I’ve missed them together.
Spoilers after the jump. Click “Read More.”
Starbuck tells him if he’s looking for an apology he can go to hell, and Bill Adama shoves Kara Thrace to the floor. “You were like a daughter to me once. No more. You’re malcontented, and a cancer. And I won’t have you on my ship. So you have a choice. You figure out how to become a human being again, and an officer, or you can find another place to live. Off of this ship. You’re dismissed.” She kicks the chair, stands, and leaves angrily. Even though it’s her mother’s language, her mother’s violence, it’s still the language she speaks herself, and the one she knows the best. He’s doing the best he can.
So glad we got to spend some more time with Adama and Roslin. I love Crazy Space Mom and Dad.
Small things: Starbuck got un-grounded at some point. Would like to see how that happened. Are we ever going to find out what happened with Kara and Lee or am I going to have to resort to fanfiction? Dualla got her old job back? I’d love that; she is, as Jacob’s always saying, the voice that brings them home, and it makes sense that she’d be back in that role. Did we ever see the Helo-Sharon wedding and I just forgot about it amidst all the awesome, or was it just assumed?
Here’s the big thing, with regard to the whole kill them all or don’t kill them all question, here’s what it’s really all about. What you’re willing to do in a struggle has nothing to do with your enemies, nothing to do with their motivations, their tactics, their intentions. What you’re willing to do is something decided by you and you alone, and the rest of it is all bullshit excuses designed to make you feel better about what kind of monster you’ve become. You make up your mind, what you’re going to do, and you carry that. No one else’s fault, no one else’s burden. You carry that in your head and heart no matter what your enemies are like. Say all you want about being forced; in the end, you pull the trigger. It’s never not a choice.
Laura’s always been more primal, always been more willing to give up her soul, and maybe it’s to do with almost dying about two dozen times and seeing the insides of too many prison cells. She’s always been harder, willing to steal the election, willing to go along with a lie, willing to send Kara spinning out across the stars back to a devastated world on the smallest shred of drug-induced hope. She’s always been hardcore; you get hat close to the abyss, maybe nothing else ever looks serious as that ever again. So she was ready: send them all where I almost went, but for the Cylon baby whose blood I stole. (Andnice piece of continuity with having carried Hera making Sharon immune.)
Adama got that close to the abyss, too, and he wanted nothing to do with sending anybody else there. The responsibility will lie with the person who gives me the order. I will not carry this. Testing Laura, a little, though he should know better; willing to take it to the edge but no farther, and then, in the end, forcing her to let it lie. There are things you can’t live with, and he’s always been good at pulling her back from the brink. I love howadult they are (there’s no other way to put it) with each other, how strong they both are and how each makes the other stronger instead of weaker. That’s a lot of power in one room, the two of them.
Helo, on the other hand, is about love. I’ve always thought he was as dumb as a bag of hammers but tonight changed my mind about him a little. Helo loves and believes to the limits of his experience (which is why he stuck his foot in it with Roslin; dude, don’t try to tell anybody else what their pain is like) and it’s a kid’s mistake, believing that if everybody just understood thatshe’s different with me, they’d stop being worried about you being a toasterfucker. He loves Sharon in no small part because she’s a Cylon; kill all the other Cylons and she’s just someone else who can die on him, like all his friends, like Hera, and never download, never come back to him. He did what he did out of that conviction.
The Cylons torturing. The Cylons being tortured. I kept flashing back to Gina on the Pegasus, what they did to her there, and realizing that because she didn’t download, that experience hadn’t translated to the rest of them; what torture does to its perpetrators and its victims. Those who do not heed history, being doomed to repeat it, all of this has happened before.
So now it’s a treasure-map-driven race to Earth. Awesomeness.
A.