The recently completed Battlestar Galactica was the story of the death and rebirth of humanity and its creations, a story of humans hunted by their creations to near-extinction — only to reconcile with their creations in order to start anew on a fresh, untamed planet, with their erstwhile enemies as allies.
One of the interesting things about that fresh start was that it was just that — a complete reboot of humanity, jettisoning any technology more advanced than agriculture. Of course, that was partially because BSG was set roughly 140,000 BP, and you can’t have us only inventing electronics in the 20th Century if we were using them 140 millennia ago.
Now, I never found the idea that humans might trade technology for a new start as ridiculous as some people — after all, if technology came a hair’s-breadth from destroying you, you may want to emulate the Amish as well. Especially if you could do it in Africa, with a pretty yellow sun overhead and plenty of food to eat that wasn’t derived from algae.
But there are other reasons that the survivors of the Fall of the Twelve Colonies might want to give up technology. After all, while the Colonies were portrayed as earthlike in their existence, they weren’t Earth. These were peoples with a different history than ours, who had seen technology literally rise up against them and destroy everything they held dear.
That history begins with Caprica.
The new prequel, set 58 years Before the Fall, is the story of two grieving fathers — Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adams — both of whom lost their daughters in a terrorist bombing of an elevated train. (Adams lost his wife as well.) Zoe Graystone was a brilliant, temperamental 16-year-old with a fervent, heretical belief in monotheism — and a boyfriend whose fervor led to the bombing. Tamara Adams and her mother, Shannon, are innocent bystanders.
Adams is a defense attorney from Tauron, a member of a persecuted minority. He’s Capricanized his name — he was born Yosef Adama, but such a name makes him seem more ethnic. He does business with the Tauron mafia, who like many minorities chose a life of crime over toiling as second-class citizens. He does so reluctantly — he has a conscience, and he doesn’t like the violence associated with the mob. But he works with them because they helped him go to college, because his brother is a part of them, and because honestly, it’s easier than the alternative.
Graystone, on the other hand, is a multibillionaire, the Caprican equivalent of Bill Gates, only he’s played by Eric Stoltz, so he’s both more attractive and creepier. He’s working on a defense project — a military robot, one that can be used for defense. It’s not going that well, though — a rival from Tauron has developed a new processor that could doom his project. But he’s not as concerned about that as he is about data left behind by his daughter, including a link to a virtual night club full of unspeakable virtual perversions — including bland ones like orgies and drugs, and more sadistic ones like torture, murder and human sacrifice — all set to bumping techno music. (This is not farfetched. As Graystone’s guide, Zoe’s friend Lacy, notes, the first use for the virtual imagers Graystone himself invented was pornographic — and porn was one of the first serious industries to tap the internet. All of this has happened before….)
But nothing in this virtual club is more odd than Zoe Graystone’s avatar.
That’s because Zoe’s avatar is not just an avatar. It’s Zoe, more or less — a copy made by Zoe before her death, one that includes her memories, her personality, her likes and dislikes, her faults and strengths. The copy is made from many sources, including her school records, medical records, television viewing habits — things that could be used to make a good simulacrum of any human.
And thanks to his daughter’s genius Daniel Graystone finds the chance to do the unthinkable — to raise his daughter from the grave.
Daniel finds an unlikely ally in Joseph, who he meets at an information session for family members of victims of the bombing. He uses Joseph’s connections to steal the Tauron technology that could make his daughter live in the real world — albeit in a body that is made of metal. And he promises Joseph the same — a resurrection of his daughter, and his wife.
Joseph ultimately balks when Daniel shows him the proto-avatar of his daughter — she’s afraid, confused, and certain that something is terribly wrong. Joseph agrees, believing that there’s something Frankensteinian in what Daniel is doing. And yet Daniel is trying to do what any heartbroken, desperate parent would do if they could do it without punishment — bring back his daughter. To let her live the life she was supposed to live, before it was senselessly snuffed out.
Is such a thing Right? I don’t know. I do know that I would rather rip my right arm off than even think about my daughter coming to harm. That I can’t bring myself to write the comparative sentence between myself and Adama or Graystone because the mere thought is too painful for me to bring into enough clarity to express it in English. Suffice to say that I would gleefully make a deal with Satan himself if it guaranteed my daughter’s safety through a long and happy life. Eternal damnation would be a small price to pay. Simply messing with the laws of the Gods and Nature? That’s kid stuff.
That doesn’t mean that there will be no price for violating those laws. Just that in that pit of grief and despair, I can imagine being able to justify almost anything, grasping at any straw, praying to any false idol.
This tension — between Upholding That Which is Right and Saving Those We Love — is the driving force behind Caprica. We know, of course, how it will end — with the nuclear bombardment of the Twelve Colonies, with the flight of Galactica and the fleet, with the eventual colonization of Earth (Mark Two). But how we get there — a path that, like BSG, is not straight or clear, not good or evil, but rather a road paved with good intentions — that appears to be a fascinating journey. And one that I’m looking forward to.
Love the premise.
Recall the premise for Planet of the Apes? A human population grieving over the loss of loved ones — in this case, a plague wiped out all dogs and cats — looked around for substitutes and struck upon the idea of raising apes in their households. Rollicking madcap mayhem ensues. Except for the rollicking part. And most of the madcap.
Is anyone else bothered by the “logic” that all of your various records would make up a simulated personality? I mean, yeah, my Netflix queue could tell a simalcrum that I like Buffy, but it won’t tell you WHY I like Buffy (or whatever). Ugh.
It was indeed a promising start. I think the principal will be more important later and I’m looking forward to that; the actress did a great job with the part, limited as it was in the pilot. I am wondering what happens to the virtual Tamara. Also, the scene with the cylon reaching out and saying daddy? So chilling and sad.
