any way the wind blows
Sometimes A Great Notion
I have absolutely no idea how to write this recap. Also I clearly have to start the next episode right now so it’s going to be really short. The episode has all the feel of the other supporting character swan songs, with Dee doing the voiceover and coming to the forefront and with her eventual suicide mirrored by both Laura and Bill before, with Kara’s cremation of herself, and then Three and Tigh after. But it is still absolutely horrible and shocking. And then incongruously possibly
very exciting.
I don’t read Dee as having an illness of which this is usually the last symptom, and I don’t think the show is supposed to read that way. Things are never going to get better, so she’s going to make herself feel really good for one day, and then Dualla out. And I hurt for her and I’m angry with her all at one. It’s her life to give up, it is, but she matters to all of these other people and to abandon them like this when they are already grieving a lost dream is incomprehensible to me. I just don’t understand. Which is true to life, you never understand why someone does it, even if you can take stock of everything around them and recognize that it’s pretty awful.
Dee doesn’t think she matters to any of these people, or maybe they just don’t matter to her. It’s the supreme demonstration of Dee’s capacity for self-deception, and her conscious knowledge of its limitations. She believed in Earth because Bill said it was real, and that was her goal. She decided who the Lee she knew was, and she made herself believe Lee was in love with her when she knew he wasn’t.
Especially Lee. So much of my concept of their relationship has been about what clearly wasn’t there. But, there were some good times. There had to be something. Maybe they could have been friends. They didn’t split up over violence or a betrayal or an enormous change, they just didn’t love each other the way they wanted to. But Dee decided he was the best she was ever going to get and she doesn’t want to try again. We see him through Dee’s eyes in this episode - hearing the politics second-hand with only the heroics and none of the awkwardness and ego and failures; standing in the amphitheater as if that’s where he belongs (when the whole point of the scene is that he doesn’t), charming and bashful and kind without the cruelty or the self-centeredness or the hardness we’ve seen of him, and which will pop up when she leaves him in this most final way.
Dee isn’t the only character who’s lost her way, though. All those people who trusted me, they’re dead. But Bill isn’t, Bill is right there and he trusted her more than anyone and he needs her and she’s giving up and it’s such a reversal from where they’ve been before. She wasn’t sure about the gods, she wasn’t nearly as sure about herself as she let on, but she believed in Earth in an unshakable way and it’s been destroyed by radiation and she’s not going to submit herself to that. I think Laura’s hopelessness has a lot to do with Bill’s awful breakdown - normally he would go to her and she would comfort him and recognize that there’s nothing they can do for Dee but think of maybe something they can do for the others. I was so angry with Bill for walking out on her when she’s giving up on life, on Pythia, on her job as president, on all of it.
I wasn’t angry with Gaeta for leaving Dee in the room, though, I didn’t expect it either, and she really does seem fine, maybe just a little cheerier than usual. Of course looking back that’s the thing that he’ll tell himself could theoretically have tipped him off, there’s no reason to be fine, except maybe the way it looks like she has some hope of getting her marriage back together, but there’s no way he could have known. He’s going to hold this against himself forever, oh, sweetie.
I don’t think this is fridging, it makes perfect sense with the story and with Dee, but I’m grateful that we’re clearly going to see the effects of her death on the people who cared about her. I don’t think she mattered much to Adama, but she’s still a member of his crew and her death is more the thing that pushes him over the edge than anything else. But Lee, Dee still mattered to him even if they weren’t in love; she and Felix always seemed friendly if not like genuine friends; if Hera goes to her so easily she’s been friendly with Sharon and Helo and babysitting the child and this is a type of death they’ve never had to deal with. It’s completely, unquestioningly self-inflicted and can’t be explained away as courageous or honorable or in pursuit of a real goal. This might not be the long-term horror that losing the dream of Earth was, but it’s a giant blow in its own way.
The Cylons being the thirteenth tribe is the thing that you know, you know the minute before they say it, but it doesn’t make sense. Oh that is so fucked up. Because what, then the twelve tribes are as different as human is from Cylon? But. “Planet was nuked about 2000 years ago,” when we know the Cylons we know of were only created 60 years before. I mean, I suppose the way Kara jumped around in space and time suggests that that doesn’t have to be quite right. So they are way in the future and oh my God, I almost wonder if the Cylons went from Earth to Kobol to the Colonies and back again because all of this has happened before. I’m kind of guessing that humans will have nuked Earth somehow just to mirror the Twelve Colonies? I really have no idea how that would work, though. A 100% good thing that happens on Earth is that Baltar is just useful again.
The flashbacks for the younger three Cylons are only meh even if OMG HIPSTER GLASSES TYROL. Doesn’t he look like Matthew Yglesias (but IMO handsomer)? But they make sense to set up what I think. What I hope. Oh, I hope they are memories and not hallucinations.
