena, tried to snap Hera's neck, and ended up feeling just as crazy and trapped as she had the whole rest of the time. I don't blame her for going to Cavil's side, but it does bum me out that she was so warped and sad that she stayed there. She's never done anything in particular to earn her own salvation, and the truly gross part is she would agree.
It's not entirely out of character, but then she's never really had any options. Even being reminded of her free will by Ellen didn't really help, because in this new tense cold war, the two sides she'd prefer to be on both want her dead. That's her fault -- the second part, at least. I guess it's possible that a little more kindness from Bill when she landed last week might have helped, but I don't know that he had any options there. Getting Queened doesn't mean you win, it means you can see every marker on the board, and for Boomer there's no alternative route. The more free will you have the more room you get to look around and see how truly fucked you are. Ask Kara, about the weight of just existing.
There are tremors and lights flickering all around the ship; on the bridge Hoshi worries, and in the sickbay Cottle stares around. Ellen and the Six and Eight that are always there shiver, and Cottle tells them that, while the readings are going crazy, unprecedented and bizarre, there's still nothing to indicate Sam's actually thinking in there. The Six offers that his brain is possibly rebooting, reorganizing as it heals, and he darts a look at Kara. "The last thing we need is you jerking our chains with a lot of quack ideas. So why don't you take them someplace else?" They leave, an Eight wondering if he couldn't be hooked up to a datastream, like the Hybrids do. Kara strokes his hands, noting that his eyes are open, and Cottle tells her it means nothing. He asks her to pull it together and get used to her husband's vegetative state, but she's quite clear with him: there's not a way to do that. He promises he'll let her know if anything changes. Back to existing. She cries quietly and strokes Sam's face; there is a flourish on the piano.
There's a saying, old, says that love is blind
Still, we're often told "Seek and ye shall find"
So I'm going to seek a certain lad I've had in mind
Looking everywhere, haven't found him yet
Kara sits at Joe's, drinking, with a mirror by her side, echoing her tattoo back to her, the other half of her marriage insensate and unspeaking. She's irritated by the music, and yells at the piano guy. He clarifies that he's not "playing" the same lame-ass song, but composing it. "Been at it for four days now, it's hell." One of my chief issues with this script, as usual, is the tic where everybody talks like Wolverine: Like these actors aren't talented enough to interpret the lines in character. Gotta write them naturalistically as possible. Means a lot of dropped first words in every line. Been that way since the first season.
Kara drinks more and tells him to give up, what's the point, and Slick's like, "Um, to bring a little grace and beauty to an otherwise ugly and brutal existence." Kara lazily yells at him about the pointlessness of music -- of existence -- and retreats to the whole "how many bombs on Caprica did your music stop" place, which is obnoxious, and Slick's like, "So you're crazy and fucked up, I see." She admits, and wonders aloud how the heck that might have happened. Rafferty tells the bar it's last call, and Kara tells Slick to learn to actually play the piano before attempting immortality as a composer. She downs her last drink as he begins to play, something beautiful and sad, ethereal. Something different from his own work, something very well known in fact, to prove his skill. She doesn't look up, but she doesn't move either. The sound of the piano is amazing: like something broken that's been fixed many, many times.
The song continues as Chief works on the Galactica, staring across the way at an Eight, still alive and walking around, free, part of the new alliance. He remembers how much he loved Boomer once: the curve of her lips, the way she smelled. Boomer laughed at him: he sees her face every day! They kiss. And later, after she tried to kill herself, in the brig, having almost died himself, telling her that their love meant nothing. She was a machine, and he wasn't, and her love was never real. "Software doesn't have feelings," he hissed. Now he knows different. The other Eight applies compound to metal, unaware of how lucky she is, to be forgiven. To be free, working the deck. "How many of us ended up with the people we really wanted to be with?" He screamed at Bill. "Got stuck with the best of limited options?" He remembers Boomer, how she was gunned down, laughed at and screamed at, on her perp walk. How she died in his arms. "And why? Because the ones we really wanted, that we really loved were dead. Dying..." Her last word was his name. He's lost in the memory, shocked out of it when the power goes down. He jerks away and screams at his people.
