Confession time. I’ve never seen Breaking Bad. I know I need to. I have heard, repeatedly, about how great it is, and I know Bryan Cranston won Emmies, and apparently it’s just stellar. I am planning on catching up, hopefully by the end of this new season, but at the moment, the List of Giant Things is really holding me back. So, some day.

In the mean time – a note about Friday’s episode of Caprica, and the bildungsroman:

As a part of the List of Giant Things, I’ve been thinking a bit about the underlying construction of big, serious television shows, and wondering why there have been so few television shows that follow one of the most basic, reliable plot constructs in literature – the coming-of-age story, or more precisely, the bildungsroman. There have been many shows aimed at younger audiences that center on young protagonists trying to grow up (The Wonder Years, My So-Called Life, Boy Meets World, most Disney shows, etc.), but all the enormous, adult, highly-constructed (mostly) HBO shows of the past decade are about middle age. It’s not hard to imagine why, as there are endless reasons why a story about the growth of a young protagonist is troublesome from a production standpoint. Maybe most importantly, it’s nearly impossible to tell an extended, complicated story about growing up when you don’t know how long show is going to be on the air. You arrange it so that the story’s done in a season, and then you have nowhere else to go when your show’s a hit, or you cross your fingers and hope for five seasons to work with, and then your character never goes anywhere, because you got cancelled two seasons in. It works for a miniseries structure, but is nearly impossible in the American television production system.

Female robot bildungsroman, ultimately leading to the mass destruction of humanity: YES.

Caprica has the opportunity to tell a story like that, and – in a twist that makes it way, way more fascinating – to tell a growing up story that feels new and relevant to our current cultural moment. There have been a few novels that have dealt with robots who wake up, as I mentioned in a previous post on this show, but Caprica has that structure plus all these added bonuses. It’s a show with a young character who is trying to find her way in the world, but who just happens to be a digitally constructed personality trapped inside a hulking metal skeleton. The fact of her digital heritage is curious, and her war machine body is an obstacle, but Zoe Greystone as a character is more central to the story than Zoe Greystone as an avatar. And in this instance, I think the show’s relationship with Battlestar Galactica can be a huge boon rather than a frustrating burden. It doesn’t solve the problem, but it helps mitigate some of the difficulty in spacing and timing a growing up story: when you start with a formless, not necessarily compelling young character, it’s tough to keep an audience watching long enough for the character to develop. We may not know exactly what Zoe will become, which gives the show freedom to move that story in surprising ways, but we do know what will ultimately happen to the Cylons, which creates an inherent curiosity about her that her personality might not have earned quite yet.

Bereaved father runs around Frank Miller-esque virtual world ineptly searching for daughter-turned-Neo-from-The-Matrix: NO.

Which is why I am still deeply frustrated with Caprica. It could be so good, and yet it’s attached to two whole other plotlines that I do not care about at all. Tamara has the possibility to be a strong companion story to Zoe’s development, but as long as it’s just Joseph Adama doing a Michael-from-Lost impression around New Cap City (TAMARAAAA! TAMMMIIEEEE!!!), it really doesn’t move me. And maybe crazy-mom-sees-vision-of-dead-brother-and-hangs-out-with-polygamist-monotheistic-druggie will end up somewhere interesting, but right now, not so much.

Fears of cancellation continue to loom large over this series, so who knows if it’ll have a chance to address some of these weaknesses. I hope so, because there’s so much potential.

From a perspective of philosophical and thematic coherence, I think the most exciting thing Caprica can do is develop and explore an area that Battlestar Galactica frequently touched on but rarely dealt with fully – the collapsing divisions between humans and computers, and what that means for humanity. It shows up again and again in BSG, but is often stuck in the form of hilarious, sexed-up musings by Gaius Baltar or tortured reflections from Boomer/Athena/Number Eight. Caprica has the chance to tell that story from its beginning, and tease out all the painful and intricate links that exist between a dead human girl and her self-aware avatar.

