Before and After: Caprica & Battlestar Galactica

The Sci-fi Channel (excuse me, Syfy) has decided to tease us by releasing the feature length pilot of their Battlestar Galactica spin-off, Caprica, on DVD fully half a year before the series airs on TV. Caprica is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, set in the halcyon days when things only occasionally blew up and the human race had not been whittled down to 40,000 desperate spaceship-bound refugees. The deeper difference, though, is in the aspect of human psychic life it takes as its subject. Battlestar Galactica is all about the death drive: are we, as individuals and as societies, destined to destroy ourselves and each other? Caprica, instead, focuses largely on the theme of mourning, both public and private. It parallels two fathers, each of whom loses a daughter in a terrorist attack on the public transportation system of a major city. One father embraces the possibility of a cybernetic recreation of his lost daughter; the other rejects this possibility in the attempt to move on with what remains of his family. One gets grief right; the other represents grieving gone awry. Battlestar Galactica is Civilization and its Discontents as space opera; Caprica is a sci-fi version of Mourning and Melancholia.

Of course, as the pilot hints, the series will be much more than this. The pilot touches on some themes that are important to Battlestar Galactica: terrorism, extremism, and technological overreach; along with themes that are less central to the original series: immigration, organized crime, and the conflict of different customs in a melting pot society. Caprica is us, although its various groups and individuals resist easy equation: the main minority group in the pilot, the Taurons (one of the fathers is a Tauron immigrant to Caprica who has become a fairly prominent lawyer) look Hispanic, speak Greek, and have Italian Godfather-style organized crime. In the end, though, it is the theme of grieving that it is at the core of the Caprica pilot, and it handles this much more subtle topic with surprising depth. In this sense, although it is a prequel to Battlestar Galactica, Caprica is really its psychic sequel—it asks how we deal with our personal and public loss once the tide of destruction has ebbed? Battlestar Galactica was the perfect Bush administration series, focused relentlessly, as it was, on human self-destructivity, war, terrorism, and abuse of power. Although many of its characters died, there was very little time for grief—just some scenes of the surviving loved ones smashing things in their anger and their helplessness. Caprica is a decidedly post-Bush phenomenon—it asks the question, how do we pick up the pieces and move on?