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So Amanda's nuts. Not "Amanda Graystone" nuts, which we knew about, but full-on booby hatch nuts, which we didn't. To wit, she gets the shakes and takes crazy pills and has recently started seeing her dead brother Darius all over town, and Clarice of course is like, "That must be a sign from God! He is using these insane Graystone Women to speak to me!" It's less of a double-crazy situation and more of a crazy-squared one, and it all starts when Amanda goes off on some guys for moving the Maglev Memorial from Ground Zero to a nearby park.
I like the idea in theory, but I've gotten so protective of Amanda for precisely this reason -- and hate so much when the women on a show are crazy, because that just sends the message that men are accountability-free Homer Simpsons -- that I'm still unsure about where it's headed. Still, I respect the show so very much, and the idea of Amanda getting on the ghost-chaser bandwagon that started this show is pretty exciting. Not to mention the bi-curious way Amanda uses this new relationship to mess with Daniel's head -- which is just minorly counterintuitive but astoundingly realistic -- and that's without him even knowing that Clarice's move is getting Amanda hooked on hash.
Which at least gets Amanda over the hump as far as coming clean about her time in the Delphi mental hospital -- and tossing out our first "All of this has happened before" of the show! -- and halfway to just frakking Clarice right there. And I mean, of course Clarice and Amanda are such a wonderful trainwreck regardless that it's at least thrilling on an Absolutely Fabulous level to see them continue day-drinking and going nuts in public. Gods, so much happened in this episode, it was great. Anyway, Clarice seems to be questioning her use of Dr. Graystone as they get closer, and Amanda's halfway to STO by the end of things. And both of them seem to be narrowing their focus to each other in unexpected ways. Whatever happens, they are one scary/awesome duo.
Speaking of Philo and Rachel, they go on a Matrix vacation together, tandem-flying virtual Vipers (!) until she screws it up, and they end up ejecting themselves into a whole Harrison Ford/Anne Heche romcom, which is of course even sexier than the fighter planes. She floats her anti-Matrix/apotheosis Zoë theories for him, but it's her generative fractal-algorithm ideas about game theory that end up sealing the deal. (Of course.) Plus, talking fluent Geek with a boner is about the only thing that could make Philo dreamier.
Cute Cult Couple Lacy and Keon spar about Barnabas and the secret of the Zoëbot, and Lacy finally commits to becoming full-on STO instead of just a monotheist and, into the bargain, handily works his shit. I would say the awesoming of Lacy has officially begun.
Joe and Tad run around New Cap City being awesome, but Joe of course screws it up and gets Heracles killed. Of course, now that Tad has no life because he can't get back to NCC, and Joe's pretty much screwed by that too... Until Tad sends him a very cute new lady-player -- with actually a passing resemblance to Evelyn that might or might not be intentional -- to help guide/grift him. Dude, if this storyline ends up hinging on whether or not Joe Adama can learn to play World Of Warcraft, this show will end up even more amazing than I even thought.
As if that's possible, because the end of the episode is one of the most amazing yet. Daniel and Tomas continue to get their own homoerotic fervor on, while Cyrus watches anxiously, and Tomas says that the stolen MCP never even worked in the first place. Daniel continues to act totally stupid about the C-Bucs, but realizes that if Vergis is not lying -- and Caesar the dog's ongoing love affair with the U-87 means anything -- then clearly the Zoëbot continues to be very magical. His ongoing hilarious abuses of Philo get him thinking about the MCP in a whole different way, which inspires Daniel to get back to work. Which seems like a dead end until the last word of the episode -- yet another game-changer in a show that's already establishing itself as the most dynamic and relevant show on TV -- as Daniel stares up into his daughter's robot eyes.
And that word? "Zoë." Frak yes.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Just like with BSG, the previouslies are becoming increasingly important to the canon of the show. I'd imagine if you hadn't been through this with the series, it might be confusing: "When did she say that? When did that happen?" Luckily, here it's the voiceovers that do the trick, settling accounts and firming up storylines with a minimum of muss and fuss -- plus, no drummy spoilers to freak out completists. Now, if you think about like a writer, you can see that these things are obvious to the staff because they know the whole story already, but as a viewer it's good to just know that yes, the story is going this way rather than that way, so don't waste gas going down cul-de-sacs. (Even incredibly romantic cul-de-sacs about cute boys.)
So this week, there's two essential things that draw the line under sorta-ambiguities: Lacey's voiceover ("I'd do anything to help my friend, even enlist the help of terrorists from the STO") and Zoë's ("I'm hatching my own plan to escape from the lab"). Of course they are both givens by the end of the episode, but if you were wondering whether Zoë and Lacy's boyfriend troubles are completely ambiguous -- sweet and terrifying in equal measure -- now we know for sure. Lacy knows exactly what Barnabas is (and by the transitive property, generally what Keon is), while Zoë's Rachel Suit is (sadly) at least as much about Operation Dumbo Drop as it is about Philo being absolutely perfect in every way.
Speaking of the continuously more-muddled agendas every single person is working, let's hie ourselves to the Willow house, where husbands Nestor and Olaf are jumping around with nervous cult energy because of last week's drunken swipe drive mission by good old Sister Clarice. There's much in the way of computer talking, but the basics are that the Zoë avatar was on the computer she snooped, but that it also is not, because it's been downloaded "into another device." Which begs two obvious questions: First, if it's there then it's there (which doesn't count because of the curious and necessary alchemy between Zoë's soul, Zoë's body, and the MCP itself, and we'll get to that); and second, if it was downloaded, it's somewhere.