Hera's in the Agathon quarters, drawing the sky, coloring in thirteen stars, waiting for Kara. Helo's excited when Kara arrives, with a box full of the pieces of Kara's life before she died. Anxious to get in there, fix her up, return her to normal. Find the thing she's been missing and give it back. And he's right: what she's missing is the girl she used to be. But giving it back won't fix her. She's not broken. Kara grins at Hera, and compliments her art. After she died, the pilots auctioned off her stuff, as they always do. He's spent the last who knows how long begging, buying, stealing it back. On top there's a DAT tape of one of her dad's performances: Dreilide Thrace Live At The Helice Opera House. A collector's edition. She picks it up, and Hera hands her the picture that she's drawn, and Kara tries to leave. She's grateful -- doesn't want Helo to think otherwise -- but the idea of walking through the corridor with a box full of some other girl, some irrelevant memories and painful ones, is a non-starter. She smiles winsomely at him, with just the tape and her drawing, and when she's gone Hera searches her father's disappointed face. It's hard to seem grateful for a gift you don't want, even when you are. She's too far gone. The sound of the hatch door closing is like a car pulling away.
He's the big affair I cannot forget
Only man I ever think of with regret
Boomer's lying in her cell, looks up to see Chief standing there in his deck gear. She can't read his face, so she stands up slowly and goes to the window. The guard watches her passively on the monitor and goes back to his NYMPH or whatever. When Chief finally picks up the phone, she thanks God for it, but he immediately says he doesn't even know why he's there. Her smile falls. "You know, when I shot the old man, the things that you said to me... The way that you looked at me... I thought New Caprica was a way to set things right." It could have been; it never could have been. "You can't force people to love you at the point of a gun," he says, looking Boomer in the eye. "I know that, now. But at the time I felt betrayed. So I wanted to forget you. And hate you..." Ran to Cavil, to the better machine, to a world where the Final Five stayed gone forever. Where the better machine said you couldn't even think of them, and it would never hurt again. "It didn't work. I've thought about you every day since that moment I died in your arms." The best lies are the ones that are true. The Chief nearly weeps. He admits his regret, the irony that goes too far even for him, for hating her for what she was. The lights flicker as she pushes her advantage: "I know. Galen, it's okay, really. I mean, the most important thing is that we both know who we are now." She reaches toward him, toward the glass, and asks if they can't make the most of the time they have left. He takes a while, but finally he reaches out, touching the glass on the other side.
I'd like to add his initial to my monogram
Galen's hand rests against the glass of their back door, their house on Picon. Sharon hums in the kitchen, arranging flowers. It is beautiful. Much more a home than Gaius's projection ever was. Galen's surprised, and Sharon explains that this is their home, the one they planned to build when they mustered out together. There's a wedding photo; he recognizes the place. She's wearing a lovely dress, white, with those enduring pink and brown polka dots that would have been in fashion at precisely the moment they first fashioned this house. He freaks out and runs, back to the glass outside the brig, begging her to stop. It's hard to seem grateful for a gift you don't want, especially when you do. The sound of the hatch door closing is like a car pulling away.
Tell me, where is the shepherd for this lost lamb?
There's a somebody I'm longing to see
I hope that he turns out to be
Someone who'll watch over me
Slick plays a new song, on a once-broken spinet, trails off into nothing, and hears Kara's snarky applause. He sighs when he sees her, but she grins. Some of that old fight back, that teasing grin that means she likes you. Is he making progress? "It's longer," she says, with that tiny doofy smile. "Lotta notes?" Slick makes the artist face and crestfallen says she must hate it. "I didn't say that," she says, sipping her shot, and he shakes his head. "You were savagely honest with me the other night. Why be diplomatic now?" He covers the keys, feeling caught out. She nearly laughs. "I'm not being diplomatic, you oversensitive jackass. I said I liked it." He's at first grateful, then asks why, harder. She puts down her drink, finally engaging. "Um...it's hard to put into words." Words. "...Made me think of... someone chasing after a car." He says that's what he was going for, but she knows it really was: a sense of loss. She stands up, wading toward him, toward the words. Excited for the first time in weeks. "That's what I meant, it's like losing someone that you care about. Their car pulls away." In his memory, he's sad. He focuses on her. "You chase them, but they're going too fast." She does know; he relaxes. The song is for her.
