15 Years Later, One Battlestar Origin Is Still Shockingly Dark
Does "Ghosts in the Machine" hold up?
Although various questions still linger about the 2003-2009 Battlestar Galactica reboot, less analysis and attention is paid to its quirky prequel, Caprica. While generally considered a noble failure by pundits and BSG pursuits, aspects of Caprica still hold up 15 years later. Or, at the very least, deserve a second look.
Because 15 years ago, on March 19, 2010, Caprica dropped an episode that was as good as any ruminative Westworld story, and on par with some of the best Black Mirrors. Here’s why Caprica’s “Ghosts in the Machine” is still some solid BSG storytelling, and pushed the envelope of what what robot stories in sci-fi TV could encompass. Spoilers ahead.
“It’s the great missed opportunity,” BSG boss Ronald D. Moore lamented of Caprica in the Battlestar oral history book So Say We All, written by Ed Gross and Mark A. Altman. “It had a lot of potential, but for a variety of reasons it didn’t click.”
Arguably, one of the reasons that Caprica didn’t fully click with audiences is that nearly all of its characters were so aggressively amoral, as to be unlikable. “Ghosts in the Machine” is the perfect microcosm of this Caprica problem, insofar as the concept is really interesting, but one character in particular is behaving so horribly, that it’s hard to know what to root for.
Written by Michael Taylor, the title “Ghosts in the Machine” refers to various searches for missing people, who have become digital ghosts. Joseph Adama (Esai Morales) is searching for his missing daughter Tamara (Genevieve Buechner), who, along with Zoe Graystone (Alessandra Torresani) was slain in a terrorist bombing in the first episode. While Joseph enters the virtual world of New Cap City to find a virtual version of Tamara, Daniel Graystone (Eric Stolz) is trying to coax the consciousness of Zoe out of a physical robot, which is, very clearly, the prototype of the Cylons.
Zoe versus her dad in “Ghosts in the Machine.”
In both searches for deceased people, who now exist only in cyber form, the two respective fathers don’t behave particularly well. And while Joseph's desperation is understandable, what Daniel does is more reprehensible. In what is essentially a bizarre, really extreme version of the empathy test from Blade Runner, Daniel tries to get Zoe to react to various traumas, including a recreation of a fire that nearly took her life in the past, and an attempt to get her to shoot the family dog. Again, her mind is inside of something that looks like a Cylon centurion, so, the tension here is pretty clear; we’re meant to think about how the Cylons eventually waged war on humanity in BSG, and the sideways origin of that in Caprica is a weird dad trying to get his deceased daughter’s robot self to react emotionally by doing horrible things.
This is the dark heart of Caprica laid bare: a storyline that makes perfect sense in the context of the show and the BSG lore, but is very, very hard to watch. The audacious thing with “Ghosts in the Machine” is that it showed how Daniel was losing his own humanity in order to prove the existence of Zoe’s humanity, buried inside of a machine. Again, this is some Black Mirror action, in which a technological artifice reveals the depravity of humanity.
But in the end, in terms of BSG canon, this episode and Caprica as a whole are still the foundational story that leads to the rise of the Cylons. In contrast with the Host revolt in Westworld or other robots-gone-amok stories, Caprica may not be pleasant to watch, but upon revisiting the show, it does present this kind of trope more realistically. The nuance between what it means to be alive, and what it means to be organic is fully unpacked here. And, much to the surprise of the audience and the characters, one state of being doesn’t necessarily mean the other thing is true.
