Caprica review

My take after the first 9 episodes: simply put, Caprica sucks.

As a fan of Battlestar, I found Caprica to be huge disappointment from the pilot onward, certainly worse than BSG's final season. BSG, I thought, started great but took a turn for the worse in season 3 and got still worse in season 4. It went uber-dark, characters became increasingly dysfunctional, and the main plot never really came together. Caprica is a couple of notches below BSG Season 4 in every possible way.

Scientifically, the show demonstrates a shocking ignorance of all the science, technology and biology it is based on; any educated person should be offended. It starts with angry teenager Zoe Graystone creating a seemingly perfect replica of herself in cyberspace using little more than various computer records and videos of herself. The absurdity gets worse after Zoe dies, when her father Daniel finds out what Zoe had done and, in just a day or two, builds a completely convincing intelligent being (Tamara Adama) with an accurate and seemingly complete personality and memory, based on nothing more than whatever random database records he could find about this dead person. And that's just the beginning. The show just goes on and on and on with asinine "syfy" that is blissfully unaware of how face-palmingly stupid its technical aspects are.

So the human race developed hyper-intelligent AI using... nothing more than a couple days work from Daniel and a maybe a year of her dead terrorist daughter's free time? Really? That's their explanation for the origin of the Cylons? The same cylons that try to exterminate the human race for no clear reason? Surely backstories don't get dumber than this. This show craps on the memory of BSG, friends.

All the main characters are flawed, unethical to some degree, not all that likable, somewhat bland, and not well developed, so that none of them really stands out from the others. The few meaningful relationships between characters are dysfunctional to the point of being annoying, like Daniel Graystone's passing familiarity with his wife. The plot moves almost glacially slowly, as if they just can't think of anywhere to go with it.

On the plus side, the acting is good and there's enough drama to keep one from falling asleep. But I hate to see a great show like BSG leaving behind nothing but a turd like this.