The Hand of God v. the Fist of Man. (You had to know that would come back. Don't say "God" on this show unless you want me to freak.) "Our little systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be: They are but broken lights of thee, And thou, O Lord, art more than they."

Queen Victoria spent Christmas 1901 at Osborne House, which Albert designed, on the Isle of Wight. She died there from a cerebral hemorrhage, in the birth of the new century, aged eighty-one. She reigned for sixty-three years, seven months, and two days. In her time, she knew love, and she knew hate: she took everything that ever scared her -- from your body and mine, in real life, to Doctors and Wolves, in this world we know now -- and marshaled her considerable power to throw it into the sun, like an immune reaction. "I will be good," she said at eleven, and she tried her best, as we do. But it wasn't the sun that she burned with, and it wasn't love that moved her. She walked between worlds of grief and shadow, and had a mantle on her of a heaviness none of us will ever know. There is no room there to be moved by love. What moved her was this: the horrifying fact that behind every face, there lurks a world we can never know, and that might be taken away at any time at all. And she girded herself around with as much fear and anger as she could, to protect her heart from this essential truth. She had that Wolf that is Fear in her heart, a bit of the Wolf inside, and rather than accepting the inevitability -- of death, of time, of pain -- she made what barricades she could.