Salon.com > Caprica

“Caprica”: Prattlestar melodramatica!

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:22:00 +0000

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?

She’s bare, and she “looks eight”

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:31:00 +0000

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.

The face and bare skin belong to Alessandra Torresani, a young veteran actress who is in fact a full 10 years older than that creepy ad would have you believe. She plays the series’ pivotal character Zoe, a rebellious, uniform-sporting 16-year old. It’s like Christmas came early, schoolgirl fans.

Frak this prequel

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 10:19:00 +0000

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.