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So, to refresh: Daniel Graystone had a rough day. He lost his company to hated rival Tomas Vergis, his wife found out he was a mob-tied murderer, and then wife and robot daughter both committed separate suicide (drowning, exploding). Since then, he's just been hanging out, screamin' and drinkin' and gettin' real crazy. Resolutely not shavin'.
Joe Adama has hated Daniel ever since Daniel created a creepy, screamy daughter copy in the Matrix who later accidentally led him into drug addiction, then treated him to a murder-suicide of her own. Luckily he bounced back (frakking finally) and now Joe's a made man in the Tauron Mob, so when crazy Daniel comes a-courtin' (since that worked out so well last time), he gets the job taking care of arrangements.
Arrangements for what? Well, it's funny. See, Daniel and cult leader Clarice Willow have both happened upon a way to sell virtual grief avoidance to the masses: Daniel as a way of holding onto our loved ones, and Clarice as part of a kooky plan to create a heaven for martyrs -- "Apotheosis" to virtual Rivendell -- which will then serve as a recruitment tool after some large-scale terrorist attacks.
Clarice's kooky reasoning -- which fails to sway Pope Meg Tilly or her best monk despite a fantastically insane virtual PowerPoint presentation of little girls blowing themselves up -- is that since nobody has faith in God anymore, you might as well give them a creepy Disneyland version of heaven instead, and then they'll just pretend. The Pope, realizing that Clarice is a wacked-out motherfucker with magic evangelism powers, sends some monks to kill her. Luckily, Clarice has already done her usual thing of smoking tons of hash and sleeping with randoms to make them join her cult.
Somehow, through the power of her makeouts and Jesus freak eyeballs, Clarice causes the lead Monk to get stabbed full of holes. This proves to Pope Meg that Clarice should just be given whatever she wants for now. All this happens on Gemenon, which looks like virtual Hogwarts as portrayed using technology from 1995.
After they tell him to blow up his mother, and he refuses -- but that was okay or something because they were just kidding anyway -- Joe and his awesome brother Sam finally let Daniel be in their Tauron mafia, even though they all know he'll end up screwed somehow by this deal. And over at Graystone, Daniel's top guy Cyrus is still acting kind of like a mole for his drunk, mean mobster ass, so he goes against Vergis's orders to melt the Zoë robot down to scrap and instead boxes her in a literal box.
Which is fine, because somehow Zoë ended up in New Caprica City, where she has the same undying/Matrix powers as Joe's dead daughter Tamara, with the extra bonus of her horrible personality. For some reason she's taken to stalking around underneath the virtual abandoned highways in a cloak and carrying a sword, looking for Tamara so they can fight or else be Internet God together, or probably both. Given the nonsensical, pandering kung-fu fight she gets into with some Tamara Cultists, probably both.
It was stupid and it was mean -- oh, Lacy's still being a terrorist and Barnabas is clearly screwing his youngster cultists, so there's that to look forward to -- but at the end, it's all better: Amanda Graystone is alive after all, shacked up in some lesbian cabin with Clarice, looking like hell but communicating with her husband as well as she can, considering she left him for doing exactly what he is now doing. Now just get me my virtual Philo -- the only person who actually stayed dead -- and we'll call it even. In the meantime, yeah, let's stick the two most batshit crazy women in the history of television in a cabin, and see who cracks first. That sounds like a good idea.
week, presumably: More shooting, more yelling, lots of kickass fighting in the Matrix for no real reason, more stupid Three Wise Men nativity outfits on Gemenon, and Clarice making spooky witchy sex faces at everybody.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Previously: Girl Genius Zoe guilted her best friend and fellow cultmember Lacy into upping her involvement in the militant armed faction of their cult. She blew up a car that was supposed to have Clarice Willow in it, but Clarice was too busy watching her best drinking buddy Amanda Graystone jumping off the Pantheon Bridge. After possibly/hopefully rescuing poor old Amanda, Clarice refused to let a little thing like a Barnabus car bomb stop her from going to Gemenon, which the kooks believe is the Holy Land of the OTG but in actuality is a shitty greenscreen world where everybody acts like Legend Of The Seeker all the time.
