I was putting together something to eat before I started the episode and let the menu play through. I am not impressed by the production values of this DVD. Okay, the menus are just a little extra flair, and so long as they get me to the episodes, commentaries, and deleted scenes, and those are all high quality, great. I get that. But the top menu has the opening credits theme to the show playing. Trouble is, it’s ripped from one of the episodes. You can hear the cylon eye at the end from the zoom-in to Zoe-A. I mean, come on. I have a clean copy of the theme, and I didn’t even work on the show.

WHAT THE MAMA SAW, IT WAS AGAINST THE LAW

One of the big things in this episode is Amanda discovering more of Zoe’s double-life, culminating in the big Terror-Mom scene. I’d kind of forgotten that that happened this early in the show, so when I saw the very first shot of the episode was Zoe-A’s memory of the infinity brooch, I assumed it was a case of planning ahead, foreshadowing its importance in the second half of the season as the backup copy of the avatar program. Alas, it was not to be the case, and it proved to merely be foreshadowing the end of this episode. Well, you know, whatever. I’m already way more invested in these people thanks to the later episodes, so the show’s already retroactively become better.

I was curious last week, and more so now, as to exactly what Durham found to link Ben and Zoe to the bombing, and each other. I suppose Ben isn’t too hard- he’d be the only victim with remains on every part of the train, but there’s no indication of exactly what evidence he had to join him to Zoe and Zoe to the STO. If it was just circumstantial, since Ben was the bomber and Zoe was a classmate on the same train, then you’d expect him to have come down a lot harder on Lacy, since it seems to be a matter of fact that she played hooky on the same day and almost went on the train with them, since Amanda knew about it. Apparently, there was something deeper in the investigation that joined Ben and Zoe to STO. It wasn’t Ben’s previous pickup with bomb materials, since they won’t find the record of that for another couple episodes.

Anyway, I’m getting away from what prompted this, which is the fact that Zoe never brought Ben home to meet mom and dad. I can totally understand this. Not only was original Zoe an evil, conceited bitch who hated her parents, Ben is incredibly creepy and not the kind of guy you want to have to introduce to anyone in the age of majority. That didn’t go both ways, though, as we found with Mama Stark at the memorial. It does prompt the question of whether Druham gave her the same “Sorry, lady, you birthed a mass-murderer” talk he gave to Amanda. She seemed awfully composed, so I’m guessing not. On the other hand, she can’t have avoided the news, even if she didn’t go to the briefing for the victims’ families that Joe and Daniel met at, so she probably would’ve recognized the Monad paraphernalia for what it was. Maybe she was STO, too. Though, again, why wasn’t Durham riding her ass the way he was going after Amanda?

Speaking of the STO swag, I admire the restraint in the final edit. In the deleted scenes, we see the video Amanda was watching of Lacy recording Zoe wearing the infinity brooch in its unedited form, where Amanda would’ve seen Zoe bragging about Lacy being her first convert to the STO, talking about how God made everyone in His image, and screaming out “Look at my giant fucking Monad brooch!” Without that, it’s much more plausible that Amanda would only recall Zoe wearing it once she got the real thing from Mrs. Stark, and then flip out. Trust me, I know from denial, and you can willfully ignore all sorts of unsettling little details like wearing cult symbols, but only so long as the subject of your denial doesn’t go out and draw attention to it. That just ruins the whole “You pretend you’re not doing anything upsetting, and I’ll pretend you’re not terrible at hiding it, and we’ll both be happy” dynamic.

HE WAS A MEAN INDIVIDUAL, HE HAD A HEART LIKE A BONE, HE WAS A NATURALLY CRAZY MAN AND BETTER OFF LEFT ALONE

Back in the Adama household, Joe is having trouble adjusting, trying to pick up Willie from Tamara’s school. Apparently, more than once. Luckily, that just gives Sam more time to corrupt the little bastard, with helpful advice like “If you run, you’re guilty of two things, the thing and the running away from the thing,” “Give in on the little things, and they’ll miss the big things,” and, my personal favorite, “If someone tries to make you feel guilty, you just start talking about whatever makes them feel guilty,” which Willie used to great effect on his own father, complete with a little shit-eating grin during a heartfelt father-son hug.

