I never watched Battlestar Galactica on real live television. I got into the show when a roommate loaned me the season 1 DVD. That was summer, 2005. In early 2006, a classmate sent me a link to a (vaguely) legal website that was hosting all the season 2 episodes. I became an honest citizen for season 3: I suffered the commercial breaks watching episodes on the official network website. (Back then, Sci-Fi was spelled correctly). By the time the back half of season four finally started in 2008, I was tired of pixelated video. So I went show-crazy and paid real money to download every episode from iTunes. You do crazy things for love.

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Image Credit: Eike Schroter/SyfyYesterday, Amanda Graystone smoked cigarettes. Lots of them. She got bored, so she turned on the window video. She slouched around all day. When the sun went down, she slouched around all night. Someone stopped by the house and told her some terrible news about a member of her family. She said she didn’t believe the news, but it was clear she did.

This all happened on last night’s episode of Caprica, the eighth episode of the season, but it also happened way back in episode 2. (The visitor was Agent Duram instead of Vergis, but they said the same thing: “There’s a murderer in your house.”) Viewers, I think that we’re reaching the critical mass point with Sad Amanda; it’s starting to feel less like believable grieving time, and more like pathological depression. The dead-brother visions feel like a double anchor – how many dead relatives does this lady have, anyways? READ FULL STORY »

Image Credit: Eike Schroter/SyfyI try not to talk too much about Battlestar Galactica in these recaps. I feel that I’d be doing Caprica a bit of a disservice; this new show is still barely half a season old, while BSG exists now as a complete story, in 75 chapters (plus webisodes.) Moreover, since Caprica is a spin-off and a prequel, there’s always the danger that a comparison would just lead us down rhetorical dead ends. I like Caprica for what it is: the weirdest, smartest, and most consistently surprising show on TV.

How surprising? Last night’s episode was titled “The Imperfections of Memory,” which sounds like a college textbook for Psych 101, or maybe a fake textbook in a Borges short story. Viewers, I thought the first half of last night’s episode was the worst we’ve seen of Caprica yet. There was the arrival of an imaginary dead brother, and the counterbalancing descent of Amanda Graystone into a depressive ennui that’s beginning to feel like self-parody. There was Tad Thorean, overexplaining everything about New Cap City in case we didn’t get it the first five times. There was Zoe on a Viper date with her darling Philo, in a special-effects sequence so non sequitur and awful that I could swear the writers overheard some BSG fans who were missing all those old Viper fights and decided, in a fit of pique, to throw a couple of Vipers in their faces. READ FULL STORY »