"Really, Paulla. Are we going to enjoy this food with children starving? Now ask yourself this question, really." Paulla grins ruefully, seeing exactly what he's doing and unable to stop it or do much more than glare hilariously, outdone. I love Paulla. To be so disappointed, again and again, by the desperate moves of someone you believed in, someone who gave you hope when you were so desperate and afraid you could even believe in Gaius Baltar; to deal with this monumental ongoing affront and still just smile and think about ripping his face off with manicured nails, powered by Jesus. "Look around, look at these chil... It's not just this child here, this little Gaius -- I mean, but he is very cute, this one, yeah -- I mean, it's all... It's all the children, isn't it? All of them. And you're putting the food..." He shouts, in the grip of full oratory, pointing to his own empty mouth, addressing the whole of Dogsville now. "Listen to me! Listen to me! I'm coming back here. And if it is the last thing I do, I will ensure that every single one of you are fed, and your children are fed, as God is my witness!" Naia holds him, so close, and he makes that sad-clown moue face I love so much, hilariously, at Paulla, spitting nails with fists curled up.

George: Take the trouble to construct a civilization, to build a society based on the principles of, uh... of principle... You make government and art and realize that they are, must be, both the same. You bring things to the saddest of all points, to the point where there is something to lose. Then, all at once, through all the music, through all the sensible sounds of men building, attempting, comes the Dies Irae. And what is it? What does the trumpet sound? "Up yours."

I always thought "Utopia" was some weird Tudor-era misspelling from eu-, like euphrasy and eulogy and, um, euphemism. The ironically named Eumenides. A perfect place, εὖ + τόπος. It's not. It's οὐ + τόπος: a place that doesn't exist and never will.

Laura runs after Caprica, putting on her politico voice, anxious to rally the players against Ellen; equivalent the voice Ellen keeps using, but fine-tuned for a schoolteacher who rose in the ranks of administration until she walked the halls of Caprica City's seats of power. That plastered smile I remember from when Hilary tried to give us universal healthcare and got shit on by old fat white men every day for about a hundred years: I get the joke, but the joke you don't know is better, and maybe I'll tell you one day. It's brittle and scary and I don't like it, and neither does she, but we both know what it means and why it's necessary. We never saw her in action as the Secretary of Education -- or when we did, it was framed as a consequence of Adar's infidelity and we didn't get to see the steel behind it -- but we've heard this voice, on Colonial Day and, later, in the election. It's her Gaius voice and it means "Schoolteacher hell, I've put down strikes before and I'll do it again unless you take me seriously."