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One left for this demiseason. Michael Taylor's always been my favorite writer in this canon, so -- even though everybody's fingerprints are on everybody's episodes -- I had high hopes for this one. And, of course, we do not disappoint. While Daniel spends the entire episode in horrifying escalating war of attrition trying to get Zoë to admit she's a robot now, Joseph burns his way through about a million Sim people, to end up at a bar run by the most Teiresias of all guides, who does a literal song and dance that lasts most of the episode before ending in a Sphinxian riddle which Joe answers in the only way he does anything: Whining at top volume and bothering everybody until they're so fucking sick of him they'll do anything to make him go away... Including giving him the clue on his Everquest. And some virtual drugs that will no doubt make him even more horrible in weeks to come.
But then after all that awesome -- and all that wonderful amount of people pointing out how obnoxious Joe can get, and Zoë being a fucking trooper no matter how mentally abusive her dad gets in pursuit of the truth -- things get wicked sad. Tomas Vergis shows up telling crazy Amanda all kind of truths about how the MCP was got, and meanwhile Daniel is down pulling his worst shit of all: Telling the U-87 with his daughter inside to kill Caesar the Dog (a character with personal importance for us all)... And her taking aim, in the ultimate bluff, and blowing the puppy away, only to find out that she's shooting blanks.
So now Daniel's sad thinking he spent the whole episode calling a robot his daughter but still not ready to drop the possibility, Amanda's as usual sad as hell and now knowing her husband is a bad guy, and Zoë? Admitting she'd just as easily have turned the gun on Daniel himself. Which, after all this? Guess that ripped-off arm still smarts. This show is a ten-lane road to hell paved with every good intention that exists. So brilliant.
Guess we're calling week the "season finale," but it should serve. This shit is real, and only getting moreso. Lucky you, being on the ride. Best show on television, ninth week running.
Watch this episode here, discuss it in our forums, then see the season's most memorable moments!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously on Caprica: Daniel's creative process got enough of a jolt about the U-87's MCP that he finally realized who was in there. Which you might think was a good thing...
In New Cap City everybody's gross. Joseph is becoming a virtual addict in his latest iteration of being obnoxious about Tamara; now Emmanuelle is cooking up some amp and making him wear an even sillier hat than he usually wears. Amp is a drug that you shoot in your eye like your eye has asthma. What it does is make you fast: "Think of it as a hack that bypasses the holoband's safeties, interacting with the visual cortex to heighten a player's senses and reflexes. In here, you're either quick or you're dead. Take your pick." I choose not being here. Is that an option?
So Joe squeezes the thing in his eyeball, giving him a powerful euphoric/speed jump both in the Matrix and IRL. So now I guess officially everyone on this show is a drug addict. But I mean God, Emmanuelle, he's obsessive enough without giving him a bunch of eyeball meth. Or maybe this is all just a conspiracy to get somebody dumb to clean up New Cap City, and by the time he's wasted and burnt out and tooth-free the whole place will be sparkling.
Daniel turns Zoë back on and apologizes for shutting her down after the freakout moment last week. He begs her to talk to him, and she won't, so he's like, "Ah, the old silent treatment. Just what you'd expect when you kidnap your daughter's soul and put her in two tons of hideous steel for the sake of your own sick obsessions." Like she's a typical teenager who's just being difficult, and not the newborn victim of his total grotesque betrayal. He switches tracks.
"I can't imagine what the last few weeks have been like for you. This certainly wasn't what you were expecting, was it? Must have scared the crap out of you. I can understand that. I'm sorry, but you have to understand that this was always just a temporary place, just so we could get you back in our lives. And if you can't handle it, you just let me know, and I will take you out of this and find a way to make you a more human body, whatever you want..."
He's still hedging bets. He's still not sure if it's true. But if it is true, then this is how he has to play it. I don't doubt that he loves and loved his daughter, but never lose sight of the fact that he is being totally gross. Worst case scenario, he's talking to a robot, which is no shame because only the dog can see him doing it. Best case scenario, she's in there and he can make his daughter do way worse stuff than just ripping her own arm off. All of which Zoë knows, all of which is why Lacy's the only person who's really allowed to know what's going on: Because she's waiting, always waiting, for the way his brilliant mind can find to betray her.
