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How much Lacy and Clarice in this episode? Zero. Zero much. No Nestor, shirt-wearing or otherwise. No Philo, dancing or otherwise. One scene of Amanda, where she's giving Daniel a pep talk. One scene of Zoë, which we'll discuss in a sec. So what happened in this episode? Lots of special effects, mostly, and Adamas mourning/turning awesome, the resolution of the "Willie Is Led Astray" arc, and Daniel pulling yet another clutch move.
Tamara has spent however long wandering around the Matrix looking for a way out of there, and rumor brings her eventually to this totally intense old lady-mobster who loves Russian Roulette and playing New Cap City, which is essentially GTA crossed with a cartoon FDR world. She and her cute young helper guy use Tamara's inability to die to win cash in the game, but after a heist goes wrong and Tamara learns that she can control the Matrix with her magical brain, she sort of stops doing what people tell her and becomes way awesome instead.
After Joe finally finds out about Willie's new Thug Life -- and sees his dear little son brain some guy's face in with a huge rock for acting racist -- he pull it together long enough to give Tamara and Shannon their funeral, and thus their family the closure that they need. There's a really beautiful Tauron ceremony involving tattoos. But since it's Joe Adama, who will never once get a break, that scab is immediately yanked once again by Tamara's gamer BF, who shows up at the house ranting about how Tamara needs help and then runs off the second Joe explains to him the obvious truth, that she's dead.
Meanwhile, Daniel is in huge trouble with the board for his stunt on Sarno, but after a rallying convo with Amanda, ends up with a whole new business plan: Instead of manufacturing holobands for entertainment, why not create a slave race of Cylons that will do your total bidding and never get tired? What begins as an adorable father/daughter act becomes just incredibly sad when Daniel orders Zoë to rip her own arm off. Yeah, I can't imagine how doing shit like that for grins would ever lead to the total apocalypse.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!It's a school day but Willie's playing on his computer in the morning when Sam arrives at the Adama house, calling his "Khairei." He jerks the headphone out of Willie's ear; Joseph is asleep on the couch in his robe, having fully gone there. I don't think I've ever seen a show or movie where the dad goes into full-on couch depression like this, have you? Nancy Botwin, and Jessica Lange in Men Don't Leave, but never the dad. It's terrifying either way, trust me, but this seems more terrifying because it's so unusual. Joe tries to pull it together and take Willie to school, but he's in no shape and Willie doesn't need any of his mess anyway, because nobody but Joe thinks Sam is actually going to take him to school instead of into the movie Goodfellas.
Things right under your nose. I was so in Joe's space the first time I saw this episode that I honestly heard Willie the same way he did: "I'd prefer if Sam took me to school" meant just that at first, and not the opposite. So Joe's going to feel like a totally bad parent when Sam leaves, but then he's going to find out where Sam's taken his kid, and then try to fit them both into a stupid fishing fantasy to get back to when things were normal, and in all of these cases he's just climbing right in the casket with Shannon and Tamara, because that's what we do. And when he leaves Sam's going to try to remind Joe to be a man, to be a Tauron man and all that implies including fatherhood, and Joe is going to laugh and say that he's just a Caprican, like Sam said, which means that he is weak and not a man at all. And through all this, Joe's so ashamed he can't even get mad.
"...First, you be a father. And when you can manage that, maybe I'll introduce you to your son." But that's not the most important thing he says; the most important thing he says is the last thing he says: "Wake up, brother." It's a theme, but it's a song too. A poem by one of my favorites, and who in fifty years will be one of Willie's favorites too:
There is another sky,
Ever serene and fair,
And there is another sunshine,
Though it be darkness there;
Never mind faded forests, Austin,
Never mind silent fields --
Here is a little forest,
Whose leaf is ever green;
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been;
In its unfading flowers
I hear the bright bee hum:
Prithee, my brother,
Into my garden come!
