Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Love Lockdown
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 3 | Aired on 02.05.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.First of all, Tauron hip hop is the bizzle. Amanda got fired after her dumb move last week, and of course both Graystone stock and the C-Bucs themselves are taking a hit from her bad PR. Zoë is horrified to hear her mother's belief that she was a suicide bomber, of course, but even more horrified when her parents do more sexual healing in the room with her.
Daniel's hating the media to the point of cancelling all his Google alerts, but gets a sexy new PR person who finally convinces him to visit Patton Oswalt's Daily Show to defend himself -- recalling Wallace's "My Appearance" -- and maybe somehow defend his rep by talking about how his daughter was abnormal/psycho. Heartwrenching.
Law & Order: Caprica City: Agent Duram and his buddies at the GDD start to realize that it wasn't Zoë at all -- that they never followed up on a curfew violation by Ben -- and begin their coverup. The agent getting bothered about this is all, "Is this because I'm a lesbian?" Also, Joe's corrupt dealings within the system get sloppy, pissing off a dirty judge, but surely that shit is going to get gross pretty soon. For now, it's just all very portentous.
Zoë finally finds her way back into the Matrix, and awesomely sends Lacy a hyperlink on computer paper so she can meet her there. Lacy brings her breasts along for the trip. (Also: Cylon psychology is based on projection. Hi, Mike!) They discuss how Original Zoë never showed our Zoë to Clarice, and thus didn't trust her -- and Lacy's still unsure about Clarice, and dicking with her mind in a fairly awesome display of hardcore -- but once inside V-World, the girls locate Tamara. Just as Joe feared, she's been in a black room all this time. They assume she's some kind of made-up Daniel Graystone sex doll, which is terrible enough that they just refuse to talk about it, and help her "escape" into the gross V-Club world. She takes off -- but where could she be going? She doesn't exist.
Sam and Joe give Daniel the brutal business about Tamara's death, and then Joe demands to see Tamara for the one hundred millionth time, but Daniel still can't shut him up. Joe finally remembers his wife died, and asks to see her too; Daniel can't create more avatars because that was Zoë's program, so when they go find her, she's already gone. Which is neat because now you have two daughtervatars who aren't really gone at all, and are just out there somewhere frakking everything up. Daniel and Joe have another one of those interminable talks about Tamara that ends up with Joe leaving and being downtrodden, but you just know he's going to come around tomorrow asking some more.
Meanwhile, Willie's trying to fit in with Tauron wiseguys and skipping school with Sam's consent, but Sam and his husband are still a better set of parents for Willie than Joe is, because Joe is crazy now.
Since Amanda's announcement, Lacy's been the subject of severe Malfoying at school. Clarice bugs her about the rep of monotheists after this latest PR disaster of the suicide bomber child, but Lacy's more interested in giving Clarice zero information. Zoë sends Lacy to find Ben's best friend -- who is secretly also STO, but not in deep as the rest of us, and of course is also yet another dreamy teenager, and appears at first to be the meanest of the Malfoys before you figure out his game -- and then take her to Gemenon like Zoë wanted. Clarice logs on to meet the head of her cell, who talks to her in a Dalek voice while she prays and basically reiterates how crazy she is/they are.
And just when you're thinking it's Clarice who's going to go fucking nuts at the end of the episode... Joe sends Sam to kill Amanda, to even the scales! NO! The best dude killing the best lady! Next week: More yelling.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!We charge through all the channels once again, looking at all the fallout from Amanda's incredible flameout last week; once again, it catches us up in case we forgot what was going on. I love that device. Baxter Sarno (Patton Oswalt) pops up, playing somebody we heard described as a Jon Stewart but comes off more like a slightly dumber Letterman, or I guess Leno, but maybe if you combine Leno and Jon Stewart you end up with Letterman anyway, and the way they talk about him later in the episode feels more like Letterman than anybody else, and anyhow he's talking about how there are hackers just like Zoë creating a "virtual game version of the bombing," which I don't know if you know what that's in reference to but I've played it and it's boring.
Then a boy chyroned as "Scared Student" is talking about how he didn't have any classes with her, but still is offering his opinion, and then "Plans To Boycott" talks about how yes, he's "into holobanding," but has certain moral issues with supporting Graystone Industries by doing it, and then we hit some clips of a Tea Party-type blowout in the parking lot of the hospital where Amanda works, and their signs are just adorable ("holoBOMBS!" reads one). All in all, a very succinct picture of how stupid everybody can get when one dumb word like "terrorist" suddenly assumes such magic power as to render everyone insane, mixed with the Stephen King-like musings of a dad who looks around his culture and thinks he comprehends it. I love the idea that these people are just as much, or moreso, responsible for the oncoming fall of the Colonies, just by being their usual dumbheaded selves, because nothing makes people act this obnoxious quite as much as tragedy.
So Amanda's coming out of the hospital right this second and everybody's yelling at her and the reporters are up her ass about how the hospital allegedly asked her to leave or fired her, and she quietly explains -- ashamed, today, not because of Zoë but because of her outburst -- that she has resigned. They ask if she thinks the publicity will hurt the hospital, and one of them gets very manipulative about how this is her chance to share her side of the story. Amanda finally hisses through her hair that she knows damn well they don't care about the truth: They just want to destroy her, and the memory of her child. Except she never says that last word, because somebody chunks a bottle at her out of the crowd and it smacks one of the reporters. So then the story becomes -- as Amanda climbs into her car and bounces -- whether or not the reporter is hurt, which is also very timely. I wish we could have a reporter like Anderson Cooper (Who was that BSG reporter I was so taken with?) but A) There's nobody actually like Anderson Cooper and B) He's from some other, better planet anyway.