"Can you at least look at me when I'm talking to you? Can you look at me, please?" No dice. And so he changes tack again: "U-87, look at me." So she does. Another clue: She'll take commands as the robot? (Maybe has to?) Or, you know, as Occam's Razor would suggest: The robot responds to commands the way it always has. Then he says the scariest thing you can say: "This might be hard on you, but it's going to be all for the best." Not a smile. A heaving chest, and his mouth a firm line, but no love at all. Just power.
I think it's easy to lose sight of the deal here, which is that as much as Daniel is capable of love, he's essentially a cold person who sees other people as tools. The robot, the daughter. You can love someone and use them at the same time: Just ask God. But while the tenor of his speech -- the very fact that he's the only one talking -- might lead you to sympathize, to see Zoë through his eyes, as a spoiled brat, she's only a brat insofar as she's not doing what he wants. And women are always the biggest bitches when they don't do what we want, aren't they?
Which is the reason, always, that we have to hide. It's easier and more powerful to be an object when the alternative is hatred. Zoë's only power, and she's said this more than once, is hiding inside her magnificent new body. Pretending there's nobody home. And I think probably it's hard for some people to understand how that works, because they never got the hang of it -- or never had to -- for themselves. If your body, or your sexuality, have never been commodified, then I think it's probably difficult to understand the alternatives, of which you've been lucky enough to remain ignorant.
I would say that her life and soul are endangered, but that word's not correct because the danger has already arrived: He did the worst thing he could possibly do. He stole her out of heaven and locked her in a tower. And if he ever finds out she's still in there, he'll do worse. So her whole plan is just as deceptively simple as always: Get the frak out of there without him ever knowing she was in his house. Granting Zoë her subjectivity -- I know it's hard -- shows you the truth.
The metaphor isn't the father/daughter pissing contest you think you're seeing, it's Night Of The Hunter. It's Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" The killer clowns and night things and Michael Myers, bumping and shrieking outside the house, begging to come in. Getting angrier. Not smiling.
Joe sees an amphead shivering on the street and suddenly realizes he's become an addict, and Emmanuelle explains the missing true part, which is that amp is "like jamming a wire into your brain's pleasure center." Excellent! Joe realizes for the fifth time that the Matrix is creepy -- "addictive drugs, senseless sex? Heck of a game" -- and they discuss how nobody knows how you win the Matrix, and again you get the feeling that this is a conversation every cube has ever had. He's ridiculous for a while, adorably angry at the killer zeppelins in the sky, and finally she rolls her eyes: "You think this is real life? You think this is what I look like in real life?" He asks who she is, then, really, and -- just to tickle that exciting little storyline mystery a bit -- these are her exact words: "Someone who's being paid to help you. So keep quiet and keep alive."
I do want it to be Evelyn. He goes into the underworld looking for his daughter, and ends up meeting his wife. She saves him there, and she saves him here, and he can only truly see her when she's wearing a mask. I mean, that's story.
Amanda goes to the bridge where her brother died and hallucinates all manner of things, including her brother driving a car and glaring at her. So, good deal there.
Joseph's got the U-87 breaking down and reassembling an assault rifle, over and over again. Zoë looks awesome holding a giant gun, of course. Eventually, once there's a rhythm set up, he lights a cigarette with some sing-song patter about how much Zoë hated him smoking. And maybe that's because of their first house, which burned down when she was five, which we only learned about recently. He tells the story in just the most horrible sort of troubadour fashion, begging her to respond, and the whole time he's like "do it again" as she completes the task. Amazing; torturous. He keeps breaking her heart, over and over, pulling secret cigarettes out of the bookcase as he pulls secret memories out of another girl's mind.
Her hands stay steady; the gun comes apart and the gun comes together. So Daniel had a server farm in an all-wood ramshackle place with a garden, wood beams and wood paneling, and one night a fire started in his office, and by the time they woke up the fire was all the way upstairs. Zoë had just moved into her "very first big-girl room, up in the attic," which of course she loved. They could hear her screaming, but they couldn't get upstairs -- the new house is all stone, all open, a million ways to escape, unless of course you're a giant robot -- and they waited seven minutes for their daughter to die, until the guys arrived and saved her. And the gun comes apart and the gun comes together.
