Sometimes I love TV

[maystone]

Holy shit! I called it early in the ep that the four hearing the music were in the Final Five, but damn they did an excellent job of pulling that one off. And Starbuck! Or Kara :) Looking ghostly and acting all creepy. And Lee's speech! I'm not a fan of Apollo; I'd always thought he was a bit of a prig. More than a bit, actually. But I loved his speech at the trial.

Great way to hook the audience to stick around for the January premiere of the final season. Who were those people who spirited Baltar away? They're the threat to Hera, I'm guessing; three women who think Baltar is a god and then three women (Athena, Six, Laura) who are bound to protect Hera. I don't know how it'll play out, but I can't wait to see how it rolls.

I really thought one of the Adamas was going to be a Cylon. Who knows, maybe that will still be the case? It could be that Kara is outside of that paradigm now; after all, Not!Leoben did say that he wasn't a Cylon. It could be that her role is some sort of mediary. Maybe Bill is going to be in the final five, after all.

Too damn cool. Using Jimi Hendrix was genius, because really if you'd ever seen him play electric guitar you'd swear that they were melded together at times: man and machine.

Meanwhile over at Rome, it was Antony who earned my tears and Atia who won my heart. Polly Walker was simply amazing in the scene of Octavian's triumph. I thought I felt my heart drop when I realized that Antony's corpse was strapped onto that float and paraded through the crowd. PW's reaction was perfection.

I like that the writers gave Vorenus a quiet death surrounded by his children; it was an artful comparison to the deaths writ large of the aristocracy in the story. I don't care that they played a little loose with Caesarion's survival; for all intents and purposes he died and Pullo's son lived on.

There were shocking moments in the episode; not shocking in the sense of being surprising but in their visceral impact. Antony's reaction when he read Cleopatra's suicide note; Antony's suicide; my reaction when Cleopatra appeared in the throne room after his suicide (I knew she was still alive and yet my pulse quickened when she appeared). There were so many moments of exquisite drama, and all were perfectly portrayed.

I'm going to miss this show like crazy, but I'm so very thankful that I got to see as much of it as I did.