by Kate Blake, editor and contributor Multipleverses
When it was announced that the creators of Battlestar Galactica would be creating a pre-quel to the iconic BSG story I was sceptical. How much suspense could there be in watching something which would result in an end-game that ultimately we all know? The answer to this question is that there is tons of suspense. The creators of the show along with the writing team and the actors have managed to achieve something I have never seen successfully done before- they have managed to develop a science fiction series with a virtual world enmeshed in the core storyline. Many series have tried this before. Chris Carter tried with the 1999 series Harsh Realm. He had several episodes of the X-Files which tackled the theme along with artificial intelligence without a lot of success. Virtual reality of course was the basis for several films- Lawnmower Man and the Matrix series come to mind. Star Trek used their holodeck for amusement but virtual reality is tricky. Caprica pulls it off with aplomb and it is key to the BSG mythos. During the last seasons of BSG we learned some interesting things about Cylons. They all have an ability to project. Projection is the building of a virtual environment around themselves for their enjoyment. This explains why their big empty ships are void of decoration but the inhabitants don’t mind. They use their internal programming to build a world they want to be in. Other Cylon characteristics related to programming- resurrection. In the first episode of Caprica Zoe Graystone- the head strong and brilliant daughter of Daniel Graystone a brilliant engineer and scientist- dies. Zoe is killed when her boyfriend pulls the trigger on a suicide bomb on a train carrying thousands of passengers. But this is not the end of Zoe. The brilliant teenager has taken her father’s virtual reality holoband technology and built a sophisticated program where she has built an avatar- a virtual representation of herself that is not only her image, but her memories and in essence her consciousness all downloaded into a sophisticated bit of code. When she dies- the essence of her lives in this avatar. When Daniel Graystone finds the avatar and the code is accidentally transfered to the prototype combat robot he is working on- she is resurrected as a machine and the first cylon as we will know them is born.
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