So what Clarice is really saying is, the people of the Twelve Worlds have gone so far into Ravenclaw and Slytherin that Griffyndor isn’t even a possibility anymore. And letting faith speak for itself isn’t working, because sex and drugs — as she well knows — are way more awesome than self-denial. So how do you sell self-denial to people who can have everything in thereal world, and double that in the Matrix? By building a disgusting highway interchange that substitutes Slytherin and Ravenclaw for Griffyndor, because they’re too stupid to know the difference. They’ll drink the sand. And if you scare them bad enough, the downsides of that — the withering and eventual dropping-off of your leperous vestigial soul — won’t even matter anymore.
It’s the most cynical, nasty, wrong-headed thing imaginable. It’s also precisely the way we, as a country and a world, do tend to talk ofreligion: “I offer you a religion that removes the need for faith. A religion of certainty.” That’s the most hateful possible way to describe both sides of this fake, dumb IRL debate. It’s also how Dawkins got rich, because that’s what it looks like to a Ravenclaw: Like sheep, praying to Santa Claus. She’s not wrong — they’re not wrong — but she’s right on such an adverse, horrific vector that I’d rather see the apocalypse come about. (Luckily…)
Which is sort of something my doctor told me a few weeks ago, during one of our periodic Is This Normal or Is This The Crazy conversations. Some things just suck, hard, and they’ll suck until they don’t. Death. Disappointment. Rejection. Breakups. Endings in general. They just suck, and you can’t force them to not suck, and you can’t make a secret reward where there isn’t one for having gone through it, and you can’t make the suck Virtuous and you can’t make it Necessary and you sure as hell can’t make it shorter.
It is exactly what it is. No matter how much you drink or work or run or think, it still sucks. You just have to keep walking upright. It sucks. It hurts. Sometimes you want to lie down and kick your feet and flail your fists like a two-year-old. Guess what? So does everybody else. Everybody else feels like this, at least a certain portion of the time. That’s not much of a comfort, but it isn’t The Crazy talking. The reason I say all the time that we get back up is seriously, tell me what else there is to do? What other choices do we have? This show is about what if we had other choices, and I think it’s pretty clear how horribly wrong it’s going to end up being.
Quick takes: Everybody gets NASTY. Daniel, who sort of always was that way though DAMN, Clarice, who went all killative on Pann and Hippolyta (seriously?), Barnabas, who shoots Keon IN THE NECK, and Amanda, who opens her very best gun safe and takes out her very best gun and puts it in her ugliest purse. And we say our relationships are complicated.
The lack of Serge is making it very hard for me to develop a Caprica Drinking Game.
So now Daniel has the Zoebot to play with. Goody. I was concerned he’d get lonely in the house with only the Tauron mob to keep him company.
Is Willie still on the show? For that matter, is Joseph?
Clarice asked Holy Mother Nutbar last week if she could have control over all the STO cells on Caprica. I guess to her that meant, can I just killinate anybody who bugs me? Resounding yes, but where does that leave her? In need of new recruits. I wonder who they’ll be. I wonder if any of them will be older than twenty.
Is Lacy going to end up being the only one on the show I like? She might be. She was the only one pointing out to all and sundry that ALL their plans sucked ass, but then everybody keeps hitting her Berserk Button and accusing her of disloyalty, which just twigs her guilt about Zoe and so she overcompensates. Still, she seems to be emerging as the very fucked-up voice of reason here. Lord knows Caprica could use one.
A.
Lacy has always fascinated me because she keeps ending up in the little intersecting set where other characters overlap. If she ever grows a fully functioning spine, she will be awesome.
Amanda, poor black and blue Amanda. Badly used by everyone she trusted. She’s going to do some damage, bacause really, why the fuck not?
I was kind of freaked out by Jacob saying the show has somehow become less than it was and all the great female characters have taken a backseat to the men. I don’t get that at all. It seems a bit early in the game to make that kind of assessment.
Virgo, I thought that bit was somewhat … overwrought, in the vein of the final Galactica recap, but it is early days.
I feel like Lacy is in some ways the viewer stand-in, and most of us would end up being a Lacy, trying to have it both ways, than we would end up being a Clarice or a Daniel or a Joseph.
A.
http://www.afterellen.com/tv/recaps/2010/10/caprica-recap-1-12
I’ll have to rewatch because I found it so bleak that my mind wandered.
My wife, who loved Galactica with me, halfway through this episode said, “I don’t like any of these characters, so I’m having a hard time getting engaged by the storyline.” It wasn’t just the bleakness in this episode, but the continuing despicability from one episode to the next.
She has a point – Galactica made complex charcters by moving the target often on whom was the heel and whom was the babyface under the plot circumstances. Some were continuing assholes (Saul, Baltar) whom rose at certain times and fell quite often, but even Dudley Do-Right, err . . , Helo, was an asshole once too.
Dr. A had the same reaction that idiosynchronic’s wife did. She was cranky, edgy and in a bad mood after we watched Caprica.
I like dark and edgy stuff but all the characters this season have been total shits through and through. I’ll stick with it for awhile but wish there was someone, anyone to like even partially. Hell, I think Pete Campbell in Mad Men is a douchebag but I like some things about him; particularly his love of urban life in Noo Yawk.