This two hour pilot for the new series Caprica surprised me. I certainly was not expecting Battlestar Galactica all over again, but i also was not prepared for such a ‘character-driven’ experience. I use the term loosely here, and mainly to highlight the move away from space as the main narrative background. Intended to gain a wider audience, Caprica may also end up leaving some BSG fans behind…

Caprica takes place on a planet that, aside from a couple of minute differences, looks exactly like our earth. Its main city, Caprica, is any 1950s North American city with a few futuristic skyscrapers added here and there for good measure. I read that the idea of using the 1950s as an influence was to emphasize the fact that all this is taking place in our distant past but to nonetheless convey a sense of excitement towards the future. Personally, i found the production design of Caprica to be one of its weakest points. There is an underwhelming sense of lack of imagination as we stroll through streets and alleys that look like the types we would see in any other TV show. I understand that Caprica takes place in our past, but that knowledge is not enough to overcome the disconnect that one experiences when seeing our present when one is in fact thinking about either the distant future or the distant past. The fact that Caprica and BSG take place millions of years ago is already quite a challenge from a production design standpoint, one that i have discussed already in a couple of BSG posts. But in Caprica, it has become worse. The creators did not even see it fit to show us a game of Pyramid. Instead, we just see a few foamy pads laying around while around 70 extras jump up and down in what looked to be an ice-hockey arena. This is of course intentional, the producers and writers either held up by budgetary constraints or intent on ‘keeping it real’ in an effort to cater to a larger audience than the usual Sci-Fi fare traditionally does. In the end, i see no reason for Caprica to look like 1950s New York or Chicago, as i saw no reason for pens, paper, cancer, cigarettes and many other things to exist in the universe of BSG. One can not have invented interstellar and faster-than-light travel and still be bogged down by so many 20th century human weaknesses and memes. And this applies to design and architecture as well. I also felt uneasy by some of the casting choices, including Eric Stoltz as Daniel Graystone, the driven and selfish scientist who brings about the beginning of the end. Stoltz failed to convince me as a technical genius and as a father, even as a bad one.

A week after having watched Virtuality, it was interesting to see again virtual reality being depicted on TV. Ron Moore has been recycling some of his ideas since in both pilots, a character dies but continues to exist in virtual reality. And in both cases, VR is used pretty much as a recreational tool where a simple headset is enough to transport the ‘user’ into an exact replica of the real world, whatever that real world may be, all five senses included. But Caprica goes much further and attempts to explore some potential societal and moral implications of not only virtual reality but also of immortality, transhumanism, artificial intelligence and genetic engineering. The theme of religion is emphasized from the very start and Dr Graystone’s experiments provide the required foundation for the standard science vs religion debate. Where the debate becomes more interesting than usual is in Dr Graystone’s ideas about merging (mind uploading?) the encoded data of his daughter (drawing on current lifelogging trends - blogs, social networks, data capture…) with an AI-enabled robotic shell. The potential result is immortality for a new a type of being. These concepts are not too far-fetched and many people today in transhumanist circles are working on such ideas. So credit to Ron Moore for keeping it believable. I suppose Mary Shelley did not come up with the idea for Frankenstein. She must have found some old book somewhere telling tales of immortality based on Caprican rather than Summerian or Egyptian mythology.

In spite of what i consider to be weaknesses in the production values and in the casting, the pilot for Caprica had plenty of interesting moments and clearly warrants further viewing. It is hard to imagine that the Cylons were created only 60 years before the fall of Caprica, but i am sure the creators will find a satisfactory way to put it all together.