"And if it's somewhere, we can have our Resurrection," says Clarice, who has just woken to alertness in a blink. (Clicks into place: These good STO guys are all about Resurrection, but don't care about the bodies: Just Rapture. The disconnect here, the tragedy, then, would be how the Cylons eventually lose the plot w/r/t the eternal soul and focus on regaining their bodies, which is gonna make things super shitty for everybody, in about fifty years.) So if he moved it somewhere, they reason, Daniel knows where it is now (wrong), which gets Clarice to smile with canary feathers poking out of her sensual mouth: "Amanda Graystone goes to the Memorial every morning. I think she could do with a shoulder to cry on, poor little thing." Cold as ice! Won't last, though.
Ground Zero. As much a reference to NYC as to the Hall of Remembrance. Labor guys from Gideon Enterprises moving all the memories and pictures and flowers to Apollo Park nearby, where they can be safe, but Amanda isn't having it. She goes to the Memorial every morning. So she attacks one of the workers, who asks her to please chill, but it's Amanda Graystone: She doesn't have a Chill setting. She gets all up in his area about how the Memorial has to stay where they actually died, or else it's just an empty signifier, and they'll build over the broken tracks and whatever it is will be shiny and new and people will forget and her daughter will die.
(Which is bad, but especially today, because she woke up this morning dreaming of another death: Running through a hospital in her slippers, plastic bracelet around her wrist, the guy up ahead never quite recognizable... And then looked at a letter from the Delphi Convalescent Institute she's been hiding, and went back to bed with the vapors. You may recognize the Delphi Institute as Dr. Simon's Rape Farm & Ovary Concern, which might just be the Vancouver Effect but could also work in-show, as they did say it was once a mental hospital. Ughhhh, Cylons suck sometimes.)
Amanda, when she doesn't know what to do, generally she starts a riot. It is one of the top things about Amanda. So Sister Clarice walks up while Amanda's getting all YouTube in the guy's face, wanting to spread the word about the dirt they're doing. The guy I don't think knows who she is: The sad face and the scary face and the rich face of the bombing. Terror Mom, who somehow became the Speaker for the Dead: Who loved her daughter in all her complexity and spoke the truth to the Twelve Worlds and eventually got clean again. If anybody's going to put these guys on blast -- "Let's get your faces on camera!" -- it's going to be her. The guy asks her to get lost, and tries to move Clarice out the way as well, even though he knows -- cultural semiotics we don't know yet, I guess -- that she's a priestess. Amanda and Clarice, they make a good team of shriekers.
So while Clarice is like, "You put your hands on a person of cloth?" Amanda does an end-run around the same religious angle: "This is sacred ground!" The guy's not having it, and Amanda's managed to get him feeling gross and defensive, so he's pissed, and finally Clarice drags Amanda off him, but Amanda's not really present to complain about that because she's just spotted the guy again. The family resemblance is uncanny: He takes her Dust Bowl harshness and -- where she manages to turn it into a sturdy, wounded beauty -- he ends up looking like somebody from Don Draper's secret history. Amanda takes pictures of the staring crowd, but there's nobody there.
Sitting in the car, Clarice draws a line between this latest desecration and what Jordan did to Zoë's room: "Clearing them all away, out of sight" before hesitantly changing the subject to how Amanda is full-on crazy right now, looking sick and freaked out well beyond what you'd expect. (She does not know yet that crazy/not-crazy is a decision Amanda makes every single second, and never falls the same way you or I would.) So Amanda admits that in addition to the Memorial highjinks, she's also got crazy eyes because her brother Darius was in the crowd, the blonde boy from her nightmares, which is impossible because he is dead. So... We're going with crazy today, then.
Zoë summons Lacy to "the VIP room," which either we've never seen from this angle or is a different place entirely than the usual Zoë place. It looks like a side stair in a mansion or something, with the revels rocking outside and occasional shapes -- including the STO infinity? -- flashing against the windows. All in all, not sure what we're to glean here. The reason Zoë's all oxygenated is because of Clarice's visit to the lab yesterday, and how she messed with Daniel's computer, and is generally way too up in Zoë's grill (actual grill!). "She looked me right in my eye!" (Ah, for the days of Saul Tigh eyeball jokes.) Anyway, having shared that information in the aghast manner of a teenage girl, she moves on to Operation Dumbo Drop: "Make sure that Barnabas knows I'm gonna need a big box, okay? Don't even give him a hint of anything that's gonna..."
Lacy gets sketchy, because she doesn't want to admit that she screwed up first contact, and then lies right to Zoë's robot face about how everything's fine on the STO front. Zoë's not convinced, and reminds Lacy that she's holding up her end of the deal: "I already have another date with Cute Lab Boy." Lacy asks if she likes him, in that way, and Zoë glitches for a sec before going, "...Not relevant!" Heh. She brings it back again to how they're both responsible for half of the plan: Zoë gets her giant ass out, and Lacy gets it off-planet. Lacy finally goes on the defensive, promising she can do it with a little more time -- shades of Clarice/Alvo? -- but that Zoë needs to trust her, because she's never let her down. Having gotten such good results pushing the Dead Friend angle last time, Zoë goes right back there, hissin' and spittin' about the time Lacy got scared at the maglev station and thus didn't get blown up.
