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The final few episodes of Caprica’s first season went a long way towards proving not only what the show is best at, but that it could truly become something special. Unfortunately, last Tuesday’s final episode (‘Apotheosis’) was not only the season finale, but the conclusion to the series as a whole. Syfy opted to cancel Caprica earlier this year and Sky1 haven’t been able to show the last installments of the show until recently. At that time, it wasn’t clear why Caprica would be a show worth saving, but in the aftermath of that finale, I can’t help but feel that a second season would’ve been pretty damn fantastic.
The endgame of the Battlestar Galactica spinoff’s first season revealed how the Cylons were able to be so wholly integrated into the lives of humans. Before the finale, Joseph Adama’s son had been shot and killed, Daniel and Amanda Graystone had reconnected with their daughter Zoe (or, really, her avatar programme) but are now on the run (branded as terrorists by the GDD) and Clarice Willow’s plan for apotheosis (blowing up a sports stadium during a Pyramid match and bringing the scanned avatars of her martyrs through into a virtual heaven) was finally falling into place.
Caprica was far from a flawless show, but it was certainly a whole lot more ambitious than a lot of other sci-fi on television. Its tone and content was almost as far from Battlestar Galactica as it could be, and that’s probably part of the reason for its demise. However, its approach was very similar to that of BSG, as it was concerned with examining larger philosophical issues and deep moral complexities. Even if it didn’t consistently succeed in doing so, I respected the show’s attempts to push the limits of sci-fi.
In its final five episodes (which were the ones that didn’t air before its cancellation), Caprica improved drastically by raising the stakes and moving at a quicker pace. In ‘Apotheosis’, Clarice’s plan was ruined, with Zoe tearing apart her virtual heaven and Daniel using the cylons to save everyone at the Atlas Arena from her suicide bombers. It provides a climactic conclusion to the season but leaves enough loose ends that a second season would’ve had interesting material to work with.
A short couple of scenes at the very end give us some idea of what the show would have been if it had continued. Entitled ‘The Shape of Things to Come’, the four-minute coda shows us that BSG’s William Adama is actually Joseph Adama’s second son, that Cylons quickly become part of everyday life after the event at the arena, that Lacy becomes the leader of the monotheists and that Zoe is brought out of the virtual world and into a humanoid Cylon body (effectively becoming the first of the Cylon “skin-jobs” that were featured in BSG).
In truth, there have been more painful cancellations than Caprica, but it does feel a little unfortunate to know that there could’ve been an exciting second season in store. The ending was more than decent, though, and I’d recommend it to BSG fans. Syfy isn’t quite ready to let go of Battlestar yet, however, and production is already underway for a two-hour backdoor pilot called Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome, which will be set during the first Cylon war.
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