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Like a full season opener much of this was set up for what’s too come but given that what’s to come is only the second half of what’s already been I liked the echoes of the pilot in this. Again the central issue is Zoe’s death and possible rebirth but her physical form has changed and it’s the robot body laid out on the slab, it’s metal crcass the key to the technological miracle both sides crave. Zoe herself has moved on from physical to virtual (she’s looking for Tamra not Lacey) but this is not revealed until the end and the bulk of the episode focuses on the parallel efforts of the secular and religious camps to exploit her.
Secular gets the best tunes. Eric Stolz is perfectly cast as Daniel, vulnerable but totally unable not to know things. He can sell Zoe’s software soul as the way to give people that one last chance to say the things they never got to say and make it sound perfectly normal and sympathetic while fully acknowledging that it’s the ultimate drug. It takes Joseph though to point out that this is a palliative that will only be available to the rich. I also loved their second scene where Daniel fails to show enough faith in his product (or possibly he’s still a little bit human) to pull the trigger on his mother and Joseph tells him he’s not ready.
I’d like to see more of the Taurons, how they negotiate Caprican excess and the pull of the old planet. I’m less keen to see more of the monotheists and the STO. Partly because setting up their conflict with Caprica as a battle of theologies/ideologies still looks like comic book politics. It’s never just about ideas, one god or many, it’s about power, it’s about history, it’s about ethnicity and none of these have been believably factored into the struggle. Is Clarice Willow a true believer or a politician? If the former we should be hearing more about how technology is God’s means to his end, if the former she should be able to persuade her Brutii by force of rhetoric not literal seduction. It’s frustrating because the religion in BSG (at least in the early seasons) felt much more real. I think there they had the advantage of not hanging the whole plot on it. Also it was much harder to see as a direct allegory of America vs Islam because the emotional Americans (the underdog fleet) were the polytheists and the economic Americans (the victorious Cylons) worshipped an American Christian-style god of love. Love is less prominent in the STO’s religion, which has been further Islamified (from a non-muslim perspective) with its “there is no god but god” like slogans and given a Marianised Catholic hierarchy to distance it even more from mainstream US religion.
Was Finn eating the sacred sandwich a kind of perverse communion ritual?
Kurt throwing the worshippers out of his father’s house hospital room was pretty awesome.
Although their prayers were less selfish and more tuneful than Finn’s three wishes, theologically they were pretty much equivalent.
Spoilers made me worried they were going to have Sue lose her faith when prayer failed to ‘fix’ Jeanie but they made it clear her sister’s Down’s syndrome was other people’s problem not hers and Jean herself got to point out that she wasn’t a mistake.
My atheist heart wishes they could have ended on the final hospital scene or with another Lennon number. God would have worked lyrically… I just believe in me , Yoko and me. That would of course have meant giving the final word to the non-believers while the point of the episode was that nobody has a final word in these debates, they’re not a competition. So they compromised with a song that liberal Christians and Christian agnostics would probably think is bland enough with it’s “god in everyone” metaphor for no-one but Catholic extremists to object to. Except that it doesn’t. For one thing it unthinkingly equates God and Jesus as if the other faiths, including the other Abrahamic ones simply didn’t exist (although the show to its credit didn’t air the verse that does this most explicitly). Also, like Mercedes, it assumes that believing in people individually or collectively can be recast as believing in something more than we can see and touch and feel thus allowing that something to be called god when for people like me the point is that it can’t or that it doesn’t make sense to do so.
Finn describes losing his religion as making him feel alone in the world. I guess it works like for some but I don’t remember it being that way. It was almost a relief to realise that I didn’t have to believe in any version of God, however metaphorical. God or the idea of him had become like one of those family members you have to keep making excuses for. Not just for the big questions, why is there suffering etc. More that the world just didn’t feel like something a person would make, not even a person with an inordinate fondness for insects. It was too big, too empty, too detailed, too not like us and that was all right. It was all right not to keep pretending there was any more too see than what I could see. It was all right to leave Oz and its glittering abstractions, click my heels and come home.
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