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Okay, there was a lot of gloom and doom coming the past few weeks, but SyFy is saying that the timeshifted totals are outperforming their expectations -- and with a few more episodes this brilliant, I'm fairly certain they'll have the critical support anyway. So an early-morning bombing causes the Twelve Worlds to go even more nuts about the Graystones, and Jordan Duram (who gets more and more interesting and admirable every week) finally gets his warrant to search not only the Graystone home, but the Athena Academy. Clarice continues to melt down, warning her compatriots across the board, and the GDD comes away with essentially nothing.
...At least until Daniel goes on Sarno, coached to a thimble-sized shell of himself. Amanda pulls her signature move of going apeshit at the most inconvenient possible time, but of course this time it totally saves the day. Their impeccable intimacy and teamwork on live TV manages to charm both Sarno and the viewing public. Especially when Daniel creates a plan on the fly to open-source all holoband IP, figuring that without profit motive -- just like the legalization of drugs years ago -- there won't be a shadow economy in which kids do these fucked-up virtual things in the first place.
Like the show in general -- which has probably become my favorite show on TV as of this week -- this scene is a stunning display of what science fiction can and should be doing, and rarely does: Addressing the issues that matter now, in a timeless way. Then he does his own version of the Amanda Move by admitting that "he" created a virtual copy of Zoë, who explained to him about why these kids are joining cults in the first place. It's cut short, but still pretty effective, and the Graystones come out looking a lot better than they did last week.
Along those lines and in other Zoë news, she and Philomon continue to fall beautifully and terrifyingly in love, this time actually dancing together, in a scene that cannot really be described, but once again underscores the point that Philo is so adorable/amazing that forty years hence they'll still be trying to get human bodies working so they can do it with him. (Hint: She looks a lot better with your holoband on, Philo.)
Of course, now both Clarice and Amanda knows for sure about the existence of the avatars, which is huge; meanwhile, Lacy's getting closer with Keon -- rebuilding a motorcycle and awkwardly high-fiving like the straight-edger nerds they are -- and trying to get Zoë's robot body to Gemenon. And Grandma Ruth continues to be totally bad-ass, leveling her Tauron rage at Amanda and having a fabulously terrifying talk with little Willie about the benefits of Our Thing -- and Joseph of course changes his mind about the hit on Amanda about ten times.
Sam spends the whole episode tracking Amanda, and finally nabs her after the Sarno appearance, leading to another really unnerving bravura scene when Amanda realizes she's about to get murdered Tauron-style. Of course, he doesn't go through with it, but messes with Joseph for a good long while before admitting it anyway, because nobody has ever deserved to get fucked with quite as much as Joe Adama. week: Tamara Adams rocks her new Dark City eXistenZ on the 13th Floor of the Matrix.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Laws of nature are human inventions, like ghosts. Laws of logic, of mathematics are also human inventions, like ghosts. The whole blessed thing is a human invention, including the idea that it isn't a human invention. The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts...
Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.
Previously, a bomb blew up some people and everybody lost their shit, but especially Amanda lost her shit. This morning, on an empty street, another place gets blown up for reasons we don't really know about. Director Singh points out that there could be any number of reasons, but Jordan Duram is of course convinced that it's another STO thing. He proudly produces warrants to search the Athenian Academy -- Zoë's locker and "any other locker she might have used" -- which he got on appeal from the Libran Intercolonial Court, I guess since the STO isn't just a Caprican organization. Singh gives Duram that smile he's constantly begging for, but tells him this plan to make yet another huge media circus of this better stay classy.
Clarice wakes up her hot wife Desiree with a morning kiss, and Nestor wakes up on the other side of Desiree, cuddled against Olaf. He grins and lets Olaf's hand go, climbing sweetly over Desiree so he can kiss Clarice good morning. This is all exactly as inconvenient as I pictured it: The morning breath, the tangled-up people, the stolen sheets, the fact that Tempur-Pedic doesn't make a variable-firmness mattress for that many perverts. That's probably why the pointy pregnant one sleeps with the older guys and gals, to better share the collective burden of their college-aged husband's constant boner.
Clarice and Nestor are adorable for a few seconds before her phone goes off, and she immediately re-stresses and shoves Nestor off of her, running out the door. Desiree and Olaf are worried, but Nestor's got more pressing concerns this early in the morning. Clarice peaces out and bumps into a dude in a fedora on the street, who hands her a one-off e-paper -- how cool is that stuff? -- with which she alerts her army of high school terrorists about the incoming GDD raid, then tosses it.
There are kids laughing in the hallway when Keon gets the message and runs to his locker, where he's got like an entire terrorist starter kit including an actual stick of some explosive. A couple of day-players shoot him weird meaningful eyeballs, and Jordan leads his GDD team down into the hall, where they yell a whole lot and act real scary and start flipping open lockers left and right. Clarice stands there like this is totally normal, even though normally I'm guessing she would throw a fit because this is actually very scary.
Lacy stage-whispers to Keon that they need to have a little meeting about how they are terrorists. Unsurprisingly, he does not meet her eyes, and goes off to get rid of all those wires and plutonium and whatever, because every time Subtlety tries to have a talk with Lacy Rand she goes all, "Can I have some sugar for my tea? And some lemon? And a little spoon?"
