Caprica episode 7 review

Caprica does its usual trick of taking a couple of steps forward, and a couple of steps back…

7. The Imperfections Of Memory

Last week’s episode finally saw Caprica delivering on the promise that it had been diligently building up since the pilot episode. Not wishing to overegg the point, we finally got – in the threats from Vergis – some here and now drama to contend with. Up until that happened, the show had primarily been week after week of laying down foundations.

So, how did it fare this time round? Appreciating already that we still seem to need a two-minute recap at the start of every episode (for a show that’s not even ten episodes old!), things did seem to be bogged down again this week. Once more, it was juggling multiple narratives with differing levels of success.

The strongest remains Daniel Graystone again, who continues to resist the overtures of Vergis. Appreciating some haven’t warmed to the mob drama element of Caprica, I still rate it as the best bit, and Graystone is clearly shit out of options. He’s going to have to sell the Caprica Buccaneers to Vergis at some point, else the Cylon project is ultimately doomed. That was rammed home again with Vergis’ small appearance in this episode, where he dropped the bombshell that the stolen MCP wasn’t fully working when Daniel ‘acquired’ it.

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But whta’s this? Elsewhere, in Daniel’s lab there’s Philomon, who continues to build a relationship with Zoe. But for the purposes of this episode, he also has an idea as to how to get the MCP working. Time will tell how that one pans out. ‘Not well’ would be my guess.

The weakest link in the show remains Amanda Graystone, though, although she’s followed by the thus-far underwhelming Sister Clarice. Given that Clarice is the show’s main link to the terrorist group STO, she’s not coming across as a character with a sinister undercurrent at all. It feels like we need someone akin to Louise Fletcher from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest to pull this off, because right now, in a show where everything is being fleshed out to the nth degree, she’s the one that’s thus far been left off the list.

It’s fitting, therefore, that Amanda and Clarice have been lumped together, with the latter befriending the former to get the missing part of the avatar programme that she conveniently didn’t manage to nick last week. However, at least some meat was put on the bones of Amanda’s character. We get glimpses into her past that explain her erraticisms, but it still doesn’t cover, for me, why she does such dumb things from time to time.

Joseph Adama, meanwhile, finally tracks down the messenger from an episode or two back, and persuades him to join him in the V-world. It doesn’t end well, predictable, and Joseph is seemingly no closer to tracking Tamara, his daughter, down, while the aforementioned messenger gets blasted out. Joseph may yet have a way forward, thanks to the approach of someone offering help, though.

There was nothing inherently wrong with any of the above, but it all felt a bit like wading through treacle at times. I’ll give the show this, though: the effects are improving week by week. The look of New Cap City is just brilliant at the moment, and stretching the show’s budget impressively.

Caprica goes on a six month break after the next episode, so I’m expecting some kind of solid cliffhanger. But I was content with the ending to this episode, anyway, with Graystone looking into the eyes of his Cylon creation and uttering the word ‘Zoe’. Let’s hope Caprica picks things up right there next week.

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As for this week? It was a step backwards from the last episode for me, and continued to highlight the increasingly obvious pros and cons of the series.

Read our review of episode 6 here.