In Caprica We Trust

I begin with a confession. I have a little bit of sci fi fan in me. Just a little. Enough to have watched the campy Battlestar Galactica back in the 1970s (although that was at least 50% a schoolgirl crush on the actor who played Starbuck), but not enough to have watched its broody reincarnation that aired a few years ago. So I came to Caprica without any expectations. But that means I don’t have the BG chops to understand what’s going on “58 years before the fall,” either.

At first I thought Caprica was going to be just another copycat space show, but when I saw it advertised in the New Yorker and then heard a promo for it on NPR, I decided to try it out. Okay, that and I needed something to watch because I hadn’t timed my Netflix deliveries right and had nothing better to watch.

Let’s start with the preliminaries. My first question was whether Caprica rhymes with paprika. It doesn’t. Note to self - a show title you have to “know” how to pronounce is Clue #1 this program takes itself a little too seriously.

The foreign world Caprica seems a little familiar - a parallel Earth of the not-so-distant future, where everyone wears a lot of black and seems oddly disconnected. Robots do the dirty work, and everyone has a lot of time to pursue happiness. Only no one is smiling.

Here’s a basic rundown of what I picked up from the premiere (Ep. 101, Pilot) and next episode (Ep. 102, Rebirth).

The show depicts two families from different ends of the Caprican spectrum. There is the privileged Graystone family – scientist Daniel (Eric Stolz, hot mess level = high), wife Amanda (a doctor in her own right and a bit of a harpy for someone who is married to Eric Stolz, if you ask me), and angst-ridden teenage daughter Zoe (Alessandra Torresani). The other family, the Adamas, are Taurons – ethnic underdogs. The Adama patriarch is Joseph (Esai Morales), a successful criminal defense lawyer who has hidden his Tauron background on the way up. His young son is William, who apparently goes on to greatness in Battlestar Galactica. Joseph’s wife and daughter die in the pilot, explained below. Joseph has some connections with some mean mofos – the kind that would rather, and do, kill their enemies the old-fashioned way, with their bare hands.

The opening sequence has Zoe Graystone romping through an anything-goes rave, where teens dance, drink, copulate, and kill each other. These kids today. We learn this is a virtual reality pastime for the youth of Caprica, who have commandeered Daniel’s creation, the holiband, to visit these virtual sin dens. (The holiband is a more sophisticated version of the gold banana clip that dude from Fame wore on the “new” Star Trek, which allows one to inhabit the virtual reality of his or her choice.) Daniel, in typical clueless parent fashion, doesn’t know the kids have repurposed his creation. (Incidentally, the holiband was intended for “adult” entertainment. I love the scene in which Daniel tries to get Joseph to use it for the first time, and Joseph says something along the lines of “I’m not really into that sort of thing.”)

Zoe is a child genius and has created an avatar of herself in her imaginary holiband world. This avatar is a virtual clone, who looks like and interacts with Zoe, but who lives only in the virtual world. Zoe is still working on perfecting her avatar, and her virtual representation is prone to shorting out at critical moments.

We learn that Zoe and her BFF Lacy and her BF are all monotheists. I know you are thinking, “Dammit Holly, speak English here.” That means they believed in a God, not a bunch of gods. Let’s just say Caprica isn’t the Bible Belt and monotheism isn’t something to shout from the mountaintops. Monotheist extremists, members of Solders of the One, advocate terrorism.

Zoe gets in trouble for using the holiband in the school bathroom, and her parents give her a good riot act reading when she gets home. (Sidebar – that creepy Gothic school is straight out of Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart video.) Shortly after the parental tongue-lashing, Zoe, Lacy, and BF (the latter of whom looks like the Harry Potter dude) decide to run away to Gemenon, apparently a planet full of fundamentalist religious types. Lacy chickens out as Zoe and Harry Potter are boarding a mass transit train. Unbeknownst to Zoe, Harry Potter is one of the terrorist-type monotheists and had strapped his body with explosives, which he detonates rather dramatically, killing himself, Zoe, the wife and daughter of the Adama clan, and other innocents. Just before he detonates himself, he sends a message to Zoe’s mom from Zoe’s computer/communication device, which Mom later interprets as containing an admission of guilt from Zoe in the terrorism.

