Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Ambling Alp
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 5 | Aired on 02.26.2010
Either way: Fix you, fix the world. Or as everybody in this episode keeps saying, "Wake up." Come to the better garden, where the shades of the Underworld don't have such a hold on you. Start here. Wake up to the ways you're trapped and you'll see how free you really are. Take hold of the fact that you're writing the story of You, starring You. It's as empowering and exciting as it is humbling, and shameful.
(Now, in terms of my personal beliefs, this is a spiritual issue in the same way that everything is. Because knowing yourself is knowing God, who lives in the dark sweaty places you're scared to look, and also because everything that rises must converge eventually. Because loving or bringing to light the parts of yourself that you hate and keep in the dark is the only real way to get closer to happy. I only started saying "God" instead of "grace" because I got so much shit for the latter, even though it's more precise.)
But I would stress that I'm not bringing this to you in any kind of metaphysical light, and I hope you see the distinction: I'm talking straight-up pragmatism. Pattern recognition; relevance to your own empirical experience. Either way, you're affecting your world in a massive and complex fashion: Wouldn't you prefer to be on the side of the angels?
I think these ideas or intuitions are necessary -- maybe essential -- and that for a certain kind of person, you and me included, the Matrix metaphor is the best way of getting them across without tripping our atheist BS detectors. But only insofar as we're willing to take the next step and see their relevance to life. Otherwise it's cool shit and kung fu, little-boy fantasies, and everybody hating the next two movies because that's where the consequences start. Otherwise it's just TV science fiction. Which is how this episode was written -- hence the grade anomaly -- but more troublingly, how it seems to have been perceived.
As much as I find this episode clunky in its dialogue and SyFy in its presentation -- as much as I resent the idea/fact that genre fans seem to finally be warming to the show now that it's given them their requisite handjob of whoa -- I want you to understand that I don't fault, and in fact love, the use of the Matrix metaphor here. Overall, but even in this episode. I didn't expect to love Tamara as much as Zoë, but she makes it real in a way Zoë can't. If we're playing any character -- if we're putting on, to revive a redeemed concept, any Helo/Kara/Athena Suits -- we're now playing Tamara Adams, because she is both the most trapped and the most free. Because every move she makes deforms the universe, and as above so below.
I mean, absolutely I know I'm begging the question of whether I'm putting my shit on the show and overdoing this, and I'm willing to admit when that happens -- c.v. the recaps for like the last two seasons of BSG, with which I was upfront about playing around because it got so WTF -- but listen to the words: As embarrassing/adorable as "Figuring out the object of the game is the object of the game but we think it's about getting things... like money" is, I mean, any epiphany sounds retarded if you say it out loud. The game is life, and vice versa, and we're quite clear on that.
But even moreso because the show does the work connecting the three stories: Daniel, wake up. Joseph, wake up. Tamara, finally, finally wake up. Join your sister Zoë, finally, by becoming her opposite. Stop fucking around looking for avenues that don't exist anymore and become what you are. Joseph, your grief is ripping up the world and killing your kid. Daniel, wake up to the fact that you've taken your daughter's crazy terrorist cult philosophy and made it a financial strategy, carrying it forward directly into the media, while Tamara plays the other side. Daniel, listen to your intuitions and let yourself love Zoë like Philo does, no matter how she looks. Wake up!
Man, that was a blowout.What's that gonna be, like, ten pages when published? You got off easy and you know it. After ten years, you know how it goes. Back to the Matrix, where Tamara is shoving her way down a long The Hunger chainlink hallway, past all manner of what passes for hardcore punk-rockers in Vancouver, and eventually up to the door. A very pretty girl with a lot of lines but no name and no real personality, along with a very Canadian, ugly/pretty Beaver Casablancas type named Heracles (Tad, in real life), whom we'll get to know better, step up to her while the randos grumble. In her time since Zoë and Lacy set her free, apparently, Tammy's been wandering the Matrix and eventually heard about some bigtimer named Vesta (look it up, it matters; it always matters) who might be able to help her with her whole heartless/trapped issue.
The boy and girl are curious immediately when they hear her conundrum, which is automatically a bad sign, and then they're like, "Okay, you can talk to her but we get to watch." Which isn't a bad sign so much as an engraved invitation to Badness. And then immediately, the Badness: Vesta running a roulette table that is a specific kind of roulette you might have heard about. V-world is so dumb, and so, so awesome.
As Annalee's excellent-as-expected coverage notes, she's very Mondo 2000. Which is to say, she looks exactly like an internet nerd with a coterie would imagine herself circa 1993: Fried hair, conspicuously latex/leather apparel, more eye makeup than you can shake a stick at... But still with that moderately Wiccan "I have n+1 cats" thing happening.
As I've often said, cyberpunk-which-never-existed died when Jane Child left us for Tokyo to make it real, just like riot-grrl-which-never-existed died when Courtney Love left us for the better crazier place where she still takes residence. Her Own Private Tokyo, if you will. I alone still love her, but I don't expect anybody to go there with me, and anyway this is not the show to talk about that, so let's go. Bets placed.
Tamara freaks, Hot Girl #122 licks her lips while looking a lot like the Blood Ties girl, whom I spotted recently on both Legend Of The Seeker and Life Unexpected. Rando True Blood-looking dude with a goatee is also very horny for death, because the Matrix is so gross that you become a terrorist or else just give in. Tamara, watching this now -- I thought she was so innocent because she couldn't afford a holoband in life, but Lacy has one and Joe took one or something similar away from Willie last week -- seems like she's already heading the STO's direction, because it's so creepy.
Then they grip, pull their hair back, put the guns to their temples, and fire. The guy derezzes, everybody cheers, somebody wins. Tammy's confused by his disappearance, more for our benefit than for making narrative sense, so somebody explains how that works, for the first of many times so we understand her entire plotline coming up. "Gone where?" Wherever, some boy says. Maybe home. Tamara's like, "That's my jam," and steps up on Vesta at the table, who goes, "You're the girl who can't get out. People have been talking about you," while counting her money, even though this comes off like a lie because Tad/Heracles like just explained her. Either way, proper for the tone and proper for the interaction. "Look, I need to get outside. I need to go home. Can you please help me?" Vesta suggests she simply take off her band, Tamara squeals about how she can't, and Vesta pulls out a gun and immediately shoots her through the middle.
I love Vesta. I would like to see her come back, although I guess it would have to be in some other form. Hopefully this very ambitious/enthusiastic writer Kath Lingenfelter (late of Pushing Daisies, btw) will pull an Angeli and find a way to bring her back. So Tammy falls on the ground all screaming and bleeding and the freaks freak and the people stare, and finally Herc points out to Vesta that she hasn't derezzed. Vesta stares, a real power in her suddenly, like she's waking up, and leans in real fucking close, smiling her tiger smile and telling Tammy it'll all be alright.
"The pain should zap you out of the program, and you have to re-launch your avatar, but you..." Tammy's like, "Um, can't?" No, don't have to. (Wake up!) There's a myth about "Sleepers" who for some reason have gone into REM with their bands on and can't wake up, which I guess makes sense hypothetically but also makes sense that they're a myth, because it really doesn't. Since Tammy's obviously been knocking around the Underworld for way too long for that, Vesta offers that maybe she is just in a coma or something instead. "We can hack it, do a manual disconnect," Vesta says, and Tamara immediately gets annoyed. "There's some kind of price, isn't there?"
The hardness of Tamara Adams is one of the masterstrokes of this show, man. You've got Zoë, who is basically a baby even when she acts like a woman, and Lacy