Meanwhile, Lacy's still in the terrorist group despite having failed the nominal objective, getting Zoe's toaster self to Gemenon before her dad could erase her. Now mostly Lace fires guns at random and acts nuts. Zoe herself, after killing the cutest boy on all Twelve Worlds, drove her truck into a barricade and blew up. I'm guessing she has a plan, because she's Zoe. Our third Gossip Girl, Tamara Adams, is still running around the Matrix acting fly and getting into situations. Her flower symbol has become all the rage, because novelty is everything.
Joe Adama fell into a little bit of a breakdown after his daughter died, eventually getting into drugs and obsessive video gaming, but Tamara appeared to him and his sidekick Emmanuelle (secretly his secretary and future wife Evelyn) and dissuaded him from staying in the Underworld and shooting drugs in his virtual eyeballs. Apparently this did the trick, and how he's better off in the Tauron mafia than maybe even his wonderful murderous brother Sam.
And Daniel? Well, he could never get his daughter to admit she was a robot, and pushed her essentially into killing herself as part of a father/daughter pissing match as old as time. Once his wife found out that he was responsible for getting the mafia involved in his work, she went full retard and left him, to go do some suiciding. He lost his basketball team and his company to Tomas Vergis, a Tauron creepster who bears a grudge, so it turned out the whole thing was futile. Now he drinks and wishes his wife would come back to him and stop making out with cultleader druggies.
All set? So it's some three weeks later and Daniel's watching TV. On the first channel we got Graystone Ind., under Vergis's guidance, moving out armies of toasters on time and, smug giggle, on budget. is the FBI guy formerly up Amanda's crazy ass all the time, letting us know the car bomb was STO. Nobody knows, of course, that it was due to terrorist infighting arising from the conflict between Clarice's nutty Joan of Arc thing and Barnabus's nutty Helter Skelter thing, which is to say: Between Clarice's ego and Barnabus's ego.
up: Baxter Sarno, saying nothing of import but allowing us to see his cute little badger face so we know it's not an entirely different show all of a sudden, just... Mostly. Another thing that Vergis does better than Daniel is apparently "owning the C-Bucs," because they're on a seven-game winning streak. Also, they're rebuilding and re-safetyfying the Bridge after Ol' Crazy jumped off. This whole time Daniel's flipping through the channels using Wii technology and drinking deep of the crazy. He lies back on his couch and screams like infinite vuvuzelas...
...Which transitions us to a scary scenario in which a little girl cult member (My favorite thing about this entire show has got to be the child-soldiers as the reactionary reformers and the adults being the ones that are crazy and horny and always doing drugs -- it fits so well with the mythos: How do you get a Caprica Six? Well, here's how.) getting out of the car and feeling a little bad about recapitulating the beginning of the pilot as she says goodbye to her mom.
On her way into Atlas Arena, terrorista tries not to cry, gets her religious crazy on, and signals STO shibboleths to all the other nuts around the place. She eventually settles down for the terrorist attack, which will happen as the announcer counts us down to the game. Old (Sagittaron?) ladies, Tauron family men, this little girl, Sister Willow, all of them surrounded by innocents and saying the same prayer as they set their bombs off:
"May the One True God drive out the Many, that I might find forgiveness in this life and redemption in the . Hear my prayer, oh God in heaven. So say we all."
Atlas comes crashing down, burden too heavy, and the Conclave takes off their holobands and asks Clarice WTF she's on about. Led by a patrician man named Obal Ferras, who is dressed like the people under the stairs from Beauty & The Beast, is flanked by various ridiculous outfits and beardy men. And he is unimpressed: How can a large-scale terror attack possibly bring anybody into your cult? You're killing the market, literally, and making everybody look bad. This is a Church, not a mosh pit.
Clarice is like, "We haven't even gotten to the Apotheosis part yet. This is just the fun terrorist part." They all put on their holobands again and we see all the saints that just murdered all the people blinking into new life in Rivendell. It looks, if this is possible, even stupider than Gemenon, which is essentially Myst. Any complaints about the way the Cylon Basestars looked, I would like to you retract them. At least they weren't generated on an Amiga A4000. On the other hand, for people confused as to whether this show was base-level science fiction or something newer and better, we now have our answer.
So 30,000 Capricans would die in the fire, but "a select few" would be reborn: Specifically, the ones in your stupid cult. They all gag and delight and caper in their fake heaven, and Clarice explains her horrible, stupid idea.
"Only they will savor life everlasting, in a virtual heaven that we have built. The Twelve Worlds will see our paradise, and understand the gift that our God offers." Are you following? She'll explain more just how terrible this is: "We live in a remarkable era. Myth and mystery have been replaced by reason and science. I offer you a religion that removes the need for faith. A religion of certainty that reflects the wonder of all we have created. That is Apotheosis."
