The Moth Chase

I’m pretty bummed Caprica is going on break – but boy did they leave us with an action packed, fun episode to keep us on the hook!  This one was framed by Zoe’s escape, and the slow reveal of the 20 hours prior, leading up to the deaths or potential deaths of a pretty significant number of characters. Read the rest of this entry »

Caprica: “Ghosts in the Machine”

First off, an editorial aside: apologies to our Caprica readers for the missed post last week. Natalie is out of town again this week, so it’s just me tonight. We have one more episode before a long midseason break, so let’s try to pull a few threads together.

Caprica has had a few enigmatic episode titles along the way (“Reins of a Waterfall”?!), but tonight’s title was inspired. The heart of Caprica thus far has been a tale of two daughters and fathers: Zoe and Daniel Graystone, and Joseph and Tamara Adama. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey Travis,

Perhaps it’s because I watched this episode late last night after my dinner guests had left (and after a few rounds of drinks), but I had kind of a hard time following some of it. On the other hand, I get the hunch that they’re setting up a bunch of plotlines that will pay off over time, which gives me hope that we’re getting a second season! The episode opens in Tauron City with Verges discovering his MCP has been stolen and two of his friends have been killed. We swing to a month later as Verges reveals to Daniel both what had happened and how he was going to respond. What remains unclear to me is exactly how much Daniel knows Read the rest of this entry »

Hey Travis,

So Tamara quickly became my favourite character last night – badass!  And she brought a new dimension to our ponderings about bodies with regards to avatars.  While Zoe continued to test the limits of her new body in the real world with the horrific ripping off of her arm – an act that surely set in motion a chain of consequences – Tamara began to experience her avatar body as limitless in a deeply productive way. Read the rest of this entry »

This episode really centered around two key relationships: Daniel and Amanda Graystone and Joseph and Sam Adama.  And these two connected to each other through Joseph’s ongoing grieving and Amanda’s continued impulsiveness…both of which actually paid off for them tonight. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Moth Chase Readers,

Natalie is out of town, so please welcome guest blogger Travis as he covers this week’s episode of Caprica in her place.

Caprica: Reins of a Waterfall

This week’s episode marks an early transition point in Caprica. After the heady themes of the conflict of mono- and polytheism, the puzzle of embodiment with the melding of a virtual avatar and a robotic body, and the ominous portent of the first Cylon charging the first two episodes with tension and high-concept drama, last night’s episode felt like a show settling into the work of establishing a world, and building characters who inhabit that world. It felt similar to the episode “Bastille Day” of BSG* – after the extraordinary epic of the miniseries, and the broad lines of the story arc laid down in “33″ (a hopeless war) and “Water” (a mole onboard Galactica), that episode took a step back and trained our eyes on the complicated political world of the exiles. There we got, for the first time, a clear sense that the moral universe that BSG was giving us was going to be far more murky and interesting than we realized. Read the rest of this entry »

Another great episode!  Last week I focused on the relationship between mono- and polytheism in the show.  I enjoyed last night how, without dropping that theme, Caprica directed our attention to another developing subject for reflection: the soul/body, or rather, the chip/robot connection.  Having lost Zoe’s avatar in a data mishap, Daniel somehow – without knowing it – preserves her essence in the U-87 robot.  It seems that when the avatar information fused with the robot body, a moment of uniqueness occurred; a fusion that couldn’t be undone.  Though the avatar (the info+body) was lost, the info itself found a new body.  And, much to the scientists’ surprise, that information could not be transferred to any other subsequent body.  Hence Daniel’s questions, “why can’t we copy you?”  Because uniqueness can’t be copied. Read the rest of this entry »

I kind of feel unqualified to write about Caprica. I haven’t been a scifi geek since Next Generation and I’ve only seen 2 episodes of BSG, late at night, after a few drinks…and I didn’t get it (although I realize it’s something I’ll need to return to one day).  But I got pulled into Caprica because it just looked so good and it has Trixie from Deadwood (who I love) in it!  So while I realize that a two hour intro into the invention of the Cylon was probably very exciting for all the BSGers out there, and likely to be filled with significant references only they would get, there are a bunch of other themes that made me love last night’s premiere of Caprica.  And they’re almost all themes we’ve discussed on this blog in other contexts before: the relationship between bodies and identity or personhood; concepts of the Divine, particularly in this mono- vs. polytheistic battle, the relationship between memory and identity, the conflation of sex and violence in pop culture imagery; and life, death and everything in between. Read the rest of this entry »