OMG KARA OMG. Is she a Cylon? She can’t be that, they’d have noticed back in The Farm. But she’s…something. Of course she stacks her corpse up in the water and burns it. She is a valkyrie - the warrior, the wise girl, the chooser of the slain, the harbinger of death. (I am kicking myself for not getting that one. The Wiki entry actually feels Kara-spoilery.) Kara has showed major growth in the last few years. To see her face up to this, deal with it, and not do anything terrible and self-destructive but instead come back and recognize that she’s gone through something here and try to fix it peacefully is amazing for anyone but shocking for Kara.
By contrast, LEOBEN IS SUCH A FUCKING SHIT, YOU GUYS. As soon as she starts to believe him - no no to believe in herself and start to understand her own future - HE RUNS OFF SCARED. I HATE HIM THE MOST. I HATE HIM MORE THAN ANGEL OH I WENT THERE. Leoben exists to make Kara/Lee look healthy and functional.
So….we are back to episodes where I just want to shake Lee awake. I don’t blame him for Dee in the least, and I don’t blame him for being fucked up by his grief. What I do blame him for is yet again stepping back and allowing it to happen with Kara. I need to talk about this. I need to get it out. And what the fuck does he do? Not just ignore her, but go on to moan about how he’ll never know what happened with Dee because it’s too late. IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR KARA! But it could get there AS WE JUST LEARNED TONIGHT.
I know. I feel guilty being angry at someone who’s grieving. But he just dismisses her. Why not just say, please come back. I can’t talk right now. I want to. Promise me. THAT IS WHAT YOU DO when someone - especially someone as hard and closed-off as Kara! - comes to you and says, I need to talk. I guess I have higher expectations for him now, though really, this isn’t backsliding so much as how he can deal with a depersonalized political situation far better than a personal emotional one. I’m not saying he has to be her shrink right now. But he does have to say, tomorrow. Suicides really do happen in clusters even in populations where, you know, THEIR ENTIRE REASON FOR LIVING hasn’t been yanked away from them.
Bill’s attempted suicide by Tigh: “You’ve got no guts. You’re a frakkin’ machine.” holy mother. When Tigh cuts you off YOU ARE DONE. YOUR EVENING IS COMPLETE. It’s just a pathetic mirroring of when Tigh sacrifices himself, when he starts telling Bill that he didn’t have the guts. And Bill and Tigh go back and forth here about whether Bill has the follow-through to pull the trigger on himself but suicide right now is the easy way out in some ways. It was one thing to fight on with even the lie of Earth in their minds, with an end point to their journey, but now they’re more in the dark than they’ve ever been. Bill can’t bring himself to surrender.
Oh my GOD Bill’s gross speech about Ellen. I mean, I get why he does it - he’s playing the part of someone who Saul Tigh would shoot in the head - but oh ew, he reaches way too easily for that for it to be quite something he never thought, he spits it out so much more easily than he calls Tigh a machine. It’s also the same lie Ellen used to get to Tigh back in her introductory episode, which - yeah, Tigh is the jealous type and it’s obviously one of his buttons, but both of them pressing it in pivotal Ellen episodes suggest that….something did happen there. CAN WE FOR A SECOND. Wasn’t there some line way the fuck back when Bill tells Tigh (or maybe it’s the other way around) that if his marriage doesn’t work out he should trade her in for a younger model? And now the possibility of Ellen raised so close on the heels of Caprica Six’s pregnancy…OH MY GOD THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HE DID DAAAAAAAH WHAT IS THIS SHOW EVEN TRYING TO DO TO ME.
Tigh continues his streak of actually being likable to me when he handles Bill really quite well. He’s a little meaner than I think I’d be to someone with a gun to his own head - “you don’t have the guts” is basically yelling I DARE YOU! YOU WON’T DO IT! at Bill Adama - but he knows Bill well enough to know just how far he can push and it turns out to be exactly what works. Tigh, not Bill, is the one who can stare at someone else’s despair and deal with it in a helpful way rather than just letting them self-destruct in front of him. Tigh doesn’t put on the show of giving a crap the way Bill does, but he does have a baseline for the things he can’t tolerate others going through.
“Ellen, you’re the fifth!” AAAAAAH! YES PLEASE! BUT THAT CAN’T BE RIGHT! IT CAN’T BE! BUT IF IT IS….
To the tune of BILL A-DAM-A DOESN'T KNOW WHERE EARTH IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS! Because that will never not be funny.
I can’t have my hopes up again after keeping them alive for a season and a half just to let them go. I can’t trust Tigh and his self-delusional mind without corroboration, even if I want it to be true just as he does. I wish to share a lesson I have learned this evening: IT IS REALLY HARD TO TYPE WITH ALL YOUR FINGERS CROSSED. That’s direct from me to you. It took me forever to figure out Tigh’s hallucination because we’ve never seen him in non-scruffy civvies, but it’s not a hallucination, it’s a memory, maybe, and I so hope so because MORE ELLEN PLS! Even if I did not have a special place in my heart for anyone who tells Bill Adama to suck it - which YOU KNOW I DO - she’s kind of hilariously mean. DON ‘T BE FUCKING WITH ME, TIGH, YOU ARE ON NOTICE AT BEST DESPITE BEING VERY RECENTLY AWESOME.