Okay. The reason that atheists and evangelicals are both so annoying is that they think reason and faith are the same, concrete, thing. Atheists adjust faith down to reason and point out how stupid it looks (Creationism, Biblical literalism, terrorism, the Tea Party), while and evangelicals adjust reason down to faith and show how stupid they are. But you're gaming the system by doing that, because most people of faith aren't going to fall into that trap, because they know God is a private matter and because they're better off shutting the fuck up about it.
Mealymouthed liberals always toss around this football of how quantum mechanics is mysterious or quarks or dark matter or whatever stupid thing, the God particle, but they're really just imputing the same basic fallacy: That religion is a system of thought, not a system of belief. We live in the house of our best accomplishment. If you're Ravenclaw, as all atheists are, you think smart is what matters. If you're an emotional Hufflepuff or a body-centered Slytherin like most conservatives, you think feelings or money are what matters.
But matters of faith are a road that goes north and matters of thought are a road that goes west. You will never get there driving that way. It's like trying to think yourself thin (taking Ravenclaw Road to get to Slytherin), or think yourself out of grief (Ravenclaw also doesn't lead to Hufflepuff). They are unconnected. A whole person has the entire map, and just a few blind spots that they know to account for. There's four suits in the Tarot, and none of them are trump. (Everybody thinks they're Griffyndor.)
So what Clarice is really saying is, the people of the Twelve Worlds have gone so far into Ravenclaw and Slytherin that Griffyndor isn't even a possibility anymore. And letting faith speak for itself isn't working, because sex and drugs -- as she well knows -- are way more awesome than self-denial. So how do you sell self-denial to people who can have everything in the real world, and double that in the Matrix? By building a disgusting highway interchange that substitutes Slytherin and Ravenclaw for Griffyndor, because they're too stupid to know the difference. They'll drink the sand. And if you scare them bad enough, the downsides of that -- the withering and eventual dropping-off of your leperous vestigial soul -- won't even matter anymore.
It's the most cynical, nasty, wrong-headed thing imaginable. It's also precisely the way we, as a country and a world, do tend to talk of religion: "I offer you a religion that removes the need for faith. A religion of certainty." That's the most hateful possible way to describe both sides of this fake, dumb IRL debate. It's also how Dawkins got rich, because that's what it looks like to a Ravenclaw: Like sheep, praying to Santa Claus. She's not wrong -- they're not wrong -- but she's right on such an adverse, horrific vector that I'd rather see the apocalypse come about. (Luckily...)
The twelve-person Conclave is impressed, but more by her quantity of crazy than anything else. Over on Caprica, Daniel is running late for a very important date with an equally terrible and somewhat related idea. Hello, Guatrau of the Ha'la'tha! You look just a tad bit more like Brando than I was expecting. Anyway, Daniel is meeting the Godfather of the Tauron Mob to talk to them about his crazy person ideas, and Joe Adama is sitting there at the table; seething, but acting professional for once. He manages to get through this whole scene without shouting TAMARA! at least.
Daniel's plan: Use his Ravenclaw powers to defeat Hufflepuff, i.e., use the Matrix to eliminate the need for grief. (The danger is always thinking you're the thing you're not, thinking you can game the thing you're not with the powers you already have. It's why they'll both lose: By trying to overcome the other houses by pretending you already live there, you make it haunted and it will always take you down.) His last ditch, after losing wife and child numerous times, is to get his company back by allying with the Mafia to sell another form of earthbound heaven, where our loved ones never left.
He talks long enough that the Godfather gets a little antsy, and then reveals his concept. Gautrau's a bit peeved, considering they were supposed to be talking about an army of robots, but of course Daniel can't offer those any longer thanks to Vergis, and anyway he's much more excited about the idea of never having to feel bad feelings again. "I can make us both a great deal of money: A cure for human grief." Not mortality, like Clarice, but the pain of being left behind.
"Who hasn't lost someone that they loved? Who wouldn't do anything possible to bring that loved one back? Well, what if all I had to do was to buy the right piece of software? That would recreate them? They'd be in the virtual world, yes, but... But you could visit them every day. Talk to them, spend time with them again, say the things that you'd always wished you'd said. Maybe ultimately we can even find a way to get them bodies in the real world." Maybe ultimately -- once the Final Five show up -- they can even look like Tricia Helfer!
