Here’s the thing about stories, good ones, ones that mean something. They’re supposed to shake you up, knock something loose, change you inside, so that even if you knit yourself back together you can still trace the seam with your fingertips, you can still see the place where the change happened. I’m trying to find a way to describe the ache in my chest because it’s not sorrow and it’s not joy.
you flay yourself, open up your veins and your skin and your
selfishness and your cruelty and the greatest shames inside you, to
earn a sense of worthiness. You work to earn your just reward. And when
you get it, it is broken. They burned off the things that kept them
blind and they walked one painful, bloody step from the Altar of the
Colonies, on which they were sacrificed, to the Temple of Aurora, and
when they got there it was broken.
I chose the snippet above not knowing a damn thing about this episode. Not a DAMN THING. So there’s them apples.
How do you know when to quit?
I’m asking, because I don’t, it’s kind of my thing that I don’t, you all know this by now. Most of you have, at one time or another, told me to fuck off with the constant exhortations to get back up after some humiliating bullshit goes down. So I’m asking: How do you know when to quit? It hurts either way, so which poison do you pick? It’s brave either way, because either way people will try to talk you out of it, either way you’ll feel like you’re disappointing people, letting them down, letting them go. It’s stupid either way, because you’re always going to needle yourself, if you stay or if you go, should I have gone the other way?
Laura. You’re fucking your boss, then you get cancer, then the world blows up, then you fall in love, then you lose an election, then the world blows up AGAIN, then your cancer comes back. In between there’s mutiny and terrorism and for extra fun you get to be a hostage. How do you know when to quit?
Bill. Your kid dies, you get divorced, you get old, the world blows up, your surrogate sons and daughters die all around you, try to kill you, turn into killer robots, your friend Admiral Cain shows up only shesucksnow, you fall in love with someone who’s currently a hostage, your best friend’s a Cylon, you’re really really really fucking old, and tired, and your remaining son’s kind of a ponce sometimes. How do you know when to quit?
D’Anna. You have, at this point, killed yourself about a dozen times, to find answers to what you think are the questions that matter. You’ve inhabited a dozen bodies and fought your own people and stuck your hands into the programming so many times you can’t pull them out anymore, you don’t know where you end and this mission begins, you’ve gone forward only to meet yourself going back. How do you know when to quit?
There’s graffiti on the walls that says FRAK EARTH and people are holding guns to each other’s heads and it’s all just too much. Laura’s burning books, as if the books are the problem. As if the story, what got inside her and gave her hope, was the point. How do you know when to quit?
p>It sound so glib and easy to say you never quit, you never ever ever quit, but I’m not talking about this the way I usually talk about this, about a hockey game or the FISA sitch or whatever. I’m talking about this like life. What choice do you have? The foxes can’t go back and fight the hounds and they can’t make it across the river and they’re foxes, it doesn’t occur to them to not steal hens from someone who owns dogs, so what choice do they have? The third option, it isn’t back, it isn’t forward, it’s just … out, the only way out there is.
We all get what we want, eventually. If we live long enough and fight hard enough we get what we want, and usually it’s horrible in some way we didn’t think about. Usually it’s not what we imagined, not exactly, because our imaginations are designed that way for a reason, to get us to places in which we then have to live. We want Earth, so we get Earth.Then what? There’s always going to be a job in front of us. There’s always going to be somewhere to go. There’s always going to be, as Laura said so beautifully back in Season One: “Okay. Next crisis.” Until you decide to stop. Even then, that’s going somewhere. Even then, that’s moving, just to stay in place as everything changes around you. You don’t quit because youcan’t.
Quick takes: Gaeta still looks like hell, like he sucks blood from the rats that show up in the hallway at night instead of drinking from humans.
How did I never notice before that Hoshi was so cute?
I guess my frequent e-mails to Ron Moore yelling about Hera’s daycare were answered in the form of that scene of Dualla babysitting.
Speaking of which FUCK SHIT JESUS DUALLA. Dualla’s suicide was hard, terribly hard, to watch, because up until the moment I saw the gun I thought they were playing her as Cylon, and then it was terribly hard because I’ve done that with someone, said goodbye when I didn’t know it was goodbye, and deep down I’m probably still angry with him for doing that, for being lovely only to try to (thank god, it was only try to) leave. She went to see Helo and Sharon and Hera and she went to see Lee and then she was done and only afterward do you see the pattern. There was joy in her eyes because she’d made a decision. That’s how this works. I’d like to hate her for it but I understand.
Kara. Kara Kara Kara. Kara, finally finding a truth good old crazy prophetic Leoben was too scared to face. Even the biblical prophets, seeing God, were horrified. You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace. You will lead them all to their end, the Hybrid said, and then I wondered, why “them” and not “you?” Was the exclusivity on purpose? She’s so, so, so strong, burning the evidence and hiding the tags. It’s terrifying, like watching somebody jump out of a plane without a chute and every mile they fall they’re whispering, “so far, so good.”
Ellen. Really? I’m withholding judgment, though I now feel slightly less icky about her fucking Cavil on New Caprica.
THIS SHOW IS TOO FRAKKIN’ SHORT.
A.