A Disquiet Follows My Soul
This is a horrible episode for me to watch because it has all of my favorites behaving so so badly. Laura, trying to get a last good taste in her mouth as she gives up; Kara, brutally trying to cut Gaeta down using below-the-belt vulnerabilities including the ones her own bad decisions caused; Tyrol drunk and brawling; Baltar feeding the people’s discontent; Gaeta going rogue and aligning himself with Zarek.
There is something so fucking creepy about Tigh and Caprica sitting there for the sonogram. Tigh had her IN JAIL! And was dealing with his identity crisis by fucking someone he readily admits he could have tortured with no repurcussions! And is still in love with the woman he MURDERED because she collaborated WITH SIX to SAVE HIS LIFE. And Six just…smiles beatifically and croons over OUR BABY. This makes my fucking skin crawl so hard. Even if: “Kid doesn’t even have a name yet and already you’re loading up on the expectations.” Also, Cottle is extra bluntly funny in this scene.
Laura is still not back at work oh god that’s who she was, that’s what she wanted to do until the day she died and now she’s just…dying. I was actually worried about where she was even living, as Lee is in her quarters on Colonial One, and we didn’t see her in Bill’s room. But it looks like she’s elsewhere on Galactica, keeping just enough distance from Bill that she can cut out on her treatments. She doesn’t actually care if he finds out about it, though, because what the fuck is he going to do? She’s done.
She’s basically doing exactly what she did on New Caprica, but this time, she does have the responsibility Baltar had taken from her then. Now she’s backing out and letting the fleet go to hell. And yes, it’s a huge problem, but nothing she can’t (or in fact hasn’t) overcome. Part of it’s the come-down of not being predestined, of finally having to admit that her plan didn’t work out. Not that they had any reason to believe that Earth was less a place they should look for than anywhere else, they had to be going somewhere and all signs did point that way (secular and divine), but the fact of the matter remains that prophecy is a tricky thing to hang one’s hat on.
Part of it is a kind of terrible insecurity. As long as Laura was representing something bigger than herself - destiny, the gods, Pythia, Earth, the unity of the fleet or the rule of law - then she was able to step up. But she’s having to face the fact that the buck really did stop with her all this time, and therefore the successes and failures so far were all her. And what the hell, if she can’t be the dying leader, she’s just going to die. Those people who trusted her huge mistake died, and she deserves to die too.
Bill, among his many other fuck-ups in this episode, handles her exactly wrong. He can’t bring himself to do what she did for Gaius fucking Baltar and ask her to try and live for him, when that is the one thing that might get through to her; oh, he’ll give up on life and humanity and fly off in a rickety old raptor to suffocate to death waiting for her once she’s in all likelihood dead, but he won’t tell her she is important to him and what they have is worth living for.
I hurt, too, with the idea that this is the episode Laura and Bill are finally openly acknowledged as a couple - they end up together (on-screen, at least) out of sheer despair and that is not who they’ve been to me all this time. Do you care? Neither do I. That more than anything is what drives home the dire straits these characters are in, that something that’s been so beautiful and moving all this time is just a threadbare layer of algae at their rock bottom.
We revisit the coup of three seasons ago in twisted fashion. Now it’s Zarek being kidnapped instead of Roslin. Bill fucks with the fleet by once again being a shit at the press conference - “Is it true that you’re thinking about an alliance” IS NOT A HYPOTHETICAL, BILL. One again without Roslin to keep his worse instincts in check, he threatens and then arrests Zarek. It’s not about a fit of pique this time, though, he threatens Zarek cold as ice. “It makes it a little bit easier to know who to hold responsible if there’s an unfortunate incident.”
ARREST THE VP AGAIN? BILL WE HAVE BEEN HERE. YES LAURA IS A SUPERSTAR AND ZAREK IS THE WORST BUT IT IS STILL WRONG. This is a little more insidious - Laura hadn’t done anything wrong; Zarek has probably acted illegally, Bill is probably underestimating the illegal crap he’s pulled since assuming office. But Zarek’s right. It’s extortion. He held his suspicion in wait until he needed to get Zarek.
Not for nothing, but the worst pilot he could have sent to the tillium ship was Athena if he didn’t want to look like the government was selling out to the Cylons. That’s the kind of thing Bill wouldn’t think of or would be too proud to reconsider, and Lee would have been to embarrassed to argue convincingly about, but Laura would have pointed out the importance of appearances in selling this new thing.