Also dealing with this latest Zoë issue is Lacy, whose sturdy ankles are trudging down the Athenian halls with a distinct lack of spring in her step now that it's all become real. Now that her friend is dead and also a terrorist bad guy. The staring faces of the kids range, realistically, from hate to intrigue to hidden sympathy, but nobody talks to her; Clarice watches from a stairwell overhead and wonders how she can use this since Nestor's hot ass didn't work yet. Clarice should give her some drugs. Lacy deserves some drugs today. It's been rough, but now it's over.
Keon Gatwick is a dreamy boy at the Academy, and a quite strong actor, and right now he is standing on the front steps, staring at Lacy. He's not quite aggressive but not quite friendly either; he could go either way. Lacy stops in front of him and asks what the hell he wants, but then mean red Prefect Caston from the pilot shoves past her and laughs. "So sorry. Be careful, Lacy. You might get hurt!" Keon goes along with the crowd; he stares back at her: "Uh, yeah! Like, uh... Like all the people on that train!" He gets the approval he wanted; hearing them chuckle his whole body relaxes. But he doesn't stop looking at her face until they've pulled him away.
Leno cracks a dumb joke about how Daniel is revising his autobiography from The Man Who Could See The Future to Wow, I Didn't See That Coming. The hysterical sheep laughter of his audience at this bad joke cuts off just brutally. It's creepy and echoey and perfect.
Daniel's sparring at the Red Gloves Gym, which is not a place for rich people, which is an issue we'll explore. Cyrus is bugging him about how the TV was all about his evil daughter and his crazy wife last night -- "I hate TV," Daniel grunts -- and how all the pundits are starting in. "Scandals are sunburn, Cyrus. They fade." Cyrus points out that sometimes instead they give you cancer, and Daniel laughs angrily. He continues to fight. Cyrus offers to call a Sagittaron PR lady named Priyah Magnus in, since their last guy never got replaced, and Daniel reiterates that he hates TV, as well as PR.
"Well, you think you do, but you don't." (But you know who really hates PR is your crazy-ass wife, apparently.) Cyrus points out that Daniel already plays the game, like we all do, in ways he doesn't even know he's doing it. Like he explains for e.g., as Daniel dismisses his sparring partner, how Daniel comes to a rat hole like the Red Gloves instead of using the awesome lab gym, and how obviously the reason for that is that he wants to appear "like a man of the people." I think what Cyrus isn't getting here is that it's more important for Daniel to feel like a regular human than to appear like one, and that's because he has no idea how far Daniel is from his actual life.
Daniel points out that the whole PR plan is obvious anyhow, and basically just him going on Sarno and telling "charmingly self-deprecating anecdotes" and trying to spin his family's pain into something good. Cyrus point out that "turning this into a plus" is not really the first move here, because it's already blowing up in their faces... (Beat.) Which is a poor choice of words. Daniel towels off and obviously doesn't acknowledge that shit at all, and Cyrus brings up their stock issues they're having, and Daniel swears once again that he's not doing PR, and Cyrus continues to eat something mysterious.
Outside the gym, things have gone wrong. Daniel's Tauron driver Kalil has handed over the keys to Sam Adama and busted a move, so that Sam can get fucking scary on Daniel. Who of course doesn't know who he is, so he thinks he's getting mugged, but then Sam beats the everloving hell out of him, and finally when he's on the ground Joe appears, gangster feet first, and stands over him still making that one face. We go through the whole It's Adama Now thing (for not the last time), and then Sam beats the shit out of him some more for raising a terrorist that killed his niece and sister-in-law. When he's just completely broken on the ground, Joe starts in on him again about how he wants to see Tamara. Which, for the eleventh time, isn't happening, or maybe it is, or whatever.
Daniel agrees to take him to the black-box room where her avatar is or is not, and Joe finally remembers that he also had a wife, and says he wants a Google avatar of her also. Daniel tries to explain the whoosit about how he can't create avatars anymore -- "no matter how many bones you break" -- because Zoë stole the program that does that, but that whole part of this storyline is hopeless anyway, so of course Joe's not hearing it. He gives up on Shannon, but says again that he wants to see the Tamara avatar, because he can like "feel" that it still exists. At some point the metaphor is going to become top-heavy and it's going to stop looking like new sad ways of mourning and just start looking like Joe is a moron. I submit to you that this point has come. Joe spits that Daniel better start answering the phone when his boring droning one-note ass calls, Sam menaces Daniel some more, and then I'm not sure how but a giant crow flies away as Daniel -- looking like hamburger at this point -- goes to pick up his keys and feel totally emasculated back home.
After the credits, which I still love even though they are dorky in the same way that Babylon 5 is both embarrassingly dorky and loveable at the same time, there's a whole long shot of Willie going into a bookie joint with a box of lunch for some Tauron wiseguys. A song plays, which I love even though it is dorky in the way that all of the wannabe hardcore songs in this Kobol universe are long-hair/goatee/soft-rock dorky, which is called "Voices Of The Dead," which is remarkable for several reasons: One, it starts with a long ragtimey piano intro that dives into a cool beat at just the right moment in the tracking shot of Willie going through the door into the back area of the place; Two, part of it is rapping an ode in Ancient Greek such that the song goes "these are the voices of the dead" and then an actual song by dead people gets rapped; and Three, the rapping and yelling is the same guy that did "Watchtower", which was dorky/good exactly as per above, who is the brother of the wonderful man who does all the music on this show and many others, Bear McCrary, whom you also might not know is (Four) with the woman who sang the prayer in the BSG credits that I loved so much.
Among the wiseguys around the table are Duck, now called Francis, and apparentl