Caprica – A World with No Home
For those who don't go deeeeeep sci-fi the way I do (although if you don't I'm not sure how you got so turned around that you ended up reading this blog) Caprica was a sort of fable that was set to tell us about the downfall of a society a long time ago. Pushed to hedonism and depravity in a way remanicent of the final days of the Roman, and possibly American, Empire, humanity's last ditch effort to save itself from itself by creating intelligent machines went, predictably, horribly wrong. Caprica was a prequel to the Battlestar Galactica re-imagined series which was introduced in the early 2000's and pretty much single-handedly brought hard sci-fi without a Star Wars tag on it back from the dead. However, discontinued and, in my view, discounted in many ways, Caprica never got a chance to come into its own. It’s unfortunate because the universe they were given to write and play within was already so diverse and intensely populated that it never occurred to me that under-development would be its demise. Perhaps the writers felt too held back by the fact that the end of the story was never in question; the Cylons would destroy Caprica and along with it all colonies and humanity would be essentially lost in space left to figure out life and survival with just Admiral Adama to guide them(masterfully portrayed in the BSG series by Edward James Olmos), but I felt like they spent too much time showing the loss and remorse of characters who's storylines needed to be pushed along in order to create a cohesive narrative. They introduced compelling concepts like the STO or Soldiers of the One, a religious-terrorism organization which believed in the existence of only One True God (as opposed to Caprica’s mainstream ideology which subscribed to a Pantheon religion using the gods we know from Greek and Roman mythology). This created an intense and violently relatable contemporary premise to work from (the main character was killed in a civilian suicide bombing in the first episode) but which never developed along any believable train of thought. The colonies of each planet in Caprica’s solar system were briefly explored with the Planet Tauron’s culture being the most showcased off Caprica and the people of Tauron being cast as stand-ins for Italian gangsters. The toughest gangster on the show also happening to be gay. So they set a whole bunch of stages within the first two episodes and didn’t give the characters the chance to explore the personalities that were written for them. Alas, now we'll never see exactly how “Zoe”, the human being whose personality was uploaded to the internet on the day she was murdered and whose existence was then maintained through an “Avatar”, made the jump from angst-y teen internet creation to bloodthirsty kill-bot (although we do get to see that her physical manifestation is ironically built by her father who is forever trying to devise a way to get her back from the dead without knowing that he has already done it), we'll never see how (future) Admiral William Adama's sister's death and subsequent internet resurrection impacted Adama's growth and we'll never have a clear vision of what was going on in the "Holonet" (read unregulated internet and media with three dimensional chat rooms and addicted inhabitants of life-like games involving extreme behavior) and how it contributed to the birth of a species of robot with the singular goal to destroy all of humanity. <P>
Later this year we'll be seeing BSG:Blood and Chrome, a new series set some time after the events that were (not entirely) depicted in Caprica (ten years into the second Cylon War to be precise) but its confusing to figure how they plan on jumping the narrative to Adama's early days as a pilot without finishing the story of how the Cylons actually came into existence, and working out how Adama avoided joining his uncle's gang for that matter. It's a frustrating end to a show that had a lot going for it, but I'm not necessarily sad to see it go. The production never looked the way it should have; I didn't buy the stylization of Caprica’s city in the way I bought the hard edged, lived-in feel of Galactica, and again, the writers dragged the characters around by the scruff of their necks without ever really getting near the places we knew they needed and wanted them to go psychologically and at times even physically. It is interesting because one of the writing department's major players, Jane Espenson, a veteran of the first BSG series as well as Sci-Fi fan favorites like Buffy and almost every other Joss Whedon project, contributed heavily to the storyline. Although original creator Ronald D. Moore produced the Caprica project it just goes to show how many roles have to come together perfectly to create that blend of beauty, brawn and brains that is the blueprint for hard-hitting and believable(or at least willingness to suspend disbelief) science fiction projects. Hopefully Espenson and her new crew will find a more interesting story to tell with Blood and Chrome in the near future. Because I for one would hate to see the re-imagined Battlestar Universe placed on the shelf for good.<P>
Post Script: I will be interested to see how Alessandra Torresani’s (Zoe in Caprica) career develops. I thought she had a lot of promise but was never given enough screen-time, especially as what amounted to the central character as “Cylon-zero”. I know she has some schlocky horror vehicle coming out sometime this year, but after that it would be cool if she gets some nifty sci-fi spot. She has the spunk to be a Sarah Michelle Gellar or Eliza Dushku in the ‘10s if she wants to go that route…