I’m not sure why Zarek even has this kind of decision-making power that he’s worth kidnapping. Has Roslin even formally resumed power? Because if she hasn’t, Lee is still the acting president, and Zarek should be off hitting on interns, which is really the only reason for him to be standing there at the press conference anyway. Unless, Lee as Laura’s CJ Cregg, which is just the rightest thing I have ever seen on this show. That is just a frakkin whopper about the fifth Cylon being dead, though if Tigh is right and it was Ellen, it’s true, because he killed her. (How did he know to say “she”? I mean, it’s obviously a 50/50 shot, but saying he or she instead of it makes him look even more in the hands of the Cylons by way of the alliance and the military.)
Unfortunately, the power vacuum left by Roslin’s breakdown and Bill’s hardass approach to dealing with it, Zarek is back where he wants to be, as a symbol of someone or something standing up against…some government. He’s back to craving destabilization. The only thing keeping him in line was his total hatred of the Cylons, and once the alliance is proposed he doesn’t have that in common with the military any more. Clearly he really doesn’t mean his call to pragmatism (any more than Lee means his pretty talk about unity), because thinking about the alliance is the pragmatic best chance at survival. Neither is he actually running the government the way she claims; everything is falling to hell.
Zarek doesn’t mean shit. He’s a nihilist, an anarchist. And while Bill isn’t quite there yet when Zarek claims they’re the same, he’s there by the end of the episode, when he’s managed to pull the fleet back together with his shameless extortion of Zarek (with laundry reports, which is great) and he doesn’t give a shit.
And in the end, neither does Gaeta. Gaeta’s potential to be incredibly dangerous showed up years ago, and it’s coming to fruition now. He was disillusioned by the military’s attempted theft of the election, so he left; Baltar aligned himself with the Cylons, so he (heroically) betrayed Baltar for the resistance; he didn’t think Baltar’s civilian trial was going the way it should so he lied; he was the driving force behind the (legal and rightful) overthrow of Starbuck on the Demetrius; and now he’s getting his own faction of the military together to start a civil war. Gaeta’s willingness to buck authority - based in his almost always correct knowledge that he knows more than those in authority - has lead him to this dangerous place. He’s right that the world is frakked, he’s wrong if he’s telling himself that Zarek will do anything positive about that.
But I’ll say this for him, he does it masterfully. The way he pushes Kara’s buttons - because she would narc on him - to get her out of the room in a way that guaranteed maximum sympathy for him and suspicion of her. Gaeta has a right to be furious at her, and as far as we can tell he’s done his best to stay away from her, but no matter what she’s gone through lately the way she treats him (as a symbol of her own failures rather than a victim) is inexcusable. He’s had to suffer over and over again for everyone else’s bad decisions, and all he gets for his solid judgment and courage in the face of all this shit is the reminder that he needs to call Bill sir as he argues against the Cylon alliance. But he’s abandoning the rationality that’s kept him on course all this time, deciding that it’s not whether they go down but if they fall on their own terms.
Baltar gives up in his own way here. You’re not being punished for your sins. You’re not the errant children of a terrible father. What have you done, as if there is some cosmic balance sheet, as if a good parent doesn’t do his best and then let it go. He’s been so thrilled by his perceived absolution and his feelings of having been chosen, he hasn’t accepted one of the down sides of faith in a grand purpose, which is that bad things happen too, and if everything happens for a reason, the driving force is crueler than we can imagine. And so when petty, pointless violence breaks out in his temple, Baltar sits and smokes and rolls his eyes.
Tyrol, though he has several low moments of his own in this episode, is really the character that hasn’t quite given up. He starts off as superdad to Nicky, and for his pains finds out that he’s not the child’s biological father, Hot Dog is. He goes out of his way to attack Hot Dog - but in the end, he goes to sober up and agrees to take the next shift, and it seems as if baby Nicky will have two daddies for the forseeable future.
His crisis over fatherhood happens in sad tandem with his identity crisis. He can’t decide whether to identify himself with Cylons or humans, and so he’s the one to carry the idea of the alliance to Galactica. His proposal for citizenship in exchange for using Cylon technology for the upgrade is the catalyst for the drama of the whole episode, though it’s almost irrelevant to the immediate drama because the fallout was clearly inevitable. I do very much appreciate the reminder of the importance of Tyrol’s skill set, when it was so maligned and devalued and taken for granted for so long.
I really like the complications offered by Tyrol’s bid for citizenship for the Eights, Sixes, and Leobens (and Three?). It’s an engaging idea, and the existence of the Final Five, as well as the fact that these three models actively chose to break from the others’ bloodthirsty ways (and are therefore the enemy of the Colonies’ enemy), and the fact that they’re the thirteenth tribe, suggests that perhaps reclassification of at least some Cylons is on the table. Tyrol as social justice activist comes forward here, negotiating for Cylon well-being using both loftier moral arguments as well as his political leverage. It’s not an easy political sell, though (and good for Lee for recognizing that the civilian fleet’s acquiescence will be critical, and for genuinely talking himself out of giving up here).
