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Finally safe from the Willow House of Horrors, Lacy meets a cute, reluctant STO recruit named Odin Sinclair and their fairly awesome cell leader, Diego. En route to Gemenon, they're attacked by Polytheists... Or so it seems. After an episode's worth of fairly scary hostage situations, Lacy finally loses it on the face of one of the guys, and they finally reveal it was just a training scenario. Well, insofar as how once they get to Gemenon, everybody that didn't stick with OTG -- when push came to shove -- gets a bullet through the head. Lacy watches them shoot a bunch of children in the head and for a moment thinks, "Maybe this terrorist cult was a dumb idea. Especially considering I lost my robot a few weeks back."
While Amanda snoops, plants bugs and rouses Mar-Beth's suspicions, Clarice's GDD mole gets Zoë's infinity pin out of evidence lockup. Jordan Duram gets a fair amount of heat back at work for refusing to reveal his CI, now that it's obvious Singh is STO, and he gets confirmation of this when Mar-Beth is framed for spying in Amanda's place, and Clarice stabs her pregnant ass to death.
The Guatrau is sending Cylons to the STO, I guess because they pay the most, which bothers Sam on multiple levels, firstly because he's become politicized about the Tauron resistance and secondly because the STO killed half his family in the pilot of this very TV show we are watching. Joe is less worried about it, because he sucks. Daniel goes to the Guatrau to plead for a little bit of lagtime to get the Grace x Graystone program working before he starts selling warbots to the dangerous cult. So the Gautrau decides that he's outlived his usefulness and sends Sam to kill him. And yet Joe is allowed to live. I don't get Taurons, I really don't.
Meanwhile, Daniel's still working overtime on his Pretend Amanda program, since she's the basis of anything he's going to end up doing. It gets gross in a lot of ways, because Daniel is gross in a lot of ways, but then the real Amanda shows up and tells him how it is inside his sick little head, and maybe provides a good key to where he should look . But with Clarice back in charge of Zoë's Resurrection backup, it might just stop mattering before you can count to Jesus Freak Apocalypse.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Apparently Olaf dropped Lacy off at the spaceport and didn't look back because she's just chilling with her backpack when we meet her again. None of the security guards seem to recognize her as the girl that got one of them killed one time, but then honestly if you were Lacy wouldn't you kind of be hoping for some attention from a security guard right now? "Yeah, I blow people up occasionally but mostly I'm a teenage child and they're shipping me off-world so that I can be indoctrinated."
As if Lacy needs to make sense in order for this show to accomplish its mandate. Which mandate, and I'm quoting here, is now "Less dancing, more shooting" when it comes to the robots. Or as incoming showrunner Murphy says, it's time to "butch them up." And if you don't understand why this is all so disheartening, then you'll probably love this show, starting now. Precisely now, that they're doing their best to turn this show into every other show you've ever seen. Not that it will help, because the TV industry is a bunch of crabs in a barrel, a great ship with sixty steering wheels and zero rudders that entirely depends on getting praised for your ability to turn the wheel, regardless of where the ship is going.
Which I bring up not because I'm going to say the things we all say when this happens, or to talk about the motives of Syfy that brought us here, but because science fiction people are continuity people. They want it episodic and they want all the toys back in the box at the end of the day, and will spend lifetimes connecting continuity for themselves in a way that makes the most satisfying sense. And that's a pursuit, but it's one that is ultimately futile. And last year with Doctor Who this predilection nearly caused me to have a breakdown, because it's not the way the world works. So we can say that Caprica is a chimerical thing with the head of a robot and the body of a mermaid and the tail of a big strong stupid ox. And the ox part is where we're at now.
But when we talk about this show in years to come, which we won't, we will talk about it as though it were one strange creature, and it isn't. It's three barely connected creatures. The analogy here is that there are the people who love Chris Claremont's X-Men or Grant Morrison's, or Joss Whedon's, and then there are the people who love the X-Men, full stop. And most of the people you're likely to meet, regarding this show or any show, are the latter. It's ontologically painful to separate out the various shows we've been watching, when so much of them share so much on the surface, because they seem to be the same show. And hopefully when you get ahold of a franchise, or a doomed show like this one, you show respect for what's gone before -- but it's not a requirement.
