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Wow, that was awesome. Maybe I like this show in inverse relation to internet katana shenanigans. Or maybe in direct relation to amount of Amanda Graystone. Either way, a killa thrilla was this: Lacy fucks things up real good on a Barnabus mission, which causes James Marsters to act better than he's done since the post-Initiative years.
Remember how Keon was always talking about Pan and Hippolyta? Well, they're dead now. Clarice murdered them in totally sick ways because of their disloyalty to her kooky terrorism. And then Keon turns around and gets his head blown clear off by Barnabus for rudely pointing out how crazy nuts all of the grownups on this show clearly are.
So: If you're keeping score, that was all the cute boys left on Caprica. And that was all their brains everywhere.
Who's left? Lacy, who gets kidnapped by Clarice with full bag-over-head action. And that's it, we now have full STO control thanks to Clarice going all nun-with-a-gun Judge Dredd up in everybody's face... Unless I guess Barney managed a last-minute cheat out of the bomb Clarice shoved up his fundamentalism.
During the same exact 24 rainy hours, Amanda was taking meetings, and showers, and jaunts down memory lane about her suicide attempt and how Clarice went all Terms Of Endearment in the hospital and how she told Daniel to go be somebody else's creepy husband. Then she met with GDD Agent Jordan Duram, who connected the dots for her once again about how Clarice is clearly a terrorist and that she should grab a gun from home and take it to the cabin for to shoot her... Or flip, and work both sides as a CI until she can find out for sure. Guess which one allows her to hang out in the terror cabin with her best bud-slash-makeout partner, and continue to drink the planet's supply of wine.
All of this, of course, presented in Amanda's glorious patented Fragment-O-Vision, where the camera shakes around a whole lot to simulate what it's like to be that crazy and meanwhile flashbacking to shit that happened literally at the beginning of this sentence, so that you know empirically what it's like.
What's going on with Zoë and the other Deadwalker? Who cares/Not me. So who's left? Ah, the Dads. Who, along with Sammy, are blackmailing and beating up all the different boardmembers of Graystone Ind. so that they will be Daniel's friend again. Mob tactics. None of the victims are all that interesting except one scary-face lady, and this one guy who is addicted not only to beating up hookers but also smoking something that looks like fudge, or one of those 25-cent brownies from a gas station. Instead of smoking all of the drugs to kill himself like a true OG, Superfudge just leaves a stupid note for his wife and shoots himself in the head. Weeeeeak.
All in all a pretty good bodycount, but only a couple people that really mattered. Daniel and Joe being wiseguys will never be not funny. Amanda, conflicted is what she does so it's nice to watch her acting, but I think first prize this week goes to watching Clarice turn into fucking Omar over 24 hours. After that, apotheosis really is the only option.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!11:30 PM: The last interplanetary flights of the night are taking off from Caprica City Trojan Interplanetary Spaceport when Lacy gets there with her friends and some bombs. The one that it seemed like Barnabus was molesting, that's oft-mentioned Hippolyta, and the one that looks like Pan -- sort of a lower-quote Eric Balfour -- is the one they call Pan. How long does it take Lacy to fuck this terrorist op beyond all recognition? Hold your breath.
So Lacy's stressing because there are still cleaning people there, security guards and stuff, and she doesn't want to blow them up. She is the worst terrorist of all time. Blowing up people is like your entire job, little girl! Pan and Hippolyta run off to set their bombs up in places, but Lacy sort of just loiters around and sits in the middle of the place where anybody could see and starts playing with her bomb. Of course, a guard immediately comes up and is like, "Could you act all twitchy and tell me a poorly rehearsed lie about your Temple group flying to Picon?" Lacy obliges.
Lace tries to run away when the cop asks to see her backpack, which is obviously carrying a bomb just based on her googly-eyes, but then suddenly the guard is very, very dead due to Pan shooting him in the entirety with a gun. They grab her lame ass and run out to the car, where Keon is looking stressed and confused. Shortly after, they explain to him about Lacy's ongoing suckiness and how bad that terrorist operation just went, and then to hide the evidence they think about detonating the bombs anyway.