When we lose someone, the Tauron ritual reminds us, we go with them into the Underworld. The job -- which we have to do, in their honor -- becomes finding our way home again. That's what Orpheus & Eurydice is about. (Orpheus is about a lot of stuff, but that particular story is about this.) So on one level you have Sam beckoning to his brother, to come back to the "brighter garden." But you also have Tamara, whose violence is echoed in her brother here, sending messages from the Underworld. And in every case, the message is the same: "Wake up." Grief and fear are a dream from which you can eventually wake, if you stay strong.
Which leads into the other thing -- and settle in because it's a biggie, with its fingerprints all over this episode, and the entire show, which is why I'm doing it upfront even though doing that invariably earns me even more hatemail than getting the fanfic people all riled up -- which is the purpose of Matrix metaphors to begin with. And I've thought about going here but second-guessed, which I should know by now means I'm going to end up taking too long for having not built it in advance, so whatever, page forward until I shut up.
Before this job, before I even knew television was okay, I did the kind of drastic overthinking you regularly see on display here, but silently. And on comic books. (You were warned.) I make knowing references to comics but I don't ever really talk about how important they were to me growing up, because that's not really how I see myself now so I don't think about it a lot. But three writers in particular -- Gaiman's Sandman, Milligan's Shade and Enigma, and Morrison's Invisibles -- left the same mark on me that they've left on anybody you've ever met that gets all woggle-eyed if they talk about them. Which is why we don't.
Before The Matrix, before Dark City or eXistenZ or any of the other ones I glibly noted last week (although around the same time as Snow Crash, speaking of things that saved my literal life) there was this: These three writers who brought the Matrix metaphor to life. (The Invisibles, which is the most important comic book ever written in my opinion, was openly a huge inspiration for those movies... And come to think of it, suffered exactly the same way for the same reasons and along basically the same timeline as BSG's overall arc, which is a discussion for another time).
In every case, you've got somebody who for whatever reason has control over the mutable world -- like Neo, like Tamara -- which is itself a recapitulation of the particular Hero's Journey iteration that goes into wizards and shamanism: Guy (or Gal) goes with the Guide and has all the Quests and everything, and eventually learns the Language of the Birds, which is just code for rewriting the code.
What the stories above, among others, synthesized about this mytheme is the fact that if you have absolute -- if glitchy -- power over the Matrix, then you are totally accountable for what happens. It goes both ways. Sandman's Dream King, Morpheus, affects the weather with his moods (like, for another example of this concept, Peter Pan) and eventually engineers his own fate in a brilliantly complex and moving way. The tremendous Rac Shade ricochets through America and sexuality -- and eventually, time -- laying brutal waste to everything he loves, out of his own selfish blindness and innate sense of wonder. Enigma and Michael are this whole other fucked up thing about existentialism, while the Invisibles are just about the most... Just read it. I can't even.
But so in every case, including here, it's the implication that matters: If your mind -- not your ego, not the best and most "you" part of you, but the Self, all of you -- is in charge of reality, then you had better fucking come correct. Because the things you don't allow yourself to think are the things that are going to fuck you up. Guaranteed. (Not to mention everybody else, if you're not present for the decisions you "don't know" you're making just as much as you are for the ones you're able to own.)
That's every story ever written. It's the point of every single religion that ever existed. If life can be said to have objective "meaning," I would honestly say that this is it. Buffy spent two much-ballyhooed seasons exploring this idea, sometimes explicitly, but looking back I would say -- beyond obviously "Primeval"/"Restless" -- that the Riley arc and "Conversations With Dead People" in particular are about acknowledging and taking ownership of the ways we warp the world around us. The good and bad there. The people/worlds you leave behind when you are so set on ignoring your effect on the personal world all around you, what it does to them.
It's the reason I loved writing about Lt. Thrace so much, and eventually fell in love with her without ever identifying with her: That was her story. She painted the sky. She wrote the Starbuck story, starring Starbuck. She came back from Heaven unbroken, and brought us all home. And she did that by being braver than we can imagine, in ways we barely knew about sometimes, and in ways that usually looked more crazy than not, because she knew the Underworld and learned to speak the language of birds. Shit
happened to her that wasn't her fault, and I'm not saying otherwise. Shit happens to everybody. Unbelievably awful shit happens to us on the reg. But once it happens, it's yours. Different rules for before and after, because you're not the one to blame.
