There Is Another Sky

Synopsis: This episode ignores most of our other leads to pick up the thread of avatar-Tamara running around free. She wants desperately to get home, so she hooks up with some folks in the V Club who say they'll help her if she helps them first. This involves a quest through the online game New Caprica City. Meanwhile, Joseph Adama learns his son has been skipping school and they hold a Tauron memorial service for their dead. Dr. Graystone is about to be thrown out of the company over the holoband thing, but he placates the board by revealing Cylon Zoe (not as Zoe of course) and unveiling his plan for the company's future: a Cylon slave race. Because THAT always works out...

This episode is odd for having no scenes at all of Lacy or Sister Clarice and very little Zoe. Speaking of Zoe, I neglected to ask in my prior review, how is it she can change clothes now? For the first few episodes, her avatar image remained stuck in that party dress from the pilot. That made sense to me. But then "Gravedancing" opened with her in the V Club in a different outfit. I thought, okay maybe she can change virtual clothes inside the virtual world somehow. But she's wearing something different this time too. Why? Does it just make her feel more "normal" to change clothes every day?

Tamara is still stuck on her own, which makes sense since there is no "her" outside anymore. But what I don't understand is why back in "Reins of a Waterfall" Zoe just let her go the way she did. Zoe KNOWS she's pure code, and assumes that her father put her there. So saying "Those doors lead outside" won't help Tamara since she's not real. For a computer genius, Zoe's kind of stupid. If it had played out that Tamara was like, "Thanks, bye!" against Zoe's objection, that would have worked. But it makes no sense to me for Zoe to just let her go when it's reasonable to assume she has nowhere to go.

Tamara seeks help from this woman who runs a russian roulette game. Only in this version, it's a bunch of pistols on an actual spinning roulette wheel. I just find it kind of silly, and it reminds me of an old Lost in Space episode where something similar happened, only it was laser guns.

The action moves to Caprica's version of an MMORPG, New Caprica City. It's like Grand Theft Auto meets Gotham City meets World of Warcraft or something. Nobody knows the point of playing, or how you win, but they all keep playing. Tamara is special because she can't die in the game, so they use her to help them rob some fat cat. This is all very obvious commentary on modern video games. The kid Tamara's with says this place is real to him because here he can be somebody, and she says, "Maybe if you weren't here in the holoband all day you could be somebody out there." And I think that's kind of unfair. It's a very simplistic, judgmental attitude to say "Oh well, maybe you wouldn't be such a loser if you stopped playing games and did something with your life." And just because I always need to point it out, this is yet another theme that Star Trek already did in "Hollow Pursuits".

This theme of hiding in fantasy worlds seems to resonate a bit with Willy Adama as well. He would rather spend time in the underworld of Little Tauron where he feels like somebody than out in Caprica where kids treat him like [he eats] dirt.

What is going on with Amanda Graystone? She seems to be totally coping now with Zoe's death. It feels like a complete 180 from the Amanda who was falling apart calling her daughter a terrorist. It doesn't seem natural to me.

At times I feel like they go too far making Caprica "just like us" where people where suits and fedoras, drive the same sorts of cars, carry cell phones, etc. Apart from the holobands (which have contemporary analogs -- it's just virtual reality mashed with the internet) and e-sheets and paper without corners, it's just normal. If some viewer hadn't seen BSG and tuned in to this, I don't know if they'd really get where this world is. If you told me this was supposed to be Earth in the not-too-distant future, I'd believe it because there's really very little about this show to tell me otherwise. Or at the very least, a parallel dimension. I would totally buy that it's a parallel dimension. Considering how the whole BSG thing ends it also makes it all feel a little silly.

The big thing about Tamara is that as pure avatar she cannot die. Anyone else who "dies" in the V Club will immediately de-res and disappear. ...But why then doesn't the virgin sacrifice victim in the pilot disappear once that knife goes in her head? Does she eventually and we don't see it? Or are the virgin sacrifices not real, just code so kids can fulfill these fantasies? If that's the case, it seems kind of a hollow sacrifice (no sacrifice at all really) and I can't see how Hecate would be pleased.

Graystone immediately suggesting the Cylons as a slave race seems incredibly stupid to me. For a world that's just like ours, don't they have science fiction about robots rising up against their makers? You can't give a machine "artificial sentience" and then expect it to just do your bidding!

Speaking of that scene, Graystone orders Zoe-bot to rip off her arm and eventually she does. I kept wishing for a shot of Alessandra with no arm, just out of morbid curiosity.

There's a nice touch in the memorial service scene where Bear McCreary does a little musical nod to "Wander, My Friends," the memorial theme from Battlestar.

As the episode ends, Tamara learns she is dead in the real world, and is using her new-found avatar powers to control New Caprica City. She's sent the other guy into the real world to tell her father about her. So now just as Adama's let her go, he learns she's not gone after all. It's a very odd episode since so much of it plays out inside a virtual world, and while it helps tie up whatever happened to Tamara, I feel like I kind of don't care. I wonder if it was a mistake for the show to introduce that thread, since we're really no closer to anything about the STO or the monotheists or Sister Clarice and her crazy bed full of people. We did get the next jump ahead in the creation of the Cylons, but as I said back in the pilot review, this whole story already feels contrary to canon. This episode is the first time Sam is somewhat likeable, and not just a hired thug. But I do find it interesting that every time Ron Moore thinks he's being progressive by including a gay couple, they are always villains, or at least bad people in some way. I also wonder what the very Mormon creator of BSG, Glen Larson thinks about all this. The original series was a very Mormon show littered with Mormon ideology. To see his creation proudly espousing homosexuality as normal I bet rubs him the wrong way.