Caprica Review

WHY YOU NEED TO WATCH ‘CAPRICA’

  

Comments (3)

Written by Alex Wilgus on February 22, 2010

Name me one piece of popular American film in the past decade to intelligently explore the subject of religion.

Kingdom of Heaven?  Nope. Expelled?  No.  Religulous?  Heavens, no.  Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?  Warmer, but no.

Today, theology is the last thing the entertainment industry wants to deal with in any kind of intelligent way.  It’s difficult to find one popular TV show or film that explores religion in any form other than abject villainy.

To find the epicenter of theological inquiry in modern entertainment one must dive beneath the mainstream and descend into the world of fanboys and comic conventions.  For all the diverse achievements the past ten years of film and television have produced, the only focused exploration of the religion in modern society was a contemporary remake of a failed 1970s television show called Battlestar Galactica.

Spaceships and robots, you say?  Are these really the proper metaphorical tools for exploring humanity’s longest held institution?  Perhaps not, but however little intellectual legitimacy you feel comfortable giving the science fiction genre, Ronald D. Moore’sBattlestar indeed went where no popular television show dared venture.  It spun a deeply theological narrative that is more than worthy of repeat viewings and armchair conversation.

Now, SyFy–the Sci-Fi channel’s sleek new brand name–is airing Battlestar Galactica’sprequel, Caprica.  The series replaces spaceships with a sprawling city and trades military battles for family conflicts.  The title is the name of the capitol planet of the thirteen human colonies.  Earth is out of the picture, as original BSG fans know well, and each of the thirteen human planets has its own distinct culture and identity.

Caprica sets a rich metaphorical stage for modern America while planets like Tauron and Gemenon are looser amalgams of third world cultures.  Because Caprica takes place in a sort of American alternate reality, it is freer to explore touchy subjects like religion and terrorism behind a thin allegorical veil.

The show begins by setting up Caprica as a society drunk on its own prosperity.  It is the paragon of democracy, in which even divine power is shared between a pantheon of gods.  When a member of a rebellious monotheistic cult miraculously succeeds in creating an artificial intelligence, tragic events are set in motion that bring together a diverse group of people and force them to reconsider what is right, what is wrong and what is possible.

So far, the heart and soul of Caprica’s drama and philosophizing is a robot.  The creation first true artificial intelligence (or ‘Cylon’) is chronicled in detail in the show’s two-hour pilot.  Creators Ronald Moore, David Eick and newcomer Remi Aubuchon succeed in finally bringing A.I. into its proper thematic habiliment:  the religious.

The ‘creating life’ motif has been slathered onto plenty of other human/robot stories, butCaprica is the first to actually place God at the center of its mechanics.  In the show, a true A.I. is finally created by a monotheistic cult that credits the one true God as its source of inspiration.  This is not a mere plot device.  It is clear that someone on the creative team had done his homework.

Creating A.I. is impossible without a specific kind of miracle:  the miracle of language.  One need not come from a religious heritage to agree with this.  There has not been one successful attempt in the history of science at either creating language or teaching an animal how to use language.

The problem is methodological.  Scientists assume language to behave in much the same way, like a computer code that can be deconstructed and replicated.  It turns out that language is nothing of the sort.  It is more of an epiphany than an evolutionary process.  One cannot build consciousness; it happens usually all at once in a human child.

The closest anyone has come to describing the experience in detail is Helen Keller in her autobiography.  Because she could neither see nor hear, her ability to recognize language was severely slowed.  But after a month of vain behavioral learning (Helen holds doll, Helen spells ‘D-O-L-L’, Helen gets treat), the leap of consciousness was made all at once while standing at a water pump.  Keller recounts the experience:

“Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me.”

There is no way to prove that this moment was God’s inspiration acting upon Helen’s consciousness but over a century later, there is still no way to prove that it was otherwise.  Evolutionary scientists are powerless to explain the event.  The thing just happens, all at once, catastrophically, like a great flood or a pillar of fire illuminating the mind.  Sometimes it’s best to call a spade a spade.  It’s impossible to talk about the creation of artificial intelligence without talking about God and the good people behind Caprica know it.

I wouldn’t count on the storyline to support Judaeo-Christian theology–or any theology for that matter–to the letter, but do expect Caprica to fearlessly examine religion, the only subject that the entertainment industry has kept taboo.  Battlestar Galactica was profoundly interested with religious questions though its answers to those questions remained ambiguous to the end.  Caprica will likely follow suit, which is not at all bad thing.  If anything it’ll just be nice to watch a show that doesn’t automatically assume faith to be the same thing as psychosis.

In many ways, Science Fiction is the best-equipped genre to explore religion today.  It allows the audience to re-consider the mysteries of the universe by wiping away the haze of our spiritually disinterested society through all manner of fantastic (but not usually improbable) catastrophes and weird alternate futures.

The genre’s cult status is actually rather fitting considering how many people take God seriously these days.  I’ve had to come to grips with the fact that being religious in modern times is, well…geeky.  I’m always reading the same books over and over again, always coming back to uncomfortable subjects that nobody wants to talk about, obsessed with stories about some other world and the ash on my forehead makes me look like a Klingon.

No matter.  I shall soldier on.  I shall continue to attend church on Sunday and on Fridays I shall select Caprica on my DVR, go into my upper room and ‘play.’

Originally published at www.parcbench.com 2/22/10
Direct link:  http://www.parcbench.com/2010/02/22/why-you-need-to-watch-caprica/