Daniel is so not impressed by Priyah's script for his Sarno appearance, and though he's not grossed out by the constant disculpation of Graystone Industries and the holoband stuff, he's still troubled by all the talk about his mindset, his love of his troubled daughter, et cetera, because that's actually the inauthentic part. Cyrus as usual knows how gross they're being, and Priyah's like, "Use your own phrasing!" Amanda clomps through the room in a cloud of rage and cigarette smoke, and Cyrus totally goes, "Is she going to go nuts and fuck everything up for everybody? You know, like she usually does?"
Team Graystone tells Daniel to act "a little guilty," because people love contrition and fakeness and whatever -- that he missed the signs and will never forgive himself -- but also to keep talking about the holoband, because of money. Daniel goes, "No, it had nothing to do with the holoband! That's just true!" And Priyah points at him with her finger, all excited: "That was great! Do that!" It's pretty amazing. I love the scary realness of Priyah's whole thing. Daniel as performance.
Across the lake, Sam's watching them with binoculars and a bobble-head Tauron bull on the dash of his awesome car. Joe calls to bitch at him about how Amanda's not dead yet, and Sam -- who actually knows what's going on, unlike Joe at all times -- tells him to shove it because there's all kind of media and stuff in the house. "How big a bloodbath do you want?" Joe is just appalled at the idea that his murder contract might end in somebody's death, but then stares at a picture of Shannon and Tamara and thinks about things exploding long enough for him to sack up again. You get the correct impression that this is about the tenth time Joe has already waffled, because Joe's only friend is inner conflict and his only reason for living is to make shit as inconvenient as possible for everyone around him.
Clarice tells the kids to just go home and rest up after the big school raid, and they look at her with hollow freaked-out eyes and scatter. I wonder if the politics of this are such that we can make assumptions, but you best believe that somebody would have eaten shit if they'd tried that at a regular school on Earth. Rayanne Graff's mom would throw a fucking wobbler. But maybe because of the school involved, the people are all super-conservative and think the word "terrorist" is magic and so in this one case, some-counterintuitive-how, privacy is less a conservative issue and more like one of those "civil liberties" that always leads to sodomy or whatever.
When Clarice is alone in the trashed hallway, she slides down the wall and almost freaks out, then starts smashing her fist against the locker, and then curls up on the floor and starts crying with her hands on her face. Nothing will fuck up your day like having your teenage army of sociopaths getting their lockers searched, because it means that your perfect cover is no longer so perfect, which in turn means that the salvation of the human race is threatened in the one place you thought was not only safe, but -- like Amanda's house, Zoë's room -- your personal territory.
All of which is sad and scary, but hard to get to because her entire character's arc is in the acting and the emotions so far, so it seems like a lot of people have trouble understanding what's up with her, which always defaults to "this story is boring" instead of "I wonder what's going on with her, because she's very much alone and very driven by her beliefs, but has a personal life that's clearly being revealed slowly so we'll accept her more sympathetically when it's time." ("You look at where you're going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you've been and a pattern seems to emerge.") At which point I guess they'll have her explain it in some awkward expository speech and then we'll all be caught up again.
[God] resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of the mountain, or in the petals of a flower.
Amanda stalks around the bedroom smoking and being pissy and telling Daniel that A) She doesn't know where the fuck his jacket is for those pants and B) It's going to look bad on camera anyway, plus C) Why the hell is he okay with going on TV and dancing on Zoë's grave? (It's a gift of Paula Malcolmsen that these concerns -- which only moments ago were ones with which we, and Daniel, sympathized -- suddenly sound insane coming out of her mouth.) Daniel reminds her that she was the one who called Zoë a terrorist, and she dithers by saying she never called her "crazy," which is an epic hairsplit but one she's been doing for weeks, and then backtracks and points out that actually, like Daniel said last week, they have no idea what really happened.
The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
Which is to say, start at home because you're the only person in charge of you, and here is awesome because she finally got the memo that she was making up these stories to service her own grief, but also awesome because she was the one that convinced Daniel their daughter blew up that train, which is what drove Zoë back into the virtual world two weeks ago. So now Amanda has clawed back to reality enough to realize that Zoë might have just been running away like she implied in her fake suicide note, which is back to the first of the three or four stories Amanda's been telling herself. Major breakthrough. But Daniel's like, "PS, remember how this is all your fault?"
Amanda again splits the hair, saying that the difference is that he's going on TV on purpose to talk about their terrorist daughter, while when she went on TV to say that, she was out of her mind and more concerned with the crowd and speaking to their grief. (Which is a very cool, ongoing thing with her character: She looks at you, she's intuiting you and being completely empathic. She's done it with Jordan and she'll do it again in a second, and it's half the reason their marriage is so awesome, but she also works crowds completely differently than she does one-on-one. Which is a thing doctors can do, because that's the job of them, but doubly neat because she's a plastic surgeon -- and because she couldn't ever manage to see her daughter standing right in front of her.)