Which, obviously if she had there would be no Lacy at all, even a pretend messiah one, so shut up Zoë, but she's working with a generative algorithm. She's an infant, and anything that happens around an infant goes in the hopper and eventually you're a person, so you can't blame her for working the one Lacy angle that's gotten positive reinforcement. Of course, Lacy could care less, and returns the serve: "Original Zoë wanted me to get on that train. Not you. I have never let you down." For a moment you see the Proud Mama side of Lacy, how all three of them delighted in Twopointoë when she was just a baby messiah, and remember that Zoë was an AI trainer, which feels somewhere between dog training and parenting. Caring for Zoë is as much about Zoë's memory as it is about finishing the job she started: Taking care of our Zoë, helping her become what she is. And she's never let her down.
Tad's getting yanked around by his boss at the grocery store when they spot a mysterious smoking bummer in a fedora lurking around, so the boss tells him to get the guy to frak off. Good instincts. Tad doesn't recognize the slouchy awfulness of Joe right away, so by the time he gets over there to show him the entrance, he's too close to Joe's grabby snatchy hands. Joe gets all in his crazy face screaming about guess what, and Tad's like, "Um, this shit is creepy, your dead daughter doesn't exist, the Matrix is haunted, I'm trying to cut back on otaku sad-sackin' and I don't need this ghost in the shell shit right now." (Which is still stupid, because they told him five times her ass was dead but he only figured it out when Joe told him the sixth time that she was dead, but whatever gets you there.)
Joe picks Tad up by his weird face and shakes him like an Alsatian and tells Tad to get over his existential terror because clearly Tamara is not dead, i.e., whatever Tammy is in the Matrix is de facto Tammy now. (So basically he agrees with Clarice's version of apotheosis and doesn't even know it yet. Which, can you even imagine those two bastards in a room together? It would turn into that play Bug, like, instantly.) Tad continues to try to get away, but the list of people who have successfully evaded Joe's obsessive whining is a very short list. Just give in now. They jack in.
While Amanda has more hallway memories and tries to find her invisible brother in her camera phone pictures, and lambastes herself for not being a skilled enough photographer to capture imaginary people -- subtle nod here to the idea of plastic surgeon as frustrated artist, which makes so much sense that every plastics guy on every show is presented that way, as an artist in flesh who chose money -- Tad (Heracles now, shazam) drags Joe, or vice versa, through the Yesod level with all the pipes, and Joe acts cantankerous and old some more so Heracles can be hilariously teen-annoyed and we can explain the Matrix and New Cap City again: You die there you can't go back, etc. Specifically a neat analogy that will come into play later about the similarities between genetic and computer code as relates to the game.
Joe's sure that Tamara stayed in NCC because she said she would, and Adamas keep their promises -- or whatever, as long as he gets to yell "ADAMA" like one million times in every episode he's happy -- and they discuss the size of the gun Heracles gives him, ha ha, and Heracles gives him more of that good advice for living: "Try not to die." Joe is almost as scared by the smashing scary nonsense of NCC as his daughter, and plaster dust falls down, and he goes back to being cute. It is a very specific kind of Joe that I can handle, but shivering in the middle of GTA is in range of it.
Because everywhere Amanda Graystone goes calamity will follow, there is a big car accident and she tries to go help, but a doctor who is not completely insane gets there first. She sees Darius again, and gives chase in both the dream and the now -- echoes of Hera at the Opera House! -- all the way through traffic, to a carpark. (And the song that plays over the Darius parts this week? It's that Amanda song I love so much... But backwards. This show/Bear McCreary rule.) My cable got weird here on Friday, so I totally missed the point of this scene, but at the chainlink where the trail ends, there's a poster for another museum show, which features your basic impressionist painting of a bridge. She flashes on it, for some reason -- flipping to another bridge in another life -- and peels the poster off the wall, then cracks her crazy pills right out.
Speaking of nuts, we got Clarice Willow Omnimedia putting on a little show for Olaf but basically for herself about how "All it needs is, like, a tasteful ribbon around the neck of the bottle, like... Like this..." while she's putting a ribbon around a bottle of very expensive Scorpion Ambrosia. It's totally weird and totally awesome. Just adorable, like, she's just giving this little talk while sitting on her bed. Olaf is more worried about the expense, and how pissed Hot Desiree is going to be when she finds out that Druggie Clarice is moving up to the expensive top shelf shit, but Clarice's matter-of-fact explanation is so frakking mindblowing that he gets sidetracked. In toto:
"I just need to spend some time with Amanda Graystone. She sees people who aren't there. Amanda is the mother of Zoë, and Zoë is the mother of life everlasting! There is a connection! This is a sign! God is using these women to speak to me! And I have to listen!"
God! I love you, Clarice! That is some Caprica Six shit right there. Olaf stares at her closed crazy holy eyes and thinks, "What if joining a cult with her turned out to be like a really bad idea?"
(Bit of a download, courtesy of the wonderful Caprican: The civil war, aka the Tauron Uprising, took place 35 years ago and it was a junta situation between their DNC... And the Ha'la'tha itself! Good to know. Previously, though, like 800 years ago, Tauron got the old Modest Proposal from Virgon and Leonis, eventually leading to an Easter Rebellion thing called Our Day. The involved Potato Famine was in this case about beef/liver, which led to iron deficiency, which led to... Dirt-eating. I mention this for interest, because it's come up, and because I love the history blender of this show so much, and because I love its ancillary projects more than anything I've seen, but mostly because: Far from being a fatalist countdown to genocide, this show is its own generative algorithm. And that's sexy.)
