"Lies," he says, shaking them both off. "All lies. A rehash of all the other old lies. I did not collude in the genocide of my own people." Laura stands and steps toward him, looking him in the eye before sighing in disgust. A bit later -- though it's an instant cut -- he's crouched against the wall of the cell, on the floor. Where Laura was, when she didn't even have her shoes. "This is Devlin and Maryanne McAllister, and their son and daughter. This is a family of four that was gunned down in their own home on suspicion of harboring insurgents," she spits, holding out an octagonal photo of dead folks. They both start talking at the same time, all over each other. He basically claims that the occupation was no more his fault than the genocide, and that her tactics aren't about legitimate threats or clear and present danger, but about scapegoating him for her pound of flesh, and demands a fair trial. While all of that is going on, Laura is losing her entire fucking mind. It's literally, actually, the scariest thing I think I've ever seen. The concept of Mary McDonnell yelling at me like that, even if she was acting, makes me want to first shit and then airlock myself. I mean to say that she trips the crazy fantastic. I don't know what else to say. You have to see it to believe it. Mary McDonnell's seriously the scariest person and the most scary-awesome actor on the face of the planet. Imagine if you will that you are four years old, and you have just driven the family car into the living room, killing Stephen Hawking and some orphans. And instead of just your mom yelling at you, terrified and enraged and hating herself, it's also every mean teacher and mean librarian and police officer and meth addict that's ever made you think you were about to get a black eye. Plus, like...Kali. And the Furies. And Sean Young.

That's what Gaius's feeling right now. And the reason for that is that he is four years old, and has driven a succession of family cars into the living room, killing a succession of Stephen Hawkings and creating orphans, whom he then kills. Like ten times, and each time is more of an accident than the last time. It's kind of funny, but mostly it explains why he's crazy, and why he's really really sad.

So she starts winging the photographs in his face and tuning up the orchestra for the freak-out like so: "I just wondered if you recognized even one of these faces. Did any image get through to you on the rare occasion when you ventured out from behind your sandbags and your razor wire to see what was happening to your people?" This is where the first big crack happens: her grief is larger than the Olympic Carrier and all the ships left behind. This is all on her. "Your people!" she screams, full of hate and fire; he's nearly in tears. "I need to know! Now! Colonel Tigh, get in here! Get this man out of here, he's not gonna talk. I want you to take him, I want you to toss him out the nearest airlock." This is the second big crack: she does this jerky solfège hand movement on "airlock" that she's only done a couple of times on this show, like when diva singers get weird in the hand area, or like Imogen Heap all the time, and it always means she's this close to fucking killing you for real. She screams for the guards, and there's another instant cut to the corridor, where McDonnell and Callis continue to get all New School on your ass, dancing back and forth very stompily across each other's lines and shooting laser beams of acting at each other.