Ahead of the much anticipated debut of Battlestar Galactica’s offshoot, Caprica, SyFy has created an immersive web experience to heighten the buzz. Cleverly presented as a newspaper styled blog, The Caprican delivers all the news worth printing from the 12 colonies. Of course, it’s all done with a very Caprican slant. Growing threats of monotheism and militant religious activists are downplayed. Caprica’s premier magnet school, Athena Academy, gets glowing coverage of its record-setting enrollment. And the C-Bucs latest score in a disappointing season of Pyramid defeats is prominently displayed on the front page. For earthbound agencies hoping to create an online news presence, The Caprican offers a worthy role model: a nice balance of photographs and content, user-friendly design, and plenty of whitespace.

But the most compelling aspect of the site is the social commentary that’s beginning to form around the articles. Those of you familiar with Battlestar’s central themes have already spooled your FTL drives up and jumped ahead. For the less invested among you a summary will suffice.

Cylons, the cybernetic antagonists of the series were created by man. Through scientific hokery pokery they evolved into sentient beings that have the ability to “download” their memories and experiences into a cloned body upon their death. Think reincarnation. Along the way, Cylons have developed a monotheistic philosophy that is distinctly at odds with the beliefs of much of the 12 colonies’ population. The show Caprica predates the reimagined Battlestar Galactica by about 50 years. It answers many questions that BSG’s end-of-series movie didn’t, and it poses others.

The parallels between Caprica’s religious problems and issues we face earthside are undeniable. The mythical planet’s residents share our theistic views. Monotheist, polytheist, atheist and agnostic alike have to reconcile their differences or learn to live with the occasional suicide bombing or bout of ethnic cleansing. It’s an unsavory prospect in either world.

If one chooses to infer real world meaning from the eager scribblings of Caprican’s readers, then recent post-article comments at the site keenly reflect how religion divides us as much as it unites us. Through a fisheye lens, this microcosm of dedicated fans provides an invaluable research tool for SyFy in general and Caprica’s producers specifically. The site’s Terms of Service leave no doubt the network understands the crowdsourcing potential for future plot material.

With the success of 2012 and the insatiable interest in apocalyptic themes (Book of Eli anyone?), it’s easy to accuse SyFy of simply profiting from a current entertainment trend. But with Battlestar Galactica we’ve seen producers Ron Moore and David Eickman handle religion, rape, honor, betrayal and loss with both fierceness and finesse. If the movie premiere of Caprica is an indication, the acting will be on par with if not better than BSG.

The beginning of the year always means one thing to me: Prepare for the onslaught of Black History Month and the Martin Luther King holiday. I don’t mean to make it sound like an onerous duty, but comparisons between these two events and the commercialization of Christmas are valid. Nonetheless, it’s necessary to think about how far we’ve come and remember some of our leaders who were felled while clearcutting the path to civil rights. I recently had that opportunity while shooting a weekly news show.

Brian Bowman, Public Affairs Officer for Wilson, NC interviewed Burk Uzzle, local resident and youngest Life magazine photographer ever hired. Besides having an eye for absolutely stunning compositions, Uzzle was present after Dr. Martin Luther King’s assasination and at his funeral. One of the photographs he took of Dr. King lying in repose graced the cover of Newsweek. Now, he has decided to show 20 previously unpublished photographs surrounding that moment in history at the Arts Council of Wilson in Wilson, NC.

An excerpt of Bowman’s interview with Mr. Uzzle is airing in this week’s city-produced news show, Around Town. A longer version of the interview is also available on Wilson’s Vimeo channel. If you happen to be in Wilson this month, the Arts Council is exhibiting the photos free of charge until
February 6.

Around Town, Week of January 13, 2010 from City of Wilson, NC on Vimeo.

Woefully behind the times, I just watched the SyFy premiere of Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. I loved it, even though the objective viewer in me had to admit the movie was little more than a hand-stitched quilt of memories created to keep fans invested in the BSG franchise. I still mourn the death of the show. And I marvel at how other shows, (Scrubs for instance) can be born, syndicated, killed, resurrected, killed again, and then reborn on a different network. What a perfect example of Cylon regeneration!

If you’re as slow as I am and haven’t seen The Plan yet, I won’t spoil it for you. But I will leave you with a beautiful quote from the movie as emoted by #1 (Dean Stockwell):

I don’t want to be human! I want to see gamma rays. I want to hear X-rays and I… I wanna… I wanna smell dark matter. I wanna reach out with something other than these prehensile paws… and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine. And I could know much more.