"The ultimate drug, to heal the ultimate pain." Even Daniel has got to hear how awfully bad that sounds, but he's long past caring. He brings up the recent death of the Guatrau's son, which makes everybody's nerves jangle, and he nearly gets killed right there, but Gautrau's feeling him. "Now, we can either sit and wail at the gravity of our loss, or we can rise up and redress it. This has unlimited potential on any number of levels, not the least of which is profitability." Gautrau sends everybody out of the room except Joe, who after all has even more anecdotal experience with this than anybody on the show.
On Gemenon, Obal tries to explain to Clarice -- his one-time protege, apparently, before she proved herself totally insane and joined the IRA -- why virtual heaven is gross. She asks why, if being OTG means accepting a heaven built by God, they can't just cut out the middleman, and awesomely he goes, "Well it's tacky, for one thing." Additionally, the entire point of heaven is not going there but knowing that it's there. Dying might well be dying, and heaven sounds pretty boring if it's real, but this is the point of faith: Not being right about the facts, but about something we don't have words for. Clarice is like, "You don't believe in life eternal?" Clarice and metaphor are estranged, but we already knew that. "I believe in being surprised," says Obal.
If we know one thing about this show, it's that whoever is awesomest dies first. Might as well start saying goodbye to Brother Ferras now, because he's clearly not going to last the hour.
"Apotheosis will work! It will unite the Twelve Worlds under One True God!" Not that this is very flattering to the Twelve Worlds, but she might have a point. Obal shakes his head and tries to explain Clarice's central issue. "You're not a religious leader. You are STO. Technically a terrorist." She goes off on this whole Sinn Fein thing about how they're just the Strong Right Arm of the Church, and he's like, "No, you just like blowing things up and using our money to do it. How about you go blow some more shit up, and we'll save some souls while you're off our backs."
Clarice demands a meeting with the Blessed Mother, which get ready for her kind of Papal crazy, and Obal fully laughs in her face. "Sipping tea, with little Clarice Willow?" She gets up in his face and points out the many terrible things she's done in the service of this Church. Well, he can't deny that. Without Clarice, no STO at Athena's Academy: No dead Zoe or dead Ben, no violent terrorism for Lacy, no crazypants Amanda, no evil robots, no Cylons. She's got a point. She just doesn't ever seem to pay the price, which is odd considering how erratic her behavior like constantly is. On the other hand, you can't doubt the strength of her feelings: When the FBI came ripping through the school, it broke her heart. I do believe she loves Lacy, and loved Zoe, and loves Amanda, at least as much as she loves God. I just think she loves Clarice more, in a place she doesn't know about.
Joe Adama on Daniel Graystone: "Great wealth. No humility. The idea that that rich people can somehow buy their way out of grieving?" Guatrau's like, yeah but stick to the dude himself. We are an organization that prides itself on networking. Okay: "I don't like him. He believes he's smarter than we are." (The eternal complaint of low self-esteem that can't find its own way out. And they control the media!) "He thinks he can use us and then discard us when we're done solving his problems for him." Okay, but Tamara?
"I've seen what he's talking about. Tamara... After she died, he... Made a version of Tamara that was horrible. She couldn't feel her heartbeat, she was frightened." Okay, wait. Didn't he lose that like whole tech? She blew herself up and was the only working copy? Yes, but this is Daniel, he'll work it out. But Joe's got a good point, hard earned: "That's a good thing, because we need to grieve and move on. It's the Tauron way." Guatrau likes the opposition, likes Joseph: Suddenly, Joe's in charge of the whole enterprise. I think this makes him a made man, and also puts him back in bed with Daniel where they're both happiest. And back in bed with the Ha'la'tha, which is apparently part of taking back his roots: "This is an honor," the Guatrau says. "You've spent enough time straddling two worlds."
Joe sends Daniel home -- desperate, smoking again, babbling about "how we gonna do this" like it's a drug deal -- and tries not to act smug with Sam. Sam's impressed, but Joe tries to stay cool in front of his big brother.
The Blessed Mother, Papess of the deck, is intrigued by Clarice's whole thing, but being very cagey about it. Obal reports that OMG it's total blasphemy, if you didn't get the memo, and tries to explain why Clarice's ass is so scary. "She came to us when she was a child, and she quickly became the brightest star in the STO training camp. She also became a dyed-in-the-wool zealot with delusions of grandeur. Definite messiah complex." She's got the Conclave worked up, with her little PowerPoint, but Mother still seems like she's on Obal's side. He points out that once she gets control of the STO cells, she'll probably end humanity: Maybe better to kill her now, before it happens?
