AND WE WERE INTERESTED IN HER AND HER CLIENTELE

So, what’s the giveaway with Clarice? At the beginning of the episode, a construction worker immediately pegs her as a member of the clergy, despite the fact that she’s in plain clothes and hasn’t said anything. My best guess is that giant ring she wears. I don’t think we ever saw any of the priests later on wearing anything like that, though.

Clarice’s attempts to ingratiate herself with Amanda go off swimmingly, aided by Amanda’s nervous breakdown. And, might I say, the fact that the Darius storyline doesn’t go anywhere is a frakking mercy compared to the original concept that Vergis hired an actor to impersonate Amanda’s dead brother in the hopes of provoking a mental breakdown as part of his campaign of vengeance against Daniel. I mean, Jesus. We were really spared some awful, awful things thanks to further consideration, weren’t we? I’m not even going to talk about Saul and Ellen’s marriage almost becoming the lynchpin of the finale. Yet. Anyway, after Amanda and Clarice go out to the Dive, Clarice begins telling her how she needs to trust in God, and Amanda obliviously asks which of the gods she’s talking about. In light of that drunk-dialing deleted scene I talked about before, I think we can conclusively say that Clarice is the worst secret terrorist ever. Amanda isn’t doing much better, since she’ll be utterly shocked once Durham tells her the Willow family is one giant STO cell. In the deleted scenes, Clarice snaps out of it with admirable swiftness and fingers Zeus as the god in question. Yep, just go to Zeus with all your problems. He’s the guy you need.

There’s an interesting moment after Daniel comes home and he’s so distracted that he repeatedly almost notices that Amanda had someone over, and once it finally sinks in, he asks if he should be jealous. Amanda say’s she isn’t sure yet. I don’t recall if there was ever any compelling indications that Clarice and Amanda actually got it on at any point. I suppose if it happened, it was probably while they were in her secret love cabin after the suicide attempt. I’ll have to keep an eye out for that when I get there.

WHO MAKES THE RULES? SOMEONE ELSE

There was also a deleted subplot with the GDD using their new facial recognition software (acquired in an earlier episode’s deleted scene) to mass-screen the spectators of a Pyramid game. There’s some stuff with Durham going after a guy who’s 75% likely to be an old-hand STO bomber who’s served his time and been released, arresting him because he looks like he might be an ex-con at a sporting event. The real meat is another one of Durham’s cracking anti-Monad speeches. I always loved how twisted these were, ever since a quote from his first one in “Pilot” was put into an early review about the dangers of a single God who could, on a whim, decide that murder or theft were morally virtuous. More or less, he says today that “Monotheists are weak people who need God to tell them right and wrong because they have no sense of personal conscience or respect for law.” Can’t say I never met someone religiously or politically doctrinaire enough to have that description apply to them. I may use it sometime myself.

SHE’S GOING TO SMILE TO MAKE YOU FROWN, WHAT A CLOWN

Zoe and Philo go on a date where, in her attempts to sweet-talk him into taking the robot on a field trip to Gemenon, she accidentally explains why her chip is different from all other chips. There’s a bit of eyecandy with proto-Vipers that, interestingly, have Greystone logos painted on them. That’s probably because they’re in a computer game, and not because Greystone actually manufactures Vipers. I’m curious about what all those off-shore platforms were for, though. Do you need to get that much petroleum if you aren’t burning it for fuel? Zoe’s loose lips, along with Vergis taunting him about how the chip he stole was a lemon, finally let Daniel put two and two together and realize Zoe-A faked her death and is still in the U-87. It’s still odd to me that no one ever commented on how the robot’s eye would go crazy whenever someone talked about Zoe, but I guess no one pays attention to the help.

Lacy continues her attempt to get the STO to take the robot to Gemenon through the magic of flirting (it’s a shame she doesn’t know how much they want killer robots. It’d make things so simple to just ship Zoe with a batch of other U-87s. Of course, the others won’t work until she abandons the chip to give them a duplicatable operating system, so it’s a bit of a catch 22, there). Ben’s friend explains the holocafe bombings are being prompted by the fact that V-World allows people to go and sin against God’s will without having to face the consequences of their amoral behavior as they would in the real world. This is actually pretty similar to the reason Zoe-A will condemn V-World heaven in the finale, but it also opens up an interesting philosophical question: are evil acts still evil if they’re divorced from their negative effects? And, if they aren’t, then what’s the intrinsic problem with V-World depravity? I mean, there’s the concern that it can lead to acting out in the real world, the theory Baxter Sarno advanced, but Zoe and Barnabus were offended that people would even contemplate doing the sorts of things seen in V-World, even if the reasons they were wrong didn’t exist there, just leaving the theater and spectacle of it all.

It’s a complex question, and I’m a little surprised they never had anyone challenge Zoe-A to explain why, for instance, a human sacrifice was so bad if no one actually died in it?

SHE WAS A GIRL, SOFT BUT ESTRANGED

Joe begins his wild trip through V-World. When he’s talking to Tad and convincing him to help him look for Tamara, he seems really fuzzy on the relationship between the Avatar and the original. This despite the fact that Tamara-A is so obviously not the same person as Tamara. I’m going to chalk this one up to his mind being clouded by grief, as well as Daniel’s attempt to up-sell the realness and perfectibility of the Avatars. Still, the makes me wonder whether Adama would’ve bought Clarice’s spiel about V-Heaven.

There’s a hilarious deleted scene where he tells Tad/Heracles to stop calling him “Joe,” and when Tad says “Or what?” Joe reaches up and yanks his holoband off, making him scream and cry like a little girl since “That’s connected to my brain! You don’t go ripping things off people’s brains!” Don’t be a baby. Adama didn’t blubber like that when Daniel yanked off his holoband a few weeks ago. The whole bit is something to think about and smile the next time a keyboard warrior starts getting under your skin.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it in these reviews yet, but I’ve always wondered about the blimp in New Cap City. Is it an in-game hazard, or is there some asshole who’s been playing the game for months or years, saved his cubits, and then went and bought a blimp and just uses it to grief the other players? I have to say, I’m personally a fan of the asshole theory. Anyway, Tad gets blasted by the blimp, leaving an opening for Emmanuelle to show up. It’s never really gone into, but we get another look at the kind of person who plays New Cap. Evelyn is a professional adult, but she’s evidently quite experienced with the game, and can play the role of disinterested guide for Adama to the hilt, enough so that it didn’t seem likely to me that she might be someone Adama knows until well into the next episode (also, I’m looking at the DVD, and I’m surprised that this whole arc is only three episodes. The second quarter of the season feels a lot more dense, story-wise, than the first quarter).