I never really got into BSG. The few times I saw it I realized there was a lot of story, lots of relationships, and plotting, ect.. all going on. So seeing a few episodes here and there didn’t really pull me in.

But I am a huge Farscape fan…so I can relate to having your favorite show of all time shat on by SciFi (as it was called during that time, and I refuse to call it Syfy *shudder*).

The story was always slow, plodding, and floated between being wildly predictable and just plain absurd. I can’t tell you how many times I managed to figure out what was going to happen in the episode after the first 5 minutes—but of course, rather than have these things happen quickly, we were treated to 37 minutes of filler in the form of vapid, uninspired navel-gazing from one-dimensional, unimaginative characters. In 12 episodes, the only unexpected thing I can remember happening was Vergis’s suicide. In TWELVE EPISODES, they couldn’t come up with more than one twist without an entire episode of lead-up that beat you over the head.

The CG sequences were invariably wretched-looking. One of the reasons that BSG worked so well was because the CG was applied sparingly. Here, CG was constantly being smashed in the viewer’s face, and the result was painful.

The cinematography was amateurish full of the same small bag of tricks repeated over and over and over again. (Hey, let’s pan so that an object in the room obscures our view of Zoe, and then when she reappears she’ll be a CG robot! And then let’s do it over and over again just in case the viewer forgets it’s a human in a robot! Brilliant!)

These next bits are entirely nitpicking, but… they used no fewer than four different unrelated typesets for titling at various points in the show for no reason, and they used CMOS cameras in moving car scenes and ended up with terrible rolling shutter wobble. For a highly anticipated, high-budget (relatively speaking) cable television series, these sorts of amateurish mistakes are sort of representative of the lack of attention to detail that plagued basically everything about Caprica.

TL;DR, bad pacing, vapid dialogue, garish CG, and poor production combined to make a series that should have succeeded but couldn’t. There is so much opportunity in the BSG universe and they squandered it all on some whiny teenagers and their grieving parents. Maggie, that show sucked, let it go, some people care but we’re almost certainly better off this way.

It’s unfortunate that the network would rather air countless hours of faked ghost shows, cheezy (not in a good way) “original” movies and professional wrestling instead of compelling drama.

Much like The Nashville Network’s eventual morph to Spike before it, I see science fiction completely disapearing from Siffy’s lineup. Perhaps a GAC will come along to fill the void.

So Caprica joins the rest of my favourite TV shows, now officially earning the moniker of ‘TV too good for TV’. From Twin Peaks to Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles, from The Prisoner to Carnivale — I’m left with the most excruciatingly wonderful unanswered questions about future plot points and ultimate character developments.

Frak it. I’m watching BSG again.

No teenager wants to “just be normal,” as pop culture seems to suggest endlessly. In fact, they want to be super awesome and escape from their boring lives. This is why I believe Harry Potter is so successful. There is never a scene when Harry is on the verge of tears, saying “I never chose to be a wizard, I just wanted a normal life of tedious classes, failed romances and too much TV.” Instead, he goes “I’m a wizard? AWESOME! Quick, teach me how to fly/levitate objects/make potions/fight evil!”

Luke Skywalker never complains about being a Jedi, because the abilities of clairvoyance, telekinesis and super-reflexes are really cool, not burdensome. Ender Wiggin doesn’t complain about being a super-genius, he embraces it and uses it to become a badass.

Take note all you screenwriters. Superpowers or whatever other thing that elevates select humans should be viewed as wondrous. This is the key to media win.

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The whole notion of having robotic opponents in the old ’70′s BSG was quite explicitly because no one would care if they got shot. We’ve seen wave after wave of stock movie villains come and go as they are humanized, or fade into history, but robots can always be counted on to remain safely on the side of cannon fodder- no more worthy or capable of compassion that, well, your toaster. BSG reboot, amongst a thousand brilliant things it did, tore that apart- if those robots are really beings, then there is no reason they would not be capable of both excesses and keenly felt loss, and thus, many conundrums are born.

Caprica’s job wasn’t necessarily to lay a trail of breadcrumbs from flipping the switch on Cylon #1 to dropping the nukes, a job at which it either was redundant or insufficient, apparently. The role of the show was to explain how it is that these synthetic beings feel so much so deeply, and are torn in so many directions, and they laid so many seeds in those veins that establishing which ones germinated seems of secondary importance (much as I would have liked to see it in later seasons, of course.)

All we need to know is that, one way or another, from digital Zoe or digital Tamara, all the Cylons inherited a kernel laden with all the contradictions of two very young, very smart, very wounded, grasping, seeking children, and that makes the entirety of the Cylon arc snap into focus beautifully. Zoe’s youthful, hopefully religious zeal shows up in our dear Sixes, her analytical powers in the pragmatism of the Cavils, her questioning in the Threes, and her conviction that she is a better creature in a sinning world she has the power to wipe clean, seen in her immortality-fueled scouring of New Cap City, is played out again in the coming conviction-laden apocalypse. She doubts the good intentions of her human parents- much as we see the Cylons do again and again, determined to wipe out the ragtag fleet lest they seek revenge- and answers one sin- her father lighting her on fire- with another- renouncing him and stabbing him in the chest, attempting to forever separate them, and then is driven to go home, reunite, and forgive just the same- sound familiar? This gentle young soul finds herself buried in violence, killing Philomon, in league with gangsters and terrorists- anyone else see our poor, naive Boomer, shooting the old man in the chest, brewing in there? The craving for flesh and all that it entails that we see in the love for Helo, and her satisfaction with the powers of the artificial, evidenced in the creation of the avatars themselves- it’s all there, in each and every Cylon brain.

