Anyway. You can choose or not choose to include the DH stuff in your appraisal, but you know how I feel about discounting stories just because they're about lady things. You've been fooled into watching a story about lady things right now, the call is coming from inside the house. And given this episode's clear and intelligent rewriting of most of the rules in a way more respectful-to-before way than we saw during the transition, I'm willing to bet we've got a staff that feels the same way. (Especially now that Weddle & Thompson are locked for Blood & Chrome.) And you know, since only two of the characters are old men and half the cast is teenage girls, maybe it's time you got over it too.

Anyhow, that was fun. Zoë's finally located Tamara, playing Tina Turner in some kind of Master Blaster gladiatorial situation. I still can't figure out how much of the Matrix is New Cap City and plays by the NCC rules but given what's up this week, maybe we'll find out next week about that. Meantime, she's looking to chat with Tammy Adams and she's willing to interrupt some Tauron swordfighting to get it done. There's chainlink all around the top of the arena, and the NCC-dressed people do a lot of shaking it with their hands and moshing their shit just like in the Roaring Twenties.

The announcer girl is all excited to see Zoë, because somehow Tamara has let them talk her into being their Messiah -- wonder how that went? -- and Zoë's like, "Drop the dramatics and tell me where Tamara is, because I am totally not interested in playing fake NCC games." Which, imagine your frustration when everybody there is only interested in playing fake NCC games because the rest of their day they're out in the world doing things, and you're stuck in the Matrix all day long. Like, how long would it take -- listening to the Sims make those noises, manifesting the same triangles over their heads, working slavishly for the same consumer electronics -- for you to go fully bugshit?

Because the fact that Zoë entered the arena is itself a "challenge," they go all "Ave Deathwalker!" and a whole fight starts. There's a pretty delicate systems-within-systems thing happening all through this episode, having to do with focal perspective and finite/infinite games, and that's one part of it: Zoë says "I don't want to play games," and they say, "What games?" Then, stupidly, they go "You fight or die!" Which... No I don't? I mean, not in the philosophical sense toward which the entire episode is leading, but also in the actual: "Hey girl that can't die! Fight or die!"