The recently con­cluded series Bat­tlestar Galac­tica (2003–2009) was crit­i­cally acclaimed and much beloved by a rel­a­tively small group of fans and crit­ics that appre­ci­ated the brainy show’s bleak, pes­simistic view of human­ity. It will cer­tainly live for­ever as a clas­sic achieve­ment in tele­vi­sion, but the com­mon con­sen­sus is that it failed to reach the wide audi­ence it could have. Exec­u­tive Pro­ducer Ron Moore told Vari­ety “‘We had view­ers say that if they were able to trick their wives or girl­friends into watch­ing Galac­tica, they loved it. But with the name Bat­tlestar Galac­tica scream­ing sci­ence fic­tion,’ he adds, ‘there was just such a high hur­dle to get female view­ers to even try it.’” So comes Caprica, a pre­quel osten­si­bly engi­neered from the begin­ning for greater appeal.

In an orig­i­nal move, its unrated (read: blood ‘n’ boo­bies) movie-length pilot episode pre­miered day-and-date on DVD and dig­i­tal down­load in May 1999, nearly a year before the series proper. It pre­serves some of the sig­na­ture ver­nac­u­lar of its par­ent series, includ­ing tech­nob­a­b­ble like “Cylon” (a mar­ket­ing term short for, we finally learn, Cyber­netic Life­form Node), the trip-on-the-tongue “gods damn it,” the infa­mous euphemism “frak,” and even racial epi­thets like “dirt eater.” The char­ac­ter of Bill Adama (Edward James Olmos in Bat­tlestar Galac­tica) appears as a young boy, and one sup­poses we might later even see some of the “final five” Cylons from the orig­i­nal series (Michael Hogan, Kate Ver­non, Michael Trucco, Rekha Sharma, and Aaron Dou­glas), who ought to have been run­ning around in some form at this point in BSG chronol­ogy. Some of the same core themes are still present, par­tic­u­larly reli­gious intol­er­ance and fam­i­lies cop­ing with cat­a­strophic dis­as­ter. Even the spe­cial effects are up to par with Galactica’s ground­break­ing space­ship bat­tles, although applied to spec­tac­u­larly con­vinc­ing dig­i­tal cityscapes.

Caprica, like Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, holds that there are no Sur­geon Gen­eral warn­ings in space

But there are sig­nif­i­cantly wor­ri­some signs that indi­cate a fatal mis­cal­cu­la­tion on The SyFy Channel’s part (worse than their aston­ish­ingly stu­pid rechris­ten­ing from “Sci-Fi”): Caprica hinges on two men and three annoy­ing teens, rel­e­gat­ing its only two adult female char­ac­ters to the side­lines. It may very well be the case that many women were dis­cour­aged from giv­ing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica a chance, but it’s also true that the show fea­tured a bevy of sig­nif­i­cant, com­plex women: self-destructive fire­brand Star­buck (Katee Sack­hoff), pres­i­dent of all human­ity Laura Roslin (Mary McDon­nell), Dick Cheney-esque war crim­i­nal Cap­tain Cain (Michelle Forbes), and con­flicted Cylons Three (Lucy Law­less), Six (Tri­cia Helfer), and Eight (Grace Park). So far, at least, Caprica includes only two lead female roles, nei­ther of whom fig­ures strongly in the pilot episode: Amanda Gray­stone (Paula Mal­com­son, from Dead­wood) and Sis­ter Clarice Wil­low (Polly Walker, from Rome).

But maybe this gen­der inequal­ity makes a kind of sense. The real core dynamic between the two male leads makes for clas­sic sto­ry­telling. Indus­tri­al­ist Daniel Gray­stone (Eric Stoltz) invented a vir­tual real­ity play­ground called the Holoband, and has since turned to devel­op­ing weaponized robot­ics. Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) is a crooked lawyer tied to an off­world orga­nized crime syn­di­cate that put him through law school, and fur­ther con­trol him with threats. A ter­ror­ist bomb­ing claims their daugh­ters (and Adama’s wife), and the two men later bond over mutual grief, cof­fee, and cig­a­rettes (like Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, doc­tors and nutri­tion­ists many thou­sands of years in our past haven’t yet warned peo­ple about the dan­gers of caf­feine and nico­tine). The two men may be of dif­fer­ent plan­ets, races, and reli­gions, but become bound by com­plic­ity in an act of indus­trial espi­onage that leads to a mur­der of an elected offi­cial (cast and cos­tumed in thick glasses to resem­ble Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel) from Blade Runner).

