It took a gay poet to persuade me to check out the new version of “Battlestar Galactica” on the SciFi Channel. The original series is nothing but a dim, cheesy memory, a haze of well-scrubbed flyboys under the beaming paternal guidance of Lorne Greene. (Surely the one foolproof way to make “Bonanza” even more boring was to put it in outer space?) But if my friend Charles — who I’m pretty sure never sketched rocket ships in the margins of his homework as a kid — thought the new “Battlestar Galactica” was worth a little TiVo space, I was willing to give it a shot. Two episodes and I was hooked; the second season, which begins on Friday, July 15, should be one of the rare bright spots in the summer TV schedule.
The SciFi Channel emits space operas faster than Tom Cruise gets engaged. Some of these series use the “rag-tag band of misfits” premise so beloved of American pop culture; others more or less mimic “Star Trek” by sending off a team of earnest multicultural middlemen from some indistinctly virtuous intergalactic federation on weekly missions that amount to a string of pat civics lessons. All feature stock figures, including but not limited to, the wisecracking maverick who always comes through in the end, the barely pacified (and usually quite hairy) noble savage, the goddess/nature-worshipping telepath, the pseudohuman troubled by the rumblings of genuine emotion, the tech guy, and of course freakish aliens, who, however bizarre their reproductive processes and skin textures, will, if female, be endowed with sizable breasts and skin-tight costumes.
These shows have ranged from the passable (“Farscape”) to the appalling (“Lexx,” a sort of R-rated “H.R. Pufnstuf”), and without a doubt each of them has its own cadre of fire-breathing hardcore fans, just as the hokey original “Battlestar Galactica” does. For someone never that thrilled by original “Star Trek” (or any of its permutations), they hold little charm. So what put the new “Battlestar Galactica” at the top of my Season Pass queue? Let me count the ways.
It began with Starbuck, the best pilot among the marines on the battlestar, which is the last remaining warship belonging to the remnants of the human race. In the series’ back story, humanity has been at war with the cylons, robots that have rebelled against their makers. The cylons went into hiding, then returned with a devastating sneak attack facilitated by their recently developed ability to simulate the appearance of human beings. Only 50,000 people have survived from 12 planetary colonies, and most of them are on an assortment of civilian ships, now on the run from the cylons, with only Galactica to protect them. The battlestar’s fighter pilots are crucial to the future of the species.
Starbuck is blond, cocky, insubordinate, a cigar-chomping, card-playing showoff; another stock figure, really, with roots as far back as Shakespeare’s Hotspur — if not for a clever twist. In the original series, Starbuck was played by Dirk Benedict; in the new version, it’s Katee Sackhoff, a gender switch that knocks the character well out of type. Starbuck’s no kick-boxing babe in stiletto heels, either. Like all the other pilots — in fact, like all the soldiers aboard Galactica — she wears a uniform, a flight suit over a tank top-T-shirt combo, a distinctive Galactica military outfit that makes everyone who wears it look buff; Starbuck is a tomboy.
She’s also the only TV character who’s ever sent me back to a fascinating book, “Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety,” by Harvard professor and Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber, in search of the key to her appeal. Technically, Starbuck isn’t a cross-dresser, or even a tomboy, because the society she lives in doesn’t seem to subscribe to our own gender roles. Civilian women sometimes wear skirts and pumps, it’s true, but the military appears to be seamlessly integrated. No one ever accuses Starbuck of being insufficiently feminine, although her friend and immediate superior, Capt. Lee “Apollo” Adama, has complained that she doesn’t bathe often enough.
Still, Starbuck (whose real name is Kara Thrace; Starbuck and Apollo are pilot call names), is a tomboy by the standards of our world, and we all know what happens to a tomboy in pop culture. She tries to be one of the guys while harboring a secret, unrequited crush on her best guy friend, but the guy doesn’t even see her as a girl until she has the sense to put on a dress, lipstick and a suitably demure manner at the big dance, whereupon he is wowed. Well, you can scratch that scenario. Late in the first season, Starbuck did put on a dress for a party, and Apollo was duly wowed, but he was already in love with her before that, and she wound up in bed with another man anyway, and then that guy fell for her, too. This is one tomboy who never has trouble getting laid.
What makes Starbuck so hot? Sometimes a girl dressed like a boy is sexier than any boy or girl in the “proper” outfit can be. According to Garber, this type of figure — she calls it “the changeling boy,” a theatrical staple from the Renaissance to “Peter Pan” — is like a mirage, someone who hovers impossibly between genders. No one can possess Cesario, the boy that Shakespeare’s Viola disguises herself as in “Twelfth Night,” because Cesario doesn’t really exist. Considering how most people feel about what they can’t have, it’s no surprise that Cesario is irresistible. Sackhoff’s Starbuck has some of the same allure, which is why she looks so much better swaggering around in her T-shirt than she does in a dress.
