Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Caprica—Who
Gives a Frak?
(Caprica, 5/11/09)
By Nicholas Nicastro
According
to the Dictionary of Philosophy, the genetic fallacy is "the
misapplication of the genetic method resulting in the depreciatory appraisal
of the product of an historical or evolutionary process because of its
lowly origin." In other words, it is the mistake of judging something
from the circumstances of its beginning, not from its state or meaning
at the moment. With the monstrous success of—among others—the
Batman Begins origin story, the advent of a new Star Trek
origin story, the onslaught of X-Men origin stories (X-Men Origins:
Wolverine now, X-Men Origins: Magneto in 2011), the genetic
fallacy is more epidemic in Hollywood than the swine flu. We'll leave
it to philosophers to ponder why. For now, mere critics will suffice
to decide if any of these are any good.
The end of Ronald D. Moore and David
Eick's revamped Battlestar Galactica series this year was the
occasion of much sadness in the fandom. Folks debated the choice of
having the old battlestar and its ragtag fleet land on Earth 150,000
years ago, and aptness (or lameness thereof) of attributing some of
the series' unresolved mysteries to the hand of God. What we didn't
hear much, though, was the question "Gee, I wonder what happened
in the BSG universe 58 years before the series?"
Yet this is exactly the project
Moore and Co. set for themselves—to present how humanity began
down the dangerous path of creating their cybernetic nemeses, the Cylons,
and the roots of the war that would almost destroy both races. Why?
Perhaps because it's interesting, but the more cynical motivation is
the more likely: BSG, though intense and harrowing and terrific,
never found a wide audience because it was—to put it bluntly—a
downer. Chicks just never warmed up to it. But a sci-fi- inflected origin
story, set among the beautiful, decadent citizens of Caprica, the humans'
prelapsarian homeworld? Now there's the ticket.
Or so somebody thought. Now that
the two-hour pilot is out on DVD, there's reason to wonder whether Caprica
will just end up swapping one limited viewership for another. Not that
the show is bad, actually. It's the story of two families—the
Graystones, led by the rich, complacent uber-entrepreneur (Eric Stoltz)
destined to invent the Cylons, and the Adamas, whose shady-lawyer patriarch
(Esai Morales) has lost his family in a train bombing (he's also the
father of William, the boy who'll grow up one day to be Edward James
Olmos). Though it gets off to a slow start, the tale of two mismatched
fathers mourning their daughters, and their unlikely plot to bring them
back from the dead, has both power and nuance. The combination of well-wrought
drama and underplayed sci-fi feels like something we haven't seen before.
Problem is, set against the monumentally
high stakes of BSG, the domestic goings-on in Caprica
seem like small beer. Insofar as we already know where all of it is
going to end, they're academic too. Sure, we hope that Eric Stoltz irons
out his relationship with spunky, teenaged Zoe, and that Esai Morales
doesn't get in too deep with the Caprican version of the Mafia. But
let's get real—when the end of days is nigh, Mommy and Daddy should
really get busy digging that fallout shelter.
As Rick said in Casablanca,
the problems of two people (or two families) don't amount to a hill
of beans when the world's about to go crazy. When Caprica begins
as a regular series next year, its low-key virtues won't be enough.
We're going to need a better reason to watch it than filling in the
backstory of another, better show.
©2009 Nicholas Nicastro
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