Kara opened the door on the ugly stuff so that she could stop fucking up the world around her. She took it all in, all those darling daughters, and became beautiful and hard, and stayed beautiful and hard, and that's a huge reason I didn't mind her arc in the end, which confused a lot of readers. But to me, she was headed there all along, and I believed in it -- and her -- all along, so when it became explicit it wasn't really a shock.
So the part is the part you do for yourself, which is taking that idea -- that some fictional person shapes the world around him- or herself -- into the real world. Where the things you don't allow yourself to think are the things that are going to fuck you up. I'm not talking about blaming the victim or The Secret or any of that shit, I'm speaking here pragmatically: You're sitting at lunch with your best girlfriend and she's just gotten dumped and no matter how sympathetic you are, you find yourself mentioning your own perfect relationship a bit more and a bit more, and she starts getting weird without knowing why, and shoots a pointed look at the amount of food you're putting away, without knowing she's doing it, and you start drawing parallels to her last failed relationships without knowing why, and pretty soon you're both assholes.
Or you give yourself a pass to be a dick just this one time on the highway, because of road rage which everybody gets sometimes so it's no big deal, and the person you cut off goes to work and is a jerk to a client because he's annoyed at you, faceless asshole, and needs to pin some rage somewhere. If he gets fired, there's a tiny-tiny percentage of that which is on you. Do you see what I'm saying? You reach out, you pluck the threads of your universe like a guitar. You warp the world around you with every step you take, just by existing. You are in the Matrix. You are the One. (You're the Bad Wolf, essentially.)
Which is why 99.9% of all therapy, like any Quest, is getting your shit under control: What you did, why you did it, where it came from, and can you fix it. Because your stuff, your unthought thoughts and your hidden aversions and your petty point-scoring and your obsessive needs -- along with all the lovely things that are just as valid but get all the attention -- are the things that warp and shape the universe. Or at least the part of it you touch, which is all that really matters, on a moment-to-moment basis (denying which is just another trap they've set for you).
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 step and see their relevance to life. Otherwise it's cool shit and kung fu, little-boy fantasies, and everybody hating the 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
whose whole job is to get hard ASAP. But now there's also Tammy, who has already been burnt hard by being a Tauron in Caprica City; Tammy who would have ended up like Ruth or Sam in a way Joe can't even understand, but who certainly got as far as Willie before she died, because her innocence was always compromised by prejudice. I would hasten to remind you that -- and I always knew I would love her, for this -- the last and only thing she did before she died was kick the shit out of a boy for calling her a dirt-eater. Not just because of the point about the three girls, but mostly because of Willie in a sec. She is hardcore and she is totally not interested in your bullshit, which are two things I like a lot in a person but should scare you to death in a living/undying avatar of the Matrix itself.
(Which, it's been pointed out to me I was remiss in the "cold blonde" discussion last week, but only because I thought it was obvious: If the anima/animus takes its form as your daemon, clearly Caprica Six is my Pantalaimon. I loved Boomer and Lee, but everything good and bad about me is there. Virgo rising and all that shit we don't believe in.)
So what's the price? "Play a little game, that's all." The boy Herc stares, that beautiful henchgirl smiles. "Help me settle an old score. You play the game, I get you home." And Tammy's healed already. The beautiful henchgirl talks like that sad girl from To Die For, like she's had slight oral surgery but not to a Serena van der Woodsen degree, or anything. "She's not bleeding! I've never seen anyone heal before..." They get her dressed and on the road, while Joe -- still smoking, still in his depression robe -- finally gets the truancy call from Willie's school instead of Ruth. When he takes the call he's on the other side of an ornate rood screen, if you're keeping track of confessions, but it's interesting that he only got the call because he finally dove headlong into his sadness. We only thought he was wallowing before now.