If one of the two had been female, the viewer might nat­u­rally expect a roman­tic sub­plot. Caprica’s cre­ators may have avoided this kind of dis­trac­tion, but the down­side is that the pri­mary nar­ra­tive con­flict is between two men, and the only two adult female char­ac­ters are solely defined by their rela­tion­ships with the men and/or kids in their lives. Daniel and Amanda’s daugh­ter Zoe (Alessan­dra Tores­sani) is killed in a ter­ror­ist attack, but we never see the icy Amanda mourn as we do Daniel. Her char­ac­ter is sim­ply Daniel’s wife, noth­ing more. Sis­ter Wil­low, at least, is revealed by the end to be more than she seems. Here’s hop­ing we see Amanda and Sis­ter Wil­low sig­nif­i­cantly expanded in future episodes.

Another thing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica got right was to side­step alto­gether the trap of annoy­ing child char­ac­ters. It was an adult show, for intel­li­gent adults. Caprica obvi­ously also didn’t learn from a les­son from Jeri­cho (2006–2008), a gen­er­ally smart show whose weak­est char­ac­ters were a pair of whiney teens that were thank­fully writ­ten out. Out of Caprica’s trio of kids, two die but unfor­tu­nately come back to a kind of immor­tal­ity (if you only counted one, check out the deleted scenes avail­able on the DVD edition).

Wait, there was a woman in Caprica? Let’s hope poor Paula Mal­com­son actu­ally gets some scenes in the full series

The first 10 min­utes pack in a mas­sive down­load of impor­tant infor­ma­tion, espe­cially tricky for any view­ers not already versed in the fic­tional Galac­tica uni­verse. Cer­tain key points are reit­er­ated once things slow down later, but a new viewer tun­ing in cold might get the sense they were sup­posed to be versed in all this stuff already, instead of just get­ting teased with a bar­rage of info to be unpacked later. When a title card reads “58 years before The Fall,” Galac­tica fans will catch the ref­er­ence to the sneak attack by the Cylons that nearly erad­i­cates their human cre­ators, the incit­ing inci­dent that moti­vated the entire story arc of the par­ent series.

We then cut directly to the deca­dent V Club, imply­ing this civilization’s late-Rome-like deca­dence to be one of the direct causes of the com­ing Fall. A fully immer­sive vir­tual real­ity sim­u­la­tion not unlike The Matrix, the V Club is full of teens danc­ing to dated techno, ogling hot les­bians, mak­ing sim­u­lated human sac­ri­fice, and squar­ing off in a fight club knock­off. Its banal­ity betrays a fail­ure of imag­i­na­tion not just on the part of Caprica’s teens, but also on the film­mak­ers. A rebel­lious gen­er­a­tion co-opts a vir­tual world in which they can do absolutely any­thing they want, and all they can come up with is a sin­gle night­club that only spins techno from Earth’s 1990s? No gay boys want to make out in pub­lic too? Nobody wants to fly? Nobody wants to enhance their vir­tual appear­ance, say, to make them­selves younger, more beau­ti­ful, cov­ered in fur or made of diamond?

The tit­u­lar Caprica is the cap­i­tal of twelve plan­ets col­o­nized by human­ity. We only caught glimpses of its future before it is dec­i­mated in the first episode of Bat­tlestar Galac­tica, so there is plenty of unex­plored ter­ri­tory for a new pre­quel series to fill in. Its fash­ions resem­ble 1950s Amer­ica, per­haps meant to cap­i­tal­ize on the pop­u­lar­ity of the Show­time series Mad Men. We’re sup­posed to agree that this is a cor­rupt, deca­dent soci­ety on the cusp of col­lapse. But how, exactly? They’re play­ing god(s) by delv­ing into dan­ger­ous tech­no­log­i­cal areas like robotic weapons and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, or at least a means of record­ing a human individual’s con­scious­ness into a com­puter. They’ve designed vir­tual real­ity sys­tems capa­ble of sim­u­lat­ing any desire. The soci­ety is racist to the core; Tau­rans (from the sis­ter planet Tau­rus) are called “dirt eaters” and asso­ci­ated with orga­nized crime (although to be fair, the lat­ter actu­ally is true — they seem mod­eled on the immi­grant Sicil­ian mafia of 1920s Amer­ica). Like Michael Cor­leone in the God­fa­ther tril­ogy, Joseph is osten­si­bly an upstand­ing cit­i­zen forced to com­pro­mise with his her­itage. Unable to com­pletely extri­cate him­self from the mob, he tries to Capri­can­ize every­thing else is his life: chang­ing his sur­name to Adams and rais­ing his son as a Capri­can, all to the con­ster­na­tion of his mother.

