"Your wife has stated that your daughter, Zoë Graystone, was involved with terrorists and may have been been responsible for the bombing..." Daniel admits most of it, but will only say that she'd "fallen in" with the STO. He throws down the "troubled" word -- upsetting Amanda further -- and tries to change track to how the Matrix isn't evil, just like Team Graystone wanted, and Sarno goes right for the heart of that bullshit. "Let me just tell you what I see here. Uh, I see a lot of young people growing up in a virtual world right now..." Daniel tells Sarno he's heard the theory a million times, and Sarno's like, "Fine, let's talk facts." Daniel's "troubled" daughter grew up in a holoband society, which told her that there are absolutely no consequences to anything. Basically, the same Grand Theft Auto causes rape/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles causes ninja miscegenation bullshit we've been hearing our entire lives, whose only purpose is to let shitty parents off the hook for not parenting their shitty kids.

This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything.

Backstage, Cyrus realizes that "troubled" was the wrong word, and Amanda's like, "I've been saying that all day!" Daniel brings up for the first time how hard Zoë hated the Filthy Science, which fascinates Sarno so much that Daniel nearly trusts him, smiling, but Sarno stays on message: "She didn't like the holoband? Hated it? Maybe because it was making her want to blow things up?" Daniel's sad that Sarno turned on him so fast, but backstage Amanda looks at Cyrus and just goes, "...No."

I don't know about you, but I started rubbing my palms together at that moment, because a day without Amanda Graystone going apeshit on some poor mother is like a day without sunshine.

(My friend The Stove explains: "You always love the hot blonde one best, on every show." Guilty. But then the next week she revised: "It's the cold blonde one, actually." It's completely true. It's because the dark-haired one is almost always going to be the Bad Girl and get redeemed, but it's the blonde one that has the option of going cold: Being so good and sticking to your convictions so hard that on the rare occasion that you absolutely must control a situation, you can do it merely by withholding or supplying affection or approval, and further that you can do this with complete transparency because it's not a secret. Not proud of all that, but then survival skills never come cheap. By definition.)