Or... y'know, just no prequels ever

Yes, two posts in one day. All because this got me thinking, and I needed some way to celebrate.

So... why do we have prequels at all? No, seriously, what do they bring to the table? From "Vader was seduced by the Dark Side of the Force" to "The Cylons were created by Man," anything and everything we need to know about a film or TV show's background has been given to us in plain, simple terms. (Note: Caprica > Star Wars Prequels.)

You already know who's going to be alive at the end.
The audience has got to care about your characters. As Joss Whedon finally found out on Dollhouse, people have a hard time getting invested in your characters if they think they're gonna die. Now, Whedon's problem was his penchant for killing fan-favorite characters. Prequels have a slightly different problem.

From the moment it became clear that his younger, whinier sidekick was Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon Jinn was a dead man walking. We all knew he was going to die. It was only a question of when. Same goes for literally every person who picks up a lightsaber who is not Anakin or Obi-Wan. Same goes for Padme. We were hoping that the same went for the cartoon rabbit. And we knew that Anakin was going to get dropped into a volcano and put inside a sci-fi gimp suit. So what happened in the Star Wars prequels that we didn't see coming?

While you're pondering that, consider Christopher Nolan's The Prestige. We know from fairly early on that a) Hugh Jackman's character is going to die, and b) that sometime prior to this, he's going to injure his leg very, very badly. Now I'll argue later on that The Prestige is the exception that proves the rule, but for now just consider the fact that you probably started wincing each time Jackman went down that trapdoor. In a nutshell, this is because The Prestige is one self-contained piece; the chronologically-scrambled narrative is here used as a means of foreshadowing. If each of the three acts of the film had been separate films, and those three films were not released in chronological order, it would have been a different story.

Now, Caprica does its best to subvert this. One, it is set more than 50 years before the events of BSG and features a cast of characters who never show up on BSG, plus one character who has the same name as a BSG character, presumably to mislead you into thinking they're the same so that when the character dies, you go "what the frak???"

Still, Caprica has to overcome the big massive hurdle of a fact that everybody will be dead in 57 years at the outset. Now, yes, everyone dies eventually, but it's hard to care about the characters and the society in Caprica since we'd spent four years on BSG getting over the fact that everyone our heroes knew back home were dead and gone. It's like Sarah Connor in Terminator 2. Everyone's already dead, so why does any of it matter?

To its credit, not that it deserves much, Star Trek Enterprise is set way before the Kirk era, and there's not a young Kirk or Spock running around getting in the way. On paper, therefore, you'd think that Enterprise would have a better shot than either Caprica or The Phantom Menace.

You have to reduce the amount of cool technology.
Star Trek had shot its bolt on technological wizardry, and the sane thing to do in order to get a show that wasn't just about a bunch of techno-wizards in space solving all their problems with technobabble would be to do a prequel. But did it have to be so far back in time? The holodeck had, for better or worse, been a staple of Star Trek since 1987, and it suddenly disappeared. We were stuck following the adventures of a guy nobody had ever heard of before in a version of the Enterprise that was conspicuously absent from Picard's collection.

Hell, there are about 75 years between where the Original Series films end and where TNG picks up. We know virtually nothing about that time. You'd lose site-to-site transporting, holodecks, hyper-capable cloaking devices... and, the original show was very rarely about technobabble. So yeah, you'd still have shields, phasers, torpedoes, and that all-important magic-wand-shaped-like-a-deflector-dish. As long as you stayed away from Young Picard, I'd watch a Star Trek show set between TOS and TNG. (Okay, now I'm fantasizing about a Caprica-style Trek show featuring the creation of the holodeck.)

Ron Moore famously took a different approach, qutting Star Trek in general to make Battlestar Galactica, a show in which there are no deflector shields or techno-wizardry. But was that because he wanted to avoid technobabble, or because the Miniseries budget was already stretched to the breaking point? Caprica has oodles of fancy-pants magitech that was never so much as alluded to in BSG. Yeah, yeah, First Cylon War, whatever. (In Star Trek: Holodeck, there is no big calamity at the beginning of TNG to wipe out all our characters and technology. It'd be a hard task to navigate all the continuity and still be accesible to the average fan, but it could probably be done.)