Across the bar, the Final Five are drinking green stuff. Chief's been denied the help of his people. "We're just gonna sit on our hands? Let our people kill her for vengeance?" Tory can't imagine them putting down some kind of formal decree, but Ellen's still in love with the idea of their children's free will. As she should be; as usual I pretty much agree with everything Ellen has ever said: "We can't interfere. We can't set ourselves up as Gods. The Rebels are the aggrieved parties, they have every..." All Chief hears is "can't," but there's more to it. They have the right to determine Valerii's punishment, as a war criminal and a hateful sister. "Boomer saved your life! You wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for her."
I'm a little lamb who's lost in the wood
I know I could always be good
This is Baltar's trial from another angle: just tell the truth and love the law, and the law will love you back. Ellen promises to testify to that effect, but it puts Galen into the position of Felix, long ago, when I stopped loving him. If you can't trust the law to do what you want, you must go further. Lie, kidnap, stab, whatever it takes to make the system do what you want. The Chief shakes his head, knowing they'll kill her, sure as hell. "We're all in hell," Saul grumbles, and leaves, too preoccupied for anything as stupid as fighting over the path of the woman who nearly killed Bill. The Chief swipes at him as he's leaving, but Ellen points out once again that the personal is not political: "He just lost his child, for God's sake." She runs too, leaving Galen alone with Tory, which is apparently worse than being alone. I really hope Tory gets one more good scene in the four hours, because man she's a punching bag. It's been so long since she was anything but a mouthpiece for the worst shit somebody's got to say that I barely care about her at all. But then, I used to like Boomer too.
Although he may not be the man some
Girls think of as handsome
To my heart he carries the key
Chief, left with nobody to talk to, is back with Boomer, asking how long she's been going there. I say, about a week into her internment on Caprica, with Three watching her every move. She watches his face, tells him it was her secret retreat; a way of feeling close to him. She implicates him in it, asking if he remembers how often they obsessed over it. Every detail, until it was almost real. He jokes with her, saying it was her nesting, her obsession, but she smiles and reminds him of all the floorplans he drew up. Building the perfect life. They fall back into old rhythms; she almost weeps with all the times she wanted to share this with him. How lonely it got, in that house without him. Even New Caprica was a house she built for him, like Leoben for Kara, and he killed her again and again. When they talked, it was about Cally and Nicky, about the family he'd built and run to, leaving her behind. It was all in her head, an engine for dreams, an engine she built with her blood. When it was over, she had no heart left. You pick a side, and you stick with it. The thing every Sharon has to learn; the thing she learned too late.
Won't you tell him please to put on some speed
Follow my lead
He gives in, and puts his hand against the glass. It's like a tattoo, reflected. She reaches out, even as he's shaking, and asks for his permission. He can't find the words; he nods instead, and she touches him through the glass. Galen steps out onto the balcony; Sharon wraps her arms around him, with a bottle of wine. The cherry trees are blossoming; it's always springtime here, in this Utopia, this no place at all. In the brig he smiles and breathes, and gives him. He takes the wine into the kitchen and fetches glasses; on the wall there are height lines, following a daughter's growth. All those years he wasn't there, with only Sharon to breathe live into that little girl. He heads upstairs, at her embarrassed nod, and heads into their daughter's room.
