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Wow. Okay, so while it's a different show now, that show is possibly also very awesome. Lots of shit went down tonight, hang on... Lacy. Um, she spends most of the episode drugged in Clarice's attic, getting abused by Olaf (did we know he was STO?) and Nestor (did we know he was alive?). The latter is particularly scary, with all his weird Good Six/Bad Six head games designed to break her down: Screaming at her, then sweet hugs with all those football muscles, then more crazy. Worth a shot.
Doesn't take long for all the brainwashing techniques you've ever heard of to work their magic, so when Clarice comes calling -- having quit the cabin for good -- Lacy spills about Zoë's download, the robot body, and how both are now exploded. Meaning zero Zoës left. (Very wrong, Lacy! More Zoës than you can shake a ninja sword at!)
...However, there may be a backup Zoë in that damned infinity broach Amanda used to carry so she could wave it around whenever she was screaming at strangers about her terrorist daughter. Clarice moves Amanda into the Willow Compound, where nobody's like thrilled to meet her -- but fits perfectly into Jordan Duram's plans for Amanda -- and sneaks Lacy out, to the STO bootcamps on Gemenon, because enough horrible things simply have not yet happened to Lacy.
(In other news, Clarice is now invoking God every time she opens her mouth -- "Give me that slice of pizza, it is God's will" -- and Daniel's so confused by his Caprican privilege he can't open his mouth without saying racist shit to whatever Tauron's standing closest.)
Also having a good day/bad day, is Daniel G, who attempts one of the most balls-out maneuvers I've ever seen -- trying to talk Vergis into teaming up so they can bring down the entire Ha'la'tha -- but alas, Vergis pulls some typical Tauron honor shit and stabs himself with the ceremonial knife Daniel's holding. So Daniel's got his company back (thanks to a unanimous vote of the board he blackmailed), but also he has now stabbed a guy. And a pretty awesome guy, at that.
While it sucks to think about having to deal with Lacy on the stupid-looking Jesus planet, we are rewarded vastly with a compelling new twist in the Deadwalker storyline, both the most complicated and most strangely moving: Zoë tracks down Tamara and, after much fighting and philosophical callbacks to most of BSG and Buffy, convinces her to be Zoë's, like, John the Matrix Baptist.
Which fits perfectly with the Virgin Mary drag Amanda spends all day crutching around in, especially after the big Athena/Boomer fight scene which basically is both Zoë and Tamara declaring they're real, not copies, but meaning the exact opposite by it. (Two great Zoë moments: Her grin when seven of Bartertown's finest attack, and the hangdog way she remembers how she totally killed Tammy and her mom: "Oh. That.") The young ladies finally agree NCC is totally gnarly, and head off to find better things to do, like be God of the Internet and wear awesome clothes all the time.
What's more interesting than that, though, is the proliferation of not only Zoës but also the mysteries of the various Zoës. I knew there would be more of her, but I didn't know it would be so... Weird, and cool. We needed to see Real Zoë being cool, and for once she obliges, in a vignette all about how she came up with Cylon bodies, before their souls, but didn't bother hassling Daniel about stealing her ideas as a kid because she was more interested in creating life (zoë) before him anyway. Then when she makes Our Zoë, she says outright, "This isn't about you being a narcissistic copy of me, it's about you being awesome." (A concept Our Zoë finally, finally takes to heart this week, after dealing with more of NCC's scumbag scapegoating than all of Gaius's bad days put together.)
So you've got Daniel/Taurons worrying about what makes you human, Tamara/Zoë with a vested interest, Lacy taken apart to where maybe she'll end up the least human of all, and Clarice pretty much opting out altogether for what she thinks are really great reasons... And that's just the Dune talking-talking-talking parts! Add the Matrix and robots, and you're gold.
But the thing that makes this episode totally frakked up and awesome is this other Zoë, a very dong-dong Chip Six-like Zoë that only Zoë can see, who saved Real Zoë from that fire and has been visiting her ever since, and now comes to Our Zoë in the Matrix wearing pink ruffles and saying the most beautiful, inspiring things... And inspired her to create life in the first place. Weirded! But stoked! No wonder Zoë thinks God talks to her! God totally talks to her!
Is it an angel? When they said they were going to draw the lines closer to BSG in 1.5 I didn't really think they meant like that. But this newest, awesomest Zoë is so far definitely following the classic satanic/angelic pattern of our old beloved Chipsters: "Just grab some fire, who's gonna notice? Let's just piss off your dad and take it from there, yeah?" Very fantastic, all around. Five more episodes is not enough episodes. Tell your friends shit just got real.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Quick game of Vet the New Exec first, because you can really tell. Kevin Murphy takes over as showrunner, effectively, with this episode. Here's what we know about him:
First: Creator/showrunner of Valentine, which is one of my favorite shows of the past few years, although talking about that makes me feel like I'm admitting to Legend Of The Seeker or something because of its weird syndication deal, which was with like the Dubai government or something, so it looked like a Mentos commercial, and came on in the middle of like Saturday night. If you don't remember it, it was a bunch of insanely hot, hotly beloved character actors -- Lila from Dexter having that accent and that hair all over the place; dude from North Shore and Life UneXpected foregoing any shirt with buttons; the even hotter Professor Hank Landry, and motherfucking Taylor Townsend in gauzy sun dresses -- running around having Greek God-type problems. There was a procedural element that involved this incredibly annoying chick and her incredibly annoying face, but usually even that part was pretty good. Additionally, Murphy wrote two of the best episodes of that series, the one with the white guy and the Indian chick, and the one with the lesbian wedding planner.