She's the girl genius, she knows exactly what she's doing. That doesn't stop it working on her, it only means she gets as angry as it makes her sad, terrified. This is one definition of evil, this compassionate specificity: "I can only imagine what it must have been like for her, trapped up there all alone, watching the flames climb the walls, melting all the little glow-in-the-dark stars that she glued to the ceiling. Trapped in a box of living fl..." He burns himself, accidentally, with a match, and she jerks. Zoë rolls her eyes, and breathes, but it's too late: He knows. He's proud of himself, for breaking her.
I think the cheap VIP Room set has replaced the cathedral for that set's purposes. Have some extras walk by the black windows every now and then, thumping bass behind, and a random set of laser-show projections, and you're in the middle of a club. And given that Zoë isn't really God anymore, we don't really need the cathedral anyway. I did love it, though. So they're in there discussing how creepy Daniel was being, all the "soldier stuff" the robot already knows how to do. "And then he started barking orders at me like some crazy drill sergeant from one of those Tauron war movies." Lacy doesn't get it, and explaining it to her allows Zoë to put it together: The test wasn't the drills, it was the story. It was the way she wanted to kill him -- "reach out and snap him" -- for doing it.
"Zoë, are you still sure that it would be the worst thing if you did, you know, come out to him?" Zoë reminds her -- she was there when it happened -- how bad it got, when he wrapped his arms around her and put her in a cold, dark place. "If he really thought of me as his daughter, he would've never have done the things that he did." And ultimately, as chilling as that sentence is, she takes it to the obvious level, which is that she has only ever thought her father cared about his business, his science. His money, his work.
And where that takes us is fruitful, if well-trod territory. Zoë can't have her Daddy, so she hates and infiltrates his science, becomes a girl genius. Attempts to use the hard and software that he uses to transcend itself: To create something from her own forehead that will take down the whole sick world he invented. Zoë can't have her Daddy, so she hates and infiltrates his territory, eschewing and spitting on her mother's life, hiding herself even before she died, inside the tower. The things she wanted were the things she hated, and those are the things she tried to become, in order to evolve them past her mother and father both. Destroy the Matrix by making it a Heaven. Destroy the culture of Caprica, for celebrating Bill & Melinda above all others. Destroy science, and technology, and medicine, for being loved more than she was.
"What am I supposed to do? Follow every order, no matter how stupid. Refuse to let him under my skin. I have to turn me off, just be the robot." Lacy asks if she can even do that anymore, but she should know better: We practice doing that every day of our lives. The triumph and the tragedy are, as Zoë and the MCP and the body come together -- as she unites her trinity and becomes the person, soul and mind and body, that she's meant to be -- it will become more difficult, until one day it is impossible. As happens to us all. And that is also a very beautiful, and very scary thing.
It's taken three years and counting to talk about this over on Gossip Girl, but essentially: When we were cavemen and evolution plus sex told us to have a baby, we would bonk a lady over the head and impregnate her. The vulnerabilities of males and females are shockingly inequal, due to bugs in the system. Every face of social order -- from the Bible to polygamy to Victorian etiquette to the waves of feminism -- are about renegotiating this contract, generationally and personally.
Because it's where people come from and it's our favorite thing to do, women's sexuality -- particularly teen sexuality -- is the most important commodity that ever existed, and generally men, who are in charge, treat it like oil, or that stuff from Dune. We're better than cavemen, but only because we have systems in place that, for reasons of religion or political leverage, are more powerful than the natural inequalities, and when those systems are trespassed, the punishments are hopefully deterrent enough that we can minimize the outrages that result. And in the meantime, we can treat teenage girls like they don't matter, even though they're in the room and can hear exactly how creepy we get about them, which is the kind of fucking-up that everybody has to deal with.
But the part we're looking at here is that anybody who threatens that economy, particularly women and gay men, have a duty to maintaining the system, by shutting the hell up and not acting like they have minds or voices or sexual desires of their own. And when they don't follow those rules -- when they don't turn the robot on and themselves off -- it upsets the powers that be. So young women and gay men learn very early on to be infantile, or robotic, or anything that doesn't shove the essential stupidity of that entire economy in the faces of everyone beholden to it. They're the cherry bombs thrown over the transom, into the room where men and women have been holding their parliamentary meetings about this stuff since the dawn of time.
This is the Best Show because these are naked truths. Zoë has to stay quiet in the robot because she's a cult member that needs to get home, but she also has to stay quiet in the robot for the same reasons as Lacy, or Amanda, or any woman or dude who realizes how much she or he frightens the horses, warps the system, just by walking into the room.
