Caprica: Unvanquished

It’s been a long, long time but Caprica is finally back for the second half of its first season. After only 8 episodes the show took a 5 month hiatus, surely that can’t be a good thing. Despite the fact that almost nothing happened in the first 7 episodes of the show, the eighth episode left us on a major cliffhanger and I couldn’t wait to see how it resolved.

The problem with Caprica, when compared to the massively successful Battlestar is that it’s not an action show, it’s a show about religion and about politics and unfortunately while that makes the show deep and interesting, it also makes it thinky and occasionally dull. This week’s episode was a little bit of everything. I enjoyed seeing the resolution to the explosive cliffhanger and yet I wasn’t blown away by it.

Initially we are led to believe that Daniel Graystone has lost everything, his company, his football team, his wife and as we later learn, the Cylon that contained his daughters consciousness. While that is an interesting plotline, it isn’t enough to sustain the show, we still need action in our sci-fi.

Meanwhile Clarice has returned to Geminon to meet with the Church elders. She returns to them proposing a new faith, one based on science rather than faith, one that can offer an afterlife for certain. She is talking about the software that Zoe created, about using it to create a virtual avatar of anyone who dies, so that they can be reborn in a virtual paradise. I never much cared for Clarice and her continual religious waffle is rather irritating, I was rather hoping she would be killed off in the midseason finale, but her death seems unlikely now.  

Back on Caprica Lacey has been fully integrated into the STO, working for Barnabas. I don’t know where that storyline is headed, but with James Marsters slated to have his own series very soon, I thinking we’ll know before the season is out.

In New Cap City, we finally discover what happened to Zoe after the car blew up at the end of the last episode, her robotic body may have been fried, but somehow she made the jump to the virtual world. Now she is on a mission to find Tamara. To what ends we don’t know.

In the closing moments of the episode we discover that Amanda Graystone is also alive and well, and for some reason, living with Clarice. This of course puts a whole new spin on Clarice’s afterliffe idea. It would seem that the Graystones and the STO may well be working together.

Overall I thought the episode was a bit of a mixed bag, I liked some of it, I didn’t like other bits. The CGI was all very nice, I loved the look and feel of Geminon, even if the action that took place there felt a bit stagey. I like the idea that the Cylons are now in full production, trained to be soldiers without a conscience, although the removal of Zoe brings up the question of how they achieve a higher level of conscience and evolve into the monotheistic Cylons we see in Battlestar. However, I’m glad that it’s back as I really want to see where it’s going to go, but I have my doubts about the possibility of a second season, especially after the bizarre way the schedule has been treated.