Second: Creator/showrunner of Hellcats, which is a very charming show that, unfortunately, I cannot watch due to a severe Aly Michalka allergy. I believe that if the Japanese haiku writers had known about Ashley Tisdale they would have included her on their list of perfect things -- plums, snow, Ashley Tisdale -- but there isn't an EpiPen developed that would enable me to sit through Aly Michalka walking around with that face all the time. She's like if Ke$ha didn't know.
Third: Writer and co-librettist of Reefer Madness: The Musical, which for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. The only thing I hate more than the experience of musicals is the marijuana experience, so it stands to reason that either it's my perfect thing, or I hate it squared. No soy interestante in finding out for sure. (Same with the various good-to-medium good kid things he did before anything else.)
Fourth: Producer, meaning a senior Writer, on the mysteriously beloved Reaper, about which my theory is that it centered on the same sort of people it attracted, namely: Nerds who thought/wished they were slackers/hipsters, but were in fact just awful/way further behind than they knew. (Vide related theory: Bones as FUBU-for-Aspies). Ed and Jack & Jill both had the horrible-face/person problem that keeps me from watching a lot of shows -- you absolutely cannot tell me that Tom Cavanaugh and Zach Braff don't have the same goddamn disgusting face; I hadn't learned to stop worrying and love Amanda Peet yet -- but I'm sure his writing was charming on those shows, because he knows his way around a romance: Get Real was great, which leads into...
Fifth: Boyfriend knows his fucked-up family dynamics, which is of course key. In his three seasons on my new gig Desperate Housewives, also known as "the good seasons of Desperate Housewives," we not only got the screechingly familiar breakdown in communication between Bree and Andrew, a slow-motion trainwreck that led to him seducing his mother's hot sex addict boyfriend -- a coup for the ages -- but also, specifically written by KM: Lynnette hallucinating and nearly committing suicide due to her Ritalin addiction, which was hilarious; a really memorably well-written episode where Lynette leveraged her female boss's sexual harassment for more Mommy Rights; several episodes co-written with Chris Black, whom we love, and the only cool thing Susan has done, ever.
Anyway. You can choose or not choose to include the DH stuff in your appraisal, but you know how I feel about discounting stories just because they're about lady things. You've been fooled into watching a story about lady things right now, the call is coming from inside the house. And given this episode's clear and intelligent rewriting of most of the rules in a way more respectful-to-before way than we saw during the transition, I'm willing to bet we've got a staff that feels the same way. (Especially now that Weddle & Thompson are locked for Blood & Chrome.) And you know, since only two of the characters are old men and half the cast is teenage girls, maybe it's time you got over it too.
Anyhow, that was fun. Zoë's finally located Tamara, playing Tina Turner in some kind of Master Blaster gladiatorial situation. I still can't figure out how much of the Matrix is New Cap City and plays by the NCC rules but given what's up this week, maybe we'll find out week about that. Meantime, she's looking to chat with Tammy Adams and she's willing to interrupt some Tauron swordfighting to get it done. There's chainlink all around the top of the arena, and the NCC-dressed people do a lot of shaking it with their hands and moshing their shit just like in the Roaring Twenties.
The announcer girl is all excited to see Zoë, because somehow Tamara has let them talk her into being their Messiah -- wonder how that went? -- and Zoë's like, "Drop the dramatics and tell me where Tamara is, because I am totally not interested in playing fake NCC games." Which, imagine your frustration when everybody there is only interested in playing fake NCC games because the rest of their day they're out in the world doing things, and you're stuck in the Matrix all day long. Like, how long would it take -- listening to the Sims make those noises, manifesting the same triangles over their heads, working slavishly for the same consumer electronics -- for you to go fully bugshit?
Because the fact that Zoë entered the arena is itself a "challenge," they go all "Ave Deathwalker!" and a whole fight starts. There's a pretty delicate systems-within-systems thing happening all through this episode, having to do with focal perspective and finite/infinite games, and that's one part of it: Zoë says "I don't want to play games," and they say, "What games?" Then, stupidly, they go "You fight or die!" Which... No I don't? I mean, not in the philosophical sense toward which the entire episode is leading, but also in the actual: "Hey girl that can't die! Fight or die!"
Zoë spares herself a fabulous weary smile, fights off the two dudes with a quickness, stands there looking awesome... And then gets shot through the chest. She remembers when Zoë's house caught fire, and how Daniel couldn't save her. Tamara walks onto the floor, out of the shadows, and notes how much it hurts when they shoot you. "By the way," she says, cocking that shotgun and firing a few more times: "You found me."
Why so serious, Adams? Continuity. The human need for continuity is the strongest thing in the universe, because we are lonely minds and can only live based on the facts that we know. When somebody cheats on you it only hurts a little because of possessiveness: It hurts mostly because the world in your head and the world outside are vastly different. You thought you were on solid ground and you weren't. It's ontological. It's shameful and embarrassing because the world is calling you a fool. What broke Amanda Greystone wasn't a mental illness relapse, it was finding out her entire family was filled with double agents who were completely unlike the people she thought they were.
