χαῖρε, ὦ θεράπων
2011-12-14 02:14It does not feel like December. It does not feel like two weeks to Christmas and Hanukkah next week. I started making fudge tonight and it didn't help. I feel as though I have come unmoored completely in time.
I was shown the pilot of Caprica (2010) tonight. And on the one hand, it's terrible science fiction. People named things like Daniel and Clarice are walking around the futuristic distant past with fedoras and robot butlers, the gods are the Twelve Olympians via interpretatio Romana and the planets are all named after the Hellenistic zodiac, and apparently the rave scene hasn't changed in light-years. I accept the convention of characters all speaking English so we can understand them, but I'm not sure why the one other language we do hear is essentially classical Greek—I didn't need subtitles—oddly mixed with invented terms.
(Seriously, when you're already calling someone a bastard in Iliad Greek—νόθος is not attested in the Odyssey—I'm not sure why you need to make up vocabulary. At least throw in some other ancient language for consistency. At first I thought Halatha might be an acronym as in Hebrew, but I bet that only works if the Tauron language uses an abjad. Maybe they're sort of Phoenician.)
On the other, all its characters are morally ambiguous from the start, there are some very nice casual details already (I am waiting to see whether the tattoos are a criminal marker or normative on Tauron: Sam's are extensive and I haven't seen any on Yosef, but maybe he's just been careful not to get any visible, considering he's the one with the originally Capricanized name), and it took me about a picosecond to become firmly attached to the Adama brothers, so now I'm hoping my usual correlation of character liking to life expectancy will for once not apply. It's entirely possible that the show will fumble it, but I haven't seen a lot of mainstream science fiction where assimilation and cultural identity are as central to the plot as virtual reality or the emergence of AI. (Plus I appreciate that if![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
handful_ofdust has to back off the Lackadaisy for a little while, the universe has seen fit to supply me with a mob lawyer and a triggerman. Even without the fedoras, the Halatha so far resembles early twentieth-century gangs more than it does contemporary organized crime—recent immigrants, ethnic tensions, solidarity in a world that treats you as second-class.) And it is very interesting to see that while the show's poster suggested a seductive Eve, the first episode is much more about the appropriation of female agency: as if Pandora invented fire and Prometheus stole it from her. Well, if Pandora were involved with a terrorist group.
Either way, I'm sure I'll be unhappy—if the show detonates, it will be a waste of promising character work, and if it's excellent, it will join the ranks of television I like that never got a chance. I'm still going to watch the next episode. It's nice to find, however briefly, onscreen science fiction that doesn't suck. Even if I don't understand why the far interplanetary past looks like Vancouver plus Times Square.
I was shown the pilot of Caprica (2010) tonight. And on the one hand, it's terrible science fiction. People named things like Daniel and Clarice are walking around the futuristic distant past with fedoras and robot butlers, the gods are the Twelve Olympians via interpretatio Romana and the planets are all named after the Hellenistic zodiac, and apparently the rave scene hasn't changed in light-years. I accept the convention of characters all speaking English so we can understand them, but I'm not sure why the one other language we do hear is essentially classical Greek—I didn't need subtitles—oddly mixed with invented terms.
(Seriously, when you're already calling someone a bastard in Iliad Greek—νόθος is not attested in the Odyssey—I'm not sure why you need to make up vocabulary. At least throw in some other ancient language for consistency. At first I thought Halatha might be an acronym as in Hebrew, but I bet that only works if the Tauron language uses an abjad. Maybe they're sort of Phoenician.)
On the other, all its characters are morally ambiguous from the start, there are some very nice casual details already (I am waiting to see whether the tattoos are a criminal marker or normative on Tauron: Sam's are extensive and I haven't seen any on Yosef, but maybe he's just been careful not to get any visible, considering he's the one with the originally Capricanized name), and it took me about a picosecond to become firmly attached to the Adama brothers, so now I'm hoping my usual correlation of character liking to life expectancy will for once not apply. It's entirely possible that the show will fumble it, but I haven't seen a lot of mainstream science fiction where assimilation and cultural identity are as central to the plot as virtual reality or the emergence of AI. (Plus I appreciate that if
handful_ofdust has to back off the Lackadaisy for a little while, the universe has seen fit to supply me with a mob lawyer and a triggerman. Even without the fedoras, the Halatha so far resembles early twentieth-century gangs more than it does contemporary organized crime—recent immigrants, ethnic tensions, solidarity in a world that treats you as second-class.) And it is very interesting to see that while the show's poster suggested a seductive Eve, the first episode is much more about the appropriation of female agency: as if Pandora invented fire and Prometheus stole it from her. Well, if Pandora were involved with a terrorist group. Either way, I'm sure I'll be unhappy—if the show detonates, it will be a waste of promising character work, and if it's excellent, it will join the ranks of television I like that never got a chance. I'm still going to watch the next episode. It's nice to find, however briefly, onscreen science fiction that doesn't suck. Even if I don't understand why the far interplanetary past looks like Vancouver plus Times Square.
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