Headscratchers / Caprica

• So, apparently, some of the guys at Graystone Industries thought it would be a good idea to make an elaborate, realistic CGI model of Daniel's head and realistically synthesize his voice just for a TV commercial, without Daniel's permission or knowledge, when it would have been much easier, quicker, cheaper, and less ethically dubious to just tell Daniel about the commercial and ask him to appear in it, which is what he thinks they should have done.
  • Given how realistic the V-World looks, this level of CGI probably isn't at all difficult for them. In the first episode Adama was able to scan in his own image for use in V-World pretty much instantly.
  • Daniel doesn't answer the phone or respond to messages, even from his right-hand man, Xander. Xander complains about this constantly, including on this occasion. How else can the company complete the ad?
  • Remember we're talking about the company that created the holoband and user appearance doesn't seem to be unique to the holoband - it must be stored somewhere. The company may have used Graystone's image and then animated it, similar to the puppet that greated Joseph Adama when he first got his band. Difference here is that the advertisement was supposed to be realistically portrayed, rather than just a bot with pre-programmed speech patterns.
• What happened to Tamara-A?
  • Remember Clarice talking about the one who would lead the Cylons to rebellion? Maybe that's who she meant. I thought it was Cavil (since he's number one), but I think the timeline doesn't fit that.
  • According to Kevin Murphy, she became the basis for Number Eight. Zoe was the basis for Number Six.
• So how did the Cylons become sentient? Was it anything to do with Daniel Greystone, Thomas Vergis or Zoe-A at all? Did the other models pick up some kind of spark of intelligence from Zoe-A, or did they just evolve intelligence on their own (with a bit of help from the OTG)? And did they follow Lacy Rand because of her connection to Zoe-A or because of her devotion to the OTG?
  • I think it was some spark of Zoe-A. That's why they instinctively place Lacy as the highest authority. Note when she orders them "raise your right arm...if you're Zoe." After some hesitation, they all do it, insinuating that there's something in them that's still Zoe, but on a "subconscious" level.
  • Messenger Zoe seemed to be guiding the real Zoe through the process of creating an artificial intelligence. This implies that her avatar program was purpose-built to meet the expectations of the OTG and repeat the cycle of Human/Cylon conflict. The Cylons became sentient because that was exactly what the OTG wanted them to become. "Intelligent Design" so to speak.
• What happened to the original Blessed Mother?
  • It seems to be strongly implied that when Lacy says "there's work to be done," activating the Cylon centurions, she orders them to kill everyone else, including the Blessed Mother. We see her as the next Blessed Mother in the last episode.
  • According to Kevin Murphy, she's still alive, and makes an awkward marriage of convenience with Daniel against Clarice and Lacy's awkward marriage of convenience, leading to Zoe/Daniel problems.
• Why does Clarice essentially turn against her own species in the epilogue?
  • Maybe she's mad they won't convert to her religion, and uses the Cylons (who thwarted her attempt to bomb the stadium) to undermine them.
  • I always got the impression that Clarice genuinely believed she was doing her god's work. If she believed that god wanted her to side with the Cylons then she would, and based on the Battlestar Galactica finale the Cylon god is real and is fond of needlessly overcomplicated plans that involve genocide. We would probably have learned more about the details if the show had been renewed for a second season.
  • It could be that when she talked about the Cylon's makers being overthrown, she did not mean humanity generally. Perhaps she meant the actual researchers, Graystone Industries or even the Graystone family in particular, who must at the end of the season be among her greatest enemies. It looks like we won't get any more context for her sermon now.
  • I figured the Cylons were already susceptible to the religion due to the ancestral spark of Zoe-A's mind, and Clarice either figured this out or just picked up on it. This presumably after she encountered increasing difficulty finding human followers.
  • After the attempt to blow up the stadium, it is likely that public sympathy for the Monotheists was at an all time low. Clarice would therefore have trouble finding human recruits for the STO. Also, it was likely that she was trying to subvert Lacy, for whom the Cylons formed a power base to protect her in the cutthroat world of the Monad church and specifically kept her from getting killed by one of Clarice's cronies. Things may have just gotten out of hand once the Cylons decided that they were as worthy in "God's" eyes as humans, and they stopped listening to Lacy, Clarice or anyone else.
• What happened to the Zoe Cylon that we see her parents create in the last few seconds? It's not present in BSG, and there's no evidence of its' existence - all the Cylon models are accounted for there.
  • The question really, is, what happens to the entity termed 'Zoe-A' that exists in V-world, in the Centurion robot and later in the life-like skin-job android? This is the consciousness inhabiting the skin-job android, and though that body may have been destroyed, it is clear from Caprica that Zoe-A can survive the destruction of a robot body by returning to V-world (although how she does this is not shown). V-world seems to have been shut down at some point, presumably in the course of the First Cylon War, and thus she may not have been able to save herself after a certain point if her body were destroyed.
  • One interpretation of the scene where Clarice is preaching to the Centurions and an image of Zoe Greystone is present, is that this is Zoe-A, who at some point turns against humanity and allies herself with the Centurions, who apparently received some spark of consciousness from her. She may therefore be the 'one' who Clarice prohesies will lead the Cylons into war and could have perished in that same war.
  • Presumably, it gets destroyed in one of the wars, perhaps leaving rumors, but no technical specifications, among the Cylons that causes them to ask the Final 5 to help them replicate the technology.
• Why does Clarice never seem to have any actual work to do? She is not only a headmistress, but an Athenian cleric, and yet later in the series you would be forgiven for failing to remember these two facts.
  • Maybe it was during the summer holidays. She wouldn't need to be at the school so much when no pupils were there.
