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.