The show’s creators like to fool around with Starbuck’s androgynous glamour. Last season, when she crash-landed on a barren planet and had to hot-wire a cylon raider to get back to Galactica, it turned out that the enemy’s ships are as much animal as they are machine. Starbuck crawled inside to find a gooey cavity lined with weird tissues, sinews and organs, all of which she was able to sort out and operate, Boy Scout-style, by keeping in mind the principle that “every flying machine has four basic controls: power, pitch, yaw and roll.” When she got the raider back to Galactica, she told Apollo that the plane was a “she”; then in the next episode, she starting calling it a “he.” At any rate, she’s the only one who can fly it.
Starbuck does have her problems, but so does everyone else on this show, which brings us to another strength of the new “Battlestar Galactica,” the sort of thing that makes viewers want to stick around after being drawn in by the flashy and new. This is a character-based drama, not something you often see on a spaceship. In a way, once you get past the trappings (which aren’t very high-tech to begin with — Galactica is an outdated model that escaped the cylon’s crippling computer virus because it wasn’t networked), the series has more in common with “The West Wing” than it does with “Star Trek.” Granted, trying to lead a small group of fugitive survivors on a flight across the universe differs a bit from running a stable terrestrial superpower, but as Machiavelli would probably point out if he were still around, the dilemmas of power are surprisingly consistent.
The remnants of humanity are led by two individuals: Cmdr. William Adama, captain of the Galactica (and father of Apollo) and President Laura Roslin, the former secretary of education and 30-somethingth in line for the presidency before the cylons attacked and killed everyone ahead of her. Edward James Olmos’ Adama is in most ways your basic fictional military hero, what we imagine we want our leaders to be in the dream world of American popular entertainment: a tough, decisive straight-shooter, the proverbial man who does what has to be done. But, as tradition dictates, Adama’s emotions are never entirely submerged and are sometimes allowed to overwhelm his judgment (“This time it’s personal!”) because, as in our real lives, we want to be shown that our leaders are both better than us and the same as us.
Roslin is something else, something you rarely see on television, a consummate politician who is nevertheless treated sympathetically. As played by Mary McDonnell (the performance is similar to another great McDonnell role, the mother in “Donnie Darko”), she is a woman whose composure almost never ruffles, whose strength lies her ability to dissemble expertly and act expediently when necessary. In the first season, when a vice presidential election was forced by a dangerous political opponent, she switched her backing from the more qualified candidate (who was also a good friend) to the weak and inexperienced but more popular Dr. Gaius Baltar. She knew this was one battle she couldn’t afford to lose.
Both Adama and Roslin are “good,” but they aren’t always right, and “Battlestar Galactica” is exceptionally comfortable with allowing some of their decisions rest in the gray regions between the right and wrong. When Apollo was ordered to destroy a civilian ship that had probably been infiltrated by cylons, he was haunted by the possibility that he’d killed innocent human beings. He tried to talk to his father about it, but Adama told him to suck it up and stop dwelling on it: “A man takes responsibility for his actions, right or wrong.” Roslin, detecting Apollo’s distress, told him that, on the contrary, a good leader should remember and learn from his mistakes, even if he must show perfect confidence about his past decisions in public. She keeps the name of the destroyed ship written on a piece of paper in her pocket.
Apollo, the Prince Hal of “Battlestar Galactica,” wavers between these two models of leadership, civilian and military, and in general he’s veered toward Roslin. But late last season, after Roslin’s credibility had been carefully built up, the president suddenly seemed to go off the rails. She’s dying of breast cancer, taking a strange, hallucinogenic herbal remedy and now believes in an ancient prophecy supposedly foretelling that a leader like herself will guide the people to a fabled promised land: Earth. (Yes, these folks are meant to be our ancestors, not our descendants.) Roslin defied the skeptical Adama by sending Starbuck off on a risky prophecy-related mission. This precipitated a military coup.
Roslin’s visions have been so prescient it’s hard not to think there might be something to the prophecy after all, but Adama’s rebellion is perfectly understandable, too. Faith in “Battlestar Galactica” is as fraught as it is in real life. The cylons are monotheists who talk about “God’s love” and the salvation that awaits those who repent of their sins, even as they proceed to brutally exterminate those they consider to be “corrupt.” The human beings are pagans who worship a pantheon of gods with the names of ancient Greek deities. The prophecy Roslin believes she’s fulfilling, of a leader who takes her people to the promised land but doesn’t make it there herself, echoes the Old Testament, while the prophecy’s emphasis on an eternal cycle in which “all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again,” has intimations of Eastern religions.
It’s so easy for a series dabbling in such matters to go even further overboard than Roslin and get lost in the byways of metaphysics and mythology. It’s also easy for a drama so interested in realpolitik dilemmas to degenerate into too much talk. “Battlestar Galactica” is exquisitely balanced. The woo-woo philosophizing is evened out by the gritty, workaday sets and the documentary feeling of the hand-held camera work. The palace intriguing gets a regular jolt, courtesy of action and suspense sequences that are believably immediate and intense.