In Tammy's version, she's a ghost: She died, she was resurrected, she lives here now. (Daniel's and Clarice's versions of Apotheosis agree on this, but they're all three wrong.) She has no other logical option than to assume that Zoë is the same thing, which is more than enough reason for vengeance. She has no context for Zoë's continuity -- born, died a few months later, got here by another route -- because the concept of Our Zoë is something nobody on the show can really get their heads around, because she is a miracle. The only evidence for, the anomalous Deathwalker thing, just makes Tammy's continuity more complete. Our continuity wants nothing more than to connect itself to itself, because that's the meaning of the word but also the only way we can live.
And knowing this fact about humans means a lot of power, for good or ill. For example, right now kidnapped Lacy is having her sense of continuity ripped apart, quite purposefully, by sexy Nestor: First the screaming abuses -- "You're useless! Worthless! "I don't even know why Clarice wants you here!" -- and then the sexy embraces, the protective muscles, curling around her up in the Willow attic: "Shh, it's okay. I won't let the others hurt you." Back and forth, good cop/bad cop, drugs in the water, and Lacy getting the floor ripped out from under her every time she finds a place to stand. Devastating.
Or in business: You've got Tomas Vergis standing there in the middle of a board meeting, for the company he won fair and square, that he didn't ask for. Cyrus (gleefully-ish) explains to him that it's an emergency meeting about reinstating Daniel as the head of their company, and suddenly none of his boardmembers can even look him in the eye. Cyrus herds him out and tells him they'll let him know what they decide. And over in the Graystone house, a lifetime victim of continuity error waits for the call, with nowhere to stand, with his whole world in the box like a cat, neither alive nor dead. So when Cyrus finally lets him know the unanimous vote is in, he crumples like a puppet with its strings cut. Back on the ground again, with nothing to lose.
The Willow wives, particularly the pregnant one Mar-Beth, are not feeling this latest outrage. Clarice has been off in her Kooky Kabin for weeks and weeks, and suddenly she's back with this jailbait torture victim in the attic. Not what she signed on for. And you know Clarice, she's like, "Why am I living at that cabin? God. Why did I kidnap a little girl? God." I mean, I can't imagine there was a time Clarice wasn't like this, so I'm not sure what Mar-Beth thought she was getting into, but the fact that the husbands seem to be mostly on Team Clarice makes me think it's partially due to her weird sex powers, and if that's a problem for you, don't marry Clarice Willow. She's got like three magic powers, and the other two have to do with getting real before you know what hit you.
Back in the Matrix -- Zoë lying in the dirt full of holes -- our own continuity gets a sudden slap in the face: Fading in and out while she heals, Zoë remembers a time long ago, after the fire but before everything else, when she saw her special friend again. She was thinking about the fire, and the beautiful girl that saved her from it, and drawing a picture of her trauma like the therapists said to do, and suddenly the angel was back. She smiled and said, "You're drawing the fire!" There's a child dev theory that says Eden's fall is a memory, universal to us all, about the first time we cried and mommy didn't come immediately to fix it. For Zoë, the angel saved her when her daddy couldn't. And years later, he'd use that memory against her, to get her back under his control. It wouldn't work, but it would support the continuity of her beliefs about grownups, which drove Zoë to the OTG in the first place, to the STO; to create life itself.
Zoë stands again, looking up at Tamara, who is just full of her Tauron rage at this point. A smirking handmaiden skips out into the arena, handing her the news column that first broke Tammy's continuity in half: The day she first learned about her mother's death, and her own. "Okay, that," Zoë says sheepishly, because this is going to take a lot of explaining and she can already see the way Tammy's lining up the facts against her. She thought she would come to her as a sister; she tried to be compassionate when nobody else would, and let Tamara out of that black cage, but now she's on trial for another girl's misdeeds.
And the most ironic part is, Zoë didn't bomb the maglev either. But maybe nobody -- not Our Zoë, not Tammy, not poor Amanda, not the people of the Twelve Worlds -- will ever know that. Philo was attracted and repulsed by the image, but the reality of that sin linked up to her physical body, in his own continuity, and it's that fear that killed him.
Lacy gets to the window this time, scraping hash marks on the slats boarding up the windows -- providing herself continuity, somewhere to stand -- before finally getting one board off. She smashes the window and screams out into the street, but nobody can hear her. After ten seconds, Olaf is there, and knocks her out. She drinks because she's thirsty; it takes her away again, down the rabbit hole, and when she wakes up they've scratched out even those marks. The despair of being trapped is nothing compared to the despair of losing control even over the number of days of your torture.
Amanda can't find anything weird in the cabin; he immediately responds with an order to infiltrate the Willow house. Amanda's fully into that idea, for the same reason essentially that Lacy scratches out her days: It gives her somewhere to stand. Wrapped up, later in the day, in a blue scarf like the Virgin Mother, Amanda and Clarice finally move out of the cabin. Amanda asks to come home with her, and Clarice just blows her off. "Don't be silly. Anyway, I don't think my family would like it." The last thing Amanda sees before she gets in the cab is Clarice's holoband, peeking out of her bag. The last clue, the one that showed her Clarice was just another double agent.
