Caprica in a boring font. Then '58 years before the Fall' - well that'll help put it in context for people who have never seen BSG. Caprica begins in a fun nightclub with naked girls with tits and everything! Things degenerate rapidly with beating the shit out of each other and killing other patrons also on the menu - somewhat like a Glaswegian Friday night. A trio of whiny teenagers complain about how decadent and perverted everyone is. These people worship the One True God and behave in generic religious fanatic way. One of them is watching a copy of herself. The copy is standing right at the stage as some Cirque du Soleil rejects come and dance a bit. A particularly enthusiastic dancer looks normal enough in the light but is rather trollish in the dark (which is rather the opposite problem one might expect of a crazy from a nightclub). A poor screaming hapless is brought forward and stabbed a bit. At this our fundie chick's double disappears all computerishly. Fundie chick and fundie boyfriend have a kiss while awkward friend watches on. All of a sudden fundie chick is pulled out of this virtual nightclub (v-club is what all the hip young people call 'em apparently) by a girl walking in on her in the toilet. She's in a cubicle so either she doesn't believe in locking or toilet door locks are yet to be invented - possibly introduced by yet to be invented AI. Her 'holoband' which is what lets her enter virtual realities is like a little mini-VISOR with lots of blinking LEDs to show it's high-tech. As people move in virtual reality by thinking about moving but don't in the real world there must be some kind of neural interface skulduggery going on which renders the green LEDs beamed at shut eyes pretty decorative and begs the question why this is a called a holoband when it doesn't use holography? There are many far worse misuses of technology. The girl Zoe Gladstone studies at Athena Academy which looks nothing like the glitzy modern architecture that the rest of Caprica seems to use and looks just like an oldish north-American high school.
Remember Balthar's swank Caprican house? Well we are introduced due to its vastly superior cousin. It's far more futuristic with its use of glass. A rich couple are paying some kind of Caprican hyper-tennis (it's very futuristic cause someone's laid down extra lines with duct tape to mark off the court into triangles), they get into a disagreement about whether a shot was out. They resolve this by telling Sergei, which seems to be their robotic butler, to activate the line sensors and the auto-umpire. Some of the court lines flash red at this. Sergei, who is like a large futuristic vibrator and though seemingly propelling itself by some kind of ball has no problems with stairs, tells them that there's a call coming through from the school. The wife bitches and moans while the father says they are prejudging what the calls about. It then cuts to a scene that could be cut from any contemporary drama where the family have an argument, daughter makes a snide comment about "marrying into money" and the mother gives her a slap. Zoe is a little spoiled bitch, you have to agree with her mother on that. The dad sort of pussies out during the whole scene and offers meaningless reassurance after the argument. We don't have to worry about Zoe being an emo bitch for longer though. Zoe logs back into the v-club for yet more T&A and goes up to see her copy inside her secret room. They talk about how the AI doesn't like looking at the violence as she finds it upsetting and original Zoe promises her that she won't have to.
The next day after being dropped off at school Zoe and her fundie friends don't go to school and enact their plan to move to Gemenon. They go down a perfectly normal modern escalator and wait at a perfectly normal modern subway station and get into the magic ugly looking future train. Some woman and her daughter have also got onto the train after phoning some bozo in a suit called Joseph. Zoe and boyfriend get on the train but their friend evidently sick of the idea of spending the rest of her life watching these two get off with each other decides against getting on. This proves a good idea as it turns out 'move to Gemenon' is fundie code for blow up train and fundie boyfriend kills himself with a suicide bomb belt to Zoe's suprise.
A week later and everybody is sad. There's a press conference where Caprica's Prime Minister talks about the bombing and how it was bad and introduces us to incompetent anti-terrorism man. This guy gives us exposition about how the fundie terrorists are bad. He sucks at his job so badly. He has two further appearances. Once asking Zoe's mum if he knew she was a dirty monotheist terrorist scum bag and then asking the friend of the person they know to be the bomber whether she knew he was evil. At no point does he consider seizing any kind of computers Zoe might have had - not like anyone's ever used computers to plan terrorism or leave trails of contacts of other fundie mentalists right? The school principal/nun (she's referred to as Sister) is a creepy English-accented woman who it later transpires is in fact an evil crazy fundie. This is in no way obvious when she consoles Lynsey, the surviving fundie teenager, in perhaps the worst way imaginable. Incompetent anti-terrorist man didn't do his homework before coming to see her but perhaps the rest of his organisation is as crap at its job as he is at his and so she's on no kind of watch list.
