Caprica: Like Mad Men With Robots

There’s nothing like a good origin story, those moments where the bits of the puzzle come together and you see the picture underneath? Like the first time anyone utters the word Cylon or the name Adama. It gives you a little thrill and that’s the joy of Caprica.

Prequels aren’t easy. People already know how the story turns out so you have to find a different way to build suspense. And then there are all the ground rules and backstories that are already set in stone, so the road is already fairly well mapped before you get there. To make this work, they have to deliver characters that we can relate to and characters are something Ronald D. Moore and his gang are good at.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I came into Caprica with very little knowledge of what it was about and how it was going to proceed (I made it a point to stay away from spoilers on this one) so I was a little confused by the opening club sequence and the introduction of the three teenage characters. It felt a little a scene from Hogwarts Gone Wild and I’m not sure it was the best place to start the story but I stayed to see where it was going. I wasn’t compelled to stay, though, until Ben revealed the bomb under his coat. That’s when I realized that this wasn’t going to be an easy ride. That there would be no clear-cut heroes and villains. Every character in the series is living in the grey area. Some are crossing the line because they think it’s for the greater good, others out of loyalty and some out of greed. In the pilot episode we were handed political corruption, terrorism, religious extremists, racial profiling, and the struggle of teens trying to find a place in this world. As a parent of a teen, that last one really hit home!

In the middle of all this, you have a story about a man with the ability to create life, or a close facsimile, and therein lies the question. What are little girls made of? Are we simply a collection of data that can be stored in either a human or mechanical brain? Or are we more than that? As Joseph Adama says, what about the soul? Is that the one thing that separates us from a cybernetic copy? On the other hand, if it walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck. . .

Caprica isn’t popcorn TV. It’s a show you have to pay attention to and probably watch over and over in order to pick up on all the nuisances. The performances are subtle, the emotion runs deep and there are way more questions than answers.

Visually, it’s a beautiful painting underscored by another Bear McCreary haunting melody. The effects are good to great and the costuming and sets are stylish. It’s like a scifi version of Mad Men.

On the downside, the pilot was incredibly slow in spots. The moody meetings between Graystone and Adama had me reaching for the remote. They may be an advanced society, but obviously they haven’t done the studies on the effects of smoking. Then there were the virtual club scenes which felt like nothing more than a reason to include gratuitous kissing between two girls. I felt the same about the counterpoint piece between the Graystone sex scene and the murder of the official – I get what they were going for but I felt like it went on for way too long.

The Caprica pilot packs a lot into two hours. Maybe too much. A dozen characters are introduced along with some intense and complex plot points. If you came in to it from Battlestar Galactica then you had an advantage. I’d be curious to know how it faired with people who had never seen any version of Galactica prior to this. Then again, if you hadn’t seen Galactica, would you even have bothered to turn on Caprica?

Right now, I’d say the story does stand on its own merit. So if you didn’t watch because you weren’t a fan of Battlestar, give it a shot. It’s a different kind of scifi. More Terminator meets VR5 meets Total Recall and Surrogates. It’s not a “space opera.” It’s another story about man as the architect of his own destruction and in this case, we already know how it turns out.

Caprica airs Fridays at 9:00 on Syfy. Next week, Buffy’s James Marsters guests along with Scott Porter of Friday Night Lights. I’m looking forward to it.

Want to learn more? Syfy has a whole collection of goodies and it begins on the official website. Follow Twitters, Facebook, Vlogs and more at http://www.syfy.com/caprica/

Syfy Photos: Jeff Weddell & Joe Pugliese