It’s much easier to be down on Willie now that I know he won’t become Bill Adama. I don’t think Bill would resort to that kind of sneaky psychological manipulation. Bill was far more direct with his psychological manipulation (“I could smell her, like a dog in heat. Smelled so good”). Though I am probably going to remember that bit about asking to pay the fine. That’s the sort of thing you just don’t learn leading the exemplary (read: boring) life I have. Now I know what to do if I ever run into that son of a bitch again and can’t keep myself from beating the pretty off his face with my bare goddamn hands. Don’t run away, ask about the fine. Easy.

There’s also some good Adama in the deleted scenes, including a bit where Joe throws away Willie’s Graystone PSP and tells him to read a book, saying “He’ll thank me when he’s older.” And Bill Adama did love his books, having so many that they wouldn’t even stay on the shelves, and his quarters were filled with loose stacks of novels. A man after my own heart, who apparently benefited from his parents explicitly preventing every personality flaw possessed by his namesake. In the same scene, Ruth advises Joe to beat the crap out of Graystone, despite not knowing who Joe is upset with or why. I’m wondering if Grandma didn’t get that name because she is, in fact, ruthless.

“GOD DIDN’T CREATE THE CYLONS, MAN DID. AND I’M PRETTY SURE WE DIDN’T INCLUDE A SOUL IN THE PROGRAMMING.”

There’s some clumsy dramatic irony in Zoe-A’s flashback to first being introduced to Ben (in a V-World temple to God which… well, let’s call it a fixer-upper) being told by original Zoe that, “You’re a gift, and everyone will know it soon.” Given the schizophrenic way this show developed, I honestly can’t tell if that was intended to be an ironic comment on her being the first of the race that would bring about the end of humanity, or a double-ironic reverse because she was going to try to stop the STO later on. At least with the sly reference to Amanda’s previous institutionalization, I know that that was intentional. Also on the foreshadowing front, Philomon could’ve very easily been killed when Zoe was freaking out in the truck and he tried to talk her down, which is pretty much exactly what happened to him in the end. Odd that he was much more sympathetic to the robot when it was just a really smart robot, and couldn’t get away from it fast enough once he found out it was also his girlfriend. I mean, he didn’t even stop fetishizing the U-87 when it bit off his buddy’s finger. His buddy was an asshole, though. “It’s not a person, it’s a tool.” “She likes it rough, she told me.” Jackass, even if you are “only” risking the bosses favorite robot.

Caprica killed or wounded a lot of kids, didn’t it? Maybe it got away with it because so many of them were jerks.

There’s a deleted scene where Zoe-A talks to Serge. I actually thought that was just a little logic patch that they inserted into Serge’s twitter to explain how Lacy kept sneaking into the house, but, nope, they actually filmed him finding out that Zoe was in the robot. I’m not sure if that scene was before or after the one where Daniel tells Amanda that Serge has a crush on the U-87… could this be our first robo-mance? Are these star-crossed lovers going to foreshadow the profound weirdness that is Tigh and Caprica Six? Or the just plain horridness of Cavil and Tough Six? Oh, God, I just thought about that scene three seasons before I actually need to deal with it.

There’s fun bit of business where Zoe-A picks up a miniature giraffe extremely gently, sits on the bed, breaks it, and then puts down the giraffe, still gently. And then she sits on the bed again, not having learned her lesson, though we only see that in Zoe-vision, so it’s hard to tell if she broke it more. I’m not sure if it means anything, but there was something familiar when Zoe-A told Lacy to “Take a good look” at her robot body. I feel like that line’s used elsewhere, like a “Would you kindly” sort of thing. Zoe worrying if the robot looks like a boy is also a good beat, especially on the rewatch. By the time “Here Be Dragons” comes around, we will find nothing at all unusual in a computer duplicate of a dead teenager’s mind taking over a combat robot which proceeds to beat her principle’s college-aged co-husband to death with its own arm, so it’s nice to have the reminder that all of this is extremely weird.

“HELP ME LISA! I HAVE SERIOUS MENTAL PROBLEMS!”

Oh, speaking of Nestor, the deleted scenes confirm he was, in fact, deliberately trying to seduce Lacy on orders from Clarice, who we now know for certain was using Homer Simpson’s winning strategy of telling the truth in a sarcastic tone of voice so you aren’t technically lying when her spouses gave her grief about it. I wonder what her “track record” was, anyway.

Which brings us to the list of miscellanea, mostly related to production design and world-building. Don’t complain, I actually made an effort to be organized this time instead of just throwing up everything more-or-less as it came up in the show. If you want more editing, start paying me.