Of course, Lacy takes her sweet time mentioning that bomb number three is still in her backpack, which is in her lap, which is in the car with them. When she does, they get sort of antsy. Pan, icking, screams at her about how stupid she is, at length, while Hippolyta just tosses the backpack out the window at random and says, for some reason, "I'm not going to jail for you people." I'm not sure about the sentiment, or the reason she is expressing it at this time or in this particular terrorist arm of a dangerous cult, but there you go. I don't like the look of her, never did. She reminds me of that weird goth girl that was involved in Tamara's whole thing with the Bloody Mama casino owner in Imaginaryland.
12:02 AM: Having had enough of Pan's ongoing freakout and meanness -- which, to be fair, he's amped on terrorism and then also the adrenaline of almost getting blown up -- Lacy finally tells Keon to pull the car over so she can be sullen in the rain and they can go frak themselves. At this point, none of them shoot her, even though obviously that's what they should do. This terrorist apocalypse is so doomed! What they need is some well-adjusted, good-under-pressure, child soldiers from good homes in this cult.
Meanwhile: Sam and Joe drag some poor asshole into Daniel's house so he can be all sexy with this new beard and meanness. This is Cornell, one of the disloyal Graystone Ind. people that needs to be brought back over to Daniel's side so that he can invent ghosts. It seems the leverage we have on him is that A) He smokes fudge with nuts in it (?) and B) He likes to beat up little girls, whom Daniel had to then pay off. Also, he has a loving haggard wife and some kids, and he has turned his life around and is no longer hitting the Superfudge. Daniel applies lots of kinds of pressure and pisses off Cornell lots of ways, and the end result is that Cornell is not interested in being blackmailed -- even if, as Daniel says, it just means doing the "right thing" -- or listening to reason, so Daniel lets him go. He is not very grateful, if you ask me.
1:18 AM: In the cabin -- which is maybe not so far from the Pantheon Bridge? -- Amanda just feels like taking a shower, because it's a thunderstorm and it's 1:18 and what else are you going to do? She thinks about that time she jumped off a bridge and killed herself, and then she thinks about how she was in the hospital and when she woke up, Clarice was throwing a whole Terms Of Endearment tizz about her care. Amanda was like, "Girl, get in here and talk to me," because Sister Willow was always showing up places.
Clarice lied about how she saw Amanda's suicide on TV -- rather than being underneath it on the bridge in a car that blew up around the same time -- and told her Daniel was on his way, but Amanda -- still raw from how he killed those dudes -- said she didn't want to see him. Clarice pretended to be bummed, I bet, but really she was thinking about how having fifteen wives and thirty hot husbands was kind of weighing on her ever since she became a living saint, and maybe all she needed was a cabin in the woods with one very special very crazy woman on crutches and that would be all she needed.
Sam looks out the window of Daniel's house at the big storm and goes, "Big storm." Apparently it rains a lot on Tauron, too, because everything that could possibly be wrong with a place is wrong with Tauron. The blackmailable person is Lillian Teller, a scary-face lady who is into getting tied up by little boys, like a Kidz Bop! version of Justify My Love. She has been flipped, thanks to pictures of her getting tied up and being scary looking, but it sort of bums Daniel out because I guess he likes her.
is this drunk driver guy, and Sam's genius plan there is, if he doesn't mind them telling everybody about his old convictions, maybe they will set up a fake police stop and do something to him there. Daniel is impressed/horrified, and then really sad about the guy on the list. Joe kind of calls him a wuss and Daniel gets very self-righteous considering his part in all this. "You know, excuse me if I'm having a hard time finding the joy in this enterprise, but I know these people. They're a part of my life. I've been to their weddings, their kids' birthday parties. We vacation together!"
Yeah, so how weird that you called the Mob to line them all up and destroy them. I can see how that would make you feel oogy inside, Danny. It is pointed out by the Adams/Adamas that all of these people totally sold him out -- they're all on the board -- when Vergis showed up and (the dastard) promised to save them and their company from the lunatic mad scientist that was dragging their stocks and careers through the mud while he and his wife had separate but equally spectacular public breakdowns after their terrorist daughter blew up herself and a bunch of other people.
The guy, they can't come up with anything yet, but Daniel's got something to prove: He's in love with his wife's sister and his nephew is probably his son. Daniel drains his drink and pours some more and at some point his macabre attempt to display enjoyment turns into actual enjoyment, because I don't know if you know this but Daniel Graystone is kind of a creep.
