Caprica What?!

... No, really. We spent about half of this two-hour premiere asking ourselves what was going on. Pilots are always like that, though, so fear not, clever readers! We'll be watching this week, too. (Okay, so we're a little late on the review. Blame it on the fact that we have a life. Also, we don't get paid for this. Show us the money and we'll talk about timely reviews.)

Okay, so first of all, props to whomever hired Ann Number One from Arrested Development to play main character Zoe Graystone. Props taken from whomever named her "Graystone," because we will always think, "By the power of Greyskull!" whenever we see her or her parents.

Now, you might be wondering about the premise of this show. Zoe, she of the Power of Greyskull, is all computer genius-y and involved in some kind of weird avatar world where everybody is TOTALLY FREAKIN' CRAZY and people are, like, shooting each other and sacrificing virgins, and engaging in all sorts of despicable behavior. But Zoe and her friends are trying to undermine that avatar world (we think?) because they believe in some sort of monotheistic - and, apparently, to everyone else on Caprica, crazy - religion. But then Zoe goes and gets herself blown up.

You may think the show ends there, but no! Because the two hours are not up yet, we discover that Zoe's avatar survived. Because she is a computer genius and created an avatar that couldn't die, we don't know, whatever. The point of all this is to get to the part about her dad. Her dad finds out about this surviving avatar, and because he's all computer genius-y, tries to make it into a Real Boy, like Pinocchio, except it's actually a girl. Duh. What, did you think this show was about wooden puppets?

Anyways, Zoe's dad makes friends with this guy from our mom's favorite show, Da Vinci's Inquest, which is some kind of Canadian answer to Law and Order, except with more of a serial plotline. So this dude, who is from a planet called Tauron, where apparently everyone eats dirt (no they don't), has just lost his wife and daughter. Zoe's dad is all like, I WILL BRING YOUR DAUGHTER BACK TO LIFE IN THE AVATAR WORLD! and then he does, but the daughter is like, um, no thank you, this is weird, because my REAL self is dead. So we're not really sure how this Tauron dude is going to continue to fit in the plot, but he got so much screen time during the pilot that we know he's important.

Finally, because we're sure you're ready for this recap to just end already - we know we are - the icing on the cake: Zoe's dad has created this robot that looks just like Megatron, only smaller, and he tries to transfer Zoe's avatar into it, but it doesn't work ... except it DOES!!!!!! The episode ends with Zoe's voice speaking out of the tiny - well, tiny by comparison, anyway - Megatron, asking her friend for help.

Um, hi. We love any pilot episode that ends with a girl-robot asking someone for help. Because it's ridiculous. And since you don't know us too well, internetz, we love ridiculous.

Our one complaint about this show is that their favorite swear word is apparently "frak." In case you're not an avid 30 Rock watcher like us, that's their favorite fake swear word. When someone calls someone else a "frakkin' dirt eater," we cannot hold it together. It sounds ridiculous - but not the good kind of ridiculous, the kind where you're like, really? You couldn't come up with a better swear word? Really. What the frak were you thinking?!

 

Images from Oh Mars, Share of Voice,  and Geek Sugar