Now in the Star Wars prequels, Lucas tries to have his techno-cake and eat it too. On the one hand, there are no Death Stars. Jedi Starfighters don't have hyperspace capability (gee, it would have been nice if this were a plot point, ever). There are some obvious "precursors" to tech in the classic trilogy, especially throughout Revenge of the Sith.

But on the other hand, despite the 20-year-gap between Sith and Hope, there really aren't that many changes. There's a Death Star, yes. They can now make fake flesh so that Mark Hamill doesn't have to wear a blue glove all the time... I mean, Luke can have a normal-looking hand. The changes are largely cosmetic, except for the Death Star, and don't really affect the story as a whole. How can a 20-year-old droid hack a state-of-the-art trash-compactor?

So, um, what I'm saying here is that the Star Wars prequels actually did a good job with the tech thing...

(The author has a sudden recollection of R2-D2's rocket thrusters.)

Frak.

"How we got here" is not as interesting as "what do we do now?"
Take the superhero genre for a second. Do you care how Thomas Wayne made that fortune that his son squandered on Bat-themed suits, cars, weapons, floodlights, etc? I don't. Or what Superman's dad was up to before Krypton did the big firework? Nah.

Likewise, I don't wanna know how Galactica got constructed or what life was like aboard it prior to the Cylon attack. We saw enough of that in the Miniseries. Not that what we did see was bad, mind you, but it served its purpose as part of a larger story. Here's a quick description of the BSG backstory: "A society a hella lot like ours gets flash-fried by our own robotic creations. The last survivors go on the run. Paranoia, intrigue, and fantastic character-driven storytelling ensue."

Star Trek Enterprise tries to show us what the creation of the Federation was like. Even George Lucas wasn't stupid enough to show us the formation of the Galactic Republic.

Stories should be self-contained. They should start at their beginning and end at their end.
I like that Battlestar even took the extra step of ensuring that there could be no continuation by destroying the Galactica in the finale. To me that sent a very clear message: "we're done here. We've said all we came to say. There will never be more. We promise not to wreck this for you with a sequel. (And if you really want one, just watch Blade Runner.)" It's an entirely self-contained story that doesn't need Caprica. Nor does it need Blood & Chrome. We know everything we need to know.

Now take someone who's notorious for not telling his stories in chronological order. Christopher Nolan has taken the chronologically-scrambled story and turned it into an art form. But note that, aside from his Batman films, which will be discussed in just a moment, each of his films are self-contained. It's true that they don't begin at their chronological beginning, but Nolan builds mystery and suspense by showing things to his audience out of order. The best example of this is, in my opinion, The Prestige. Now, I know I'm part of a pretty small minority when I say that The Prestige is my favorite Nolan film. But I love the fact that once you know Christian Bale is playing twins, it's a whole different story. You'd lose that element if you were given that information at the very beginning. In fact, part of the reason I love The Prestige so much is the fact that you can watch it twice and see a very different film the second time (I rooted for Hugh Jackman pretty much the entire way through the first time, and it was only on second viewing that one of Bale's characters became much more sympathetic).

But imagine if The Prestige only contained the second and third acts. That is, imagine if the story was told in chronological order beginning with Jackman's journey to Colorado and ending with Bale's reunion with his daughter. All you heard about their friendship and early rivalry would be related to you by the other characters. This might just about work, incidentally, though you'd lose a lot. And then later, somebody tried to make the first act into a prequel. Would that be marketable? Would that stand up on its own? I kind of doubt it.

Now the Batman films are a bit different, but they still have self-contained stories to them, with a beginning, middle, end, and in the case of The Dark Knight, an extra end. They're told in chronological order. But would Batman Begins really be a film that could have been made after The Dark Knight? I doubt it. What would be the point?

Why, in short, do filmmakers go backwards after the fact?