Daniel explains that this is the hand they've been dealt, and when he asks if his tie works with his outfit, she spits out a hilarious "YEAH, IT'S GREAT" before stomping after him to yell some more words at him. Amanda asks him to say that they need healing time as a family and to be left alone, and he tells her that will no longer play to the audience -- which grosses her out more, because it's a Priyah word -- and she screams about how they're not just the face of Graystone, they're parents first, and he shuts her up the only way he can: "Parents? Actually no, we're not." Ouch, Daniel. He yells at Serge and bounces, and Amanda continues to smoke and freak out and plan her big public meltdown.
The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
There's a funny little interlude where Zoë gets off the phone with Lacy and logs onto the Matrix, steps out into the decadent dancing or rock concert or whatever in her human outfit... And then immediately goes, "Oh, hell," and derezzes again. Like, how inconvenient that you can't go eat a cheeseburger right now because you have to pretend to be a robot.
...With the cutest boy in the Colonies chatting sweetly and randomly at you while he takes your chassis apart and tsk-tsked about how she's been all alone in the home lab, and she just considers Philo's amazing face and listens to him talk for awhile before he... Drops to his knees and drills her groin area.
Daniel's backstage at Backtalk getting his makeup done while Priyah and Cyrus drill his groin area about the whole line of bullshit they want him to spin, and you can still see his bruises from when he got beat all to hell by Sam, back when Joe was just warming up his being-annoying muscles. The makeup artist is like, "But I mean they beat him all to hell, let me work," and Daniel tries to change "troubled" to first "complicated" and then to talk of Zoë's "troubles," but Priyah is running little PR subroutines behind her eyes on every word, and won't let any of them fly. Finally Cyrus exercises his curious ability to be awkwardly correct: "I loved Zoë."
He says it so straight that Daniel's like, "You did?" Cyrus explains that he should start with that, humanizing them both by talking about how he loved Zoë and missed the signs, and that it wasn't the holoband. Priyah just keeps printing out the same word, "troubled," whenever anybody sticks a nickel in her. Finally Daniel orders Cyrus to give him a cigarette, and Rebecca the makeup girl is like, "The fuck you do," and sticks to her guns until he finally offers her a grand, at which point she's like, "Done." I love Rebecca. The best part of Hunger Games is the stylists and managers and PR people, which I bring up only because as long as we're doing this whole starring-Daniel-as-Daniel story, why not make the makeup artist this cool? I love it.
When Willie walks in, having skipped school yet again, Ruth gives him a tiny amount of shit about it, but she's happy he was with Uncle Sam. Which, she's hardcore in a very specific way that I love, but it also makes sense: She's operating from the same values and mindset as the Ha'la'tha, which is that to be Tauron is to be so often shit on that the Ha'la'tha is what makes life bearable, and in turn Willie better get started as quickly as Sam's doing it. Her nuttiness adds to Sam's nuttiness and makes them both make more sense: William Adama is going to grow up in a very harsh, very unwelcoming world, and if he's going to retain any sense of himself it means growing up in this society, not Caprican or Tauron but the Ha'la'tha way of things. Like, you can't really go back to Sicily but you'd better know the rules in Chicago.
"We won't tell your father. On Tauron, when you're 13, you're a man. You make your own decisions." William gives a great WTF but thanks her, and takes a bottle of water into the TV room, but she sits down in front of him and snatches the remote out of his hands. "What do you want to be, William?" He gives a Caprican answer; she wants the Tauron one. "What do you want to be now?" A Buccaneers waterboy. She's like, "Go for it." Get the job. He sighs and says how his connection -- the Joseph/Daniel Cigarettes & Misery Club -- seems to have discorporated sometime around the pilot episode, when Joe started stalking Daniel and getting on everybody's nerves.
Ruthie grins in the most terrifying possible way and tells Willie that you can't count on friends for favors like that: "You get the best things from enemies. Because they're scared of you!" Willie is not at all sure about that -- What big teeth you have, Tsattie! -- and Ruth tells him Sam will get this shit done. Just as soon as Joe stops fucking bugging him every five seconds.
Sam watches the GDD agents banging on Amanda's door, and once again tells Joe to leave him alone, and then at the door Jordan is ten tons of intense with Amanda, who predictably screams her ass off about the warrants. He tells her to chill -- "We're not gonna do anything to her, we're just trying to find out who turned her into a bomber" -- and she invites herself downstairs to watch them ransack her room. She yells at him to watch out for Zoë's cello, and he gets a little snotty ("Careful with the cello," he barks at the guy) and then just watches Amanda slowly lose it some more.
Finally, Jordan breaks it down for her, what they're going for: "...Who she met with? Who brainwashed her into believing in a moral dictator called God? Maybe the name of some other kid who blew up a Caprican business in the middle of the night? I really don't know." Jordan sure hates big-g God, doesn't he? Amanda's exhausted but not down for the count, but then Youngblood finds that infinity pendant in Zoë's jewelry box. Which Amanda starts yelling about, because she was the one that put it there -- not that it matters, but it speaks to her mindset and the breakthrough from before: The necklace was Zoë's, she can buy that, making it a part of her daughter she still doesn't understand, but still wants to, so she put it where it belongs. All the pieces of her daughter, the puzzle. "There are loose ends, Doctor, and I'm sorry if we have to take your daughter's life apart in order to put other terrorists behind bars. But if we have to, then so be it."
