I love Vesta. I would like to see her come back, although I guess it would have to be in some other form. Hopefully this very ambitious/enthusiastic writer Kath Lingenfelter (late of Pushing Daisies, btw) will pull an Angeli and find a way to bring her back. So Tammy falls on the ground all screaming and bleeding and the freaks freak and the people stare, and finally Herc points out to Vesta that she hasn't derezzed. Vesta stares, a real power in her suddenly, like she's waking up, and leans in real fucking close, smiling her tiger smile and telling Tammy it'll all be alright.

"The pain should zap you out of the program, and you have to re-launch your avatar, but you..." Tammy's like, "Um, can't?" No, don't have to. (Wake up!) There's a myth about "Sleepers" who for some reason have gone into REM with their bands on and can't wake up, which I guess makes sense hypothetically but also makes sense that they're a myth, because it really doesn't. Since Tammy's obviously been knocking around the Underworld for way too long for that, Vesta offers that maybe she is just in a coma or something instead. "We can hack it, do a manual disconnect," Vesta says, and Tamara immediately gets annoyed. "There's some kind of price, isn't there?"

The hardness of Tamara Adams is one of the masterstrokes of this show, man. You've got Zoë, who is basically a baby even when she acts like a woman, and Lacy whose whole job is to get hard ASAP. But now there's also Tammy, who has already been burnt hard by being a Tauron in Caprica City; Tammy who would have ended up like Ruth or Sam in a way Joe can't even understand, but who certainly got as far as Willie before she died, because her innocence was always compromised by prejudice. I would hasten to remind you that -- and I always knew I would love her, for this -- the last and only thing she did before she died was kick the shit out of a boy for calling her a dirt-eater. Not just because of the point about the three girls, but mostly because of Willie in a sec. She is hardcore and she is totally not interested in your bullshit, which are two things I like a lot in a person but should scare you to death in a living/undying avatar of the Matrix itself.