See, storytelling is an art. The storyteller has to decide which details to include and which ones to leave out. You're a lot more constrained in television, because every episode has to be 40 minutes and change (and there are a ton of deleted Battlestar scenes I wish had been re-integrated into the DVD episodes, but that's just me).

Star Trek: Holodeck
Now, let's return to my hypothetical idea about a Star Trek show set at roughly 2350 (about 15 years prior to TNG, because if memory serves, the holodeck was a relatively new piece of technology). It'd be set either on or close to Earth and be a character piece - incorporating elements of DS9 and Caprica. No character from TNG, DS9 or Voyager would show up and do anything important. (N.B: the 24th-century Trek shows all had this thing where one character from the previous show would turn up at the beginning in a glorified cameo. I'd be okay with that, so long as it was fleeting enough that it wouldn't lead to a plot hole on the other show.) The only thing that this show would pass on to its sucessors would be the holodeck.

See, the Dominion War isn't really on the same scale as the Nuking of the Colonies in Battlestar, so the whole "everybody's going to die" thing won't really be an issue. As far as cool technology, this would be a show about the creation of the holodeck, the coolest bit of Trek tech ever. I don't know that the holodeck has ever really been used to its full potential. It's been the focus of some comedy episodes on TNG and Voyager, and some "breather" episodes on DS9, and it played an important role in, ugh, Insurrection. The point is that there's a lot of untapped potential here.

There would have to be some conflict, obviously, but it would have to be minor and low-key, to the extent that future/past shows never have/had cause to mention it (something involving Section 31, that secret organization that was introduced on DS9, perhaps). It would in effect be a drama, which is something Trek has never really tried.

Could it work? Maybe, but not under the Star Trek label; drama fans wouldn't watch, and Trek fans would hate it. (Caprica had the same problem.)

So Paramount decided to revive its Trek franchise, but with a "prequel" that knocked everything else out of continuity. Brand recognition, a fresh start, and no continuity problems. Definitely the way to go.

So why do people still think they can make prequels?

...and Another Thing About Caprica

Generally speaking, the science-fiction genre has been a way to tell all sorts of fairy tales with the sort of subtext you couldn't use anywhere else. H.G. Wells did this with the Eloi and the Morlocks, using them to tell a story of a working-class rebellion. It wasn't the main point of The Time Machine, but it was in there.

This approach works because the audience is watching the adventures of people a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (or just a long time ago. Or in the future. Or whatever). They don't expect those people to be us. Captain Kirk can proselytize about a better tomorrow without getting painfully preachy.

Then came Battlestar Galactica, which turned that equation on its head. In his manifesto, Moore notes that the crew of the Galactica "are you and me." But the audience still doesn't mind because they're in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. You think I would watch "Dirty Hands" if it weren't an episode of a science-fiction show? And that's just the most obvious polemic in the series; you don't have to be a partisan hack to notice that they're putting all sorts of references to the War on Terror, torture, Iraq, justice, religion, and so on into the show.

Now some of this subtext is probably just a way of making the unfamiliar familiar. For example, Roslin gets sworn in aboard a futuristic jetliner, much like LBJ was sworn in on Air Force One. I don't think they intend to compare the series as an allegory to Vietnam, and I don't think anything Roslin does particularly mirrors the Great Society, but just about everyone who watched the Miniseries could pick up on the post-Dallas mood. Cally gets to play Jack Ruby in one episode, even though Boomer wasn't a sniper and her target lived. There's a reference to the "Daisy Girl" ad, and the girl isn't even playing with daisies. Hell, there's even a point where the show digs up something familiar to the audience as a way of unsettling the audience; by the time "All Along the Watchtower" makes its appearance, you've accepted the Colonial culture as a sister culture. You don't expect them to start quoting Star Wars or listening to the Beatles. They're "us" and "not-us" at the same time, which is what makes the fact that "Watchtower" exists in their universe a big slice of wham in an episode that's already nearly reached a critical mass of wham.

