Review: 'Caprica': "Pilot" and "Rebirth"

I was leery of Caprica. From early descriptions, it sounded like a softening of the hard-edged epic that Battlestar had, at its best, embodied, replacing iron and blood with melodrama and CW-style teen angst. The aging king had to be renewed, but this reinvention sounded like an ill-favored mutation.

Response after the DVD came out ages ago was mixed, and that seemed to justify my concerns: some Battlestar fans loved it, but others found it weak tea, a daughter who little resembled her illustrious forebear.

The upshot is: advance word of a new show doesn't replace seeing it and being drawn in, as I was with Caprica.

The big potential problem with Caprica (premiere: Jan. 22, 2010 in Syfy) was that its remit of fleshing out the origins of the Cylon/human conflict using the Adamas and Graystones could have reduced the central characters to ciphers: Joe Adama representing Humanity, Daniel Graystone representing the crassness of captilalism that literally destroys us in the end. Fortunately, it's clear from the long-available pilot and the recently broadcast first regular episode, "Rebirth," that the show's creators -- mainly Ronald D. Moore and Jane Espenson -- knew better than to reduce the Caprica storyline to dogmatic allegory.

The second problem I foresaw was that shifting the action from the dark hallways of the battle-scarred Galactica to the sunny, futuristic utopian metropolis of Caprica would visually sap the urgent deconstruction of human conflict and identity it was carrying over from the mother series. But the visual presentation of Caprica is cleverly approached: the open-air Graystone mansion is pale and desaturated, while the virtual world where the youngsters fray their morality to shreds is lush and overdriven, a visual manifestation of decadence. While there are signs that the CGI artists behind Caprica city took immense pleasure in erecting a metropolis full of monumental statues (like the colossal Atlas bending over the stadium named for him), bristling with buildings raised to giddy heights, and buzzing with humans and their contraptions, Caprica itself never strays into the uncanny valley because of the shadows cast across it by the characters' damaged souls.

It seems that at the center of Caprica are the two fathers, Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) and Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz); and it's true that the complementary performances of the pent-up, conflicted Tauron immigrant energized by Morales and the repressed, aggressive, type A Caprican businessmen played by Stoltz anchor the series.

But Caprica has two centers, the second being Zoe Graystone (Alessandra Torresani) and her friend Lacy (the wonderful Magda Apanowicz, from Kyle XY). And with my earliest fears swept away by intelligent writing and design and outstanding acting from all quarters, I came to realize the chief peril facing Caprica is that its two centers are not well-connected. The sort of upstairs/downstairs disjunct between the adults and the teens, even after what happens to poor Zoe's avatar at the end of the pilot, will doubtless be an ongoing concern of the writers; but so far the plotlines seem to be charting separate courses into the thicket of Caprican history.

There is cause for confidence. Caprica effortlessly handles problems that would derail many a lesser program. How, for example, to you show that the avatar of a teenage girl inhabits the steel frame of a killer robot? "Rebirth" handles the problem well, shifting easily from one image to another at the right moments, unobtrusively accustomizing the viewer to the imagery. Occasions for disconnect between the two are used for dark humor, as when the bound Zoe/U-87 defends herself against a brutal tech guy. In these scenes Torresani is somehow able to show both steel and a vulnerable teenage girl.

Much has been made of the "issues" brought to the fore in Caprica: the series seems to want to press our face right up against the bigotry, religious persecution, sexual degeneration, and terrorism faced by its characters. Some of this I talked about in my interview with Esai Morales, and I echo his response: "Thank god!" Television has a breathtaking capacity to reduce the real world's knife's-edges to stunning dullness, in all possible senses; with its capacity to reach into our homes and lives, some television at least should speak to the conflicts we see and either face or shirk in our own travels, and not reduce our complex minds and thoughts to shattering banality. If this can be done in a way that entertains and draws you forward, it might be a good thing to have around.

Caprica is not shy. When a government official groused at the end of the pilot that all Taurons were liars, I recoiled: television characters seldom display such raw bigotry. But I realized that that only means that television is further from reality than we'd like to believe.

Caprica is not perfect as a television show. And it is certainly not Battlestar: the ruthless excavation of human nature undertaken by that show has been rebuilt and redirected, and the new road bumpy and untraveled. The simplest test, at the end of the day, is: Do I want to see what happens to these people next week? After the pilot I wasn't sure; I was processing all that had was new and changed. After "Rebirth," I want to see not just the origins of the Cylons, but the evolution of Zoe Graystone.