Joe heads over to Sam's backroom gangster hangout, where Willie's learning magic tricks from one of them. "It's so simple!" he exclaims -- first it's here, then it's gone -- when Joe appears. Willie makes that oh hell stare-face he's perfected, and Joe tells him to get the fuck on up out of there. Sam watches very carefully; Willie checks in with him and heartbreaking, this, waits for Sam's nod. Which he gives, before asking Joe to speak privately. Joe swears at him in Tauron, about which Sam points out the irony, of course, and hustles poor Willie out of there.
"You lose something in the desert," Sam reminds him, an old Tauron saying, "Someone else finds it, it belongs to them. Permanent." Which works here, but also connects to the larger religious questions via Paley's Blind Watchmaker thing, which you already know, but basically says that if you find like a pocketwatch, something comparatively complicated, abandoned in the desert, you assume somebody made it. It didn't just happen. So you've got the metaphor on the face, which is that Sam found Willie in the desert, but also underneath that there's the fact that Willie is a product of his environment: He didn't just become William Adama, he was raised that way.
(So then also in terms of the metaphor itself, there are at least two worlds we've found in the desert: Ours, and the Matrix. The religious person would say of the first that it proves the existence of God. And the atheist would say, "Find a watch in the desert, doesn't matter who made it: It belongs to you, permanent." And the STO/Zoë would say -- of both worlds -- that we have to fix the watch, no matter how bad it gets or what it turns us into. And Tauron Tamara would say, "Fuck this v-world, it belongs to me. Permanent.")
"I did not lose my son," Joe whines -- because that's all he ever does -- but Sam's pretty satisfied with it altogether, as it turns out: "Then what are you doing here?" I don't think this whole thing was an elaborate farce to get Joe to man up, but I do think Sam sees it as just as valid an ending as anything else to this particular chapter.
Tad jacks in and he's dragging Tamara down a slick hallway full of pipes, Yesod, toward their destination. He explains the in-world game they're heading for, which is called New Cap City which is, like so much of this show, dorky, but so is the internet so it cancels out. Basically, it's a Grand Theft Auto in the Matrix, modeled on Caprica City herself (he'll explain later they even blew up the maglev to keep it current, which she won't quite know yet is her tragedy and her salvation), with the very important caveat that, unlike other Matrix activities, if you die there it's permanent and you can't come back. A garden you can't get back to.
He drags her through a space which becomes a window in a very cool Matrix-y brokedown-palace kind of hotel room, all curling wallpaper and wrought-iron sconces, onto the fire escape. Special effects commence; it's all Sin City monochrome and those dogfight planes with the shark smiles painted on. A dirigible unleashes a squad of them on the hotel in an unrelated squabble, and Herc pushes Tamara down against the wall while she screams -- it's pretty terrifying -- and then pulls her back into the hotel room which didn't exist a second ago so he can reload his guns and explain about the Matrix some more.
There will be a heist. The guy has security, but Tammy can't die so that won't fuck her up at all. There are no consequences to her game, which is to say NCC is a finite game except when Tamara is playing it, which changes everything. She is now wearing moll furs and her hair is long and wavy and she looks like a million bucks. She immediately asks what the point of all this is, and shit gets deep. "It's a mystery. It's almost like figuring out the object of the game is the object of the game. But we think it's about getting things that convert into points. Like money, or weapons." Tamara, every inch Willie's sister in this moment, is like, "That's fucking stupid!" Um, it is. "Nobody has ever finished it?" Not that could tell you what happens , because they're in the brighter garden.
She heads into a club that is looking all kinds of Heavy Rain while Herc's debrief continues in VO. "Okay, so our target is Chiron. He's a fatcat. Likes to hang in this club on the Lower East Side..." It's a speakeasy in there basically. They hang out at the bar and sneak glances at Chiron, who sits in a back booth of course, caressing pretty boys and nuzzling pretty girls. "The Horse. Best gamer in the City." Tamara -- love this girl -- asks why they don't just fucking kill him already, but there's more to it. If they can nab his avatar (like Daniel did in the pilot), they can use it to do whatever pointless shit. Tamara immediately calls bullshit on the entire game, particularly his idea of the endpoint -- which is awesome, because in most stuff these game mechanics would be the actual point -- and he's like, "Well, but just do it so Vesta can wave her wand around behind your head while you click your heels and stop shitting on my hobby. Look, it's not real, okay?" It is to me, she says. Which is true in about four more ways than she even knows.