Joe and Emmanuelle find his analogue house in the Matrix, and he can't get in because somebody has taken possession. Because it's the only word he knows, he assumes it's Tamara, but it's not. It's an amp-head. Real gross. He doesn't recognize Joe at all, of course, and they take him hostage and yell at him a whole lot and keep him from taking off his band. The place is shitty, of course. Which, um, begs the question of why you would come play this game just to hang out in some kind of Howard Hughes druggie Burroughs nightmare... But I think amp explains it. He's not there to "win" the game of NCC, he's there to do a bunch of drugs and has taken possession of this house so he can do it. Which is slightly less nasty, I think, than becoming a junkie IRL, except his house probably looks this shitty in real life, too.
Junkie offers them his stash, but Joe says he just wants a young girl. Of course, the guy gets yucky about that, too, and Joe calls him a motherfrakker because he's talking about his daughter. Scared junkie again promises to help them, and comes to the conclusion that they're talking about Living Dead Girl. "She's like a new part of the program, new character. You can't kill her 'cause she's already dead. Very bad mojo, you know?" Persephone, the Iron Queen. Which is an important thing to understand, both her myth and the curious ambivalence about her, before moving forward:
Like any taboo, Persephone is beloved and feared at once. You know the story as it relates to creation myth -- Six months warm, six months cold, Demeter screaming in the rain -- but what she became after that was the wife of Hades, and she's worshipped in a very different way after that. She's the Queen of After. She speaks with the voice of ghosts and is the dark mother into whose arms we are taken on dying. The first part gets a lot of play, it's one of the myths we all have to learn, but the second part is just as important, and it's what Tamara is currently negotiating. As she becomes more what she is, Joseph's journey in the Underworld is going to get more and more fundamental.
The cycle is told every year in the place where she died, and returned, at Eleusis. Like any myth cycle you play out physically, it is known as a Mystery. When we act out all the steps of the Passion, in the exact same way, it's called a Mystery Play. So while the name of the club that's our step in this story is called "Mysteries" and that's a bone thrown to the noir aspects of this tale, really it's a clue to how deep we're going to go. These are Eleusinian Mysteries, not Phillip Marlowe ones.
Odysseus goes to see Teiresias, about whom more in a sec, in the house of Persephone in the Underworld. Here, we're going to end up at the house of Teiresias, the biggest Mystery of all and one that ties the threads of Zoë and Lacy and Tamara together in unexpected ways, to find Persephone. But first, big fight.
Big Mean Dude comes busting into Joe's fake house yelling at the junkie for letting them in, and refusing to believe that Tamara isn't just another part of the game. And if she really is Joe's daughter, then we have another problem, because her "bitch ass" already took out two of the Big Mean Dude's friends. Emmanuelle tells them to leave her out of it, calling Joe a "jagoff," which is the perfect word for him, and recedes into the shadows. They fight and yell and negotiate for a while about whether they'll help Joe, and then Emmanuelle takes out all the bad guys. Joe freezes, of course, and Emmanuelle gets shot, but not enough to kill her: Just enough for her arm to do that thing. She's angry enough that she tells Joe to get the eff out of the Matrix until he gets his shit together. "You're no good to her if you're gonna freeze every time some dirtbag shoves a gun in your face. I thought Taurons had bigger stones." You still don't get Joe at all, do you?
Clarice takes another call from Crazy Amanda about the brother drive-by, and talks her down. Eventually she brings Amanda around to how maybe this is still all grief about Zoë, and prods her to spill about her conversation (which we didn't see) with Daniel about the avatar. Essentially he told her what he's been telling Joe, that it's unstable code and she can't see her, although in this case he's lying. "You know what, it's the last thing I need anyway, is to start seeing more dead people..." Clarice apologizes for bringing it up, and offers to come chill with her of course, but is in the middle of a giant family BBQ, so Amanda just needs to drink more and smoke more cigarettes and fall down, down the rabbit hole she's in.