I have absolutely no idea how to write this recap. Also I clearly have to start the next episode right now so it’s going to be really short. The episode has all the feel of the other supporting character swan songs, with Dee doing the voiceover and coming to the forefront and with her eventual suicide mirrored by both Laura and Bill before, with Kara’s cremation of herself, and then Three and Tigh after. But it is still absolutely horrible and shocking. And then incongruously possibly
very exciting.
I don’t read Dee as having an illness of which this is usually the last symptom, and I don’t think the show is supposed to read that way. Things are never going to get better, so she’s going to make herself feel really good for one day, and then Dualla out. And I hurt for her and I’m angry with her all at one. It’s her life to give up, it is, but she matters to all of these other people and to abandon them like this when they are already grieving a lost dream is incomprehensible to me. I just don’t understand. Which is true to life, you never understand why someone does it, even if you can take stock of everything around them and recognize that it’s pretty awful.
Dee doesn’t think she matters to any of these people, or maybe they just don’t matter to her. It’s the supreme demonstration of Dee’s capacity for self-deception, and her conscious knowledge of its limitations. She believed in Earth because Bill said it was real, and that was her goal. She decided who the Lee she knew was, and she made herself believe Lee was in love with her when she knew he wasn’t.
Especially Lee. So much of my concept of their relationship has been about what clearly wasn’t there. But, there were some good times. There had to be something. Maybe they could have been friends. They didn’t split up over violence or a betrayal or an enormous change, they just didn’t love each other the way they wanted to. But Dee decided he was the best she was ever going to get and she doesn’t want to try again. We see him through Dee’s eyes in this episode - hearing the politics second-hand with only the heroics and none of the awkwardness and ego and failures; standing in the amphitheater as if that’s where he belongs (when the whole point of the scene is that he doesn’t), charming and bashful and kind without the cruelty or the self-centeredness or the hardness we’ve seen of him, and which will pop up when she leaves him in this most final way.
Dee isn’t the only character who’s lost her way, though. All those people who trusted me, they’re dead. But Bill isn’t, Bill is right there and he trusted her more than anyone and he needs her and she’s giving up and it’s such a reversal from where they’ve been before. She wasn’t sure about the gods, she wasn’t nearly as sure about herself as she let on, but she believed in Earth in an unshakable way and it’s been destroyed by radiation and she’s not going to submit herself to that. I think Laura’s hopelessness has a lot to do with Bill’s awful breakdown - normally he would go to her and she would comfort him and recognize that there’s nothing they can do for Dee but think of maybe something they can do for the others. I was so angry with Bill for walking out on her when she’s giving up on life, on Pythia, on her job as president, on all of it.
I wasn’t angry with Gaeta for leaving Dee in the room, though, I didn’t expect it either, and she really does seem fine, maybe just a little cheerier than usual. Of course looking back that’s the thing that he’ll tell himself could theoretically have tipped him off, there’s no reason to be fine, except maybe the way it looks like she has some hope of getting her marriage back together, but there’s no way he could have known. He’s going to hold this against himself forever, oh, sweetie.
I don’t think this is fridging, it makes perfect sense with the story and with Dee, but I’m grateful that we’re clearly going to see the effects of her death on the people who cared about her. I don’t think she mattered much to Adama, but she’s still a member of his crew and her death is more the thing that pushes him over the edge than anything else. But Lee, Dee still mattered to him even if they weren’t in love; she and Felix always seemed friendly if not like genuine friends; if Hera goes to her so easily she’s been friendly with Sharon and Helo and babysitting the child and this is a type of death they’ve never had to deal with. It’s completely, unquestioningly self-inflicted and can’t be explained away as courageous or honorable or in pursuit of a real goal. This might not be the long-term horror that losing the dream of Earth was, but it’s a giant blow in its own way.
The Cylons being the thirteenth tribe is the thing that you know, you know the minute before they say it, but it doesn’t make sense. Oh that is so fucked up. Because what, then the twelve tribes are as different as human is from Cylon? But. “Planet was nuked about 2000 years ago,” when we know the Cylons we know of were only created 60 years before. I mean, I suppose the way Kara jumped around in space and time suggests that that doesn’t have to be quite right. So they are way in the future and oh my God, I almost wonder if the Cylons went from Earth to Kobol to the Colonies and back again because all of this has happened before. I’m kind of guessing that humans will have nuked Earth somehow just to mirror the Twelve Colonies? I really have no idea how that would work, though. A 100% good thing that happens on Earth is that Baltar is just useful again.
The flashbacks for the younger three Cylons are only meh even if OMG HIPSTER GLASSES TYROL. Doesn’t he look like Matthew Yglesias (but IMO handsomer)? But they make sense to set up what I think. What I hope. Oh, I hope they are memories and not hallucinations.
