EPISODE REVIEW: Caprica: “Know Thy Enemy” (Episode 6, or possibly 7 depending on who you’re talking to)

As predicted, Caprica’s ratings rebounded some last week, despite it being a somewhat sub-par episode. Interestingly, they still came in a hair beneath “Reins of a Waterfall” two weeks ago. I’d have figured they’d have surpassed it by a fair margin. Ah well. In any event, the doomed “Little Show that Can’t” did manage to far-exceed its series low two weeks ago for “Gravedancing.” So is this their comfort level? Will the ratings hold at 1.12 million-ish per week?
They’d better not. That basically means they’re blowing $2.49 for every viewer watching this show. By contrast, Stargate: Universe - itself not exactly blazing ratings glory - is only blowing about $1.58 per viewer on average. It’s probably no surprise, then, that SGU has been unofficially renewed already, according to behind-the-scenes people attached to the series ( http://www.republibot.com/content/breaking-news-stargate-universe-has-been-picked-second-season ) while Caprica hasn’t. And likely won’t .
“But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, now was the play?”
PLAY BY PLAY
Lacey Rand - meets with “Barnabus,” a hatchet man for the Soldiers of the One. She asks him to get Zoe’s package to Gemenon. He refuses, and tells Lacey’s love interest to spy on her for him.
Philomon, the Robot Fetishist - can’t get a date, though he’s on the dating sites. “Twelve worlds, and not a single woman wants to go out with me.” When he’s not looking the Zoebot sends him an email through the dating site, calling herself “Rachel.” They meet, and he’s a bit smitten with her.
Sister Clarice - drinks some hooch, smokes some hash, and in between she fake-befriends Amanda Greystone and downloads the entire contents of Daniels’ home computer, in an attempt to find the “Living Zoe Avatar.” Later on, in “Confessional” with her superiors, she asks for more time and expresses concern about Barnabus running around blowing things up, and lays out some plans for a computer-based “Apotheosis” for the church. The church remains skeptical.
Daniel Greystone - suffers pangs and nightmares of guilt when the man Daniel stole the MCP chip from shows up politely asking for revenge for the two murders Daniel caused in order to steal the chip. “I’ll buy the Buccaneers. I don’t know if I’ll destroy them or win a championship, whichever cuts you deeper.”
Amanda Greystone - Continues to be really lonely, and easy prey for creepy predators like Sister Clarice. Also, she has a pretty spectacular hinder for a middle-aged woman. Way to go, Paula Malcomson!
Joe Adama - has his secretary track down the kid who told him about Tamara from last week, buys a holoband to (ineffectually) try to track down his daughter, rebuffs a pass from his secretary, and gets the prize for best line of the episode: he explains away his tattoo by saying “I got some Tauron on me.”
Barnabus - mortifies his own flesh, and sets some bombs at holoband centers. Refuses to help Lacey - giving the impression of being barely in control of himself while he does it - and then orders her love interest/his lackey to spy on her.
OBSERVATIONS -
This episode takes place one month after the murder, which means all these episodes have taken place about 4 or 5 days apart on average. This actually mostly tracks, though I think the Greyson’s relative return to social normalcy and recovery from the loss of their daughter is a bit too fast.
We’ve established that at least four other members of Sister Clarice’s creepy 24/7 bisexual swingers party/group marriage are members of the cult, and in on the whole thing. Clarice herself, who was so steely and polished in the pilot, seems positively dowdy in this one. It’s a little unclear what the Soldiers of the one are trying to accomplish. There are apparently independent-but-overlapping cells in Caprica City, with Barnabus running one of the, and blowing up random holoband centers. His lackey (Lacey’s eventual beau) actually built the bomb that took out the train, however they all seem genuinely surprised that it was used for that, and Barnabus - despite being clearly a freakshow - seems to be limiting himself to unoccupied targets after hours.
It’s worth noting that in the Bible, “Barnabus” (Or, more properly, “Bar Nabus”) was the most significant of St. Paul’s disciples and traveling companions, and evidently his best friend for most of that time. Eventually they parted ways over a theological difference of opinion. Paul was evidently cut to the quick by this defection and the epistle in which he mentions it shows some profound emotion.
While on the Biblical name thing, “Philomon” is obviously derived from Philemon, another of St. Paul’s disciples. One of Paul’s epistles was written to him, which basically reminds the man of his subordinacy to Paul, and discusses the issue of slavery. This may or may not be relevant, as Philomon is clearly very subordinate to Daniel Greystone.