The season 2 premiere has Adama in critical condition after an assassination attempt by sleeper agent (another interesting character, fatally conflicted in her loyalties). His second-in-command, Col. Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), has to take over — a scary prospect since Tigh, although not untalented as a tactician, tends to wobble in a pinch and furthermore has a drinking problem. While in charge of Galactica, Tigh attempts a risky maneuver Adama would never condone. Meanwhile the occasional flashback shows us why Tigh is so dependent on Adama and fears nothing more than having to go on without him. It’s just another example of how “Battlestar Galactica” proves itself a little braver and more grown-up than the standard genre fare; in this case, the faithful sidekick could be more liability than asset.
There are deft citations of real-world events in the series: Roslin’s swearing-in ceremony harks back to the presidential oath taken by LBJ after the Kennedy assassination; the unfathomable loss suffered by Galactica’s crew is represented by a wall of loved-one photos reminiscent of the ones that sprang up after Sept. 11; the camaraderie of the pilots, who have made a ritual, before flying out, of pressing their palms to a photo of a soldier taken on one of their blasted home planets, recalls the solidarity of the firefighters of New York. None of this is belabored; all of it strikes home.
Season 2 should tell us more about what’s left on the 12 colonies, explore the ever-widening rift between the military and civilian leaders in the fleet, and perhaps most intriguing, shed a little light on what, exactly, the cylons are up to. They have a plan, the shows opening credits keep telling us. Or, rather, their god has a plan, as Number 6, the seductive, praying-mantis of a cylon whose voice and image have been implanted in Dr. Baltar’s brain keeps telling him. These androids are true believers possessed of superior technology, something you don’t have to be a beleaguered Galactica passenger to fear. I’m guessing we’ll discover the cylons and the human beings aren’t as different as the colonists would like to believe, but only a summer of Friday night appointment viewing will tell.
San Diego’s annual Comic-Con can be a very scary place for the uninitiated. With thousands of panels, screenings and artist booths, the four-day entertainment convention is perhaps the only place in the world where you can have a panic attack while staring at six versions of “Sexy Leia.”
In two weeks, nerds will descend en mass to California, and in preparation, the producers of Comic-Con have posted the schedule of events for the kickoff day on July 21. (Technically there is a preview night, but who is counting?)
If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, we’ve prepared a brief guide of the day’s must-sees, as well as what programs to avoid.
Definitely catch: “Game of Thrones” panel
Author George R.R. Martin moderates a panel featuring series executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as well as cast members Emilia Clarke, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage, Kit Harington and Jason Momoa.
I know this is going to be the hot ticket event of the first day, but I’m not sure if it’s because the show is so popular, or if fans are just going with a bag of rocks to pelt at George R.R. Martin’s head. Either way, it’s not to be missed. Bring your Flip cam.
Definitely avoid: “Battlestar”: So Say We All
Richard Hatch hosts a panel and fan discussion of the “Battlestar Galactica” universe, politics and philosophy with Hatch (Tom Zarek, Capt. Apollo), Michael Taylor (“Battlestar Galactica,” “Caprica,” “Blood and Chrome”), Dr. Kevin Grazier (BG science consultant), and surprise guests for this exciting roundtable and Q&A session.
Guys: “Battlestar” is over. Time to move on. Now, someone show me the way to that Damon Lindelof/”Lost” theory panel.
Definitely catch: “Oh, You Sexy Geek!”
Does displaying the sexiness of fangirls benefit or demean them? When geek girls show off, are they liberating themselves or pandering to men? Do some “fake fangirls” blend sex appeal with nerdiness just to appeal to the growing geek/nerd market, or is that question itself unfair? And what’s up with all the slave Leias? Action flick chick Katrina Hill (ActionFlickChick.com) asks Bonnie Burton (Grrl.com), Adrianne Curry (“America’s Next Top Model”), Clare Grant (Team Unicorn, “G33k & G4m3r Girls”), Kiala Kazebee (Nerdist.com), Clare Kramer (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), Nerdy Bird Jill Pantozzi (“Has Boobs, Reads Comics”), Jennifer K. Stuller (Ink-Stained Amazons, GeekGirlCon) and Chris Gore (G4TV’s Attack of the Show!) to discuss whether fans can be sexy and geeky at the same time — and if they should!
I’d say that you could just watch the mashup of hot chicks on late-night shows and save yourself the effort, but since these are actual nerd girls discussing gender issues and not just Mila Kunis talking about World of Warcraft, it’s worth making time for.
