Last night, I watched the pilot episode — episodes? I think what I watched online was the uncut DVD version — for Caprica, the new Battlestar Galactica prequel. I was surprised by how much I liked it.
I gave up on Battlestar somewhere midway through its final season. I would often find an individual episode intense and gripping, but almost never enjoyable, and almost always overwrought, overly dour, and more concerned with teasing the identity of “the final Cylon” (which I cared increasingly less about) than in honest character development and interesting plots. I’m aware that the last season, particularly the show’s finale, divided a lot of viewers, but I just grew uninterested with the whole thing during that failed mutiny arc. I think it’s telling that I stopped halfway through a two-part episode, right at what was ostensibly a huge cliffhanger, and felt almost no compulsion to continue watching, even into the second half.
That was several months ago, maybe even almost a year ago when the episodes first aired, and I still haven’t gone back to watch the eight that are left. I was a big fan of the show until at least Season 3, and although in retrospect I think it may have been a little heavy-handed, I think the first part of that season, on occupied New Caprica, is some of the more interesting and challenging work the show ever did. But at some point — and I’d probably have to re-watch the entire series to figure out exactly when –the show went a little off the rails for me. It felt like a chore, like I was watching out of a sense of obligation, of completion, rather than because I genuinely enjoyed the series.
And so I was thinking about giving Caprica a miss. I didn’t watch it when the DVD first came out in April, just as I didn’t watch any of the other spinoff projects like Razor or The Plan. But then I heard Jesse Thorn’s interview with Jane Espenson, the series’ executive producer, and a writer I’ve liked since at least her Buffy the Vampire Slayer days. Her explanation of the show and the themes it will explore — identity, religion, culture, racism — made it sound a lot more intriguing than I expected. And so I figured, hey, why not?
I think Noel Murray describes it best:
“This new show feels different, but its concerns are the same. Eick, Moore, and company aim to show how grief and fear drives us to construct precarious paradises, with the seeds for their own destruction rooted underneath.”
It’s too soon to tell if the series will live up to the strengths of the pilot without falling back on its occasional weaknesses (or the weaknesses that, for me, brought down Battlestar). But for now, I’m cautiously optimistic. I’m still not sure what to do about that last handful of Battlestar episodes, of course. I sometimes feel like I should watch them, if only for the sake of completion, or if only so I can stop avoiding spoilers about how the show ended.
I know some of you have seen the show to its end. What’s your take?
Hmm. I found BSG flawed, but at least moderately interesting up until the end, but was bored out of my mind by the Caprica pilot. None of the characters interested me in the slightest, and it felt like it was mostly retreading very, very familiar science fictional ground without adding very much to it.
Whereas I was very intrigued, and I thought this was ground that really hasn’t been covered very often — certainly not in televised science fiction. (The way Star Trek treats religion, for instance, is comparatively pretty shallow.) I found a lot of the characters — including Stoltz’s, though I didn’t always love his performance — promisingly complicated, and I look forward to seeing what they do with it once it goes to series.
And while I often found an individual episode of Battlestar gripping, even in its final season, I would never have called it particularly interesting, and it almost always just tried my patience.