Question: Yosef’s son William – that’s the future Bill Adama, right? I wasn’t 100% clear on that but it fits the timeline: that would make him roughly 48 at the time of the fall. Tying him in to the creation of cylons is a fabulous geek out for fans, I think. Explains his hatred for lawyers, no?
I hope in this series they don’t have most of the main female characters raped like they did in BSG. That was pretty much my biggest fan complaint about the series. They managed to avoid it in the night club so I’m cautiously optimistic. But the way they threw around a teenager using birth control (to break her daddy’s heart!) and virgin sacrifice…makes me less optimistic re. their treatment of women.
Now I understand why I didn’t like Caprica. It’s Stephen King’s Pet Cemetery with technology.
Jennifer – a single item from your Netflix list couldn’t tell why you liked that item, but analysis of all the items you ever had rented and wanted to rent in the future, plus your ratings of the ones you had rented, plus the items you had queued at one time but eventually deleted (cross-listed with your Amazon and Hulu accounts to figure out which ones you deleted because you bought or watched them, versus which you probably deleted because you lost interest), could start to extrapolate a great deal about the “why” of your preferences.
Researchers at MIT found that they could accurately identify your sexual orientation just via your friends and fan pages on Facebook even if you didn’t have the information listed. Data mining gets more sophisticated by the day, and I think we’ll continue to be shocked to find out what can be understood and predicted about us from our documented behavior and choices.
In addition to data mining, one of the pieces of data is “synaptic records,” presumably a future-tech scan of the brain. That’s used to explain some of Avatar Zoe’s “memories” — that they came from the synaptic data from the original Zoe’s medical records. That would suggest that the Avatar Zoe’s personality is shaped significantly by the original’s brain architecture. But of course, that doesn’t mean the copy is perfect — one of the leaps that Daniel takes is to say that Avatar Zoe *is* Zoe — something not even Avatar Zoe argues.
As for women being “second-class,” as I’ve argued before, I think the BSG universe does a good job of presenting women as equals considering it’s created in our own, inequal world. Certainly, the smartest person on the show is Zoe in all her incarnations, and Amanda Graystone is presented as a successful surgeon. Indeed, one of the points made on the show is that teen girls are quite as willing and interested in going to use the group sex rooms in the virtual night club as teen boys. It’s not perfect — I would have like to see “debauchery” demonstrated by something other than the shorthand of “girls kissing” — but that’s because the writers are products of our own flawed society. On balance, I think they do a good job.
That said, I’m never opposed to depictions of rape simply for existing. I’m opposed to them being sensationalized or trivialized. Rape does happen in our society. Disappearing it from fiction is as grave a sin as overselling it. But it needs to be treated as the grave crime it is. Ultimately, I think BSG did that — including, I might add, the time when Helo was raped. The acts weren’t neutral, and they weren’t without fallout. They weren’t sensationalized. They were shown as part of the violence that was slowly infecting what was left of society. And in that context, I think they had to be portrayed — just that they had to be portrayed realistically.
Well, the virgin sacrifice had to be a female, didn’t it? Seemed unnecessary. True, at least they gave a nod that teenage girls *have* sexuality (progressive), but teenage girl sexuality was also used as a weapon and as a motive for murder/virtual sacrifice (regressive). That the writers come from our misogynistic culture isn’t an excuse. I can’t judge yet whether on balance they do a good job since there’s only been one episode. True, BSG seemed to be better than the majority of TV/movie shows, and Caprica may follow suit, but there’s always room for improvement and always room to point out what can be improved.
As far as the rapes depicted in BSG (true, I didn’t talk about Helo but I did have that in mind when I wrote – I was shorthanding where I shouldn’t have) …I have mixed feelings. First, as a survivor, any depictions of rape that come without warning trigger me pretty badly; to have so many blindside me on a beloved show was flat-out traumatizing. I really, really wish there was a way (perhaps a voluntary rating before the beginning credits?) to warn viewers so survivors can either brace themselves or turn it off. To have so many on one show belies, in my opinion, a lack of sensitivity to the viewership, a large chunk of whom have been or love someone who has been raped. Second, I think any depiction of rape in a work of fiction needs to forward the plot (perhaps this is what you were getting at by not sensationalizing or trivializing, about which we agree). Some of them did , some of them did not and some could be argued either way, I think (which is where we disagree). I would argue that just because a plot element is built around a rape, does not mean that the rape advances the series plot. The former is a back-end justification (excuse?) for depicting rape, ergo sensationalizing it (i.e. violence for the sake of violence but trying to appear that it isn’t), in the latter case the plot comes first (and hell it’s just better writing). I don’t think the writers of BSG succeeded in depicting each and every of their many, many rapes with deference. Added to the sheer number depicted, their treatment rubbed me the wrong way. But at this point we’re veering on off-topicness. Suffice it to say I don’t want to be bombarded again in Caprica.
I have a hard time believing anyone would pass up modern medicine in favor of being killed by easily treated diseases (or childbirth!) and the like…
leah —
You’ve given me the third category of rape scenes that squick me out — those meant to be “titillating.” Rape isn’t titillating, and scenes that portray it as quasi-sexy are enough to make me give up on a show. Happily, I don’t think any BSG scenes fit that mold. I do think one can argue whether some of the assaults furthered the plot (Gina’s and Athena’s rapes were, I thought, important in both advancing the plot and setting the scenery for the degradation of humanity; the whole Kara-Leoben thing was just odd).
And I can understand the dangers of rape triggering, just as I found Dee’s suicide to be triggering. I don’t know how you fix that. But it doesn’t make it easier. And I agree, I hope Caprica is freer of violence (which, frankly, it should be).