I feel like a game controller that just got all its buttons pushed at once so I'm a little scattered, to say the least. What's better than A+? I give this episode three Shirtless Helos and a Starbuck's Haircut.
From the top: Helo, looking incredibly hot, and the Twinset Eight that was Natalie's backup manage to unite the Cylon and Colonial air groups to take out the Resurrection Hub, but the Sharon finally admits that she dabbled in Athena's memories and has now managed to fall in love with him. He is weirded out trying to do the math on whether that is majorly or just minorly creepy, but he's nice about it.
Three wakes up as frisky as ever, and manages to murder Cavil and decimate Boomer's self-esteem even further with a single word. Helo and Twinset Sharon rescue her off the exploding Hub, but Helo follows Laura's crappy double-dealing order to take the Three back to Laura alone. Of course, this suits Three fine, because she isn't telling anybody jack until she's sure she's safe -- and would have told the Cylons the same thing, even if she weren't now mortal. She tells Laura she's one of the Final Five, and then laughs her ass off because it's a total lie. Even Laura has to admit that was funny.
In addition to the hilarity and tenderness, which are abundant, there's also some of the best acting of the series: Helo, Laura, Gaius and Bill all turn in Emmy performances. Whatever star-magnitude of awesome Mary McDonnell's acting is usually at, go to nova. I guess they weren't kidding about offering this one For Your Consideration. I Consider it the Bomb Diggity.
Laura and Gaius face off in a hilarious Propheting Bee, both screaming at the Hybrid and trying to be the Anointed One. He eventually takes his ball and leaves to go minister the word of the Lord to a bemused Centurion -- but when the Rebel Basestar takes hits, things go from funny to very awful indeed. Laura plays Cottle, tending Gaius's serious (and ever so Longinus-adjacent!) wound...
Right up until Gaius, high as a kite on morpha, finally confirms her suspicions that he was implicated in the original attacks. I would imagine that there is a way to confess this that wouldn't move a person to full-on murder you in cold blood, but it's Gaius, so instead he tries to witness to her about all his God shit and how he's been redeemed. This causes Laura, of course, to totally kill his ass.
Except what's been going on the whole two days of the episode, every time the Hybrid jumps -- which it turns out is actually related to Natalie's death, which pissed her off as much as us -- Laura goes into a slipstream universe in the future, where the Twins and Bill are mourning her death. Her guide, Elosha, points out that she shouldn't even be touched by their presence at her deathbed, considering she's long ago left things like human feeling behind in her quest to become the scariest President ever. Only the sight of Bill weeping over her dead body, and putting his wedding ring on her finger, gets through to her, and she realizes that her job isn't to earn humanity's survival, but her own.
She wakes up from this last vision -- and seemingly brings along Chip Elosha to hang out with from now on -- and saves Gaius in the nick of time. She and Three negotiate over the fragile frakkin' body of Gaius Baltar, and they start the long ride home. Bill's sitting there when the Basestar jumps back, and very intense about docking. And when they meet, she tells him she loves him, and he tells her it's about time.
And then they fuck like rabbits.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!
THE BODY OF EACH TRIBE'S LEADER
Two days ago, Laura and Helo and Gaius and a contingent of Marines boarded the rebel Basestar, because it had to stop. The Cylon God got too real, too many people knew about the visions; the place Laura was standing on got smaller and smaller and she had to share it with too many people. It had to stop. The Hybrid lay in water and blood, staring vacantly. Laura knelt, and Natalie's Eight plugged her in, and Gaius murmured a quiet prayer; Laura told him to shut up. And the first thing she said was Jump.
The Hybrid is the Ego, the soul, the CPU, the prefrontal cortex and the corpus callosum of the Basestar. She cares, and she monitors, and she jumps and she breathes and she sings, unceasingly. And the greatest of these is the jump. When you jump, you are everywhere and nowhere. You knit yourself into the fabric of everything that is, and was, and ever will be. You move beyond sight, or projection, or fate, or history, and into the everything. This has all happened before, and it will happen again, but in the moment of the jump it's all happening at once. You are at one with the universe, in a very real way; your body is experiencing what the Hybrid sees all the time, and tries to tell us in her song. We are the ant, and the universe is the cloth; the jump is the wrinkle in time, the fold in space.
Maybe for a moment you can see it all, and the way it goes around and around. This is certainly more than we've ever talked about it, even during the 33 minutes that started this, it was just another thing that could go wrong. But it's a miracle: like any miracle, we take it for granted. And like any miracle, we forget it when it's done. Most of the time. You wanna talk about miracles?
(Jump.
Laura stands alone in a Galactica corridor, and muses to herself. She's never seen what the Hybrid sees, or remembered it if she did. I mean to say she's never stepped out of her universe and taken a good hard look at it: that sublime elevation, looking down at everything else, looking back at herself. You and I work with three dimensions, until we grow up enough to work with four. Laura's strength, and her tragedy, has always been taking it down, looking at the thing in front of her, clearly and dispassionately. How many times, this season alone, has she rung out her common prayer? "Here's what's going on." She always knows what's going on.
Laura looks around, and suddenly behind her is Elosha. The Price in Blood. Her guide, in life. The woman who told her she wasn't crazy. Elosha never held back, the glory or the pain, but she told Laura she wasn't crazy. She had facts and figures, scriptures and scrolls. Her belief kept Laura alive. Laura embraces her without a thought.
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