And you can’t ever be sure. There are some fucked-up retarded bumper stickers in the world that will tell you idiosyncrasy and acting like a freak are personal imperatives. Those are not the daemon speaking, but low self-esteem selling itself a pass, and the way that I know that is: you can’t buy God on a bumper sticker. But from the outside, the merely insane or annoying are identical to the annoying insanity of genius. The fact that you can’t ever be sure is a safety measure against letting it drive you actually crazy.
Spoilers inside. Grab your gun and bring in the cat.
You know, in the beginning of this show, back to the miniseries, they took a lot of time to tell us that this ship, the Galactica, wasn’t the best in the Fleet. Its people weren’t the best and the brightest. Commander Adama was an old busted dude on the verge of retirement, the place was a museum, everybody there was there to get to somewhere else. And when the world ended, they didn’t have the luxury of picking your ten best men and women. They had the imperative to pick who was left, and if you weren’t openly talking to yourself that day and could keep your need to pull your own hair out strand by strand under control, hey, guess what, you’re flying CAP and planning missions and maybe being made President.
One of my favorite, favorite, favorite movies is Apollo 13: What do we have on the spacecraft that’s good? Let’s work the problem, even if that means using, like, someone’s sock to make an air filter. That’s where they were, with a big pile of stuff trying to shove it into the holes it needed to go in, to make it fit right. And now, now they have a bunch of the best; as the Hybrid was speaking we’re looking at Helo and Seelix (crazy Seelix who came out of the Circle) and Gaeta and Sam and always, always Starbuck, and Athena, people who barely existed back in the beginning. They’ve taken the pile of crap and the sock and made something out of it, something useful, that fits in the hole that needs to be filled.
Do you ever drive in deep snow, and feel the car shift into the tracks in the road? Shift and fit in, and guide itself as though your hands are barely needed to steer? That’s how Starbuck was tonight, shifting into the track, feeling the wheels lock in and the ride smooth out, before they got to that horrible stunted base ship. Maybe that’s the wrong metaphor: a strong wind came up and filled her sails, and she let them go ahead full. Greasy, dirty, beat-up, overtired and tweaked; in my life I’ve never seen anyone so beautiful as she was in that moment.
Quick takes: The admiral is my kind of atheist, who doesn’t argue doctrine because he wonders what the fuck the point of it is anyway, like if we’re going to have a conversation about feelings can it be about how he wants to bone? Mr. A noticed a discrepancy with the model numbers of the Cylons (Cavil being a One, and Leoben a Two and so on, but Sharon’s an Eight, so we’re missing an number in there?) and we talked a while about how their model numbers related to either their order of build or their role in Cylon society, but then Anders went all kill-crazy and I got distracted. Next week should be fun. Can I just say, while we’re on the topic of Cylons, that I’m really, really happy we’re starting to deal with Sharon’s shit? Her job up till now has been to hang around acting pissy; it was nice to see her being, in her own way, just as intractable as the Ones in her me versus you thing. You need that, in there, as everybody else is being mushy in the middle. You need someone to remind you that this is in fact a little nuts and they are in fact KILLER ROBOTS.
A.