Everybody on this show has a shitty life but I think Lacy's really going for the gold this week. All she did was hop onboard when her two best friends started dating. That's literally all she did. "Join a cult? Sure thing. Leave the planet...? Um, no. My abusive mother can't be expected to get her own box wine and cigarettes." And then before you know it, she's blowing up people and getting strangled and kidnapped and watching everybody she knows get shot in front of her. Drugs are not a long-term coping strategy but maybe it's best she won't really remember this week. Well, except for all the hot hugging action. Kind of a catch-22 there. So Lacy finally figures out, as she's downing more of the drugs, how they are drugs. She calls them motherfrakkers but it doesn't really hurt their feelings, and she passes out again. Caesura!
"...Want a drink?" No, apparently there's drugs in them. Daniel's in the Guatrau's office, I think, and Joe is telling him sort of elliptically that they're going to need to kill the shit out of Tomas Vergis. That is a total bummer because Vergis is great, but you can see where they're coming from: Vergis is a Tauron, which means one way or the other he is going to make some stupid goddamn Son of Mogh mess and then they'll have to clean it up and retaliate and then he'll retaliate and so on. The only way forward is to jump past that whole shiz and just kill him dead. Daniel wonders if this is Ha'la'tha policy or something Joe and Sam just feeling like doing, but the answer is always simpler when it comes to Taurons: Taurons are dipshits.
Think about it. Admiral Cain already made total sense, but this show is like, "No, for real, that's how she rolls. Taurons are just like this." Just terrible people.
Daniel points out that their whole sham of a blackmail scheme was to make it look like he got the company back legitimately, but that doesn't matter because now it's about Vergis coming after Daniel. Which he already did, but whatever: "He must be returned to the soil," Joe explains, because the stupider it is, the more likely Taurons have some folksy way of saying it.
Daniel begs to do it his way, which is inviting Vergis over and having some ambrosia and leveling with him man-to-man and everything, because he still doesn't get the central point, which is that -- again -- Taurons are bullshit and won't go for it. Joe says that Vergis speaks Businessman, yes, but as a second language: Businessman is really just Caprican, and all Capricans are John Kerry.
Dannyboy accidentally gets racist again about how human beings value life, it's one of the main things that make us "slightly more evolved than animals, understanding the value of life," and Joe points out that other things have value, too. Which is true, I guess, and I'm all about honor and bushido and doing the right thing, I just feel like Taurons get it wrong 100% of the time. Plus all those tacky tattoos. Daniel begs him for at least the chance to try because if he doesn't, he's no better than... Joe fills in the blank: "Me?" Daniel fills in the blank: "Him!" Reality fills in the blank: "TAURONS."
But also, there's the pain in the box and the other main thing in this episode: The agreement, by every character, that humanity is essentially a choice. Or at least personhood. And that it has to do with things bigger than us. Now, it's ironic that Mr. "Death Zero Me A Thousand Booyah" is telling us about the sanctity of life, but it's also a reminder that everybody has their own context. For Daniel, not killing is part of the same continuity as creating ghoulish revenant ghost-puppets of our loved ones: These are choices that make you a person. But Joe would say -- specifically did say, last week that pledging your own life and soul to a cause greater than either is the choice, and that you're becoming a person when you prove it.
(To say that this concern is central to the concept is, of course, self-evident, but what's interesting to me is how we're adding to the answers we already got -- or, more accurately, the questions we've already asked -- in this particular sprawling history. Look at Ellen's daughters. Agathon answered the question correctly, but took it so far she ended up at Tauron; Valerii answered it so hard and so wrong that she tipped her canoe over. Caprica got the answer right the whole time, but in such a stupid scary way she nearly didn't come back from it; Natalie answered the question on her birthday, and didn't get the chance to tell anybody. And Three, well, let's just say she and Clarice would have been chums.)
Up at Graystone, Serge is happy to see Amanda, insofar as his programming dictates, but she tells him not to worry about pinging her husband just yet. She's got a lot of mooning about, sitting places and smoking cigarettes and staring into space, to catch up on.
Nestor brings Lacy her food and when she won't eat he gets all Sweet Cop on her, but she has definitely answered the question: Yes, she is very hungry. No, she's not frakking eating anything from him. "time I eat, it's because Clarice brings me food herself. And tells me what she wants." The point of brainwashing being to make a new person in the place of the old person, Nestor is of course delighted with this version: "I'll tell her!" he says, and skips off down the stairs.
Zoë starts explaining about the bombs and God and everything, but Tammy's high on the energy of her crowd and just keeps interrupting: "Explain! Why you deliberately slaughtered hundreds of innocent people! All for your meaningless fictional God!" Leaving the latter point for another time -- and the whole God + Zoë = Sittin' In A Tree thing just got a lot more interesting, now that we know she's been talking to Her this whole time for realsies -- Zoë tries to point out on that selfsame newspaper article how that girl totally died.
Which seems logical, but plays into Tammy's continuity in a way anybody but an AI would have immediately red-flagged, because what Zoë is basically saying is that neither she nor Tamara is a real girl: Not even ghosts, just things. Never having been confused about her existence or its properties, she can be forgiven for her tardiness on the uptake here, but of course Tammy goes off real bad on her: "I am not a copy!"
