Caprica - the much anticipated prequel to Galactica (rhymes)

[Ivanhoe]

The pilot is out on DVD (and the internet) since yesterday!
I haven't watched it yet, but I just quickly browsed through it and caught glimpses of nudity (the DVD's uncut) and pretty awesome visual effects. I also thought I've heard someone say fuck, but I may be mistaken as I didn't want to learn anything in advanced and quickly turned it off. So anyway, I hope it's going to be at least half as good as Galactica was in it's prime and here's to a whole new adventure with Ron Moore!

(will be back later this week with a review of some sort - hopefully it will be a rant full of words like "loved it" and "amazing")

[Avery]

I'm so torn! I can't imagine a world in the Galactica universe without Galactica itself, much less without the characters I love so much. But a bunch of my friends have seen it and are saying really good things about it. I'll probably get it on DVD soon but I'm not as excited as you'd think. I spend way too much time debating whether or not to watch TV shows because I know how invested I tend to get

[Mr_Clark]

With The Shield, Deadwood, Burn Notice(for the moment), and BSG all gone, it's been hard to fill the void - Rescue me is doing a good job of that, but Ron Moore oozed in thought out storylines and well crafted characters.

[Ivanhoe]

So, first of all, I must say it's obvious SciFi (or is it SyFy now?) put a shitload of money into Caprica. The visual effects were awesome, the highlight being the Cylon Centurion. It looked better than some of the robots in Star wars Ep III.

But other than that, I wasn't really all that impressed. I knew it would be more of a drama that happens to be about robots than a robot show that happens to be dramatic, but still, it seemed a bit boring. Clearly, the main conflict is about what it means to be human. Is Zoe Graystone's digital image the same as the real thing? Is it a good idea to make AI robots? Why should we be better than the robots if we do the same evil things? All these questions have already been the subject of other, better works of fiction. Mainly BSG itself, and the great, wonderful, astonishing Blade Runner. So what is different about Caprica? There seem to be two other plot lines going on. Zoe and her friends were part of a religious group worshiping what sounds like the God the Cylons worshiped. I think that's pretty cool, because now that Zoe is part of a Centurion, they clearly took that idea of a God from her. The other thing is that Joseph "Adams" (apparently he changed his name from Adama to Adams, because he's from Tauron and he wanted a new beginning on Caprica, away from his peasant heritage) is not the glorified lawyer BSG made him out to be. He has ties to Tauronian mafia (BTW, the Taurons are apparently all Hispanic) and those guys have some sort of leverage over him (forgot what it was).

Also, I'm not so sure Caprica works well in the BSG universe. Some things I found odd:
-Joseph "Adams" is a bit of a crook
-the Adama clan is from Tauron... I always thought the old man was Caprican to the bone. Was this ever mentioned on the show?
-if this is almost sixty years before The Fall, then how old was Galactica? They have all this super cool technology in the movie, yet Galactica looks like a World War II submarine. I know it's supposed to be an old Battlestar that was ready for retirement, but now it looks REALLY old in comparison.
-the setting is 58 years before The Fall. Billy Adama is eleven. Am I really supposed to believe Admiral Adama was 69?! E.J.Olmos was 57 when BSG started.

but there were cool things as well:
-while I found the idea of virtual reality being so important a bit strange, at least the V Club was shot in the same theater as the Opera House stuff from BSG and I thought that was pretty neat
-speaking of virtual reality, is this where the Cylons got the idea of projection? because Zoe Graystone was into the VR stuff? Cool.
-Daniel Graystone owns the Pyramid team Anders played for! And we got to see their stadium!
-despite the robots and virtual reality, this "future" was pretty realistic and Earth-like, which I think makes it more believable

And remember when I mentioned Blade Runner?
William B. Davis (famous from The X-Files) had a small part in Caprica playing some sort of politicians, and he had THE EXACT SAME glasses as one fo the characters from Blade Runner. Check it out:
Caprica:

Blade Runner:

It's really just an obscure nod from the writers, who I think had no choice but to acknowledge the fact that the premises of Caprica and Blade Runner have several similarities. If you're not a fan of Blade Runner, you won't even know, but I know the movie by heart so I'm going to constantly compared the two. Guess which on is inevitably going to win...

