Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT The Apple & The Amp
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 14 | Aired on 01.04.2011
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.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 next. 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.