OMG KARA OMG. Is she a Cylon? She can’t be that, they’d have noticed back in The Farm. But she’s…something. Of course she stacks her corpse up in the water and burns it. She is a valkyrie - the warrior, the wise girl, the chooser of the slain, the harbinger of death. (I am kicking myself for not getting that one. The Wiki entry actually feels Kara-spoilery.) Kara has showed major growth in the last few years. To see her face up to this, deal with it, and not do anything terrible and self-destructive but instead come back and recognize that she’s gone through something here and try to fix it peacefully is amazing for anyone but shocking for Kara.
By contrast, LEOBEN IS SUCH A FUCKING SHIT, YOU GUYS. As soon as she starts to believe him - no no to believe in herself and start to understand her own future - HE RUNS OFF SCARED. I HATE HIM THE MOST. I HATE HIM MORE THAN ANGEL OH I WENT THERE. Leoben exists to make Kara/Lee look healthy and functional.
So….we are back to episodes where I just want to shake Lee awake. I don’t blame him for Dee in the least, and I don’t blame him for being fucked up by his grief. What I do blame him for is yet again stepping back and allowing it to happen with Kara. I need to talk about this. I need to get it out. And what the fuck does he do? Not just ignore her, but go on to moan about how he’ll never know what happened with Dee because it’s too late. IT IS NOT TOO LATE FOR KARA! But it could get there AS WE JUST LEARNED TONIGHT.
I know. I feel guilty being angry at someone who’s grieving. But he just dismisses her. Why not just say, please come back. I can’t talk right now. I want to. Promise me. THAT IS WHAT YOU DO when someone - especially someone as hard and closed-off as Kara! - comes to you and says, I need to talk. I guess I have higher expectations for him now, though really, this isn’t backsliding so much as how he can deal with a depersonalized political situation far better than a personal emotional one. I’m not saying he has to be her shrink right now. But he does have to say, tomorrow. Suicides really do happen in clusters even in populations where, you know, THEIR ENTIRE REASON FOR LIVING hasn’t been yanked away from them.
Bill’s attempted suicide by Tigh: “You’ve got no guts. You’re a frakkin’ machine.” holy mother. When Tigh cuts you off YOU ARE DONE. YOUR EVENING IS COMPLETE. It’s just a pathetic mirroring of when Tigh sacrifices himself, when he starts telling Bill that he didn’t have the guts. And Bill and Tigh go back and forth here about whether Bill has the follow-through to pull the trigger on himself but suicide right now is the easy way out in some ways. It was one thing to fight on with even the lie of Earth in their minds, with an end point to their journey, but now they’re more in the dark than they’ve ever been. Bill can’t bring himself to surrender.
Oh my GOD Bill’s gross speech about Ellen. I mean, I get why he does it - he’s playing the part of someone who Saul Tigh would shoot in the head - but oh ew, he reaches way too easily for that for it to be quite something he never thought, he spits it out so much more easily than he calls Tigh a machine. It’s also the same lie Ellen used to get to Tigh back in her introductory episode, which - yeah, Tigh is the jealous type and it’s obviously one of his buttons, but both of them pressing it in pivotal Ellen episodes suggest that….something did happen there. CAN WE FOR A SECOND. Wasn’t there some line way the fuck back when Bill tells Tigh (or maybe it’s the other way around) that if his marriage doesn’t work out he should trade her in for a younger model? And now the possibility of Ellen raised so close on the heels of Caprica Six’s pregnancy…OH MY GOD THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HE DID DAAAAAAAH WHAT IS THIS SHOW EVEN TRYING TO DO TO ME.
Tigh continues his streak of actually being likable to me when he handles Bill really quite well. He’s a little meaner than I think I’d be to someone with a gun to his own head - “you don’t have the guts” is basically yelling I DARE YOU! YOU WON’T DO IT! at Bill Adama - but he knows Bill well enough to know just how far he can push and it turns out to be exactly what works. Tigh, not Bill, is the one who can stare at someone else’s despair and deal with it in a helpful way rather than just letting them self-destruct in front of him. Tigh doesn’t put on the show of giving a crap the way Bill does, but he does have a baseline for the things he can’t tolerate others going through.
“Ellen, you’re the fifth!” AAAAAAH! YES PLEASE! BUT THAT CAN’T BE RIGHT! IT CAN’T BE! BUT IF IT IS….
To the tune of BILL A-DAM-A DOESN'T KNOW WHERE EARTH IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS! Because that will never not be funny.
I can’t have my hopes up again after keeping them alive for a season and a half just to let them go. I can’t trust Tigh and his self-delusional mind without corroboration, even if I want it to be true just as he does. I wish to share a lesson I have learned this evening: IT IS REALLY HARD TO TYPE WITH ALL YOUR FINGERS CROSSED. That’s direct from me to you. It took me forever to figure out Tigh’s hallucination because we’ve never seen him in non-scruffy civvies, but it’s not a hallucination, it’s a memory, maybe, and I so hope so because MORE ELLEN PLS! Even if I did not have a special place in my heart for anyone who tells Bill Adama to suck it - which YOU KNOW I DO - she’s kind of hilariously mean. DON ‘T BE FUCKING WITH ME, TIGH, YOU ARE ON NOTICE AT BEST DESPITE BEING VERY RECENTLY AWESOME.