"Lord save me from the Capricans," Mother laughs, and you know exactly what she means. Her breathing is labored; she sits awkwardly and stands painfully. (She's not long, I think, for this world. She gave her body to God a long time ago, and he's not returning the favor. I think she's looking heaven in the face, and wondering if it's real at all. We say we want to be surprised, but the thing about death is that it's always a surprise. She's closer than most; a dying leader, if you will. Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think so. She breathes louder than Tony Soprano and that's not something that just happens.) Obal kisses her ring and, at Mother's request, leaves the holoband behind. He's been given permission to kill Sister Willow, but Mother's not quite done deliberating.
Serge welcomes Joseph and Samuel Adams at the door; Sam's quite taken with him. Daniel scrabbles at his memories, trying to remember how these meetings work, but his words come out too fast, jumbled up, nervous and hung over and crossing a line he never wanted to cross again. The Mob will "reach out" to Graystone Ind.'s board of directors, get Daniel his title and access so he can start working again on magic Matrix ghosts. In return, he essentially becomes their bitch, no expiration date. "A resource, not a partner. You'll suck my company dry of all its capital and toss the rest." Sam giggles that usually they just sell off the parts, and Joe wonders why Daniel's even going for this. He's so smart, and all. "I'm gambling that I can convince your Guatrau that my company will be more valuable to him operating business as usual. With my hand at the tiller." Joe admits this is both ballsy and, tacitly and reluctantly, that it might even work out. Daniel bitches at Sam for going through Amanda's stuff, and asks the "errand boys" to bounce. Daniel needs to review his networking skills, I think.
Joe pulls out a bomb trigger and starts talking about Daniel's mom, who lives in Phoebus, on 14 Arno Court -- Daniel gets very itchy at this point and Sam holds him down in his chair -- as Joe explains that Mama Graystone is about to get in her car, to visit her friend Irene. Except instead of that, Daniel is going to blow that car up with his mom inside. Daniel wigs and says it's a bluff, but Joe plays it cool. "We're not screwing around, Daniel. We sign our deals in blood. It's a show of faith to the Guatrau." Daniel thinks about it, but of course can't do it, and Joe presses his advantage a little bit, laughing and saying the whole thing was a lark.
"In a partnership, it's important to understand what lines your partner won't cross. The point was to make you think." Daniel spits on that, because it's pretty stupid, and Joe's like, "You've shown me your limitations. This isn't a life for you. Walk away, and hope that nobody ever asks you to kill someone you love. Think about it. Take the afternoon." But I mean, what was the point of that really? Just to fuck with him. It's not like Joe is capable of acting normal, especially with Daniel, and even his intimidation tactics got a little personal there at the end. And even though Sam and Joe both approved of his decision, secretly, all this advice is still just a challenge: We're going to fuck you up; I'm just asking you to really think about what that means before we do it. Rub this lamp!
Lacy is firing a gun in this greenhouse, for some reason. It's hilarious and awkward, the way it's staged, because the rest of her cell is gathered in a circle about to do a ritual, so she's just doing some target practice in the middle of it, for no real reason except it's a cool way to come back from commercial. Anyway, they're like, "Hey Lace? Put down the gun and come do religious stuff, okay?" She does. Barnabus does this whole weird ritual where they pour blood into a cup and then pour the cup 'o blood into a wooden cutting board with the infinity logo in it. The prayer is per usual -- "Bless this circle and the ritual we are about to perform, we are your soldiers and we'll gladly give our lives to serve you, let me be your vessel O God, fill me with divine light, I am your hammer and your sword," etc. -- but at some point Barnabus is like, "Lacy! Am I boring you?"
Frankly, Lacy thinks, yes. But this is like totally a majorly sacred made-up fake cult ritual that Barnabus invented on the bus over here, so pull it together. Keon (hi!) tries to speak up on her behalf, but Lacy tells him to STFU and grabs the knife. Something about this causes Barnabus to "feel God stirring within," which means in this case his penis stirring within his pants, but the kids don't know that: "I feel God stirring within," they murmur, and then he grabs one of them, Hippolyta, and goes off to feel God some more. I still don't understand what she is doing here. They did the whole Blood In Blood Out thing when she blew up Clarice, but that was when she still thought she could get the Zoebot to Gemenon, right? I guess maybe now she's just in too deep, and maybe just warped enough by the experience that she wouldn't go home if she could. That sounds valid.