Round Two. Daniel chews on some scenery, having taken Zoë out to a lovely overlook so he can scream in her face about how she already dropped the act once and now he knows she's in there, so really she's just being a bitch. It's incredibly beautiful. His points, to summarize, in addition to how much he hates her loves her hates her, is that she's being a bad hang because, to his mind, he kept his "side" of the bargain: "I took you out of a virtual playground and brought you into the real world." But she's ungrateful, he says, because even though she's brilliant, she's still just a little asshole. The real world he brought her back into is the thing that always scared her. This point breaks down into several bulletpoints, as follows:
Number one, Daniel and Amanda are such fucking paragons of awesome that she couldn't help but feel like a failure (true, but not really accurate). Number two, this lack of self-esteem led her to declare war on the entire grownup world (entirely true). Number three, she is a terrorist who killed innocent people for the simple reason that she is afraid of "life itself" (half true). "Life is scary and brutal and unpredictable, and you gotta make choices like that. And sometimes you make the wrong ones. Maybe I've made some wrong choices, too. But you keep moving on." (Entirely true, and the problem with all fundamentalism.)
"I still love you. No matter what you did, no matter what... No matter what you are, crazy as this is. I know you're not really even her. You are all of her that I have left. So please... Talk to me. Please." A brilliant performance and a killer ending line. He's banking on it. And personally, it's just his version of Amanda's freakout at Ground Zero that started this whole mess. Totally honest, regret and resentment and love and fear and anger and self-hatred, all mixed up. And Zoë can barely stay standing up, huge as she is, because he walked her from A to B to C and now he's giving her everything she wants: Even a reprieve from being the real Zoë. He's offering to love her as she is.
But she stays strong, the hateful he circle he draws around her. The greatest thing about Zoë was her convictions, and our Zoë, all she is is convictions. I love her, maybe more than I love Amanda, for this. Philo's learning to love her for them. But one man's superhero is another man's little bitch, so he lights a circle of fire around her, a wall as tall as a man, and orders the U-87 to stay, and sets it alight. They lock eyes as their hearts break, but he watches it burn.
He's going dark. This is his version of Joe's trip to the Underworld, as the shadows consume him. The darkness he's investigating is inside, not in the Matrix, but as above, so below. There's less difference between the two every single week. Just ask Amanda. And he knows the robot's steel and chrome won't melt -- if she's even there at all, which is still a bluff he's bluffing -- which means all he's trying to do is burn her heart. But if he, and she, are very unlucky... He'll burn it away entirely. This hurts her more than it hurts him.
The Matrix is a machine that stands between Joe and his daughter. The U-87 is a machine that stands between Daniel and his daughter. Those are strict parallels, and what was dark is becoming light as Joe searches the Underworld, and what was light is becoming dark as Daniel tinkers with the machine. Very much in character, and their trajectories from the beginning.
But what we're discovering, and I will continue to belabor the point, just because this is SF with an unprecedented lyricism and wisdom about people, is a whole other parallel: Those machines, the Matrix and the U-87, are also bodies, specifically magnificent and miraculous bodies, that these two girls must learn to acknowledge as their own. They -- we -- must take possession of those bodies, if they can ever learn to live at all. If they ever want to get home.
(And we'll get into Lacy eventually, but I think her journey -- understanding and empowering herself as part of the violent, nasty real world -- might be the hardest of all, if only because it doesn't come with magic powers.)
So on a fundamentally gross but all-too-realistic level, you have the grim story of all parents and all children, staring at each other through these murky windows and trying desperately to understand each other, bodies and all. But you also have the fundamental story of men and women -- the story BSG eventually straight-up told -- which is that men have no compelling reason to see women as anything other than very complicated, very confusing machines. But in order for any of us to survive, and I mean our very existence is contingent on this fact, everybody has to make the jump past that red line.
Sam comes walking into Joe's house, since when he knocks nobody answers, and finds his brother IRL for once, looking at old things and being maudlin because Emmanuelle yelled at him. He can barely focus when Sam walks in. One of the things is a cute little art-card, on which Tamara signed her name the way she always did: With a bright flower blooming from the top of the "T." Sam rips it out of his hands, reminding Yusif about the funeral: "You gave the ferryman the coins, you sent her on her way. Shannon, too."
