By Erika Blake
Multipleverses.com Admin
When I first heard of CAPRICA coming, I had zero interest in the series. I sat through the BSG/Caprica panel at Comic Con, thinking that Esai Morales was a charming man, but his show sounded like a dud. As we got closer to the premiere, I kept shrugging my sister off saying “eh, not interested.” I mean a planet bound sci-fi family drama what was the point of that? Also I’ve never really been a rabid BSG fan, so why would I be interested in a prequel? Then the premiere came and went and my interest was piqued. By the second episode, I’ve become hooked.
For those looking for BSG 2.0, this show is not it. In fact, other than the fact that Joseph Adams is finally embracing his Tauron heritage by revealing his last name is Adama to his son, you’d barely know that the series was BSG related…well except for the silver Toasters that keep popping up in Daniel Graystone’s lab. If there is any show out there that it is similar to, I’d more closely link it to TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES.
CAPRICA is its own sci-fi entity, yet if you watch it carefully you can hear echoes of the future that is to come for these people’s children. Instead what we have is a smart family drama that happens to be set in a futuristic world. I like that there are funky modern conveniences, however, not everything is automated, and the folks behind the show don’t try to make the series “flashy.” There are some very Jetsons elements to it, like the wealthy Graystones having their own personal housebot butler named Serge, tennis courts that auto light up the lines to let you know if a ball was in or out, or a home avatar design program to create your own hologames. In the Adams family things are simple and homey and completely lack any great high techno gadgets to assist with making their lives better. They still drive standard cars in this time frame (58 years before the attack on the colonies) yet you can tell that there are space ships and highly modern planes & jets.
The series sets up the birth of the Cylons and where exactly their belief of “one God” comes from. Zoe Graystone, the headstrong and brilliant daughter of Daniel and Amanda has been taken under the tutelage of her school’s instructor Clarice Willow who happens to be a member of an underground movement called “Soldiers of the One” – a cult that believe that there is one all powerful, all knowing God. When Zoe’s classmate and boyfriend blows them up on a train in the name of their cause, Zoe dies, however, she had created an exact duplicate of herself and downloaded it into her own private hologram which her father stumbles upon. This second Zoe has all of the real Zoe’s memories, yet she’s never lived her life. She feels what Zoe had felt yet doesn’t breathe. She is the core prototype of the future cylons who resurrect by having their consciousnesses downloaded. Zoe 2.0 even recalls Zoe 1.0’s death. A grieving Daniel Graystone (a brilliant robotic scientist) whose last memories with his daughter include fighting with her, downloads this consciousness into one of his robots – a cylon and accidentally overloads the robots systems and Zoe vanishes. Or does she? Inside the robot, Zoe comes back into consciousness and reaches out to Zoe’s old school friend in an attempt to figure out how to stay alive at all costs. All of the while this particular robot is acting peculiar and Daniel is hell bent on trying to understand why.
Meanwhile, Graystone’s grieving wife Amanda has been visited by the government over and over and told that her daughter was a member of this radical movement and in a fit of blind grief, after finding undeniable truth of this in the form of a pendent that her daughter owned in the shape of the Soldier’s symbol (an infinite symbol) she exposes her daughter as a terrorist on live TV. This is about to put a major crimp in the Zoe’s parent’s relationship as they become social pariahs and fodder for the nightly news.
Joseph Adams is finding it hard to accept that his daughter and wife who were innocent bystanders on the train are gone. Little William Adams is left a distant father and begins to learn about his Tauron heritage by hanging out with his gangster uncle. From him, Bill Adama learns his greatest weapon that he will hoist in his arsenal as leader – the power of guilt, which he twists and uses effortlessly on his father. Joseph is lost without his family – the former orphan again appears to have lost his footing on ground. To add extra stress to his life, he makes a single bad decision that ends up linking himself to Daniel Graystone for life.
The characters on this show are immediately engaging and intriguing. Original Zoe 1.0 was a spoiled, annoying brat, however, her avatar self is innocent, scared, and extremely likeable. Daniel Graystone is a charismatic ass, Joseph Adams is wonderfully richly written every man, and the other women on the show help fill out the cast nicely by adding layers. In a television landscape where crime & hospital dramas rule the airwaves, CAPRICA is a nice change of pace – it’s a throwback to the large night time soaps from the 80’s where wealth, arrogance, and power are thrown around with ease, and here everyday average folks unfortunately get in the way. Eric Stolz and Esai Morales positively shine on screen and command their parts and have already succeeding in showing us that these two men are a complete mess. 
Bear McCreary’s score far more resembles his TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONCILES soundtrack than that of BSG, although there are echoes from the original series in the score, particularly whenever something occurs that poignantly would remind us of the future. The score is emotional and haunting. For this TSCC fan, the score is familiar and is that final bridge that has connected me to the series, the melodies link me to the characters and helps to paint their emotions. For TSCC fans who enjoyed that series for family sci-fi drama – CAPRICA poses similar questions about the morality of imposing human will on non-sentient objects, and at what point does humanity cease to exist when our creations are nearly as real as we are?
SyFy is going to be running a marathon so that you can catch up on the first 3 hours of the series in case you missed them or you can watch them online at SyFy. For a bit of fun – follow the Graystone’s robot Serge on Twitter!
