It always looked like it was going to be a rough road to a third second season for Caprica, but it didn’t even make it through the second half of the first. In a fairly unusual move for a cable drama, Syfy has cancelled the Battlestar Galactica spinoff drama before the season was even over. (Reportedly, the final episodes will air later in the year.) Don’t blame Steve Snyder; he’s only been blogging it here a couple of weeks.
Curiously, though, Syfy has already picked up a second BSG prequel, Blood and Chrome, an action-oriented drama set during the first Cylon war. Will it do better for having spaceships and dogfights at its disposal? Maybe, though I would hope this doesn’t mean that Syfy has given up on the kind of philosophical Syfy that Caprica represented.
Admittedly, I tended to like the idea of Caprica more than iots reality, except for a few standout episodes in the first season. But what it was trying to do was fascinating; to explore, within the contet of a corporate-intrigue soap, the ethics of creating sentient intelligence, the nature of consciousness and the implications of not just virtual reality but virtual immortality.
It was hobbled, though, by a slow-to-establish plot, and a plethora of storylines, some of which (the Tauron mob, the religious terrorists) veered into cliche. Ultimately, I guess I have to rule Caprica a Cincy—a show whose ideas were excellent and ambitious, but whose execution didn’t live up. (A la the term’s namesake, John from Cincinnati.) But I hope it’s not the last one we’ve seen from Syfy.