Overal, it was a nice character-driven story that works if you don't know BSG better than if you're a fan. Which is weird because it's a prequel. (The time discrepancy was just too distracting.) I'm going to watch the show next year because there probably won't be anything better (besides Lost), but I don't think it will be a smashing hit like BSG.

[Avery]

Still haven't seen it, but thanks for the review!

-the Adama clan is from Tauron... I always thought the old man was Caprican to the bone. Was this ever mentioned on the show?

Yes, this was mentioned, I believe in Litmus. I think that it was also visible in the dossier Roslin looks at in Hero. It's been an accepted part of fandom for awhile, at any rate.

-if this is almost sixty years before The Fall, then how old was Galactica? They have all this super cool technology in the movie, yet Galactica looks like a World War II submarine. I know it's supposed to be an old Battlestar that was ready for retirement, but now it looks REALLY old in comparison.
-the setting is 58 years before The Fall. Billy Adama is eleven. Am I really supposed to believe Admiral Adama was 69?! E.J.Olmos was 57 when BSG started.

This is iffy. I've heard that Caprica takes place 50 years before the fall, which makes far more sense in terms of characters, because there's no way Adama was nearly 70 when the Colonies fell. However, given that Galactica was constructed as a result of the first Cylon war and is about 50 years old at the time of the decomissioning, 58 years make more sense because time was needed to first create the Centurians and then for them to rebel, not to mention the actual construction of the ship. BSG has had some wonky timelines before, but it's pretty annoying. They should have made Billy Adama younger.

[JustABill]

Ok, so I've said that I didn't like the BSG miniseries or the first 2 episodes.

So I decided to download Caprica and watch it.

And you know what???

I really liked it!!! I thought the story was great, and the special effects were terrific. it's also nice to see Esai Morales who played the Lieutennant in NYPD Blue and played Jorge Martinez in the 24 Season 6 Debrief.

A great line in the show was when Joseph Adams said to Daniel Graystone about seeing the flowers on Caprica, and that he wept. Then he said:
"Find those things in life that make you cry...make you feel. Because they're what makes you human. That's what I'd tell Tamara."

I liked Serge...the guard, I guess. A funny line to me was when Lacy came to Zoe's house and wanted to go to her room. She said she was going to Zoe's room and Serge said "As You Wish." Made me think of The Princess Bride.

I will definitely watch this series to see what it's like.

[Ivanhoe]

You have PARTIALLY redeemed yourself.

[JustABill]

Tonight is the SyFy debut of Caprica. Thought I'd bring this thread up again.

[Avery]

Still haven't seen it, and don't have any immediate plans to. I know the basic plot and it doesn't really fit into my BSG canon, and I just can't see myself wading into this universe again under such different circumstances. It may be something that I look into in the future but for now I'm staying away.

[JustABill]

Episode two aired tonight, and it was really good. I like how they shifted the view from the Cylon to Zoe.

[Kasia]

I'm into this as well. I think I might need to rewatch the Pilot and the second episode, though, because I watched the Pilot quite awhile ago when it was released on DVD and I didn't bother to rewatch it before watching tonight's episode, so I kind of forgot how things were left off and was a little confused about a couple of things, like how the two lab assistants were introduced to the story. Mind you, I kinda came into the episode like 5 minutes late.

Caprica airs here in Canada on Space, the same network that carried BSG before it. After the show, they have another show called "InnerSpace" where these two guys totally have the job I want. They sit there and perform critical analysis on the episode. They basically do a debrief and get paid. It's ridiculous. Why do I not have this job? Anyway, they seem to figure that the two lab assistants are symbolic of the two fundamentally different ways that human beings could approach AI (and by extension any person or thing that is "different" than you, or "opressed", race, religion, gender, etc, issues of equality) -- a) kind, accepting, empathetic, tolerant or b) domineering, subversive, reactionary and afraid. Interesting.

Anyway, I really do love the idea of telling the story of the very first Cylon, and that the first Cylon in fact had a human consciousness. At least in part, because the avataric consciousness inside the Cylon Zoe was created by the human Zoe, and is entirely her. Avatar Zoe was entirely Human Zoe, even though Human Zoe was also more than just Avatar Zoe. Also interesting that in BSG, the Cylons practiced a monotheistic religion, and the first Cylon was, as a human, part of a radical fringe group who believed in monotheism. Coincidence? I think not!