But in Caprica, they're already in a familiar setting. Caprica depicts a society that is maybe 10-20 years ahead of our own (ignoring the interplanetary travel). So when this society gets hit by a terrorist attack, and a barely-competent investigator starts barging in on private property just to get some good press, it hits a tad too close to home.

Suddenly, the show has abandoned one of the central tenants of political science fiction; that this all happens to people who are not us. Caprica continues the BSG theme that these people are us, but we're looking for escapism here, not a subtext so heavy that it's become plain old text.

Impressions of Caprica

So I'm now three episodes into Caprica, for which there may or may not be individual reviews, because even moreso than BSG this show is really adhering to the concept of being one long film.

But that's not to say that I can't make some observations about things I like (and things I don't), and some guesses about why the show ultimately failed.

#1: The Pedigree

I have some issues with the finale of Battlestar Galactica, but one thing I'm incredibly happy it did was virtually kill off any chance of a sequel. No, the reason I'm happy about this is not because I don't want to see more of the Galactica 'verse, but because a sequel simply couldn't hold up to the very impressive level of quality that BSG pulled off. It prevented subsequent geniuses from coming in and wrecking the Galactica legacy with a bunch of subpar spinoffs.

To demonstrate what I mean, just look at the Star Trek franchise. Let's ignore DS9 for a moment because I know that opinion is highly divided on that one, and just look at the other three incarnations since 1987: first you had TNG, which struggled for a little while to find its footing. Then it had a good run starting in the third or fourth season, but by the end the writers were obviously struggling to come up with good ideas. As soon as TNG got promoted from television to film, they created Voyager, which was basically as far away from DS9 as they could get; DS9 would have ongoing story and character arcs and stay in one place, while Voyager would thump the reset button every week and never stay in the same place. You can't really say that DS9 is just TNG on a space station, because there was a lot more going on there. But I think it would be accurate to say that Voyager is just TNG trying to get back to Earth (assuming you ignore the divergent qualities of each).

And after Voyager, there was Enterprise, which was basically TNG in the past. See, Deep Space Nine brought something new to the table, and it was better for it. I would argue that DS9 was better than TNG, but I also recognize that that's just personal opinon talking. However, Voyager and Enterprise showed an obvious decline in quality. So of the more recent Star Trek incarnations, we've only really had one that was even arguably better than its predecessors.

I could use other examples, but with Moore, Thompson, Weddle and Taylor all DS9 stalwarts, Star Trek seemed like the right one to go with. My point is that just like novels and films, sequels to television shows tend to suck.

#2: Prequelitis

Another problem that Caprica has is one that it shares with the Star Wars prequels. And no, I'm not talking about poorly-written characters, lousy dialogue, bad acting, or an over-reliance on CGI in place of storytelling. Caprica's not really guilty of any of that (although any show that needs to start each episode by telling you precisely what the main characters are thinking probably isn't doing everything right).

Rather, you know how it all is going to end up. The biggest twist that the Star Wars prequels could have delivered would have been to reveal that Darth Vader was actually not Anakin Skywalker (somebody on the Caprica staff knew this. Two words: Willie Adama). But that didn't happen. All we prequels really told us was that Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force. Gee, Obi-wan Kenobi used those exact words about 30 minutes into Star Wars. Likewise, all Caprica is going to tell us is that the Cylons were created by man, which is something that all but three episodes of the first three BSG seasons told us at the beginning of each episode.

But there's another problem here, one that Caprica doesn't share with Star Wars. In the prequels, we knew what Palpatine's plan was the entire time. He was going to create the Galactic Empire. We'd already seen that. So we knew there was an end goal in mind. In contrast, the Cylons never really had a "plan" beyond "nuke everything until it's dead" over in BSG (until its final season), and Sister Polygamy's plan in Caprica is a) vague as all hell, and b) not really clearly tied in to the events of 58 years later. (Palpatine manipulating things behind the scenes -> Empire. Monotheistic terrorists -> ...um, Cylons, somehow.) And then there's the stuff about Tauron languages and other stuff that never came up in Galactica. And don't tell me it's because the Colonies aren't unified yet, because there's apparently a unified court system, and even just before Galactica (per "Taking a Break from All Your Worries"), people from one colony needed a visa to work on another one.

