Blowback

The last time I talked about Caprica, I was noting its cancellation by Syfy. I also noted that I was ambivalent about that. The show had never been so great that I looked forward to it the way I had Battlestar Galactica, but neither was it so bad to make me want to give up watching it. Mostly, I stayed with it, hoping it would get better at some point.

Cancellation was only a speed bump on the road to that last destination. From what I've heard, Syfy is planning to burn off the last five remaining episodes in a marathon early in 2011. But no need to wait until then; the last of Caprica was just released on DVD this past week. While my mixed feelings about the show meant I wasn't willing to buy that box set myself, I did toss it into my Netflix queue. So here's the first of my final five Caprica episode reviews.

The next episode is titled Blowback. In typical Caprica fashion, it pushes a few different plot lines incrementally forward. The featured story -- arguably -- is about Lacy, whom we last left in Clarice's attic. Clarice has decided that Lacy needs some "training" at an STO camp, and this episode finds her traveling off world for that purpose.

In her story, her transport is captured by a group of polytheistic warriors fighting against the monotheistic STO. They terrorize the would-be terrorists, executing the people on their way to the training camp one by one unless some vaguely defined person on the other end of a phone agrees to some vaguely defined demands.

Why all so vague? Because it's a ruse. Really, this is just step one of the recruits' indoctrination, seeing how they'll respond to a stressful situation. I've never bought Lacy as a kick-butt action hero, and here again you have to just go with it when she (with the help up a young man she met in transit) takes charge and gets the best of the "hostage takers," passing the test. It's all a pretty rote bait and switch, and the weakest element of the episode. (Though if you're a fan of the show Sanctuary, you might enjoy the presence of not one but two people from that show in guest starring roles.)

A more interesting storyline -- as per usual -- follows Daniel, who is given a two week deadline by the Tauron "mob boss" to make the resurrection program work. He tries in vain to make more progress with the simulacrum he constructed of his wife Amanda. Though the story doesn't progress far, the emotional and dramatic content of the scenes are strong.

The ongoing story advances most with Jordan, the police officer who has been pursuing the STO in general, and Clarice in particular. We last left him having convinced Amanda to be an undercover spy in Clarice's family. But now, his supervisor is pressuring him to reveal the identity of this "confidential informant," which he's quite reluctant to do.

This reluctance, it turns out, is for good reason, as his boss is revealed in this episode as an STO agent himself, trying to get information to tip off Clarice. Jordan smells something fishy though, and decides to test his boss by revealing that his informant is not Amanda Greystone, but one of Clarice's wives. Sure enough, this information is leaked to Clarice...

Who reacts by killing her by her own hand. So while Clarice is far from the focus of the episode, she gets what I think is the single most powerful moment. I don't think they've built up the wife in the past quite strongly enough for the death to pack a major punch, but you still get a chilling sense of Clarice's ruthlessness that she stoops to this act with no real hesitation.

Anyway, Jordan at last becomes a principle character in the narrative, now with problems of his own in the form of a dirty boss he must find a way to bring down.

Zoe, Tamara, and V-World go unseen this episode, and I can't say I really missed them.

I'd say in all that this episode represented one more small step in the right direction for Caprica. I still don't think it's going to reach the point where it would have been appointment TV, but I do think that it may be building to a decent climax to the season.