Is CAPRICA coming too soon?

My feelings have been all over the place regarding Ron Moore's reboot of the Battlestar Galactica series from the '70s. (I really wish he'd called it something else to distinguish it from the original show, so we weren't stuck with clumsy descriptions like "Ron Moore's reboot of the Battlestar Galactica series from the '70s.") I seem to be one of the few people on Earth who actually enjoys the original Galactica for what it was - fun '70s sci-fi cheese, with surprising ambition and a little more depth than you'd expect. (Seriously, if you thought some of the pseudo-Mormon mysticism of the Ron Moore series was weird, you should check out some of the stuff in the Glen Larson original.)

When Moore's BSG was announced I was all ready to hate it, but I ended up being a huge fan of the miniseries despite myself, and I thought the first few seasons were some of the best TV I'd ever seen. The series began to lose its way around the time Baltar ended up on the Cylon ship and the whole Lee/Starbuck thing got gooey, but then it rebounded towards the end and went out with a series finale that was as exciting, tragic and frustrating as the series had ever been. Weeks later, I'm still turning it over in my mind, trying to parse its meanings and imagining what happened to those characters after the closing credits rolled. (Does anybody else suspect Baltar lasted maybe three weeks on that farm with Six, before he took off one night to hook up with a dozen cave-ladies and get himself installed as the new, despotic ruler of some Stone Age empire?)

But now... Caprica. BSG is barely over, and suddenly we're back where it all began (or where it all re-began) with an earlier generation of Adamas and proto-Cylons. And I must admit that right now, I'm not really thrilled about another show set in the Galatica universe. It's simply too soon, it's like we've just finished dinner and now the waiter is trying to serve us breakfast.

It doesn't help that Moore and the show's other creators keep telling us that this is a very different show, something they've repeatedly compared to Dallas... Not so much a space opera as a soap opera in space. BSG came perilously close to soap at times, but never quite tripped over the line. The new show apparently starts over that line, and never looks back. I've never been one of those people who gives up on a show because it's gotten too dark. (What some fans call "depressing," I call drama.) But I felt like BSG got the balance of melodrama and action just about right, and I definitely didn't think it would be improved by getting rid of the space battles and giving us more angst and weepy love triangles.

It's funny that Caprica apparently involves characters who have died and been resurrected in proto-Cylon form, and the ambivalence that other characters feel about them... Because that's sort of how I feel about this show. Battlestar Galactica died a noble death, I made my peace with it and now it's gone... Only, it's not quite gone. It's back. Sort of. Maybe. But the reviews have been great, and I went into Moore's version of BSG not expecting much and he surprised me, so he'll probably surprise me again. All of this has happened before...

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Technocrati tags: [Caprica][Battlestar Galactica][SyFy]