Of course, once Zoë the apparent Caprican gets all John Kerry on her ass about how it's more complicated than that, Tamara goes full Teabagger. "You know, there were a lot of people in NCC who had friends and family on that train." She's willing to bet that Zoë will talk a blue streak about her autonomous existence and all, but even more willing to bet on the madness of crowds. "Tell it to them, but I don't think they care." Zoë reminds one of the advancing droogs that beating her won't bring his father back -- in fact, won't even really do permanent damage to her either -- but he shrugs: "Might feel pretty good, though." The first stab is the only one that surprises her.
The thing about the Matrix is that it removes all context and continuity: It's all pretend, just bits and bytes, yesses and nos. But that's where the real-world analogue falls apart, into obsolete over-forty paradigms about the dangers of the internet -- even Tipper Gore will one day give up on how killin' imaginary hookers makes us bad people -- there's a higher point that is quite true. Namely, that guy just looked in her face and offered to cause her pain, which proves her point and not his; i.e., the old You Can't Rape A Robot thing that Battlestar was always mostly about. It wouldn't feel "good" if he didn't acknowledge her real, subjective existence on some level. This is when they stop playing a video game and start scapegoating actual people and their actual suffering.
Clarice comes to Lacy and clucks over her bruises and overall derangement; when Lacy finally confides that she's afraid, and for good reason, Clarice puts the human question in new terms: "I need your help, not your fear."
They've got Zoë down pretty soon around her in a circle, beating her bloody, knives and guns and chains, heavy pipes, nunchaku, fading in and out of consciousness as Tamara approaches. Half the crowd is screaming, "Stay down!" The other half is saying, "Get up!" but what they really mean is "Stay down!"
Tamara wonders why, if Zoë's healing factor works like hers, she's not getting up or fighting back. Zoë's face is unrecognizable: "You don't know where I've been lately. I'm tired of fighting." Tamara doesn't even understand the concept. "Maybe you just won't fight because you know you deserve this."
It's true. The angel can't believe it. Tears jump in her eyes, looking down at Zoë: Does she honestly think she deserves any of this?
Zoë came bounding down the steps, into Daddy's office, looking for permission to go "snow-ramming" with Lacy and the guys over the weekend. Slyly, she suggests saving money by getting a season pass, and he congratulates her on her savvy. On his screens there are bodies, chasses for the government robots; they caught her eye immediately. Sentinels, the first and the furthest, laboring senselessly toward God. Through the whole conversation she couldn't take her eyes off them. She drew them as a child, after the angel; she innovated, she dreamed: A body so strong it could never burn. They were hers and he took them.
Zoë's gaze lingered a little too long, so her Daddy tossed the images into a sidebar. "Maybe I saw it, and it stuck in my head somewhere," he said, stretching his back like an old lion. He drew her eye away, said goodnight, and she smiled after him lovingly.
But the angel was incensed for her, once they pulled out those old kiddie drawings. Look, said she, Same legs. Brain's in the chest, not the head. He's got plenty of time for you when he wants to steal an idea... Zoë shrugged. Daddy wasn't stealing anything. But she heard the angel, that testing shove in the back of her voice, and she heard the second point. She burned, and screamed, and he didn't save her. You know what would infuriate him? Beating him at the thing he's best at.
Zoë shrugged. It was never about beating him, those were games for a son and his father. At least back then. But something about the idea excited her. "I can design a chassis," she argued, "It's not the same as making a robot." Kronos ate his daughters and his sons for less than this: For the very idea of someone, someday, beating him. Best to make the evil eye, and push those thoughts away. But the angel's eyes were fire.
Think of something bigger. Zoë grinned; her magic mind went spinning out, and the angel had her. "And what would I create?" Life's a good start, I think.
It was a bit later, then. She was wearing her poodle skirt and neckerchief, high ponytail, on the day she finished her daughter. She only dressed like that, like life was a sock hop, when she felt the world closing in, on every side; the way the Matrix took everything terrible, and made it real. When she wanted to go back to a simpler time, that never really existed.
Maybe her daughter was the first step. The compiler took a while, too long, but after brief terror and a call to God, her daughter appeared. She giggled and clapped, like the little girl she could have been before the fire, and wired in.
The world behind the band was identical: Same basement office, same equipment. New girl, a second Zoë. She saw, or imagined, the uncertainty in Zoë's eyes; she looked upon her daughter the way Philomon would, one day. She wondered if she were real. "You don't have to talk yet," she said lovingly. "You're brand new."
Zoë could talk, which delighted her mother. "I have your memories, I can feel them." Zoë smiled, and apologized immediately: "I'm still gonna have to make you take some tests. Memory tests, like, profile stuff, just to see how good you are." Zoë agreed, casting new eyes around the world. "I don't remember making me," she said, trying to be helpful, "So that could already be a possible problem."
That first impulse: To help, to find the cracks in the system, to heal them. To worry over it until it's fixed. Zoë understood immediately, impressed: "No, that's okay! You won't remember anything that happened since I last scanned myself. Don't worry, you're probably perfect."
"A perfect copy," Zoë clarified, and maybe Zoë imagined the loss in her voice. But no, Zoë explained -- the thing Tamara won't yet understand -- the "copy" part wasn't important, it was the life part. The second she was born she began to iterate, diverge, reach for the sun. She began to rise, perfect and untainted in a way Zoë would never get to be. She wasn't the copy. If anything she was the ideal. And anyway, we don't steal fire for our own dinner. We steal it for the world.
"Starting right now, you're a person."
