Since the episode will not be airing in 2009, I'll keep plot details light.
Caprica: Pilot The series will be built around tragedy-entwined lives of two families on the most famous of the Colonial planets. Having struck up a friendship with a fellow grieving father who also lost his daughter in the same terrorist bombing, Joseph Adama finds his moral fiber strained by the experience. Late into the pilot, it begins to dawn on him just what his new friend is saying. Aghast, he declares:
"Our daughters...! They're gone... you know this."
Daniel Graystone is perhaps the richest man on Caprica, having developed a ubiquitous recreation technology. He presently dabbles in cybernetic life forms for the Caprica defense ministry, and is unaccustomed to problems without solutions. Hearing Joseph, he nods:
"Yes, yes...but."
With that one, doubting syllable, Graystone dooms his people.
The inclusion of the Adama family (and a future Old Man has a prominent role) is one of the draws for Battlestar's audience. However, in the pilot, Caprica is the story of the Daniel Graystone. When his teenage daughter, Zoe is killed, he learns that she had previously created a perfect replica of her personality, hidden in the lurid (very; it won't make it to broadcast in its dvd form)
Initially skeptical when he finally meets Zoe's duplicate, he slowly finds himself wanting to believe, and then, leveraging his own work for the defense ministry, the dream grows: he can download this perfect copy of his daughter into a physical body. The path from credulity to obsession is a short one, and, as it happens, Daniel has a primitive cybernetic body with which he can move Zoe-A (avatar) to the real world, with unexpected consequences...
--
There are subplots: Joseph Adama's crime connections, Caprica's decaying morals, religious war, racism, intra-colony rivalries and hatred. As befits a pilot, they're more used as suggestions for future directions and receive only passing moments here.
With Daniel Graystone as the center, it's damn lucky that Stoltz is on hand to immediately move the character into deep complexity. Ever shifting: smart, fatherly, curious, envious, manipulative -- Graystone is fully realized by the end of the pilot.
As Adama, Esai Morales has less time onscreen, and much of that time in stoic silences or few words. His range is not on showcase, but his character benefits from the audience's familiarity. Joseph may not yet be as engaging as Daniel -- but, at the least, he is certainly an Adama.
The other characters, with the exception of Zoe and Zoe-A, are tertiary at best, given a chance here just to check in and announce their availability for future stories down the road.
Visually, Caprica is stunningly beautiful; whether in the ultra-clean city or the frenetic, violent virtual "V Club," it looks like it must be the most expensive thing the Sci-Fi Channel has ever produced. The storytelling benefits in scenes large and intimate from director Jeffrey Reiner's Friday Night Lights experience in capturing moments: in the high-praise words of Grady Tripp, it feels true.
The dialogue likewise has benefits from the well-polished machinery of the Galactica writer's room processes. For a pilot, it's fantastically good; better than several episodes of its parent. Not flawless: that creeping SF-exposition is nearly impossible to escape in a pilot episode. There's three or four times when that most hoary of exposition-launching phrases "As you know...." rear their head.
As a pilot episode, Caprica is not Galactica. It's in the quality ballpark with Firefly.*
Pros: Stoltz, intelligent premise, well executed.
Cons: Saggy in the middle, kind of heavy-handed with the world-building points, especially the colonial racism.
Grade: B+
* The real pilot, I mean. Not The Train Job.
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