Every Day is Judgement Day

This is a post about the midseason finale of Caprica. Spoilers abound, so I’m putting the rest below this musical interlude from Battlestar Galactica.

“Mists of dreams drip along the nascent echo and love no more. End of line.”

–Cylon Basestar Hybrid, “Torn,” Battlestar Galactica

Caprica a tragedy. That’s easy to forget, because it’s a new show that’s feeling its way along its own narrative arc — and because, let’s face it, tragedy has nothing on drama and comedy for popularity (though it still is ahead of irony).

But that’s what the show is — a tragedy, in the classic Greek sense of the word. A series where fate works most for woe, with folly’s fairest show.

Man’s little pleasure is the spring of sorrow.

Tragedy is, at its heart, all about making choices that try to defy fate. Creon is warned not to strike against Antigone, even though she is breaking the law; because he will not listen, his son and wife die. Hamlet is told to take action, but he waits, and waits, and waits for a perfect moment, and the perfect moment never comes. Oedipus is told he will murder his father and marry his mother, and to prevent that from happening he leaves home, and murders his father and marries his mother.

In the end of a tragedy, the tragic hero understands his mistake. Oedipus tears his eyes out in shame. Hamlet dies, knowing that he waited too long to strike. Creon stumbles out of the room, saying, “Lead me away. I have been rash and foolish. I have killed my son and my wife. I look for comfort; my comfort lies here dead. Whatever my hands have touched has come to nothing. Fate has brought all my pride to a thought of dust.”

That is tragedy. And we are working on a tragedy in Caprica, heading for a bloody war that will ultimately leave billions dead.

There are many characters in Caprica, making many mistakes. A few of them will be our heroes, ultimately — our tragic heroes, the ones who look on their own creations with despair.

In Sophocles’ Antigone, the titular character tels her brother Ismene, “It is the dead, not the living, who make the greatest demands.” And so it has been in Caprica. Zoe, though dead, still pushes Lacey. Still flirts with Philo. Still enrages her father. Tamara, though dead, still floats out in the ether, drawing her father further and further in, a nightmare, a dream, a bit of both.

Daniel is broken. He stole a metacognitive processor to give his daughter a chance at life, and it failed to do so — or so he thought. The theft led to two deaths, deaths that enraged the owner of the company he stole from. And so that owner, Tomas Vergis, has set out to break Daniel, and he’s doing a good job of it so far. Daniel has been forced to sell his beloved Caprica Buccaneers, a professional Pyramid team. Worse, his wife has been told by Vergis about Daniel’s theft, and the murders that stemmed from them. And Amanda Graystone has found herself at that deepest point of depression, where the pain of going on seems far worse than the possible relief of nothingness. And her husband — her beloved husband — is maybe a murderer. Probably a murder. Is a murderer.

Daniel doesn’t notice Amanda’s despair, because he’s too busy trying to save his company from the abyss. He has already tried psychological torture to draw his daughter out — if she still exists. But that failed (as it was bound to — he all but proved to her that he was not to be trusted), and the government is on his back, and he simply has reached the end of his rope. He’s willing to wipe clean the MCP on which his daughter may still reside — on which he knows, at some level, she does reside — so that he can get with the program and start building his business again.

The dead demand much. And they do not like it when we do not listen. Daniel is one of our tragic heroes. He is not the only one.

Joseph is stuck in New Cap City, desperate to find the ghost of her daughter left in the shell. Tamara is approached by the woman who’s been Joseph’s guide. The woman tells Tamara that Joseph is desperate, lost, falling apart in the real world. Tamara wants her father back in her life, but more than that, she wants her father happy. She is a good person. She loves him, more than she loves herself. She will find a way to release him. She does not fear what lies on the other side. When Joseph finally finds Tamara, she shoots herself, before shooting him. She leads him to believe that she has died — though she cannot die, not in there. But she does so to free him. To let him go, as he needs to let her go.

Neither Tamara nor Joseph are tragic heroes. They are, if anything, the chorus. The people who wander in to explain morality, the way we should behave if we but listen to our better angels. They will find redemption. They will not end the show in tears.

Lacey has gotten her box for Zoe, checked through to Gemenon, but it will not ship in time. Zoe is desperate, angry at Lacey — who has gotten in so deep that she’s swapped out a key fob in Sister Clarice’s car so a rival S.T.O. faction can follow her. Or so she thinks. Lacey has been using Barnabas, using her boyfriend Keon. But they have been using her, too. And as Lacey finds out, being a terrorist requires the willingness to draw blood. You can’t shake the Devil’s hand and say you’re only kidding, and by the end of the episode, Lacey will push a button that will detonate a bomb meant for Clarice. She will do so to save herself, and Keon. But she will do it. She will become a murderer, so as not to fail Zoe the way she failed the flesh-and-blood Zoe. She is one of our tragic heroes, but she has time to be redeemed. She already knows she’s made the wrong decision. But she can claw her way to the light.

Clarice, you will be happy to know, survives the attack. She is not, perhaps, what we thought she might be. She is a terrorist, perhaps, but she is above the violence at some level. She is fighting the depravity of Barnabas. She is pushing for a vision of an afterlife, not a takeover of this temporal world.

When the bomb goes off, she is standing on the banks of a river, looking up at a bridge from which Amanda Graystone has just jumped. Amanda is not our tragic hero either. She is Euridyce, she is Ophelia, she is Jocasta. She cannot bear up under the failures of her loved ones. Not the failure of Daniel. And not the failure of Zoe.

Which brings us to Zoe, for if anyone in this series is the tragic hero, the moral center, it is she.

From the moment she was implanted inside the robot that houses her, Zoe’s decision-making has been, well, bad. She told Lacey to shun Sister Clarice in favor of the violent and dangerous Barnabas; Clarice hoped to use Zoe’s invention to bridge life and death, while Barnabas wishes to make the world burn. She hid from Daniel to maintain “control” over her situation, but her disappearance from his life — and his grief at having caused her death — have sent him spiraling out of control. By extension, her refusal to reveal herself to Daniel has allowed both he and Amanda to believe that the living, flesh-and-blood Zoe was responsible for the bombing of a train — when Zoe was actually just running away to Gemenon. This has pushed Amanda into a downward spiral, and caused her hard-won sanity to ebb away.

When Daniel gives the order to erase Zoe’s personality, she might have been able to persuade him to stay the execution by coming clean. Instead, she turns to Philomon, the lab technician whom she’s been dating in the virtual world. She pushes him, too fast, to set her free, to let her go. And for a second, Philomon agrees. Perhaps, had he been given time, he would have meant it.

But in his panic, he instead sets off alarms, and Zoe — Zoe kills him for it.

And in her grief, as she flees the scene of the crime in a stolen van, toward an army blockade that she can not hope to outrun, Zoe will put her life in danger, because she knows that she set these rocks in motion — and that she bears the responsibility for it. She doesn’t know how far these rocks will slide — doesn’t realize that the heavy boulders moving are but pebbles compared to what is to come. But she knows, like Creon knew, like Hamlet knew, like Oedipus knew, that she was wrong. And that she can’t undo it.

Tragedies are meant to warn their viewers, to urge us not to make bad choices. To heed warnings from those around us. To not believe that we ourselves are smarter than all who have gone before us. And that is what Caprica is — a warning. A warning that no matter how smart we are, we cannot outsmart the world. That when you use someone, they may be using you. That lies do not give us control of the world — but rather, that they take control from us. That we can mourn the dead, but we cannot hold them with us; that any attempt to thwart nature will carry a heavy penalty.

Or as Antigone closes, “Big words are always punished, and proud men in old age learn to be wise.”