Joe's writing checks, still in his robe but with at least an undershirt on now, and finds a bunch of pictures of the four of them stuck in the ledger: A fishing trip. It looks fun. Willie's impassive as usual, Tamara confronts the camera, Joe kisses Shannon. Joe smiles as he cries. Hopefully this will make him less, and not more, bathetic. It's about time for him to pull at least one tiny clutch play. I mean, I love the idea that the past, the Underworld, is a virtual world he tries to recreate. The darker garden, all around him; projection being key to their/our psychology. It's all there! But "INT. ADAMA HOUSE: Joseph looks at pictures and cries and has an emotional thing" is... The Tauron Way, really. I was going to say "annoying and clumsy" but that's mostly how Joe rolls, at least. Never mind.
Tamara steps up to Chiron (not sure about the name, since you can only ever call one person every name; Chiron is a biggie and it seems a bit wasted; on the other hand, there's a whole Zora Neale Hurston thing to "the Horse" that fits here, and I can't think of any other mythic horses that wouldn't be even dumber) and starts in on this random crazy monologue: "Chiron, you forgot to call me! I can forgive you, if you play it right... You have to remember, I mean, come on. It was so sweet! You said that I could have anything that I wanted. Don't you remember what I said? I said..."
At this point in the speech she's sufficiently aggro -- and clearly playing an in-game game -- that the guards go ahead and open fire, and then in the resulting confusion Herc zaps Chiron's avatar with some kind of Ghostbusters/vacuum cleaner implement. He carries Tamara's severely bloody form away, the whole time being all "It's okay, it's all right, you did good, you did great." There's something about this that blows my mind, specifically in the same way as watching the hobbits discuss Zoë's body, but I can't exactly explain it. "You're so good at dying over and over for our sins" is part of it, but "...While looking so hot" is an implied second part, and there's a third part I'm not sure about yet. (Trinity LOL) Either way it is just gorgeous. No wonder there's so much NCC in the credits.
Back at the hotel, Herc turns into Chiron, uttering more truthfulness: "Still just me. Anything that's pure code can be manipulated." Including you. Her hand trails across her collarbone, where only data flows, and she quickly heals herself again. There's the "eternal life" of Zoë, whose ugly body can never die, and then now there's this, too. And then there's Lacy, which God(s) know(s) how that's going to fall. So then there's another embarrassing convo about how he realizes the game looks dumb, but he needs Tamara to understand that it means something to him, and Tamara explains, "Maybe if you weren't in here playing this game, you could be something out there too."
(Which A) don't talk to me like I'm twelve, we get it already, and B) Hope that comes up again in this episode like it's obviously going to, maybe in a memory-montage, but mostly C) Of those of us who don't already get it, you're calling bullshit on the SyFy gamers who make up your core audience? People who will actually sit through Stargate: SG-1 if you just tell them they're pretty and make anime references? The very people to whom this episode is a perfume-scented valentine? Because guess what, they don't want to hear about how slurping Mountain Dew and getting fat playing WoW and avoiding all actual human contact might just be keeping them from being awesome and having lots of sex. I surmise that they are well aware. And it's a truism that the only people -- ask the fanfic ladies -- that get officious and righteous about internet stereotypes are the ones to whom it one hundred percent applies, so like... Who are you even talking to right now?)
Willie is being a little shit on Joseph's gaywad fishing trip, of course, and for his part Joe is being a sweetheart about it. Albeit through the power of whining. Hilarious fishing hat aside, I have to remark that Joe has looked better throughout this episode than ever before. I know he's the lead and he's supposed to be attractive, but this episode makes him look really good. So Joseph brings up how the last time they did it was with Shannon and Tamara, as though through transparency he can somehow make it less pathetic, and Willie is in no mood. He can barely remember that time, even though he's the same age as he was in the pictures. And does he want to talk about their mourning at all? Not really. Plus he's more interested in the trashy Mean Teens making fun of their dumb Tauron ways nearby.