Avoid: TV Guide Magazine: Fan Favorites
TV Guide is back with an all-star panel for the fans! Moderated by editor in chief Debra Birnbaum, Fan Favorites features your favorite talent from your favorite shows — in front of the camera and behind the scenes. Panelists include Nestor Carbonell (“Ringer”), Johnny Galecki (“The Big Bang Theory”), Jorge Garcia (“Alcatraz”), Leslie Hope (“The River”), Zachary Levi (“Chuck”), Joe Manganiello (“True Blood”), Julie Plec (“Vampire Diaries”), Matt Smith (“Doctor Who”), Kevin Williamson (“Vampire Diaries”), Deborah Ann Woll (“True Blood”), and others.
What a clusterfuck … do the same people who want to see Jorge Garcia or Matt Smith really care about what “Chuck” or the guy from “The Big Bang Theory” have to say? I imagine this panel will be the real-life approximation of channel-surfing when you’re bored.
Definitely catch: Entertainment Weekly: The Visionaries: A discussion with Jon Favreau and Guillermo del Toro on the Future of Pop Culture
EW moderates an in-depth conversation with Jon Favreau (“Cowboys & Aliens”) and Guillermo del Toro (“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”), two filmmakers at the forefront of bringing geek culture to the masses and making blockbuster art out of pulp fiction. They will discuss their inspirations, their current work, and how they strive to put a personal stamp on blockbuster entertainment. Plus: How is new technology changing the way stories are produced and viewed? And what do they think the pop culture universe will look like a decade from now? Moderated by Jeff “Doc” Jensen.
Comic-Con is one of the first places that “cool” directors will leak spoilers and info about their upcoming features, so get a front seat and turn on your tape recorder in case Guillermo del Toro lets something slip about “Pacific Rim.”
Bonus “Don’t Miss” screenings: Mike Judge hosting the new “Beavis & Butt-Head” episodes, “Archer” viewing and cast discussion, and the exclusive premiere of “Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe.” Just kidding.
This list is far from definitive. What events are you most looking forward to for Comic-Con?
Being a young “Star Wars” fan in the ’70s was awesome, but being an old “Star Wars” fan in the new millennium flatly sucks. Nothing will make you queasier than hearing a young kid refer to “The Empire Strikes Back” simply as “Number Five,” as if three stunningly bad prequels are even fit to touch the flowing Jedi hem of the original trilogy. Working backward only made the dialogue and plot points of the prequels feel clunkier and more on-the-nose than they would have otherwise: Characters marched around, remarking on Anakin Skywalker’s fierce temper and relentless insecurity, over and over again. “We get it, we get it, he’s going to be seduced by the Dark Side!” we growled at the movie screen, begging George Lucas to stop showing us his character notes. How did a luminous being like Lucas churn out such crude matter?
Likewise “Caprica,” SyFy’s much-anticipated “Battlestar Galactica” prequel, suffers from the awkward starting block of presenting “the burgeoning technology of artificial intelligence and robotics that will eventually lead to the creation of the Cylons,” but it’s also charged with exploring the same looming questions that “Battlestar” did over the course of its run. This means that, not only does every plot point of “Caprica” feel like a big, obvious explanation for the far more compelling original (“So that’s how the Cylons were created to think for themselves!” “Ah, that’s why the Cylons are monotheistic!”), but the whole thing is stuffed with the worst sorts of flashy but skin-deep characters. Here’s a rebellious teenager with delusions of grandeur, an arrogant, heartbroken father turning to technology to cure his grief, a working-class girl hungering for some way to belong, a nurturing nun who’s also a drug addict.
Feeling dizzy yet? Sure, as with the “Star Wars” prequel, there are plenty of provocative scenes to pull you in, whether it’s a Cylon prototype blowing up smaller robots with merciless efficiency (I don’t recall the Centurions from “Battlestar” being such good shots) or two fathers, Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama, reunited (in a virtual world) with their poor, dead daughters. We know by now that creators Ronald D. Moore and David Eick are skillful at translating their groovy story ideas into compelling, emotionally wrenching snapshots of anguish or ominous portrayals of arrogance and bluster among the ruling elite. We also know that they’ll weave in heavy-handed commentary on class, race, gender, religion, politics and anything else that might lend this soapy robot circus more intellectual flair and street cred.
On “Battlestar Galactica” these elements usually felt organic, like another smart layer to complement an already full plate of suspense, action and the emotional reverberations and post-traumatic shock befitting the wake of a nuclear holocaust. But on “Caprica,” hearing the same echoes of meaning sort of feels like seeing Yoda fly: It’s cool and everything, but it’s also out of step with our understanding of him. Basically, we want Yoda bickering with R2D2 on swampy Dagoba, not leaping through the air or playing preschool teacher to a bunch of saucer-eyed “younglings.”
And just as we knew the damn younglings were going to get slaughtered the second they ambled adorably into the picture, we recognize early on that Zoe (Alessandra Torresani), with her big, pretty Zooey Deschanel look-alike face and her genius brain and her girly, foot-stomping alienation, is going to use her talents for evil rather than good. She hangs out in a virtual club where people virtually slaughter each other for fun and entertainment, after all. Or are we just prejudiced against the sensationalistic hobbies of this younger generation?
