And the whole quoting-the-song thing is a huge part of that, because we get it, we get it, we get it. It should be the least noticeable part of the entire script, the weave, but instead it sticks out like something large and looming, a bright red thread, in a way that takes you out of the entire setup. None of the actors know what to do with it, so they can't even really help weave it right, but this is a time where they shouldn't have to. It should work both as real live dialogue, and as the clues to the song, and in most scenes (although this one works as a disorienting non sequitur, the rest don't) it's not doing the double-duty it should. There is a lack of... shit, sorry. Enjambment, basically. It means what it is, and it does what it says, and that's the extent. And there are ways in which I kind of feel... cheated? That's not the right word. And I don't know if I have explained it sufficiently, because to say there's a lack of poetry is to go too far in the direction of criticism, and this isn't a criticism exactly, just an openness to the possibility that every story can be told in an infinite number of ways, that every split second on that screen is the result of somebody's choice, and imagining other iterations of those, like a Hybrid, is fruitless, and sometimes the worst idea you can have, because the only person you're hurting is yourself. So shut up, Jacob. Back to the trial.

"Do you recognize this document, Lieutenant?" Cassidy asks Gaeta. He does. It's the one he brandished in Gaius's face the day his heart broke: "A death list issued on New Caprica by the office of the President." Who signed it? Gaius. Was it a forgery? No. For sure? Yes, for sure. "Because I was there. I saw him sign it." Lie. Gaius starts to wig out. The smile on Felix's face would scare the entire Cylon Fleet: so disingenuous, so hateful, so broken, so vengeful. Of all the people in the Fleet, that document is Felix's problem: the second he saw it, he took their names onto his back, scratched in like scars. He was the one who put "democracy" back in place, he was the one who got the Presidency back for his hero, he was the one who watched it fall to shit almost instantly around him, for a year he watched this and could do nothing. For who knows how long, he sat under the Cylon thumb, and watched Caprica and Gaius together again, and tried to think of ways to help the Resistance, and then back onboard, he nearly let the Circle take him down: to buy back for the Fleet what his ideals took from them. There's a reason Tigh and Laura were questioned together: it's so Gaeta and Lee could take the stand together, in this episode. What Gaeta was, Lee is: a person whose ideals brought down the world. A person who hasn't learned to be good, but not too good. And what Gaeta is now, I don't want anybody to be. "I saw him sign it," Gaeta says, over Gaius's screams; Cassidy asks him to describe a scene he never saw. "The Cylons brought the document into the presidential office. They had already selected the names. One of them, I believe it was a Three..." Gaius is spitting now: The gall! The unmitigated and déclassé cheek! (I'm extrapolating from his spitting sounds. I'm like Leoben!) "...Gave the list to the President and said, "Here are the people that are going to be executed. Please sign this. He looked at the list. He saw all the names. And then he signed it." Did he protest? "I mean, did he argue? Did he offer any resistance whatsoever?"