After her shower, Amanda went to bed and now she's dreaming about Zoë refusing to eat her lunch, over in the awesome Graystone house. You can tell it's a dream because it's the middle of the night, not because Zoë is being disgusting in a way that is out of character at all. "How can I eat this when it tastes like vomit?" asks the little terror, and Amanda asks the obvious question, which is why is Zoë so horrible all the time. Well, the answer is twofold, Amanda. Number one, you are a terrible parent and have raised a monster of a child. Number two, she is in a cult that apparently only contains total jerks.
"Maybe it's because I hate you. But don't worry. I'll be dead soon, and then we'll both be happy!" At the end, her eyes flash red, just because that's your basic scary. Not because of Cylons, because Amanda is not psychic. If she were, that whole thing with her brother would have been even stupider. Not to mention the fact that her weird Crucible outfit in this dream -- Peter Pan sleeves, weird bib -- would never have happened.
Waking up after her nightmare -- and staring strangely into the camera when she does so -- Amanda goes crutching into the kitchen for some water, and overhears Clarice having a weird conversation on the holoband. Which is usually a toy, although we've seen more and more adults wearing them in the past few months. Can't make out a lot of what she's saying, but all Amanda needs to hear is Clarice saying the name "Zoë."
"... Yes, that's what I'm trying to tell you. The secret to Apotheosis lies in Zoë's code. It's imperative..." at some point, we go into her confessional, where the mysterious confessor is telling her all the news that's fit to cult. (Mysterious People #1: Confessor. I'm making a list, you can play along.) Clarice can't believe that Pan and Hippolyta have joined up with Barnabus because that's totally rude, considering everybody knows that Clarice and Barnabus are in a dick-measuring contest for just the two of them about who is going to run the STO.
"They're my kids. They wouldn't betray me, they just wouldn't. Who's told you this?" (Mysterious People #2: Highly placed GDD official, who is apparently involved with this #1, whom I guess slightly prefers Apotheism to Barnabism and operates independently of but is linked with the Conclave.) The #1 person is like, "So, the Barnabites are going to just keep trying to kill you, and now four of your students are involved -- including the main one, who is not only somebody you personally indoctrinated but is also key to Apotheosis itself -- and you're shacked up in the rain not doing anything about it? Maybe I backed the wrong crazy."
Clarice whips off her holoband and has a panic attack in bed -- "Am I the wrong crazy? Should I get crazier?" -- in the murderer cabin in the middle of nowhere, where she sleeps with all the lights on, while Amanda roams around the house dragging her leg along the floorboards and taking showers and they take turns staring at the other one when she's sleeping. It's like they're having a Creepiness Bee, competitive, that last throughout this episode and into the at least. Whoever wins that one, I can't wait to see.
Superfudge flashes back to like one page ago when Daniel threatened him about the fudge and his family and all that mess, writes a letter to his wife Helen (helpfully labeled HELEN, because this episode is all about accounting for how unbelievably stupid you are) and drops his wedding ring inside, and then blows a hole in his head. Dang, guy we've never met and thus don't care about at all! You must really not like getting blackmailed!
TV time: The rain will continue at least for two more days, which is twice as long as the episode... Also, today is Tuesday, not that there's a Tuesday in the pretentious sci-fi Colonial calendar (nor the other days of the week, all of which show up on screen at this point)... Home shopping can net you a "Traditional Picon Engagement Necklace" for just 100 cubits... That guy Superfudge shot himself... There's a cheap-ass (I'm talking actual cardboard) version of Caprican Price Is Right... There were terrorists at the Spaceport, but the GDD hasn't nailed it on the STO yet... Remember when TV time on this show was actually clever? Like, it did more than one thing? Yeah, those were good days. Now it's just like, "Price Is Right in space? That is hilarious! Because we have that show on Earth! Only we win dollars, not cubits, because that's what we buy things with. On Earth."
Pan turns off the television -- perched delicately and ever so subtly at the edge of the bathtub -- and reclines, because after a hard day of terrorism what most teenage boys like to do is really pamper themselves. So retarded. "Clarice is going to kill the kids, where will they be? I dunno. In the street, and she can shoot them in the head. Or wait, one of them in the street and the other one can be in a bathtub and she can throw the TV in the bathtub. That's fresh and innovative storytelling, right?"
