Ghost Ship Meta, DVD Commentary Style (Disc 1 of 2)
When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a cloud of stars.
And then the last bits, of course, are from Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy, in which Hamlet contemplates suicide and asks the big question: if life on this side is so horrible, why not take your chances with the other side? Which I think begs the question: what’s the difference between the two?
“I should really pay Gaius a visit,” Felix says, crossing his arms. “Tell him not to name one of his kids after me. Because he is going to name one of his kids after me, isn’t he?”
Which I believe Gaius will do, and which I also believe really would annoy Felix to no end. Also, I used “Felix” rather than “Gaeta” in the preceding passage because we see Felix somewhat vulnerable there, sharing that the other side doesn’t have some things this side does. I don’t know why I used “Felix” here. I probably just wasn’t paying enough attention.
Dee shrugs commiseratingly. Then she narrows her eyes and says, “Of all the people you could visit, you want to visit Gaius Baltar? I’m sure Hoshi’s still pretty pissed that you asked for Baltar over him before your execution. Wouldn’t doing that again be rubbing it in a bit much?”
Gaeta sighs and lets his shoulders fall. “I don’t want to drive Louis crazy. Gaius sees dead people all the time, and he has a big enough ego that he thinks it’s more likely that he’s an instrument of God than completely nuts. He can handle it. Besides,” Gaeta pauses for an awkward moment. “I want Louis to move on, have a life. Going back, seeing him having a life without me…it’s like when you see Kara, Sam. You feel the loss of all those possible bright futures together so much more acutely.”
Oh, this part hurts, but I think it’s accurate. It would be torture to go back and see what he’s lost, and it would hurt Louis if Felix didn’t just let him go start over.
Dee bites her lip. “If I could choose anybody, I’d go see the Admiral. He needed me to talk sense into him, and I wasn’t there for him.”
Notice that Dee’s wish has nothing to do with the future. Even now, she can’t see a way to have a “bright future” the way Gaeta does.
“He wasn’t there for you,” Gaeta says, crossing over to her and putting his arm around Dee’s shoulders.
Though not the main reason behind the mutiny by far, I do think Gaeta was angry at Adama and his lack of leadership in relation to Dee’s death, considering the way he was staring daggers at Lee Adama outside the morgue. In Gaeta’s mind, maybe if Adama had been the man who’d given them Earth to hope for back after the original attacks, Adama could’ve given Dee something to hope for enough to keep her going after Earth.
“Still,” Dee says, slipping away from Gaeta and kneeling beside Sam’s tub. “If we had known what we do now, do you think we would have given up on life so lightly?”
“‘Lightly’? It was hardly ‘lightly,’ even for you,” Gaeta argues. “But I know what you mean.” He turns to Sam. “Don’t get me wrong-it’s beautiful on the other side; beautiful doesn’t even begin to describe it. You’ve started to see the patterns, but you’ll see so much more-how poetry and mathematics are really two sides of the same coin, how everything…fits. How nothing is ever really lost. But…” Gaeta pauses again. “But. There’s nothing new under our sun. All the possibilities, all the change and randomness and risk-that’s all on this side.”
Gaeta sneaks in a couple allusions here. The obvious one (to me) is a twist on Ecclesiastes’s “There is nothing new under the sun,” though the author of Ecclesiastes is saying exactly the opposite of what Gaeta’s speech is doing-Ecclesiastes is sort of doing his own version of “This has all happened before, and this will all happen again.”
The one with the more interesting history is “Nothing is ever really lost.” When I wrote it, I was thinking of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wind in the Door, after the cherubim (yes, he’s a plural), Progo, is un-named (essentially, un-created), but the kids agree that because they remember Progo, he can’t ever truly be un-created and lost.
Then emmiere commented that the line reminded her of an L’Engle quote about nothing that is loved ever truly being lost, so I went hunting for the exact wording of the quote, thinking it was from A Wind in the Door. Lo and behold, I discovered two interesting things:
1) "That every life is noted and is cherished/And nothing loved is ever lost or perished" is actually from L’Engle’s A Ring of Endless Light, not the book I was thinking of, even though the theme still holds true.
2) Even stranger, it turns out that I didn’t just make up the phrase. “Nothing is ever really lost” is the first line of Walt Whitman’s “Continuities,” a poem which I may or may not have read at one point but have no memory of. So maybe it’s not as hard to tap into that collective unconscious as I thought? ;)
“That’s why he said he wouldn’t trade those five years on Galactica and New Caprica for anything,” Dee tells Sam.
“That’s one of the reasons,” Gaeta mumbles, staring down at his hands.
I’m ambivalent about this line. On the one hand, I’m glad I left it ambiguous as to why exactly Gaeta is looking at his hands, because I think it’s pretty easy to figure out that at least one of the other reasons is Louis. I very briefly flirted with the idea of including a snippet from “Unchained Melody” (from Ghost) into the Hybrid interlude for this section, but I thought that was too much and couldn’t find a good passage that fit (and nearly died laughing at the image of Gaeta and Hoshi making pottery together). On the other hand, I think I could have been a little more explicit with the connection that Felix is thinking about the fact that, even though he could physically touch Louis in his current angelic condition, he can’t because it would emotionally hurt both of them too much. That was my attempt at weaving in part of prophetkristy prompt that Dee and Gaeta couldn’t touch anything but each other without going so far as saying they literally couldn’t touch anything else, since if they’re the same thing as Head!Six (which maybe they are, maybe they’re not), they could.