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.
]]> Deadwood vet Malcolmson's performance is typically excellent; the material given her in the pilot is really, really not.)
Their 16-year-old daughter Zoe (Alessandra Toresani) is, well, pretty much a hateful brat. She does one selfless, kind thing in the entire two-hour pilot, which just barely makes you feel sorry for her when her plan to run away with her monotheist boyfriend to another planet is slightly derailed by her boyfriend's plan to blow up himself, her, and a trainful of people in the name of the One True God.
Meanwhile, in another, far more interesting television show, Joe Adama (Esai Morales) is a morally conflicted mob lawyer who wears really awesome '50s-style suits. He's an orphaned immigrant from Tauron in a society brimming with anti-Tauron racists; one of the show's greatest successes is its intriguing portrayal of Tauron culture, which manages to feel familiar and truly alien all at once. Joe tries very hard to be a good guy, which is complicated somewhat by the scary tattooed mobsters for whom he works. One of said scary mobsters is his brother Sam (Sasha Roiz), an incongruously likeable wiseguy who reminds one of Adrien Brody, if Adrien Brody were buff, tatted out, and prone to stabbing the guy who played The Cigarette-Smoking Man to death. Hi, William B. Davis! You are just as menacing as ever, and twice as leathery.
Joe's wife and daughter happen to be on the same ill-fated train as Zoe, leaving Joe with just one family member left: His 11-year-old son Billy, who 58 years hence will become a certain growly, paternal commander of the Galactica. The kid playing Billy is not the worst child actor in history, and since he's not the focus of the series, the whole conceit of The Adventures of the Lil' Old Man is a lot more fun than it has any right to be. Except now I fervently want to see Billy pal around with a surly, drunken, grade-school-aged Saul Tigh.
In the Too Much of a Sort of OK Thing department, there's a third storyline involving some tedious nonsense about a sinister schoolmistress (Polly Walker) with monotheist leanings, and her manipulation of Zoe's weak-willed idiot best friend. Yawn. Fast-forward.
Daniel and Joe initially meet out of their mutual loss and grief, but get drawn closer together after Daniel discovers that Zoe was a computer genius who'd created a virtual copy of herself in cyberspace. Zoe 2.0 has all her meatware twin's memories, feelings, and emotions, not to mention her progenitor's scarily fervent teenage-girl belief in the One True God.
Daniel enlists Joe to use his mob ties to steal a processor developed by a rival corporation -- a processor that can not only whip his company's amusingly clunky attempt at a killer robot into shape, but resurrect his daughter's digital clone in that robot body. (Yeah, that's going to end well.) In return, Daniel promises to use Zoe's tech to virtually revive Joe's daughter Tamara.
Joe fulfills his end of the bargain, which is where things finally start to get interesting. In one brief and very well-acted scene, the show does a fantastic job of highlighting why being brought back to digital life as a half-complete copy of yourself might not be the best idea. ("Daddy, I can't feel my heartbeat! Why can't I feel my heartbeat?" Brrrr.) And the subsequent gunfire-intensive birth of the first working Cylon succeeds in generating real goosebumps, even if you could see it coming a mile off. By the time said Cylon rose, Frankenstein-style, from its lab table with Zoe's soul at the controls, I was considerably more interested in seeing where this show would head next.
Esai Morales is thus far the series' MVP. He does an eerily great job of echoing Edward James Olmos's turn on Galactica, and manages to sell Joe's anguish, dignity, and moral conflict without ever getting too overwrought. Also? He looks way cool in a fedora.
The interplay between him and Stoltz also works well, and Stoltz does a heroic job investing some humanity into his woefully thin character. I'm having trouble separating my evaluation of Torresani's acting from her obnoxious twit of a character, but she does bring an interesting blend of vulnerability, arrogance, and subtle creepiness to the role.
Another promising sign: Post-pilot, Moore and Eick ditched co-creator Remi Aubuchon and put the writing in the far more capable hands of Whedonverse vet Jane Espenson. Yes, she wrote the hugely disappointing, fan-fictiony mess that was Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. But even that wad of needless continuity porn had a few compellingly written scenes. More notably, she wrote a bunch of fantastic episodes for Galactica, not to mention her sterling body of Whedon-affiliated work.
Also in the good-news column: impending recurring roles for the ever-more-awesome Patton Oswalt, and -- I'll just pause here a moment to allow for all the fangirl squeeing -- James Marsters, who is consistently a far better actor than his hunky dreamboat status among the ranks of lonely Midwestern housewives would suggest.
Going forward, I hope Caprica can be less about the sort of tedious rich-people domestic drama we've seen a billion times before on other shows, and more about the way a series of understandable human choices become the drumbeat that leads to Armageddon. And I'm admittedly amused, and intrigued, by what appears to be Moore and Eick's core message for this show and Galactica. In both, it seems, the apocalypse is unleashed by a spoiled child acting out because mommy and daddy didn't love him/her enough. This is the way the world ends -- not with a bang, but with a whiner.
Killer robots text their friends, go to the mall, and complain about how life is, like, totally unfair Friday nights at 9/8 central on SyFy. ]]>
A few months ago I got my first HDTV, a nice big 50-inch Samsung plasma. It's only 720p but it was on sale (since plasmas are being discontinued).
I saw Harry Potter and the Endless Franchise the other day. (Can you remember a time when we weren't watching Harry Potter movies? Can you imagine a time when we won't be?) I don't want to review the movie, really, except to note that it's one of those middle-of-a-series movies where plot threads are mainly carried forward and nothing is really resolved; if you haven't been paying attention to the whole series none of it will make the slightest sense; and even though I'd read and enjoyed the book I spent most of the movie slightly bewildered and confused anyway.