Clarice sits down with her gun and tells Pan that he was her very first recruit -- I guess to the OTG, since she always used to play dumb about the STO and because the whole point of Pan and Keon's group of Barnabites was that Clarice didn't even know about it -- but now suddenly it's a civil war and he chose the wrong side. He begs and pleads and she shows him mercy and then dumps the TV in the bathtub, obviously, because she forgives easy but God is sort of a jerk.
I don't know what Clarice does after that, but at 6:08 AM on Tuesday, Hippolyta is walking home with her groceries -- What young cultmember doesn't enjoy doing their shopping at 6AM? -- when Clarice shows up and acts creepy and kills her in some way. She also now has a huge black sidekick, does Clarice, which we never acknowledge, but damn does she look amazing chasing Hippolyta slowly down the alley with her black umbrella.
Lacy calls Barnabus so she can come see him in this awesome blown out office building and, you know, apologize for being such a bad terrorist. What she doesn't know is that Pan and Hippolyta have disappeared, or that James Marsters' virtuoso acting in this episode surely implies his upcoming total death. He's being so amazing you'd think she would just relax. They chat about how bad last night went, what with the mistakes and the running around and almost blowing herself up. Lacy's like, "Yeah, how embarrassing. But you said there wouldn't be people there, and there were, and so after that I mean, I just started fucking things up left and right!"
They crosstalk and yell at each other but what both of them are saying is interesting and hard to piece together, so here it is. Barnabus is like, "Remember how you totally wussed out about blowing up Clarice? Not that I have to explain why I'm always blowing up Clarice. The point is that I tell you to do things, and you do them, or else the whole system falls apart. What is a batshit terrorist doomsday cult without a set social hierarchy, am I right? Anything less would be totally uncivilized. You must murder your thousands of innocents with decorum."
Meanwhile Lacy is making a much better case for herself, along with some pretty strong observations along the way: "Number one, you lied about the target. Number two, you tried to kill Clarice for no reason, and it was a reckless act. You have personal beef, which has no place in our terrorist doomsday cult. You are making us take crazy risks in order to satisfy this blood feud, and it has nothing to do with our mission. Like, blowing up Radio Shack and places with holobands: That makes sense to me. People need to look at the way they're living their lives. And their gadget purchases."
At some point, though, the rising thunder in that little room gets to be too much for both of them and Barnabus grabs Lacy and starts strangling her and yelling crazy paranoid shit about Clarice and how she's a double agent or a mole or something and that she's working against him and all that usual mess. Lacy, once again keeping her cool pretty well, tells him not to be an idiot, think about the fact that she's done everything he ever told her to do, that she's offended by any and all accusations of disloyalty, etc. He asks her like sixteen times to promise him her loyalty, at just the most inopportune time for such a request, and she rewords it very awesomely: "I am committed to God."
Barney's going to end up making Lacy the best terrorist of all, just by showing her what not to do. He's like Goofus, and she'll be Gallant. (Which makes Clarice? The sexy Gray Spy one in their dorky made up world of Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy.) "Goofus always questions his child-soldiers' loyalty. Gallant knows they're doing the best they can with the information given." "Goofus sleeps with underage teens and sometimes strangles them on a bad day. Gallant knows that a terrorist cell commander's life is fraught with challenges and tiny upsets, and that a little Xanax goes a long way."
9:15 AM: Daniel's being driven somewhere -- not sure where, but it's near the "Harbour" because sometimes on this show things are spelled Canadian -- when Cornell's wife HELEN shows up and starts beating on his window, like they always do on this show. Presumably this crazy behavior makes him miss his wife even more -- and, subtly, Helen screams a same thing that Amanda said to him this one time -- so he has a bunch of flashbacks to stuff from before, the beginning of the show, conversations from five minutes ago, the entire finale, and finally what it was like when he went to see his wife in the hospital after she got so busy smoking cigarettes -- only sometimes lit, which is either a mistake or just how crazy she is -- to really notice that she didn't care if he came or not.
Right out the gate Amanda's like, "Okay, just to clarify: You did have those dudes killed so you could get that computer chip. Yes?" Yes. But: "That's not fair!" Hmm? Not fair, because how was he supposed to know that when you hire hired killers they kill the people you hired them to kill. "It's like our shitty daughter. You knew you were a terrible mother and that she was a crazed supergenius..." Daniel realizes he's about to fuck up worse than the time he forgot their anniversary and she jumped off a bridge, but she tells him to bring the analogy home.