Amanda hears something in his voice, there at the end, and while her question is good -- "What is this to you?. Did you lose someone on that train?" -- his silence is better, and his eventual answer is best: "I lost everyone on that train." So awesome. Now, I don't trust him one inch, because he seems just as one-track as anybody else you can't trust on this show, and that's clearly not the real whole answer anyway, but as a thing for a person to say? Dude, I went from total hate to total love for Lee Adama just based on him saying shit like that.
Lacy shows up at Keon's bike shop, and after he hustles his customer out, he tries to slam the door on her a couple of times, but she's fast and pointy, so he is stymied. She forces her way in and reminds him about how she crushed him in her tiny hands last time and that he promised to get her and a giant robot to Gemenon. "You shouldn't have scampered off during the locker search. It made you look guilty." (Unlike standing there in nose-and-glasses whispering, "I'll walk away and then you walk away and then we will have a secret terrorist meeting away from these global investigators about how we are terrorists with a bomb in your bookbag, okay?" which was of course slick as hell.)
Keon tells Lacy to leave, because she mostly just stares spookily and doesn't talk much except for about the one freaky thing they have in common, plus he needs to fix a motorcycle, but coincidentally Lacy is from a motorcycle-fixing family, including her invisible drunken mother the motorcycle repairman, so now he I guess has no grounds to ask her to leave. Keon's like, "We can't be seen together!" but Lacy tells him to get with the Zen already, because it's just them and the machines. (Cute boys fixing machines one hundred percent of the time. But the difference in this parallel is that Zoë's the scary bad thing and Philo doesn't know it, while over here in this shop it's Keon who is obviously way more hardcore than he lets on, and Lacy's the one about to get burned.)
Singh's disappointed at the nothing they managed to scare up in Zoë's bedroom, because the only revolutionary thing she ever made was herself. They talk about how there was nothing in the school either besides some drugs, and while Singh's disappointed -- "You guaranteed me detonators and infinity symbols!" -- Duram just says this proves they're going after the right places, because clearly somebody warned the kids. He is, of course, extrapolating correctly that it's a kid army, but we've also seen that most of the STO getting rounded up on TV tend to be young as well -- so the step needs to be accessing the kids' phones and e-sheets. Singh grins and points out how grey-area Duram's getting, but Jordan won't let him leave until he gives him permission. Singh employs some Tauron profanity in explaining that he'll have Jordan's balls if he's wrong, and signs off.
"That's a nice-looking chest," Philo mumbles to himself, and Zoë quirks an eyebrow down at him. "I think it looks great!" He runs a diagnostic, and after a few minutes of watching Zoë walk like an Egyptian, he turns on his iPod and cycles through a sort of Jars Of Clay jam, the Colonial Anthem, and then a much better song, grinning. He watches her dance while the music plays, and then decides to dance with her. She follows his movements, eventually picking up her own moves, and while he dances with his robot, she's dancing with him. The cutest boy in the world.
The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test.
If you were a boy and I were a girl, we couldn't ever dance like this: He's dorky, un-self-conscious in his abandon, in a way no human would ever get to see; she starts out stiff and childlike, but slowly gives in to the rhythm, moving her hips. For a second there's no fear, just people; she can pretend that he's smiling back at her, and she's just a girl. She sees a face nobody will ever see. They smile, dancing, and look into each other's eyes, and when the song is done, her limbs go limp. He looks at her for a moment before shaking it off and getting embarrassed again ("Quit feminizing it!") and walks back to the screen.
(But whose grave is she dancing on? Zoë's, yes. And her loneliness, and his. But also yours, and mine, and all the 60 billion children of Gaius Baltar. One day.)
Youngblood bitches about their anachronistic shitty computers, dropping huge sheets of confiscated e-sheets on Duram's desk; he's so frustrated it's a little bit scary. When she asks, he hisses about how "we" let Ben Stark go, and she's like, "Again with this?" You can tell it really stings. He apologizes and says they're all responsible, and she drags a chair around his desk to chat, pointing out that by that reasoning they're all responsible for the bad wheat crop on Aerilon. He wonders why she's just as single-minded as he is, and she just goes, "Looks to me like Gemenese scum are luring good Caprican kids into a killer cult. Anyone doing that needs to be destroyed." He agrees; it is way intense. It is also nice to hear somebody shit-talk Gemenon once in a while. (Not to mention nostalgic; my frenemy/hero Sarah Porter's probably not even born yet.)
Ruth's chopping the shit out of some chicken carcasses when Joe gets home; she lets us know that Joe's joined the whole Boycott Graystone thing and gotten rid of all Willie's toys, so she gave him some jacks. Jacks made from, she says, the finger bones of Tauron children who lose at jacks. Chop! He stares at her and she totally laughs at him, because he's kind of a d-bag and obviously they are from the chicken feet. They announce Daniel's appearance on the TV, and Ruth very subtly pushes Joe to once again check on Sam's murder progress. She is just chilling. Joe's like, "I'm taking care of it" but she still goes -- chopping meat with her huge cleaver the entire time -- "You know, the dead don't really die until their death is avenged. My daughter and your daughter are caught between life and death." He tries to just as subtly tell her he's working on it, but she's not convinced he's not going to flake out, because of course he's going to flake out.