Also hanging out in the spaceport is a cute boy named Odin Sinclair, with whom Lacy trades lies for awhile before their child-cult handler, Clarice's old friend Diego, shows up to take them to Gemenon. And all the other little kids on their ship are just as scared and just as young as they are. Odin explains that his parents are STO and they had him kidnapped in the middle of the night to be sent to bootcamp and become one of the blown-up faithful; when he asks if Lacy's a true believer her answer is "kinda," which is as good an answer as any, considering she's just been through days or weeks of torture in the Willow attic and now can't be expected to know for sure.
"I welcome you all to the holy birthplace of monotheism. We're on our way now to the retreat where the Reverend Holy Mother lives. You will enter children, and you will exit warriors of the One True God... Those of you that survive."
Which is when the Polys lock onto their ship, and start to board with guns, speaking Gemenese, which is Romanian in the same way as Tauron is Greek and which is why Gina's last name was Inviere. The Polys say that the Many Gods are striking back, which has happened before and will happen again. It's interesting to see it happening this way, because the Gods of Kobol acted out in the same way that Clarice, and later Gaius Baltar, will be acting out in the future: Twelve happy Gods with twelve happy sects, and then the Thirteenth jealous God comes along saying He's just a little bit more important than They are.
time, His faithful will build the only possible lasting bridge between Us and Them, and their differences will be struck out by angels, on a holy anvil that only looks like war from certain angles. Last time, His faithful took their immortal bodies to a world they called Earth. They forgot their own immortality and were destroyed by their robots and even now five geniuses have taken back their immortal bodies and are winging themselves here, hoping they'll save us in time. But they won't. They will make it far, far worse. It didn't make sense to talk about the Fall until now, but since it's all a wash anyway we can talk about Galactica as it comes up. We're heading there as rapidly as the show is dying.
The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. The road out of Hell? Same deal.
This show has always been about the intersection of five or six technically good but horribly flawed plans to save the universe from its own grief, for innocence lost. For Zoë and the STO it's the world's innocence, for her father and Tamara's it's about their deaths and their own incoming doom, and so forth. Add them together, these yearnings to return to a hypothetical grace that never really existed, and you get a recipe for stasis: The one thing God hates above all else. Maybe the only thing. But since they can't be trusted not to bite that apple the best thing we can do is hold up a microphone to catch every juicy bite. Turn up the volume on the how and why, so that we don't repeat it more times than necessary. Escaping pain is the mandate for living, but it's the antidote to evolution.
Mar-Beth catches Amanda spying on Clarice -- who is meeting with her confessor in the Matrix and trying to get ahold of Zoë's infinity pin containing Resurrection, which is in GDD evidence -- and when sour old Mar-Beth asks her what she's doing, Amanda immediately starts saying she's not spying, just concerned: Possibly Clarice is "using" again. As in, Amanda smoked hash with her in a bicurious fashion a few days before her descent into madness and eventual suicide attempt. Mar-Beth assures Amanda that she knows her wife better than anybody, and also to go fuck herself.
Amanda apologizes to Jordan for getting caught, but is optimistic that Mar-Beth maybe kinda believed her about the relapse situation. Her new bright idea is to bug Clarice's room because she still subvocalizes when she's using her holoband, because old people don't know how to use iPods right. Of course, Jordan Duram has seen The Wire and knows that you have to do due diligence and chain-of-custody type things when you're doing this, and he's already as far off the reservation as he can be without turning into some kind of Harvey Keitel sort, but maybe he can find a way to get Amanda a bug ("Warrants are overrated anyway") without totally screwing his investigation. That is, if time weren't already ticking on the GDD mole that will soon, obviously, even he knows this, be taking his ass out cold.
Porky Pig-talking, Monad-sympathizing Singh immediately knows that Jordan's got a CI somewhere in the STO, and thus now he has two problems: Calm Jordan down, and get this mole murderated. He demands to see all of Jordan's current files, and Jordan says no, and you are not the boss of me: Caprica is the boss of me and the people of Caprica. I think Lee Adama would have been a happier boy if his dad had been more like Jordan Duram and less like any of a number of Willies. Hell, I think his dad would have been better off as a Duram. For a show with no moral center, or more to the point with an infinity of fucked-up moral centers, Jordan still manages to be both the least and most trustworthy person, but this is in no small part actually due to his total racism. Regardless, "I work for [Caprica]" is about the sexiest thing a cop can say to his boss, on any planet.