"How is you hiring thugs to rob and murder people... Equivalent to me being a bad mother?" He tries to remember his point but he can't, because when you say it like that it sounds awful. But then Amanda, somehow, ends up giving him the upper hand anyway: "You think it's my fault that Zoë hated me. The idea that I could control her behavior is just... Stupid!" Yeah, Amanda, it's so weird how parenting works.
I mean, I guess her point is that a crazed supergenius will do whatever he or she feels like doing -- you married it, after all -- but then somehow out of nowhere she swings it back around to how he is a terrible man and she doesn't even recognize him. The crazed supergenius she married would never do things like hire murder thugs or join the Mafia. ("Well, honey, funny you should mention that...")
No, the crazed supergenius Amanda married was the kind of man who wouldn't bat an eye when she went on TV screaming about how her daughter was a terrorist, or when she went on TV and pledged a billion dollars of his company's money to some made-up cause, or when she went on TV and quit her job to start day-drinking and snorting horse with the headmistress. He would just hold her hand and then when they got home he'd cut vegetables for six hours while listening to opera.
10:26 AM. So sometime in the last hour, they figured out that the two dead kids are of the STO cell that tried to blow up the spaceport. Now Jordan and his (Mysterious Person #3) partner are investigating and talking about the smell of dead Monads, which Jordan enjoys because he is now one-dimensional. They figure out that Pan and Hippolyta both went to the same school as Zoë Graystone and Ben Stark, and so Jordan decides to go bother Clarice. Today is not the day, bro.
Staking her out -- because her deal today is walking around all creepy with her umbrella, just all over the place -- he yells at his wife about their troubled marriage and then their son about his attitude in school and how he's going to be grounded or whatever, and then he spots Sister Willow and runs after her in the rain. She doesn't really want to help him out with her umbrella of death. She also doesn't really want to joke around about students being dead, or if they were monotheists or if they were terrorists, or whether or not she sounds surprised enough that they are/were all three of those things. Jordan spitballs that maybe she is a part-time Monad, a little curious maybe, and she's like, "I am the headmistress of the Athena Academy! Athena!" Jordan still thinks maybe it happens that sometimes nuns get a little crisis-of-faithy and that it's okay if she did. What's she supposed to say? Yeah, and then I joined a terrorist cul-- Oh, you got me. Anyway, she tells him to frak off and resumes strolling around Caprica City looking scary as hell.
Cyrus delivers Zoë's old robot body to Daniel's lab and they talk about how crazy Amanda is today. The answer is, relatively. Daniel's like, "She's fine. She'll be fine. She'll be physically fine. One of these days." He blames all of her hating him and escaping to the murder cabin on how she's grieving and blames herself for Zoë dying and stuff. Which isn't untrue, but sort of leaves out the giant Ha'la'tha in the room which is the actual reason she offed herself. Well, that and her stupid brother. Anyway, Cyrus and Daniel are back in love and all is right with the world. Daniel stares down at the robot and thinks about Zoë and it goes on for just long enough that the threat of Matrix shenanigans looms, but no: False alarm.
2:15 PM. This guy, I don't remember if it's the GDD boss of Jordan Duram from before or some other GDD boss, but whoever he is, he talks like Porky Pig. Or the dude that was always hunting wabbits. [Elmer Fudd. -- Angel] The wascals in this case being Clarice Willow's lawyers, who need Jordan to stop hawassing this nun everywhere she goes in public. Jordan's like, "I know, right? But she's connected to all these terrorists and terrorist attacks and dead kids, like all of them, every single time." Bossman (Mysterious Person #4) goes, "Yeah, clearly the school is wife with STO and she's protecting them, but that doesn't mean she's 'involved' involved." Either this guy is crooked or just got Peter Principled into this job, because: What?
"Sir? That is pretty much the definition of involved!" Elmer says that no, she is maybe just misguided. Like, maybe she just thinks it's one of those harmless terrorist doomsday cults that use children for their suicide bombers. You know, like the Jonas Brothers. Jordan is like, "That nun is dirty! She is living one more secret lives!" We learn that Jordan's partner -- What is her name? Youngblood? Gen-13? Care-A-Lot? Gee, Your Hair Smells Suspicious? Something like that -- also thinks he is getting crazy and going after Clarice for no good reason.
