Caprica 1.7: Ghosts in the Machine

[marymary]

Daniel Graystone with an idea is like a dog with a bone. He’s a heat-seeking missile. He takes no prisoners; he’s got a scorched-Earth policy. There is only one force in the universe that can stand in his way: a petulant teenaged girl.

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RECAP: PART 1

[marymary]

Joseph is back in the NC with Boots. She gives him “amp,” a drug used inside the game to heighten senses and reflexes. It’s what my son would call a cheat code. She also gives him a gun and tells him that when he points it, he has to shoot it too. OMG, I wonder whether he will take her advice.

Boots explains that she’s not this kick awesome on the outside and that she’s being paid to help Joseph. Whatever she’s getting, it’s too much, because she’s spending a lot of time chewing the scenery.

They make it to the NCC version of his old place, and find a junkie squatting there. The junkie says Tamara might be at a club called “Mysteries.” Then some thugs burst in; head thug disparages Tamara’s character, on account of she killed two of his friends. Bullets ensue, Joseph has the drop on the head thug, but can’t pul the trigger. Quelle surprise. Boots: “I thought Taurons had big stones.” (For those scoring at home, Joseph just got shit for not being a real Tauron and for being a coward.)

Back home, Joseph is looking at a card that Tamara had signed with her trademark “T” turned into a flower. Sam says Joseph should stop dwelling. Joseph asks Sam what’s in his head when he kills people and Sam’s all offended. Ha. Sam relents and says, “You tell yourself it’s not real and then they’re not people, they’re targets. The whole thing becomes a game.” I fail to see how that helps Joseph, who couldn’t kill someone when he knew, for sure, that it was an actual game. Because he’s a coward and not very Tauron.

Joseph and Boots go to Mysteries and check their firearms. It’s all Cabaret in there. Boots tells Joseph to avoid the emcee and his riddles and keep a low profile. So Joseph strides halfway toward the stage, stands there until the spotlight can find him, and gets dragged up onstage by the emcee for a riddle. The emcee explains that he must answer a question correctly or be shot by several men pointing guns at the stage. “As the gods overthrew the Titans, so has Man overthrown the gods. But when Man visits his sins upon his children, how shall he be repaid?” O hai, BSG.

Joseph cannot be bothered with obvious call-backs to future-time shows. He insists he just wants his daughter and starts calling for her. The emcee calls him a coward (this is starting to bore me or piss me off, I can’t tell which) and does not have him shot, but has him dragged out. So apparently the only winning move is not to play.

On the way out, Joseph spies Tamara’s flower-T drawn on a wall, snorts some amp, steals some firearms and they go back in, guns blazing. People are derezzing like flies until Joseph and Boots order the survivors out of the club. They threaten the emcee till he tells them Tamara displayed her death-resisting feats onstage one night and he wants to book her for the summer. She was “seeking answers to the afterlife. Maybe she IS the answer.” Man, they’re hitting some stuff hard lately. Outside the club, they find Tamara’s flower-T painted all over the walls like graffiti. Boots says maybe Tamara’s found a new home.