It’s a storyline that feels fresh and relevant and rich, both infinitely far away from the technology we have now and easily within our imagination of what’s possible. I love computer-waking-up plots (my favorite of which has to be Heinlein’s The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, with its cheeky, practical joke-playing, world-dominating computer Mike), and the show has begun to do a decent job of exploring that area. The most compelling device Caprica has employed so far is the technique of visually substituting avatar-Zoe for her hulking robot monster body, and switching cannily between the two. It plays with and sidesteps the dreaded uncanny valley, and gives us some high emotional stakes, at least for this one poor stranded virtual human.

So far, Tauron identity seems to be mostly about violence, tattoos, and snazzy hats

The problem is that the face of a full on Ray Kurzweil revolution, the show’s other minor plotlines are hard to care about. Caprica has been pressing the Caprican/Tauron racial divides pretty heavily in the recent episodes, and it feels like a version 1.0 incarnation of a civil rights plot harnessed into the same show with its newer, more attractive version 2.0 upgrade. Ideally it would create parallels and allow something as well-established as civil rights to speak to the new virtual rights territory, but right now it’s just dull. In this sense, Caprica also suffers from knowledge about its fictional future. If you already know that sixty years from now, Cylons will be a giant frakkin’ big deal and different human races are merely obsolete identities, it’s difficult to appreciate the esoteric diet of Taurons as meaningful.

At the moment, Caprica has a lot of promise but isn’t yet firing on all cylinders. Or maybe I’m just afraid of commitment.

Proto Cylons on Caprica

As with most spinoffs, Caprica starts off burdened by its predecessor, and it’s difficult to separate the experience of this first episode from its resonances with what we already know about the Battlestar universe. Visual and verbal cues constantly recall the earlier show. The robots that guard buildings have scanning red eyes, characters swear by shouting “Gods!” and “frak,” and we even get a very young William Adama, tying us to the story’s known future. Also like Battlestar, Caprica instantly tackles contemporary problems, especially focusing on terrorism, religious extremism, and virtual worlds.

It’s a double-edged sword. Every adaptation must cope with its original, bringing something new without completely erasing whatever was attractive enough to warrant an adaptation in the first place. Sequels and prequels have it a little easier – they can assume the original’s thematic and atmospheric content without needing to tell the same story, which gives the writers room for more experimentation and development. Still, the pleasure and frustration of returning to a fiction that is both familiar and new is as problematic for Caprica as it is any adaptation.

Urban settings - Caprica City

Someone grunts “frak” under his breath and you thrill with recognition, but even the basic move from militaristic space ships to planet-based, urban settings changes the whole tone. I’m hoping this will shift a little as the series develops out of this first episode, but the fact that many of the main characters are teenagers is surprisingly disorienting. It’s also an essentially different type of story – where Battlestar started from a very science fiction, distant-future foundation and then become something much more recognizable, Caprica begins in a place very close to our reality. Virtual worlds and artificial intelligences are developing but nascent technologies. (Kids these days, they get into all sorts of crazy technology.) Religion and race are powerful political entities, but they get shushed out of polite conversation.

Baby William Adama - you've gotta wonder what will happen to make him look like Edward James Olmos

Part of what made Battlestar Galactica so remarkable is that it was an adaptation itself, and it was forced to take on the cornball, pulp science fiction of its original. Battlestar dealt with the silliness head on by reinterpreting the premise with deep seriousness and completely rethinking the show’s themes, storylines, and dramatic possibilities. I certainly want Caprica to succeed, but it has yet to fully articulate itself outside the shadow of its original, and its ratings indicate its appeal as a prequel isn’t an obvious sell. If it’s going to work, Caprica needs to have moments where the audience forgets it’s watching a prequel to Battlestar and accepts it as a show for its own sake. I really want this show to work, but so far all I see is the impending robot apocalypse. C’mon, Caprica. Make me forget.