“Caprica”: Prattlestar melodramatica!

Like the clumsy "Star Wars" prequel, Syfy's "Battlestar" rewind is a pale shadow of the original (remade) series

By Heather Havrilesky

CAPRICA -- "Pilot" Day 16 -- SCI FI Channel Photo: Carole Segal (Credit: © Sci Fi Channel)

Topics:Caprica, I Like to Watch, Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, Television

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.

: Heather Havrilesky is Salon's TV critic and author of the rabbit blog. Her memoir, "Disaster Preparedness," published in 2010. More Heather Havrilesky

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SyFy's new "Caprica" campaign is scary for all the wrong reasons

By Mary Elizabeth Williams

Topics:Broadsheet, Caprica

The girl, all tousled dark hair, casts a sultry glance over her nude shoulder. She grasps a bright red apple that bears one large bite mark. She has large eyes and full cheeks. She looks all of 12 years old.

Great timing there, SyFy Network — leaking your provocative early poster for the hotly anticipated “Battlestar Galactica” prequel “Caprica” the very week that the entertainment community has gone out of its way to support a man who raped a young teenager.

: Mary Elizabeth Williams is a staff writer for Salon and the author of "Gimme Shelter: My Three Years Searching for the American Dream." Follow her on Twitter: @embeedub. More Mary Elizabeth Williams

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"Battlestar Galactica" spinoff "Caprica" has family drama, holographs and a man named Adama. But is there enough action in this pilot to satisfy the show's fans?

By Thomas Rogers

Topics:Fiction, Caprica, Battlestar Galactica, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Television

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.