A quick review of last night's "Caprica" coming up just as soon as I get a bigger gun... Last week's episode was the first hour of the series to really feel like a soap opera in the type of stories it was telling. Last night's "The Imperfections of Memory," meanwhile, was the first episode to feel like a soap opera in terms of its pacing. The plots moved, but very, verrrrry slowly. The episode was so flat that many of the act-out moments (which are, by design, supposed to be big and dramatic so you'll want to stick around through the commercials) were almost comical in how low-key they were (Daniel trying to puzzle out a technical problem, for instance).
Because of that, and because so much time was spent on Sister Clarice, a character who's been a colorless disappointment so far(*), this was the first time I've felt actually impatient with the series. I like the world and many of the characters, but when you're doing a pure serial (as opposed to a show with serial elements where each episode is still supposed to stand on its own), there has to be more forward momentum and urgency than I feel like we got last night.
(*) I've recently been going back through the podcast commentaries David Eick has been doing for each episode. In one of the early ones, he talks about how Clarice was originally conceived as more of a hybrid of villain and comic relief, ala Gaius Baltar on "BSG," but it was so clearly not working that they had to reshoot a lot of Polly Walker's material. Whether it's a bad match of actress and character, or the creative team not having a clear enough replacement plan once their original conception turned out to be a mistake, Clarice remains the character whose scenes most often grind the show to a halt for me.
Only two episodes left of the initial winter run. What did everybody else think?
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