Caprica

Here we are, with Caprica the series finally unfolding before us. I’ve been looking forward to this for months, with an audience’s curiosity and a writer’s. I’m eager to try and write a spec script for this series, to get under its hood, and to see what choices the writers make when expanding and deepening this world they’re creating. So I’m planning on giving Caprica the same treatment I give Lost: a weekly musing on what I’ve seen.

I don’t have cable, though, and the show’s on a days-long delay on Hulu and iTunes, so I won’t be able to get around to these posts until just before the next episode airs. Bear with me.

Naturally, spoilers follow.

Two things attract me to this show above all: the cast and the world-building. When these two work in tandem, the show takes flight for me.

This episode seems to relish playing with those two elements — actors and setting — above moving the story forward. We mostly seem to check in with characters, learn a few more rules and truths of the setting, and then push the story ahead a bit at the end. Above all, this episode defines the relationships between key characters, which shows us more of this foreign culture along the way.

We’re shown what Caprica’s polygamy, sports fandom, and criminal subcultures look like at the practical level. We’re taken to corner markets and opium dens. We’re given a glimpse at a world that looks very much like our own and yet also very different — the things the production chooses to change (like cars and communications technology) and the things they choose to leave the same (by shooting on location in Vancouver houses and neighborhoods) are fascinating.

Caprica City

The opening-title sequence depicts a Blade Runner-esque future city, but the show itself shows more of a multi-era mashup on a smaller scale. It’s something of a magic trick, getting us to picture the city around the scenes we’re shown. Every episode is a potentially new feat of prestidigitation — conjuring a futuristic and foreign city out of a slice of Canada.

A lot of that world-building wouldn’t work, though, if the cast wasn’t up to it. They need to sell things like casual references — to Tauron school and cuisine, to the justice system, to religion — without putting it all in italics. They need to feel at home in an imaginary, alien planet and they need to do it in a way that typical SF shows set in the future don’t.

So often, characters in sci-fi settings are playing only heightened emotions in extreme situations. They’re on the run or in a war or part of the rare few; they’re exceptions to the normal society. On Caprica, though, the characters aren’t wholly exceptional. They’re actions and reactions are vital parts of the world-building. They’re establishing the norms and rules for the setting with every scene and every acting choice. They need to establish the normalcy of the show’s implied First Act even while they’re in the midst of Second Act-level drama. We in the audience have to scrutinize everything they do to glean an understanding of what’s different and what’s the same between our world and theirs. That must be one hell of a challenge.

The big weakness that I see here is in the very broadly sketched story of the Graystone Labs technicians who drive the U-87 robot body to Daniel Graystone’s house. One technician feminizes the robot (which he ironically doesn’t realize contains the digital avatar of Zoe Graystone) while the other is an asshole to it. Neither seems to have much reason to fawn or be irate, but there they are, loving and loathing the machine they work with. It’s a heavy-handed way of making the point: we, as a people, swing to both extremes in our relationships with technology.

This exchange between Daniel Graystone and his valet robot, Serge, is much more believable. Daniel has just scored a mock goal in a paper-wad ballgame:

In that, we see that Daniel has drafted Serge into the role of cohort, but that the relationship is not at all even. It feels like a believably low-key exchange and, best of all, gives us something else to do while we soak that in: laugh a little bit.

Likewise, when we get a scene of the human girl Lacy hugging her dead friend’s digital avatar in its robot-soldier body, we are asked to feel a lot of different things. The scene is, on some level, plainly ridiculous, but it’s not only ridiculous. It’s creepy, it’s sort of sad, and it is somehow a little sweet. That is to say, it is complicated. That’s terrific.

Hugging A Robot Built to Kill

Part of what makes that scene work, beyond the performance of the human girl, Lacy (Magda Apanowicz), is the music.

Composer Bear McCreary is such a vital part of the show’s texture and identity that he practically straddles the line between producer and actor: he’s a world-builder, but he also plays an invisible, audible part on-screen. And his post-show rundowns are fantastic and detailed — a lot of his musical talk goes over my head, but it’s fascinating all the same. Check out his post on “Rebirth,” complete with music clips and looks at the themes’ actual notations.

My time is up, so I’ll leave you with this final thought: I sure hope that Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama don’t end up being such nemeses that they don’t get the kinds of scenes together that they got in the pilot episode. I hope their relationship is more complicated than straight-up rivalry. I can get angry men growling at each other in other movies and shows. I want more complexity here.

In the meantime, I’m going to cook up a stand-alone episode idea that I can spec, and you should drop your thoughts on this show — good or bad, tentative or certain — here in the comments.