"You're a polytheist. Quite devout, right?" Yeah, one of the few. I wish they'd painted the monotheist minority this way from the beginning, like an actual minority. It makes a lot more sense than them just being like three nerd kids and a spooky old lady (and besides, it fits better with the Kobol myths). Jordan assures him that his Gods have nothing to do with this religious persecution he's perpetrating, and Elmer's like, "You need to back off from your weirdly sudden and personal investment in this case, which is also not a case but like six different things that only you seem to understand are related." Jordan's like, "Okay, I promise not to taint this investigation by doing any more suspicious shit to Clarice Willow. P.S., I am lying."
Fast-forward immediately to Jordan stalking Amanda Graystone, who apparently got sick of taking showers and decided to go around on her crutches in the rain hoping that nobody would notice her. (Imagine if you will that Melinda Gates jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and survived, and it was all over the news, and then you see her walking around on crutches and having some coffee in the pouring rain.) He sits down and asks her please to not hold against him that time he invaded her home and ransacked the place. This is where things get totally retarded and everything cool about Jordan goes down the drain forever, because this show is kind of dumb now.
"Doctor, there are people around us. These Muslims, they want nothing more than to have us either convert or destroy us!" Amanda shakes her head at this awkward grammar, and then tries to sell an even more ass-empty response: "It's not the Muslims, it's the terrorists."
It's like the whole world is raining. Jordan suggests to Amanda that Clarice, her live-in lover and drinking buddy, is one or the other, since it was her students that blew up the train. Amanda's acutely aware, of course, what with her daughter being the most famous one. Apparently in the minutes between the crime scene and this little coffee date, the news that the Spaceport bombing was STO has also been on the news. Not sure why it's necessary to track this, the flow of this information, but Jordan's like, "You heard about that?" Yeah, I was just watching The Price Is Right and there it was.
The facts are as follows: Clarice Willow lived on Gemenon, as a child, at the same time that the STO was actively training recruits in order to protect the new Church. Last week was the Conclave meeting on Gemenon where that one monk got stabbed a hundred times while the Pope watched and breathed really loud, and this happened at the same time Clarice was off-world. Amanda confirms, because she's a nutcase and a bad friend, that Clarice was on Gemenon, but at a teaching conference. Which, Jordan tells her, did not exist. In fact, she took vacation time. And on the flex form she wrote, GOING TO CRAZY JESUS FREAK MEETING and then crossed it out and wrote OB-GYN.
"I believe that Clarice Willow pulled your daughter into that organization. She got her to trust her. She brainwashed her. And then she put her on that train with that bomb." Amanda attempts to get up, that doesn't go so well, so then she has to listen to him talking even though she doesn't want to hear his shit. Also because it's making a strange kind of sense, being that it makes total sense, and would in fact be self-evident to a bright five-year-old.
Finally he helps her up and before she can hobble away Jordan's like, "You are in a unique position, because you live with her in a weird cabin even though you live in a palace and she lives in a house with about a hundred people, so that means you have intimate access to an STO leader." He asks her to be a CI and she's like, "That means SPY! You want me to spy on my friend!" Nobody points out the end of that sentence, which is "...my friend! Who is on a killing spree that will probably last all day! I do not want to get on her bad side!"
Jordan explains their entire conversation to her one more time, and then points out that she's free to go tell Clarice about this little meeting: She won't, because if it's true then Clarice will murder her and go then smoke some hash. But if it isn't true, he says, Clarice can call Elmer Fudd, call the President, they can take away his badge, the whole thing! That's how sure he is! That Clarice is STO!
Amanda then has an irritating flashback the likes of which probably I have never seen in my entire life. It's like this: "You are in a unique position, because you live with her in a weird cabin even though you live in a palace and she lives in a house with about a hundred people, so that means you have intimate access to an STO leader." He asks her to be a CI and she's like, "That means SPY! You want me to spy on my friend!" Nobody points out the end of that sentence, which is "...my friend! Who is on a killing spree that will probably last all day! I do not want to get on her bad side!" Jordan explains their entire conversation to her one more time, and then points out that she's free to go tell Clarice about this little meeting: She won't, because if it's true then Clarice will murder her and go then smoke some hash. But if it isn't true, he says, Clarice can call Elmer Fudd, call the President, they can take away his badge, the whole thing! That's how sure he is! That Clarice is STO!
