4. Gravedancing

Okay, now that's a bit more like it.

For the last two episodes, Caprica has been sowing lots of seeds without really throwing much at us to wrap our heads around right now. Episode 4? That really began to address that with some style.

Before we got to the main highlight of the episode, we had a pre-credits explosion in an empty café, and suspicion inevitably heads in the direction of the STO. With that in mind, Sister Clarice gets a message out just in time so that the school locker of Keon has its explosives removed just before a police raid.

There's also the police search of the Graystone property covered, which we'd been promised in the last episode. The magic bullet wasn't there, but the ball has clearly been set rolling, and the investigation continues. No one seems to have come close to the idea that Zoe wasn't the bomber her mother thinks she was yet, though. It stands to be the great untruth at the heart of the Caprica story.

Then there was the Adama angle, most notably Joseph and his decision to order a hit - through his family contacts - on Daniel. He's given an opportunity to pull out of this, which he fails to do. It seems the contract was on, even though I was never really convinced that this was going to pan out quite as outlined.

But the centrepiece of the episode was the interview with Daniel and ultimately his wife Amanda on the Backtalk late night discussion programme. This was terrifically handled, exposing not just the fractions and disagreements between the Graystones, but also the necessity to keep public opinion on their side.

The balance of Daniel Graystone's life, and his family and business conflicts, was clearly thrown up. Thus, you had the build-up, and the coaching for Daniel, with his business people in the wings while his interview started to flounder. Eventually, Amanda stormed the show too, and Daniel announced he wasn't taking any more profits from the holoband. He also put out in the open the information that he'd been in contact with his dead daughter through an avatar version of her. That's bound to have ramifications.

It also certainly got Daniel and Amanda talking properly at last, but not before Joseph's hit nearly goes ahead. For the assassin, Sam Adama, takes Amanda for a ride, with Joseph desperately trying to call off the hit. Again, I never really bought for a second that Amanda was for the high jump, but we did get a scene where Sam let Joseph think that she was dead, which basically proved that Joseph had made the wrong call in ordering the assassination in the first place. Granted, I don't have one eye on how the storyline for the season pans out, but I wonder if Caprica should have taken the unpredictable turn here and had Amanda killed. Can you imagine how the tensions between the Adamas and Graystones would be ramped up then?

As it was, the tease didn't go on for very long at all, before Sam told Joseph the truth, and basically let him off the hook for the time being.

The episode did give us some time with Zoe, and Lacy too had a bit of minor work to do, but their roles were minor here. More beefed up was the character of Joseph Adama's mother-in-law, playing utterly against the idea of the friendly granny by declaring that she could happily kill Amanda Graystone with her bare hands. We believe her, too.

Still, this was very much a Graystone episode, and I really quite enjoyed it. I'm not utterly convinced that Caprica has yet managed to resolve its issues of balance between present and future storytelling, but I did enjoy the central narrative mechanic of the talk show, and having something of that ilk to hang the episode around certainly did the show a favour.

We're still some way from firing on all cylinders, though...

Read our review of episode 3 here.