Her name is Dionne. (One of the Titans was named Dione; one of Saturn's moons is named for her. It's the feminine of Zeus's name, Dios, and she was Aphrodite's mother, but more interestingly she was the goddess of the oracle of Dodona -- from which we get the name of the New Caprica oracle who told Three that Hera was alive, and that Three's God was not so different from the Colonies' Gods: Dodona Selloi.) In the plaster handprint on her door, however, she's written her name closer to "Dromire," a form of the verb "to sleep." It's just a dream. It's the dream that kept Boomer alive, until she found her new trajectory. This part's straight out of the Leoben playbook too, if you think about it.
And from a nasty angle, it makes a certain elegant, ugly sense: if humans and Cylons and God weren't so obsessed with children and parents, children becoming parents, if humans weren't so obsessed with their creator and authoritative status as parents, if Ellen didn't still think of them as her children, maybe none of this would have happened in the first place. If Gods didn't eventually wear out and asked to be replaced -- if we didn't insist on changing and evolving every generation, if our societies stayed static, needing the same Gods as the week before, and the week before that -- maybe people wouldn't have to die in their name so often. Observation lends existence. He laughs; they laugh together, weeping. Boomer falls in love with him again, and for a moment stops pretending.
Kara's kicked up beside him now, with her drink and her feet on the bench, working through the first movement of his opus. Nobody seems to notice, in the bar, but whatever. He's stuck again, lost, but assures her it's just the hurdle. He had a trajectory, now it's gone: "The key is to, you know, not panic. Just trust yourself, something's gonna come. It's just part of the process." Existing. "Is part of the process also stealing from other composers? That piece that you're riffing off of, it's Nomion's Third Sonata, Second Movement." He stops, and she shrugs apologetically, but he admits it. "No, you're dead on the money. It's pronounced No-mayan..." But when he's stuck, he looks to the past, for his touchstone. For inspiration. "For somebody who hates music so much, you know an awful lot about it." She nods. It was never music she hated. "My Dad used to play." Slick treads carefully: was it the old story, he was a prodigy and forced her to learn, he was a perfectionist, she learned to hate it? He dares himself to hope it's wrong, and it is: that's not Dreilide's story, that's Socrata's.
Kara Thrace has hands, which begin to ache. Every finger, between the first and second knuckle.
"No. No, I loved it actually," she remembers, as he looks at her. "He used to sit me to him on the bench when he played... Smell of tobacco on his breath." She takes a drink, remembers little Kara at the keys of a small upright, playing the first bass chord of a song she used to know. "He taught me a few songs. I used to try so hard to get them right. Not because I was afraid he'd get angry, but because I knew he'd be so proud." And once he was gone, she only responded to rage, and violence. It became her language. Even Bill knows this. "There was this one song that he taught me. It made me feel happy and sad all at the same time." Slick knows -- "The best ones do" -- and she realizes she can trust him.
Oh, how I need
Someone to watch over me
Kara sleeps. There's a little girl, playing the upright, on an empty hangar deck, as slowly as she can. Kara, in her flightsuit, approaches, and touches the little girl's shoulder, but the little girl's gone. There's a dead pilot in her place. She wakes up, jerks away, shaking in sweat, and heads out to find Slick. He fidgets with the dogtags and watches her work it out. "How is it possible that I found my body, and I'm still here? I mean, what am I? A ghost, a demon?" Just a girl. Just a girl, existing. "You're asking the wrong guy. I'm just a piano player." She sits at his knee. "When I was leading the Fleet to Earth, everything seemed so clear. For the first time in my life. I knew what I was doing, why I was here. Now I'm just adrift again." Slick welcomes her to the human race. "Listen. You may feel like hell, but sometimes lost is where you need to be. Just because you don't know your direction doesn't mean you don't have one." We're all on a trajectory; she was lucky to know it, even for a second. She looks up, younger than before. Stronger, maybe. Maybe strong enough to live.
