for you I bleed myself dry
I watched Endgame and Rising Star together, which was a bit like watching Leaving Las Vegas and The Princess Bride in one sitting.
Rising Star is a happy ending on so many fronts I never expected. All in one episode, John secures amnesty for his crew by outwitting the acting President, gets named President a new and extrememly powerful alliance, is reunited with his father, and gets married to Delenn. Garibaldi and Lise are reunited. Londo laughs and it's a brilliant, joyful thing, and he cares more about his strange relationship with G'Kar than he does about being emperor and at the end of the episode, Londo and G'Kar are sharing a drink after the wedding and G'Kar is eating the rice and they are funny and easy and it's amazingly well done. The alliance endures and Babylon 5 endures because things that are built and loved endure.
But even in Rising Star, the tragedy of unrequited love hits you square in the chest and you lose all your breath all over again. Lennier asks Delenn if she heard what Ivanova said, that all love is unrequited, and Delenn touches Lennier's face in this deeply tender moment and says, "She was wrong, of course," and Lennier's expression here kills me, because his very heart knows Delenn is wrong, and still, he says, "Of course."
There's no quick patch that can go over the wound of Endgame. The last words of the episode are Marcus telling Ivanova he loves her, and he lays his head down on the pillow beside her and closes his eyes. Ivanova's happy ending is to be promoted to Captain and to stare out at the dark, black sky, trying to find the path of her heart. Ivanova's big scene in Rising Star is full of tears and that sharp edge of Ivanova humor - laughter at the mouth of darkness opens up to swallow her - as she tells Stephen she thought she heard God's voice and he had an English accent just like in the old movies and then she comes back to the living world in enough time to watch Marcus sacrifice himself for her and she can't do a thing but wake up with regrets. So many regrets about her own fears, of seeing what she wanted, someone who loved her and wouldn't hurt her and wouldn't leave her and being too afraid to do anything but give Marcus grief. But we know he loved the grief she gave him, he loved every moment with her, and maybe he sacrificed himself to atone for the part of his life that came before the way Delenn thinks he might have done, but maybe he just loved Ivanova so much he wanted her to live no matter what it cost him.
Love makes you stupid. Aeryn Sun knows it, and it's my tag for Battlestar Galactica for a reason, and now Ivanova knows it, though I would have spared her that knowledge. Maybe she knew it all along.
Rising Star is a happy ending on so many fronts I never expected. All in one episode, John secures amnesty for his crew by outwitting the acting President, gets named President a new and extrememly powerful alliance, is reunited with his father, and gets married to Delenn. Garibaldi and Lise are reunited. Londo laughs and it's a brilliant, joyful thing, and he cares more about his strange relationship with G'Kar than he does about being emperor and at the end of the episode, Londo and G'Kar are sharing a drink after the wedding and G'Kar is eating the rice and they are funny and easy and it's amazingly well done. The alliance endures and Babylon 5 endures because things that are built and loved endure.
But even in Rising Star, the tragedy of unrequited love hits you square in the chest and you lose all your breath all over again. Lennier asks Delenn if she heard what Ivanova said, that all love is unrequited, and Delenn touches Lennier's face in this deeply tender moment and says, "She was wrong, of course," and Lennier's expression here kills me, because his very heart knows Delenn is wrong, and still, he says, "Of course."
There's no quick patch that can go over the wound of Endgame. The last words of the episode are Marcus telling Ivanova he loves her, and he lays his head down on the pillow beside her and closes his eyes. Ivanova's happy ending is to be promoted to Captain and to stare out at the dark, black sky, trying to find the path of her heart. Ivanova's big scene in Rising Star is full of tears and that sharp edge of Ivanova humor - laughter at the mouth of darkness opens up to swallow her - as she tells Stephen she thought she heard God's voice and he had an English accent just like in the old movies and then she comes back to the living world in enough time to watch Marcus sacrifice himself for her and she can't do a thing but wake up with regrets. So many regrets about her own fears, of seeing what she wanted, someone who loved her and wouldn't hurt her and wouldn't leave her and being too afraid to do anything but give Marcus grief. But we know he loved the grief she gave him, he loved every moment with her, and maybe he sacrificed himself to atone for the part of his life that came before the way Delenn thinks he might have done, but maybe he just loved Ivanova so much he wanted her to live no matter what it cost him.
Love makes you stupid. Aeryn Sun knows it, and it's my tag for Battlestar Galactica for a reason, and now Ivanova knows it, though I would have spared her that knowledge. Maybe she knew it all along.