Cuteness abounds as Joe whines about the constant walking, walking that MMORPGs involve, and asks if they can't just fly there. So Heracles plays an adorable trick where he's like, "Okay, arms out, chin up, don't slam into that building. Are you ready?" And Joe's got his poor old dorky arms out, eyes closed, trying to for once in his miserable life have a happy thought... And Heracles with a straight face is like, "What the FRAK is wrong with you? Are you retarded?" Tad? Meet Joseph Adama.
Of course, NCC is realistic, a "non-fantasy world." No bullshit, no flying, no nothing. Joe's like, "So this world is like the real world, but suckier? Why the hell do people play The Sims at all?" Out of the mouths of elderly babes. (But on the other hand: In the Matrix, as we'll see, anybody can Know Kung-Fu. The difference is that Tamara can probably fly, as soon as she remembers to try, even in NCC.) Under sudden heavy fire from mosquito planes, Heracles explains that the wonder of New Cap is that you can "shoot someone in the head without going to jail" and "frak fifty women in one night without taking Vinagro." Wake up and smell the hot coffee! And remember, again, not to die.
Clarice shows up at Amanda's house with her beribboned bottle of Scorpion Marsh Genuine, best-friendy smiles abounding for her sad friend, and Amanda's eyes light up. Cuddled down in the couch and emboldened -- we view this scene at several points through the waves of a very designed glass bowl on the table -- she admits she's been seeing Dead Darius. Clarice stays quiet for a bit, drawing her out, but soon it's clear that she's actually into this story and has begun caring about Amanda. She gets genuinely worried when Amanda starts talking about chasing him -- "Crazy lady chasing a ghost," Amanda almost laughs, before de-rezzing into a scary snotty crying mess for the remainder of the scene -- and then Amanda hands over the poster, explaining that Darius died in a car accident on that very bridge.
(So, Tomas Vergis then.
Of course Clarice doesn't know about Vergis's milkshake maneuvers, and assumes God is implicated by this magical shit, but the over/under just tipped. Because as much as I like the As Above/So Below playing out here yet again -- Amanda's crazy has become real, just like Zoë's new body, or apotheosis (backwards) -- that's not how this is going to work. Somebody put that there. And maybe Amanda is drawing connections that don't exist, we've all done it for sure, but Occam's Razor says automatic Vergis on this one.)
Anyway, Amanda was "in the car" when Darius died -- I'm thinking we'll find out it was a drunk Chappaquiddick situation, eventually -- and pretty much went nuts, in-patient nuts, and got put on some really good drugs. Which she is now mixing with strong premium liquor. (So I guess the crazy pills were in abeyance until Darius started showing up again? Well, she's a doctor! Surely self-prescribing intense antipsychotics -- and then drinking on top of them -- is something she can do without any ill effects!) Clarice sweetly promises not to tell about the Counterindication Tango, and Amanda is touched and crunk: "Because you're my friend." Then she passes the hell out.
Clarice watches her friend sleep, and betrays herself completely, and -- as is the way of these things -- there is a certain enjambment as we move to the channel-clicking bricolage this show loves so much: "If you're ready to meet the love of your life, try V-Match!"
Then, some very bad acting on a Hardball-type show called Rhetoric (which is so clever I forgive them for Cubits & Pieces, which is still embarrassing), all about Graystone's continuing plummet, and there's a funny Apple reference on QVC ("This limited-edition version of the Graystone OS-9 holoband..."), and then we settle on a Pyramid game, and then out to Cyrus and Daniel watching the game and bitching about the odds: The C-Bucs have won their last two games, but are still only a ten-point favorite. I'm vaguely acquainted with the idea of sports, but I'm sure that means something.
Vergis shows up, all smiles and slicked hair, and Daniel's equally greasy hair is more than made up for by the disappearance of that totally unacceptable soul patch. He gets all in Tomas's face, and they do the dance of death some more, and Cyrus is nipping at their heels while Vergis tries to smooth-talk him, and Daniel's disgusted about their social interactions that keep happening, and then they actually call it "dancing" just like I've been doing, and Daniel calls on Ubiquitous Bouncer Sean to get rid of Tomas, but first Tomas drops the bomb that the MCP they're so worried about is a dead end, because he could never get it to work either. So now they really have to sell him the team, he thinks, because they're going to need the money to improve on his work. Daniel tells security to keep Tomas out of here from now on, and they're confused: The chip totally works! What is he talking about?
(Another way to look at this, the whole nervous subroutine/body-mind thing, comes from our friend Irit, who explains that the Hebrew word for soul, nefesh, literally means the gullet in the throat -- the location of the MCP -- while the word for spirit is neshama, which of course means "breath." So Zoë has been robbed of her neshama, but retains her nefesh: She isn't human, but she has a soul.)
