Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B | 1 USERS: C+ YOU GRADE IT Violence & Variations
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 9 | Aired on 03.26.2010
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Clarice gets hardcore on Barnabas when he impinges once too often on her place as the leader of their cult. He comes back at her by having Lacy and Keon blow her minivan up on the way to Gemenon. Nestor and Olaf I think will not survive the bombing, but Clarice is fine because she's busy watching Amanda jump off that coincidentally same bridge. So I guess Lacy is the loser here, because now she's in a terrorist cult for no real reason, while Clarice has like eight other husbands to spare.
Amanda and Joe have been going crazy since last week, in different ways. Joe is now a complete amp-head and just shivers and stinks on the couch, and even missed Willie's Tauron Ink Day. Amanda, since she already takes all the drugs there are, foregoes addiction in favor of jumping off this bridge once Daniel admits his part in the MCP theft/murder. At this point her once-amazing character has been such a pointless cipher for so many episodes running that it's not even sad.
Meanwhile, Assistant Evelyn -- in her guise as Emmanuelle -- realizes that getting her boss-slash-crush hooked on virtual crack was a dumb idea, and goes to Tamara for help. Tammy's resolution to this problem -- her strategy, I'm saying, for putting Joseph Adama back on the road to mental health -- is to: Let him find her, yell at him about getting a life and to stop stalking her, and shoot herself in front of him... Then shoot Joe in the face, so he can't come back and bother her anymore. Taurons are, once again, the fucking worst.
Daniel's wigging about last week's pissing contest and his continued technological failure. The Defense Ministry's stepped up their deadlines for getting the robots working, not least because they're secretly in bed with Vergis. So he tells Philo to wipe the MCP itself, before Zoë can escape the lab. (Then he heads upstairs to cook dinner and drive his wife to suicide.)
Stuck in a corner, Zoë reveals to Philo that she is a giant killer robot and his virtual girlfriend and the reincarnation of the Most Hated Girl in the Twelve Worlds, teen terrorist Zoë Graystone, but... Can they still date? The answer, an unsurprising no, leads to some regrettable blood of Philomon's getting sprayed just everywhere. Then Zoë steals a van, which, I don't think she's gonna drive to Gemenon so I'm not sure what her plan is there, but it ends up with her smashing herself into a police cordon, and I think blowing up all dead.
...So this show Caprica, the best show maybe ever, is sort of in bits now. Bloody, murder-suicide bits.
Not a great episode in and of itself, and the complete waste of Amanda irks, but for all the plotty-plot-plot there are some pretty amazing shocks and surprises and sensational watercooler moments, which I know lots of people often enjoy.
(But there's also a spiritual sense of attrition -- speaking personally -- that attends watching basically every character you love, on your favorite show, get lined up and shot in the head, one every five minutes, for an entire hour. It's sort of tiring.)
Well. See you in October, when some other show also called Caprica takes all the frakked-up burnt-up pieces that are left (which honestly, this is a show literally about resurrection and the Underworld, so that could be many pieces) and puts them together in a new configuration. As the episode title suggests.
Watch this episode here, discuss it in our forums, then see the demiseason's most memorable moments!
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Of note in this week's Previouslies: Clarice is being challenged for the leadership of the STO by Barnabas, who is covertly advertising to the other cells to join up and start a holy army. If the leadership on Gemenon thinks the Clarice-Olaf-Nestor cell is out of control, then the whole Zoë apotheosis deal won't even matter. Much like Joe's sudden drug problem, Barnabas was introduced so late into the demiseason that we'll just have to adjust to the idea that this is now the story.
The hardest thing for a showrunner/EP to handle, and I know I say this all the time, is to make sure the big picture gets serviced in the midst of the work of the writers they've corralled. When you have a really good staff, you get into situations where everybody's writing their own version of the show, and these things can get overlooked. Or you get the other problem, which is repetitive placeholder scenes that come from sketching out the arc and saying, "From episode X to episode Y, this Character A is going to be gradually doing Z," which inevitably -- if you're not careful, and even if you are -- can turn into a weekly check-in with Character A in a holding pattern doing the same thing as last week until abruptly switching to his or her next dot on the graph. (Fat Lee, Fat Lee, Fat Lee, jumprope, Skinny Lee.)
Both of these happened this year on this show, but they happen on every show -- and the better the writers, the more often this happens -- so while I guess we could say this is a sad thing born of overlong scripts that didn't get edited together right from week-to-week, you could also just think of it as nine beautiful movies that are mostly connected, with infodump bits to sketch in the parts we didn't get to see and telling us to trust our instincts about gradual storylines. The problem with this particular episode is that the slowness that people have complained about/gotten used to/enjoyed (if you're me) gets reversed, and the whole thing is just thermonuclear death, death, death, plot, plot, plot.
Which, if you're going to do that, you need a poet to do it right, so it's only natural that Michael Taylor did this week and last week's scripts. Here, his personal go-to thing -- the juxtaposed timelines and enjambment (remember when I wouldn't quit with that?) -- is used less gracefully than usual, since it's a tick-tock on the main story and an ongoing car chase in the other: They don't really comment on each other in any meaningful way, because the car chase is one idea with no other content. But on the other hand, the last act is basically a silent movie set to an opera starring Alessandro "Felix Gaeta" Juliani, which should be more than enough poetry for everybody.