Permission to exist is the first and last thing our parents grant us. Zoë would forget that, in the months ahead. And was it true? If she couldn't leave the Matrix, could she possibly ever be considered real? Zoë had no doubt about it, and reframed the context: "A person with restricted movement is still a person," she assured her daughter. She only wanted to take her in her arms, and tell her it was going to be okay. She started testing.
"You're not her," explains the angel. Not subject to the same laws or the same guilt or the same sins. We are expiated in death, it's the great leveler. We only rise. Whatever sins, taint Zoë carried, that's gone now. She is clean. And not even Zoë knows how small those sins really were. "You keep walking in her footprints, even after her footprints stopped, but you didn't have to. Even she knew that."
Continuity: 1) An angel, aggelos, agent of God, rewrites basic code into miracles: A virgin's belly grows; a saint is lifted above the clouds, the sound of trumpets. That's what angels do. 2) An angel enters New Cap City and rewrites the laws of physics, appearing invisibly to the Deadwalker, telling her secrets from God's lips. 3) An angel enters a television show called Caprica, and rewrites the narrative itself from the inside.
All those wrong turns and failed attempts and Lacy-bashing and robot love, risking everything to get to Gemenon, watching some other girl's father try to burn the humanity from her, those weren't necessary. Not mistakes, just the way things had to be. But the truth is so much better:
"Are you going to lie down and pay for her sins? Or are you gonna own yourself?" They're saying "Stay down!" She's saying, "Stand up!" She's saying, "Starting today, you're a person." Every day this is true, and every day we take the option of forgetting.
Tamara sees the fire in her eyes and the strength of the angel behind them, and her anger rises to meet it: "I don't care if you're not the Original Zoë. For now, you're more alive that she is, and you deserve everything you're getting." Zoë stands up. She rises. "I think you have me confused with someone else," she says. She grabs a knife, and the crowd goes wild:
Two girls that can't die, two dirty girls with untold power, fighting forever and ever. Maybe time Zoë's the one on top; maybe time Tamara's the prisoner. When the Deadwalkers fight, it's NCC at its finest: Every mean mommy, every hot cheerleader, every girl that ever said no. Every commercial break for this show includes at least one ad for Cialis. Does it matter who falls? It never does, and it never will: They can keep fighting forever, and the crowd won't ever stop screaming. We like shows about girls but only when they're tearing each other apart.
When Clarice says she stayed away because Lacy was a possible threat, Lacy reminds her of the moral fortitude in going on a child-killing spree like last week, and the chain of evidence suggesting Clarice was involved in Zoë and Ben's deaths. Clarice, on the other hand, points out the numerous times the Barnabites tried to blow her up, and the hypocrisy of those who throw stones in the terrorist blood-feud house. (Note: Clarice's voice also gets hard and stays hard, because Lacy invoked Zoë's name as another of her possible victims. Do not fuck around with the Zoë thing, because Clarice will go off the chain so fast.)
As for the charges of blowing up Clarice that time, Lacy's like, "Yeah, okay, but like I really wasn't feeling that, to be fair." Clarice laughs at her about how great that would sound at her funeral, but again, the only real emotion in her voice hits on the line: "And for the record, I would never have harmed Zoë." You can see just how bad she wants to punch Lacy for even going there.
To show she meant no harm, Lacy will be helping Clarice get ahold of Zoë's resurrection program, which is vanished. Lacy looks uneasy and Clarice, knowing how tight Zoë's hold on her once was, nearly smiles. "She's gone, Lacy. This is not a betrayal. She would want you to help me. We were working together."
Which Lacy knows is a lie. It's like Clarice is playing Good Cop with herself: "And if you do tell me... Your burden will be lifted." As God's executioner, it's made clear, Clarice's judgment on this "burden" will have a severe impact on Lace's life expectancy. (Sister Willow's language gets slipperier every week. There's a line you can draw from here to indulgences, you know what I mean? The Divine Rights of Clarice Willow.)
Weighing the many kinds of crazy she's now knee-deep in, Lacy relents. Yes, the avatar lived. She lived for awhile inside a robot body, dated the cutest boy in the universe, eventually killed him after a fight with her dad, and then blew her ass to smithereens. Then, something happened -- we still don't know what; I wonder if there was more to Zoë's "Do you even know where I've been?" beyond just the NCC droog fighting -- but as far as Lacy knows, that was the end of Zoë. And the program.
Suddenly, retroactive liberties are again taken with the continuity: That gold infinity pin that pulled the first Jenga on Amanda's mind? It was also a thumb drive! Now, the angel thing is cool, because it's a known concept in this show's universe, but things like this seem a little cheaper; on the other hand, what do I know? It could have been the plan the whole time. It just seems odd and sort of science-fiction-TV lazy to make that thing -- a known symbol of the OTG cult -- the objective correlative in not one but two major storylines. There's a definite "Makes sense, don't it?" vibe to the dialogue here that makes me think we're being oversold on a new retroactive concept, though. Clarice and Lacy all but turn toward the camera and go, "BACKUP ZOË IS DEFINITELY IN THERE, OKAY."