See how everything in “Caprica” reverberates with the most irritatingly primitive social commentary? Maybe this kind of button-pushing — Terrorist teens! Sexy murder/dance club! Criminal underworlds! Thoughtful robots! — was present in the “Battlestar” series, and we were just too distracted by the gigantic spaceships and look-alike robot spies to mind. Maybe it was the weight of the nuclear holocaust, looming at the edges of every frame, that legitimized the soapiness of “Battlestar.” All I know is, now that we’re on Caprica, “58 years before the fall,” i.e., the nuclear attack by the Cylons, the story feels like the worst sort of retread: “Caprica” has few of the charms of the original series, and because it’s a prequel, it doesn’t even further the story. We’re forced to rewind to a time that’s less weighty and less intriguing, yet everyone is walking around talking to each other in the same over-the-top heavy tones that made sense within the claustrophobic confines of “Galactica” but just feel unnecessarily melodramatic here. Not only does every line feel too obvious, but it’s tripped up by clumsy back story. It’s as if we’re being treated to some bullet-pointed character profile where key traits are highlighted, circled and underlined three times.
“You have no idea what it means to build something, or to work hard for anything! It’s all just been handed to you, Zoe!” says Zoe’s mom (Polly Walker).
“We come from a long, proud line of Tauron peasants!” Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) tells his son (Sina Najafi). “You’re named after your grandfather, I ever tell you that? William. He was killed after the Tauron uprising.”
“Let’s be clear. I don’t like your boss, I don’t like your planet, and I don’t like your people!” a high-level government official practically spits at Joseph Adama.
“Blood for blood!” Sam (Sasha Roiz) says to his brother, Joseph. “It’s the Tauron way!”
“You mean only the gods have power over death? Well, I reject that notion!” says Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz), Zoe’s father and the head of the company that’s working on creating the Cylons.
“When did you ever listen? You and Mom, you knew it all!” Zoe’s avatar says to Daniel. “Your arrogance was killing your daughter!”
It was easy to take issue with those who called “Battlestar” foolish: There was so much suspense and action and political intrigue in the mix that a few dippy scenes where Starbuck and Lee made googoo eyes at each other or Six and Baltar debated the meaning of life for the 50th time were tolerable. Somehow the same clunky philosophizing and heartfelt confessions fall flat in “Caprica.” Although the second and third episodes of the prequel are a little more intriguing and less gummed up with melodrama than the pilot, the overall picture is a world apart from the dynamism and intensity of “Battlestar.”
When grieving daddies first try to reunite virtually with their dead daughters, then become enemies, when monotheist nuns hatch eeevil plans and Cylons all but scribble in their diaries about their no-good very-bad days, it’s hard not to wish that we could pick up in the hopelessly cheesy spot we left “Battlestar” instead, with Bill Adama making a happy little Cro-Magnon family on the planet Earth. As Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama know all too well, sometimes anything is better than trying to recapture the past.
Context matters. A really great sitcom can make a horrible play. A fantastic play can make a terrible movie. An excellent movie can make an awful TV miniseries.
Fox’s “Virtuality” (8 p.m. Friday, June 26) proves that a really good pilot for a TV series can make a truly awful TV movie. But don’t be mistaken: This excursion into the far reaches of space, brought to you by “Battlestar Galactica” producers Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor, proves far more compelling than most made-for-TV movies – and most TV pilots, for that matter – up until its abrupt, hair-pullingly inconclusive ending.
”Virtuality” offers exactly the sort of story that “Galactica” fans will sink their teeth into. As Earth is ravaged by global warming and is rapidly becoming unlivable, a small crew aboard the starship Phaeton begins its 10-year mission to find a habitable planet orbiting a nearby star. Conditions on board the ship are beyond claustrophobic (how Galactican!) after just a few months: Couples bicker, young crew members second-guess themselves, personalities clash, a crew member falls ill, and the commander of the ship begins to lose control. To make matters worse (far worse, in fact), the entire crew is being filmed for a reality show, so they navigate the pressure cooker of ship life knowing that their worst (and most private) moments are being broadcast to viewers back home.
In order to offer a reprieve from the tireless strain of their mission, crew members are provided with virtual reality devices that allow them to star in their own fantasies. But when some mysterious malevolent force invades this one last respite from the confined drudgery of ship life, interpersonal relations on the Phaeton begin to deteriorate in earnest. We can feel it: Tensions are rising to the point that they’re beginning to endanger everyone on board.
And then, just when things start to get really interesting, the so-called movie is over. Remember how some of the very best episodes of “Battlestar Galactica” ended with truly breathtaking cliffhangers? Well, “Virtuality” is just like that, only it’s not a series, it’s a stand-alone movie. Guess you’ll have to wait forever to find out what happens next!