Anyway, getting back to the Soldiers of the One’s aims - I find myself wondering about their religion. On the one hand, it’s monotheistic and violent, on the other hand what little we’ve heard about their theology (Mostly by inference) makes little sense. They believe God’s emissaries aren’t to be questioned, and they apparently leave each of ‘em to more-or-less do what they want. Barnabus is listed as one, and no one seems interested in calling him on the carpet for the bombings. Conversely, Clarice seems to be somewhat on the outs with them, and her relationship with her superiors seems rather dicey. Her plan was to develop some kind of technical apotheosis (Which is the process of ascending to godhood) and “Give us all an afterlife that we can see and touch.” I assume she’s talking about the virtual world as a kind of eternal life. This makes me wonder if the STO even believe in an afterlife - some monotheistic groups don’t, most notably the Sadducees, or what. It seems apparent that they don’t have any kind of sexual code of conduct.
This is a fairly common theme in SF. Fred Pohl did some amazing work in this regard in his “Heechee” saga (Which is mostly worth reading, though there’s some gay stuff in there that’ll put off some more squeamish readers), and of course the brilliant (And frequently disturbing) Rudy Rucker has done some neat (And frequently disturbing) exploration of this theme in his books. Philip K. Dick did some things with this as well, just to name three. There are many others.
Something that moves this into full-on Rudy Rucker territory is the discussion of the Soul as basically a nexus of information. Clarice clearly thinks that the soul can be reconstituted from various online records - credit card statements, medical histories, insurance reports, digitized photos, 4th grade geography reports, etc - and that the sum of these parts is the whole of a person. Daniel Greystone himself took basically the same tack in the pilot to recreate Zoe and Tamara. Technically speaking, what they’re doing here is creating simulacrums, and not ‘souls’, but this distinction may be lost on this culture for all I know.
Interestingly, Zoe doesn’t think she’s the ‘real’ Zoe, and Tamara doesn’t know what she is, but suspects she’s a ghost.
The show is gradually getting more plot/arc driven and less overtly soapy. I don't think I like this.
Performances were all typically good, excepting Clarice who was typically wonky. Once again, Lacey jumped out at me as the best performance of the bunch. I totally buy her as a plucky, smart teenaged girl. Frankly, I buy her more than I do Zoe, who continues to kind of annoy me. I saw Allesandra Torressani on Talk Soup the other day, and was surprised by how personable and funny she was, but none of that really comes across here. I’m glad they gave her the chance to do something a little less mopey this time out, though her geek girl persona was a bit much.
Daniel *does* have a little soul patch. I didn’t notice it until last week, and now it’s all I notice. “Oh, did he say something? Sorry, I was mesmerized by the stupid tuft of hair.”
One nice little callback to the Original ‘70s Galactica: We hear a brief snatch of a religious radio show mentioning “The Book of the Word.” This was what the Colonial Bible was called in the original show. It was never given a name in the more recent Galactica. It’s worth remembering that in the original show, the Colonials were monotheists, by the way.
We get a brief glimpse of Tauron. (“Tauron City,” actually.) This is the first other colony we’ve seen on this show, and really only the second time in the RDM era they’ve shown us any other world (The other being the orgy of destruction at the start of the execrable “The Plan” TV Movie) CGI on the whole continues to be amazingly good - highpoint tonight being shots out the window of the bad guy’s apartment - though “Tauron City” looked a bit Star Trek:TNG for my tastes.
James Marsters said earlier this week that Caprica was “About the fall of the American Empire” and that he felt his character deplored the apostasy and immorality rampant in Colonial society. This tracks with what we’ve seen so far, and I think we can start to make some assumptions as to what this is all about.
A lot of people - myself included - have criticized the show for its creepy deviant sexuality, which I jokingly said “Makes gay look conservative by comparison” a while back. In BSG, the Baltar Angel talked about the decadence of Caprica City 50 years hence, and on Kobol and on “The real earth” and in New York. It’s just beginning to seem possible to me that all this sexed-up crap might not be a glorification of Sodom, but a justification for its eventual destruction. They *may* be saying this kind of stuff *isn’t* ok. The Soldiers of the One - and their eventual descendents, the Cylons - clearly feel themselves to be the instrument of God’s judgment on humanity.
It *might* be.
More likely, they’re saying “It’s ok to be gay and into orgies and polygamy and all kinds of freaky stuff, and these square God-obsessed people are bringing down the shoe of oppression square upon our heads.” Even so, interestingly, the perspective of the ‘coming judgment’ I mentioned above remains as a subtext that they may not even be aware is there. Sometimes a writer will think their work means one thing, when in fact they’re simply too close to the finished product to be objective about it, and biases they don’t even know they have sneak into it. Babylon 5, for instance, ended up being much more conservative than Straczynski himself probably intended.
It’ll be interesting to see where all this goes, more interesting since I suspect the producers are unwittingly playing into the very thing that they consciously oppose.