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?

Star Trek & Optimism

Much has been made of the supposed renewed optimism of American culture embodied by J. J. Abram’s new Star Trek reboot. The movie represents, so the argument goes, our readiness to hope again for the future of mankind, after the darkness and pessimism of recent years. The 800-pound gorilla in the room is, of course, Battlestar Galactica, which for the past four years has treated TV viewers to an unrelentingly bleak picture of our potential future, one marked by war, genocide, terrorism, and the possible self-inflicted extinction of the human race—before, that is, the series dissolved in a shower of warm platitudes in its forgettable final season. The Star Trek franchise, on the other hand, has always maintained a vision of the future marked by relative peace and tolerance. Its mission was not the desperate struggle for survival of the last remnants of the human race, but the quest for knowledge and community with other societies among the stars. There is something, though, that bothers me about the enthusiasm with which the revived optimism of Star Trek is being greeted. It seems to me somehow false. Hope cannot be manufactured. It cannot be bought and sold. It has to be earned. Science fiction’s vision of the future has to fit its culture’s present conditions. Otherwise, its optimism is just denial.

The most remarkable thing about the new Star Trek is how much it is Spock’s movie. Spock is given a rich backstory, a moral dilemma, and even a future self who comes back in time to wreak havoc and then bring the young protagonists together. Kirk’s backstory is nothing more than a doodle. Rebellious kid who grows up without a father learns to love the service as much as the service learns to love him. Essentially it is Top Gun. Every Maverick, though, needs an Ice Man who flies straight and logical as his wingman. The trick Star Trek pulls is to make its Ice Man the more interesting of the two. Spock has more to struggle with than Kirk in the film, the destruction of his home planet, the genocide of his race, and the death of his mother, and he handles it with more grace. He is not a foil for Kirk’s daring and charisma. He is not a wet blanket of logic. He is a man who has learned to temper his emotions with reason. In this sense, he is more of a man than the petulant Kirk. And once the plot gets humming we are treated to a genuine shock. The traditional Kirk and Spock roles are upended. The power dynamic that always kept logic in thrall to passion is reversed. When the first captain of the Enterprise, Captain Pike, leaves the ship, it is Spock he puts in charge and Kirk he makes his first officer (that is until Spock rudely maroons Kirk on a planet of enormous ice beasts and even larger and more absurd ice dinosaurs).

What is striking, however, is how right it feels to have Spock in command, the reasonable one, the mature one, the adult. The film is at pains to point out that Spock, in fact, makes the wrong decision, while Kirk makes the right one. Still, it is hard to escape the impression that it is, in fact, Spock who belongs in the captain’s chair. He alone befits the dignity of the office. The movie does what it can to keep Spock at its center. The famous introductory voiceover, “These are the voyages…,” is read at the end of the movie by Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock. In the end, however, it has to be Kirk, the irrational hothead guided by instinct, who takes command of the Enterprise. It is the charismatic loose cannon and not the rational sophisticate who is chosen to lead. Here we go again.

Every generation gets the spaceship it deserves. Battlestar Galactica was the interstellar drama of the Bush administration. It had it all: war, torture, extremism, abuse of power. If the new series of Star Trek movies, which this film almost certainly kicks off, really aims to earn its optimism, its vision of a future characterized by progress and harmony, and its place as the vessel of the future, it needs a new captain.

A shot across the bow for TV

Two of the greatest novels of all time were originally serialized. A Tale of Two Cities appeared in All The Year Round in 31 weekly installments in 1859. Crime and Punishment ran in The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments in 1866. The serial structure of the stories gave the reader at the time a sense of suspense and kept them coming back. It gave them something to discuss in the parlor or the pub (there were no water coolers at the time). What would happen to Charles Darnay or Raskolnikov? Tune in next time.

When we look back on these serial novels we see them backwards. We see them as great works of literature that were divided into a series of installments. In fact, they were a series of installments which together formed a great work of literature. Only after achieving success as a serial were the installments published together in one volume.

Might one not make the same case for the better TV series of our time? The Wire, Mad Men, even Battlestar Galactica? They appear first as weekly episodes and only later are published in a more permanent form, as one DVD box-set per season. The numbers are comparable. The twelve installments of Crime and Punishment is considered more or less the golden mean for a season of pay cable shows like The Wire. Dickens’ 31 installments for A Tale of Two Cities is not that far off from the 22 or so episodes that has become the standard for a season on a network or basic cable channel such as Syfy, on which Battlestar Galactica originally appeared. Shows such as these maintain the serial pleasure of suspense—they string you along from one episode to the next—but as a season, they cohere into a single, larger story with broader implications than any of their individual episodes can hold. Just like the novels of Dickens and Dostoevsky, these series are more than the sum of their parts.

The TV series taken as a whole and the novel also share a similarity of scope and scale. They can include multiple well-developed and nuanced characters. They can tell stories that span all social milieus and strata. The Wire, for example, includes as two of its major characters a homeless drug addict and the mayor of Baltimore. They can transport us from one place—a planet called Caprica—to another—a planet called Earth (a little farther apart than London and Paris but equally foreign to one another). They can range over large periods of time without seeming choppy or schematic. They can, in other words, give complicated social and political phenomena their due. Dostoevsky has poverty and crime in his contemporary Russia, and Dickens has the French Revolution. The Wire shows us the dysfunction of civic institutions in the American city. Mad Men uses the ad agency as a lens to examine the culture of consumption that got humming in the ‘50s. Battlestar Galactica gives us a futuristic analogue of the political and military apparatuses of a democratic society at war with extremists.

The most successful adaptations of novels are usually mini-series, which turn them into something akin to a shortened TV season. Examples of this are the BBC’s I, Claudius, or Pride and Prejudice, which is still considered the definitive screen adaptation after numerous movie versions. The complaint that is usually launched against film adaptations of novels is that they cut out too much of the book and reduce its complexity. The exception to this rule are four-hour mega-films, like The Godfather, which strive to retain much, but not all of the original’s sub-plots and twists. Rarely does one hear that a movie is better than the novel, except in those cases where the novel is considered mostly chaff and the adaptation presents us with the wheat. The Godfather, in fact, might be an example of that, or American Psycho. What movies do significantly better is adaptation of novellas, like Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Of Mice and Men. Short stories have to be puffed up to become films. Novels have to be cut down. The novella, which tends to focus on one plot line and a very small number of characters, is just right for a movie.

Novellas are certainly worthwhile endeavors. The Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness, for example, both remain gripping, powerful, and poignant to this day. They make the reputations of their authors as much as any of their novels. If, however, we want our narrative media to do what novels do best, to explore social and political issues that demand more than a handful of characters and a couple of settings, we will have to do away with the silly assumption that underlies our cultural reception of the screen arts, that film is the high art and television the low.