So between these two issues, I'm a bit curious as to why this was a spinoff of Galactica and not its own stand-alone thing. And don't say it's because Galactica had brand recognition. That's a stupid argument for so many reasons.

1) In 2003, the words "Battlestar Galactica" meant "that campy Star Wars ripoff from the 70s." Five years later, it meant "the best science-fiction show ever made." Moore and Eick took the name of the show and completely re-branded it.

2) Galactica fans were turned off by the finale. Look at the viewing figures for "Daybreak" versus the figures for Caprica's pilot.

3) At times it tries too hard to be a Galactica clone (pyramid, the Colonial Anthem), while at other times it has to pointlessly distance itself from its parent show.

Okay, so that's a broad run-down of some of the problems with the show. Here are some of the things I like about it so far:

Daniel Graystone

He's not a corrupt industrialist who's only in it for the money. He seems at least somewhat distrubed by some of the ways his technology has been used, and more importantly, he's trying to chase down the virtual ghost of his daughter. Yeah, his wife's a loony who can't let go of the Idiot Ball for two damn seconds (seriously, she makes Ellen Tigh and Kara Thrace look like beacons of stability), but that's hardly his fault. Faced with some of his unintended consequences, he swore to give his holoband profits to charity. We'll see if that plays out, but it's a nice gesture anyway.

Sam Adama

Yes, the paranoid wingnut's second-favorite character is the gay gangster. (I'll probably have to say this again and again, but I don't mind political subtext so long as you neither rub my face in it nor overemphasize it at the expense of the story.) I just wish they'd stop peppering his dialogue with random Tauron words (seriously, even Worf wasn't that bad by DS9).

Zoe

Thank you, Dawson Casting. It makes me feel less guilty for saying this: Zoe is hot. It's just... what's going on with her, exactly? This geeky nerd has been making Robo-Zoe dance (and there's a scene where he does... something to the robot's crotch area). Is Robo-Zoe programmed to follow the Second Law of Robotics, or is she just willfully ignoring the creep factor in order to keep up her disguise?

Caprica: Pilot

Our story opens in the V-club, which you can tell is a place up to no good because it's full of teenagers having sex, fighting each other, killing each other, engaging in human sacrifice, and listening to techno music. Zoe Graystone talks to two of her friends as they watch her virtual copy. The copy is, sadly, more believable than her friend Ben, who frankly sounds like he just read his lines for the first time that morning.

Anyway, the copy of Zoe de-rezzes (see, Battlestar took its slang from Blade Runner, so Caprica's going to have to steal its slang from some other 80s thing: Tron). Real-Zoe gets in trouble, but promises to perform "tweakage" on the virtual copy. Did the writers get all their knowledge of kids from Buffy and their technology ideas from cult 80s films?

So we meet her parents - Daddy's a major player in this show. Daniel Graystone is played by Eric Stoltz, which makes me wish I'd seen him in more stuff than just Pulp Fiction.

Zoe and her avatar talk - the avatar is pretty much exactly like her only a tad more judgemental. (Here's the first thing that makes no frakking sense to me: the avatar supposedly is Zoe, but Zoe knows why Zoe-A is so important, and Zoe-A apparently doesn't.)

So the kids run away, but then Ben blows himself up rather than admit he only read the first page of the script. Unfortunately, he kills Zoe, as well as Tamara Adams and her mother. Tamara's daddy is Civil Liberties Lawyer... I mean, defense attorney for the mob Joseph Adama, idol and enemy of Romo Lampkin, father of Bill, and owner of one very special lighter.

So in this scene there's some stuff that doesn't make sense to me. Zoe uses a piece of magic paper to send a message to her mother, and it says "message sent." By "message sent," I assume they meant the message was sent, but later we find out it didn't get there, somehow. Why is she using a piece of magic paper? Is magic paper really going to replace the iPhone and not the other way around? Check out how long it takes her to type the first four words of her message; we've got faster stuff today.