Urban playground, slurping on sodas and swinging back and forth in their cute little school uniforms, Keon and Lacy discuss the usual teenage concerns: How to move contraband, joining terrorist cells, and the like. Lacy can't tell Barney about the Zoë robot because Zoë says. Lacy can't think of another way to get off-planet, which Keon already thinks is weak because apparently Lacy just wants to go be a monotheist in a more accepting environment. Makes sense, except for how Keon is a terrorist and obviously thinks that's a wuss move. "He won't help you unless you're STO," Keon says, and Lacy lights right up. Great! She'll just become an STO terrorist! Keon's shocked by that, but she tosses him a megawatt smile and slows down their swings until he's looking her in the eye: "I know you're worried about me, but I can handle it... Especially if you're there with me." Niiiice. Then she kisses his temple softly, and he completely loses track of his shit. Well done, Lacy Rand.
Less organic overlapping talk this week from Daniel and Cyrus, but eventually they get their rhythm on track. Cyrus is still freaking out about the stockholders, and wants to sell. Daniel wants to scream like an intensely crazy person for some reason about how he's not selling the Bucs, and also about how he's going to "crush" Vergis. But I mean, his whole life is relying on his instincts and clearly that's working out for him, so you can see the impasse from here: Daniel knows they're going to work the shit out and keep the contract, while Cyrus thinks that's 100% risky. They are both right. But creative genius brains, sometimes they work like this, and Daniel already does this every week: Right up to the edge of oblivion and rage, and then Pow! Boom goes the dynamite. Clutch play.
Philo orders up "an activity" for his second date with Rachel, and Zoë has to wait until he's fully jacked in before she wifis herself there, which is a smart detail. She opens her eyes in a Viper (!) and laughs at how geeky and wondrous he is. Philo tells her to turn off autopilot, which scares her, but he tells her to just Know Kung-Fu and pull it together. Since Rachel, of course, would never "tweak [her] skillset," for reasons she'll explain in full momentarily, she crashes immediately. Freaking out, she ejects. It's so sexy because they don't even look like Vipers: They look like the fifty-year historical Blue Angel idea of what a Viper will be. We know what they are, and they say the word, but they don't know. Lee and Kara know, and that's so wonderful. Parallel situation in five, four, three...
Heracles hears a dirigible approaching in the monochrome sky, and tells Joe to move his ass. For some reason -- I guess running around like a chicken with its head cut off while like five planes strafe the ground -- Joe bumps into/shoves Herc to the street and runs away. Herc recovers, but not fast enough: The planes get him, and he de-rezzes. Forever. Joe jacks out, and gets a faceful of teenage dirtbag from Tad, whose entire life online just ended for no real reason. Which is a tragedy, but also a fractal iteration of the entire Underworld/As Above thing from a whole new angle. Tad is pissed at him, of course, but more importantly: Even if he were inclined to help Joe, he can't anymore, because he can never go back. And the way he says that, never go back, makes it sound like the saddest, saddest thing. (As PKD would say: "What if our world is their heaven?") Like, I got a little misty for him.
Joe, too. He feels awful, like he clearly understands what a big deal this is for Tad, which is a neat emotional line to play in this scene. It's the first time we've actually seen his parental instincts kick in, watching this beautiful obnoxious boy lose the one thing he loves, and knowing that he can't help, and that he took away something unimaginably precious from him. And feeling all that before the shock of having lost another guide to his daughter? Just phenomenal. Great moment.
But PS -- and again, this is a long one -- don't act out on the same shit every time. I don't know if it cuts to commercial every single time somebody tells him that, but it feels like it. That's where his story ends, eleven times. And this is one of the best episodes in a while, for a show that only has best-to-basically-great episodes, so it sticks out, but the truth remains: Don't fucking act out on the same thing. Even if you're not acting out, for that storyline you are. If every Joe scene ends with somebody going, "Oh, you cube. Just don't die." Then you have removed any chance of his storyline having weight, as far as the Underworld. You get the hit of "where is my daughter," but you don't get the hit of "if you die you die," and the story has to support both. So when you transition off that line, like this script does a bunch of times, all you're saying is that Joe will absolutely not die in NCC. At least not this week.
You can't write about the Singularity because the whole point of the Singularity is that it's the thing that changes everything. It's by its nature an apocalypse, an abomination from our side, because it's where our imagination stops. But you can -- and the best modern SF does -- write up until the very second before everything changes. Generally, you focus on one thing: Uplift, where we transcend physical consciousness and become devas (e.g., Cavil's sad speech about the paws and the nebulae), say, or Upload scenarios, where we live forever in silicon. Nobody dies and nobody starves and everybody gets the world they want. (Even the bad guys!)
But what's great about this show -- and, if you're still looking for comics recs, its spiritual forebear in many ways, the excellent Transmetropolitan -- is that it attacks all of them at once. You've got the people going into the machine (Pow!) and people coming out of the machine (Pow!) and people making the machine the real world (Pow!) and people making the real world the machine (Pow!). Now, nanomachines, in the case above and other places, are often the key: Take the consciousness and put it in the machine and then use the machine to grow a body around that consciousness -- Pow! -- that can be whatever you want. (You can even look like John Locke!) That's the best of both worlds.
But the awesome thing about this particular Singularity is that they're all going about it in the messiest, most biological, least nano way possible. Robot bodies, video games, holobands, STO bombers, orgies and Fight Club: Not the ideal ingredients of transcendence, but the most realistic ingredients for What Happens . And we know about this story that the Singularity won't come, at least not at large: Every time you try to forget about the body, the body will remind you. So that means everybody's trying to save the world, which means everybody's going to help end it. But more importantly, Zoë's All-Natural All-Vegan approach to existence becomes key, because everything hinges on her choice to stay organic, no matter how much of her life turns to chrome. That starts here.
