I submit to you that coincidental or not -- and that's a pretty long list, to be a coincidence -- this is not only offensive and misguided, but vile. You have to look in the darkest, sweatiest ugliest places to find God, and the story here tells us that you're better off just pretending those places don't exist. Wrap your hands around the shadow's throat, or your enemy's throat, or around the blow-up dolls that Cylons are after all, and submerge the holiest part of yourself in forced amnesia and bitter denial, tell yourself that development forward leads inexorably to bisexual strip clubs and casual intercourse outside the bonds of marriage, and killer robots? All the cool kids are going agrarian? That's an old man's game, afraid and lost and tired, and the show is worthy of better than that.

Human development on the individual level is self-organizing: toward strength, wholeness and transformation. That's what a soul is: the natural desire to cross the line from here to there, to move and to progress. If not for a higher purpose, then at the least from of curiosity. Everything that rises, every single thing, must converge. I haven't seen a story this... hateful, this reductive and frightened and shrinking, in a really long time.

Why on Earth should anyone, anywhere, ever retrograde? If you don't like the thesis, generate the antithesis and pull it together with your hands: don't wipe the board. I don't think I've been more grossed out by any statement of this show's characters than the order not to "underestimate the desire for a clean slate." Anyone who honestly wants a clean slate wants to die. The question is, "When Will the Work Be Done?" And the only answer is: Never. You don't get to lay down your burdens, the rough spots are all you ever had. That's called life, and it's just as sweet and just as brutal as the angels, and the Gods. You can't tear pages out of your history. That's as weak as declaring bankruptcy, and morally reprehensible. It is profane.