The teacher who is in a "group marriage" and goes to the hash cafe ... was she in the pilot? I forget.

Also thought the remarks about how it was undesirable to "feminize" the Cylon were ... interesting. I think the lab assistant meant more that it was undesirable to think of the Cylon as anything other than an "it", but Cylon Zoe then worried about whether her Cylon body presented as male, and that was very distressing to her.

I think I will be sticking with Caprica.

[JustABill]

Did anyone notice that Peter Wigfield, who played David Emerson on 24 was on?

[Kasia]

Yep.

[JustABill]

Caprica Is Quickly Becoming The Best SF Show On Television

Friday night's episode of Caprica, "There Is Another Sky," moved the already-intriguing show to the status of must-watch. It was simply one of the best SF representations of futuristic videogames and internet culture that I've ever seen.

Caprica was occasionally shaky in its first few weeks, but with this episode the series found its sea legs. We're learning more about the V-World that mega-entrepreneur Daniel Graystone created with his holoband technology. And in the process we find out what artificial sentience really means, and how Daniel intends to exploit it.

For the past several episodes we've focused on the fate of Daniel's daughter Zoe, killed in a terrorist attack on a train. Before she died, however, Zoe left a virtual, sentient version of herself in V-World - an avatar that Daniel locates and coercively downloads onto a chip which he sticks into one of his military cylon prototypes. Though Daniel thinks this destroyed the Zoe avatar, in fact she's still inside the cylon, biding her time until she can escape. During the brief moment when Daniel thought the Zoe avatar still existed, he created a similar avatar of Joseph Adama's daughter Tamara. While Zoe has escaped to the real world in her cyborg body, Tamara remains trapped inside V-World - her father thinks her avatar got erased somehow, and Zoe doesn't actually realize Tamara is a real person. She's completely alone in a universe that's a cross between Grand Theft Auto and the Sin City movie.

What's worse than being a teenage girl trapped in the body of a massive robot? Being a teenage girl trapped in the collective fantasy of a million other teenagers. And that's exactly what's happening to Tamara, as she tries to find her way home. After what is apparently weeks of wandering through dance clubs and orgy rooms, she falls in with a group of game hackers and modders who promise to get her out of V-World. If she promises to do them one little favor. You see, Tamara has a superpower in V-World: Unlike every other gamer, who accesses the place via holoband, she can't be killed when you shoot her. She just heals up and stays in the game. She's basically the perfect mod for cheating, and that's exactly what the gang - led by a very Mondo 2000-looking lady named Vesta - wants her to do.

So Tamara goes with one of the hot game modders into "New Cap City," a game that's a perfect replica of Caprica City, except lawless. Nobody knows how to win the game, and nobody can go back once they've been "derezzed" with a gun. But the hot game modder thinks the point of the game is to earn money, so he's going to use Tamara's powers to steal the avatar of the game's richest player and convert that money to points (interestingly, there's no hint that this money can be exchanged for real-world money like Lindenbucks or WOW gold - which you'd think would be the case). While Tamara gets into a shootup with the rich guy, gamer boy "steals" the code for his avatar and manages to break into the rich guy's bank and suck up gold coins. In the ensuing shootout with guards, Tamara becomes the One, like Neo in the Matrix. She discovers she can alter the code of V-World simply by willing it. Of course, she still trapped in V-World forever.

Are Tamara's powers now more awesome than Zoe's? The answer to that question is what makes this episode pure genius.

Daniel is about to be ousted from his company after announcing that they will be making holoband code free, no longer requiring people to pay a licensing fee for it. But he convinces the board to keep him by giving this speech, which is almost ripped from today's headlines about the music and movie industry's efforts to stay profitable in a world where everybody expects media to be free online.

......

From its humble origins as a spinoff of Battlestar Galactica, Caprica has grown into a terrific show in its own right. A show that nimbly asks big questions about the nature of sentience and justice, while also spinning a terrific yarn about old-fashioned gangsters in a world of high-tech corporate warfare.

This is definitely not Battlestar Galactica anymore. It's something else. And you'll be sorry if you don't tune in to find out more.

http://io9.com/5482262/caprica-is-quick ... television.