Review

Gravedancing suffers mightily from the weak cliffhanger of Reins of a Waterfall because it renders the danger of the entire B plot of Amanda's attempted murder manufactured. As I stated in my prior review, the audience knows Amanda's not going to die already and even if the episode did take the bold step to off her, the reasoning behind Joseph's motives is terribly shallow. Joseph indeed struggles with that very issue the entire episode, but I was tired of it from the very moment it was suggested.

As a consequence of this, the episode is wrought with a false sense of danger, which causes it to drag at times. Another drag was the technician (Philomon) dancing with Zoe. It was a scene that should have felt whimsical and funny, but instead it's two and a half minutes of sheer pointlessness. On further reflection, I think I would have enjoyed the scene a great deal more if it were intercut with Duram raiding the rest of the Graystone house with Philomon and Zoe totally oblivious to it, dancing their day away. Without this framing, the scene just seems pointless, if cute. Maybe too cute.

As an aside, I read a great deal of unspecified significance into Duram's line "I lost everyone on that train." I wonder what that means? Likewise, why can't Lacy arrange her own transport to Gemenon like Zoe and Ben did? Money? Passports? Another interesting aside is how ruthlessly bloodthirsty Grandma Ruth was. That lovely old woman has such a delightful dark side to her. So many great scenes from her in this episode.

Those asides aside, the most remarkable aspect of this episode is Daniel's and Amanda's appearance on Sarno's show. Several things struck me about the conversation. Firstly, Baxter has quite an obvious streak of luddite in him. He even stated at one point "isn't technology the problem?" His argument was that the virtual world is a place where young people can exist without consequences or boundaries for their actions.

Daniel's response to this puzzled me. By agreeing to derive no further profit from the holoband technology, he has essentially conceded this rather ridiculous argument. Technology is the problem? Really? No. What a stupid notion. The problem isn't the technology, the problem is how people choose to use it. By Sarno's logic, we may just as well ban the internet because people often use it to commit cyber crimes, or ban cars to prevent drunk driving accidents, or eliminate all technology entirely to prevent the obvious moral decay of the whole of society. Baxter would have loved BSG's ending...

Another puzzling aspect of the conversation was when Baxter challenged Daniel to substantiate how he was able to deduce anything about Zoe's opinions on the holoband and the V Club, Daniel responded by talking about the virtual avatar Zoe. This response is essentially a non sequitur, because as we know from the pilot, nobody besides Daniel (along with Lacy, Joseph, Sam, and maybe Clarice) even knows that an avatar can be as sophisticated as Zoe's was. It's the equivalent of telling someone from 1800 that you learned how to reach their home using Google Maps. It would be just as necessary to explain the concept of Google Maps to someone from 1800 as it should have been necessary for Daniel to explain to Baxter how virtual Zoe could possess the real Zoe's memories.

Another interesting tidbit from the conversation was Daniel mentioning that he thought he could control the content in the virtual world. This, along with Daniel's lines about the licensing of virtual space, would seem to imply that the holobands aren't linked together on an open, internet-like network, but a privately operated network that is regulated centrally by Graystone Industries. Despite this level of control, people have still been able to create things like the V Club, which is a fascinating idea, especially in a cyberpunk sense.

But with respect to this, yet another tidbit makes little sense. Part of Daniel's rationale for donating all holoband profits to charity was to compare illicit use of the holoband to the use of illicit drugs. By legalizing and regulating the illicit activity, you eliminate the black market for it because it's safer to use the legal, regulated market. This is a fine piece of logic, but a horrible comparison. Daniel still objects to illicit use of the holoband. Donating any profits to charity doesn't suddenly make the V Club legal, so his analogy doesn't make any sense at all and certainly won't solve the moral decay problem Baxter is complaining about.

Finally, I found some parallelism in this episode amusing. Amanda has now made an unplanned media appearance twice (the most recent of which may have saved her life!) and Sam Adama has now abducted and harassed both Drs. Graystone. I also liked that this episode confined the plot to fewer threads, allowing the threads that are covered to be fleshed out better. This makes the episode more satisfying than Reins of a Waterfall by allowing both the corporate image plot and Amanda murder plot to be fully resolved by the end of the story, whereas in Reins of a Waterfall, everything feels half baked.

But while the episode is more satisfying than Reins of a Waterfall, it's only slightly so. Both the A and B plots may have been fleshed out to a conclusion, but their executions were both quite flawed, rendering this episode average at best. Between weak characterization of Joseph and the repeated gaffes in the plot logic when dealing with high tech, the quality of storytelling is standing on rapidly thinning ice.