So the Guatrau is selling Daniel's Cylons offworld, but not -- as Sam would like -- to the Tauron resistance. No, he's selling them to the moneyed STO Vatican on Gemenon, of course, because they are ready to roll. Sam has the obligatory freak out about this, but Joe is strangely chill about it. Which, you can't count on Joe Adama for shit, but given the fact that they killed his daughter -- and, I suppose, his wife although you'd never know -- it does seem strange the degree of equanimity about this particular corruption. Sam calls him out and Joe tells him to hush, so he runs and Daniel takes over yelling at Joe.
Not about the obvious moral issues, but about what it says about his business, of course. Danny Boy tells Joe he wants an audience with the Godfather so that he can make up some new crazy lie and get them to stop selling his robots to the crazy-pants STO and thus save his own ass from once again being associated with them. Nobody points out to Daniel that he is also asking politely to be murdered by the Guatrau, because it goes without saying, but Daniel doesn't know that because he is kind of a racist about the Mob and he won't actually believe they're dangerous until they actually follow for once through on their constant complicated plans to kill his family members.
There is a very long, fairly phenomenal sequence on the Gemenon shuttle that is so much about atmosphere and ambience that I'm not sure I can get it across in words. All the kids are handcuffed hostages of the Polys, and they're all screaming about religious warfare and the politics of belief and meanwhile Odin and Lacy are being amazing, quietly, getting ready to do something that will be awesome when they get around to it. They take the children in the back one by one and shoot them in the head, and there are last-minute conversions and some truly beautiful moments of martyrdom as one by one the children decide which side they are on. It's hard to sell martyrdom, inherently retarded as it is, but somehow the scene manages to do it. The strength, and the holy light in their eyes.
Jordan goes around Singh, using his connections in the Evidence Room, to get a spare bug. He sees them do this every week on Dexter so he knows the routine. Then on his way out he notices that the Graystone box has been effed with, meaning that Clarice's mole has already gotten ahold of the infinity pin, as was previously discussed. Even if you didn't know what they were after, this would be the point you get the fuck out of Dodge because obviously your workplace is not secure. Even his Evidence buddy reminds him that the only people with the code in and out of here are "top brass." There are no coincidences, especially when you know for a fact that you are smack in the middle of an interglobal conspiracy. Or, I guess it could be the rats. If you're real dumb.
Daniel makes one of those gorgeous intuitive leaps we love so much, in the meeting with the Guatrau, right to being a Final Fiver: The Grace commercial was cute and frivolous, on the level of those greeting cards where Gramma tells you goodnight. But add Grace to Cylons, and you get immortality. Get it? Cylon bodies, never old and never dying, projecting, half here and half in the Matrix, one with the Cloud of Unknowing. "It will end death and disease. It will demolish our very conception of mortality."
Somewhere, Earth, a thousand or a hundred thousand years ago, Ellen said the same thing to Galen; they made it out just in time, bodies mangled in the last eruption. They made Jor-Els of themselves and sent themselves rocketing out, into the universe, to save their Twelve Poly brothers from extinction. They are on their way to save us, they are praying they'll get here on time. But they won't. They will not. We think we're safe but we're not safe.
And the reason they won't is that Daniel Graystone -- because of money and because of politics and because he's already in too deep -- has made a gorgeous intuitive leap today. Grace and Cylons: Never a safe mix. Inevitable, and unutterably beautiful, but deadly just the same. It starts today, born in fire and politics and the wars between twelve brothers, and the unending money and blood and shit on which our machine has always run. The banal, unmistakable movement of greed, and grief, working their way senselessly toward the end of everything. One more good intention.
The Guatrau is limited somewhat in his thinking, and given the eau de White Privilege that Daniel Graystone wears every day, assumes that he's being criticized on a man level, on a businessman level, but Daniel tries to keep him from going there: "By arming terrorists, you gain short-term profit, but at the expense of the biggest potential payday in either of our organizations' history [sic]." Out of one side of his mouth the Guatrau of the Ha'la'tha promises to wait two weeks before exporting his stolen robots; out of the other side he calls up Sam and tells him it's finally time for Daniel to die like they all always knew would come.