Zoe, genius hacker, goes club­bing in The Matrix

This society’s most truly dan­ger­ous trait appears to be its ingrained reli­gious intol­er­ance. The pop­u­la­tion is almost uni­formly poly­the­is­tic, and intol­er­ant of the minor­ity monothe­ists. Under­ground mil­i­tants have formed the Sol­diers of the One, a cult that believes in a com­bi­na­tion of monothe­ism and anti-science. Their secret rep­re­sen­ta­tive Sis­ter Wil­low recruits teen stu­dents from her exclu­sive pri­vate school. Zeal­ous Ben (Avan Jogia), in turn, drafts Zoe and her friend Magda, and later stages the sui­cide bomb­ing that claims the Gray­stone and Adama fam­i­lies. Ben was pre­sum­ably being manip­u­lated by Sis­ter Wil­low (Polly Walker), who also had designs on Zoe’s bril­liant com­puter skills that didn’t nec­es­sar­ily hinge on her remain­ing alive.

The biggest addi­tion to the Bat­tlestar Galac­tica mythos is a deeper look into arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Like the Ter­mi­na­tor fran­chise, I appre­ci­ate Caprica’s empha­sis that devel­op­ing arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is a sep­a­rate pur­suit than build­ing robots. Too many sci­ence fic­tion sto­ries seem to equate the two, includ­ing Bat­tlestar Galac­tica itself in its con­tro­ver­sial final episode (for the record, I loved its audac­ity). The Day the Earth Stood Still and For­bid­den Planet’s humanoid robots have minds of its own, but what about being robots makes them so, as opposed to immo­bile com­put­ers? Blade Runner’s repli­cants and A.I.‘s boy robots look human first, and it is never asked what exactly makes them sen­tient beings (unless the ques­tion is how we anthro­po­mor­phize things that out­wardly seem human). Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence is almost always auto­mat­i­cally evil in movies such as Ter­mi­na­tor and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It is rarely inher­ently inno­cent, as in A.I.: Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence. Caprica fea­tures two dis­turb­ing scenes of a human con­scious­ness wak­ing up trapped in a crude robot body. That’s called over-egging your pud­ding. Also creepy: the advances made by Zoe lead directly to Daniel’s clumsy war­rior robots becom­ing the effec­tive killing machines chris­tened Cylons.

Speak­ing of, how could a lumi­nary in the cyber­net­ics busi­ness not real­ize his own daugh­ter was a genius-level hacker? Appar­ently work­ing on her own, Zoe comes up with a means of pre­serv­ing the 100 ter­abytes of human data stored in the human brain, and com­ple­ment it with 300 MB of dig­i­tal detri­tus that per­son has left behind on Caprica’s equiv­a­lents of Google and Face­book: med­ical records, playlists, email, searches, social net­work­ing, etc. Her break­through allows Gray­stone to res­ur­rect Adama’s late daugh­ter as well (although we don’t see how he obtained her 100 ter­abytes of brain mat­ter). The resul­tant dupli­cate quickly goes insane, so Zoe is some­how spe­cial, the only dig­i­tal human mind that doesn’t go mad.

Some awfully big events are revealed in the DVD edition’s deleted scenes: Adama learns early on that Zoe was involved in the bomb­ing, adding an extra dimen­sion to his inter­ac­tions with her father. Also, boy bomber Ben’s mind was also suc­cess­fully uploaded into the V Club by Sis­ter Wil­low, sug­gest­ing that Zoe might not be so unique after all, and that her sci­en­tific break­throughs may have been in part devel­oped by the Sol­diers of the One. Both of these strike me as great lay­ers of com­plex­ity that would have only added to the story.

Note: the above is a revised, expended, and cor­rected ver­sion of The Dork Report’s orig­i­nal review of the DVD edi­tion, pub­lished on May 17, 2009.

Offi­cial movie site: syfy.com/caprica

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