The crate the U-87 was shipped in had the same vertical-and-diagonal paneling that was frequently seen in the interior walls of Battlestars. Maybe it’s a decorative thing related to the eight-sided paper.

I understand it would’ve been a pain to shoot and keep clean, but I wish they’d been able to chrome the metal bits on the real-world U-87 when the prop shows up in a few weeks. I just kept noticing this episode how shiny and metallic the CGI one was in shots where it would’ve been played by its physical counterpart.

I caught that the Willow kids were watching the nuclear power cartoon from “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” when Lacy came over for lunch, or, at least, a cartoon with the same music. I’ll have another Bear-related musing in a few episodes, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

They mention that it’s been two days since the end of (ugh) “Pilot,” yet Joe’s successfully put through the paperwork to change his and Willie’s names to “Adama” from “Adams.” He uses both names when he calls Willie’s school, and Serge refers to him as “Adama” when he tries to visit Daniel at the house (there’s a deleted scene where Daniel doesn’t recognize the name and then calls him Joe Adams once he sees him on the CCTV), so it must’ve gone through officially by now. I gotta say, Caprica must have one hell of a streamlined bureaucracy. I know someone who’s trying to change her name, and thinking you can go from deciding to do it to having everyone down to the butler-robots know about it is insane. I’m guessing there’s a lot of computerization involved in the record-keeping. That would also be something that, and I’m just throwing this out there, would make it fairly easily to plant a false war-record for a certain drunken freighter-monkey after a devastating twelve-year-long interplanetary conflict and have it percolate to everywhere it would need to be to seem real.

Just saying.

Clarice likes the hookah. Sadly, I did not spot any kids with guitars in the delightfully-named “Dive,” but we’re getting closer. Try the purple, it’s good shit.

Amanda has a “Look! We remember the themes of the parent show!” moment when, during the Terror Mom speech, she mentions that, as a parent, she created life, but then had to face what it ended up growing into. Indeed, don’t the Cylons make them all Terror Mom, in a way?

There was another deleted scene featuring home video of toddler Zoe on an “Apple Hunt,” which looked like the Caprican version of an Easter Egg hunt. I would love to know the cultural basis for this one. All I can think of is Paris and the Golden Apple. Honestly, the egg and rabbit symbolism would make far more sense on the face of it in a pagan society like the Colonies of Kobol than they do as reappropriated Christian imagery. I mean, they celebrate Solstice, for God’s sake. Let ‘em have their naughty nature-sex traditions with fertile eggs and shagging bunnies.

There’s a mention in another deleted scene of an actor coming out of the closet as a monotheist (complete with catty announcer quipping, “That’s right, he believes there’s only one god, and that it’s him!”). We see in another cut scene that the Adamas own a Graystone laptop (which wasn’t a MacBook, at least. It might’ve been an unmodified real-world PC but, frankly, there are so many gunmetal grey boxes with blue lights out there, I’d never be able to pick it out specifically).

We don’t see too much of it, but Lacy’s house… well, “modest” is probably the nicest way to put it. I wonder how her family manages to send her to what’s apparently one of the best (and, likely, most expensive) private schools in the Twelve Worlds. Or, at the very least, in the greater Caprica City metropolitan area.

Finally, just to rob some of the magic, the deleted scenes revealed that Serge is played in real life by an RC car with a three-foot-tall stick with a blue light on the end attached to the roof. I’m ruining all your illusions, I know. I’ll stop.

AND THEY HAVE A PLAN

Here we are. After a succession of attempts fell through, I’m taking the opportunity provided by the end of Caprica and the many months left before Blood & Chrome to do a complete rewatch of Battlestar Galactica. Including Caprica, webisodes, telemovies, and deleted scenes. And, to top it all off, in chronological order. And since it would be dull to just watch old TV on my own, I’m going to put into practice my own example of technology running amok and use the internet to inflict my thoughts on all of you, episode by episode.

Now, be warned, this project is a synthesis of the entire show, meaning that every entry is going to have spoilers as I tie things into other episodes, behind the scenes info, and suchlike. I’m going to spoil everything in Caprica. I’ll spoil everything in Battlestar Galactica. I’ll spoil novels and comics. I’ll spoil the original series. I am going to spoil things you didn’t even know existed. I might not even be making a point by doing it, and just I’m just mentioning things for the hell of it.

