Maybe for a moment you can see it all, and the way it goes around and around. This is certainly more than we’ve ever talked about it. But it’s a miracle: like any miracle, we take it for granted. You could grow to hate it, simply for stubbornly continuing to exist. And like any miracle, we forget it when it’s done. Most of the time.
Spoilers within. And I mean it, spoilers within. Do NOT. Restrain yourself. You need to go into it blind.
Battlestar Galactica: What Happens When You Ignore Al Gore.
Fuck it, that wasn’t even funny. You’ll have to forgive me, I feel like a train just slammed into my chest. I’m shaking here. Men and their friendships, that’s my thing. Pilots and cooks and soldiers and cops and societies, newsrooms, bands of brothers, people in extraordinary situations who form their own companies with their own rules. Men and women and their friendships, that’s what gets me. Bill, all his dreams laid before him, a story he told that he never really believed. And his lover and his son, telling him they built it for him, found it for him, and here it is. The pilots touched the picture, from the miniseries on outward that was the image I’ve never gotten out of my head, it’s why I love the humans, the pilots touched the picture on the wall before they left the surface and went out into someone else’s world. Our stories are our talismans, they keep us steady and straight in the sky. Our rituals call us back, again and again, to the home we make when the rest of the world burns down. Here it is, the picture you touched. You told us a story, made us believe, and here it is, it’s real.
And he can barely look at it.
Because what was its price?
Everything he had.
Here’s your dream, at the cost of your life. Here it is, it’s real. He can barely look at it, because what it took to get here, Saul’s eye and Gaeta’s leg, his lover’s hair, his son’s pride, his daughter’s life, his chest cut open, his family shot through with betrayal and fear. After that, andonly after that, does your dream come true. How could he even look at it? How could he not? That was Cain’s problem, wasn’t it, that one nasty hardcore thing begets another, until you’ve gone through hardcore and you’re out the other side, and you can’t stop for a second to ask what you’ve become because then the whole rickety structure just collapses; you’ve maimed and killed and destroyed to get to where you want to be, so you can’t admit you’re terrified, after all this time, to want it. To believe. They locked up Laura in a cell on New Caprica, they raped and imprisoned Kara and exiled Lee and ran them, screaming, across half the universe. After all that, could you look at what you wanted? Could you not?
It’s so easy, watching this, to say, “this was all the way it had to happen so they could have thatabsolutely ridiculous moment where Lee gets up on the desk in CIC like Bobby Flay on a cutting board and rips his jacket off,” this was necessity, this was meaningful. That which does not kill us makes us stronger. God never gives us a burden we cannot carry. We all go into the cocoon caterpillars, slimy and crawling, and we’ll all come out beautiful butterflies. We all like to bullshit ourselves, like Gaius Baltar, that horrible things that happen to us (or worse, to other fucking people) happen so we canlearn andgrow andbecome better, and other such concepts.
That which does not kill us takes away our best friends, our arms and legs, our hair and eyes and lungs and hearts. That which does not kill us pushes us onward. Come out of the chrysalis and you can tell yourself you’re more beautiful, if that makes it better, if it soothes your sting. I don’t care, particularly. Does the pain really make us who we are, or is that what we tell ourselves in order to survive it? Can we ever see the worth of the race at the finish line? Or do we need another hundred thousand years?
Because otherwise, if it’s not Meaningful and Necessary, it’s burned and blackened and stupid, empty, half a bridge to nowhere on a deserted, bombed-out world. Otherwise it’s just what you dreamed of, destitute and lost, the thing you bought at the cost of your miserable soul.
Quick takes: Edward James Olmos owns my heart and soul now. God DAMN, what is wrong with the Emmy voters? It’s a matter of time until Leoben and Tory have sex. I’ve never seen anything so pathetic as Laura trying to tell Tory what to do. Except maybe Laura sending Gaius Fucking Baltar to save the day. And to end this on a note of happiness, the following conversation took place via telephone at about 4:58 p.m.:
Mr. A: We’ve got lots of silly to watch on TV tonight.
Me: Silly? What silly do we have?
Mr. A: … It’s Friday, you know. That space show with the hot chick you like … did I dial the right number …
Me: That is NOT SILLY.
Mr. A: I’m sorry, let me rephrase. We haveservices tonight at 9 p.m.
A.