Clarice is in the makeshift tent quarters that they let the STO use, since the Church doesn't like having terrorists in the House proper, talking to a hottie STO named Diego. He tells her to stop bitching about the cold and think about how she's probably safer down there anyhow. "You've got the polytheistic rebels on the east, the Hephaistons are on the other side. One big stalemate." That's interesting, all of that sentence. If Gemenon didn't look so daft it would probably be even moreso. Anyway, Diego lets Clarice know that Obal Ferras's "ceremonial panties" are in a bunch over the Matrix PowerPoint with the little dead girls, and even that he's asked permission to rub her out.
What Diego doesn't know -- what Diego doesn't know could fill a book, but -- in this case, what Diego doesn't know is whether Mother gave Obal permission to kill her. "I'm just a poor dumb terrorist," he points out. But Clarice remembers a simpler and more brutal time, ten years ago, when the STO was the only thing keeping the Church alive. That carved out a place for her in the Worlds, a drop of blood at a time. "We were treated like saviors. Now, of course, it's different. The Church has got a little bit too safe and cozy with its polytheist neighbors, if you ask me. I think it's disgusting." Diego tries to explain that the Church still makes the rules, and she asks him to imagine a world where that wasn't the case. Something about the holy fire in her eyes -- "Wouldn't it be wonderful, Diego? To bring light to the Worlds once and for all?" -- speaks to him, and he realizes that she truly has been touched by God. (Polly Walker is a very good actress; there's no reason this scene should work, but it totally does.) She blesses him with a kiss upon the forehead, and then they make love.
Tomas Vergis, you old so-and-so. Adorable and sinister as ever, with the vest and the whole thing. Cyrus explains to an annoyed Vergis that the Zoebot is no longer special in that special way it used to be when it was a girl. Vergis coins both future Cylon terms "toaster" and "boxing" in a pretty smug, wink-wink way, and tells Cyrus to melt her down entirely. When Cyrus balks, Vergis gets pissy, so Cyrus makes sure he seems totally loyal to the new regime: "This was Daniel's obsession, not mine. I'm glad to be rid of it, Dr. Vergis." I thought, I'm going to miss watching her change back and forth, and then I thought, probably not for very long. Some things are too awesome to get rid of just because you need ratings.
Clarice -- and here we were worried she might not be able to get ahold of hash on Gemenon -- sucks down a whole hookah and remembers the day Zoe came running to tell her about the Matrix and she thought of Apotheosis and everything started to get real weird. (Hi Zoe!) Obal shows up and she's like, "Oh fuck. Maintain, Clarice. Maintain." He's going to take her to Mother, he says, which is code for murdering her, which just shows he has no idea how much power Clarice actually has over people.
A thing that is really cool but seems to have confused some people happens now. Cyrus comes running from Graystone Ind. to tell Daniel about the boxing and melting of the toaster, which interrupts a voicemail that Daniel is leaving on his dead wife's phone. It's very sad to see this happen, especially with sad Amanda music playing, but the really cool part is that we only hear part of the message -- "Hi, sweetheart. I miss you. I just... I really... I miss you" -- and it's edited to seem like he's done talking at that point.
(But he's not, which retroactively rewrites every scene with Daniel throughout the entire episode, and we don't even know that yet, but this is where the timeline loops back to for this idea. When I shouted about seeing Ryan Mottesheard's name in the credits, this is the kind of thing I was expecting, but after all there's so much to get done in this episode -- since basically it rewrites the show's entire mandate back to the pilot and simplifies everything that happened in 1.0 down to essentially nothing -- I'm happy with what we got.)
Clarice shows herself as a total hypocrite, walking with Obal in the cold: "I swear, if this wasn't the Holy Land I'd suggest moving the whole religion to a tropical beach!" Instead of pointing out that's exactly what she's trying to do, Obal just pretends they're having a secret pre-game meeting. "This idea that you brought to us today, I'm not sure if you realize just how big it is." Clarice snorts at him, and says one of the nicest things she's ever said: "The hand of God brought me a girl with the ability to turn code into a soul. When I think about it, I'm overcome with awe." Obal confirms that she can somehow get the resurrection program back from oblivion, and she waxes yet more poetic: "This is the moment. We can be a faith that builds temples here in the dirt, or we can build them in the sky."
