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?