"As the Olympian Gods rose, the Titans fell. As all Gods must. But no One God can kill them all. One God: This can only be mankind putting his own face into the heavens, making a God from his own image. It's the height of hubris!" the Polys say. "The Pantheon understands mercy," the Polys promise. They make a boy kiss the Arrow; they are given the blessing of the One True God by a girl that stays upright, strong and beautiful. The bodies fly, out of the airlock and into the firmament. This has all happened before.
As Singh notifies Olaf of the spy in Willow House, Daniel goes to visit the Amanda program. Of all the storylines I would have liked to see play out, this is my favorite and the saddest, the one I'll miss the most. A man creating the perfect wife, and then hating her because she is perfect; demanding she be as authentic as he demands, like a hall of mirrors. The Hub and the Colony were just factories for beautiful women, by the end.
"Hello, sweetheart. Haven't seen you since that awful derezzing incident. I blame you just a little bit. Can't tell your wife you killed a man and not expect a little healthy push-back. A marriage only works as an equal partnership. So look out, mister!" She's setting out the dishes and being super awesome and he still finds it all too much. "Now you're just guessing what I want from you?" Yeah, she says: "A typical human reaction, if you think about it. Neurotic, adorable even. Very authentic." She tries to make love to him, then, as she always does. It's built into the system; we are Nature Boys and Nature Girls. Every single one of us desperate to be alone and never be alone. Made to love.
"My entire future is riding on fixing the Resurrection program, which is you. I have two weeks to pass you off as an emotionally recognizable human being. If I don't, I'm dead." Amanda points out that if "she" were there and he accused her of being an inauthentic human being, she'd try to fuck the stupid out of him too -- which, ha, is very true, but only after bitching him out and making that scary hard face she makes -- and they collaborate, gorgeously, gorgeously acted and gorgeously imagined, as Amanda takes over his thinking about her thinking and they argue about whether or not she's being authentic at this time, and she speaks like a doctor for once: "We don't have a control group, do we? Because we don't have her." And she kind of loses her shit altogether, goes full harpy on him, about how he's a "frakking nasty monster who deserves to be alone" and that she hopes the Ha'la'tha does kill him, and he's shocked and she smiles and asks if that's what he wanted: Her hate.
So he deletes her, and he deletes her backup, and that's the end of Amanda. The best story this show ever told.
And this too has happened before, and will happen again. In the end, they just told Boomer's story -- and Caprica's story, and Athena's -- in the context of a single scene. And the three very different endings those three women found to this story are a parable about our options, as Nature Boys and Nature Girls, and how easy it is to forget those options when you let somebody else drive. When you let yourself be their dream and not your own; when you are a mirror for a door inside somebody else. When you forget that you always own the sand and stone beneath your feet; when your answer to the question "Are you alive?" is not firm and quick and immediate, fierce and on fire with the knowing of the answer to the question. When you forget who painted the sky; when you forget what you are here for.
Olaf and Nestor quickly download Heaven from infinity; Clarice celebrates in ones and zeroes and sees her name like fire written in the scrolls to come. Downtown Jordan seals his fate and theirs, selling out his CI finally so that he can take down their cell; begging Singh not to burn his spy. Singh with one side of his mouth tells Clarice that her wife, the mother of her new son, must be killed. He is her confessor, in the Matrix. She stares down at Mar-Beth and Amanda and her lip curls with a vicious holy vengeance.
And with the other side of his mouth, Singh smiles. "We're all on the same side," Singh says, and Jordan knows that he's lying. But we know a better truth than that, don't we? It only looks like war.
