By Jacob
"For a moment of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars -- pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time." That's pretty much what it's like. On the one hand you're looking at the last episode of the series, before the finale, so it's mostly ligature and following up on the chess moves of the last two weeks. On the other hand it's by personal fave Michael Taylor, with Olmos directing, which means even if it were a frenzy it would be beautiful. But it is, of course, meditative and lyrical: Watching the story weave Saul's forgotten F5 history, no-longer-neurotypical Sam, Bill's innate atheism and inability to let go of his ship, Kara's life and death, Boomer's thousand regrets and Laura's concept of "home" into a fairly well-formed equation is a trip indeed.
So Kara wanders around peeing in front of people and offering Sam some Kevorkian therapy before a well-timed piece of Baltar Bullshit and a sweet little speech from Lee help her pull it together and stop making her existential issues everybody's problem. Gaius blows her spot about being a zombie, on the way to his usual religious crap, but nobody even really cares. Meanwhile, the 268s have plugged Sam into a Hybrid tub in the hopes of rebooting him, but instead he Hybrid-connects himself to the Cylon goo and is now pretty much Battlegod Godlactica. The Colonel reacts to this with some gritty annoyance.
The Opera House dreams are back, and of course Athena's completely undone anyway. (To review: prostituted, raped, imprisoned for years, forced near-abortion, kid died, whoops kid kidnapped, shot in gut by husband, kid kidnapped, nearly raped, kid kidnapped, husband raped, kid kidnapped.) Since there's nothing left to throw at Athena, the heartbreak is coming from Helo this week: trust me when I say you do not ever want to watch Karl Agathon beg for anything, especially a suicide mission to find his lost daughter. It's overwhelmingly sad.
Boomer spends the flight back to the necropolitan freak show that is the Colony trying not to throttle Hera. At some point, bored out of her mind, she decides to project that gross house on Picon... Only to find Hera in there with her. Away from the drudgery of kidnapping, those two crazy kids find out they have more in common than they thought, and when she finally hands the child over to Cavil for vivisection, they are both bummed.
And overlaid across all of this is the story of sixty-something repair crew -- half Cylon, half human -- who die after another huge hull-breach. (Thanks, Boomer!) After a self-sacrificing Six gives Dealino some perspective and a dying Eight nudges Saul toward accepting his forgotten past, we're treated to a truly beautiful funeral in which the Final Five and Rebel Cylons, the Gaius people, and the Admiral and his crew each say their goodbyes to the fallen deckhands. That shit alone is worth the price of admission.
So: Bill literally says that destiny and the God(s) can go frak themselves, Caprica makes Gaius cry and feel crummy, Lee makes Kara cry and feel great, Sam is magic now, Saul feels responsible for the 268s, Boomer might actually get it together, the Fightin' Agathons are completely fucked right now, and Laura's not got a lot of time left. What she does have, though, is a joint of that righteous New Caprica kind bud, so she totally smokes Bill out in sickbay preparatory to rambling about her cabin for awhile.
Moving forward: the rapidly failing Laura talks to Bill about abandoning the frakked-up mess that is Galactica in favor of using the Rebel Basestar as a military HQ. At the new Quorum, Franks (the pretty lady from Gaius's trial and Tigh's wife IRL) leads the charge to take Galactica apart for her pieces -- pretty much reversing Cain's first mistake, which is nice. So Bill cries and drinks and froths all on the mouth -- there's even a scene with crazy and white paint, though you'll be happy to know that at no point in this episode do Bill Adama and Leoben fuck -- but of course, eventually he gives in. Tigh balks, but Bill just hands him yet more crunk and promises to send the old girl off in style.