THROW AWAY YOUR TELEVISION

I took sparse notes on this episode, and then waited two days to actually do the writeup, which has taught me an important lesson about how much easier this is when the show is fresh in my mind. You know, I realized watching this one that Joe never actually met Amanda. In fact, it’s kind of surprising in shows like this when you remember that some pair of main characters never actually ever saw each other. Most of the time, your main cast in a show tends to live or work together so everybody can be expected to know everybody else to some degree. In other random thoughts, Zoe’s holoband was making modem noises which could possibly make sense on some level. Sam has a little bull statue on the dash of his car, because he’s from Tauron. There’s a quick line in the Baxter Sarno interview about New Cap City, so it doesn’t come totally out of nowhere in the next episode.

Daniel and Amanda start to move on in the grieving process, on live TV as it turns out. Daniel makes the fateful decision to stop making money off holobands, hitching his company’s wagon completely to the incipient Cylon product line (which, let’s recall, has exactly one working robot. I don’t know much about manufacturing, but I don’t think you can really absorb the cost of a 99.9999% defective rate). Daniel caves in on calling Zoe “troubled,” which probably didn’t help his massive guilt complex but, hey, she and her ghost are gone, so nothing for it.

I appreciated that the show was willing not to stop and spell everything out when Amanda makes it clear to Daniel that she knows he’s bullshitting something when he said he was able to make a VR Avatar of Zoe that magically knew her secret opinions about the state of the world. Especially in a show like this, that deals with a lot of concepts and a lot of made-up rules, it’d be very tempting to hold the audience’s hand about things like the difference between Zoe-A, Tamara-A, and general dumb avatars. Actually, as long as the drama works, it doesn’t seem to matter how much you explain of the world. The people who care will figure it out, and the people who don’t will let it wash over them.

By the way, Alessandra Torresani dances really hypnotically.