"Don't you just hate these people?" The dying leader croaks it out -- as Laura is forced to watch; separated horribly from that future wreckage, that unassailable façade, like a widow from her lover, like a bride divorced of God -- "No." But how much of death is theatre? "Oh, but you don't love them either. The people in this room are the closest thing you've got to family, and you... You've been their President. " And the tone, the disgust, the loving way Elosha is appalled, it could fell even her. Their President. The President of her people. Her people. And she shows them this face.

Lee holds Kara. The Twins fall apart, together. A mother who stopped hitting; a mother's cancer. Bill shakes. A lover who let down the walls and lived, for a moment, on a dead and filthy heaven, once upon a time; who lay upon his bed and laughed, and is now dying. It's a funeral for a woman who already died; who dies alone, with her family all around her. Who never let them be her home. It's a funeral for a woman who died alone, without a family or a home, by her hand and by her choice. Not a razor, but not unlike a blade. A woman who, given infinite time, given a lifetime just like us all, couldn't find the time to love, when the unassailable façade came calling. After a thousand reprieves, after a thousand Gods leaned down to hear the lament, she still managed to fuck herself out of time for living, because she was too busy killing trees to save the forest, and burning off what didn't help.

I'm not going to write you a love song, no matter now much love there is, because this isn't a story about love. (Every story is a story about love.) If it were a story about love, we could have ended this the second Athena started running, down on Caprica. (Frankly, we could have stopped the second Caprica Six said, "Get down.") It would be the easiest thing in the world to say, "William and Laura finally kissed and nobody worried about the civil and martial," or "Helo and Athena had a preposterous child," or "Gaius and Caprica are living in each other's heads," or "Kara and Leoben or Sam or Lee or some creepy combination thereof," and we'd be done. I'd be happy, because these are all the Shape of Things, but it's not the point, yet: This isn't a love story.