But the fact that there are no real answers to the mysteries set up here is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re presented with stories and characters that are quite clearly meant to be explored over the course of a season, which makes the whole thing feel, very palpably, like an utter waste of time. Essentially, “Virtuality” is a two-hour-long teaser, an extended trip to a really excellent strip bar that ends with a cold shower. Unless you’re a masochist, the flash of credits will make your heart sink.
Of course, many die-hard “Galactica” fans will be interested in watching in order to advocate that the series get picked up by Fox. And it’s true, as a pilot, “Virtuality” is fantastic. Why wasn’t it picked up in the first place? Cool tricks, heavy drama, clever dialogue, twists and turns — what more could you want from a space soap, anyway?
Maybe the real question is, why torture us with what might have been? Why air a two-hour pilot that only works as a pilot, with a cliffhanger ending that’s sure to piss off more than a few casual viewers thinking they just tuned in for, well, for an actual movie, with an actual ending? Those who watch without realizing that “Virtuality” is a pilot (that was never conceived as anything but a pilot) will think that they’ve suffered through a TV movie with serious art film delusions of grandeur — in a bad way.
But then, maybe Fox is airing “Virtuality” to motivate “Galactica” fans to do all the marketing work for them. When asked if Fox will pick up the show, Moore told IESB.net, “I think they want to see what the reaction is going to be … Right now, it doesn’t look like it’s going to series, but if enough people watched and got excited about it, anything is possible.” Is this all just a savvy publicity scheme? Do Fox executives already love this series in secret, and they’re just setting us up to believe that an outpouring of fan support forced them to add it to their schedule? Or has an increasingly manipulative world of viral marketing rendered us hopelessly paranoid?
Ultimately, airing “Virtuality” will either look like a smart publicity maneuver or a really bad programming choice, depending on how many viewers rally behind the cause. As usual, Fox will let the fans decide.
It’s been a month since “Battlestar Galactica” — the smartest science fiction series in television history — battlestarred into the sunset. Over the course of its four seasons, the SciFi (now SyFy) Channel show about a fleet of space-traveling humans and their robotic pursuers won critical accolades, garnered a rabid cult following, and, most important, made it socially acceptable to talk about evil robots at dinner parties. If you’re one of the many fans left bereft by the end of the show (as movingly dramatized in the recent Onion article “Obama Depressed, Distant Since ‘Battlestar Galactica’ Series Finale”), I’ve got good and bad news. The good news: The spinoff/prequel, “Caprica,” has arrived. The bad news: It’s only the pilot and, well, it’s probably not what you expected.
In an unconventional launch strategy, SyFy has just released the one-and-a-half-hour pilot episode of the show on DVD and digital download (the actual series won’t premiere on television until 2010). Described by blogs as “‘Dallas’ in space,” “Caprica” is, indeed, a very different beast from its mother series. Planet-bound, slow-paced and with hardly any action scenes, the series is primarily a melodrama about two families on the planet Caprica (one of the 12 home planets of the human race in the “Battlestar” universe) as they overcome a personal tragedy. It also, of more interest to science fiction fans, tells the story of the birth of the Cylons, the race of robots who, as we learned in “Battlestar,” eventually become hell-bent on destroying all human life.
The pilot takes place 58 years before the Cylon attacks that kick off “Battlestar,” and begins, promisingly enough, in a raucous nightclub. It’s a provocative scene: In one room, people shoot each other for sport; elsewhere, an orgy takes place in a red-lit room; on a stage, a knife-wielding giant executes a young woman by stabbing her in the head. Meanwhile, a teenage girl, accompanied by her two friends, watches the goings-on from the club’s balcony. The setup raises the intriguing prospect of Caprica as a Gomorrah-slash-’90s-rave planet on the verge of retribution.
Not so fast. In the pilot’s first big disappointment, the club turns out to be a virtual one. The teenage girl is Zoe Graystone (Alessandra Toreson), the daughter of a biotechnology magnate named Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz), and she’s accessing the holographic club through a sunglasses-like apparatus in her school’s bathroom.
The real Caprica, as it turns out, is nowhere near as interesting as the opening suggests, though Zoe, at least, is a bit of a delinquent. Not only does she hang out at the virtual orgy-and-knifing club during school hours, she’s fallen in with a monotheistic cult. And thanks to her school-time holographic excursion, she gets herself grounded by her mother, Amanda Graystone (Paula Malcomson, “Deadwood’s” Trixie). So, as rebellious Caprican teenagers tend to do, Zoe decides to run away to another planet with her two monotheistic friends. The plan ends in tragedy when the train whisking her toward Gemenon is destroyed by a suicide bombing.
In the weeks following Zoe’s death, Graystone discovers that his daughter had been busy creating a remarkably detailed holographic copy of herself — a breakthrough in artificial intelligence and a project that, he hopes, may allow him to resurrect his daughter in robotic form. He is aided in his resurrection plans by another grief-stricken father, Joseph Adama (Esai Morales), a lawyer who is himself eager to digitally revive the daughter and wife that he lost in the same train explosion. As “Battlestar” fans know, Adama is the father of Bill Adama, eventual commander of the Battlestar Galactica.