Sarno comes out in his little suit after the crowd's warmed up, and Daniel's popping pills and eyedrops backstage through the whole monologue, which is as realistic as it is stultifying. Patton Oswalt's been a good actor for a while now, but the stuttering improv lilt he gives his lines -- and later, in the actual conversation -- are breathtaking to watch. This character is an impossible mix of Leno and Stewart, this moralizing crank who's still brightly intellectual, and it's exciting but really hard to pull off. And he does it not only well, but makes him charming as hell in the process. I'm so impressed. He cracks a joke about the GDD raiding the studio because of a mixup -- "I was only bombing figuratively" -- and then invites Daniel out.
And of course Daniel freezes before heading onstage just long enough to miss Amanda's crazy ass showing up backstage screaming about the GDD raid and how this whole investigation and Team Graystone PR campaign are going wrong according to her, and how her experience with Duram proves that Daniel can't play this the way they planned, because it's personal on both sides which means admission of guilt won't help, but Team Graystone is like, "Too late!"
There's a staccato awkwardness to the opening conversation, and Daniel cracks a shitty joke ("My Solstice wish was for free publicity, probably should have been a little more specific") which impresses nobody, so brutally that Sarno throws him a bone: "I feel so much better about my monologue right now!" Daniel grabs a glass of water and Sarno warms them up again, joking that Daniel must be asking for something stronger than water, does he need some booze to get through this, and you can feel the studio relax, like the actual temperature in the room changes the more that Sarno alpha-dogs them to be nice to Daniel. It's electric. Every joke pushes them a little bit further back into their chairs -- you've seen Stewart do this a million times -- until the atmosphere is attained where an actual conversation can take place. Daniel even giggles at one point, is how good he's doing, and they finally start, under the hardcore gaze of both the GDD offices and the Adama household.
"Your wife has stated that your daughter, Zoë Graystone, was involved with terrorists and may have been been responsible for the bombing..." Daniel admits most of it, but will only say that she'd "fallen in" with the STO. He throws down the "troubled" word -- upsetting Amanda further -- and tries to change track to how the Matrix isn't evil, just like Team Graystone wanted, and Sarno goes right for the heart of that bullshit. "Let me just tell you what I see here. Uh, I see a lot of young people growing up in a virtual world right now..." Daniel tells Sarno he's heard the theory a million times, and Sarno's like, "Fine, let's talk facts." Daniel's "troubled" daughter grew up in a holoband society, which told her that there are absolutely no consequences to anything. Basically, the same Grand Theft Auto causes rape/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles causes ninja miscegenation bullshit we've been hearing our entire lives, whose only purpose is to let shitty parents off the hook for not parenting their shitty kids.
This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.
Backstage, Cyrus realizes that "troubled" was the wrong word, and Amanda's like, "I've been saying that all day!" Daniel brings up for the first time how hard Zoë hated the Filthy Science, which fascinates Sarno so much that Daniel nearly trusts him, smiling, but Sarno stays on message: "She didn't like the holoband? Hated it? Maybe because it was making her want to blow things up?" Daniel's sad that Sarno turned on him so fast, but backstage Amanda looks at Cyrus and just goes, "...No."
I don't know about you, but I started rubbing my palms together at that moment, because a day without Amanda Graystone going apeshit on some poor mother is like a day without sunshine.
(My friend The Stove explains: "You always love the hot blonde one best, on every show." Guilty. But then the week she revised: "It's the cold blonde one, actually." It's completely true. It's because the dark-haired one is almost always going to be the Bad Girl and get redeemed, but it's the blonde one that has the option of going cold: Being so good and sticking to your convictions so hard that on the rare occasion that you absolutely must control a situation, you can do it merely by withholding or supplying affection or approval, and further that you can do this with complete transparency because it's not a secret. Not proud of all that, but then survival skills never come cheap. By definition.)
Leaving Team Graystone in a twitching mass of poll numbers and nosediving stocks, Amanda walks right the hell out there on stage. Everybody stares and loses their minds because of how amazing she is. Joe's confused because she's supposed to be dead, Jordan Duram is once again truly impressed with her total balls, Priyah's about to kill herself, Cyrus is about to call his broker faster than Martha Stewart on speed dial, Sarno's doing poodle flips of course, Daniel's smiling at her with the thinnest angriest lips. "Let's get her a chair, please... Um, people watching at home, uh, let's hit Record and we'll be right back after these messages. This is going to be very exciting, so stick around."
...And then, commercial break! Which rocks of them, because I was so afraid it was just going to cut away to somebody else instead of doing that.
Much applause, and the Graystones are a teepee and a wigwam right now, and Sarno's like, "Nice to see you, Doctor!" Amanda explains that she's as surprised as they are that she has appeared in her usual way, but that they're getting it wrong. Sarno: "I'm getting this wrong? Okay, I just flashed back to my first and third marriages there..." But the look of horror Amanda shoots him finally, finally cracks through and he apologizes for the first time for making a joke, like he literally goes, "I'm sorry, I don't know why I made a joke." He is phenomenal some more. Amanda explains that Zoë wasn't "crazy," she was angry. You can feel that same power in the crowd -- they're not sure what she's talking about yet, and not inclined to listen seriously, but the less she stutters and the more Sarno stares at her, the more power she gets.
