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News of another Battlestar Galactica prequel has been filtering around the internet for a while now, originally reported on by SciFiNow back in the halcyon days of March. We’ve recently had confirmation that another project is in development however, being a webseries focusing on the days of the First Cylon War. The aim of the project is to take inspiration from films such as The Hurt Locker and documentaries such as Restrepo to show the fictional conflict in an unflinching fashion, and ten or so episodes will be released in ten-minute instalments.
On the plus side, this is more or less exactly the direction that I wanted the proposed show to take. One Caprica, as good as it is, is enough for now, and the story was fairly conclusively finished at the end of the parent series. Indeed, I’ve had most of the principal actors and Ronald D Moore on record saying that the series is very much done following The Plan. The big unexplored area, touched on in the Razor flashbacks but never fully explored, is the First War. It also serves as a nice bridge between two shows that, for me, seem totally disconnected at the moment. Maybe it’s the stylistic differences between Caprica and Battlestar Galactica, but I just don’t feel as if they’re in a shared universe. Where events in Caprica couldn’t be directly referenced in the parent show, this might give the opportunity for a bit of dot-joining and linkage. It also returns to a more gritty, realistic (or at least, as realistic as you can get in a war against giant metal robots) form of drama, something that Battlestar always excelled at and suffered horribly for when it lost it toward the end of the final season.
On the down side, it’s a web series. The rapid-fire instalments won’t allow for the complexity of plot and exploration of character that have been a big part of the success for both series. Instead, we’ll have brief vignettes – something that I feel runs more or less counter to the idea of exploring a period in the franchise’s metaverse. Yes, it could work for some instalments – those who like episodes of popular shows such as The Next Generation’s ‘Lower Decks’ or Babylon 5′s ‘GROPOS’ know that you can have a character or a set for a short period of time and attach just as strongly as you can the main cast – but for the whole thing it seems like an odd idea. I’ve also yet to see a CG set that properly convinced me. Even Sanctuary, for all its technical achievement, doesn’t really, and the CGI hasn’t always been wonderful in Battlestar Galactica or Caprica.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that there’s more stories coming from the Battlestar Galactica universe, I’m just a little wrongfooted by the direction of it. A miniseries, for me, would be the better direction to go. Four or five episodes with a bit of budget behind them, that they can make money off at the time and through release later, rather than what I assume won’t be a highly budgeted webseries. Here’s hoping they’ll hit it for six, at any rate.
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I hope they do a Sanctuary and if the webseries goes well we can see it on the small screen in a proper series. I agree though that there is not much room for character and plot development, but give me more space battles and I’ll be happy. :)
BSG fans need to remember one thing with the proposed “First Cylon War” web series. “Caprica” has been a huge ratings disappointment for SyFy Channel, so much so that the network was debating canceling the series outright for the past several months, only to grant it an 11th hour reprieve with the order of a second, abbreviated season. “Caprica” was far too slow in its early episodes, causing many BSG faithful to abandon it. The promos for the second half of the Season 1 episodes that SyFy will finally start airing in January, 2011 (thus really making it seem like a second season) look much more action-oriented and faithful to the parent series. I kept waiting to see some of the other 12 colonies, or an early battlestar flying around, and it never happened, causing that great “disconnect” to BSG. Hopefully, that will now change and we’ll get our “meat & potatoes.” But, the ratings slide occurred, and SyFy is now very worried about pouring too much money into any more of the BSG universe. They’ve been burned already. So, while they may love the overall premise that the BSG franchise represents, they want more concrete proof that any more series based in this universe will succeed better than “Caprica” has. Ordering a much cheaper web series hedges their bets, and if it’s popular enough, THEN they will send it to a full television series as they did with “Sanctuary.” We can only hope….
Can I just say that one of the dumbest things that SyFy do is give shows 6 month or more mid season breaks. The season starts to gain some momentum then “Caprica will return in the autumn”. They did it with BSG’s last season and now they’ve done it again.
As a BSG fan I’ve loved Caprica thus far. Opinions are like @rseholes; everyone’s got one – and mine was that people who thought it was slow just weren’t watching it with the right mindset. Anyone who didn’t read the blurb in the run up to the show’s premiere and was expecting more BSG was sorely disappointed – nothing like it in content. There’s a lot of stylistic commonality but even there, there’s big differences and rightly so. One show is post apocalyptic, the other looks at a hedonistic, decadent society tearing itself apart. The sci fi elements in both run parallel to the basic human story (in that at least they are similar) but one’s space opera whilst the other’s more akin to cyberpunk with shades of “I am Robot”.
Anyway, back to my main point. I think the reason for the webisodes, rather than to hedge bets or the like is simply to fill the gap for BSG fans in space between seasons or the daftly long midseason breaks.
I am sorry but Caprica is a ponderous, overblown, self indulgent, boring pigs ear of a show. It is almost as if the writers/creators have started by asking themselves “what was the worst season of BSG”? and then said “great, lets make a new season three; only let’s see if we can make it even more boring! Let’s aim to make aim to make real snorefest this time”!