Joe follows his own crazy line of logic to abruptly asking Sam what it feels like to kill someone. If he wants to earn his Tauron stones, he must figure out this particular mystery: How he can shoot someone, even in the Matrix, without losing his nerve. Of course, Sam doesn't know about his drug habit or his trips to the Underworld, so he's just totally offended. Which, it's offensive. He realizes eventually how low Joe's gone, and says they're fine on the botched Amanda assassination, but after some awkward silence and serious puppy-dogs from his brother, he thinks maybe Joe needs to know this stuff after all. Death consumes Yusif, haunts him. But Sam walks with Her. So no matter why his brother is freaking out, Sam can help.
"Tell yourself it's not real. And then they're not people shooting at you anymore, they're targets. And the whole thing becomes just a game." Which any cube would already know, of course, but is also the terrible line we have to walk, and which most importantly is exactly the wavy blurry line that terrified Zoë so much she changed the world. It stopped being real and started being a game, so she gave birth to a daughter, from her own forehead, who could end it all.
Joe comes back, prepared to dissociate the shit out of the living, and meets Emmanuelle across the street from Mysteries. She watches his face, and is impressed by the new hardness of him. Inside, the stage show plays: A Teiresias -- name of Cerberus in this iteration -- who "fires" questions at the audience like a Sphinx, offering epiphany and a touch of the divine: How to win the game.
Teiresias is a huge, huge thing, but essentially: Wise man walking sees some snakes fucking. Kill the boy, turn into one. Kill the girl, turn into one. But -- as my friend Rachel writes -- what if you do neither? What if you kill both? Teiresias is the highest wisdom there is, because he knows both sides of a thing nobody gets to even know half of: What women are, what men are. Anytime you see transvestism or gender-blender stuff in a story like this, you're looking at the ultimate wisdom, the ultimate Guide; more usually, you're looking at something even stronger, which is the Gatekeeper. Guides you can deal with, they're the face of your personal grace and they walk with you, but the Gatekeeper -- Cerberus -- stays in one place. The Siege Perilous, the Boss at the end of every level. You have to come to him, or her. As many times as it takes to get through.
Teiresias is a figure of transformation -- that's why the snakes -- because you're only ever looking at one side, which is the side you're always looking at. Teiresias confronts you with both at once, the front and the back, the light and the dark, the wakeful and dreaming, which is not something we're programmed to do. Which life by its nature forces us slowly and painfully to learn to do. He's the symbol of your endpoint, when you cross the red line and can manage to put on everybody's moccasins at once. She threatens the economy of men and women by transcending them both. He lives on the borderline between life and death because she knows and delights in both.
Cerberus calls Joe onto the stage immediately -- "What do you say, folks? Is this stranger our new Prometheus?" -- and the crowd screams. "Stranger! Stranger! Stranger! Stranger!" The women dance, and the crowd goes still. "I'm just looking for someone," Joe says, and Cerberus laughs. "Aren't we all?" He rips up the picture of Tamara, pretending not to know her, and tells Joe he has to answer the riddle first. Or else -- the Sphinx was another famous hermaphrodite, who asked the same price -- he'll die.
A hundred guns pointed at Joseph now, Cerberus summons the "sacred vessel," a bowl full of secrets brought by his handmaiden. She reads aloud: "As the Gods overthrew the Titans, so has man overthrown the Gods. But when man visits his sins upon his children, how shall he be repaid?"
When you light the burning circle to melt your daughter's heart. When you kidnap her from Heaven and bring her down to a chrome Hell. When you make your daughter into an object, a machine; when she rips her own body into pieces. When you abandon your son to the wolves, lost in your own pain, and punish him for looking for a father. When you induce lonely, lost children to build bombs and kill themselves, in pursuit of your own sick need for clarity. When you make your children slaves; when you make slaves of your children. We already know the answer. It is being built, all around us: He shall be repaid with death. Death is the answer.
Joe, predictably, freaks out. This isn't his story, it's Daniel's. He's only beginning to understand this story: The way the Matrix takes our dreams and outmoded religious metaphors and makes them real, iterable, concrete, consequential. The way the Matrix gives us new ways to worship. How could he? The Gods are ornaments and vestments and traditions and ritual. They're not standing in front of him, begging to be seen. Begging him to stay strong on his course. They keep telling him the wisdom is to treat the real life as a game, when what he needs to learn is the opposite. As above, so below. And he's been ignoring both sides of it. He whines and says his daughter's name, again and again and again; he is so pitiable and lost that Cerberus relents. She stops her teasing and tosses him out on his ass, after offering him a hateful curse.
