OK, I'll admit I may have overstepped my bounds in saying that all of PC were "precious tomatoes". However, I still have to wonder if they were still "ordinary tomatoes", because I'm not convinced that the other PC inhabitants besides R. Dorothy, R-D, and two other important individuals from Act 15 and Act 26, are just well-programmed, well-disguised androids, and that's taking into account the number of almost perfect Roger androids made.
I don't think there's a distinction between "ordinary" or "precious." I just said "precious" for the heck of it, because that's what Gordon called the clones at one point. As for the image of the androids, I'm going to have to agree with Hobo and the vets. Whatever it was, it definitely wasn't the truth.
However, the androids theory would explain how that one officer could survive the ordeal of that protest gone wrong.
Seems to me that it's just a case of somebody improbably escaping death. Happens all the time in anime and comics, as I'm sure you've noticed.
Well, maybe it's me, but it appeared to me that the Angel watching the TV screens was outside of the "reset-able" PC, like when a computer operator runs a simulation. Of course, now that I think of it, that does make her different from "the Architect" of the Matrix, who is always inside the Matrix.
Matrix comparisons automatically make me want to roll my eyes. Regardless of whether she's inside PC like the Architect was in the Matrix, or whether she's outside PC unlike the Architect and the Matrix, I think she'd call Paradigm City, "Paradigm City."
We know that she went to basement level 666. I guess it's up to you to decide whether that counts as being in PC or not, but it seems kinda moot.
Thinking about it now, if she released the balloon after she said "it's too soon..." maybe she was sending her balloon as a "STOP!" message to The Union.
It wasn't clear that she did it on purpose. You could also interpret it as her being unsettled by the explosion, and then forgetting about the balloon as she went into deep thought. Angel had bigger concerns on her mind than being the Union's flag-bearer.