The Chief hovers over Laura as she reads through Sharon's extradition papers, begging her to stop, "as a personal favor." She hums, one of the million hums she makes instead of words: "Don't do that, Chief. Personal feelings are what Sharon Valerii preys upon, you know that. Better than any of us. You need to clear your head." She picks up her pen and he begs her to stop, let it ride, let Boomer rot in the brig, but she's not having it. This is the price of politics, which are always personal: "She is a danger in the brig, out of the brig. A danger to us, a danger to our Cylon allies." He nearly weeps; Bill can't meet his eyes. But Laura can. Cold as ice, because she must be. For the same reason you don't argue with a four-year-old or a widow in his grief, this isn't a conversation they can have. So she takes the hit, lets herself be the bad guy once again, takes up her regal raiment and looks him dead in the eyes, shaking her head in his marvelous face. "We're done here, Chief. You're dismissed." He leaves with tears in his eyes, as Sonja steps forward for the papers. Outside, he turns as though to plead again, stands in place with the guard watching, and heads away.
On the deck there's that girl again. Not a special girl, just an Eight like any other Eight. Only recently a person. Free to walk around, without ever having known love. Without ever having paid a single price. Her face is an insult. He picks a wrench up, turns a piece of equipment up, just enough to break the circuit, and in the dark he takes her down.
Slick slams the keys, startling Kara, who tells him he was heading someplace good: not drifting at all. Finding a trajectory. "Maybe you need to take a break," she says to his artist's drama: "Get yourself laid or something." That might dissipate the tension, he admits, and lights a smoke. She looks down at his ring finger, where a ring used to be, and asks if that's why she left. If Slick's a cheater, like her. If he had to do it, to make the pieces fit. He's ashamed, but admits the ring stayed on too long. "She didn't leave me, I left her." Kara looks away, because she knows this part already. If you could admit how much of your story you're writing, you'd never get out of bed.
Why did he leave? Because his wife wanted him to quit playing the piano. He was making decent money, but when their daughter was born, their special daughter, his wife said it wasn't enough. Tried to tie him down, make him get a real job. Stop creating, stop dreaming. Socrata loves Dreilide. And when she woke up he was gone. "I told her I might as well cut my heart out." We're all of us, somewhere inside, every age we've ever been. It's Kore talking now, as the lights flicker: "You start a family, the going gets tough, you ditch them? Did you ever stop thinking about yourself long enough to consider what you did to your kid?" When the lights come back, he's staring at her face, willing her to understand. To look at the flame in him and see the way it drives him on; she's the same. He didn't do anything to her, but she is her father's daughter. There's strength in that, and fear. He opens his mouth to speak.
As the lights come back on, Chief is fixing the camera screens in the brig control room; the guard assures him the locks are secure, and asks if he'd like to say goodbye to the prisoner. Slept right through it. "You gonna stay awhile?" the guard asks, lonely and bored. "Word is they're shipping her out tomorrow." The Eight in the rack, facing away from the camera, bleeds. Boomer walks down a corridor in her clothes.
"So maybe what your old man did was wrong, but he still left you with something," Slick reaches, staring at her back while she shakes: "He taught you how to play the piano." Which means nothing. It's hard to seem grateful for a gift you don't want anymore. She stopped playing after he left; her fingers ache, between the knuckles. He tries another way: "What about that song? That song he taught you, the one that makes you happy and sad at the same time? Play that for me." She reacts in anger, but really it's fear, because that's all anger ever is: the door she closed, coming open. Admitting who she's talking to, and what he took. All she's chosen to forget.
"Even if I did, I wouldn't. That son of a bitch never came back. He never called, he never wrote..." Wooden and silly, as usual, not to mention a ripoff of Lee's entire retroactive history with Bill, but whatever because the line is golden: "So you quit playing to punish him?" Very good point. An essential point, not to mention the only line of worth in these scenes, as written. Good acting can save almost anything. "Come on, play me a song. It won't hurt. Come on. Come on, I'll show you. It's easy." Dragging her slowly back to him, like a father, laughing, making her laugh: "Come on, don't make me hurt you. Here we go. That goes there..." He takes her wrist in his hands; she smiles, and remembers. "And that goes there. Go ahead." It hurts too much. Music never solved anything. She plays three notes, and begins to weep. She wipes the tears away, like a girl; he murmurs soothingly and she begs him to play instead. "I'll play. I'll play if you play," he says. This is why he's here.