"She was defiant. She was rude. She was frustrating. Show me a 15-year-old girl who isn't. She slammed her door, she played loud music. She said that we embarrassed her in public..." (We've heard this before; it's going to take more than this but it's a good place for her to start.) Sarno jumps on it masterfully -- "Slammed her door? Played loud music? And blew up a commuter train!" -- but Amanda asks him to tell her the exact moment she should have called the cops. "I don't know, maybe when she started worshipping the Big Destructo-God in the sky?" Big laughs, big applause. (To paraphrase Pirsig: One person's delusion is insanity, but collective delusion is religion. I agree with him in the original context, but that's not the context here.)
They talk about how they didn't know anything that was going on with her, and Sarno reminds him he used the "troubled" word like twice, which causes Team Graystone to sigh loudly backstage, but Daniel finally shoots his wife a grateful, loving look. They have this way of holding hands when they're not even touching. "She was angry. It's a better word, my wife's right." Okay, but also morally blank, Sarno suggests, but the crowd's not following him there yet. "Because the virtual world is a poor teacher and doesn't teach you boundaries..."
Amanda stares at Daniel as he drops the first shoe that's going to save them: "You know who would completely agree with that is Zoë, and that's exactly how the STO got to her." Genius, and totally true. She was in a cult but she wasn't a terrorist yet; she was watching the rollercoaster head for the brink in a way that Sarno only pretends to fear. Sarno's completely wrongfooted this time, and tells Daniel to back up ("keep in mind half of this audience is stoned," big laugh).
"Okay. She saw things in the virtual world. Ritual sacrifices, games like New Cap City, and... She felt the absence of moral guidelines, just like you do. Like a lot of folks do." The crowd leans forward; Amanda's never heard this. Another part of her daughter she'll never know. "And into that absence steps the STO, offering this... marvelous, ultimate moral arbiter. It's quite appealing, For a teenage girl especially," he opines. Sarno calls this accusation, and then Daniel goes apeshit in a way his wife would admire, because that's when he tells the world that he talked to her about this. (In the beat I was like, "Um, after she died?" and Jeremy laughed, but then guess what.)
"Um, after she died?" Amanda's horrified as anyone else, but for different reasons. Sarno goes, "I'm sorry, you made an electronic ghost of your dead daughter?" Daniel's like, "Yeah, it's fucked up." Sarno sympathizes but they both acknowledge how disturbing that shit was. Meanwhile Amanda feels absolutely betrayed for like ten seconds; backstage, a Tauron PA hassles Sam for his backstage bracelet, but he flashes his ink, so she hands over her laminate and then peaces because whatever happens you don't really want to be there for, and he goes off to lurk.
"...But it did offer some small insight into her motivations," Daniel explains, and Sarno points out that this just brings us back to square one, which is that either the Matrix is the problem (like Sarno says) or the Matrix is such a problem that it's a problem. Deft. Amanda immediately says it's not the Matrix, but Daniel quietly wonders if he's wrong. Sarno makes the audience laugh and then asks him to go on. "We thought we could control the content in v-world, especially for kids, but we've failed, clearly. I think the temptation to hack the code is too great." Not that he can offer anything; Sarno gives him the softest look for a second and tells him to just think out loud. I mean, you've got Bill Gates on your couch talking about how to fix the world, "think out loud" is a good suggestion to make.
"I don't know. For there to be any beneficial change, you'd have to take away the profit motive. Like when they legalized drugs, for instance." People in a hash bar watch, as Sarno points out that there were decades of really ugly fighting before we got there. "Why couldn't we try it?" Sarno's all about how this is a huge leap, but Daniel's already leapfrogged and gone. "No. Graystone Industries will no longer charge for licensing of any legal spaces. And any profit we make off the bands will go to some charity, or..." Amanda picks up the thread beautifully: "A foundation, that we can create," and Daniel nods sharply: "We'll create something for young people to find the right experiences and the right values..." Much applause.
(And why not? That is awesome. I mean, all we really ask of our TV is that there be fights and fucking and, on this channel, maybe a spaceship. But what if there were a soap opera that happened to be set in a SF universe, such that you could have the richest scientist couple in the world talk about going from Apple to Google in response to a terrorist threat, with a little GTA and IP law thrown in there? Most TV SF historically -- even the small bit now -- is on an Alan Dean Foster/Piers Anthony/Terry Brooks sort of track: Licensed and xeroxed, unrecognizably sexless and utopian, emotionally and socially shallow-to-illiterate, soullessly and bitterly commercial, and self-consciously intellectual on a scale somewhere between "nominally cerebral" and "borderline autistic." You get your occasional Babylon 5 (which would be... Oh! Pern, obviously) and Octavia Butlers and Nicola Griffithses like Farscape and all the Joss stuff, and yer Ender Wigginses like BSG.
Which is great! That's a long list and I'm proud of them all. But what if you went the full Cory Doctorow on that shit? What if Paolo Bacigalupi wrote the hospital drama, or Ted Chiang was driving the new crimescene procedural? What if China Miéville had a teen drama on ABC Family, how wonderful a trainwreck would that be? What if Grant Morrison wrote Smallville? What if Neal Stephenson wrote Lost, suddenly and all those Asperger's clues actually meant something? Wouldn't it feel more like the future, then? Wouldn't you feel like we were going somewhere?