As premises go, “Caprica’s” dead teenager uploaded into battle robot is a promising one (“Terminator” meets “Freaky Friday”?), but the pilot lacks the dramatic heft of its predecessor. It doesn’t have the same sense of scale or tragedy as “Battlestar” and feels considerably more generic, both dramatically and stylistically. The drama builds slowly, and scenes unfold without much, if any, tension. What little tension it has owes to viewers’ knowledge of what will happen 58 years later. There are no hostage crises or food shortages to resolve, since the show’s main concern is the emotional state of its two families. In fact, robot subplot and holographic excursions aside, there really isn’t much that’s science fiction-y about “Caprica.”
Unfortunately, “Caprica” doesn’t make for tremendously engaging melodrama either, largely because it doesn’t have any characters as immediately riveting as Katee Sackhoff’s Starbuck or Mary McDonnell’s President Roslin. Eric Stoltz brings quiet soulfulness to his grieving father, but Esai Morales feels wooden and stilted as Adama, and the rest of the ensemble (especially, it has to be said, the child actors) aren’t a particularly inspiring bunch. As for the show’s visuals — unlike “Battlestar,” “Caprica” is filmed largely with fixed shots (no hand-held cameras), which robs it of much of its flair and immediacy. Its clean urban setting feels antiseptic and cold and a bit dull. Judging by the pilot, the planet Caprica is Vancouver with a fancier train system.
In the spirit of “Battlestar,” “Caprica” also references a number of real-world topical issues: Adama is a member of a disliked immigrant group called the Tauron, and during their investigation of the bombing, the authorities become suspicious of a certain religious minority. But while “Battlestar’s” space-bound setting was strange and destabilizing enough to make its political allusions seem fresh — one of the joys of the series was seeing it fragment and rearrange issues like abortion and terrorism to make provocative arguments — in “Caprica,” they merely feel awkward. It’s obvious that Tauron is a stand-in for Mexico (there’s even a subplot about Tauronese gangs) and monotheism a replacement for Islam — but there’s nothing new to be learned here by renaming things.
When the show premieres on television next year it could take off in some interesting and unexpected directions. The show’s writing is fairly strong (one of the debut episode’s co-writers, Jane Espenson, was responsible for many of “Battlestar’s” best shows), and SyFy clearly has a lot of faith in creator Ronald Moore. But given the high expectations that “Battlestar” fans have for the series, and the tepidness of this initial offering, I wonder how many will come back to find out what happens in 2010.
It must have been cosmic irony: As the wandering tribes of “Battlestar Galactica” finally arrived on Earth (well, Earth II, but still), the series itself never felt more disconnected from solid ground. Main plots and subplots zeroed in on their resolutions, questions big and small were answered, tantalizing references to “destiny” made in earlier episodes finally paid out, and even God’s plan for Dr. Gaius Baltar — the existence of which always seemed so improbable — was at last made manifest in a crucial showdown on the blood-soaked floor of the CIC. It was all very epic and mystical and tidy and morally straightforward: in other words, not much like the “Battlestar Galactica” we’ve come to know and love.
This year’s half-season began in an existential funk, with humanity’s remnants and their cylon allies poleaxed by the discovery that Earth, the planet they’d spent the whole series chasing, had been rendered a smoldering, toxic wasteland by its previous residents — who, to add insult to injury as far as the humans were concerned, turned out to be cylon skin jobs. You had to sympathize with the show’s writers: No narrative twist could equal the end of Season 2, in which Baltar was elected president, the refugees foolishly settled on New Caprica, and suddenly it was a year later and cylon centurions were striding through the bedraggled little settlement in a scene that was a frank citation of the Nazis marching into Paris. After you’ve dared to flip the premise of your show entirely, what can you do next to upend your audience’s expectations? Allowing the characters to find their ultimate goal and then making it really, really suck was pretty much the only card left to play.
And then where do you go? There was way too much wallowing, weeping and ‘splaining in this season, but things did briefly return to form in the two-episode mutiny arc. That was “Battlestar” at its best: the “good guys” (Roslin and Adama) were compromised by their semi-dictatorial high-handedness while their antagonist, Tom Zarek, was conversely doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. As for his co-conspirator, Felix Gaeta, would he have been driven so relentlessly to the brink if not for a maddeningly shoddy prosthesis and the humiliation of staggering around the Galactica like Captain Ahab without a whale? That peg leg was like the proverbial nail for want of which the war was lost. Exquisitely played by Alessandro Juliani, Gaeta has long been one of the series’ most intriguing minor figures, a man who disastrously combined the best of intentions with the worst possible judgment of character.
