…well, maybe not end of line. More like halfway down line—with the possibility of a line extension, if ratings keep ticking up the way they have lately. But tonight’s Caprica did bring several of the show’s storylines to a head, leaving us with multiple cliffhangers, most of which keep the lives of major characters hanging in the balance. In brief:
-Sister Clarice confronts Barnabas over the direction of the STO, and the latter responds by recruiting Lacy to attach a device to Clarice’s keyring that will relay a bomb-detonating signal and explode her car.
-Amanda confronts Daniel over the reports she’s been reading about the Vergis break-in/theft/murder, and when Daniel doesn’t deny his involvement, she flees their house and heads to the highest bridge to kill herself.
-Joseph finally finds Tamara in New Cap City, but his virtual daughter—persuaded by Joe’s V-world guide Emmanuelle—takes drastic measures and shoots Joe’s avatar, so that he’ll be gone from the game forever. And back in the real world, we learn that Emmanuelle is actually Evelyn, Joe’s assistant, who’s not-so-secretly in love with him.
-Daniel hears from a representative of the government’s procurement department that they don’t believe he’ll ever be able to reverse-engineer his ill-gotten tech, and so they’re demanding that he stop stalling and deliver his 100,000 cylons in one week, not one month. Desperate, Daniel orders Philomon to wipe the stolen MCP of its quirky, stubborn current sentience so that they can start fresh.
-Robot Zoe reveals herself to Philomon, and begs for him to free her from the lab before she gets eradicated. He pledges his devotion, but only in order to wrest himself free of her grasp, so he can sound an alarm. Enraged, Robot Zoe flings cute lab boy aside, cracking his skull.
Frankly, for most of its running time, “End Of Line” felt rushed to me. What I’ve liked about Caprica to this point is that the writers have been willing to slow the pace and explore the parameters of this world—and the world-within-this-world. Now, in the interest of expediting the plot, they revealed some holes that have been present all along, but never seemed so glaring before. For example, the Vergis theft apparently was colonywide news, with Graystone’s possible role in the crime something of an open secret. How has Daniel gotten away with this for so long? And if Barnabas and Evelyn are going to be such significant catalysts in the main storyline, their presence and motivations really should’ve been more established than they have been over these first nine episodes. The impetus behind the action in “End Of Line” felt contrived to me, and lacked the moments of humor and wonder that I enjoy so much about this show.
But the action itself was often quite thrilling, and the underlying themes that first hooked me on Caprica were still very much in play. For example I loved the confession/pleading/killing scene between Robot Zoe and Philomon (though part of me wished we’d only seen her in cylon form, to emphasize Philomon’s perspective on the sheer horror of what was happening) and I loved the artfully assembled montage of Zoe’s life flashing before her eyes after she fled the lab and drove a Graystone Industries van into a security barricade. If any one minute of screentime could encompass what fascinates me about Zoe’s character, that “multitude of Zoes” would be it. She’s a tough one to pin down.
When Caprica began, it was as much about two desperate, grieving men clinging to memories as it was about our evolving relationship to technology. “End Of Line” featured a matched pair of scenes that illustrated where those two men are now, with Daniel mulling “what this chip cost me” after his wife storms out (and, not incidentally, after he’s been forced to sell the C-Bucs), while Joe lies inert on his sofa, so lost in V-world that he’s missed his own son’s Ink Day. Both Daniel and Joseph have reached too far and risked too much, and are in danger of losing what they already have while trying to reclaim what they’re missing.