The showers are down, so Athena's down to sponging herself off in a sink before her six-day flight, and not looking forward to it. When the Eight comes in, Athena's relieved, hoping she'll be able to get a shower in time. But when she turns -- when she sees the girl's face directly -- she recognizes her immediately. But by then it's too late. Boomer takes her down.
The showers are down, so Boomer's reduced to sponging Athena's blood off herself in a sink. Helo enters, coming in behind her, flirtatious and sweet. "You didn't think I'd let you go on a six-day mission in deep space without a proper goodbye, did you?" Boomer laughs uncomfortably, but he's insistent. "flight team's not suiting up for another twenty." Her eyes dart to a toilet stall nearby; he doesn't notice, he comes on strong: the curve of her lips, the way she smells. How would Athena do this? She swam in the stream, once; the Eights know how she touches him. She runs away and he grabs her; she laughs again, to put him off. When he asks if something's wrong, when his brain starts working for a second, she grabs him and kisses him roughly; he pulls at her shirt.
At Joe's, Tory thinks for a second that Saul's drunkenly talking about something that matters: "Cottle was right. I never should have insisted on seeing him. His eyes were open. I wasn't ready for that." She's about to nod: "Little guy was looking right at me." He's talking about Liam. He's still talking about Liam.
Helo pushes her against the wall, and she shoves him back, kicking off her shoes as he pulls off his shirt and tosses it near the stalls. It falls at Athena's feet; she's bloody and gagged, slowly waking up in a nightmare. Flickering lights, indistinct shapes that resolve into a pair of people, fucking. And then one of them is her husband. And the other is the girl who tried to kill her daughter. He kisses her tenderly, and she begins to cry out, and in the flashing light, Athena silently weeps.
Kara gets frustrated, playing, and he tells to her keep going, but there's something missing. He nods: it's the left hand. He noodles around, looking for the chords, and he starts to annotate it on his staff paper. Kara thinks of Hera, the diligence with which she drew the stars, and pulls out the paper, unfolding it. He writes them onto the staffs as well. "Play the bottom, okay? Just come in when you think you're ready." She nods; for a moment as he's playing the bass it sounds like the record she owned in Delphi. She begins to pick out the melody. Boomer fetches Hera from daycare, shoving a sippy-cup in her mouth before Hera can even notice who she is. She tosses an apology over her shoulder, excuses as she's leaving. Hera drinks deep. Saul notices the melody of the song Kara's playing, and his eye goes wide.
Boomer's trying to load a crate of the long-duration provisions into her Raptor; nobody notices. Our mission this week is the same as the week before. The Chief helps her load it; she begs him to be careful. There's life inside.
Slick and Kara kick into it, playing with confidence. Right on time, they hit the crest together: it's "All Along The Watchtower," gorgeous and full. Saul and Tory stare, recognizing the song. And when he's played the last note, Dreilide holds up one finger like a gun, for his daughter to blow the smoke away; Kara remembers, beautifully, and smiles at him. He touches her face as she recognizes him. She thanks him for visiting, calm again, with a smile and a laugh like a fresh wind. The cruelest thing about free will is knowing you've got your whole life ahead of you, and no trajectory but what you decide.
Not the Arrow of Athena, not the leader of the search, not the harbinger of the apocalypse: just a girl. To exist. That is an incredible amount of pressure. Kara's smart enough to live through it, but I don't know that Boomer is. She hasn't been so far. In order to be the man or woman you choose to be, you have to know the moves and be brave enough to make them. And then he is gone, as Saul grabs her and demands to know what the frak she was playing. She mumbles about her father, looking around for him, but he's gone. Tory snatches at the notes, the stars, and demands to know who wrote them. I've been waiting for Kara to get looped into the whole Hera thing since before she was born, but I mean, she was a very busy girl.