Zoe’s parents are, predictably, devastated at the loss of their only child. Weeping and wailing follow in short order. Pretty soon, Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama’s inevitable meeting takes place and the two bond over death and cigarettes. A wary friendship develops.

Meanwhile, Daniel finds out about Zoe’s secret life via the holiband and goes to her virtual world to visit her. He lets Joseph in on his discovery, and he takes Joseph to visit his own deceased daughter in virtual world, but Joseph reacts negatively. Daniel is conflicted. This virtual representation of Zoe isn’t the real deal, yet he is emotionally and intellectually compelled to “capture” Zoe’s avatar on one of his visits to virtual world, both for his own desire to have Zoe’s computer programming genius and to hold onto his daughter. While experimenting in his lab, Daniel loads the disk containing Zoe’s avatar into one of his Cylon robot prototypes. There is some sort of compatibility issue, and Zoe’s avatar becomes stuck in the Cylon, with the disk that contained the avatar wiped out.

Cylon Zoe is then poked, prodded, restrained, and generally irritated like a stockyard animal. We see a grotesque warrior robot in some scenes, and a vulnerable teenager in others. Cylon Zoe makes contact with Lacy, but neither knows what to do. All that’s clear is Avatar Zoe doesn’t dig life as Cylon Zoe and wants to get to Gemenon, STAT!

Before the interaction with Cylon Zoe, Lacy’s life was already beyond creepy when the headmistress of Gothic High, Sister Clarice, had her over for lunch. Turns out Sister Clarice is a member of a group marriage and has numerous husbands and wives. If that’s not enough, they were serving squirrel for lunch. And it just keeps getting better – Sister Clarice is a closet member of Soldiers of the One, the terrorist group responsible for Zoe’s death. Sister Clarice’s husband (#3? #4? How many are there?) wants to get in her pants. All this and your dead best friend’s avatar is trapped in a big, scary Cylon. Sucks to be Lacy.

MY THOUGHTS: The most intriguing thing in this series is the concept of playing God. Zoe and her friends are monotheists, yet Zoe dabbled in creating life in her avatar. Then she dies, and her father attempts to keep her alive through the avatar, even though he knows she isn’t real. He goes so far as to cross the threshold between virtual reality and reality by bringing her avatar into the real world, and then loads it into a Cylon, a robot who is supposed to be able to reason like a person. The avatar then becomes stuck in his Cylon prototype, and cannot be retrieved or duplicated. Similarly, Lacy is a monotheist, yet she engages Zoe’s avatar after Zoe is gone and continues contact with Cylon Zoe once she learns the avatar is trapped inside. And we have the Soldiers of the One, who advocate believe in a supreme being, yet advocate advancing their agenda by playing God with the lives of others.

Interesting to see how Joseph, the shady Tauron criminal defense lawyer, seems to have the more highly tuned conscience than fair-haired Daniel about artificial life. Yet Joseph is not above having his thug associates do his dirty work for him. Chip, did you catch the parallels between murder/bedroom/crying montage towards the end of Episode 102 and the christening/bloodbath montage from the Godfather? Or am I imagining that?

Costuming – interesting that Caprica is such a decadent society, yet its citizens dress like our grandparents. What’s that all about? Those getups the Graystones were wearing playing triangle tennis out back reminded me of Dustin Hoffman poolside in a buttondown shirt in The Graduate.

Young William Adama is soaking it all up, isn’t he? I’m sure there’s lots of BG backstory here that I don’t get because I didn’t watch the recent BG. Wonder what it is?

Final analysis – I’m not giving up on Caprica, but I’m not quite hooked yet.