After the flashback to the entire series and several things that just happened, multiple times, Amanda realizes that it is totally possible that her drug addict, group-married, reefer-smoking friend -- who totally admitted to being a monotheist, not that Amanda noticed -- just might be a monotheist. Even though she's always been wicked cool to Amanda, who has no other friends. Poor damn Amanda, dude, she's never had a break in this entire show. It's always "Your daughter's a terrorist! Your husband's a murderer! Your best gal pal is a cult leader!" What about me? When do I get to be something? Other than totally shithouse crazy, I mean.
After a long day of killing children, sometimes a nun just needs a damn drink. Amanda tries to stay out of the way, pours the other half of the wine bottle into another giant wineglass and brings up last night when she was watching Clarice all night talking about Zoë on the holoband, but leaves out the Zoë part. Clarice does a fairly good job of turning her nervousness into embarrassment, all like she knows it's for kids but she enjoys playing in the Matrix when she can't sleep. "So who are you?" Amanda asks, pointedly. "In there?"
Clarice takes off her wet shoes and, again, does a good job of pretending she just doesn't want to talk about it. "Depends. Different characters. It depends on the mood I'm in, you know? Different roles." Something in the way she says it, it's sort of sexual. Like, "I dare you to ask." It does the trick. Amanda stares at her and her heart breaks a little bit, because if that's true why were you whispering my daughter's name? Her face goes hard and she thinks about how if one more person she moves in with lies about one more thing or kills one more person, she is going to lose her fucking mind. Then -- plink -- she loses her fucking mind.
Over to her old house, hoping he's not there, and then a big old gun from the hall closet so she can shoot Clarice in the head for killing her daughter. And then all the guilt and shame and pain will just wash away, like the rain, because Zoë will have been avenged. She'll stop coming to her, in her mother's dreams, and she can work on figuring out what life was supposed to be like.
This whole part is filmed in Extremely Weird-O-Vision, sort of like in bad horror movies when they're trying to show that somebody is possessed. All weird angles and jump-cuts and funny twists of light. None of which is necessary, because this is a great actress, okay? She's doing all of that with her acting. She is scarier than a person has ever been on this show, it's amazing. Amanda stares at the camera again, and shoves the magazine home.
7:18 PM. Lacy's suggestion, now that Keon's at the office building headquarters: Call the Blessed Mother and she'll get Clarice to stop killing us one by one. (Wrong.) Barney doesn't like that idea, because nobody knows where the office building is (Wrong), so communicating with the Conclave about Clarice's ongoing killing spree will expose them (Wrong by reason of it doesn't matter) and is thus a bad idea. (Correct, but only because the Pope apparently loves telling people to kill other people and then being like, "Just kidding!")
Lacy's suggestion, now that Barnabus is on a full wobbler: Reach out to Sister Willow, apologize for trying to kill her, suggest that maybe killing half of their entire cell of five people is recompense, and offer to join her one-woman army instead. Barney hates that idea, but not for any real reason: It's just that he's way more into his plan, which is quote, "To stuff the barrel of a gun down her lying mouth! I just want to blow her brains all over the wall! And wash my hands in the blood! I swear to God!"
Everybody's out of ideas, and in the little quiet Keon finally realizes that all these people are fucking crazy and it's embarrassing. Because surprise, cults and terrorists are not the stable dependable grownups you may have been led to believe. But also because: If the whole point of joining the OTG is because the adults can't be trusted, then why can't the STO adults be trusted? You want a cult within the cult, a cult that says, "Our grownups in this cult are corrupt and crazy and megalomaniacs" the same way the cult says about regular grownups. You want a revolution that doesn't eventually turn to the right, and nobody in human history has ever been brilliant enough to invent that.
So Keon's like, "I'm out." Barnabus points out that you can't really do that, now that there are three of them and a crazy nun is on their trail, but it seems kind of like Keon's making a very slow choice here having to do with being completely out of options. The world out there is sick, but the world in here is sick too. Stay, and you'll be killed in here. Leave, and you'll be killed out there. And Barnabus can't let him go, because once Clarice tracks him down, she'll just come kill them too, and then there won't be any Barnabites left. Needless to say, Keon turns the doorknob anyway -- "Lacy is right, you're insane" -- and gets a big hole in his head for the trouble.