It's time, Lacy knows, and she and Odin put everything they've got into it. Every vicious thing Barnabus awoke in her, every way that Odin has learned to hate this whole stupid conflict. The One God rises in them and protects them and they take out every single one of the Poly bastards. And of all the beauty in their violence, and it is beautiful, the greatest is this: Lacy's monumental disappointment, that they could take something as fine and strong and beautiful and necessary as faith, as God's love, and make it just another sick, sad game for old men to show their cocks to one another. Just another war. She slams a rifle butt into the leader's face, again and again, demanding his apology for ruining God's face with guns and pain and bombs. Until Diego returns from the dead, and grabs her arm, and smiles at her with a pride and religious fervor that she's once again awakened in his heart. It was a training exercise. Nobody was killed, no children were airlocked. They have done well. They'll land in an hour.
This time, Amanda is real. Kind and slicing in the same voice, a real woman, his real wife. Telling him truth with so much love it barely hurts at all: "That crazy confidence of yours is just the side you let everyone see. This side, what's going on right now? This fear and this anxiety? That is always there. That is always with you. It eats at you, you overcome it. And it gives you forward momentum. That's how you work. Without that, I don't think your little empire would exist." So in essence, Daniel asks, she's saying he exploits his own fear to get what he wants? "You exploit anything that isn't nailed down. That's my theory."
She smiles when she says it. What she's really saying is something the program still wouldn't understand how to say: When you look into my eyes, she's saying, I see all of you. The bright and shining bits and the ugliest parts you can barely see yourself. "The truth hurts, pal," she says, but they both know it doesn't. Not really. Not in any places that don't deserve better. She would come home now, today, if she weren't making secret plans and avenging their daughter and saving the world in ways she can't tell him about yet. But they do kiss, and they make love. And you're thinking, and he's thinking, what if this is all in the holoband and it was never real? But it is, and it was, and they are knitting themselves back together.
Amanda gets a text and leaves him sleeping; Clarice calls somebody and asks her where she is. Amanda walks through the park, to meet someone; Clarice pulls out a knife, to meet someone. Amanda walks past a stand of trees; Clarice stalks someone past a stand of trees. In the sunlight Mar-Beth's hair is nearly as bright as Amanda's. Clarice slits her throat from behind, drops the knife; Amanda retrieves her new tech from the bench where Jordan left it. Olaf and Nestor dispose of the body while Clarice walks the baby home in its pram, his mother's blood still staining his mother's hands.
Singh notifies Jordan that Mar-Beth has been murdered, and with the other side of his mouth asks if he's heard from his CI. Jordan admits he hasn't heard from her, and with that same mouth says, "Heard from Clarice Willow, though. She reported her wife missing. Apparently, there was a fight. Mar-Beth stormed out. Clarice chalked it up to postpartum depression, but hasn't seen or heard from her since." Singh tips his hand, promising he had nothing to do with the murder. Jordan looks directly into his eyes and they can both hear the ticking of this clock as they close in on each other and he says, "We're all in this together, sir." It only sounds like a lie because it is one.
Lacy settles in and joins the cocktail mixer already in progress as they welcome the new recruits. Diego has her marked as one to watch; the fake Poly hijacker joins them -- Kevin Reikle, STO Praetor -- and she apologizes for what she can only think to call "beating you." He grins, he hears her; she is one to watch. Everybody heads inside to the meal and Odin looks over at a battlement, heart beating in his chest. Take a bite of this apple; hear it crunching in the machine.
Down below, in a courtyard, with the whole STO dining happily, down below where nobody can see but them: All the ones who failed to martyr themselves. All the faithful who failed. On their knees, shivering; noses dripping snot as they sob in fear. Taken out by a gunman past a stand of trees. "Never forget who these people are. And what they're capable of." She won't. She's one of them. That's why she continues to watch; she's earned that responsibility. Whatever happens is entirely up to her. This is the answer to the question of why she's come to Gemenon: One more good intention and justice for our lost innocence. An end to grief.
Or if not the whole answer, at least part of it: Once Odin's gone inside the executioner appears, gun in hand, red eye racing; she turns to look up at Lacy. Gears shifting, gyros whining, hydraulic legs pumping, bringing her closer to her prey. Almost a ton of pressure on each pivoting, piston-fed foot. It's cold as Vancouver on Gemenon at night, your breath makes clouds. In the absolute silence all you can hear is that footfall, loud as whole worlds falling. And when the executioner stops, and looks up with something akin to recognition but closer to love, you can't even hear that. Maybe one of them is smiling, if you could see it. If you knew what to look for.