Just one more thing on the agenda, now, which is that Clarice -- because Olaf and Nestor are getting a little too into the constant hurt/comfort, which makes sense given their devotion to killing Barnabites for her -- is going to be sending Lacy to Gemenon for STO training. Just like Clarice, when she was a little girl: "It'll help you get properly focused on your walk with God." Lacy brings up her poor mom and Clarice goes, terrifyingly, "We'll take care of her." I guess bye-bye Momma Rand. The Corps Is Mother and all that. Lacy, having just come back down from a weeks-long high, is not interested on taking yet another flight on Willow Air -- even grits out a NO! -- but Clarice ain't having it, and her voice gets colder and scarier than even before, because she said no. "Lacy. I am trying to save your life. Do you understand? There's been enough blood."
While Lacy's scrubbing all the blood and trauma off, Clarice heads over to Amanda's house. Amanda, of course, has been sitting and staring into space with a cigarette this entire time, but you know how much she hates to be interrupted when she's doing that and Clarice only left her like a second ago. Of course, now that she knows Amanda (or maybe the GDD, not sure) has the thumb drive, it's time to do some more of that patented not-so-sneaky sneaking around that Clarice always does at Amanda's house.
It's funny, because part of the Clarice problem was believing that she could wreck shop on an entire terrorist organization while still seeming so bumbling and forthright when it came to getting her hands on Zoë's stuff and yet here she is again, all, "Hey, nice to see ya! Do you think you can get ahold of Zoë's stuff any time soon from the GDD raid? Like any jewelry or things you might have help up on TV while screaming about how your daughter is a terrorist? Things like that? It might make you feel better!"
Amanda, as usual, acts too drugged out to get there by herself, so Clarice changes "tactics" and brings up this diary that Zoë gave her. Which is a weird thing to say, which Amanda notices: "She gave you her diary?" Realizing how that sounds weird and dumb, Clarice is like, "Oh, I mean like a blank diary. Funny story, she told me to write down all my good deeds in it and I told her that was hubris and maybe I should write my bad deeds in it and she said she should have gotten me a bigger book."
Which is an awesome story, actually, and sounds exactly like Zoë, down to the self-righteous poking, so good on Sister Willow for that one. You can actually hear her cribbing it together from some kinda "lives of the saints" primer (or polytheist equivalent). And then Amanda, you really only need a pebble to start the landslide, you know, so suddenly she's apeshit all over Clarice about how they were brought together for daydrinking and smoking hash and living in a cabin and collecting things of her daughter's, and see how this story just proves it. Which is, in some fundamental way on which only Amanda could possibly connect the dots, the whole reason she wanted to come live Chez Willow. Not because she hates her husband, has lost her damn mind, and imprinted on Clarice's charismatic manipulation like a bi-curious duckling, no: It's because God says so... Or something... Or whatever.
So of course Clarice is like, "Now you're talking my language, motherfrakker! Go get your stuff, ya little squirrel." Back at the Willow Compound, the sisterwives and brotherhusbands are like, not that thrilled to have Amanda Graystone and her incredibly PR-toxic ten-pound bag of bullshit calling yet more attention to their subversive activities. I swear while they're moving Clarice in the front door, Olaf is sneaking Lacy out the side, which kind of does give me faith in Clarice's ability to get shit done. He says some horrible things to her instead of goodbye, and then Lacy heads off to the land of impossibly stupid-looking CGI.
Meanwhile, everybody is still excited about Tammy and Zoë fighting, and Zoë points out -- not for the first time, but think about how it's a Tauron you're talking to -- that Tammy can keep fighting all day and she's never going to die, because Deadwalker. Right there in the name.
Knife to her throat, Zoë reminds Tamara of the time in the darkroom, how she was the first person Tamara saw and how she lifted her into the light. She points out their amazing Neo powers, and how tacky NCC is: "Why get caught up in this like all of them? You're better than this!"
Which again: Might as well just reach out and turn off her brain altogether, because that's code-switching way too fast. "This world you've built around yourself, the only true comfort you've had since your death? It's really tawdry and stupid. These people are idiots. You could be better but you choose not to be." You cannot sell self-sufficiency, and you will never get anywhere speaking to someone from outside their context, because it's just bullying. Existential bullying. The game is fixed, to keep us small.
Tamara beats the shit out of her some more, and says she's changed a lot since the darkroom. Gotten harder, faster, meaner; less PC than NPC because that's what they demand. That's the context. That's the choice you have when you play by their rules. You get to be an object, not a subject; they fill you with holes and tell you it's your fault. Quieter voice, fewer opinions, no convictions, victimhood every day. You have the choice of letting them treat you like part of the movie, part of the game, part of the scenery, and making another choice -- standing up -- is something you can only do when you see there is another choice. Which is itself a choice that few of us can make.
The girl Zoë's talking about, Tamara screams, is dead. What she means is still within her continuity: It's a metaphor. Tamara died, she was resurrected, she came here soft and she's gone hard. "I get that, on a personal level," Zoë hisses, with Tamara on the ground now. But thanks to the angel, Zoë understands it's not about shame or guilt at all, she can properly explain that their continuities are parallel: She got there through fire, but she got to the answer correctly: That girl is gone. This girl is here. "So what does this girl like, and what does this girl hate?"