Gee, I hope Lacy Rand doesn't sustain more trauma from seeing her boyfriend's head blown clean off. You know, after her two best friends ditching her -- first to date, and then join a cult, and then commit suicide -- and then having to deal with Zoë 2.0e's whole Mean Girl mess from beyond the grave, and then blowing up her old headmistress on TV, and now having that selfsame headmistress coming after her like Omar Little. I mean, at what point do you just kind of stop blinking and start killing everybody?
"Luckily" they don't even have time to process this latest thing because just as Lacy's screaming and Keon drops to his knees and bleeds out: Look, it's Clarice! It's exciting because the elevator goes ding and then there's Clarice, looking ten times tired of this bullshit. She handcuffs Barnabus to a giant bomb while her heavy holds onto Lacy, and she explains that Barnabus was super easy to find. And "Do you know what I love about our God? He's a kind God, and He's a loving God. And He's a just God."
Lacy assumes they are going to be killed, so she whimpers and pleads, but Barnabus is like, "Damn." Clarice apologizes that it went so far, but points out that the other STO people are going to need her to make a big fucking scene so they know not to cross her, and that's how she's going to get control of the whole STO. Barnabus begs using actual common sense -- "Apotheosis is a fraud," he notes -- but she's not hearing that shit today.
"History will absolve me," says Clarice, and just like usual she believes it so much you sort of believe it too, even though of course the truth is worse: History will not absolve her because there will be no history. There are barely fifty years left, of history. She's helping to end the world, not starting a new one.
Outside, Lacy's curious as to whether Clarice is going to kill her -- and the exploding six or seven floors of the office building over their heads, which just exploded in a bunch of screams and fire and dead Barney, support her hypothesis, but Clarice is just like, "Hope not."
10:26 PM: Amanda -- having spent the last seven hours after her meeting with Jordan going to her house, which is like visible from the cabin, and back -- comes crutching in, armed and ready to blow Clarice away. She asks Clarice -- who probably has Lacy stashed in the crawlspace or something -- why she's so sad. "Two of my students were killed. They were murdered." Amanda's like, "How horrible!" No idea who did it either; they were running with a bad crowd, Barnabus and all. "Yeah, I know what that's like," Amanda says mordantly. You know, being such a card. But just before she pulls out the gun and blows Clarice away, Clarice looks at her and says, almost unthinkingly, "You know, I think you might be the only person I can talk to."
A bad crowd. Not just a mother's revenge, but actual atonement. She can help the Twelve Worlds, reverse the way her daughter harmed them. She can be a hero, and then all of this will make sense. And maybe if Clarice loves her as much as she knows she does, then spying won't be so bad. "Tell me everything," she says, and slips the gun back in her purse.
I mean, it's interesting because why even have the timestamp on the episode if it's not doing anything. All it really did was make things make less sense -- 6AM groceries, seven hours to drive home from the coffee shop -- and it didn't keep anybody from bitching about the constant rain, because those are the same people too dumb to realize it all happened in 23 hours. A very rainy day indeed, for lots of folks.
I guess it's enough to know that in only this one day, Clarice found out just how far her army had strayed, and took righteous care of that; and in one day, Amanda found out that she was out of the frying pan and into a much worse fire, and somehow that did the trick of pulling her together; and that in one day Lacy saw her whole cult family killed and she got kidnapped by a rival cult, and nobody listens to her very good ideas; and that Jordan Duram has suffered some sort of brain hemorrhage that makes him slightly less textured than your average SVU witness.
week: Deadwalkers for sure, in Computerworld. Shit blowing up. Ninja swords. Teen girl asses in tight pants. Everybody getting dumber every week, the sociology of the Twelve Worlds falling apart before your very eyes, and the story just more and more blatantly contradicting itself. Ten minute slideshow of kitten pictures, captioned with humorous grammatical errors. A sneak peek at this holiday season's upcoming blockbuster Harry Potter & The Chompers Of Chilblain, Part One. Actual porn, literal people doing it. A girl on a trampoline, wearing no brassiere, in slow motion. Five dollars in iTunes money for every person that watches. Whatever it fucking takes.
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