In the anteroom, Emmanuelle says it again: "What'd I say about staying cool, Counselor?" The coat check guy reminds him to grab his gun, and on the wall he sees the flower once again: Tamara's sign. Written all over her body. He shoots another hit of amp, freaking out Emmanuelle and the coatcheck guy both. "Like you said, in here, you're either quick or you're dead." He shoots the bellhop guy: "I'll be quick." Emmanuelle grabs guns and follows him back in, and they fire on all Cerberus's guards and tell the rest of the audience to clear out before they get derezzed.
Joe forces Cerberus to her knees, gun to his head, screaming for his daughter. He relents, lights a cigarette, and tells him the story in an admirable, almost sexy cabaret intonation: "She was right here on the stage, seeking answers to the afterlife. Came right up, unlike her daddy. When she answered the riddle wrong, we discovered she had the power to transcend life and death. It was quite a show! Maybe she's found the answers that everyone's searching for. Or maybe she is the answer. But if you find her... If you find her. Tell her I'll give her star billing if she comes back. Hell, I'll even pay her. Real cubits. The game speaks through all of us differently. Changes us in ways that we can't expect. Stick around long enough, it'll happen to you."
Joe points his gun in Teiresias's face, and she blows smoke up his barrel. Holds one of the Dead Girl's flowers to his nose as they leave, inviting Joe back any time at all. And out in the street now he sees them, a million iterations, the flower of her sign everywhere they look. Written all over the walls of her body. "Maybe the other players are right, she is a part of this place. Seems like your daughter has found a home. Maybe it's time you went back to yours?"
Amanda smokes and looks at pictures, herself and her brother, and Serge summons her to the door: Tomas has come calling. She's grossed out; he's asking for her instead of Daniel. She puts out her cigarette and heads out to see the enemy.
"Are you familiar with Tauron customs?" She notes the gloves, demonstrating that she does: He's in mourning. "Some might call it mourning, yes. Two of my employees were murdered. Beaten to death during a break-in at my plant." She's horrified, but he goes on, telling her about the MCP and defense contract; how his invention is her husband's new livelihood. His game's only beginning, isn't it? If he's behind the Darius stuff, then he's the most brilliant monster of all. And his plan would work, if it weren't for Clarice's meddling, which is putting new spin on everything he touches.
Caesar smiles up at Zoë as Daniel sits, looking nuts, staring at his daughter. He holds up a gun and cocks it, for one more test. I honestly thought he was going to point it at his own head. "Now here's the deal... I love my dog. But I love my daughter even more. And if there's even a slight chance that some small part of her is tangled up in your alloy skeleton, I've got to know."
Upstairs, Amanda puts the pieces together: Daniel was behind the murders, although he's not brave enough to have done it himself. She draws a very particular line: "I don't give a frak who you think my husband killed. He's my husband. Get out of my house." That sounds about right, for who they are. It will eat at her, but she is loyal. Tomas leaves quietly, more damage done. And downstairs, Daniel forces Zoë to take the gun, and shoot the dog. After unbearable beats, she fires three times. Because she must.
They stand in silence, barely able to look at each other, over the still living body of the dog. She didn't miss, he explains. His cruelty extends further, and less far, than that. They were only blanks. It was just a test. He confronted her with the dark, and the light, and bluffed his way into heartbreak. He made it a question of love, a question he would never ask if there were love, and removed any chance of her reconciling with him, forever. He took her refuge in the body and made it a war of attrition, and his cruelty shames them both. He's no longer her father. She's grateful when he shuts her down.
Daniel walks the halls of their house, in darkness. It's been a long day. He looks for his wife, pulls down the bottle of Ambrosia, sits with it in the dark. On screen, the videos of his daughter. And outside, as far from the house as she can get, Amanda sits behind a wall, down by the pool, looking up at the videos as he watches them. It's cold out there; it's warmer and safer now than inside.
Zoë meets Lacy in the VIP, horrified and weakened, but also stronger now. "As soon as I picked up the gun, I knew. The robot knew. The weight was off by a tiny fraction, quarter rounds instead of full." But that's not the punchline: "You wanna know something? If they were full? I might've pointed the gun at him." She begs her friend to save her, once again. To get her out of her father's house -- that once-warm, once-safe place -- before she does something she'll regret. At this point, I don't think I'd mind at all.
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