On the Raptor's wing, Boomer asks Galen to come with her, swearing she can't survive out there alone. He knows she can; promises they'll meet again when the heat's off. The best lies are the ones that are true: "There's something I want you to remember. All the things that I said? About us. I meant them with all my heart." He's moved, searching her face. She's still human enough to be ashamed. "So no matter what happens..." He kisses her, here and there, in the house on Picon where it's always springtime. The no-place, where there are no rough spots, and their future wasn't taken away at the barrel of two guns. He leaves, before weeping.
Helo's running gun tape in the briefing room, calling out pilots for their dumb moves, when Athena pushes her way through the hatch. She's nearly naked, covered in bruises and cuts, barely standing. He jumps across to room to her side as she goes down; she fills him in quite succinctly: "In the locker room, it was Boomer. Did she get Hera?" Helo orders the pilots, the Six, to get a med team and alert CIC. "Let them know Boomer's loose. She's got my frakking kid!" He holds her close, and she lets him, as she screams. Her fists rise and fall, beating against his back like a drum.
Laura wakes up as Hoshi stalls Boomer on the flight deck. She gets nervous, and starts up her systems. Adama picks up the mic and calls her out by name: "Boomer, this is Galactica Actual. Return to checkers red and shut down." She nods, murmurs "Copy" guiltily, but turns her engines on. In the back, the crate shakes; Laura's head jerks up in her quarters. Bill's sad, and quiet, as he hoshis the CAP into position to intercept her. "If you launch, Boomer, I will shoot you down." She tells him she's got Hera onboard, and Laura's eyes grow wide, staring at the wireless. Saul runs in yelling about how she can't leave, and Bill hoshis to close the flight pods, which are apparently those arm things on the side of the ship. Hoshi notes that she's spooling up, and if she jumps she'll tear the ship apart, but Bill tells him again to retract them. She slips sadly out through the crack opens up, and Hotdog moves in to intercept, begging off-radio for her to stop, do anything but jump. She does, blowing a hole in the side of Galactica. Everywhere is smoke and shit, people falling down, tiles and pieces of the bulkheads cracking off and falling on people. Sickbay shakes and goes nuts. Bill feels her dying around him, and begins to cry. After all that. Laura falls, back and down, and collapses on the floor. CIC is black and groaning. The medics feel for Laura's pulse, and call for backup.
Chief runs around, saving the world, getting everybody going on repairs, when he notices Athena and Helo yelling at a deckhand, Dealino. The last thing he should say is, of course, the first thing he says: "But one Eight looks like another!" Instead of shooting him in the gut, day she's had, Athena just keeps asking WTF a kid was even doing going on a Raptor. Chief asks a knuckledragger what's up, and she fills him in. "Took Hera and just walked right out of the daycare." He stares up, feeling the same guilt as ever. All the times he covered for her before she shot the old man, back around again. He stumbles away, going crazy, while Athena and Helo continue to scream at the guy.
Ellen and Saul sit in the daycare, looking through her drawings. Ellen's exhausted. "Had to be orchestrated from the beginning. My escape, all of it. I was just a means to get Boomer here. Cavil wanted Hera, Boomer got her for him." It's just that cut-and-dried this week, as everybody gets shoved into position: "Hera's plugged into something that's manipulating all of us. Maybe Anders could help us." If he ever wakes up, Saul nods. And in sickbay, Kara plays the Opera House recording for him, lying against his chest, praying for relief. There's nothing worse than drifting, when you're a pilot, until you give in and remember to breathe. It's terrifying to exist. Chief wanders, running through the house on Picon, as the music gets louder, like a car driving away. She's not there; you can't even smell her there anymore. He runs out to the patio, back inside and upstairs to Dionne's room, but she's gone.
She was never there.