So does Clarice really want to serve God? Or does she want to be God? She stares at him, totally offended, but honestly: Right question, wrong words. There was never a martyr that didn't have a messiah complex. Activists are terrible people, by and large, because they let their one thing consume them -- atheism, the cause, the religion, whatever it is -- and they use that one thing in place of a personality. The thing that sets people apart from angels is singularity of purpose, of task; no gaps, no contradictions, no anything but the cause, the task. People have free will, but angels can fly. Angels do, people are.
But without activists, and martyrs, and messiahs -- without terrorists, without angels -- nothing would ever change. You're basically agreeing to burn up yourself, and all you own, and all you are, all the possibilities of your own future, for the sake of everybody else's. For the world, and its children. It's disgusting and crazy, but it's also very beautiful -- transcendent self-importance taking the shape of self-annihilation; a way of making yourself God, which is what "apotheosis" actually means -- and it's a way of being that is not accessible for sane people.
Cyrus explains to Daniel about the melting down plan, and admits he's still waiting for Zoe to wake up, "like a coma patient in a TV movie." Daniel gets in the grip of a tizz about how Vergis is fucking everything up, and Cyrus is like, "Weeelllllll, I mean, he's making the robots. Not because of anything he did, but because of how Zoe blew herself up in that truck and suddenly they could make copies of her chip even though it wouldn't boot up." Or something, I got a little lost there. (Also, hilarious: Daniel getting trapped for a second in the curtains when they head back inside.) But apparently the MCP can now be copied, just not as awesomely as the original was. "They don't score in the sentient range," he says, breaking Daniel's heart a little more. "But they shoot and fight. That's enough for the military."
Daniel takes umbrage with every word of that last couple lines, because suddenly he's better than this whole business plan he himself invented: "We were going to create life, and now you've settled for 'shooting' and 'fighting' and soldierbots? Under Tomas Vergis? Please." Used to the whining and ranting, Cyrus just quietly points out that he hasn't "settled" for shit, and in fact is right here committing some kind of industrial espionage by warning Daniel about melting down his daughter for scrap, and how the defense contracts are going. Daniel apologizes, shuts down almost completely, heads back to the booze, and Cyrus feels sorry for his crazy ass. "You never really let me in, Daniel," he says, waiting for the conversation to go there, so they can really superteam up, but Daniel's already in a superteam that Cyrus doesn't need to know about yet. "You should go. But Cyrus? Just keep your head down, okay?" Which is all Cyrus needs to hear, because those words usually mean a coup is coming.
Obal gets Clarice into position for her total murder, and when the Church people show up she goes, "Show forgiveness!" He feels sorry for her, because he thinks she's begging. She's not begging, she's warning him. Hopefully. Either way it doesn't stop the murder from progressing. Luckily, her stabber is Diego, so there's just a long tense moment in some stupid video game where Diego decides who to kill, and Obal's like, "Aw shit" and then stabs him a few times -- crying about how Obal's lost his way -- and the Conclave just gathers around and stabs him like a million times, having apparently been flipped by her PowerPoint?
So wait, really this whole thing with Obal speaking for the Conclave and Mother was a total lie, and the whole time they were onboard? Which means his plan to murder her and her fear of getting murdered were both just wrong? Or did the Pope flip after seeing the presentation, and tell the Conclave that Obal had gone rogue and was going to kill their new crazypants messiah? Because at first I thought it was youngsters turning on him and Mother just watching this go down, but under their dipshitty clothes I think some of them were the same twelve folks. Who cares, I'm cool with whatever.
So Clarice comes to visit Mother and she's like, "Oh, how nice to see you! I totally wasn't just watching you almost get stabbed, honest. Let's stare at each other for a bit." Clarice kisses the hem of her garment and admits she just nearly got stabbed. "I sure hope you didn't get hurt in that murder I ordered!" Clarice is like, "No, I'm good." Mother wheezes over to a fake balcony looking over a fake sanctuary, and Clarice is like, "So. Your thoughts on Apotheosis?" Um, how about God's in charge? That's like the whole point? "You like to be surprised," Clarice counters, because Obal got his ass surprised and didn't seem to like it as much as he thought.