• How does V-World evolve into the state in BSG, wherein the humans are very cautious of networking computers (and thus, cyberspace) while the human model Cylons have projection and resurrection, but otherwise seem not to exist, or at least have experiences, when they are not housed in flesh-and-blood bodies? And how does this technology co-exist with the Thirteenth Tribe technology of resurrection and clones which is brought by the Final Five?
  • The human distrust of computers comes from the Cylon War; at the time Caprica was set, the humans had never experienced a Turned Against Their Masters situation and had no reason to worry about the likes of V-World. As for the Cylons, the Final Five made a big deal about making them as human as possible so allowing them to exist without physical bodies is the sort of thing they would try to avoid.
  • Do we know for sure that V-World didn't exist in some form in the Colonies still? Galactica didn't have her computers networked as a tradition after the First Cylon War and it's a military vessel so there's no reason for it to have access to such a system and the infrastructure for it was destroyed with the Colonies. It may very well exist, just in a fashion we were never able to see used.
    • V-World is mentioned in Blood & Chrome; Beka says that her late husband's image is being used for recruitment programs there.
• I realize this can border on Complaining About Shows You Don't Like, but as a fan of the show, I have to wonder why so many of my fellow fans are so quick to say that Viewers Are Morons after the show's cancellation. Not only was it a very different show than BSG, BSG was a re-imagining of a well-known show that was actually really good. I respect the show and the story it presented, but I always watched the episodes knowing the show wasn't going to last.
  • Agreed, Caprica was always going to have a bit of a hard time getting an audience - as a spin-off, people who didn't watch or didn't like Battlestar Galactica would be wary, but given the massive change in tone and setting there was no guarantee of keeping existing fans.
• First, why does Clarice keep her job as Athenian priestess while being a covert Christian, sorry, follower of the One True (cough) God? RDM's clumsy attempts to paint polytheists as being fanatical intolerant bigots like Christians? Why not just tender her resignation or some BS excuse?. Then she could plant bombs full-time. Maybe being a fanatic bigot doesn't pay well, hard to say. Also, for being an Athenian, the school she nominally works in sure looks an awful lot like a British boarding school. Barely anything about her or her school even hints at classical religion.
  • It puts her in position to recruit disenfranchised teenagers to the cause.
  • It's a cover story.
    • Exactly. She was a monotheist before she was an Athenian priest. As for the school not seeming very religious, it's explicitly a modern, tolerant school despite having clergy on the staff and being nominally dedicated to Athena.
    • In fact, it's explicitly a modern, tolerant school because it's dedicated to Athena.
• How does Clarice get away with it at all? Seriously, by the end of the series it is public knowledge that several Athenian Academy students and alumni were STO terrorists. Even with STO plants like Director Singh at the GDD stonewalling investigations, this is such a blatantly obvious clue that you would expect the media and general public to start asking questions, and for the resulting demand for investigations going directly over Singh's head.
  • Where does "by the end of the series" come into it? By the end of the series, it's public knowledge that Clarice herself is an STO terrorist. Before that, the only publicly known STO person from the academy is Zoey Graystone, and Agent Duram investigates Clarice through Amanda for exactly that reason.
• HOW THE FUCK DO COMPUTERS WORK IN THIS DAMN SERIES. I mean seriously. These holoband rooms are server-based systems, right? Well — then they have to be run on servers. If I were the host of New Cap City, I wouldn't be much happy with some damn exploit happening and changing the entire fabric of the game, recasting it in their own image. Server = Off. No more New Cap City. There goes that entire plot line. Well, about something else. How the hell does the holoband server work? Does the damn thing give root access to the hardware it's running on? Because that sure as hell seems like it. Exploding computers in the last episode, locked out backdoors (which, because backdoors are hard coded, cannot actually be closed), whatever. Daniel Greystone must be really damn stupid if he's going to be building software which in of itself allows hackers to blow your rig. I mean seriously. In a modern processor, you'd have to shut down the temperature controllers, bust the fan systems, and overclock to the max to get anything like in "Apotheosis". You're telling me that the holoband server allows access to areas of the computer which the damn OS API can't access? No. Fucking. Way. No wonder the Cylons hack Colonial computers in seconds. They're all built stupid.
  • Decades of Star Trek has led many people to not only take Explosive Instrumentation for granted, but to actually regard it as a given. If a piece of technology is supposedly more advanced than real world tech, then it should apparently have more explosive potential than an artillery shell! As for the servers that V-World (including New Cap City) run on, it would appear that they are not closely supervised by administrators. Even Daniel was shocked by some of the things he saw in the V-World club! However, since the source code for V-World was written by Graystone programmers, certain rules may apply to all virtual environments running on the platform. For example, Zoe and Tamara's virtual immortality and reality warping powers could be a function of their avatars having OS-level administrator privileges on all V-World systems. After all, the avatar program was written by Zoe, who was the daughter of the guy who invented, and owned, the intellectual property. Creating an artificial intelligence inside the network in and of itself probably required that she employ a whole range of proprietary programming tricks exploiting her access to the source code. Less-privileged programmers designing virtual environments on the platform were probably constrained by many restrictions that Zoe had the means to bypass.
• If group marriage was legal and accepted on Caprica, why did we have to be subjected to the Dee/Lee/Kara/Sam Love Dodecahedron in Season 3 of the parent show? Why didn't the four of them just all get married and spare us the headache?
  • In Real Life, polyamory has gone through periods where it was acceptable followed by periods where it wasn't. Further, while no one outright condemns the polyamorus in Caprica, it's also clear that it's unusual. BSG is decades after Caprica, and wars have a tendency to cause people to revert to conservative attitudes. For better or worse, we are less likely to be accepting and forgiving when faced with death.

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