Caprica, "Rebirth": She, robot

I said some general thoughts about "Caprica" in this morning's column, so a few more specific ones on the second episode coming up just as soon as I let the old subconscious find the answers...

"Do I look male to you?" -Zoe
"Yeah." -Lacy
"Frak." -Zoe

"Caprica" is about a whole lot of things, but at its center, it's about a teenage girl (or a digital facsimile of her) who's been turned into a giant metal killing machine. It's a misunderstood monster story.

And if there was a point in the three episodes I've seen (including the pilot and next week's) where I knew I was in with this series for a while, it was when I saw the visual device in which half the time we see the Cylon body, and half the time we see Zoe (still dressed for the holo-band rave). Something about the image of Alessandra Torresani being treated like another frakking toaster cut to the heart of the artificial intelligence issue. (It's also, at times, very funny, in a way the grim-by-design "BSG" very rarely allowed itself to be.)

(On the other hand, given the virulent hatred many "BSG" fans had towards the theological portions of that show's finale, I wonder how people will react to the idea of this creature as a "trinity" - part Zoe, part avatar, part robot - given how overt the parallel is to Christianity.)

"Rebirth" was mainly about dealing with the aftermath of the terrorist bombing, of Daniel and Joe's falling-out, but it also did a lot more world-building in its depiction of Little Tauron, and Sister Clarice's polygamous family (including Scott Porter from "Friday Night Lights" as one of her husbands), and I liked a lot of the little touches like seeing the fans at the Pyramid game place both hands over their heart before the anthem played.

And at the end, right before Bear McCreary got to dust off the drums from the "BSG" theme song, Amanda Graystone (wracked with guilt and grief and mania) detonated a rhetorical bomb at the memorial by announcing (incorrectly) that Zoe was responsible for what happened on the train. That was a powerful moment, but it was also preceded by that awkward flashback montage of events from earlier in the episode, and all I could think about was David Simon ranting about how HBO made him put something similar at the end of "The Wire" pilot because they didn't yet trust the intelligence of his audience. Jane Espenson and the rest of the "Caprica" gang have been around the block a while, so they should know what their target audience can and can't figure out on their own by now, and I'm hoping that's the last we'll see of a narrative shortcut like that.

Overall, though, I was very pleased, after waiting months to see what came after the pilot on DVD.

What did everybody else think?