After the press conference Joseph (Adama!) and Gladstone bump into each other after sharing a lighter (blatant future significant moment in the series must be the infamous lighter from nBSG being acquired. It could have a whole episode to itself and be less unworthy of it than some other shit this series could come out with). Gladstone proudly declares he lost his daughter but Joseph one-ups him and says he lost his daughter and his wife. They go an awkward man-date for coffee. Adama gets creeped out by Gladstone and tries to leave but Gladstone says he can get Adama and his son front-row tickets at a pyramid game.
Amanda Graystone is looking at her daughter's stuff distraught when Sergei says there's someone at the door. It's surviving fundie Lynsey who asks if she can go and look at Zoe's stuff. Amanda gives Sergei security clearance to come in, thank the gods she did or Sergei the robo-dildo could have given her a good seeing-to, and Amanda goes and finds the magic paper. The magic paper is the only cool piece of tech in this whole series, I guess it's some kind of foldable screen with touch sensitivity but with a delicious paper like appearance. She enters a four character symbolic password (symbols of the Colonies I think) which I guess is the Caprican equivalent of a PIN and goes to the v-club to see the Zoe AI. I don't know why she needs Zoe's magic paper since she's remotely accessed the AI's magic room already but I guess it gives her a reason to get discovered doing so later. Zoe AI is all bloody and gross - and knows something bad happened to Zoe. Apparently as well as inventing a way to encode a human personality, emulate that as an AI Zoe, our 16-year old ubergenius was also working on a 'biofeedback protocol' so the AI could feel what she felt. Lynsey shouts at the AI saying its a thing but then changes her mind and hugs it, this makes all the bloody and icky bits go away. Gladstone walks in on Lynsey talking to Zoe and asks what the hell's going on, Lynsey runs away leaving the magic paper with the computer genius science guy.
Joseph Adama's in court defending a tatooed man. The prosecution says the guy's has unspeakable made up word connections and is likely to flee to Tauron. The judge doesn't give a fuck and grants bail anyway. Outside court Joseph meets another tatooed man, it turns out that the unspeakable word is a mafia organisation. Adama and his mafia friends all dress like it's the 1950s but everyone else dresses normally.
At the horrible CGI Graystone company (Cyrus) HQ the two of them watch a well-done CGI skeletal proto-Cylon attempt to shoot one of Sergei's robo-dildo cousins with a paintball gun. It fails epically. Even shooting the glass where Graystone and his sole colleague watch the test of the robot they need to win them a big fat defence contract. They discuss how a rival company is meeting the minister of defence and how they have allegedly produced a magic processor which would actually be able to shoot a moving target. You see while they have processors that can do reality-a-like VR and do AI they can't work out how to get a robot to lead a target or indeed aim anywhere near it.
Adama Senior meets William at school and they get ice-cream on the way home. He tells William how they are invited to the Pyramid game, William doesn't care about it that much. They Talk About Things. The kid isn't obnoxious this is good.
Graystone logs into the v-club after hacking the magic paper. He is shocked and aghast at the nonsense going on (he's apparently the inventor of this technology and remarks how he knew the first people to buy it were in the porn industry so his aghastness is surprising). He catches a glimpse of the Zoe AI who's obviously decided that she does in fact like watching what's going on here. He chases her to the magic secret room but the magic door kicks him out of the virtual reality. Later Lynsey turns up and asks Sergei if she can come in, wheic it says she can since she still has valid security clearance - whose idea was it to set up the house security so you can invite anyone into your house and they can turn up whenever they want afterwards until you kick them out. Graystone finds her and forces her to use the VR and let him into the magic mystery room. She explains to him what all this v-club nonsense is about turns out all the young kids use them, they did at first for the 'group sex rooms', Graystone remains aghast that people would use a perfect virtual reality to try out sex and violence especially kids! Who'd have thunk it? Graystone meets the Zoe AI and takes sometime before accepting her as an actually intelligent real copy. Zoe AI explains how she was created. It turns out an entire human personality can be represented in only 300MB. Less than a CD. Given the human brain has over a 100 trillion neural connections this is some serious compression going on. Furthermore while synaptic scans are part of how one digitises a human personality it also turns out that it's important to build the person's DNA, emails, school records, parking tickets and any other utterly irrelevant shit you can think off that might held digitally. She doesn't explain how one goes about actually emulating a person using this information, that's obviously not at all difficult to do obviously. Graystone grabs the AI and in the real world plugs in a USB pen into the magic paper, this downloads the AI. He then tells Lynsey to get the fuck out and even remembers to tell Sergei that she can no longer wander in whenever the hell she wants.
