Caprica

I was much too late to jump onto the Battlestar Galactica spacewagon when the show started airing on the Sci-Fi channel several years ago. By the time I really became aware of the series as a geek cultural phenomenon, it was already half-over.

Now, I like science fiction as a genre. Most of the new fiction I read tends to be SF. I’d seen the original Battlestar Galactica when I was a kid and had dismissed it as a Star Wars ripoff. I’d never been fond of Star Wars, even though my childhood occurred in the epicenter of its cultural impact. I’d never been a fan of Star Trek either, for that matter. My fondness for Doctor Who and Firefly notwithstanding, I think it’s fairly safe to make the generalization that I’m not a fan of the space opera, with its captains standing steadfastly in their bridges against the enemies to the human race, its babble about hyperspace jumping, and the shooting of big lasers between spaceships.

So when it came to the remake of BSG, I contented myself with following my friends’ excited LiveJournal posts about the series. By the time the show finished its run I had a general idea of its arc, and judged it safe finally to dip my toe in the waters, and watch the miniseries that started the whole reboot. And wow, was I impressed with it. I found the miniseries exciting. I loved its premise of a global holocaust caused by the human-looking, but totally mechanical, race of Cylons, and I really liked the notion of the only survivors being an unlikely assortment of officials aboard a decommissioned military spaceship turned into a museum and educational center. I was hooked.

Hooked for the duration of the miniseries, anyway. Almost immediately the series went off the rails for me. Fans of the show have tried to rationalize it away for me, but I see Battlestar Galactica as suffering from a contradiction in its premise set out by the miniseries—that the only scraps of humanity left to battle the Cylons are a disorganized, random group overlooked in the attack against their home planet of Caprica, who become the least likely heroes ever to defend a race against genocide—and the premise pursued in the rest of the series, which is that those aboard the Galactica are unique and special snowflakes who have been heavily infiltrated by Cylons years in advance in order to achieve some mystical goal. The series tries to have it both ways with both the notion of the humans as accidental spontaneous heroes, and the premise of this has all been planned, and the two never really gel for me. Plus, there are all the sequences in which spaceships shoot lasers at each other, which is usually the point in the program I pick up my phone and begin playing Puzzle Quest.

I’m only about two-thirds of the way through the DVDs of Battlestar Galactica, which is about the level of my enthusiasm for the show as well, so it was with a little bit of reluctance that I began watching its prequel/spinoff show on the renamed SyFy, Caprica. I’m happy to say, however, that not only am I totally hooked on Caprica, but that it’s probably the show I look forward to most these days.

It’s the simplicity of Caprica’s premise that keeps me coming back. In the highly technological world of Caprica that’s blown up sixty years later in Battlestar Galactica, an inventor and tech whiz played by Eric Stoltz has devised the first of the mechanical Cylons. His daughter, the bratty and brilliant Zoe, has managed to create an enduring version of herself in (for lack of a better term) cyberspace. When Zoe’s accidentally killed in an act of terrorism, Stoltz’s character retrieves her online avatar and infuses it into the mechanical Cylon. He believes the experiment is unsuccessful, but what he’s done is to give the mechanical being Zoe’s sentience, with chilling results for the human race.

The show plays with the notion of the teenaged girl in the oversized robot’s body with both humor and suspense as it cuts between shots of the gleaming silvery hulk and Zoe’s diminutive form. Like so many adolescents, Zoe’s both a monster and a little girl at the same time. When she’s not blowing up multiple targets with her machine gun hands, she’s sneaking away and talking to her best friend on the phone. Cylon Zoe is as sullen and silent as a sulking teen girl (and it’s rather humorous to think of the Cylon war that’s to come as the apex of an adolescent brat’s temper tantrum), but when her father asks her to strut about his company’s boardroom, the robot does so with obvious relish, proud of her dad’s accomplishments. When he orders her to rip off her arm mere moments later, to prove her absolute obedience to him, it’s blood-curdling to watch. He has no idea what his daughter has become, and she has no intentions of telling him—the standoff of the generations, only in cybernetic form. A teen's cry of you don't understand meeeeee! only rings louder when the teen in question is two tons of metal and electronics.

The show’s rife with subplots involving the Adama family, with its roots in organized crime (and their equally-deceased teen daughter, whose linger cyberspace identity becomes the biggest gangster of all), and with a sect of religious fanatics whose terrorism provides the sparks of violence that pinpoint what’s otherwise been an intellectually-driven plot. Every week I keep coming back for more, and so far I haven’t been disappointed.

It seems to me, though, that there are two kinds of science fiction fans. There are those like me who tend to like their stories earthbound, or at least planet-bound, and then there are those who like the big spaceships with the big lasers. For fans who only like the space shoot-em-ups, however, I’m afraid Caprica might be a little bit of a disappointment. However, Caprica is the kind of science fiction I most enjoy: an interplay of ideas and science with a story that sucks me in on both cerebral and emotional levels.