I'm not saying that even needs to happen: I'm just saying that's what you're watching. It doesn't have much to do with the TV SF we've been trained to expect, but it has a hell of a lot more in common with SF literature than 90% of what's out there. Not an heir to Roddenberry or Lucas, boo hoo, but a hell of a lot closer to the lineage of Bradbury and Sturgeon and Ellison. It's fine to look for what's not there -- to demand that everything act like space opera, to get vicious with SGU for attempting to be less formulaic and idiotic than its forebears, while handing over record ratings for utter trash fanfic like Tin Man and Alice -- but when you do that, you run the risk of missing what is there because you didn't even know to look for it.
It's exactly this kind of nonsense that's turned Margaret Atwood into a bundle of twigs and hair. Is there ever a valid reason to hold TV to a lower standard, much less refuse to notice when it exceeds that standard? Is the ghetto really that self-reinforcing? Do you honestly think people read Left Hand Of Darkness or The Sparrow or Iain Banks because they're about shiny spaceships and freaky aliens? And I'll tell you another thing, if you think this shit's boring, I cannot wait to introduce you to good old Canticle For Leibowitz, which is nine million pages of monks walking slower than those giant moaning turtles from The Dark Crystal.)
Sarno smiles and agrees with Daniel that the people of Caprica will have to hold him to it; backstage, Priyah is raising the roof and Cyrus is moaning that he's just given away 60% of their net. "My company will make no more profit on the holobands or v-world licensing," Daniel promises, and Amanda finally relaxes with a huge smile as the cheers go up. Sarno thanks them, classy as ever -- "This was a fascinating discussion that I was completely unprepared for... And I think we need to credit Amanda with the most amazing save since Bracken Oka beat Jenkins at the horn..." -- while Ruth and Joe separately and tacitly freak out that her ass isn't dead yet. "Let's pick an analogy where the Bucs won," Daniel jokes, and Ruth's all, "I could kill her with my own hands. Sleep well every night. Couldn't you?" And suddenly Joe realizes he can't. Amanda's not just somebody's wife. She's somebody's mother, too.
I have to believe that a culture on the verge of collapse is also always on the verge of transformation. I don't want to buy too hard into this "reins of the waterfall" idea that we're all dancing on the edge of something vast and have no idea that we're sliding off into Gibbon's Decline & Fall, because it seems dead to me. But just because we're heading for a tragedy doesn't mean we're pointed straight at it. Right up until the war starts, I have to believe we could go either way. That just because they've got group marriages and legalized drugs and boobs flopping around on the DVD doesn't necessarily mean we/they deserve extinction. Aren't we sort of saying that Zoë's as wrong as Sarno is? Couldn't these changes lead somewhere wonderful, a paradise, that's wiped out only by what we're seeing now? Does freedom always have to be bad? Caprica seems like a mostly wonderful place, and where it isn't, their problems have less to do with their freedoms and social flexibility and more with the places where they're still blocked. What the Cylons will do could never be earned by anyone, least of all these people.
"I see a lot of panicked faces behind me," Daniel jokes, and she tells him it'll be okay, and she'll find her own ride home. Saved once again, they kiss goodbye, and once Daniel's gone Sam appears from the shadows, masquerading once again as the limo driver. "What's your name?" she asks, with the easy friendliness -- not to say noblesse oblige -- that we've so rarely gotten to see from her. "I'm Amanda," she smiles, like she's smiled at a million drivers before, as though they don't already know who she is. "Nice to meet you!"
Lacy and Keon get the bike running, and high-five; finally, she's allowed to ask a question or two. She asks him if he had bomb shit in his locker and he gets all skitzy. Remember, we already know his actual-bomber cell, with Ben, didn't have anything to do with Clarice. Which I think means there's a secret inner cell Clarice doesn't even know about, or there are two to which she's desperately glomming onto -- if she even really has her own, which I'm starting to doubt -- because whoever gave her the GDD warning could have also given it to Keon's cell. (What if Keon/Ben/Pan/Hippolyta are the real cell, and her warning actually went nowhere? And she ran around being all stressed out and kicking Nestor literally out of bed just trying to be part of something? Wouldn't that be sad?)
Lacy once again congratulates Keon on being cautious, because it's smart of him and she's not smart, but she puts her tiny grubby little paws on the motorcycle seat between them, and he looks at her and her whole ten miles of cute and finally offers to set up a meeting with Barnabas, who can decide whether the STO helps her with her mission. (So if Barnabas is connected to the Ben/Keon cell, is he also Clarice's confessor Alvo, a lower-ranking STO person, or the Big Bad himself?) She nods happily, and touches his arm, and then they both get nervous because True Love Waits or whatever crap.
To the doo-wop tune of another McCrary original, Amanda continues to play nice. "Your tattoos, are they homemade? I'm sorry. I don't mean to pry, but I'm a plastic surgeon. [Did we know that?] I'm really interested in that sort of thing." He tells her they're Tauron, and she's like, "Of course! They have meanings, right?" Sam's pleasantly surprised at how charming she's being, and says that although people assume they're always a gangster thing, they're not... Necessarily. "You get ink because you're a parent, or you got a fancy pedigree, or there's some sort of ritual, maybe you made a mistake..." She smiles and offers to give him a fancy pedigree, or erase some of his mistakes, and he fake-chides her that it wouldn't be real if she did that.