Cyrus, ever since Sarno, has been avoiding Daniel's calls. (Maybe he will hire Taurons to beat the shit out of Cyrus... Oh wait, that would be trashy.) The reason Cyrus is so cagey would be the inevitable "board turns on CEO" storyline, after that shit, but Cyrus is also trying to clean up the mess. There's some names mentioned -- Atkinson, Parker -- that might be important down the line. But between the stock prices tanking and Daniel's decision to give away their entire holdings anyway, they have a point. "So if I don't come up with answers to the holo-bank crisis they're going to try to force me to step down from my own company?" Um, yeah. In a nutshell. Since that's their job.
Out by the river, Willie is feeling super shitty and wanting to leave because of racism, but Joe's like, "Don't you love the fresh air and the beauty out here?" and all that mess. Willie points out that it is totally boring, and the trashy teens get all beered up and start yelling the usual dirt-eating nonsense, and so Willie just goes ahead and... Beats one guy's face in with a rock. After nailing him with it from about fifty paces. It's pretty amazing -- remember the time he beat that Two to death with a flashlight? -- but of course it's all about Joe whining and trying to stop him.
Now, obviously you should not respond to this crap, and especially not with exactly the tacky violence they're accusing you of. If the stereotype is that you're violent and eat dirt, the two things you should not do under any circumstances are get violent or eat dirt. But it would take a stronger man than Willie to chill at this point, and Willie's just a kid. So in a way, this is also a funeral for Tamara, who took zero shit from these guys.
Five whole seconds of Amanda, so live it up. I know I will. Daniel's brooding about the takeover, and she gives him this whole pep talk about how back when she was pregnant with Zoë and they were poor, living in a flat in Cloverdale, and he was bussing it all over because his beloved car was a POS, and the rent was three months late, and he couldn't even afford to go to C-Bucs games, and it was really bad, but he got an angle on a meeting with "MicroCap" -- to which he showed up covered in water and a broken wrist (!) because he slipped helping a lady with a stroller. And he walked out of that shit with this life they have now. It's touching, because stuff like that actually happens, and the details in the story are gorgeous, and every time they're onscreen it's like they invented the idea of love, and... That's your five seconds of Amanda.
(Meanwhile, I can only assume that Lacy is drunk and Clarice is giving a similar pep talk to one of her twelve spouses, and that Philo is trying desperately to call me on the phone about how cute my outfit is today.)
So for some reason the Graystone board meets in a giant silvery airport hangar that probably costs as much to heat and cool as the entire economy is worth, so maybe we could start trimming there. What I would not give to be a consultant on Caprica, the way they do stuff. So Parker and Atkinson are bitching and moaning, while Priyah and Cyrus try to defend Daniel's position by talking about his Q. Cyrus points out that when the economy and their stock are plummeting, kicking Daniel -- who is now totally approval-ratinged again -- out will make them look even worse. "Daniel Graystone is the brand. He's the public face of this corporation..." There's a steady clomp-clomp that's really scary if you've heard is as many times as we have. Are you alive?
Daniel walks in there with his giant robot daughter and nails this amazing speech I don't even want to mess with. "Hello, everyone. I'm so sorry I'm late. Holobands are over. The hacked sites are eating up more and more of our market share each quarter. And that's where the kids are going, because they're free. And the generation coming up, they'll expect it all to be free. We can't own it forever. We can either marshal all our resources and funds towards saving that sinking ship, or we can look for the big thing, the big leap forward, that will change the worlds. We either move into the future, or we die trying to hold on to our past... And this is our future."
