Jacob, in his recap of Malestrom, which I read at least once a week:
“You’re not Leoben.”
“I never said I was.”
“I’m here to prepare you to pass through the next door. To discover what hovers in the space between life and death.” At the end of the line, where enjambment sings: zero’s the number of the Fool, the shape of the storm. It’s the beginning and the end, depending on where you start counting. It goes around and around. This Leoben’s just another messenger. Like any other Leoben, like anybody else at all. God has to wear masks because you’re not prepared for a faceful of infinity, but that’s not the secret. The secret is: how many masks.
Spoilers after the JUMP.
What is the hardest thing to do, after a loss? After a fall? After the world ends? What’s the hardest thing to do?
Laura settled down on New Caprica, after she almost stole an election, and she lived under the rule of Gaius Baltar, and she taught in a school. Humanity had been destroyed, had gone on the run, had been diminished by attrition, by the terrible costs of the road they traveled. She’d survived. Survived the apocalypse, and cancer, and she carved out in the dust a little place for herself, for a year and a half, where children smiled up at her and trusted her, and she knew where she stood and who she was.
Then the Cylons came crashing down on her again, and she was imprisoned, and her friends were killed. And she was rescued by Galactica, and went home. She sat back down in her chair, with her New Scrolls of Pythia, and she asked Tory for her paperwork, and she put up the whiteboard again, with the numbers. And even though this was Time Number Three she was starting over, she still got it, it still felt like maybe it would all be okay.
Then her cancer came back.
Is it any wonder her first reaction to the possibility of love was that it had to be a trick of some kind?
And that her second was confusion, rage, and trembling horror?
(I don’t know about you, but I did a little dance when Jane Espenson’s name appeared, knowing there’d be a lot of Buffy in there, and there was, a lot of the “who are we when the world is actually burning down” that I used to so love about that show.)
What’s the hardest thing to do after a loss? Trust, again. Hear the phone ring and know it’s not a crisis siren, hear the love in someone’s voice and know he’s not going to die. Fracking getting up in the morning, with all it entails; you’d like to stay mired in your fear and your anger and your very special alone-ness for all of time, but contact is inevitable, leading to information bleed. We have to start over. We have to keep moving. We have to meet each other and change and push and love each other. We don’t know any other way to do this. We don’t have any other choices. And so she steps forward, into his arms.
In other words: SQUEE.
Quick hits: Jesus God, I hate Gaius Baltar. Once and for all, other people’s suffering is notfor you. That is not its purpose, and it is extremely un-self-aware andridiculously fucking uncool to say so, especially to the person who became president of the Twelve Fracked Up Busted-Ass Colonies because the rest of the cabinet and government and all of everybody WENT ASPLODE. In the face of that, no one cares that you’re feeling better about it now. I wish Laura had let him die, for his sake, but I’m glad for hers that she didn’t. We do not do these things not because others don’t deserve them but because we don’t deserve to do them. Vengeance is mine, says the Lord, so get your own sandbox.
Baltar talking religion to the Centurion? Hilarious. D’Anna’s “you’re one of them” fake-out? Cheap. And hilarious. Anyone else think they should have picked up some spare Threes, as long as they were at the store? Also I cannot WAIT until the Leobens get a load of Tory.
Boom boom boom.
A.
ps. Having been spoiled for Elosha’s reappearance, I had this whole thing constructed in my head where she was the fifth, and it was very cool. Oh, well.