In short, if the words “apotheosis,” “hybrid,” “Pythia,” “Final Five,” and “Philip Glass” all seem unrelated, this probably isn’t something you should be reading. Go, watch Battlestar Galactica instead. You’ll probably enjoy it a lot more.

There’s going to be some new stuff in here for me, though. I haven’t seen Caprica on DVD yet, so all the deleted scenes will be new to me. Also, I’d been saving the extended episodes in season 4.5 for inevitable (though much delayed) rewatch, so those’ll be exciting to see, eventually.

Actually, come to think of it, I only watched the Caprica pilot in the advance-release DVD (thanks, Netflix!), and only skimmed a few scenes on Hulu of the TV cut. So this’ll be new to me, too.

ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE

I really hate it when they don’t name episodes. It’ll bother me with the miniseries, too. I mean, “The Miniseries.” What kind of title is that? It’s like they’re trying to force us into the nerd stereotype of referring to the episodes by number. Fifty quatloos to anyone who can think of the best title for (ugh) “Pilot.”

Anyway, wow, I took a lot more notes than I expected.

So, here we are, 58 years before the Fall, as the title card helpfully informs us. Well, give or take. Probably closer to 59 or 60. And look, there’s Gemenon, up in the sky. And we begin in the V-Club which, come to think of it, I don’t think we’ll ever visit again. By some twist of collective memory, or possibly because there are only so many places to film in Vancouver, it’s curiously similar to the Opera House in the City of the Gods on Kobol. I’m going to say that was intentional, given that the Opera House ended up being the symbolic representation of the crucible of human destiny. That makes it seem like the kind of imagery that would tend to pop up, even if it isn’t necessarily appropriate.

I realize it was intentional, to hit you over the head with the depravity (hence the BOOBS BOOBS BOOBS in the unrated cut) but the V-Club is really a pain in the ass, design-wise. You’ve got all these people humping on the dance floor, crowded in with no space between them. Meanwhile, the kids with the guns are just running around shooting everyone, and there’s a human sacrifice going on up the stage. In deference to television decency and the horror of the unseen, the orgies and the “really weird stuff” are in separate rooms, but, still. Must be annoying. And there was that stoned girl who came on to Daniel when he dropped into the V-Club. You’re just there to dance, and you’ve got someone’s foot up in your face, and a guy coming up out of nowhere to bust a cap in your ass, and this woman’s on stage and keeps turning into a wolf or a goblin or whatever the hell was up with that…

Anyway, that’s why I don’t go in for the club scene. Maybe there’s a V-Coffee House, where the kids go and read Kataris and play Dreilide Thrace covers on acoustic guitar. That’s more my thing.

“PASSCODE, TWO WORDS; ‘ZOE’S DEAD’”

So, among other things, the Pilot is notable for being the majority of our exposure to Zoe, Ben Stark, and the only thing we ever see of Tamara or Shannon Adams. I noticed that Zoe was very quick to question Ben’s commitment when he got nervous over her going home and risking the trip to Gemenon. Also, Ben was incredibly creepy. I mean, yeah, mass-murdering child-terrorist true believer but, still. He managed to rope in Zoe, both romantically and theologically. Maybe it’s that serial-killer panache.

Zoe also manages to make, possibly, the worst impression ever. Aside from sending her apology to her mom, she doesn’t do anything remotely sympathetic. During her argument with her parents, she slips in a reference to her father making his money from “dirty science,” which is ironic on so many levels. Of course, no one covers themselves with glory in this scene. Of particular note is the fact that Amanda immediately regrets striking Zoe for implying she married Daniel for the money, but she doesn’t apologize, even though she’s the one who takes Zoe to school the next day.

See, that’s one of my rules. You do something big like that, you make up promptly, because you never know when the person you wronged is going to be blown up by her boyfriend in a monotheistic terror strike. It happens more often than you’d think.