A Disquiet Follows My Soul
This is a horrible episode for me to watch because it has all of my favorites behaving so so badly. Laura, trying to get a last good taste in her mouth as she gives up; Kara, brutally trying to cut Gaeta down using below-the-belt vulnerabilities including the ones her own bad decisions caused; Tyrol drunk and brawling; Baltar feeding the people’s discontent; Gaeta going rogue and aligning himself with Zarek.
There is something so fucking creepy about Tigh and Caprica sitting there for the sonogram. Tigh had her IN JAIL! And was dealing with his identity crisis by fucking someone he readily admits he could have tortured with no repurcussions! And is still in love with the woman he MURDERED because she collaborated WITH SIX to SAVE HIS LIFE. And Six just…smiles beatifically and croons over OUR BABY. This makes my fucking skin crawl so hard. Even if: “Kid doesn’t even have a name yet and already you’re loading up on the expectations.” Also, Cottle is extra bluntly funny in this scene.
Laura is still not back at work oh god that’s who she was, that’s what she wanted to do until the day she died and now she’s just…dying. I was actually worried about where she was even living, as Lee is in her quarters on Colonial One, and we didn’t see her in Bill’s room. But it looks like she’s elsewhere on Galactica, keeping just enough distance from Bill that she can cut out on her treatments. She doesn’t actually care if he finds out about it, though, because what the fuck is he going to do? She’s done.
She’s basically doing exactly what she did on New Caprica, but this time, she does have the responsibility Baltar had taken from her then. Now she’s backing out and letting the fleet go to hell. And yes, it’s a huge problem, but nothing she can’t (or in fact hasn’t) overcome. Part of it’s the come-down of not being predestined, of finally having to admit that her plan didn’t work out. Not that they had any reason to believe that Earth was less a place they should look for than anywhere else, they had to be going somewhere and all signs did point that way (secular and divine), but the fact of the matter remains that prophecy is a tricky thing to hang one’s hat on.
Part of it is a kind of terrible insecurity. As long as Laura was representing something bigger than herself - destiny, the gods, Pythia, Earth, the unity of the fleet or the rule of law - then she was able to step up. But she’s having to face the fact that the buck really did stop with her all this time, and therefore the successes and failures so far were all her. And what the hell, if she can’t be the dying leader, she’s just going to die. Those people who trusted her huge mistake died, and she deserves to die too.
Bill, among his many other fuck-ups in this episode, handles her exactly wrong. He can’t bring himself to do what she did for Gaius fucking Baltar and ask her to try and live for him, when that is the one thing that might get through to her; oh, he’ll give up on life and humanity and fly off in a rickety old raptor to suffocate to death waiting for her once she’s in all likelihood dead, but he won’t tell her she is important to him and what they have is worth living for.
I hurt, too, with the idea that this is the episode Laura and Bill are finally openly acknowledged as a couple - they end up together (on-screen, at least) out of sheer despair and that is not who they’ve been to me all this time. Do you care? Neither do I. That more than anything is what drives home the dire straits these characters are in, that something that’s been so beautiful and moving all this time is just a threadbare layer of algae at their rock bottom.
We revisit the coup of three seasons ago in twisted fashion. Now it’s Zarek being kidnapped instead of Roslin. Bill fucks with the fleet by once again being a shit at the press conference - “Is it true that you’re thinking about an alliance” IS NOT A HYPOTHETICAL, BILL. One again without Roslin to keep his worse instincts in check, he threatens and then arrests Zarek. It’s not about a fit of pique this time, though, he threatens Zarek cold as ice. “It makes it a little bit easier to know who to hold responsible if there’s an unfortunate incident.”
ARREST THE VP AGAIN? BILL WE HAVE BEEN HERE. YES LAURA IS A SUPERSTAR AND ZAREK IS THE WORST BUT IT IS STILL WRONG. This is a little more insidious - Laura hadn’t done anything wrong; Zarek has probably acted illegally, Bill is probably underestimating the illegal crap he’s pulled since assuming office. But Zarek’s right. It’s extortion. He held his suspicion in wait until he needed to get Zarek.
Not for nothing, but the worst pilot he could have sent to the tillium ship was Athena if he didn’t want to look like the government was selling out to the Cylons. That’s the kind of thing Bill wouldn’t think of or would be too proud to reconsider, and Lee would have been to embarrassed to argue convincingly about, but Laura would have pointed out the importance of appearances in selling this new thing.
