Caprica spoilers, like, woah.
Kristin at E!Online has details for the Battlestar Galactica spin-off show, Caprica (via greycoupon). Set fifty years before the destruction of the Twelve Colonies, Caprica centres on two families, the Graystones and the Adams (later known as the Adamas), whose actions may have inadvertently led to the the First Cylon War.
(If it's an April Fools joke, as some suspect it of being, it's a damned good one, so I think I'll be excused for writing this.)
The Graystones include father Daniel, a computer genius; mother Amanda, a brilliant surgeon and unfaithful wife; and their daughter, Zoe, who is martyred to her boyfriend's religious fanaticism-but not before she installs the rudimentary elements of her personality and DNA into a machine, creating a digital twin of herself, Zoe-A.
After the human Zoe's death, Daniel uses these raw materials, some stolen technology and his own grief to cobble together "a robotic version of his dead daughter." This robot version, known as Zoe-R, is a Cylonic Eve, the first of her kind. (Dun-dun-dun!)
And in this corner, ladies and gentlemen, meet Grandpapadama! As Adm. Bill Adama once told us, his father, Joseph, was a great attorney of his day, fighting for the civil rights of the Twelve Colonies' downtrodden and marginalized. But that's not his whole story: Joseph Adama's wife and daughter were also killed in that same suicide bombing that took Zoe Graystone's life.
The two fathers, Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama, work together on replicating their children in cyborg form, but "Joseph is ethically appalled by the robot version of his dead [daughter], Tamara, and repents his actions." Those Adamas are all hardass conscience, aren't they?
Still, the one happy result of the Adama family tragedy is that Joseph and his young son, the 9-year-old Bill, grow closer to each other, and Joseph begins to explain their family's story to his sad, somber child. But will their bond prepare them for the havoc soon to be wreaked by the rise of the Cylon nation?
As I wrote in a comment to greycoupon's entry, I can see all of this fitting with the mythology of the cylons as told in BSG. I've always argued against the story of self-evolution for explaining how we got the twelve humanoid cylon models from the "toaster" centurion models that humans fought against in the First Cylon War; at some point, I believe, a human hand must have played a part in their creation. I also remember (either from reading a producers' interview or because it was mentioned in one of the episodes of BSG) that the raiders and the humanoid cylons have a common genetic source. (I'm getting a sense of deja vu, so I think blackcurrant and I may have discussed this at some point.)
For a while, I'd hoped Baltar to be that person who, in effect, created the cylons in his image, sometime between the First Cylon War and the nuclear attack on the colonies, perhaps without totally knowing what it was exactly he'd built; and this creation got away from him somehow, and went on its own process of evolution and self-discovery, allied itself with the other cylons. Baltar had the technical know-how, and then there was the matter of his visions of Six, and her telling him that he was the protector of a new race.
This Frankenstein-like story, of the first (successful? sane?) integration of human DNA and machine being born out of an illicit experiment by a distraught father to restore a dead child, it works much better. Because the experiment was born out of stolen technology (and highly illegal, mostly likely), it was probably kept secret by the Graystones and the Adams. The centurions could have been the face of the cylon revolt, while the ringleader and the genetic ancestor of the organic cylons remained unknown to the Twelve Colonies throughout the First Cylon War. And if Daniel's cylon "daughter", Zoe-R is the robotic Eve, it gives us the precedent of "downloading".
It also raises the question of whether there was also a robotic Adam (who need not necessarily have been male). And if Joseph Adams was so appalled with the digital clone of Tamara Adams, was that cylon was destroyed? Were records of her memories and DNA destroyed also? Or is there a bit of Tamara in all the cylons.
Other thoughts:
- Amanda Graystone, the "brilliant surgeon and unfaithful wife". Who do you suppose she was sleeping around with? Could it have been Joseph Adama? Does this make it possible that Zoe was actually Joseph's child? Caprica has been described in press releases as "Dallas in space", after all. Melodrama must not be counted out.
- Zoe's "religious fanatic" boyfriend, who got her involved with a suicide bombing. Was the boyfriend the bomber? The preview suggests that Zoe herself was carrying out the suicide bombing on his insistence. Perhaps knowledge of her immanent death was what prompted her to install her personality in a computer. What was the cause that the boyfriend involved her in? Does it have some relation to the civil rights movements that Joseph Adams was supporting in his capacity as a lawyer?
*
On a slightly unrelated note, writer Jane Espenson (Buffy, Battlestar Galactica) was recentedly interviewed by io9, where she revealed this piece of backstory about the humanoid cylons:
Not all Eights know everything the other Eights know. But during a download, memories are stored and can be accessed by a curious Cylon who knows how. Different models may differ on how widely memories are shared between different incarnations of the same model.
