Welcome to Caprica

Vancouver is about to get even more Battlestar Galactica, with word that the spinoff series Caprica has been green-lit by Sci-Fi Channel and pre-production will begin shortly in our city.

I’m thrilled for our film community to see more work coming in following the recent cancellation or uncertain futures of so many locally-shot series, including The 4400, Bionic Woman and Flash Gordon.

BUT, in anyone else’s hands, a show dubbed “Dallas, in space” would have me running for the hills. That’s the worst description since Firefly got saddled with “A western, in space” and as a result, turned people off in droves. Hollywood’s need to sum-up any creative material into witty catch phrases of one or two sentences does a disservice to the intelligent viewer, but that is a topic for another time.

Producers Ron D Moore and David Eick are behind this new Battlestar Galactica spinoff, so I have high hopes.

The most complete description I’ve read of the new series so far is here at Hollywood North Report:

‘Caprica’ is a fictional planet set 70 years before the new Battlestar Galactica TV series, focusing on the peaceful ‘Twelve Colonies’, living in a modern society. But high tech combined with a breakthrough in robotics brings to life the dream of marrying artificial intelligence with mechanical bodies to create living robots, the ‘Cylons’, leading to the ‘First Cylon War’.

The series will revolve around the ‘Adama’ and ‘Graystone’ families. ‘Joseph Adama’, father of future Battlestar commander ‘William Adama’, is a renowned civil liberties lawyer who becomes an opponent of the artificial intelligence/Cylon experiments devised by the Graystones, owners of a large computer corporation that builds the first Cylons, aka ‘Cybernetic Life-Form Nodes’.

Exploring the ethical issues behind the development of intelligent machines ought to be fascinating and like BSG, could be very topical. But if Joseph Adama even remotely resembles J R Ewing, yikes!