![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
χαῖρε, ὦ θεράπων
It 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.
no subject
Well, that, too.
I am enjoying the fact that the inventor's feverish drive to recreate his lost daughter is a trope of mad science, except that here the daughter already recreated herself for purposes that had nothing to do with her father; the traditional arguments about the infringement of humanity on God's domain are being curiously spun by Zoe's identification as a radical monotheist, a more fervent believer than either of her parents. (I like also that Yosef appears to be an atheist, which isn't going to stop Sam from offering a few extra prayers to Mars Ultor for him.) I know the premise of Battlestar: Galactica, so I'm aware that it will eventually turn into a story of technology-that-destroyed-us (or at least blew-up-the-planet-and-led-to-four-seasons-of-increasingly-debatable-television), but at least so far it seems to be avoiding the knee-jerk judgment of science that goes with so many variants of this myth. What Daniel Graystone does with Tamara's avatar is wrong not because it is hubristic to bring back the dead, but because Tamara—unlike Zoe—never asked for an existence in V-space where she can't even feel her heart beat, her memories incomplete, a jerry-rigged reverse-engineering of someone else's work of genius. (And then Daniel just leaves her on his hard drive? This is going to come back to bite somebody.) If we ever do find out what Zoe invented the avatar for, I'm betting it will be for some religious reason. If it's a terrible one, that will be all the more interesting.
Sam, trigger/daggerman that he is, turns out to be one of its most well-adjusted characters (and has a nice, cute husband, too).
I approve of that!
The show is serving as an odd kind of diagnostic of my character interests. In most casts, I think I'd be focusing on Daniel, despite his high-handed casual privilege and its spillover effects—his grief-craziness does not prevent him from manipulating Yosef through the same wound—but give me a pair of immigrant brothers with complex relationships to their home culture, their surrounding culture, and each other, and I'm just paying attention to that.
His tattoos are indeed relevant--I think there's a breakdown somewhere on-line of what all of them mean, since getting them is about acknowledging various triumphs and mistakes, plus making your criminality and subservience to the "don" physically visible.
Nice. We haven't really had a close look at any of them so far, except that it looked as though there were Greek letters across his chest (I guess that puts paid to the abjad theory), a partial sleeve on at least one of his arms, and something fairly complex reaching up the side of his neck. I'll have to look for the translation.
The other thing I liked best about it is that for a while there, it had one of the largest and most diverse casts of agencied women on TV. That alone should've signalled it wouldn't last.
Depressingly, I cannot disagree with you.
no subject
Ah, ha ha haaaa. And then some.;)
Part of what I always loved about Caprica was that it reminded me of a sci fi translation of Rome, which--from my POV--is exactly what life on Caprica should seem like. This is borne out by their casting of Polly Walker, who played Atia, as the head of Zoe's cell/school; the fact that she then turns out to be in a religiously-inspired poly relationship with, like, four other people of various sexes is just gravy.