As liminalliz has pointed out, the Leoben model in particular seems to be characterised by a high degree of shared experience between individual copies of the model - as seen in this deleted scene from "A Measure of Salvation".
(If it's an April Fools joke, as some suspect it of being, it's a damned good one, so I think I'll be excused for writing this.)
The Graystones include father Daniel, a computer genius; mother Amanda, a brilliant surgeon and unfaithful wife; and their daughter, Zoe, who is martyred to her boyfriend's religious fanaticism-but not before she installs the rudimentary elements of her personality and DNA into a machine, creating a digital twin of herself, Zoe-A.
After the human Zoe's death, Daniel uses these raw materials, some stolen technology and his own grief to cobble together "a robotic version of his dead daughter." This robot version, known as Zoe-R, is a Cylonic Eve, the first of her kind. (Dun-dun-dun!)
And in this corner, ladies and gentlemen, meet Grandpapadama! As Adm. Bill Adama once told us, his father, Joseph, was a great attorney of his day, fighting for the civil rights of the Twelve Colonies' downtrodden and marginalized. But that's not his whole story: Joseph Adama's wife and daughter were also killed in that same suicide bombing that took Zoe Graystone's life.
The two fathers, Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama, work together on replicating their children in cyborg form, but "Joseph is ethically appalled by the robot version of his dead [daughter], Tamara, and repents his actions." Those Adamas are all hardass conscience, aren't they?
Still, the one happy result of the Adama family tragedy is that Joseph and his young son, the 9-year-old Bill, grow closer to each other, and Joseph begins to explain their family's story to his sad, somber child. But will their bond prepare them for the havoc soon to be wreaked by the rise of the Cylon nation?
As I wrote in a comment to greycoupon's entry, I can see all of this fitting with the mythology of the cylons as told in BSG. I've always argued against the story of self-evolution for explaining how we got the twelve humanoid cylon models from the "toaster" centurion models that humans fought against in the First Cylon War; at some point, I believe, a human hand must have played a part in their creation. I also remember (either from reading a producers' interview or because it was mentioned in one of the episodes of BSG) that the raiders and the humanoid cylons have a common genetic source. (I'm getting a sense of deja vu, so I think blackcurrant and I may have discussed this at some point.)
For a while, I'd hoped Baltar to be that person who, in effect, created the cylons in his image, sometime between the First Cylon War and the nuclear attack on the colonies, perhaps without totally knowing what it was exactly he'd built; and this creation got away from him somehow, and went on its own process of evolution and self-discovery, allied itself with the other cylons. Baltar had the technical know-how, and then there was the matter of his visions of Six, and her telling him that he was the protector of a new race.
This Frankenstein-like story, of the first (successful? sane?) integration of human DNA and machine being born out of an illicit experiment by a distraught father to restore a dead child, it works much better. Because the experiment was born out of stolen technology (and highly illegal, mostly likely), it was probably kept secret by the Graystones and the Adams. The centurions could have been the face of the cylon revolt, while the ringleader and the genetic ancestor of the organic cylons remained unknown to the Twelve Colonies throughout the First Cylon War. And if Daniel's cylon "daughter", Zoe-R is the robotic Eve, it gives us the precedent of "downloading".
It also raises the question of whether there was also a robotic Adam (who need not necessarily have been male). And if Joseph Adams was so appalled with the digital clone of Tamara Adams, was that cylon was destroyed? Were records of her memories and DNA destroyed also? Or is there a bit of Tamara in all the cylons.
Other thoughts:
- Amanda Graystone, the "brilliant surgeon and unfaithful wife". Who do you suppose she was sleeping around with? Could it have been Joseph Adama? Does this make it possible that Zoe was actually Joseph's child? Caprica has been described in press releases as "Dallas in space", after all. Melodrama must not be counted out.
- Zoe's "religious fanatic" boyfriend, who got her involved with a suicide bombing. Was the boyfriend the bomber? The preview suggests that Zoe herself was carrying out the suicide bombing on his insistence. Perhaps knowledge of her immanent death was what prompted her to install her personality in a computer. What was the cause that the boyfriend involved her in? Does it have some relation to the civil rights movements that Joseph Adams was supporting in his capacity as a lawyer?
*
On a slightly unrelated note, writer Jane Espenson (Buffy, Battlestar Galactica) was recentedly interviewed by io9, where she revealed this piece of backstory about the humanoid cylons:
Not all Eights know everything the other Eights know. But during a download, memories are stored and can be accessed by a curious Cylon who knows how. Different models may differ on how widely memories are shared between different incarnations of the same model.
As liminalliz has pointed out, the Leoben model in particular seems to be characterised by a high degree of shared experience between individual copies of the model - as seen in this deleted scene from "A Measure of Salvation".