Meanwhile Joseph Adama is meeting with the unspeakable mafia Don (which is also an unspeakable made up word). These people have their own magic made up language. The Don asks Adama if he can go and deliver a message to the Defence Minister. Adama says he'll think about it. Not sure why a random lawyer gets to meet with the defence minister when he wants but hey why not. Other mafia guy in a separate scene then tells him its a silly thing to piss of the Don by saying maybe.
It's time for Pyramid? Been looking forward to seeing a game of Pyramid? Tough shit, the game's ended as the scene begins and the team sucked balls so get stuff thrown at them as they walk off. The budget was blown on the extras for the v-club scene so we get ten or so angry fans throwing shit. Graystone encourages William to tell the team exactly how much they sucked while he talks to Joseph about whether he would bring back his daughter and wife if he could. They go back to Graystone's hip place where Joseph lets William go off and play with Sergei, the robo-dildo, while they go down to Graystone's workshop. Graystone's workshop has one wall as a library of books and at a couple of points the camera's depth of field lets you read one of their titles, LINUX. Interesting parallel development there
. Adama is given the explanation of how super genius Zoe managed to use a search engine and turn its data into a personality - this seems to suggest that if you Google yourself and follow enough links you will sum up your entire personality - personally I'd think the synaptic scans might be the more important element. Adama's never used VR so needs to get an avatar scanned, as the inventor of this tech Graystone has a scanner in his workshop but warns it might feel slightly tingling,presuming it's something like a 3D camera I'm not sure why that would be but maybe it's X-Raying him in case some kid wants to stab him in a v-club. He then takes Adama into a boring VR room and explains it's boring though he has to teach Adama how to walk. They walk into a dark empty space where Zoe waits. Adama and Graystone then have a disagreement over whether its moral to do this. Adama says its no real life being virtual but Graystone thinks he has the perfect 7 ft tall hulking robot body for his 16 year old daughter to live in. If only he had the magic processor! However he somehow knows Adama has unspeakable name mafia links and asks him to use them to get hold of the magic processor. Adama agrees to do so in the hope that he too can love his daughter and wife as 7 ft tall robots.
Graystone cheers up his wife with breakfast in bed. They have poor communication and she doesn't bring up the fact that their dead daughter was suspected of helping the terrorists while he doesn't mention the fact that their dead daughter has a living virtual copy. Maybe he was saving the surprise for when he introduces Amanda to the new improved 7 ft robot Zoe? Adama meets with the mafia guy and says he'll talk to the defence minister if they steal the magic processor. The meeting with the defence minister seems to be a veiled threat of violence which the minister dismisses. Graystone and Amanda have sex as Adama looks remorsefully at pictures of his wife and daughter. Also minister guy gets visited by mafia guy, mafia guy has decided to do this hit professionally and wanders through the minister's house with no top on before killing him with two daggers. He takes his time, blood goes all over the minister's shit, though not his attacker.
Adama brings the magic processor to Graystone who gets all excited just by looking at it, he can tell it's an elegant design. Even the processor is octagonal by the way, at least its housing is. Graystone shows Adama the copy of Adama's daughter he's made by Googling her enough. The copy is confused at WTF is going on. Graystone doesn't seem to have explained anything to her and has left in her in the same empty black void that his daughter is in. Adama gets upset at how his daughter's copy is freaking out, exits the virtual reality and says its an abomination. He walks off disgusted with the whole thing. Graystone doesn't really give a damn, he's got the magic processor!