Then there's Ben, who's willing to up and murder his best friend. Why? Was she mocking his acting ability? It doesn't make any sense, and by the time the pilot movie ends we still only have the vague idea that Polly Walker might be behind it in some way.

Now contrast this with the way Battlestar Galactica opened. We know about the Cylon War, about the 40-year silence. Six walks in, kisses the guy, nukes the station. War is on. Six is in the market, killing the baby, a model with no acting experience doing a better job than Ben Stark (yeah, I'm picking on him because he's flat and his character makes no sense). Six has sex with Baltar, tells him she used him to get into the defense mainframe. We know what's going on here.

There's an obvious 9/11 subtext. "As of this moment, we are at war." People grieve, but they get ready for what looks like it's just going to be a black-and-white struggle (which the show then gleefully subverts every chance it gets). Roslin pulls an LBJ and gets sworn in on a passenger jet. The miniseries uses historical references to put us in a familiar world.

Nothing of the sort is really attempted in Caprica. Yeah, there's a terrorist attack, but what's the point? Who are the Soldiers of the One? "As you know," they worship the one true God, but what do they really want? What could cause Ben Stark to murder his girlfriend and a bunch of other civilians? The Cylons want to nuke the Colonies until all the humans are dead; later on, we learn that Cavil wants to prove to five specific people that mankind isn't worth saving, but we don't even need to know anything about that plotline to get the BSG miniseries. Meanwhile, a terrorist blows up a train, and the only noticeable change is that now an anti-terrorism officer is harassing a grieving mother.

Adama and Graystone sit in a coffee shop and smoke for a couple of hours. Look at us! Smoking! Yeah, we're subversive, aren't we? It's not like Mad Men does this day in and day out.

So after that, Graystone invites Adama to a C-Bucs game. And he gives this guy he just met his private number. This is before he knows that he can exploit Adama's grief to his advantage, using Adama's mob connections to steal the MCP (Master Control Program? STOP USING TERMS FROM TRON!!!!)

Next, Lacy goes to see Zoe-A in what's totally not the Matrix, honest, and when she finds Zoe-A covered in blood, she screams. Now, later we'll see that both Lacy and Adama unconsciously say what they say in V-world out in the real world too, so why doesn't that scream alert the Graystone household that something's wrong? Why does Lacy have to be in the Graystone household to find Zoe-A's magic room? They weren't at the beginning.

So they do the "you're just a thing" thing, and we talk about how Zoe-A has memories even though she's been compiled from data about Zoe's birth control perscriptions (and about eighty gazillion other sources).

Fortunately, as happens whenever I start griping about things not following their own frakking rules, a character I like shows up. Graystone shows up, but Lacy runs away.

Now, Adama's a lawyer, so I guess we have to show him in a court of law. Turns out Adama and his underworld buddies have bribed the judge (so... in the entire BSG/Caprica verse, the fairest trial we've ever seen is... Gaeta nearly being executed by the Circle).

Graystone has his own problems; he's about to lose his contract to build robots for the military because his robot can't shoot a mobile bowling pin with a painball gun. How hard can it be? The computer can always manage to shoot me whenever I play Half-Life 2, and Gordon Freeman can't move half as fast as the bowling pin. Per "Rebirth," it's because the robot isn't intuitive or some such, but 1) how smart is Serge, the Graystones' robot butler, and 2) how "intuitive" are the NPCs in any modern video game?

Then we have the scene where the kid asks the uncomfortable questions about death, but this scene is quickly interrupted because Daniel Graystone is too busy making important discoveries. Now as much as I'll complain about Season 3 of BSG chasing its own tail for the sake of character pieces, this show has pretty much the opposite problem. I want to see Adama realize that his wife and daughter were on that train. I want to see Adama talk to his son about it.

See, among the many, many other things Buffy the Vampire Slayer did to make it one of the greatest television shows ever, it always stuck with the characters in the middle of really awkward, uncomfortable, emotional scenes. There was no relief for the audience (say, by cutting to a different scene) because there was no relief for the characters. Nobody ever talked through their problems off-screen. There's a scene in "Innocence" where, just to prove to the audience how Angel is truly gone, Angelus spends a good three minutes completely shattering Buffy's heart.