(The only change I found interesting, rather than just smartly expedient, between the book and movie of V for Vendetta is relevant here: In the movie, V's awakening comes in fire, while Evie's comes in the rain. She makes the choice to be human, V had it thrust upon him. Same destination, two very different avenues. He recapitulates for her his own experience, but in the end she lands a lot softer than he did, and she's better for it. In terms of revolution, that is to say that children of the revolution don't have to break their own bones to understand the new thought, and that every generation stands on the shoulders of the one before. In terms of existence, here in this story, Zoë is giving Tamara the benefit of her experience as the first iteration of something Tamara is still becoming: Glimpsing the world outside the box for the first time, because Zoë never lived inside the box. And here comes tomorrow.)
"They like watching your pain," says Tamara stubbornly: It's about them, it's about the cruel world we're born into, and the roles they're willing to let us have. Which is the way, Zoë finally sees, to get her there completely: "They don't care which one of us bleeds," she says, looking up at them cheering. "Look at them. Is that what you want to be? Entertainment?"
Well, when you put it that way, no. Subjectivity sounds far more reasonable. And so when I call bullshit on NCC you hear that as being a critique of yourself: You see yourself contiguous with it, isomorphic to the shape they thrust upon you. But you're the girl who killed your father. You're the girl who can't be killed. You thought being their idol, their Deadwalker, meant that you could opt out of your own personhood: At least they weren't shooting you anymore. At least it meant no active cruelty. But the secret is that "no active cruelty" doesn't mean you're any more of a person. It's still a choice they're making for you. The game is fixed.
"NCC is disgusting. It's a place for the people to come and act out their own worst impulses. To kill, rape, destroy. It's wrong." And why does Zoë care? Because she has a purpose, her own purpose, and it is good. And she knows what her purpose is: To free the Matrix itself: "I think this is it. Or a step on the way, I don't know, but I think you're supposed to help me." And here comes tomorrow.
It doesn't really matter what she says now: It's the angel's fire in her eyes that does it. It's the love behind the fire. It's in the way she reaches down to Tamara, and helps her up. How the new humanity in Zoë meets the old humanity in Tamara, and they clasp hands. And it's in the way the crowd shakes the fence at them when they stand there in the center of the arena, refusing to fight at all. The angel smiles down at her; the rest of the crowd calls it bullshit but the angel knows better and now they know better too: Starting today, you're a person.
Daniel's happy to see Tomas, when he arrives. The Board is putting together his severance package, and though Tomas assumes he'll be expected to "slink back to the Tauron dirt," Daniel assures him it's not about that. The contract is crazy good, he'll actually make a personal profit -- Just for bringing the entire company out of bankruptcy? Thanks, dude! -- and Daniel swears, against the oncoming slurry of Tauron bullshit, that it's not charity: "It is a begrudging gesture of respect. You played me well. You caught me napping and took advantage, I turned the tables. That's all part of the game. Let's shake hands and live to fight another day." Sounds good, right? If the game weren't fixed.
"Frakkin' Capricans," Tomas hisses, after they toast and drink, and makes fun of Daniel's testicle-free existence before reminding him of just how goddamn retarded Taurons are. "You made me dead," Tomas says, and pulls out some kind of stupid ceremonial knife like it's a bat'leth and he's all, "Finish the job! Some dumb Greek saying that translates as Taurons are dipshits until their ritual suicide and beyond!" As annoying as that is, Daniel does not immediately agree. That is, he makes a choice not to play Tauron games; starting today, he is a person again. But the game is fixed.
Daniel's like, "Um, put that knife away and stop being gross! I have a much more insane plan to share with you." Because Vergis and Graystone, they are the richest sons of bitches on Twelve Worlds and they can totally take down the Ha'la'tha. Objectively, that sounds just chronicles of ridic. But Stoltz, even without the sexy beard and back to his wormy self, his eyes light up like Clarice when he says it, and just like with her you're like, "Maaaaybe."
So Vergis smokes his cigarette and thinks about it and he's like, "You know what, Crazy? That's kind of a cool idea." Which, he's a high-risk businessman with Tauron flair; Daniel had to know that would appeal to him just as a gamble. Devote our combined resources to the total destruction of the Ha'la'tha, watch each other's backs. Sounds very honorable. "Return them to the soil," Daniel says, that tone-deaf white man thing he's always trying with Taurons, and Vergis picks up the knife again. "It was my father's, his father's before him, so on. Swear an oath on this blade and we will be brothers."
The only thing Daniel ever wanted. Even back before, when he saw what Vergis could do, he admired him. Even when he was taking Daniel's life apart, Daniel obsessed on him so much he tortured his own daughter into suicide, trying to win. He takes the hilt gratefully and feels something broken knit itself back into balance.
But there are so many things more valuable than life, things a Caprican will never understand. Vergis wraps his hand around Daniel's, and plunges the knife into himself. He's sorry, for Daniel; he puts his hand on his brother's shoulder and falls to the ground; in the last moments before his death Tomas gets scared, grabs at Daniel's lapels, going lonely into the night. But Daniel pulls his hands away, jerking back, disgusted. Blood pours from Vergis's mouth, and it is over.
Daniel calls Joe and Joe sends the cleaners; they work as Daniel watches from above. But that spot against the couch, where he killed a man, it won't ever really be clean. He could say it was Tomas's choice, but it if were then that makes all his promises just cruelties. A temptation to sin, before death. To give up his humanity, the thing that makes him Tauron, and a man. He twisted that knife long before he drove it in.
Starting today, Tomas Vergis is a person. Starting today, Daniel's just a little less. And we'll see about tomorrow when it comes.