On the shores of a virtual lake, watching a virtual Viper sink beneath the water, Philo is aghast. They're went and shucking gear -- Philo shivering in a tank top and wet cargo pants; Zoë soaking wet in a frakking flightsuit; this is the GREATEST SHOW EVER MADE -- when Philo asks why she didn't just Know Kung-Fu like she was supposed to, and Rachel lays out her whole thing. Which, we've gotten hints of it before, from the complaints about high heels to the whole part about how Zoë became a terrorist, but her explanation here is good SF.
"I set my avatar so I could acquire skills naturally. That way, V-world would be more like real life." Philo likes that; the , less so. "V-World pisses me off a lot of the time. The way people see this place as an excuse to cut corners, or drop out of life, or... Do things they know are wrong, but just because they're in here, makes it not wrong anymore..." Philo says this is not geeky enough for her, and doesn't get it. "I just think there are better things to do with our technology. Like maybe in V-World we should... Extend life." Philo follows: She's talking upload.
But Rachel isn't yet convinced that the Matrix can handle it, and we swoop back around once again to the theme of the episode: "It's still too fakey-fakey. I mean, look at the sky. And look at that tree, all right? It's exactly identical to that one over there." There's a great Invisibles metaphor for this, about the universe being a fractal of set iterations such that my favorite character takes a picture of a cloud as a child and later compares it to one in the current day, likening our universe to the repeating vases flying past in the background of a Scooby-Doo cartoon, and for the same reason Philo -- thinking exactly like a programmer would -- suggests: "Maybe someone didn't want to program a million different trees."
But no, as their hands get closer and his gaze gets more and more intense, because that's counterintuitively lazy, taking the long way around because it's the easiest to conceptualize. Why not work with a generative algorithm, like a living system? Seed the tree with all the blueprints for Possible Tree, plant the seed, let it grow. "Pow! An infinite variety of tree-like trees." Up pops the boner of all time, and Philo plays his last geek sex card: "I work with top-secret military robots." Pow! Infinite makeout.
But there's a thing here that's worth going into, a little bit. In school I was bad at three things: Geometry, Biology and Chemistry. I can do theoretical and I can do physical, but try both at once and I tilt. However, I've always had a soft spot for chemistry because I had a chemistry set when I was young enough that my stepmother and I were still trying to be friends, and my favorite thing was crystallization. Everything looks like water and dust, but you tap the glass and Pow! Infinite complexity pops into place. And I have found that metaphor invaluable, because of exactly what she's talking about: It's intuitively and empirically true. You can see it happen, the same way water snaps into ice molecules. Take implicit structure, feed the tree, tap the glass and the world occurs.
And in depth psychology, you have the same principle: All these archetypes below the surface, swimming around in the soup of your unconscious, and as your ego grows up and your mind starts ordering things, the glass gets tapped: Pow! That delicious warmth and food becomes Mommy, and for the rest of your life everything Mommy-related feeds the Mother/Eve/Trump III tree. Or the Authority tree, or the Black Dog Dream tree, or Dead Darius, or King Arthur or Jesus or Mithras or whatever you're working with. Luke Skywalker, if you want.
Infinitely personal, but always engaged and growing around these same seeds, these same implicit structures: Your Mommy doesn't look like my Mommies, but we have the same generative process, because everybody has a Mother. The Clarice parts and the Amanda parts and the grandmas and the housekeeper and the mommies on TV all factor into Zoë's Mother in one way or another, say. And that's why stories work on everybody, and why the Quest looks the same, always, and always completely different: The same branches sticking up out of our equally infinite and equally chaotic soup, the parts of the trees we can occasionally see, so we can look at them and name them and stop them controlling us and use their power for ourselves.
And our inner determinist says that's where it ends: Your generative process means the tree grows up and out depending on prevailing wind patterns and soil conditions and gardening techniques, like a book that's being written in indelible ink. But as in every spiritual truth, and every fairytale, the opposite is also true: There is a best tree. There is the best you implicit in the structure, implicit in the infinite chaos under the water where you already know everything there is to know -- that Hamlet already written by the typewriter monkeys of your unconscious chaos -- that is working damn hard on getting out: Pow! Pulling you by the hand and urging you forward, through the Maelstrom into truth. And every trauma or bad call or bad year isn't a scar on the tree, it's an obstacle to climb over, so you can get back on the path toward Future You, who's calling your name, over and over and very loud indeed. Just sometimes from so far away that you can't quite hear it.
And the reason I can understand anything if you explain it with crystallization, and why I did jumping jacks throughout this scene, is because both are always true: The tree is all nature, and all nurture, and heading toward something perfect. And both are the point of Zoë, and Zoë's point: While a hard-SF person watching this scene is thinking, "This is last month's game development theory, we've moved on," and might make the jump to the universe-building scale that she's talking about, what's implicit in this scene and leads directly to the end of the episode is the other half: Zoë is talking about herself. A seed of Zoë that contained in it the blueprints of infinite Zoës -- a soul like yours and mine -- with memories applied to tap the glass. And out she came -- Pow! -- fully formed but still growing, from her own and Daddy's forehead. Which, again: While she is Clarice's new life, zoë, she's a disappointing Apotheosis/Resurrection. (Tammy's still the secret star there, the perfect and eternal copy.)