I’m not sure why Zarek even has this kind of decision-making power that he’s worth kidnapping. Has Roslin even formally resumed power? Because if she hasn’t, Lee is still the acting president, and Zarek should be off hitting on interns, which is really the only reason for him to be standing there at the press conference anyway. Unless, Lee as Laura’s CJ Cregg, which is just the rightest thing I have ever seen on this show. That is just a frakkin whopper about the fifth Cylon being dead, though if Tigh is right and it was Ellen, it’s true, because he killed her. (How did he know to say “she”? I mean, it’s obviously a 50/50 shot, but saying he or she instead of it makes him look even more in the hands of the Cylons by way of the alliance and the military.)
Unfortunately, the power vacuum left by Roslin’s breakdown and Bill’s hardass approach to dealing with it, Zarek is back where he wants to be, as a symbol of someone or something standing up against…some government. He’s back to craving destabilization. The only thing keeping him in line was his total hatred of the Cylons, and once the alliance is proposed he doesn’t have that in common with the military any more. Clearly he really doesn’t mean his call to pragmatism (any more than Lee means his pretty talk about unity), because thinking about the alliance is the pragmatic best chance at survival. Neither is he actually running the government the way she claims; everything is falling to hell.
Zarek doesn’t mean shit. He’s a nihilist, an anarchist. And while Bill isn’t quite there yet when Zarek claims they’re the same, he’s there by the end of the episode, when he’s managed to pull the fleet back together with his shameless extortion of Zarek (with laundry reports, which is great) and he doesn’t give a shit.
And in the end, neither does Gaeta. Gaeta’s potential to be incredibly dangerous showed up years ago, and it’s coming to fruition now. He was disillusioned by the military’s attempted theft of the election, so he left; Baltar aligned himself with the Cylons, so he (heroically) betrayed Baltar for the resistance; he didn’t think Baltar’s civilian trial was going the way it should so he lied; he was the driving force behind the (legal and rightful) overthrow of Starbuck on the Demetrius; and now he’s getting his own faction of the military together to start a civil war. Gaeta’s willingness to buck authority - based in his almost always correct knowledge that he knows more than those in authority - has lead him to this dangerous place. He’s right that the world is frakked, he’s wrong if he’s telling himself that Zarek will do anything positive about that.
But I’ll say this for him, he does it masterfully. The way he pushes Kara’s buttons - because she would narc on him - to get her out of the room in a way that guaranteed maximum sympathy for him and suspicion of her. Gaeta has a right to be furious at her, and as far as we can tell he’s done his best to stay away from her, but no matter what she’s gone through lately the way she treats him (as a symbol of her own failures rather than a victim) is inexcusable. He’s had to suffer over and over again for everyone else’s bad decisions, and all he gets for his solid judgment and courage in the face of all this shit is the reminder that he needs to call Bill sir as he argues against the Cylon alliance. But he’s abandoning the rationality that’s kept him on course all this time, deciding that it’s not whether they go down but if they fall on their own terms.
Baltar gives up in his own way here. You’re not being punished for your sins. You’re not the errant children of a terrible father. What have you done, as if there is some cosmic balance sheet, as if a good parent doesn’t do his best and then let it go. He’s been so thrilled by his perceived absolution and his feelings of having been chosen, he hasn’t accepted one of the down sides of faith in a grand purpose, which is that bad things happen too, and if everything happens for a reason, the driving force is crueler than we can imagine. And so when petty, pointless violence breaks out in his temple, Baltar sits and smokes and rolls his eyes.
Tyrol, though he has several low moments of his own in this episode, is really the character that hasn’t quite given up. He starts off as superdad to Nicky, and for his pains finds out that he’s not the child’s biological father, Hot Dog is. He goes out of his way to attack Hot Dog - but in the end, he goes to sober up and agrees to take the next shift, and it seems as if baby Nicky will have two daddies for the forseeable future.
His crisis over fatherhood happens in sad tandem with his identity crisis. He can’t decide whether to identify himself with Cylons or humans, and so he’s the one to carry the idea of the alliance to Galactica. His proposal for citizenship in exchange for using Cylon technology for the upgrade is the catalyst for the drama of the whole episode, though it’s almost irrelevant to the immediate drama because the fallout was clearly inevitable. I do very much appreciate the reminder of the importance of Tyrol’s skill set, when it was so maligned and devalued and taken for granted for so long.
I really like the complications offered by Tyrol’s bid for citizenship for the Eights, Sixes, and Leobens (and Three?). It’s an engaging idea, and the existence of the Final Five, as well as the fact that these three models actively chose to break from the others’ bloodthirsty ways (and are therefore the enemy of the Colonies’ enemy), and the fact that they’re the thirteenth tribe, suggests that perhaps reclassification of at least some Cylons is on the table. Tyrol as social justice activist comes forward here, negotiating for Cylon well-being using both loftier moral arguments as well as his political leverage. It’s not an easy political sell, though (and good for Lee for recognizing that the civilian fleet’s acquiescence will be critical, and for genuinely talking himself out of giving up here).