It was that reframing that made Caprica terrific as it found its feet- the notion that all of the murk in the war between man and Cylon was really, truly, the confusion of battle within a family- Zoe and Daniel and Amanda, of course, but the family of man and the minds it birthed. The bouncing, skittering, flickering interactions of attraction by love, of repulsion by way of resentment for wrongs too old to redress and themselves inspired by misformed love, all winding around again and again and again- isn’t that a vastly more satisfying, and beautiful, and hurtful, way to set our killer robots in motion than “Skynet woke up?”

#1: There is no inconsistency regarding Graystone creating a skinjob.

According to the BSG wiki: “The new humanoid Cylons were created by the five survivors of an earlier generation of humanoid Cylons from Earth in exchange for the Centurions ending the Cylon War. These five early generation Cylons (now known as the “Final Five”) are the descendants of Cylons created by humans on Kobol thousands of years ago. These humanoid Cylons were the Thirteenth Tribe that left Kobol and settled Earth.”

So, the Final Five were early skinjobs descended from the earliest Cylons created by humans (Daniel Graystone). The Final Five gave the technology/knowhow to the Centurions to end the Cylon War. They didn’t *invent* skinjobs, they perfected them and gave away the technology.

#2: Why did the Cylons attack humanity? Seems pretty obvious to me: it was a religious war. Cylons were monotheists and hated their slave-driving polytheist owners/creators. Their DNA contains plenty of STO thinking.

Sounds exactly like the problem Joss Wheadon’s Dollhouse had. Lots of people switched on one of the earlier episodes, thought it was all about glorifying prostitution, and never returned to watch the end.

I think maybe longer story arches just arn’t really ever fit for syndicated television? If you want to tell that kind of story in a serial format you either have to draw wiewers in with various appealing sub-plots while planting the arch, or make it a “mini-series” from the start so that people know you’re going somewhere with it.

The problem with the show is that all the big questions are answered. What happens to Joe Adama? He becomes a famous civil-rights lawyer. What happens to Bill Adama? He becomes Bill Adama. What happens to the Cylons, to Caprica, to humanity? We know, we know, WE KNOW.

So from the beginning, this show’s mainspring was already pretty loosely wound. With most of the space-opera elements deflated by the rigidly defined future, the writers by necessity had to focus this show around compelling, nuanced characters portrayed by skilled actors. And they definitely got skilled actors.

But I feel like the writers never succeeded in giving them what they needed. The show is grim and joyless, choking in cigarette smoke and ennui. We already know this society is doomed to war and annihilation. Maybe I’d care more if it seemed like a single person was enjoying their pre-nuked status.

The writing is ponderous, self-important navel-gazing. But where I finally gave up was the scene where Daniel Graystone lays out the dark secrets of his entire board of directors to regain control of his company. I’ve met corporate directors. I know “what comes out at corporate retreats.” These are careful, boring people. They’re accountants. If they have dark secrets, do you know who they confess to? Sure as shit not their boss, that’s who. The scene boiled down my big problem with Caprica; in order to write powerful, emotional, fiercely intelligent characters you must be more powerful, more emotional, and more fiercely intelligent.

And lasttide, great points. Once they have those powers, however, realizing/counting the costs of those gifts (e.g., Twilight) s where much of the drama happens — until they decide it is worth it and they should do their best.

But, as you suggest, when they drag out the “oh what will I do with my superpowers bringing me down” too long (e.g., Spiderman movies) things get really draggy.

Then they took the horrid, extensive, mis-season break (on Space Channel in Canada). You just can’t do that in a plot this complex and interesting. I couldn’t get back into it at all. If they hadn’t done that, maybe viewership would have stayed up and the show would have succeeded.

oh, wait….

Plus, TV executives HATE serial shows, because casual viewers rarely stick with a show they surf into randomly if backstory is needed to understand it. Even if a show is fucking awful (Ghost Hunters?) if it doesn’t require context and is just good enough to keep a modicum of eyeballs — and ESPECIALLY if it’s cheap to make — it will have more staying power than a quality series.

So if you wonder why Sy Fy in particular and Network Television in general is so shitty, it’s because it isn’t made for viewers. It’s made for executives who probably wouldn’t watch the channel themselves on a dare. They’re out to enhance shareholder value and preserve their jobs, not make great television.

It makes sense, from what we know is coming- the experiments on humans we see in Razor and the final five ending the war by giving the Cylons human bodies, and the hybrids, and so forth- that Epilogue Zoe-bot is either an incremental step towards returning to the flesh that doesn’t satisfy the urges of whatever Cylon group rebels, or is a dead end never doled out to the rest of the robots at all- there were writing whispers that Zoe, disillusioned with her faith and returned to her family, would eventually oppose the uprising, and so she probably wouldn’t have shared.