"Very little is real these days," Amanda says, exhausted, and leans back, and finally says it. "...This isn't the way home." She didn't whisper. He doesn't answer.
Joe continues dialing wildly, drinking his Lethe beers and staring at the bones on his table. "Don't," he whispers and texts. Ruth watches, unimpressed and silently angry -- we focus for a moment on her own tattoos, right where her children and grandchildren are located -- as he calls Larry and begs him to have Sam call back. "Turn on your frakking phone!" he screams at it when he's done, slamming the table. Ruth seethes behind him, and finally goes upstairs.
"Excuse me," Amanda says once she's found her voice, "This isn't the way home." Sam tells her they're going around an accident, cutting through Little Tauron: "Don't worry. It's good people here. Not very nosy." She tenses up, he changes course: "Which is a good thing, right? What with all those people angry about all those deaths." Better, less scary, but there's a wariness as she thinks it out. "I lost my sister-in-law and my niece on that train," he says, offhandedly, and she pauses for a moment. "My Gods, I'm so sorry." She's nearly whispering. The pop song slides into score, turning into scary murder music.
"Yeah. Well, you can't turn back time. Nothing I could do to change that now." Amanda loses herself to dread, embarrassed, wondering if it's racist to be so afraid. "Yeah. I guess all we can try and do is understand." He nods. "Or look for some kind of balance." She stares. "Maybe try to even things out." She watches him carefully; it's his words that hit like ice down her back. "My sister-in-law's name was Shannon." She nods; that's when the fear is real. "My niece was named Tamara. She was gonna make us all proud..." She closes her eyes, nearly weeping, and there's another jump cut away from her total dread to commercial that is just brilliant. This is also where the joy of the last ten scenes added up and burst and I suddenly realized that Caprica had become my favorite show on TV.
Joe's asleep at the table when Sam arrives; he wakes to his brother scrubbing up in the kitchen. "Larry hates it when I come home bloody," Sam smiles, and pretends he can't hear Joseph asking, over and over, if Sam did it. He spins out a whole long, scary story about how he took her to Little Tauron and ordered her into this abandoned restaurant and then chased her through there with the knives, and he's taking his time drying his hands and lighting a cigarette and the whole time Joe's begging, over and over, to just hear the words. "You killed her in the kitchen?" Tauron Rule #143: "That stuff they spray at crime scenes can't tell the difference between animal blood and human blood." Joe's eyes bug out and he nearly loses it and finally Sam says he's just kidding, and is frakking around with Joe for bugging him all day and jerking him around on business.
"Was that sarcastic?" Joe chokes, and his stress level is so very high, understandably so, that it's totally hilarious, like, Sam-playing-Sam can literally go, "I am lying to your face" and Joe's still like, "Are you lying about lying about lying?!" Sam sits down and grins and finally reminds him that he doesn't turn off his phone, because actual people besides his bipolar insane brother might be calling, so yeah, he got all like 60 texts and calls, and he didn't kill her. Though he did scare her, which he noted is nothing new for her because of how she's constantly getting bottles thrown at her and riots everywhere she goes, and Sam's like, ultimately he knew Joe wouldn't go through with it because he is a, quote, "frakking Caprican in a Tauron body," and then there's this really adorable, really real physical beat where Sam snatches Joe's beer out of his hand and slugs it, and Joe grins at him like "Aww" and Sam's like "What?" Like, that's what brothers do. Fuck with you for putting hits on people, and then they jack your beer. So cute!
Clarice is in bed watching the Sarno appearance, and not for the first time, when Nestor comes in and kisses her on the head and is like, "Here you go again." Clarice points out that every time those crazy bitches go on TV they tend to say really important stuff about her Magical Internet God, so you can see how interesting that would be for her. Because she already knew the virtual copy was real, even if Lacy won't confirm it or share it, and now she knows Daniel's got or had a copy, which means Clarice is about to start touching other plotlines besides her current one, where she mainly gets weird on Lacy when she's not dealing with a personal life so wildly complicated that even Kara Thrace would be like, "Girl, you need to simplify your situation."
Amanda gets into bed, still shaken from her Sam encounter. Daniel, of course, can identify. They talk about the prevailing and continuing anger and fear surrounding them, and decide they can't really blame anybody for it. She won't look at him, the whole time she's taking off her jewelry, and finally asks about the avatar. "It was nothing. You know how it works. It's just a picture of her, nothing more." She gets into bed, knowing all that, and asks again why he did it. He can't say it out loud, fussing with his glasses and reading the same page over and over -- he's the peacemaker, he's the one that always makes her laugh -- and finally she just reaches out for him. "I didn't know it got that bad," she says, pulling up tight to him. They are very sad, and quiet; they admit aloud how much they miss Zoë, and they can rest.
"...Want to watch TV?" Amanda finally asks, and he thinks. "Graystones are on Sarno tonight," she says, and he finally laughs. "I heard they were really good," she continues, and he rumbles under her. "I am so sick of them! They're everywhere!" Oh, awful, she nods. "Rich... Disgusting!" They laugh. "Ridiculous people," Daniel hums into his wife's hair, and holds her closer.
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