Let's be honest here: The first episode of Caprica, the much-ballyhooed spinoff of Ron Moore and David Eick's mostly amazing relaunch of Battlestar Galactica, is just OK. It's listless and a bit loopy for much of its first hour, displaying more of the noodly quasi-mystical elements that sandbagged the end of Galactica than the gut-wrenching moral and physical perils that defined the bulk of the series. But that's fine by me -- I still don't care much for the initial miniseries that brought Galactica back to TV, but the series shaped up quickly from there. And the way Caprica's pilot picks up steam in its second hour leaves me intrigued enough to look forward to the rest of its first season.

Fifty-eight years before a petulant robot Dean Stockwell will turn it and 11 other planets into smoldering nuclear craters, Caprica is a smugly wealthy enclave of power and privilege. Its inhabitants, many of whom seem blithely racist toward residents of less shiny planets, worship the same pantheon of Greek gods that got a lot of lip service in Galactica. They're pretty much like us, except for the occasional spaceship or virtual-reality "holoband." Capricans have TV shows, restaurants, cars, sporting events, and oh yes, religiously motivated terrorist bombings. Except in this case, the whacko fundamentalists have this crazy notion that instead of many gods, there's just one all-knowing, all-powerful deity with an ironclad grip on the notions of right and wrong.