At least Daniel Graystone's story is interesting enough to make up for the character bits I miss from Adama's story. Graystone gets Zoe's friend, Lacy, to show him Zoe-A. Then Graystone steals Zoe-A and puts it in a Cylon body. (Hey, this guy's supposed to be some sort of genius, right? If there's a risk of something going wrong, how about you copy Zoe-A's program? You yourself aren't really sure whether she's your daughter or just a tool to help keep your contract from being stolen by a competitor.)

(Further note to self: be sure to mock Baltar's supposed genius credentials on the next BSG review, too.)

Graystone shows Adama a copy of his daughter, Tamara, but Adama's not quite as quick a convert to the Church of the Robot Soul (established 1982). Still, he's perfectly willing to help Graystone steal the MCP from his competitor.

So Adama agrees to give the defense minister a message in exchange for his mob buddies getting the MCP. The defense minister has Tyrell's glasses from Blade Runner, because hey, why not? Either you get the reference, or you don't, and if you don't, why are you watching this? Then Graystone has sex with his wife while Adama's brother kills the minister.

So basically Graystone is this amoral businessman who's willing to steal from his competitor and corrupt his daughter's work in order to keep his contract... except then he was sad he couldn't suceed in putting his daughter in the robot. This makes him a complex, nuanced character. But because they kept cutting away from the Adama storyline, and because they left a bunch of material invovling Mrs. Graystone and Sister Clarence Willow on the cutting room floor, I don't really have that much of a feel for their characters yet.

See, in the Battlestar Galactica pilot/miniseries, you got to know all these characters. Adama was this crusty old guy who had the respect of his underlings, Tigh was a functional drunk with an estranged wife, Starbuck was an ace pilot but also a world-class screwup partly because of the guilt she felt in getting her boyfriend killed, Apollo wasn't a chip off the old block at all, Roslin was either an obstructivist schoolteacher or a cancer-stricken heroine who rallied a civilian fleet, or both, and Baltar was a sleazebag with an imaginary girlfriend. Basically what I know about Joseph Adama at this point is that he's a defense attorney for the mob, and he doesn't know how to raise his son.

Epilogue: The Perils of Prequels

We're in a similar trap here to the one that the Star Wars prequels fell into. Now, that's not entirely fair, because Caprica doesn't have a cartoon rabbit, an awful love story, and an over-reliance on CGI instead of characters (although I'm not sure I like how much attention the Cylon prototype is getting, and I applaud the decision to have Zoe stand in for the robot a lot once we get to the series proper). We have much better characters, (let's face it, saturday morning cartoons have better characters than the Star Wars prequels) but the story's in a similar dilemma because we all know where it ends up. The very first thing on the screen is a title card that says "Caprica: 58 years before the Fall." We go into this thinking that we know how it's all going to end.

All we knew about the way Battlestar Galactica was going to end was that they were probably going to find Earth (they did), and that they were probably going to discover 12 Cylon models along the way (they did). We didn't know who those Cylons were, who would die along the way, what state we'd find Earth in, how well the Roslin-Adama alliance would last, whether Starbuck and Apollo would ever frak, whether Starbuck would ever confess to Adama about the real circumstances of Zak's death, or even when the entire show takes place.

Not nearly as many plotlines are set up here. We have the Soldiers of the One and whatever Polly Walker's up to, but it's harder to care because we all know they'll be dead in 58 years. Here we know that the Cylons will become self-aware, that Joseph Adama will live long enough to know his grandson Lee, that Zoe-A is somehow going to have to magically vanish, they're going to lose that magic paper technology and the holobands, and that it's all going to end in a nuclear holocaust. We think we know little Willie Adama's going to make it, but that's subverted far too late.

So, and especially given the way "Daybreak" divided the Galactica fanbase, I really think Caprica should have been an independent show instead of a prequel.