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Religion. Robots. Immigration. Race.

The first episode of Caprica, the new Battlestar Gallactica (BSG) spinoff series, takes science and religion, layers on family drama in full Greek-tragic mode, and throws in a dose of dystopic anthropology. And where better to engage all of these themes than in televised science fiction? Margaret Atwood once wrote that “within the frequently messy sandbox of sci-fi fantasy, some of the most accomplished and suggestive intellectual play of the last century has taken place.” In that spirit, we've convened a club of media and religion experts (Diane Winston, Henry Jenkins, Salman Hameed, and Anthea Butler) to take the pulse of the show every week, and to share their readings with us. 

So Say We All.

[Warning: Spoilers, spoilers, and more spoilers, follow. If you haven’t yet, you can watch the full-length first episode here.]

See here for the full list of discussions so far, or sign up here for the RSS feed.

Diane Winston ___________________________

Comrades, Capricsters, Y’all (or simply Anthea, Henry and Salman):

If there had just been the BSG miniseries – Dayeinu

If there had been the miniseries and four seasons of BSG – Dayeinu

If there had been the miniseries, the four seasons, and the Caprica pilot – Dayeinu

But The Caprican? At the very moment when journalists wonder what and if they have a future, Ron Moore reveals we have a very deep past (Did you catch the New York Times’ bungling of the timeline?) Since none of you, as I do, teach journalism, this may seem incidental—but it goes to the heart of what made BSG a knockout series and may do the same for Caprica: the shows’ embedded humanism.

Whereas most TV dramas are good guys versus bad guys, BSG and Caprica probe the passions that enliven us. The pull of temptation, the cost of obsession, the slog to redemption (yes, yes, and yes) and then the biggest question of all: Do you need to be a carbon-based life form to own and feel these? Teetering between “must-see TV” and bloated soap opera, BSG worked because the melodrama was grounded in the quotidian: model ships, dog tags, and toothbrushes. Now with all the imaginable artifacts that could draw us into Caprica’s odd collision of machines, mobsters, and monotheists, a newspaper—with ball scores, stock prices, and local weather makes it all so mundane, masking (as our own newspapers tend to do) the real stakes behind the stories.

So, besides reading The Caprican, here’s what I look forward to as the season unfolds:

The pull of temptation: How far will Daniel Graystone go to see his daughter again? Watching Eric Stolz is so enjoyable that I almost missed his small steps into monomania. But when he sanctioned a mob hit to obtain the technology that could restore Zoe to the “real” world, the truth of his fall was undeniable. What’s Graystone’s real temptation? It’s too early to tell whether it’s scientific hubris, parental love, or the intrinsic entitlement of a super-rich genius. But the impact of Graystone’s fall on his wife, daughter, and society is the stuff of myth.

The cost of obsession: Ben Starks’ obsession with the one true God caused the death of hundreds. If Clarice Willow’s veiled glances reflect the same commitment we can expect lots of righteous appeals for a rectitudinous monotheism in place of a dithering polytheism. But at what cost? The slinky headmistress is less concerned with the morality of Ben’s suicide bombing than the timing. I’d vote for less talk and more action on this score. I’m all for the enactment of religious extremism, but the debating seems heavy-handed.

The slog to redemption: Hello Joseph Adams. Esai Morales’ portrayal of a man torn between doing right and doing well is a lot closer to where most of us live than Eric Stolz’s law-unto-himself role. Adams feels stolid, close to the ground yet caught between Tauron tradition and Caprican possibility. Disgusted by Graystone’s bid to cheat death, he reaffirms his commitment to his son. Where will that lead? On BSG, Adama spoke of his father’s law practice with respect and reverence. That’s not what Adams was about this week.

We loved BSG because in the post-9/11 moment, it captured our consternation and confusion. Why do they hate us? Can we justify torture? What makes us human? When can we stop fighting? Moreover, it lodged these questions in the space between human passion and species survival, mediating the religious quest for meaning with the political will to win.

Caprica, going back to how this came to be, meets us in the present. This is what we face, too: religious extremism, economic inequality, anti-immigrant fervor, a military increasingly dependent upon drones, the lure of the virtual worlds, and the comfort of slick surfaces. Like BSG, Caprica asks, “What makes us human?” But this time, the answers seem a lot closer to home.

-DW 1/24/10

Henry Jenkins ___________________________

The opening sequences of Caprica already pose some interesting questions from my point of view. What constitutes temptation and transgression on Caprica? The virtual world is depicted as a kind of carnival space where one is permitted to act out upon one’s inner fantasies and desires, to experiment with identities, to test social boundaries and personal limits, because what goes on there isn’t “real.” Throughout the episode, the space is shown to be one where violence and sexuality are explored in all of their dimensions—including, say, fantasies of human sacrifice which are not that common in virtual worlds on this planet, but reflect the particular ways that Caprica’s religious conflicts have deformed the imagination of their children.

The scene where Zoe is caught tapping into the virtual world hidden away in a bathroom clearly connect this space with masturbation: it is obscene, off-scene, hidden from view, a source of shame, even though it is also something most teens do at one time or another. We get hints that teens have constructed this space for themselves, exploiting technologies that adults have created for their own pornographic entertainment, and thus, it acts as an odd mirror of the adult world as it is imagined by the teens; at once, what they anticipate adults desire and fantasize about and what adults prohibit and sanction against. This association of the carnival world with adolescence hints at this as a kind of rite of passage—a time betwixt and between childhood and full adult responsibilities. Much like game worlds, it occurs within a space where actions have been stripped of real-world consequences, though from the first, we discover that Zoe has discovered ways to make what happens in this space count: she’s turned to it as a space of religious conversion and political activism.

Tags: artificial intelligence, battlestar galactica, caprica, creation, frankenstein, robots, science and religion, science fiction, sin, technology, television

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