And that's why Philo is the messenger here, taking this idea back to Daniel, because both Zoë and Daniel are too focused on the way things should work to see how they are already working, but perfect programmer Philo sees Rachel, and the U-87, and the Matrix, and the IRL universe, all as the same thing: A wonderful, beautiful, frustrating puzzle.
What bugged me about BSG and continues to bug me with Zoë, though, is that while her methods are correct, her real/fake judgment is wrong. It's a false analogy. Like Stephin Merritt explains about music, electric distortion synthesizer music and live acoustic recordings are the exact same amount of lie. One of them just seems more legit. And what I've never seen -- except in the Eights, and maybe Gaius at the end -- is anybody grasp that fact. I'm known to rant about it myself, but it seems integral to Zoë's scarier ideas (and Barnabas's even moreso) that she cannot grasp the fact that "nature" is a scam. That the infinite variety of the Matrix isn't any faker than the infinite variety of the Twelve Worlds -- just a newer and more malleable version of the reality to which she always clung. As the noted philosopher Courtney Love says, the key is to fake it so real that we're beyond fake: Pow! Clarice and Tammy are down with that, clearly, but Zoë and Barnabas seem to find it sticky, and that's already presenting as a problem.
Amanda's smoking and watching the Bucs lose when Daniel comes home, and she does this hilarious Seinfeldian WTF face at him, gesturing at the screen. They immediately start bitching about sports, and he turns the TV off. She wants to connect, have some dinner, but he's too busy worrying about Vergis and wants to hit the lab. She gives him leave to go, but he notices the near-empty ambrosia bottle and asks what that's all about. She gets beyond sketchy, but explains that "we" think there are only eleven bottles left in all the Colonies. She hands him a glass, and he apologizes for working so hard lately. She plays it cool and they share grunts about how good the ambrosia is.
At the door -- "Serge! Sustenance!" -- he remembers to ask where the bottle came from. (Pow!) A friend, she says, playing it cagey, and when he cutely asks if he should be jealous, she says maybe. She tries to be flirty, just like him, but she's off her game, and by the end of their gaze he's gone flinty and so has she. "Let me know, dear," he says nastily, and she wonders about it for a sec before running to her purse for more crazy pills and an instant call to Clarice. If this is getting to him, then it's worth doing more of. And that's all she's thinking about. Nothing else. Nothing!
More makeouts in the beautiful virtual sun, but Zoë breaks the clench to babble some more about her secret robot self. Philo's still caught up in the romance, nodding and staring at her lips with undisguised horniness, but he lets her go as she explains the U-87 to him in graphic detail. "If you were to program a robot using a generative model, like something in nature, it could benefit from modulatory input, like living in the real world." Philo gets there: "And those inputs would be different every time. I mean, each robot would be unique, and uncopyable," he says, already thinking about work again. But that's not the point, she explains cutely/firmly: "My point is that a robot could benefit from being in the real world. You know, let it out, explore, get it out of the lab..." Her acting is so, so good: Innocent and sneaky and excited, all at once. If only you'd done this before the kissing, maybe you could have gotten out immediately, but no: He's back to programming. "No no no... Uncopyable. Because it's analog. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!" He traces her lips, and kisses her a thousand times.
...And Daniel enters the lab, watching him moan and osculate, plinking out the Anthem and then banging a few keys, until Philo flips back out IRL. Zoë opens her eyes, grinning, and Daniel stares at his once again terrified pervert assistant.
Clarice is high when she takes the call from Amanda, who wants to do "somethin' fun," and Clarice is like, "I'm actually smoking hash as we speak, remember how I told you I like to do massive amounts of drugs at that one place?" In for a penny, Amanda. She's like, "Um, let me think. Of course I'll come roll around on satin pillows with you at your opium den. Be right there." Take that, Daniel! Maybe time I start hallucinating dead people and flashing back to my mental institution days you'll be here to... (Get me drunk? Offer me major drugs? Recruit me into a cult?)
Daniel plays Nomion's Third over Philo's fumbling freakout, waiting for him to put his wang away, before suggesting that -- critical deadline, mysterious computer chip, billions on the table -- Philo could maybe focus a little. As Daniel's day jacket describes a perfect arc across the room and onto the hatrack, Philo tries to explain the idea he got with Rachel, and finally filibusters Daniel into shutting up. "We've be treating the MCP like it's digital, because it's supposed to be. So we expect to be able to reproduce a perfect copy. But what if something in the MCP is analog?" Zoë gets worried: This means more lab time, not less. Opposite of desired effect. "Like a person, created through a generative process? There's no way we'd be able to make a perfect copy of that. And that is exactly what's happening." Smart boy, quoting back your master's voice: "Essentially, a tiny difference would make a difference."
Daniel -- and that motherfrakking soulpatch is back by the way -- asks Philo if he's come up with anything of the sort, and he's like, "I was too busy making out with your daughter wearing your dead daughter's face, like, I just had this idea just now," and Daniel -- clearly having been sparked in just the right way -- tells him to go home and he'll keep working. Zoë watches while her dad thinks, staring up at her.
Joe takes a drink to steady his nerves, sighs, and jacks in once again. Remember not to die. He comes out of the pipe corridor at a clip, and slinks around back alleys, looking for her. Banksy-style stencil graffiti on one wall says This is not me, it's just my body vehicle. (As Above, So Below: True here, truer there. Truer and less true for the dead girls, all at once.) Planes whiz overhead and he looks around desperately, and starts shouting her name. Behind him, there's a girl he doesn't notice, watching.
