SyFy has announced ten short webisodes totaling about one hundred minutes of story featuring a young Bill Adama’s adventures during the First Cylon War will hit the channel's website.The webisodes may serve as a backdoor pilot to a series about the First Cylon War, which is what fans wanted Caprica to be in the first place. Several points make me think Blood & Chrome is a way of testig the waters for a change to Caprica. First, SyFy has delayed the second half of Caprica‘s first season until January. Second, Ronald D. Moore has expressed cautious optimism there will even be a second season, but is uncertain as late as last weekend. Finally, Moore went on record last spring there was not enough story to maintain Caprica original Dallas with Robots premise.
Add these three points together. I think you will draw the conclusion either Caprica is going to shift gears towards the First Cylon War story or it is goig to be canned in favor of a Blood & Chrome series that. I will concede we may wind up with both, but somehow, I doubt SyFy is going to go for two series running simultaneously when one is a prequel to the other.
I like Caprica, but I note that I did not get upset to learn its return was going to be postponed from October to January. There is no particular sense of anticipation on my part. It is just a show I am willing to watch. Talk about killing with faint praise. Like may fans, I was hoping for a more action oriented war story. Blood & Chrome sounds like a course correction n that direction.
The thing is that after reviewing every episode of Deep Space Nine and seeing how it handled the Dominion War story, I have a new perspective o aseries focusing o the duration of a single conflict throughout its run. I liked the Dominion War arc. I think it is the best Trek ever featured, but it was not without its flaws. Somewhere I the fourth ad fifth seasons, the story got lost in the Klingon-Federation War which never really materialized to any level of satisfaction. There was a lot of pointless meandering before getting back on track for the final two seasons to feature the war nearly exclusively. At that point, it felt overwhelming to cram so much ito so little time.
Babylon 5 did a fairly good job of running a huge war story through a season and a half, but the bookend seasons had a lot of dud stories with little contribution to the overall arc.
These war stories were told within a single series. What is going to happen with two series potentially dovetailing to tell parts of one story? What changes would Caprica have to make to its original arc? How much lead up would Blood & Chrome have to have for its story to be effective? Can either or both do it better than Deep Space Nine or Babylon 5? These questions have tempered my enthusiasm in Battlestar Galactica spin offs.