The bitchers -- who, after all, have their careers riding on this little coup -- throw up their hands and complain, and finally Daniel goes, "U-87? Make the circuit, please. Take a nice look at all these fine folks." Zoë walks around the table, staring each of them down one by one; the girl we know bucks at them adorably, like what's up, and the people all shiver like they've seen RoboCop and know what happens .
"Looks a little uncomfortable, doesn't it? Do you find yourself wondering what it might be thinking? Or feeling? Well, that is the big leap forward, people. Do you sense it? Beyond artificial intelligence: This is artificial sentience! Do you feel it? I feel it, don't you? I feel like there is a being inside this machine, something alive and vital... And special."
She loves that part the best: "There is a brilliant mind in here." It's another, brighter garden. A father-daughter act, terrorizing the board, being adorable together. Working as a team. She always liked her father best. She's so close he could touch her, and he doesn't even know it. Not really. He feels it, like Philo, but he doesn't know it. Only Zoë knows it; Zoë who is so close to her father she could touch him, but can't ever let him see her true face. Zoë, who died, and died, and died again. Their looks are complicit and loving, prideful and gluttonous.
"Are you seriously asking me about the practical applications of creating another race that will walk beside us? Do you not understand the enormity of this creation? It's more than a machine. This Cylon will become a tireless worker, who won't need to be paid. It won't retire, or get sick. He won't have rights, or objections, or complaints. It will do anything and everything we ask of it without question. U-87?"
This is where it gets bad. Of all the scenes so far in this show, I have to say this one really got to me. It's just so well done, the sweet/funny shading into sad/terrible, so fast you don't see it happening.
"Rip your arm off."
Zoë stares at her father, hurt. She forgot what she was, for a second. Like dancing with Philo, but a million times worse. He can't be serious -- but she has to stay hidden, which means he has to be serious. It's the only power she has. And so, she's got to do it. And it breaks her heart. She's so close, and he doesn't even know it: "Go on. Go on!" She does, after prompting; she can't reveal herself, but at least she can hurl the arm, once it's off, onto the table among all of them. A little flourish to the father-daughter act; a sign of her defiance that he can't even recognize. He has no idea that it's a message for him. And he fights the feeling, that she's there:
"Looked a little painful, didn't it? The desire to anthropomorphize, the need to connect -- it's powerful. And that is why this thing is going to sell. We make them, we own them. They're real. And the world's just changed." Um, wake up.
Tamara and Herc/Chiron -- Ah, gotcha now: Heracles tried to heal the wounds of his old friend/teacher, the immortal centaur Chiron, with the blood of the Hydra; Chiron was in agony but couldn't die (forgot that part until now) until Prometheus stepped in to take Chiron's immortality, which also turned out splendidly -- walk into a bank vault, where Heracles in Chiron's body tells the guards to split. They're just code, not people, although MMOs are so repetitive and boring I can imagine somebody actually playing that way. Alone with a mosaic of the Twelve Colonies on the floor,
Herc talks Tamara through a Dance Dance Revolution sequence that Vesta decoded from another puzzle in the game ("It was encoded on manhole covers," he says, which whole discussion is altogether fucking awesome.) Picon, Caprica, Gemenon, Picon, Tauron. The floor CGI's itself all Q*Berty and then coins start flying up like doves, or butterflies, or leaves; he vacuums them up with that same thing, but then an alarm goes off and guards appear. Tamara, because she is living code, vanishes them with a wave of her hand, and it's pretty fantastic. "Gods! What are you?" Um, no. Just the one, I think. (Or the One. I'll stop.)
Joseph gets all in Willie's face about doing his homework, but Willie would prefer to click a pen over and over, faster and faster, until Joe screams so loud and then essentially realizes that, short of beating him, he lost control of this situation a mile back. Luckily, Sam and Larry show up to talk Joe through this latest bullshit: Specifically, to perform the Tauron rites and let go of Shannon and Tamara before Willie actually loses his mind. "Too Tauron for you, maybe. But not for your son. You're losing him... Look past yourself and perform the rites, brother."