Clarice lights the pipe for Amanda, reminding her to go slow on the purple. They chill out and drowse. Amanda seems to be smoking with purpose, like today is just bad enough that getting seriously fucked up is worth it. She pulls out the fundraising letter from the Delphi Institute: "You know the old saying, 'All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again'?" (Why yes, yes we do. So awesome.) Clarice is like, "Not sure where you're going with this." Really, Clarice? Just not puttin' it together yet?
Amanda giggles and explains she was at Delphi for two and half years; sweet Clarice honestly asks if she was hurt that badly in the accident. They're lying on the couch, close to horizontal, within kissing distance. Amanda laughs and says the booby hatch was three years after, when she lost it again. "I was having trouble... Coping with reality. I went crazy." They laugh, high as kites, but also high on intimacy, because who really knows what "crazy" is? Not these two, that's for sure.
Joe is adorable some more, climbing around and looking in abandoned buildings, and finally ends up with a gun barrel pointed at his head. The lady -- who I still think looks like Evelyn -- tells him not to even try and de-rez. "I have to stay alive!" he says, and she's like, "Um, all of us do?" Her name is Emmanuelle, she looks like a Canadian Morena Baccarin dressed like Trinity, and she was sent by poor dead Heracles to guide him to Tamara. For a cost. (Dude, of all the Guides you can get the Underworld ones are always the most hardcore. Talk about the willies. Give me a forest witch or time-traveler anytime.)
Amanda laughs hysterically at Clarice for jumping when she mentioned her crazytime, and Clarice bats at her face with the Delphi letter, hoping she's joking: Visions of the dead are one thing, but if this bitch is certifiably crazy then we're all in trouble. That is such Clarice logic. Amanda continues giggling: "I'm serious, I lost it! I lost my frakkin' mind. I was seeing my dead brother everywhere!" Clarice caresses her cheek sadly, and Amanda admits that she dropped out of college and spent six months chasing Darius down hallways both real and imaginary. ("Dropped out of life," she says, echoing her daughter elsewhere, and proving in this very moment that it doesn't take the Matrix to let yourself drown.) Finally she sits up to take another hit and get maudlin, leaning wanly against The Olde Headboard.
"They say that surviving is the punishment for leaving things left unsaid." Clarice points out, correctly, that this is a vile fucking thing to think or say, and Amanda says maybe she's the one that coined the phrase. "I left so much unsaid. There were so many things that I didn't say, and I wasted so much time. And then he died... And I was left." Amanda's crazy is a lot less scary when she's crying hysterically. This cold, measured crazy is heebiejeebie town. She keeps saying how she's still being punished, maybe her entire life and Zoë's death and everything are her punishment, and Clarice gets right up in her face like a BFF. Like a stoned, bisexual cult-member BFF, petting your hair and wiping your tears and getting all up in your situation.
"Listen to me. God does not want you to punish yourself. He loves you unconditionally. He made you in His image. We don't know the reasons why, when He takes those that we love. Like Darius. Or Zoë. We just have to give ourselves over to His final judgment. We have to trust in His wisdom. And if you can learn how to do that, then you're gonna be free from... From all the pain of these terrible years." Wow, Willow. A good seven G-bombs in that little speech, which is clearly helping Amanda immensely, obviously. I love that it's a speech you could easily give about the Gods, probably a speech she herself has given a million times about the Gods, but... Way to show your cards. These ladies are unsupervised.
"Now, you just have to... Trust Him, Amanda. Trust God." Amanda's eyes finally focus, and her voice gets a little firmer: "Which God? Which one? Which God do I trust?" And they're both so fucked up I can't tell which, but maybe all of the following are true: 1) Amanda is giving Clarice a polite way to retract her glaring mistake here. 2) Atheist-ish Amanda is honestly asking which of her Gods can give her solace now. 3) Amanda is asking Clarice whether to go mono and leave the Old Gods altogether. Clarice's total abject fear in this moment, as she pulls her hand off Amanda like it's burning, would seem to suggest she's not sure either. But with Amanda, who the fuck knows? Not herself, for sure, as she's always been plainly aware of what a Magic Eightball she tends to be. Still, I'm all manner of excited for week because it could go a million places from here.
Emmanuelle leads Joe down some hallways and that, and Joe's being all weird, and finally she's like, "Gods, what." Of course he's stressing about dying in NCC, and she says it one more time: "Then don't die." I wonder if that's a NCC gamer joke, like, every newbie ("cube," they're called here) that comes in has to keep hearing and saying that over and over: Don't die, don't die, don't die. Be reckless because that's why it's fun, but not so reckless that you die. Get in the game but don't get kicked out of the game, because the point of the game is figuring out the point of the game, and you can't do that if you die so don't die. As above so below, and so on.
While Daniel thinks out loud in the lab, staring at the schematics and pinking buttons, Caesar brings him the ball for fetch time. He tosses it, and Caesar catches it, then places it at Zoë's feet. She silently begs him to leave her alone, and he whines, and finally she kicks the ball. It lands at her father's feet, and he tosses it again, still talking to himself. "It won't work for Vergis... But you'll work for me?" She looks at him, worried, as Caesar brings her the ball again. She begs him to get lost, but he gets frustrated, whining and barking at her. Finally, focus broken, he heads on over to her, and picks up the ball. He looks up into his daughter's eyes...
And Pow.