I always say how much I despise Prequels, but I have to admit I always find myself getting sucked into them, because there’s a part of me that always wants to know how X got to Y. Also the Pollyanna side of me always watches these things thinking Anakin really won’t go bad, Wolverine really won’t loose his memory, Lex Luthor is really going to turn out to be a good guy and on Caprica the Cylons really won’t kill everyone in sight. You can’t help but feel a sense of creepiness and foreboding to everything that’s going on with this show.
The first question one must ask is, when will the “human” race learn that Robots, Artificial Intelligence and Apes are always bad. Sure they’ll start of all baby like and able to play checkers, or bring you a banana or do other cute tricks, but at some point in their developmental cycle they will realize how vapid and stupid we humans are and seek to conquer us; if that isn’t bad enough these scientists always go, “you know what would be really cool? Nanotech, yeah, let’s add Nanotech to these things so they can fix themselves and become virtually invincible.”
Have I said Caprica is creepy? As in skin curdling at times? Namely surrounding The Greystones who lost a daughter, Zoe (Alessandra Torresani, because the dumb bint was part of some cult who blew up a subway train. Her distraught father, Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz) discovered his daughter’s Avatar and captured it. Somehow the Avatar ended up into his prototype Robot Soldier of the Future. So the first Cylon was actually a girl?
The show’s creepiness comes into play when we see Zoe’s reaction to being a Cylon from her point of view – she’s literally stuck in a Cylon’s body and no one knows she’s there accept her best friend. So when the computer geeks are working on the Cylon the camera view shifts between the Cylon Shell and the Avatar version of Zoe. She also gets to watch her parents have sex, how creepy is that.
Ok, so I understand the motivations and roll the Graystone’s play in the eventual destruction of the human race, what I don’t understand are the Adamas. After 4 hours, the only things I can see are Adamas are a sort of mobbed up family with Bill’s father Joseph being a some sort of prosecutor. Joseph Adama (Bill’s father) knows what Graystone is up to and helped him capture the Zoe Avatar on the condition that he saves his daughter who died in the bombing. I would give you some spoilers for the next two episodes but honestly not much happens in these initial eps that would be spoiler worthy.
Caprica maintains the same overly dramatic, serious tone that Galactica had, which made sense considering most of the human race got wiped off the map and they were struggling to survive. Here, the pacing is painfully slow and everyone’s depressed all the time – even before Zoe blew up a train full of people. So maybe the Cylons were the good guys because they put these horribly depressed people out of their collective misery. Ok, so they made the ones who were left more miserable.
Once again the folks in SyFy’s marketing department confuses the heck out of me, they aired the original movie almost 8 months ago and are going to launch the new series this Friday night with a re-broadcast of the movie – with some supposed surprising twist (that wasn’t on my preview copy) and then start the “regular” series run next Friday. Based on the movie and first two official episodes, I think I’m down with Caprica, I’m curious to see where they take it. It has quality production values, and solid acting, but the pacing feels slow. They need to lighten the tone a bit, not be so pretentious and cutback on using the word Frak in every other sentence. This is a good start I’m consciously optimistic. Caprica premieres Friday, July 22nd on SyFy with a re-airing of the original movie pilot.
Grade B-
EM Review
by Michelle Alexandria
Originally posted 01.19.2010