Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Loves & The Lives Of Man & Machine
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 7 | Aired on 03.12.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.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 next 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 previous 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.