Daniel, of course, remains head of Graystone, while across town a cute girl does ritual obeisance, preparing for the ceremony. Over in the corner, they're leading Willie in an old clapping game, and Sam's giving Ruth grief as she cooks, and Willie smiles, larger and more authentically than we've ever seen, wrapped up in the good side of the Tauron community. Joe's smile is beautiful, watching him, like the sun coming out over a garden. Like somebody waking up after a long, fitful sleep; realizing every dream and every nightmare eventually ends.
Over to Vesta's own monochrome bar-booth hangout, where a cute kid -- maybe the one who told Tamara the Russian Roulette guy went "home"? -- lights a match as they walk past. It's a fairly awesome, scary, noir little moment. Vesta's reading the paper when they arrive, surprised they pulled the job so fast and Herc's proud as he explains how magical Tamara is. Vesta's like, "Awesome, give me the money so I can sublime or whatever," but Tamara tells her to suck it because she's going home first. Good girl.
But also, fuck Vesta because there is no amount of money that will get any of them there, which means they'll just keep killing Tamara over and over as long as the game exists. What do you do when you can't get out? Turn into something else. Like maybe God, sometimes. Vesta gets sassy and shows her the paper, where she's just learned that Tammy is totally dunzo dead. Tamara wigs out just a bit, although I think she was starting to figure that one out, and Herc is just completely confused, and Vesta and her girl keep calling her "Baby" and "Dollface" and generally acting like Ursula the Sea Witch, and Herc holds her tight, but finally Tamara just... Shrugs and kills the fuck out of everybody.
(The song from which this recap takes its alliterative appellation is envisioned by the band as a monologue issued to pugilist Joe Louis from his coach: "And if anyone should cheat you, take advantage of or beat you/ Raise your head and wear your wounds with pride/ You must stick up for yourself, son/ Never mind what anybody else done..." A lesson both Adams kids learned today, not for the first or the last time: Wake up!)
Tamara sends Herc to find Joe and tell her family what's going on, and we revisit the idea that Tad/Herc is whatever, worthwhile in the real world -- I was so scared he was going to be ...IN A WHEELCHAIR! or some shit -- and Vesta's on the floor, shuddering and asking what the fuck Tammy is. And if you've been paying attention, you already know the last words Vesta ever hears, looking up at Tamara in her beautiful gown:
"I'm awake."
And in a moment, Tad will leave her there and go -- still beautiful; shy and skittish -- to the door of the Adama house. He'll ask for Joseph Adams, and get the usual shit about how it's Adama now. He'll ask her father to wake her up, help her get out of the Matrix, and Joe will be confused. Offended by the idea of purgatory, after all his time trying to win against the richest man in the world to get her back. And when he tells Tad that Tamara died on the maglev, Tad will stumble away and run off down the street, having ripped something precious out of Joseph's hands again.
But first, it's quieter now. The Taurons circle the room, sitting and watching. Before the altar is the priest, and before the priest Yusif and William sit in chairs; attended by Sam. He stands behind them, his skin telling the story. Yusif offers the priest a coin for the ferryman, to buy Shannon's passage; William says goodbye to his sister as Ruth weeps.
"Will you grant them passage? They will have passage. Will you let them go? Will you bid them farewell?"
They do, with tears in their eyes. A boy should never have to say goodbye to his mother. Not like that.
"Then they will live forever in peace. They will live forever in your hearts."
An elder woman sings a song -- another form of the ode to the dead that was in that rap song, matter of fact -- while the rest of them say goodbye. The voices of the dead. The priest closes their omega, writing the story on Yusif and his son. Sam holds the candle and the ink, weeping at the well. Every painful stab is a reminder and a blessing, as they tell the story. As they sacrifice flesh to the story.
It's the Tauron way; it's the oldest story in the world. One day the woman who wrote it -- who lived only through her art, who never left the darker garden; who was so beautiful already but could have been so much more, out there -- will become one of Willie's favorites. It goes like this:
Here is a little forest
Whose leaf is ever green.
Here is a brighter garden,
Where not a frost has been.
Yusif leads his son home again. What started as a funeral becomes: A wake.