The Heavens Will Rise

The antepenultimate episode of Caprica was a rather frustrating exercise in going nowhere. Okay, some of the subplots in the episode did move forward. But as you may recall, the last episode ended with Daniel and Amanda resolving to go into V-world together in pursuit of Zoe.

So imagine my frustration when that plot utterly failed to progress in this hour. Oh, it's not like Daniel and Amanda were off screen. The teaser even shows Daniel using a backdoor to hack into New Cap City in violation of its rules, only to be caught by Zoe, forcefully ejected, and then having his backdoor access erased. He then decides he needs a little muscle on the mission, and recruits Sam Adama to accompany them into V-World.

The problem is, all this takes the full episode, and the hour concludes right back where the last episode ended -- with Daniel and Amanda planning to go into V-World after Zoe. (This time also to meet Sam on the inside.) With only two hours to spare after this one, I was disappointed to not get anywhere.

My frustration was further amplified by the most prominent plot of the episode involving Lacy in her STO training camp. One of the recruits is about to be executed by a superior, who orders a Cylon to shoot him for no real provocation. Lacy is spurred into "action," ordering the Cylon to stop. To everyone's shock, the robot obeys. It takes until the final act of the episode to resolve all of this, but she ultimately learns that some piece/copy/remnant/whatever of the Zoe avatar that was in that original U-87 model is present in all the Cylons being manufactured, and so they all respond to her orders. Possibly an interesting development... but one to be explored next episode, it seems.

After Lacy, the most time is devoted to the plot with Jordan. Having been drummed out of the GDD, his only remaining recourse is to convince Amanda to go back to Clarice's house and steal her holoband, swapping it for a duplicate. With her holoband in his possession, a hacker friend of his may be able to uncover her plan. With some reluctance, Amanda agrees, and actually carries off her mission without a hitch.

The problem comes in making the handoff back to Jordan. An unseen sniper shoots him, and Amanda is barely able to get him to the hospital in time -- losing track of the holoband in the process. (For Galactica continuity fans, she mentions that the man at the hospital who tended to him was a young Doc Cottle.) So a double mystery here -- who shot Jordan, and why didn't s/he shoot Amanda when she came to his rescue?

The Adama boys each get a minor subplot. As mentioned earlier, Sam's has Daniel trying to recruit him for a mission to V-World. At first, Sam wants nothing to do with pursuing the fake version of his niece. But Joseph's sinister mother-in-law Ruth and equally conniving Evelyn both prevail on him to do it, to put an end to Tamara.

Joseph is troubled by a woman affiliated with mob, who just got out of prison. She apparently had an affair with him while his wife was still alive. But the bigger issue is that she's a busybody accountant type, and by the end of the episode, she comes to suspect that the Adama boys are smuggling Cylons to the Tauron resistance.

Finally, there's Clarice, whose perhaps more clever husbands discover that her holoband has been switched. In a flash of insight necessitated by the limited number of episodes remaining, the three of them deduce that Amanda must be the real mole -- and that their wife was executed wrongly by Clarice. They resolve to make the Graystones pay... but again, this is held for next time.

So a lot of marking time this installment, setting up for (hopefully) better things to come. But there's not a lot of time left to do it.