Caprica Pilot

Even that, though, doesn't convey the full sense of difference. The scale of the show is just different. In Galactica the story–right from the pilot of that show–was about the death and survival of civilization. The stakes were always HUGE on Galactica. They're not in Caprica. This is a much smaller, more intimate story. Yes, we the viewers know where the early robotics experiments we see are going to lead, but there is nothing in the pilot that indicates that. The story isn't about Cylons and what they'll do in the future.

Yes, that's not a typo. Adamses. Not Adamas.

On a conceptual level, it's about memory and identity and what you might do if you could kinda-sorta bring back lost loved ones through technological means.

There are thus a lot of echoes of Galactica on the thematic level. We see something that is kinda like Cylon resurrection–but isn't. We see echoes of Gaius Baltar in the character Daniel Greystone–though he is way more together as a human being and not nearly the scoundrel that Baltar was. (Greystone is actually likable, even if you don't agree with him.) We also see echoes of Bill Adama in his father, Joseph Adams. And we get to see the future Admiral Adama himself as an eleven year-old boy, who is an important character in the pilot and who promises also to be important in the series.

Okay, so what's the deal with this Adams/Adama business?

Every spinoff needs to go beyond its original–to extend and go deeper–and this is one of the ways Caprica does that. It significantly expands and deepens what we know about the Adama family.

Which is where some *minor* spoilers come in.

For a start, they weren't originally from Caprica but another colony: Tauron. 

Tauron, apparently, was something of a backward, agricultural world and was looked down upon by the urbanites of Caprica, who are openly bigoted against Taurons. They comment about the way they smell and–apparently because of their farming background–refer to them as "dirt eaters."

Like a lot of downtrodden immigrants coming to a new land, Joseph Adama tried to fit in to the new society by changing his name to make it sound more Caprican. Hence "Adams" rather than "Adama."

It's a nice character touch that reflects what happens in the real world.

That's not the only new and unexpected but plausible aspects to the family, though. In BSG we only heard about the elder Joseph Adama, and we had a somewhat lionized portrait of him as a crusading civil rights attourney–one of the principled, idealistic good guys.

But the guys running Caprica decided to start him somewhere else in his career for, as one of the put it on the DVD commentary (paraphrase from memory), "So he's a hero. Where do you go from there?"

They therefore decided to show us a time in Joseph Adama's life when he hadn't yet become a crusading civil rights goodguy lawyer. He is a lawyer . . . but not that kind.

Y'see . . . those downtrodden immigrant communities? They understandably stick together. They circle the wagons for reasons of self-protection. And sometimes they do things that aren't, y'know, exactly legal. Sometimes they get a little carried away in that and you have an immigrant community that's infected by what's known as organized crime.

In a fallen world, those things happen. And not to just one community of migrants but to any of them, in any part of the world.

It's certainly true of the Tauron immigrants to Caprica, who have a culture that is clearly inspired by Italian/Sicilian precedents, meaning that Joseph Adams . . . 

. . . is a mob attourney when we meet him.

But hey, it makes him more interesting, and it gives him room to grow as a character, and of that the stuff of drama is made.

I'm cool with that.

They naturally form the primary nexus of the pilot, and to avoid spoilers I won't say too much more about them.

I will give you a content advisory, not unlike those you see over at Decentfilms.Com. Like BSG, and especially the BSG pilot, this pilot episode does have some sexual content in it that I wish wasn't there or wasn't as explicit as it is. (The DVD box should also carry a warning label it doesn't have, so buyer be warned.)

The good news is that they are few and brief and that they will probably be edited out of the televised version, but they are there.

It's a computer-generated space in which teenagers have covert, underground rave parties and act out their fantasies. The slogan of the V-Club is "No limits."

That actually, on a narrative level, makes the existence of this material more tolerable, because it isn't presented to the viewer as a way of conjuring an alluring nightclub atmosphere. Quite the opposite. We are meant to see–and the main characters who go to the V-Club comment on–how disgusting everything is.

There is one sequence in which a girl leads Daniel Greystone through the club, pointing out different horrors in the degradation to which the youth in the club have sunk. Some areas are for group sex and drug use. Then there is the fight area, where by the magic of virtual imagery you can beat the snot out of anyone you want . . . your ex-boyfriend, that annoying kid in math class, your parents, anybody! That not enough? Then you can blow them away in the shooting gallery with an automatic pistol. And the central area? . . . Ritual Human Sacrifice.

GAAAAAHHHHHH!!!

That's the only sane human reaction to this stuff, and it's the reaction that we the viewers are meant to have.

And after the school girl explains these horrors to Greystone she tells him that there is a right and a wrong in the world and that God–the One True God–knows the difference.

And thus we have monotheism vs. polytheism as a recurrent theme, just like in Galactica.

The monotheists are by no means the unambiguous good guys in this pilot–far from it. But neither is monotheism presented as unambiguously bad–especially compared with what pagan society does in a V-Club. Instead, the situation is ambiguous, like on Galactica, with religion played as a very important element but without particular religious positions being portrayed as clearly good or clearly bad.

We also see a vivid depiction of what our society may one day face with realistic virtual environments.

Some years ago I was listening to an audiobook version of The Physics of Star Trek by physicist Lawrence Krauss, and he commented on the many Next Generation shows that focused on the holodeck. In particular he commented on the episode "Hollow Pursuits," which focused on Lt. Barclay (in his first appearance) and his problem with holodeck addiction.

Krauss commented that he thought this episode was way too optimistic and that he thought that if holodecks really existed then they would be a HUGE societal problem, with holodeck abuse and addiction being major blights on humanity. 

Scary stuff.

That's not to say that Caprica doesn't have flaws or unbelievable points. It does. (Greystone . . . you ever heard of backing up your data? Nuff' said.)

So there is stuff there to explore.

Exploration begins in 2010.