Now, Tamara, she is something else. Especially since I’m used to Tamara-A. We only see her for a few minutes, but she’s got a viciously sly sense of humor and is clearly a very bright girl. She quickly traps her dad into making an extra effort to be home on time (incidentally revealing that the bombing was on Willie’s birthday, and joking that if Joe screwed this up, Willie would need therapy for the rest of his life, which he did, though not for that reason, and not for as long as that phrase might imply), and after they get on the train, she brags to her mom about kicking a kid at school in the nads after he called her a Dirteater. Compare that to Tamara-A, who starts life raving, simpering, and with essentially no personality outside of the broadest strokes (I am a girl. I love my family). Even when she becomes queen of New Cap City, she’s still a cypher, and doesn’t have any of the personality she demonstrates in this one scene. Daniel’s later going to run into this same problem when he tries to perfect Grace™ by Graystone, except he apparently has a lot more to go on when he makes Stepford-Amanda. Tamara is just the most basic default, without even the unconvincing diary quotes (which is kind of amazing, since Daniel implies that she’d be easier to recreate as an AI than Shannon. Maybe he assumed that since she was younger, she’d have more stuff on the web to build of of). Clarice’s Apotheosis program probably made much better copies, since she had the original living brains to work with.

Lacy ended up being double-smart for skipping out on the train. Not only did she avoid being killed, when she did end up going to Gemenon, it kind of sucked. And this time, she wouldn’t have had any robot buddies to help her out.

Zoe-A must’ve had a rough two weeks just sitting in that room covered in blood. I wonder if she got bored. Its interesting that she was supposed to have a live connection from Zoe’s mind. Despite her apparent sapience, even her own creator intended her as a glorified PDA, an appendage to herself. Oddly, when she talks to Lacy, Zoe-A appears to have internalized all the bigotry she and her inheritors are going to face, saying “I’m not a person, but I feel like one.” That’s not going to keep her from getting pissed when she meets Daniel and he keeps ignoring her and calling her a thing.

An interesting tidbit on Tauron culture; when Sam tells Joe to find the terrorists and take revenge on them, Joe responds that he’ll grieve in his own way. I don’t tend to think of grief and vengeance being part of the same process, but there you go. Also, it’s much easier to deal with Willie being a little prick to his father when we know that he, in fact, isn’t the same Bill Adama that worshipped the ground his father walked on. Also, Joe refers to the attack as “the accident,” which is just another bit of his Capricanization. It’s okay. It’s nobodies fault. Sam later accuses him of crossing a line when he asks his mob contacts to steal the MCP chip from Vergis, which, in light of what’s going to happen over the next year, he certainly did.

Speaking of lines, Sam kills the racist defense minister with mob ties and Blade Runner glasses. There are a couple things to say about this scene. One; Is there ever a Battlestar Galactica sex scene that doesn’t end up being profoundly disturbing? Here’s Daniel and Amanda getting it on while Joe thinks very hard about crying and Sam slices and dices the old bastard. And on that note, Sam is stripped to the waist. Is that, like, a thing? Was it so the defense minister could see all his tats? Did he not want to get blood on his shirt? Was it warm that night? Maybe some kind of weird sex thing they didn’t go anywhere with?

In the flashback to Ben and Zoe trying to convert Lacy, Ben uses a similar line of argument to Baltar’s (“It’s not that the gods aren’t listening. It’s that they don’t exist.”) Of course, Ben goes on to condemn virtual promiscuity, something Baltar practically considered a sacrament. On the other-other hand, as far as we know, Ben was Zoe’s only IRL boyfriend, and she had that prescription for the Pill, so he definitely wasn’t opposed to knocking boots in general. I’m not sure if it was a Larry Craig hypocrisy thing, or if it’s not fornication if you believe in God, or what, and I don’t really care. As I said, Ben is creepy, and I’m glad he’s dead.

I’m running out of steam, so let’s wrap this one up with a brief mention of two other things I’m glad about not having to deal with down the line in Caprica: Amanda and Tomas Vergis having an affair,and there being a secret Avatar of Ben to go around V-World and be creepy. The idea that Clarice and Daniel used to date was also kind of stupid. The series improved as they realized that they didn’t have to actually embrace the worst excesses of the soap opera. But we can discuss that more when we get to the dead brother.

On a VFX note, in that close-up at the end, it looks like the U-87 has a 50-pin serial port in its nose, just under the eye-slit. That amused me. I wonder if that’s actually what it is. It seems like a sensible place for a connector, right next to the robot brain. I’ll have to keep an eye on it, especially once they transition to the physical prop.

Next up, the first regular episode of the show, “Rebirth,” where can all try desperately to pretend we can’t tell the differences caused by the months-long gap in filming. Spot the camera setups they could only use in the pilot because the Greystones lived in a real house and not a studio set duplicate!