And the reason I can understand anything if you explain it with crystallization, and why I did jumping jacks throughout this scene, is because both are always true: The tree is all nature, and all nurture, and heading toward something perfect. And both are the point of Zoë, and Zoë's point: While a hard-SF person watching this scene is thinking, "This is last month's game development theory, we've moved on," and might make the jump to the universe-building scale that she's talking about, what's implicit in this scene and leads directly to the end of the episode is the other half: Zoë is talking about herself. A seed of Zoë that contained in it the blueprints of infinite Zoës -- a soul like yours and mine -- with memories applied to tap the glass. And out she came -- Pow! -- fully formed but still growing, from her own and Daddy's forehead. Which, again: While she is Clarice's new life, zoë, she's a disappointing Apotheosis/Resurrection. (Tammy's still the secret star there, the perfect and eternal copy.)

And that's why Philo is the messenger here, taking this idea back to Daniel, because both Zoë and Daniel are too focused on the way things should work to see how they are already working, but perfect programmer Philo sees Rachel, and the U-87, and the Matrix, and the IRL universe, all as the same thing: A wonderful, beautiful, frustrating puzzle.

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.