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What if you’re not a ‘Battlestar’ supergeek?

For the supergeek BSG fan analysis of Caprica, I wrote this article. I wanted to get the opinion of a complete and utter BSGvirgin, but I thought all the intelligent people I know I’ve already dragged into watching my 30hr BSGfests. I know Caprica is good, but is it good on its own merit? Am I biased in favour of all things Ron Moore? — Reznik

When Battlestar Galactica ended, we weren’t quite sure how Reznik would handle it. I think that deep down, he had come to believe that the world no longer had anything new to offer–that we were all just jaded frakking hipsters trying to make sense of our post-BSG lives. So when I mentioned to him that I had actually never watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica, he got a strange look in his eye. He didn’t say anything–he just shoved a DVD into my hands. And some blankets and glass beads. He told me to come back when I’d watched it. So here we be.

I’m not going to lie. If hadn’t been asked by a trusted friend to watch Caprica, the Battlestar Galactica prequel, I wouldn’t have lasted through the first twenty minutes. I probably wouldn’t have lasted through the first four minutes. Usually, when a film starts with topless girls making out under strobe lights to lame generic techno, I figure this is some weak, shock-value compensation to make up for lack of substance and turn it off. But I stuck this one out.

And that was tough to do, for about half an hour. The first act is pretty exclusionary. Not knowing what “the fall” was or or when it took place, I had no reference point in space or time. It seemed like the future, and yet there were combustion engines and girls wearing heavy bangs. I wasn’t sure how the kids were planning to get to another planet via train. There was some sort of ethnic tension, but as the source of it was unclear, it came off as half-baked allegory, which was annoying. I was also unimpressed the monotheism-as-revolutionary schtick. Ooh. On Caprica, every day is opposites day.

But by the time the half-hour mark rolled around, I was willing to see where things would go. This was largely thanks to Eric Stoltz. I found his character, or perhaps more explicitly, his portrayal of his character, to be genuinely original. You don’t get a lot of mild-mannered, tennis-playing mad scientist/heartless entrepreneurs on film these days. His rationale didn’t seem entirely cold, and his grief seemed simultaneously authentic and inauthentic, which was pretty engaging. I also really liked Lacey, and the places Magda Apanowicz took her. Esai Morales conveyed a fine balance of intrigue, uncertainty, and brooding.

The film was peppered with obvious references to things–family names, government systems, technologies–that I, in my inexperience, didn’t understand, and that got tiresome. Sister Clarice had a really annoying eye-glinting moment that was a bit too much of a BSG-club moment for my liking. And maybe this is a faulty assumption, but don’t our constellations don’t different from other vantage points in space? Why would other planets be named for our zodiac? Unless Caprica is really Earth, and the future is now, and the girls’ names that are trendy today will be trendy in perpetuity…

Ultimately, I’m willing to hand it to Caprica. It’s more than just a vanity piece or an opportunity for self-congratulatory BSG geeks to wring a few last cheap thrills out of the franchise.

The question at the heart of Reznik’s anthropological enthusiasm for my remarkably-untouched-by-BSG status was whether or not Caprica holds up on its own merits. In short, it’s a ‘more or less.’ I wouldn’t have lasted long if I’d run across it by myself. But by the time it was over, I was pretty into frakking it.

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