The Big O Showtime: Daemonseed

Hey, a Christmas episode! Okay they call it "Heaven's Day", but it's totally Christmas. See, they've got trees and everything.

What the hell's that cross thing?

This is actually a neat bit of world building. Holidays can tell us a lot about the culture that celebrates them and I'm surprised when writers don't use this trope more often. Here it establishes more about how weird of a place Paradigm City is. Rosewater confirms that Heaven's Day is a corruption of Christmas, so the citizens of Paradigm don't practice Christianity or even seem to know what it is. A character points out a ruined church later, saying the elderly gather there to sing songs, but nobody knows what the hell they're singing about. Neither do the elderly apparently, just doing it as an echo of their memories. I wonder if this was deliberate by the founders before the Event 40 years ago. We know there was a lot of crazy mad science going on before the Event, and the undercity from Episode 4 had a very City of the Future/Venture Compound look to it. I wonder if, going off my theory that Paradigm City was built as refuge for whatever the Event was, it wasn't also some kind of research center and/or social engineering experiment. Sort of like what the DHARMA Initiative was doing on the Island in Lost.

Like the founders were trying to weed out what they considered a hindrance in human behavior (religion or just Christianity) but realized the value of yearly societal rituals so re-worked them to serve their own purposes. Just a guess, I might be completely off base here. That mad science is our plot catalyst again, as a Memory crazed Santa slips a street musician some kind of mutant seed that's going to destroy the city. All it does is grow a big Christmas tree though. That's actually kind of funny because this giant tree starts growing and Roger calls Big O. But what's his giant robot going to do to a tree? It's a tree, it's not like you can punch a tree.

Speaking of Rosewater, this is the first time he's gotten directly involved with the events of the episode. Namely, hiring Roger to find that Santa I mentioned and stop his giant tree. This seems like a test he's putting Roger through, at least from my perspective. Angel works for Rosewater so he must know about Roger and he's got some kind of big plan in the works, so my thinking is that he wants to get a closer read on Roger to see just how the negotiator's going to affect his plan. He also acknowledges that Heaven's Day is a corruption of Christmas, and along with comments he made last episode it's clear Rosewater has knowledge of the world before the Event. Does this play into his plan somehow? There's still two episodes left this season so maybe.

Merry Christmas, you louse.

Interesting stuff with Dorothy this episode as well. Twice do people forget that she's an android, including Roger. This means she's becoming more human, despite her constant emotionlessness. She even mentions herself that she wants to be like everyone else so they'll treat her the same. If so, she's doing a very good job because even Roger goes out of his way to get her a Christmas present and not hurt her feelings. The two just keep getting closer.

Dorothy also gets some hilarious lines and Norman gets to be awesome again. Good episode, and probably the first that didn't end on a bittersweet note. Looking forward to more.