Caprica - Well. It’s. It’s complicated. (Welcome to the deep end, little one. It’s always deeper than you think.)

short and a bit chaotic. sorry.

Caprica: 1x08 End of Line.

Daniel

“End of Line” (the title itself being a mystery – and a line taken from the Cylon hybrids) is all about Daniel’s ultimate defeat. He is already desperate at the beginning of the episode when, in the case of continuously falling stocks, he finally has to sell his beloved Bucks to Vergis, but things get worse. Someone from the military tells him that they know he stole the chip, and as he can’t make it work, they are moving the deadline to next week. He’s already lost Zoe again (both he and Joseph are stuck in a never-ending circle of hope and loss…), and now Vergis is going to take the other things he loves as well, his wife (haunted by the idea that her husband could be responsible for the deaths of the Tauron guards), and his company.

Daniel: “No, let me tell you what we are going to do. We’ll treat these anomalies of yours like a cancer, we’ll irradiate the chip and burn them off. And then we’ll take the original MCP use that as a template and start cranking out new copies tomorrow, alright.

Philomon: “But we’d be destroying the original in the process along with everything that makes this prototype distinctive. Everything that makes it…”

Daniel: “What. Unique? a nifty poker player. Sweet Aphrodite I don’t know why I put up with your crap for so long. It is a robot, Doctor. It’s not a pet, and it’s definitely not a person, it’s no different than your fancy cell phone. And right now I don’t need a cell phone that will check my mail and wipe my ass, I need a cell phone that works.”

When Daniel’s phone rings at the end of the episode, we don’t know which news he received: that the prototype is destroyed after Zoe decides that she would rather go up in flames than to lose everything that makes her a person, or that Amanda’s suicide attempt was successful.

Clarice and Barnabas

The conflict between Clarice and Barnabas is about conflicting ideology: Clarice is the religious zealot, searching for a “key to heaven” which she thinks she will find in Zoe (Barnabas, mocking her, says “the leaders like actions, not crazy plans that make you into a bouncer into some homemade heaven”). Barnabas is the blood-thirsty realist, relying on terrorism to get his point across, and for now it seems that his strategy works better than Clarice’s, as she is far from getting close to Zoe. Barnabas is also more successful in getting through to Lacy, although he doesn’t even know that she holds the secret that Clarice is trying to find. Lacy needs him to get Zoe off-planet, but the prize she pays is high. Lacy is using Keon, but, as it turns out, this also works the other way around, and in the end, Lacy realizes that she is completely corrupted (she unknowingly plants a bomb in Clarice’s car, and if it wasn’t for Amanda choosing that exact moment to jump off the bridge, Clarice would be dead – these characters are connected in so many odd ways…). Before all this, she says, defeated, “I guess I’m not supposed to ask why” – which in a strange way mirrors her relationship to Zoe as well. Both Zoe and Barnabas are using her, and she lacks perspective to see what she has gotten herself into.

Lacy

Among all these flawed, selfish characters who mostly suffer because the things they want are conflicting (Daniel), they’ve never really dealt with past traumas and now that new ones have emerged, they don’t cope (Amanda), the connections they make are inherently deceptive because they are forged to win a power struggle (Clarice), Lacy, with her unquestioning devotion to Cylon Zoe, stands out. Zoe might feel betrayed because Lacy doesn’t actually have the ability to help, although she tries hard, but after the almost sadistic attempts to draw the ghost out of the machine last time, and Philomon’s inevitable betrayal upon finding out the true face of his love Rachel, she really is the only one remaining. In “Caprica”, not unlike “BSG”, it’s especially the devoted and true characters that are in for a lot of pain (at some point in the future, I’m sure, I’ll be reminded of Billy and Dualla…). Is Lacy doing all these things because she still feels guilty for not getting on the train with original Zoe, or for not realizing that Zoe would blow up the train (as Lacy still believes that Zoe was the one who did it?). She is a bit of a mystery.

Philomon is a tragic character: He truly believed that it won’t matter what Rachel looks like when he finally meets her, but in the end, Lacy is the only one who recognizes Zoe inside the machine (we can assume that Daniel would too, if she gave him a chance).

Joseph and Tamara

Tamara decides to provide her father with closure, or at least Emmanuelle, who turns out to be Evelyn, the investigating officer of the train attack and fellow Tauron, pushes her to do so (does she have any other motives than being in love with Joseph?). It’s interesting to see Admiral Adama’s childhood and youth from the perspective of his father, the man who just can’t accept the fact that he has lost his daughter – although now is probably the moment that he will have to come to terms with it, since she made sure that he actually sees her die, before killing him in New Cap City (where, as has been said so many times, you die for good). Of course she is now part of the game and can never leave – “You’re wasting your life. I don’t want you watching me. Because if that’s all you do, it’s all you’ll ever do”.

Random notes:

I’ve never paid much attention to the characters summing up what happened to them previously, but really, these small clips give you a lot of insight into the motivations that were probably only touched upon subtly in the episodes themselves. Clarissa if fighting against Barnabas to decide the future course of the STO. Lacy is ready to help Zoe, but she still doesn’t know what Zoe wants – and there is a hint in her voice that she might stop trusting her at some point, at least unquestionably.

Poor Lacy: all this for absolutely nothing. I kind of like how silently she accepted her defeat once Barnabas revealed that she had planted a bomb: she realized that this had gotten completely out of control and that she just had absolutely no way out. While Zoe had all these very teenager-y scenes with Philamon, Lacy is incredibly far away from actually still being one.

When Zoe raced towards the blockage, she had flashbacks to Zoe’s last day, including sending the message to Amanda: was she supposed to have these memories? Does Cylon Zoe know that Original Zoe did not plant the bomb?

“I want a cell phone that works”. iPhone dig?

Hearing James Marsters say “Hey Willow” is like…painful. Sob.

Daniel playing the theme music was pretty, and much more effective than angel!Starbuck’s realization that she wrote “All Along the Watchtower”. Yes, I am still bitter about that.