Last one of the season, guys.
Spoilers within.
I have GOT to stop reading spoilers. The ones I found gave me this ep blow-by-blow, and I think I’d have been much more weirded out had I not known all of it was coming. Still, I’m kind of gobsmacked, and if this is disjointed, that’s why.
Quick takes: Baltar innocent? Perfect punishment, now he has to live with his own squirrelly little self. No Caprica on the stand? Booo. Bad Gaeta, mmkay? Bill/Laura bed conversation? Adorable. Those two are totally having a Parents of Humanity affair, and even though she’s hella pissed at him right now, I think it’ll continue, because it’s TOO HOT NOT TO, dammit. Boomer looked like hell. With all of Dylan at their fingertips, “All Along the Watchtower” is what they use? “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” suits the show so much better:
I’ll walk to the deepths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are a many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
Because if that’s not about this episode, this whole frackin’ show, I don’t know what is.
So you’re Battlestar Galactica, and you’ve done the thing where the world ends and doesn’t, and you’ve done the thing where everybody gives up and the Cylons win, and you’ve done the thing where the Galactica comes back and rescues everybody from that, and it’s been AWESOME, so now what? You turn it around, turn inward. Who are we, with the finish line in sight? And how much does who we are depend on who we want to be?
This show terrified in the very, very, very beginning with the idea that Cylons look like us. What if nobody’s who they say they are? Turn that around. What if everybody is who they say they are? What if that’s been it, all along? What if it’s really about the right to decide for yourself, independent of any Cylon detector Baltar can invent, what you’re called?
At least, that’s the idea I had, seeing Tigh (who fracked things up after the mutiny and laid Ellen down) and Tory (Roslin’s support system, the one who almost stole the election) and Sam (who saved his people on Caprica long after everybody else had buggered off) and Tyrol (the fleet’s worker, the one who makes the machines run) all standing together in that room. The people who run things, who make them go. The people who resisted. The people prepared to do more than anyone else is willing to do for the saving of humanity. Heroes, after all.
And Kara. Who crossed over, and crossed back, and laughs at Lee who’s just given his Dad one more fuck-you, and put his flight suit back on. Because he’s a pilot, that’s who he’s decided to be. That’s who he says he is. We have the burdens we pick up and carry and no more, no less. We have the obligations we assign ourselves, and those obligations are called our lives, and to follow up on my earlier post today, it’s all one thing. I wasn’t talking about what we call, optimistically, the “work-life balance.” I wasn’t talking about hours or commutes. I was talking about what you consider your life, what you value. Who you choose to be. Lee, running down the hall to grab his helmet, tearing off his tie. That image will be with me for a long time, and I don’t even like him all that much.
Kara. I’ve read a hundred theories and a thousand spoilers from overeager fanboys and girls. But the raider was real, it slipped in and out of the sky, as she does now. I’ll be amazed if anyone else can see it. It’s telling, that unlike the last time she showed up on Lee’s wing unexpectedly, he called her Kara. Not Starbuck.
I wonder who she is right now.
A.