A Look at Caprica

[David cgc]

Half the backlash against the season 3 Love Quadrangle was that the Skiffy first-run trailers for the episodes (the ones that aired over the closing credits of the show) made it look like it was the exclusive plotline of, like, four episodes, and they only advertised the actual a-plot in the secondary ads that began airing later in the week.

[PsychoPere]

Marc wrote:

---

Wasn't SciFi pretty loose with it's advertising for BSG and if so should it be any suprise they've done the same with Caprica?

Sci-Fi's advertising for BSG was pretty bad, so, no, I'm not too surprised that Sy-Fy's advertising for Caprica is at least as crappy. It's still mind-boggling, though, that anyone would think that tying Caprica to BSG through "the plan" would be a good idea.

[Temis the Vorta]

There are lots of people in Caprica with plans.

Sure, but their plans aren't the engine driving the story. In BSG, the engine was apparently this mysterious Cylon Plan that was the original motivator for the Cylons to wipe out humanity, yet be unaccountably sloppy about it and let some get away and then act like they didn't want to kill them after all. I was really intrigued what explanation they could come up with that would cover all that, and wouldn't be lame. Sadly, the writers didn't have one in mind.

In Caprica, the engine is something less prone to failure because it's not a mystery that the writers have yet to work out (and never will), and stems from the central situation: the tendency of people to want to create sophisticated AI lifeforms but not accept them as human, yet that very sophistication is what drives the AIs to want to be accepted as human.

That's a neat little conundrum at the core of the story - unresolvable and therefore a great engine. Characters will make plans in response to this situation, or in response to tangental situations in the story, but those plans are not what is driving the story.

Which is why I don't worry about Caprica being crippled at its core the way BSG turned out to be, and having to dance around and come up with gimmickry like nuclear explosions and false Earths and attempted coups and mutinies to distract us from the basic and irresolvable problem with the writing. If Caprica fails story-wise, it will be for more avoidable things like too much focus on characters who aren't at the core of the story (meaning anyone but Daniel, Joseph or Zoe). So if Caprica fails, it will actually be worse, because the writers haven't created a massive stumbling block for themselves, so what's their excuse?

[PsychoPere]

Temis the Vorta wrote:

---

Sure, but their plans aren't the engine driving the story.

That's actually what I was aiming at. I should have been more explicit about that.

[Robert Maxwell]

PsychoPere wrote:

---

Sci-Fi's advertising for BSG was pretty bad, so, no, I'm not too surprised that Sy-Fy's advertising for Caprica is at least as crappy. It's still mind-boggling, though, that anyone would think that tying Caprica to BSG through "the plan" would be a good idea.

SyFy's problem with BSG was that they had a surprise hit on their hands and didn't know how to market it. And instead of letting it be good on its own, they increasingly interfered with it and watched the ratings drop.

The "plan" thing came from David Eick and RDM didn't want it, but the network overruled him, apparently. There never was a "plan" in the sense that most people would think, and that really showed in the end. At least, the final explanation we got of the plan was very anti-climactic: a simple revenge story driven by a madman. Yawn. Well-performed nonetheless, but I would have liked something with a bit more substance to it.

Wow, this post is all over the place. Back to the basic point: SyFy marketing droids don't have the slightest idea what they're doing.