Fight for Your Right To Party
'Red Widow' Gets The Axe
Review: Caprica - Pilot (series premiere)
by Nick Zaino, posted Jan 23rd 2010 10:08PM
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S01E01) In the first few minutes of Caprica, SyFy's new Battlestar Galactica prequel, you might think the Cylons were perfectly justified to try to annihilate Caprica and the rest of the human race. The show opens on a hedonistic party where people are murdered for fun to throbbing dance music and onstage human sacrifice is cheered by a sweaty crowd.
But, as Battlestar Galactica fans might suspect, Caprica is more complicated than that. (See the full episode here).
That party was taking place in a virtual world, entered by users wearing a "holoband" - think of it as a realistic, 3D Second Life. So while none of that was real, it did reflect the inner demons of the people of Caprica, a society drowning in technology and ravaged by religious terrorism. This is the soup from which the Cylons and the near destruction of humanity arise.
It has been stressed by the folks at SyFy that you don't need to have followed Battlestar Gallactica to understand Caprica. Which is true, but this series has its own complications. The first person we meet in that virtual world is a teenage girl named Zoe (Alessandra Torresani), who, along with her friends, is trying to change the virtual world before her. What kind of change is not explicit, but Zoe and co's plan to stop a sacrifice fail when her doppelganger does not step up at the right time.
Back in the real world, an act of terrorism takes Zoe's life, which affects the lives of her father, computer engineer Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz), and her mother Amanda. It also kills the wife and daughter of criminal defense attorney Joseph Adama (Esai Morales).
As it turns out, Zoe has a bit of her father's engineering talent, and managed a connection between her holoband-world self and real world self, and lives on in some form in that world after her death. When Daniel discovers her in that world, a world made possible when he invented the holoband, he tells this new Zoe that she's a copy, and she doesn't believe it. She doesn't feel like a copy, she says.
Also handy to know - Daniel is working on a prototype for a battle robot (with the slightest hint of a metal mohawk and one glowing, constantly moving eye) with stability issues.
And there you have all of the groundwork neatly laid out for the creation of the Cylons, their eventual human appearance, their religious fanaticism, and a resulting desire to destroy humanity. It's brilliantly efficient, but possibly too efficient. The trick here, as with any prequel, is that we know where it's going, and it's tough to get there without the complications and plot twists seeming contrived to conform to that end. Terrorism, racism, and a mob subplot would seem to figure heavily into that.
Still, there is plenty to do - characters to introduce, moral dilemmas to navigate, technological gaps to overcome. How quickly these things develop will determine whether Caprica is meant to last for just a series or two or last as long as Battlestar Galactica did. I'm hoping the writers are patient with the series, and we get to see more of Stoltz, Morales, and Torresani, and what they have to do with each other. The rest of the plot will be mapped to that relationship. You may not get shootouts in space, but Caprica has the potential to be no less dramatic.
S01E01) In the first few minutes of Caprica, SyFy's new Battlestar Galactica prequel, you might think the Cylons were perfectly justified to try to annihilate Caprica and the rest of the human race. The show opens on a hedonistic party where people are murdered for fun to throbbing dance music and onstage human sacrifice is cheered by a sweaty crowd. But, as Battlestar Galactica fans might suspect, Caprica is more complicated than that. (See the full episode here).
That party was taking place in a virtual world, entered by users wearing a "holoband" - think of it as a realistic, 3D Second Life. So while none of that was real, it did reflect the inner demons of the people of Caprica, a society drowning in technology and ravaged by religious terrorism. This is the soup from which the Cylons and the near destruction of humanity arise.
It has been stressed by the folks at SyFy that you don't need to have followed Battlestar Gallactica to understand Caprica. Which is true, but this series has its own complications. The first person we meet in that virtual world is a teenage girl named Zoe (Alessandra Torresani), who, along with her friends, is trying to change the virtual world before her. What kind of change is not explicit, but Zoe and co's plan to stop a sacrifice fail when her doppelganger does not step up at the right time.
Back in the real world, an act of terrorism takes Zoe's life, which affects the lives of her father, computer engineer Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz), and her mother Amanda. It also kills the wife and daughter of criminal defense attorney Joseph Adama (Esai Morales).
As it turns out, Zoe has a bit of her father's engineering talent, and managed a connection between her holoband-world self and real world self, and lives on in some form in that world after her death. When Daniel discovers her in that world, a world made possible when he invented the holoband, he tells this new Zoe that she's a copy, and she doesn't believe it. She doesn't feel like a copy, she says.
Also handy to know - Daniel is working on a prototype for a battle robot (with the slightest hint of a metal mohawk and one glowing, constantly moving eye) with stability issues.
And there you have all of the groundwork neatly laid out for the creation of the Cylons, their eventual human appearance, their religious fanaticism, and a resulting desire to destroy humanity. It's brilliantly efficient, but possibly too efficient. The trick here, as with any prequel, is that we know where it's going, and it's tough to get there without the complications and plot twists seeming contrived to conform to that end. Terrorism, racism, and a mob subplot would seem to figure heavily into that.
Still, there is plenty to do - characters to introduce, moral dilemmas to navigate, technological gaps to overcome. How quickly these things develop will determine whether Caprica is meant to last for just a series or two or last as long as Battlestar Galactica did. I'm hoping the writers are patient with the series, and we get to see more of Stoltz, Morales, and Torresani, and what they have to do with each other. The rest of the plot will be mapped to that relationship. You may not get shootouts in space, but Caprica has the potential to be no less dramatic.
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