Review: "Caprica" Goes Where "Star Trek" Didn't

Warning! This review reveals the identity of the gay and bisexual characters on Caprica as well as several minor plot points.

If Ronald D. Moore set himself a difficult task back in the early Aughts — reimagining the somewhat beloved if campy 1970s sci fi series Battlestar Galactica as a much darker, much more socially relevant sci fi series — then what he is attempting to do with his new show Caprica is something supremely more difficult.

This time out he's not just writing and producing a prequel (almost always a risky proposition) to his wildly successful and infinitely more loved version of Battlestar Galactica, he's also using his new drama to help SyFy achieve their goal of broadening their demographic appeal by making Caprica what is being called "television's first science fiction family saga" and which Caprica executive producer Remi Aubuchon said "...owes itself more to Dallas in some ways than to Star Trek."

For many hardcore fans of BSG, those aren't exactly words to instill confidence.

But all involved have stated confidently that while viewers new to the BSG universe will have no trouble getting into world of Caprica (set 58 years before the events of BSG), fans of Moore's BSG will also find plenty of the science fiction and moral complexity that drove the original series. 

Have they succeeded? After watching the first four hours of Caprica, and being very much a fan of Moore's reimagining of BSG (if not obsessed with it), I would say yes.

While I personally miss the deep space setting of BSG, the prequel offers enough futuristic cityscapes and advanced technology that viewers will likely never forget they are watching a science fiction program and not, well, Dallas.

And the show's driving storyline — how one man accidentally created intelligent machines he calls "Cylons," and how those Cylons came to hate their human overlords enough to try and annihilate them — is about as science fiction-y as one gets.