I hope Sci-Fi doesn’t greenlight Caprica. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Ronald D. Moore, David Eick, and Remi Aubuchon set out to create a soap opera, and they have succeeded. The trappings are there: two families coping with tragedy, one father a corporate sleaze, the other a lawyer for the mob, children getting into advanced mischief, a police investigation, and secrets galore. There’s even a sci-fi incarnation of the old soap staple, a girl locked in a room.
The problem with soap operas, though, is that they are so overwrought that they risk draining all the life out of the experience. They need comedy or action or mystery or something other than theatrics to pull us through. My primary suggestion for Caprica is that it needs a heavy dose of laughs.
The story concerns the creation of cylon centurions (and possibly attempts to create more lifelike models down the line) by businessman Daniel Graystone, who strikes up a friendship with Joseph Adams (né Adama) after both their daughters and Adams’ wife were killed in a suicide bombing. Lucky for Graystone, his daughter Zoe has created a near-perfect avatar in a virtual world frequented by teenagers, and Daniel becomes interested in using this avatar in order to circumvent death. Responsible for the terrorist attack is a growing monotheistic sect that promises to build in importance.True to form, the Caprica pilot introduces a wealth of plot and thematic possibilities, from an arms race analogue to the decadence of a society in decline. There’s a gripping moral defense of terrorism as a means of combating evil. There’s obsession, casual classism, the immigration experience, balancing security and democracy, corporate espionage, and above all, questions about the creation of life and cheating of death. Also, the writers have promised homosexuality which has yet to enter the fray (outside of the virtual world extras). Much as I admire the breadth of subjects introduced in Caprica, I wish I had a better handle on where the series would go from here. On the other hand, the pilot had a healthy predictability, so I am open to a more uncertain future.
Director Jeffrey Reiner is responsible for some breathtaking shots. Just after the suicide bombing, dust and ash float through the streets toward a crowd of bystanders in an echo of the World Trade Center attack. I appreciate how willing Reiner is to obscure his subjects with foreground noise; tragedy is like that. Meanwhile, Bear McCreary reprises his Battlestar role with some nice music, though the poundy drums only rear their heads during cylon test scenes. Speaking of which, visual effects supervisor Gary Hutzel continues his reign of wonder with gorgeous early cylon models in action.
The cast is spotty, but mostly solid. I hope Eric Stoltz as Daniel is allowed by the writing to tone down the obsessive derangement—if only for his increasingly frazzled hair. The most layered work comes from HBO veterans Paula Malcomson as Dr. Amanda Graystone, Daniel’s wife, who naturally inhabits an exhausted, grieving mother and Polly Walker as Sister Clarice, the intriguing teacher at the Athenian Academy where the murdered daughters went to school. Oh, and Sina Najafi, the kid they found to play young Bill Adama, is the most authentic of the child actors on the show—and we know he eventually grows out of that Canadian lilt.Unfortunately, there is a lot to recommend about Caprica, and once you’ve muddled through all this exposition, the series’ future is exciting. I hope Sci-Fi can broadcast the nudity. It’s hard to play decadence on a PG-rating. I look forward to the religious threads that Battlestar always rocked. A conversation between Sister Clarice and the counterterrorism investigator Agent Durham is promising:
“It doesn’t concern you, Sister, that kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single, all-knowing, all-powerful being whose judgment cannot be questioned and in whose name the most horrendous acts can be sanctioned without appeal?”
I read Cat’s Cradle yesterday, and it has quite a bit of overlap with Caprica. For instance, in Cat’s Cradle, everyone on San Lorenzo is a Bokononist even though the official religion is (non-Catholic, non-Protestant) Christianity, just like the surprising number of monotheists at play in Caprica. The crux of Cat’s Cradle lies in the idea that science should be a quest for truth for truth’s sake, but instead all science becomes a weapon. Here, Daniel briefly seems poised to invest his talents in resurrecting his daughter, but ultimately he slides all the way down and ends up with a killing machine called a cylon. Vonnegut ties it all together better, but then he wasn’t making a pilot.Permit me to engage with some of the show’s mythology. I can buy Daniel naming his creation a cylon, which comes from the phrase “cybernetic lifeform node,” but we know he didn’t coin the term. Cylons have been called cylons since Kobol, right? I can’t help but wonder if Daniel Graystone is a version of Daniel the Number 7 model. This time, if Ronald D. Moore tells me I’m reading too much into his show’s clues, I may nuke a planet.
The pilot for Caprica has so much potential that I’m eager to see where the series would lead. That’s exactly why I don’t want Sci-Fi to greenlight it. Unless there’s a major overhaul, I’m going to have to sit through at least a season’s worth of humorless but otherwise fascinating soap stories, and the untested performers are going to surprise me like Katee Sackhoff and Michael Hogan did, and I’m going to become obsessed with parsing the show’s theses. As it is, Caprica is intriguing, which is a fine start, but not absorbing.I'm off to watch the New Caprica arc instead.
