To the doo-wop tune of another McCrary original, Amanda continues to play nice. "Your tattoos, are they homemade? I'm sorry. I don't mean to pry, but I'm a plastic surgeon. [Did we know that?] I'm really interested in that sort of thing." He tells her they're Tauron, and she's like, "Of course! They have meanings, right?" Sam's pleasantly surprised at how charming she's being, and says that although people assume they're always a gangster thing, they're not... Necessarily. "You get ink because you're a parent, or you got a fancy pedigree, or there's some sort of ritual, maybe you made a mistake..." She smiles and offers to give him a fancy pedigree, or erase some of his mistakes, and he fake-chides her that it wouldn't be real if she did that.

"Very little is real these days," Amanda says, exhausted, and leans back, and finally says it. "...This isn't the way home." She didn't whisper. He doesn't answer.

Joe continues dialing wildly, drinking his Lethe beers and staring at the bones on his table. "Don't," he whispers and texts. Ruth watches, unimpressed and silently angry -- we focus for a moment on her own tattoos, right where her children and grandchildren are located -- as he calls Larry and begs him to have Sam call back. "Turn on your frakking phone!" he screams at it when he's done, slamming the table. Ruth seethes behind him, and finally goes upstairs.

"Excuse me," Amanda says once she's found her voice, "This isn't the way home." Sam tells her they're going around an accident, cutting through Little Tauron: "Don't worry. It's good people here. Not very nosy." She tenses up, he changes course: "Which is a good thing, right? What with all those people angry about all those deaths." Better, less scary, but there's a wariness as she thinks it out. "I lost my sister-in-law and my niece on that train," he says, offhandedly, and she pauses for a moment. "My Gods, I'm so sorry." She's nearly whispering. The pop song slides into score, turning into scary murder music.

"Yeah. Well, you can't turn back time. Nothing I could do to change that now." Amanda loses herself to dread, embarrassed, wondering if it's racist to be so afraid. "Yeah. I guess all we can try and do is understand." He nods. "Or look for some kind of balance." She stares. "Maybe try to even things out." She watches him carefully; it's his next words that hit like ice down her back. "My sister-in-law's name was Shannon." She nods; that's when the fear is real. "My niece was named Tamara. She was gonna make us all proud..." She closes her eyes, nearly weeping, and there's another jump cut away from her total dread to commercial that is just brilliant. This is also where the joy of the last ten scenes added up and burst and I suddenly realized that Caprica had become my favorite show on TV.