What does Clarice actually want? "What is it you require to complete your little science project?" She's instantly like, "Complete authority over all the STO cells on Caprica." Mother agrees so fast that Sister Willow actually kind of waves in the breeze for a sec, like the vacuum guys with the long legs that dance it all around outside a tire place. "What else?" No idea. I'll make a list, Clarice says, and kisses her ring, and takes off to be like Whaa? Back in the fake Pope room, the Pope's like, "Well. So I'm definitely not going to heaven at this point, and I'mma die pretty soon either way. Yep. Any way you look at it, I was an asshole today."
Daniel and Guatrau Brando shake on it, and somewhere Tomas Vergis shudders, and down in the labs Cyrus tells the science guys not to melt her down after all. Daniel sits in his car outside the house and smokes more cigarettes and generally feels more in control and less in control at the same time. But what about actual Zoe? Where's she?
We'll see her in a second, but first let's talk about the image that closes out the episode: Amanda, sitting on a bed in a cozy cabin on an unnamed planet, listening to the rest of Daniel's message: "I just... I wish... I wish that we could talk about this. Can we talk about this? Will you call me? Please? I love you." She stares at the screen and finally hits him back. "Hey, it's me. I just can't... I can't talk right now. I just... I need some time." She hangs up as Clarice comes in from the Gemenon cold, and lies down on the bed. Home at last.
So where Zoe is, is walking around New Cap City in a big stupid cloak, while her robot body gets put in a box which apparently requires six different people to nail the top of down. How come NCC looks so great, and Gemenon looks so stupid? It's a mystery. Some droogs are like, "You a deadwalker? We've got Tamara flowers on our heads, so you're our enemy or something. And since you can't get killed, why don't we have a big fight. That way, you can kill us with kung fu powers and a giant katana and your Kardashian ass in some leather pants, for no real reason whatsoever." Oh, but it's gotta be stylized, so let's do some fast/slow Snyder stuff while playing a minuet on the piano. She Neos the last survivor still, holds the sword to his neck, and finally lets him go so she can find Tamara and start some shit.
The reason everybody loves dumb shows like Dexter and Breaking Bad and The Wire is because they're lovable, but the reason people get off on watching shows like that is because the show can't stop telling you how brilliant it is. Meanwhile, actual brilliant shows like Gossip Girl and Caprica S1.0 and The Big C don't bother telling you how brilliant they are, so it's really up to you to rise to the occasion.
There's another reason, just on the tip of my tongue, that shows about teenage girls tend to have their brilliance overlooked, while shows about men -- men just like you and me! -- are so often called brilliant when they really aren't. They're lovable and relatable and sell back the experience of upper-middle class white men to the middle-class white men most likely to enjoy them, they challenge just enough not to actually be challenging. Which is how you make money. How you don't make money is by filling up your cast with cerebral, complex women and children, while giving the patriarchs of the families the more emotional and static storylines.
I'm not bitter about any of that, really, because the market is the market. What's interesting to me here has been watching this show turn from one extreme example to -- in just a few episodes -- very much the other, culminating in that jizz-stain of a fanboy handjob. "Cloaks! Ninja swords! Why, I was just pretending my life was actually like that, last Saturday night with all my fellow dateless roleplayer friends! Adult problems, adult marriages, uncomfortable questions of religious faith and ontological possibility past the singularity: Boooooring. This is what a science fiction show should look like! I know, because it looks like every other science fiction show! I'm so glad they finally fixed it."
And the really funny thing about that is that now it's a completely different show, now that they've dumbed it down and sped it up as much as possible -- pushed the way too many female characters to the back as much as possible -- not only is it way more likely to be accused of brilliance, but it stands a hella better shot of getting renewed. They drink the sand, but also, we're conditioned to see continuities where none exist. For some of us, this is the same show because it has the same title and actors. For others of us, it's a haunted house abandoned by the original owners. For most of us, probably somewhere in the middle. And I don't feel too terribly gloom-and-doom about it, despite this bitching today, because if anything is positioned to be in both places at once -- to be brilliant and accessible SF at the same time -- this show's got the pedigree. It's just sad to leave things behind.
It's an old story but a good one: Something beautiful, and soft, and new, became harder and meaner and more brutal, just to survive. That's the story of Caprica, but it's also the story of Caprica. It starts here.
Watch the episode below, discuss it in our forums, then see the season's most memorable moments so far!
Watch TWoP's editors discuss Caprica and other shows that deserve more viewers in this segment airing on the New York Nonstop cable news channel:
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