Gladstone talks with Zoe-A about his plan to download her to the new magic processor. I'm still not sure why the new magic processor is necessary, their current processors seem quite able to run her, she questions whether its a good idea and they have another emo argument. He quits the virtual reality uploads her into the proto-Cylon which starts moving, takes a few steps towards him then falls over, all sorts of error messages appear on his screen that the data-stream has been corrupted, he jacks into VR and shouts for Zoe in the blackness of the I can't be bothered making an environment for my zombie AI daughter to live in world. She's gone. This makes him sad as apparently despite being a computer genius he's never learned to do backups.
Adama Senior and our future Admiral have a heart-to-heart discussion where Adama Senior after feeling guilty at helping the unpronounceable mafia decides the best thing to do is give in to his mother in law and tell his son about how they are Tauron a proud people. There's some crap about William being named after Senior's grandfather who was killed in an uprising and then he reveals that the family's original name isn't Adams but Adama! Up until this point I thought he was just muttering his own name.
We then cut to the Cylon testing chamber. Inexplicably the proto-Cylon, is now working perfectly and shoots the fuck out of a whole bunch of armed robo-dildos, this impresses new government lady (who I'm sure played one of the Quorum in nBSG) who mentions the rumours that they outright stole stuff from that other company. Gladstone's sidekick/business partner rubbishes this which prompts government lady to make outright racist remarks about how you can't trust Taurons because of their lying deceitful nature and asks what the machine is called. Cylon - CYbernetic LifefOrm Node (?) which she remarks is interesting. Not sure why the hell it's interesting. We then cut to a scary locked door within which the Cylon lies, it gets up by itself and goes to the computer on the wall, chicken-shit fundie Lynsey gets a call from a raspy sounding Zoe (who always had a gruff raspy voice for a 16 year old girl to begin with) saying that she'll need her help. Being a ~7ft tall machine now that's probably an understatement. So there you have it folks - the Cylons begin as a fundie emo 16 year old girl. Given this beginning it's no longer confusing why they end up being so fucking whiny and pathetic when they become skinjobs. Does make John's hatred of being biological even weirder since that's what they started off as.
I'm not sure what interesting stories the series can actually tell. Joseph Adama and the unspeakable mafia: we know he ends up being a respected civil liberties lawyer so he's obviously going to cut the mafia ties at some point and I don't see why I'd want to watch a show with a mob thread set in a sci-fi setting which in no way impacts on that mafia plotline. There's still a disconnect between him deciding he doesn't want to work for the mafia, to helping them in exchange for the magic processor and then feeling bad when the minster guy gets murdered, then ending on deciding it's important to teach his son his proud cultural heritage. Fundie chick and sinister English fundie school lady are obviously going to do mischief in the Soldiers of the One and will likely be countered by incompetent anti-terrorism guy - but there's also lots of TV with evil terrorists plotting evil against good people being stopped by good government agents.
The only interesting story this series might have had to tell - how Cylons come about has pretty much been done in the pilot- a 16 year old girl developed AI in her spare time outside of school and she was put into a magical plot device processor and plugged into a robot. Ta-dah! The original Zoe AI seems to have magically reappeared at the end of the show so I don't know if Gladstone's going to be using copies of it to power all the Cylons (again how is it copyable given it was previously uncopyable and he lost the only copy of the Zoe AI?) or whatever magic program it was he slapped together on this foreign novel processor that actually did all the shooting of the dildos. How they plan to duplicate the magic processor is also unexplained but at least it's plausible that a tech company can reverse engineer something like that as opposed to a 16-year old girl inventing not only a way to construct a human personality from random information from the internet but also the software to emulate that personality perfectly using nothing but existing hardware (because again they were running the AI in a normal simulation not on any special hardware before the magic processor was needed to make Adama involve himself with the bad mafia men). I suppose if they'd had an actual progression towards developing true AI then it might well have looked too much like the Sarah Connor Chronicles but given both settings feature the significant plot of man builds AI which goes bad and then nukes man to fuck there would always be comparisons.
They've really tried to make this less sci-fi, remember how Caprica City's skies were filled with spaceships in the BSG miniseries? Nothing in the skies in this time. They still have interplanetary commerce but I guess people will get confused if you have spaceships in a show that isn't about spaceships or some bullshit TV executive reasoning. Most of the acting's pretty decent and none of the characters annoyed me when they weren't supposed to be annoying. However there's so much utter stupidity in the concept, technology and plot that unless the actual series gets absolutely rave reviews then I won't be watching it.
