Caprica: Wouldn't Want to Live There

I had mixed feelings about the recently departed Battlestar Galactica remake for much of its run. With few exceptions (Boomer shooting Adama, President Roslin’s cancer, the final five realizing they’re Cylons), I oftentimes felt like the show was purposely trying to keep me at arm’s length. So dense, so complex were the story lines that at some point I simply gave up trying to understand what was going on. Unlike a show like Lost, where even if you’re confused by the mythology you can still get involved in the characters’ backstories, BSG spent so much time nattering inside its spaceships that the whole enterprise was an exercise in claustrophobia.

Watching the two-hour pilot of Syfy’s new prequel Caprica (Fridays, 9pm), I was relieved to find that the show was going to be allowed to breathe… kind of. Plenty of scenes are set in the bustle of the titular city, but an equal amount take place within a boxed-in virtual world, thereby recreating the cloistered feeling that BSG seemed to revel in. Fortunately, the story—Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz), Caprica’s version of Steve Jobs, harnesses his dead daughter’s virtual spirit and puts it inside the body of an early Cylon model—makes the show more accessible than BSG, at least when it stays with this part of the story. True to form, though, Caprica is not content to merely focus on its technology, introducing mafia elements, terrorist subplots, and theological debate that are more distracting than illuminating.

The pilot dealt quite effectively and uniquely with themes of love and loss, searing emotion seemingly setting the tone for what was to come next. But subsequent episodes have waylaid that emotion in favor of the aforementioned plot strands, rendering the show inert. Stoltz and Esai Morales (whose daughter also died in the same blast that killed Graystone's girl) share a great energy in their scenes together, with Stoltz especially strong as a man blind to what his technological advances are actually doing to society.

One thing the writers of both BSG and Caprica have never really incorporated in their work is a sense of humor. They fail to recognize humanity’s ability to find something to smile about even in the darkest hours, instead choosing to depict a dour world where everything is deadly serious. I guess that only makes sense when, given the self-importance of the subject matter, both shows are also guilty of taking themselves way too seriously.