Episode Report Card Demian: A- | 121 USERS: C+ YOU GRADE IT Is That All There Is To Utopia? Is That All There Is?
By Demian | Season 7 | Episode 13 | Aired on 2005.01.30
It's all terribly futuristic in that tacky, Space: 1999 sort of way, but I'm too busy pondering the significance of the fact that there are now thirteen Avatars in total to bust on the set. "What is this place?" Dolta asks. "This is where we maintain Utopia!" I'm Not Candy beams. At I'm Not Candy's prompting, Dolta descends a set of stairs to join the others around the altar thingy, and it becomes clear they're observing snippets of life on earth through that wavery gunk at its center. "What are they doing?" Dolta wonders. "Monitoring for conflict," No Name duhs. He's kinder about it than I am, but still. Duuuuuh. The image at the center of the altar switches to a middle-aged woman yelling something at someone out of our view. The camera slides up from this to take in a female Avatar, who exchanges a somewhat annoyed Look Fraught With Significance with two of her colleagues. One of them vigorously shakes his head by way of response, but it's not clear if he's decided the woman in the image poses no real threat, or if he'd rather not toast her ass with Dolta in the room. Meanwhile, I'm Not Candy's launched himself into a long explanation of what The Change has actually wrought on humanity. It involves an alteration of "belief systems" that allows the planet's population both to stop expecting evil to pop up here and there on occasion and to shake off any dark demonic force who would attempt to influence them into performing "evil acts." I'm Not Candy further explains that some people, unfortunately, have been "damaged" beyond repair, and it is these individuals The Collective is searching for at the moment. On cue, the image of a violent fistfight enters the wavery gunk, and, as the other Avatars eye each other, the image expands to fill the screen. Basically, two guys are whaling on each other in an alleyway that's either in Chinatown or in China itself. After a bit of this, both men vanish in a wisp of grey smoke. The passersby who had stumbled across the fight stare at the space the combatants had occupied for a moment before blithely continuing on their respective ways. As the image of the scene shrinks back into the gunk, Dolta cries, "Wait! You killed them!" "We removed them," No Name corrects. Potayto, potahto, No Name. "The one for the many?" No Name prompts, ignoring me. "We have an obligation to maintain the world we've created," I'm Not Candy adds. "We can't let anything threaten it," he emphasizes, "and we won't." Under any other circumstance, this utterance, too, would rate a DUN!, but because it involves the Dolt, it quite naturally becomes a D'OH! Dolta's deeply disturbed eyes dart around for a bit before vanishing into the commercial break.