Then again, the true colors of Tom Zarek were difficult for anyone but Roslin and Adama to discern — until, that is, he finally went Stalin and massacred the Quorum. “Battlestar Galactica” made itself distinctive with moments just like that one, drawing its events and dilemmas from 20th-century history rather than the moral simplicities of space opera. When Roslin’s swearing-in echoed LBJ’s, when she and Adama hovered on the brink of fixing the election, when Starbuck tortured Leoben and the human insurgency resorted to suicide bombings to resist cylon rule, the show became electrifying, frank about the predicaments of the present in a way that a TV drama about the present could never be.
It wasn’t just that “Battlestar Galactica” dealt with “issues” — “Star Trek” did that, in its own pat, right-thinking liberal way. It wasn’t even that the series was “dark,” in the callow sub-noir fashion of a Zack Snyder movie. What “Battlestar Galactica” showed us over and over again was just how hard it is for real, complicated and contradictory people to find their way in a universe that offers them one impossible choice after another. It refused to provide any easy or obvious solutions. Should Roslin and Adama have fixed that election? If they hadn’t, then the Baltar presidency, the settling of New Caprica and the cylon occupation would never have happened. Hundreds of lives would have been saved. You can understand how the two of them must have lost their faith in democracy and ethical rectitude as the result of the New Caprica debacle. But from that loss of faith, the slow creep toward despotism began. By the end of the series last night, the political legitimacy of the Adama and Roslin regime had almost withered away.
Adama was always the series’ most conventional figure, the old-fashioned, admirable leader-hero that American popular culture typically insists upon. This also made him the least interesting character psychologically, but he was essential all the same; the rest of the survivors needed him as a fixed point, a star to steer by. Understandably enough, in moving their convention-busting story through its endgame, the show’s creators decided to attack that final redoubt of certainty by dismantling Adama himself along with his ship. His best friend was a cylon, Earth was a bust, the woman he loved was dying and even the Galactica itself was crumbling — talk about piling it on! Adama hit the sauce, prowled the corridors peering at cracks with a hunted expression (to the extent that Edward James Olmos exhibits any expression), and spent a lot of time sprawled on the floor, crying. This tactic backfired, making much of the final season feeling labored and maudlin. Take away Adama’s strength, and there didn’t seem to be much left to the guy. There’s something to be said for never getting a glimpse behind a revered leader’s facade.
Friday night’s finale, at least, provided an Adama who’d snapped out of it. The first half of the two-hour conclusion offered a hearty serving of something else the creators of “Battlestar Galactica” supposedly didn’t care about: action. The last-ditch assault on the cylon’s colony by ramming it with the rattletrap Galactica was thrilling and gorgeous, providing a final showcase for the centurions, surely the scariest monsters on television. Then came 40 minutes of speeches about lessons learned and the need to “break the cycle,” the naiveté of which did indeed feel like a break — from the knowing, worldly stoicism that made “Battlestar Galactica” so refreshing to begin with. The last flash of that sensibility came when the corpse of poor Racetrack got knocked against the wrong button and wound up nuking Cavil’s cylons to Kingdom Come just as everyone had decided to get along for a change.
Then we got to Earth, and saw one scene after another of people standing in green fields saying, “But what will you do now?” (And how preposterous was the idea of the survivors splitting up and forsaking all technology to go native? The first case of strep throat would have made short work of that vow.) Laura Roslin died with the heart-rending dignity that Mary McDonnell never failed to bring to the finest role of her career, and most of the other actors (James Callis, Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer, Grace Park, Aaron Douglas, Tahmoh Penikett) got a final chance to remind us of just how good they are. The initially puzzling flashbacks to the pre-attack days on Caprica turned out to depict the key decisions that led all of the series’ characters to the Galactica, and ultimately to the founding of a new human race.
It was the opposite of David Chase’s famous non-ending for “The Sopranos,” and it demonstrated that tying up every loose end also has its pitfalls. Granted, it can’t be easy to cap off a serialized drama this avidly followed. On one hand, the audience craves resolution, answers to all the mysteries and prophecies and visions; on the other, “Battlestar Galactica” isn’t “Lost,” a comic-book epic in which the puzzles and their solutions are the main point.
What made “Battlestar Galactica” great was the uncertainty of its characters’ condition; were they part of a divine plan, or pinging randomly around an empty universe? Was there a reason to be good, to be selfless, or was it every man for himself? How much of our better nature should we be willing to sacrifice in order to survive? How can we tell where our loyalties lie? They didn’t know. We don’t know. They were racing around in a spaceship fleeing killer robots, yes, but the ambiguity of their circumstances made them so much more like us than 99 percent of the people on television. It made them seem so real. When they got their answers, they became finally and irrevocably fictional.
Get ready to rock out. 
CAPRICA -- "Pilot" Day 16 -- SCI FI Channel Photo: Carole Segal(Credit: © Sci Fi Channel) 
Sienna Guillory, left, Jose Pablo Cantillo and Gene Farber in "Virtuality." 
