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| Bordan and friend in Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome |
««« Battlestar
Galactica: Blood and Chrome. Created by Michael Taylor & David Eick. Based
on the Syfy series Caprica and Battlestar Galactica. Available for
streaming at www.machinima.com, and
coming in February on Syfy.
After the demise of Caprica in 2010, there were ample grounds to doubt there was any
life left in Syfy’s rebooted Battlestar
Galactica. The mixed response to the original series’ finale, and the
failure of creator Ronald D. Moore’s attempt to reach beyond Galactica’s core fanboy audience with
his Caprica prequel, seemed to leave BSG without a plausible future or
prehistory. The franchise was, in a word, fracked.
Turns out series’ co-creator David
Eick isn’t done trying. The pilot for the new BSG: Blood and Chrome was released online last month, and is
available for steaming on Machinima.com and Youtube. Viewing it on a computer
screen, chopped up in ten-minute increments, isn’t the ideal experience, but
there are less rewarding ways to spend a couple of hours in front of a
computer.
Blood
and Chrome is, to mangle a phrase, a “middle origin story”—an account of
the early wartime career of the young man who would grow up to be
Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos). The setting is the thick of the
penultimate Cylon War, as human civilization seems destined to be conquered by
its silicon-based spawn. The young Adama (Luke Pasqualino) is fresh out of the
academy and eager to kill the “toasters”, but his career path takes a detour
when he’s not assigned to combat duty at all. Instead, he’s saddled with a
cargo run that seems designed to take him as far from the action as possible.
On board are his co-pilot “Coker” Fasjovik (Ben Cotton)—a short-timer with an
allergy to risks—and a quiet, spooky engineer (Lili Bordán) who is clearly
hoarding secrets.
Obviously, the mission
doesn’t stay far from the action for long. And suffice it to say that, as
prequels to hit shows go, Blood and
Chrome is a credible effort. Where Caprica
seemed to actively disdain the action-packed, high-stakes drama of the original
show, this one embraces the pressure-cooker intensity that gave BSG its addictive momentum. As for the
mystic “prophecy” of the original, the classic rock tunes playing in people’s
heads and hand-waving about “god’s
will”, some might think B&C
better for avoiding all that. It’s just fleeing and fighting here, folks, with just
a dash of that third “f—ing” thrown in for variety.
As several critics have
noted, though, this makes for a strange pilot for a projected series. The
education of the young, ingenuous Adama in the subtler arts of war is a
promising prospect, considering what a master of unconventional strategy he is
destined to become. But B&C is
tied up almost too neatly for its own good. It’s as if its makers deliberately
foreshortened its prospects. And sure enough, though the full pilot will air in
glorious HD on the Syfy channel this February, there are currently no plans to
make it an ongoing series.
In the end, B&C can’t avoid the usual prequels’
dilemma: when you give audiences the apocalypse in the original show, there’s
not much left for a follow-up except to fill in the blanks. Those blanks are
more thrilling here than in the soapish Caprica.
But we still know where all this is going.
© 2012 Nicholas Nicastro
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