Cally helped keep them in place, before the song. But now he doesn’t recognize his face in the mirror, so how can he know where or what he is? Tory knows how much Cally means to him, how he is rooted in her. After Boomer died, when he felt the toaster all over him, inside him, sickening, and it grew like a cancer until he nearly died, it was Cally that put him back together, like a mechanic. Whose grace in pain, whose forgiveness was like the memory of something we’ve all forgotten. Imagine the eyes of something infinite and loving, that could forgive you anything. Not like a hound, not like a pet, but something brilliant, that saw all your angles at once, the dark and bright sides, all the facets, and loved you anyway: that is the gaze of love, and it keeps you in place.
Spoilers below the cut.
Let’s talk about faith. Lee, you’re so stupid. So beautiful and polar and stupid. Because what you want, what you really want, is Gaius Baltar provoking holy war all over the fleet. Because that’s a good idea. Moron. One of my favorite books is The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell, about a man who comes back from something horrific and revelatory and has to put himself back together. And everyone thinks they know what happened to him, and when they tell him what they know, he says to them, “It’s all true, and it’s all wrong.”
That’s how I feel, watching Lee and watching Laura. It’s all true. They’re all right. And it’s all wrong. And this isn’t a case of thinking I’d do differently (Shit, I know I’d do differently. I’d have airlocked Baltar long ago and kept Lee chained up in my quarters as a pet for sex). This is being able to agree with both of them and be horrified by that, be skeeved by what you have to protect, by what you have to let go in order to be something worth saving. This is a case of thinking there’s something about this I’m not getting, because it’s all true, and it’s all wrong. And Laura’s dying, and Lee’s out of place, and all Adama can see is the wig and the frailty in Laura’s hands, and the hardness of her voice. Edward James Olmos is amazing, okay, in that he can break my heart without saying a word. He closes a book and whispers to her, in the dark, all the things he cannot say.
When my grandfather died, I got into a serious fight with a family member, who felt I was coping in an inappropriate fashion. All I really did was cut off all my hair and be kind of hopped up and pissed off for a while, I didn’t burn down a house or anything, but he felt the need to lecture me on how I ought to be getting by. And so during that whole scene at the bar, I was saying to my TV, “Shut up, Adama, shut up, shut up, shut up.” You get through stuff however you get through it, and it’s nobody’s business but yours how, so long as you keep your fists out of other people’s faces. Or your cylindrical light bulbs out of people’s Raptors; Adama was within his rights to kick Chief off duty, but not to tell him how to think of Cally or how to feel.
Forget Chief’s trying to turn himself into whatever he thinks he is at the moment, forget that, he’s a guy who had a complicated marriage which is now violently over and here comes Adama, trying to uncomplicate it in hindsight, for him. It’s appalling and for the first time I felt for Adama’s ex-wife. And saw where Lee got his ideas about things being all one way, or all the other. Things that are all true, and all wrong.
Tigh hardly bears talking about.
This is one of those eps, I think, that is gonna make a shit ton more sense two or three eps from now.
A.