Our Parents Do More Drugs Than We Do: Caprica Thread

Jacob:

What bugged me about BSG and continues to bug me with Zoë, though, is that while her methods are correct, her real/fake judgment is wrong. It's a false analogy. Like Stephin Merritt explains about music, electric distortion synthesizer music and live acoustic recordings are the exact same amount of lie. One of them just seems more legit. And what I've never seen -- except in the Eights, and maybe Gaius at the end -- is anybody grasp that fact. I'm known to rant about it myself, but it seems integral to Zoë's scarier ideas (and Barnabas's even moreso) that she cannot grasp the fact that "nature" is a scam. That the infinite variety of the Matrix isn't any faker than the infinite variety of the Twelve Worlds -- just a newer and more malleable version of the reality to which she always clung. As the noted philosopher Courtney Love says, the key is to fake it so real that we're beyond fake: Pow! Clarice and Tammy are down with that, clearly, but Zoë and Barnabas seem to find it sticky, and that's already presenting as a problem.

This used to drive me wild when I was younger, mostly because I was working so fucking hard, but people would constantly say, "When you get out in the real world ..." They meant when I graduated college, I think, or got a higher-paying job or moved out of my psycho singleton apartment or whatever, but it drove me absolutely nuts. Your world may not look like my world but it's still REAL, what I do in my life still matters, and by the way, fuck you. Because it's all the real world. It's all one thing. This makes me fucking crazy. It's all the world. We're all people in it. We don't speak separate languages and dividing us into camps is stupid. You are not from Mars and she is not from Venus. We all live in the real world.

High school, college, your parents' house, red states, blue states, I have friends that think I'm still not in the real world (as I sit here poking 40 with a short stick, with a mortgage) because I don't have kids and a yard and I bike to work, I mean, you can't win. And I've never heard anyone say anything prefaced with "Well, in the real world ..." that wasn't the most utterly condescending, vile, pathetic excuse to suck. If what you mean is, "Your life is fake because you're making choices I want to make but feel I can't because I am a giant pussy, and that makes me ashamed of myself so allow me to distance myself by saying we live on separate planets," you should just say that, and stop saying things that are insane.

This show is aggressively reconnecting me with my inner judgmental pissed-off 19-year-old, and I'm not sure everyone would consider that a good thing, but I sort of feel like she was my Best Chick, so I'm going with it for the purposes of these threads.

About that show.

Well, Daniel this week decided to turn into the WORST STAGE DAD EVER.

I'm sorry, that wasn't really funny. Fathers and daughters and the way they test each other, that always freaks me out. I can't watch movies about fathers and daughters and their bullshit, can't stand all that patriarchal purity ball crap, can't watch those sports parents shows on Bravo. I cannot listen to daddies berating their children in stores, I'm not kidding, I left a cart full of stuff in a Kohl's once and just walked out because this guy would not shut up. Fathers and daughters, and Daniel saying to Zoe, I understand why you had to hate me, and Zoe staring at him, you have no idea.

Because he was really asking her, "Was I so bad at my job?" He was really saying to her, "I gave you everything. Why wasn't that enough to make you perfect?" Because that's what we all think, about everybody we love, that love obligates them instead of just you. And if only it did. The stories I could tell about the people in my grandmother's nursing home, who saw their shitty mean kids once a year. Our love does not obligate anyone to do anything. Not even blood is sufficient for blackmail.

We can test, as Daniel did. We can push, and prod, and torment. We can shove away to see how fast the dear one comes running back. We can draw a circle of fire around someone and dare her to walk through it. We can point the gun down at something beloved, and dare her to kill it. We can shout and we can beg but we can't command. We don't own our children. We don't own our lovers. And watching Daniel tonight was watching him figure that out, and it hurt terribly. He loved her. Why was there anything he needed to understand about her, save that?

Quick takes: Crazy Amanda, as a friend, would be really tiresome, but I was hoping Clarice would invite her over to the Polyamory Teddy Bear Picnic. Tomas Vergis, sexy motherfucker. "You're talking about my husband" is a non-denial denial. I'm a fan of suddenly-hardcore Joseph Adama, though he could have been nicer to Poor Man's Eddie Izzard. 

Would you know your daughter, if you met her in another life? Would you recognize her in a different body, in a different world, pockmarked with bullets and graffiti of daisies? Would you look at her, across a crowded room, and see her powerful and all her own, living a life you had no part in shaping, and in that moment would you want to tear her down until she admitted she was just your helpless child again? I have a feeling Joseph Adama is about to find that out. "She's my little girl." No, she's not, and she never was.

A.

Comments

[virgotex]

More than once, watching this show, I've thought of this:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
Philip Larkin - This Be The Verse

Tonight, it was this that I flashed on:

You say my time here has been some sort of joke
That I've been messing around
Some sort of incubating period
For when I really come around
I'm cracking up
And you have no idea
Martha Wainwright - Bloody Motherfucking Asshole

1. Despite the clue by four last week, I didn't want to think Vergis would go after Amanda so quickly and obviously. Of course, I was wrong. These Taurons, so impatient. What? A whole week, and you're not completely crazy yet? Okay, Your husband's a murdering thief. How 'bout now?

2. I'm telling you folks, Lacy can only take so much, and being the only disciple is a lot of pressure. Girl is going to explode.

3. Jacob quoting Stephin Merritt is a redundacy of squee.

4. $5 that Emmanuelle is Evelyn.

[virgotex]

Any interests in a death pool? What, me? morbid? Next week is the mid season finale, people! And we all know... they ain't all gonna make it out. I would be floored if they didn't kill someone off before the break. Caesar was just a teaser.

These are NOT spoilers, just speculating. Some of you have NCAA brackets, the rest of us do do this...

Top of my list: Barnabas, mostly because it was made public that Marsters only had a 3 or 4 episode arc. Which is too bad because he really hasn't gotten to chew enough scenery yet. Closest to a sure bet.

Next tier: Philomon or Keon. These poor cute boys are just means to an end. Because Philomon has more utility with his mad cylon maintenance skills that could come in handy in future, I'll give Keon the bomb-builder the edge here.

Bottom tier: Vergis, Clarice, Willie. The first two just because of proximity to Amanda craziness blowback and/or vengeance. Willie because of discrepancies with the BSG timeline and canon bio info, and also because there just has to be huge painful fallout for non-honor-related Tauron-on-Tauron killing and Willie is the closest thing to a puppy we've got left.

But all three of these characters are too close to the main storyline axis, so it's not as likely they'll be airlocked soon.

[BlakNo1]

Apparently. Tomas is no stranger to multi-tasking.

[idiosynchronic]

This show is aggressively reconnecting me with my inner judgmental pissed-off 19-year-old . .

Or inner judgmental 17 year-old who's moonlighting in roller derby, ala Whip It. Both the show and the movie hit this conflict between teen & parent with equal veracity. What happened to entertainment writers doing shitty teenage characters & situations?

I'm getting impatient - you don't tease me me with a hardcore grandma 3 episodes back and then conveniently forget her. I want Tsattie to cut a bitch.

[Maitri]

Nooooo, Virgo, they can't kill off Tomas Vergis! Who will I have to daydream about during the off-season? I'm going with Barnabas because he's the only "disposable" character who has made enough of a mark on the audience.

Anyone else get the feeling that each episode is one or two behind where it should be intellectually and emotionally? I guess that's the curse of any show that follows the flagship series.