It took me a couple of episodes to really get excited about Battlestar Galactica. When I finished watching all I could find, including webisodes and extended episodes, I was hooked and wanted more. Enter Caprica. A show which was going to show me the birth of Cylons. Just my thing. I watched the pilot and it was eight kinds of not awesome. I found myself having to sit through grueling childhood trauma stories of William Adama and the story about an angry teenager, whose virtual representation is inserted into the Cylon prototype. Which essentially gives us a robot with issues. The premise of BSG has always been that the Cylons were sentient and were thus able to rebel. I had never imagined that their starting point (this time around) was going to be teen angst.
Caprica sports a fine cast, who deliver good acting performances. It is just a major fault of the show that the writing of the characters is boring. The sense of urgency in which the characters of BSG developed and evolved is gone. The only sense of urgency in Caprica is that there is a deadline for a delivery of robots. True, it is a family drama which should depict the birth of the modern Cylons but as far as family dramas go, it is not all that interesting. It hooks itself to the trend of throwing little pieces of the original in, to give it a connection both with the re-imagined series and the original one, such as "by your command" and "so say we all" but the way it is done, makes it seem to grasp at connectivity instead of focusing on developing a story which is interesting to follow.
Nine episodes in, I can only hope that the show will take a turn for the better and start giving us some story lines which will once again enthrall and captivate the audience. If it succeeds in doing so, it will still suffer from the curse of having a 9 episode long introduction to interesting events, which frankly isn't good enough.
Caprica sports a fine cast, who deliver good acting performances. It is just a major fault of the show that the writing of the characters is boring. The sense of urgency in which the characters of BSG developed and evolved is gone. The only sense of urgency in Caprica is that there is a deadline for a delivery of robots. True, it is a family drama which should depict the birth of the modern Cylons but as far as family dramas go, it is not all that interesting. It hooks itself to the trend of throwing little pieces of the original in, to give it a connection both with the re-imagined series and the original one, such as "by your command" and "so say we all" but the way it is done, makes it seem to grasp at connectivity instead of focusing on developing a story which is interesting to follow.
Nine episodes in, I can only hope that the show will take a turn for the better and start giving us some story lines which will once again enthrall and captivate the audience. If it succeeds in doing so, it will still suffer from the curse of having a 9 episode long introduction to interesting events, which frankly isn't good enough.