Holy Frak, BSG Is Back!!

Warning: Spoilage To Follow!!
My primary response after having watched Caprica on DVD months ago ("Monotheistic Robots of Doom"), then going back and rewatching the last 1.5 seasons of Battlestar Galactica, and also watching The Plan when it first aired, and then watching the "first episode" of Caprica last night on the Syfy channel (it was just the movie/pilot) was: holy frak, Alessandra Torresani is great! Seriously, she is the new Starbuck. Or maybe she's even Starbuck plus Gaius Baltar put together.

To be honest I wasn't that crazy about Torresani the first time I watched Caprica (the movie). And I have been very much underwhelmed by the cheesy way in which she is being hyped as "Caprica's cover girl". But now I realize just how interesting her character is, and how fantastic a job she is doing with it. It's really too bad she has to be a fraking Cylon!

But that's an inevitable problem with a story in which polytheists are the good guys and monotheists are the bad guys. As Rob Lowe recently observed, "bad guys are always the best written characters."

I am really looking forward to seeing how this story develops. So far I have been very impressed with the way in which different elements of the whole BSG story fit together. In particular, the character of the scarily brilliant, needy, self-centered but ultimately (if often only just barely) lovable Zoe Graystone really works as not only the first Cylon, but the prototype for the the "skinjobs".

And it's not just the way in which the pieces fit together logically. Ultimately the BSG/Caprica story revolves around the centrality of emotion to what it means to be human, and, even more specifically, the absolute need that human beings have for relationships. And the relationships work -- most especially when they don't. The constant betrayals and deceptions, the ability of humans and Cylons to form bonds as well as their fights among themselves -- it all works.