The mid season finale left pretty much everyone apparently dead, and with Daniel Graystone mourning his loss of, well, everything. Poor Daniel. His daughter got blown up twice; his wife’s gone somewhere, probably off a bridge; his defense project and Pyramid team have been bought out from under him. He’s about as sad as Joseph Adama at this point. So where to go from here? Naturally, he wants to commodify sadness, or the avoidance of it. He knows how to make lemonade. But first he wallows in his sadness on the couch. He’s watching the news and it’s all pretty good, but not for him. The next day he wakes up late and hurriedly drags his scruffy bum to a meeting with Joe and the Ha'la'tha crime syndicate. He tries to get personal and sell them on the idea of helping him make lots of money re-creating dead loved ones in robot bodies, or virtually in holo-band land. They don’t like getting personal. After he’s sent away the leader talks to Joe about his assessment of Daniel’s personality and trustworthiness. Joe expresses doubts, which gets his promoted to ‘guy in charge’ of the project, and gives him a chance to use his sad face. Later he and Sam pay Daniel a surprise visit. While Sam rummages through his fridge, Joe talks to him about the way the deal will go down, and tries to impress upon him that this is more than a business deal. To illustrate that, he tells him they want him to press a button that will blow up his mom to cement the bargain. He calls their bluff but doesn’t press the button, and they say they were bluffing but now knew he was weak and tell him to think long and hard and long about playing with them. He then leaves his wife Amanda a sad lonely video message.
The other main storyline involves creepy Clarice and her adventures on Gemenon. She has an eerily similar plan, with very different ways of selling it. She has visual aids. After showing a group of religious leaders a virtual terrorist attack on a stadium in Caprica, she tells them her idea is to have the martyred monotheistic people uploaded into a virtual heaven type situation. She says this is the apotheosis thing she keeps going on about, that she has a way to make it so that when believers die they can live on in a virtual world. The hooded guys seem skeptical and the main hooded guy, Obal, calls it blasphemous. It seems like the people on Gemenon are rather low-tech, and unlikely to go along with such a fusion of religion and technology. Later she asks Obal to speak to ‘Mother’ (Meg Tilly) personally, and says that all the terrible deeds she’s done for STO make her worthy. He shrugs and says he’ll do what he can. Apparently what he can do is tell Mother that he’d like to have Clarice killed. He tells her that although she’s been with them since childhood and rose quickly through the ranks, she has a messiah complex and he‘s ready to get rid of her if Mother approves. We’ve heard that before. Mother says sure, do what you want. After complaining to a random STO guy named Diego about the church being too nice to the polytheistic rebels on Gemenon, he tells her she’s been touched by god. Kissy times ensue. As she’s reminiscing about Zoe telling her the idea that she stole, Obal comes back to tell her Mother said to come talk to her. She tells him it was the hand of god that brought her Zoe and her resurrection program, and he asks her if she wants to serve god or be god. Instead of taking her to Mother, he leads her into a chamber and as she asks where they are Diego comes in looking stabby. She has an ‘Et tu, Diego?’ moment, but then Diego stabs Obal in a very romantic way. The other hooded guys come over and give him the Caesar treatment, and everyone looks relieved. Except for Mother, watching from above. She does meet with Clarice though, and manages to act surprised that she almost got killed. She tells Clarice that she doesn’t like the apotheosis thing but that she does like to just see how things go and wing it, so she tells her to go ahead and knock herself out doing this silly little science project or whatever. When she asks what Clarice needs she says control over all the STO cells on Caprica. Mother says sure, and then asks what else she needs. Clarice replies that she’ll come back with a list. This lady’s pretty easy going after all. And spooky.
Other scenes include what Lacy is up to with the STO people in Caprica. Apparently she is still hanging out with them and while she seems not too enthusiastic about it, she manages to convince them otherwise by cutting her hand in some ritual. Also, while Tomas Vergis is in charge of the robot army defense project, he can’t get the charred remains of the robot Zoe was in to show any activity. He moves along making robots and hoping that the copies of the chip will work in them somehow, and tells Cyrus to just melt down the blown up toasted toaster rather than bothering to box it. Cyrus seems sad, but tells Vergis he doesn’t care about it. In another scene he meets with Daniel and tells him about the development, and reveals himself as a sort of corporate double agent. He tells Daniel that he’s still waiting for the robot to ‘wake up’ and that while the MCP chip was broken they were able to make copies that worked adequately even though they were far from sentient. Daniel criticizes him for settling into making warrior bots instead of the amazing sentient life-forms they originally wanted, and Cyrus tells him that he never let him in. Sounds like a breakup to me. But then he tells him to keep his head down so perhaps they’ll be friends with benefits.
The last part of the episode is pretty great, with the different story lines semi-concluding at once and bringing in new elements for the next episode. Daniel shakes hand with the Ha'la'tha leader, knowing what he may be asked to sacrifice for them. Cyrus tells a lab guy to quietly box the dead robot in case Daniel gets back to it, and then the lab techs are shown literally sealing it in a box in silence. In the New Cap City game a hooded figure walks the streets, and is harassed by some random thugs with Tamara’s ‘T’ logo on their foreheads. They call her a dead walker and say she’s in the wrong part of town. The hood comes off and surprise, it’s Zoe, and she beats them up ninja style. The last guy is troublesome, and says he’ll shoot her even though she can’t die just because it’ll hurt really bad. She freezes him with some sort of Jedi mind trick and he gets scared. When she asks about the symbol on his head, he says it’s another dead walkers’. Then she says she’s looking for her and when he doesn’t know where she is, she says he can go and kills him. The final scene is of Daniel’s video message playing on a computer, with a slow pan to reveal… Amanda. Very not dead, though rather sad looking as usual. She leaves him a reply saying she just needs time and closes the computer as Clarice comes in, looking tired but accomplished, and glad to be home.
It seems like this episode set up a transition into more of the substance of the plot now that we’ve gotten all the characters figured out. I was kind of disappointed at the pacing, but I think that was only because I was hoping to have all of the story lines brought back all at once. There are simply too many things going on for that to happen. In that way this show reminds me of the Wheel of Time books, but I’m pretty patient so I’m excited to see what other little parts of the plot will line up next week. Eventually I want to see how Daniel and Clarice manage their conflicting yet similar uses for Zoe’s program and how Zoe will deal with being in the virtual world as a sort of purgatory. And then there are all the other side-items, like what’s Lacy up to anyway? Does she have a mind of her own now? The show's been moved to Tuesday night instead of Friday, and I'm not sure if that's a good sign.