Caprica FAQ

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 06:33:38 -0500

Caprica was one of my favourite shows of all time. With Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome hitting the internet right now, I figured some people might be thinking about getting into Caprica and might have some questions, so I wrote this FAQ.

QUESTIONS BEFORE WATCHING THE SHOW

Where can I watch Caprica? You can stream it on Netflix. It’s also available on DVD in two box-sets, labeled Season 1.0 and Season 1.5. And the entire series was released as a single Blu-ray set in France.

I see that there’s a Caprica movie. Should I watch that? No. The Caprica movie is just an early form of the pilot episode. It was released on DVD a year before Caprica aired on TV. The televised version is better.

How is the show different from Battlestar Galactica Caprica is a completely different genre from Battlestar Galactica. It’s not an action show set on spaceships. It’s a crime drama and family drama set on a futuristic planet with advanced technology and killer robots. Whereas Battlestar Galactica had a space opera setting, Caprica has a cyberpunk setting. (Think Blade Runner or The Matrix or Hackers.)

I heard this show was cancelled. Is it still worth watching? Does it end on an unresolved cliffhanger? It’s still worth watching. It manages to tell a fairly complete story (though you can tell the ending was a little rushed), and it leads into BSG quite nicely.

Do I need to watch Battlestar Galactica first? No. The show actually makes very little reference to Battlestar Galactica until the end of the final episode. In fact, some people like Caprica but don’t like Battlestar Galactica. (But if you have watched Battlestar Galactica, the ending of Caprica is awesome.)

What’s the show about? The summaries I’ve seen are confusing. It’s about Cylons, right? The show’s about a corporate billionaire named Daniel Graystone who invents mechanical robots called Cylons, originally intended as war machines, and his computer genius daughter, Zoe Graystone, who dies in the pilot episode but secretly lives on as a computer program. There are a whole bunch of other characters and plotlines, but these two are pretty much at the center of it. (And the show is at its best whenever the two of them butt heads.) The show is not really about the Cylons themselves.

I heard it’s a prequel about Bill Adama when he was a boy. It’s not really. You see Bill Adama, but he’s a peripheral character at best. His family members are involved, though.

Does this show suck? I heard it sucks. No, the show actually got very good ratings in Canada. I can’t explain why the ratings were so disappointing in the United States, but it seems that the Syfy Channel (which aired the show in the United States) was going through a change in direction at the time, and it’s possible that Caprica no longer suited their audience demographic.

Online reviews have been skewed negatively by some fans of BSG who didn’t like that Caprica was a different genre and left many negative comments along the lines of “This show sucks, it doesn’t have any space battles”.

QUESTIONS WHILE WATCHING THE SHOW (SPOILERS MAY FOLLOW)

What’s up with Amanda? Is she crazy? Amanda struggles with mental health issues. This is hinted at in the pilot episode, but doesn’t become explicit until later on. Her behaviour is a little puzzling in the early episodes if you don’t realize this.

I understand why Lacey joins Barnabus’s group, but I don’t understand why she stays with them. Lacey is afraid to leave. On one of the deleted scenes included as a DVD extra, she tries to leave Barnabus’s group but Barnabus threatens to kill her if she does.

Is Clarice evil? Well, she wouldn’t think so. (Yes, Clarice is evil.)

In “Gravedancing”, what was that phonecall Clarice receives? Clarice has a mole in the police department who warns her about the upcoming search of the school. She deftly pickpockets a piece of holo-paper from a stranger to send an untraceable warning to Keon, telling him to remove the bomb-making materials before the search happens.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE FINALE (MAJOR SPOILERS)

How did Clarice get away Presumably it took some time for Daniel and Amanda to explain their innocence and prove who the terrorists were, during which Clarice escaped off-world to Geminon. Perhaps Lacy is now hiding her from the authorities. (According to the DVD commentary, season 2 would have seen Clarice and Lacy form an uneasy alliance out of necessity.)

Where was that church with the Cylons? How do Cylons go to church? That church was in V-world. You can tell by the transition effect used before that scene, among other hints.

What was Zoe doing in that church? Why is she smiling A common theory is that it was actually the Angel Zoe from “Things we lock away”, smiling because things are going according to plan. You can tell from the fact that no one seems to see her, and from Alessandra Torresani’s acting.

What happened to Tamara? Who shot Agent Duram? It seems that Tamara and Agent Duram were victims of the show’s cancellation. Unlike the show’s “regular” actors (who are contracted for every episode), Genevieve Buechner (Tamara) and Brian Markinson (Duram) were paid per episode that they appeared in. It’s possible that once cancellation of the show seemed likely, there wasn’t enough budget to bring them back to finish off their storylines.

I like to think that Agent Youngblood was the one who shot Agent Duram, and that she was sympathetic to the STO all along (though not working with Singh). It was hinted earlier in the series that she might have let Ben get away with bomb-making materials, and she tried to dissuade Duram from pursuing Clarice Willow. (Also, she just sorta disappeared from later episodes, and I’d like to think the writers didn’t just forget about her.)

Tamara’s family want her dead, so she has no reason to want to return to the real world. Now that Zoe is in the real world in a skin job body, I guess Tamara’s back to wandering V-world all alone.

QUESTIONS FROM PEOPLE WHO WATCHED BSG (MAJOR BSG SPOILERS)

How does this tie in with the Final Five cylons from Battlestar Galatica, a.k.a. I didn’t understand the last season of BSG The Final Five cylons are the last surviving members of “The Thirteenth Tribe”, who were a race of Cylons created on Kobol. During the exodus from Kobol, the humans settled on the 12 colonies while the The Thirteenth Tribe settled on Earth. On the 12 Colonies, the Thirteenth Tribe and Earth were forgotten and passed into myth. The Thirteenth Tribe remembered the other 12 Colonies but wanted nothing to do with them. After Earth was destroyed in a holocaust, the only five survivors (the “Final Five”) travelled to Caprica, and, together with the mechanical Cylons invented by Daniel Graystone, created a new race of 7 humanoid cylons. The Final Five wanted peace with the humans, but the new cylons disagreed. So the new cylons wiped the Final Five’s memories, lobotomised the mechanical cylons, and nuked the 12 colonies.

Does Daniel Graystone have anything to do with the Cylon named Daniel? …maybe? Daniel Greystone is a pianist (like Stabuck’s dad), and he has the same name as Cylon Daniel, so maybe the writers of Caprica were trying to hint that Daniel Greystone is both Cylon Daniel and Starbuck’s Dad, which would support the popular fan theory that Cylon Daniel was Starbuck’s dad. (The writers of BSG didn’t support the theory, but the writers of Caprica might have.) That would make Zoe and Starbuck sisters, kinda. Also, Caprica’s showrunner Kevin Murphy wanted Zoe to become the “template” for Cylon Number 6. That would mean Starbuck and Number 6 were sisters, kinda. He also wanted Bill Adama’s sister to be the template for Number 8. Fun.

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Caprica FAQ

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