CAPRICA: EPISODE 5 “THERE IS ANOTHER SKY”
Written by Alex Wilgus on March 2, 2010
What’s the point(s)? America is an MMORPG.After I wrote my first article, our illustrious Editor-in-Chief suggested I continue updating on Caprica and the progression of its social commentary. I admit I was a bit under-confident that the show would continue its socio-theological commentary in earnest; that it would placate wider appeal at the expense of good thought.
After episode 5 aired Friday I am still repenting for my lack of faith. Capricacontinues its steady march into even testier religious waters, striking deeper at America’s Modernist core. The show’s allegorical environment plus its refusal to allow even one of its characters to assume the mantle of ‘villain’ may serve to soften the blows the writers are dealing toward the modern establishment, but the provocations are obvious if only ye have eyes to see and DVRs to record. This column is meant to make Caprica’s peculiar brand of social commentary as plain as this philosophy major can possibly make it.
SEMI-SPOILER ALERT: Though I don’t really like describing plot twists in detail it’s probably best that you watch the episode before reading this.
Episode 5 is a game-changer. The big (and beautiful) reveal is a new area in V-World called New Cap City. It skirts close to being a re-hash of The Matrix except in this iteration there is no narrative of mental slavery and redemption. Instead people live in the digital world to play ‘The Game’, a contest without rules or objective.
Tamara: “What’s the object of the game?”
Gamer: “It’s a mystery. It’s almost like figuring out the object of the game is the object of the game. But we think it’s about getting things that convert into points like money or weapons.”
Sound familiar? The parallels to addictive Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (or MMORPGs) are plain. Tamara’s advice to her gamer friend to unplug and “be something” out in the real world could seem like a quick and relevant ‘moral to the story’ but the symbolism runs deeper.
The people of real Caprica and the gamers in New Caprica are in the same existential boat. Caprican society does not believe in God, but gods; not in moral imperatives, but freedom from obligation. Driving every character on the show is an unshakable need to connect with something beyond their present experience in order to give their lives meaning.
Joseph Adama returns to his traditional rites, Daniel Graystone reaches farther into the digital haze of artificial intelligence. Though they both risk the public labeling them insane, neither one is content simply ‘playing the game’ of society, and it will be interesting to see where each man’s path to meaning leads him.
Getting points (money) or weapons (power) do not satisfy the objective. The answer can only come from someone or somewhere beyond the present experience. In this light, there are no ‘evil’ or ‘good’ only the distracted and the awake.
The scenes with Tamara and the Gamer are laden with existential meaning. The way he stares at his collector full of ‘points’ and exclaims with wonder “It’s gotta mean something” is an affecting picture of the middle class American. It doesn’t matter what your ‘points’ are (money, health, sex, power, etc.), there seems to be a common idea that getting enough of them will reveal the meaning of existence, the object of the game when in fact the only object is to get out.
Now replace Caprica with America and New Cap with World of Warcraft and you have the exact same situation. We are all ‘players’ out here in the real world and none of us are (by law) allowed any authoritative clue as to what the objective is. We are charged with finding it out for ourselves. We have effectively turned our world into a big MMORPG (and we wonder why WoW is so addictive). If escape from New Cap is Tamara’s raison d’etre, then our own must be the promise that “There Is Another Sky”.
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