After the last frames of Battlestar Galactica flickered across our TV screens a few weeks back, fans of the show consoled themselves with the promise of two upcoming projects: the spin-off series Caprica and the made-for-TV movie, The Plan (set to air in June). Well, today we get access to our first taste of the former. While the Caprica series will not air until 2010, what is in essence the pilot episode of the show is being released on DVD and being made available for digital download now.

Caprica is set in the same world as Battlestar Galactica: The loyal will notice that the title is the name of the planet that many BSG characters had ties to. However, this show takes place 50 years before the Cylon attack that kick-started the former series. Gone are all of our familiar characters; the only one remaining is Edward James Olmos’s William Adama, except here he’s 11 years old and a far cry from the crusty Admiral we all came to adore. Gone is the space travel. Caprica has its feet firmly planted on the soil of its titular planet. The most notable relics from its sister series are a religious conflict between the polytheistic majority and the monotheistic minority and the birth of the first Cylon technology. But while Caprica shows us a world with shiny virtual reality technology and robot butlers, it turns out that, compared to its predecessor, it’s much more soap opera than sci-fi.

The plot of this roughly 90-minute TV movie follows the intersection of two families on Caprica, the Adams (née Adama) and Graystones. In the first act, a terrorist explosion blows up a train carrying Zoe Graystone (Alessandra Torresani) and Tamara and Shannon Adams (Genevieve Buechner and Anna Galvin). The patriarchs of these two families, Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz) and Joe Adams (Esai Morales), meet in the wake of the accident and share an afternoon over coffee and cigarettes. The two come from very different worlds. Daniel is an extremely well-off technology mogul who’s in the middle of a government contract to create what will eventually become the Cylons. Joe is a mob lawyer, tasked with such dirty tasks as bribing and threatening judges. Their relationship becomes more complex when Daniel discovers that his daughter, herself quite the technology wiz, succeeded in creating a perfect digital copy of herself before her death. With this discovery, Daniel entertains the concept of using Zoe’s creation to give both of their daughters a second chance at life.

Caprica’s affiliation with Battlestar Galactica is both a blessing and a curse. This connection will certainly ensure that the show will begin with a wider and more dedicated audience than most new shows can hope for, but it also means that it has ridiculously high expectations to live up to. Fans of BSG should prepare themselves: Caprica will disappoint you. Compared to the worldwide annihilation that occurred in the opening miniseries of BSG, Caprica’s train explosion is small potatoes and doesn’t bring with it nearly the amount of dramatic tension. Additionally, the characters here are incredibly flat. Daniel and Joe are both stoic guys, and while that makes perfect sense within the context of the story, it means that we, as an audience, are straining for someone to relate to. Zoe is probably the most well-developed character, but she’s got so much annoyingly petulant teenager in her that sometimes I just wanted to slap her.

As a standalone TV movie, Caprica is adequate. It introduces some interesting ideas, and there’s certainly plenty of drama established by the losses both families face. As a pilot, though, it fails on the most important counts. After watching Caprica, I didn’t feel like I had any idea what to expect from future episodes of this show. Many concepts are introduced from the religious conflict to the racial tensions to Daniel’s quest to create artificial life, but there is no clear goal for these characters and not enough tension to really drive things forward. There are actually a couple of deleted scenes on the DVD that seem like they would have added some much-needed conflict and suspense to the story and I can’t help but wonder if their removal from the final product means that they will pop up in future episodes of the show or if they’ll just be dropped entirely. When Caprica finally airs in 2010, I’m not entirely sure what it is I’ll be tuning in to watch. I’m sure that Sci-Fi released this film now to capitalize on BSG’s popularity while it was still fresh in our minds, but I just don’t think there’s enough here to whet the audience’s appetite for the next year. The loyal, of which I count myself a part, will certainly still be there to watch the series premiere next year, but then, we would’ve been there with or without this early release. If they’re looking to open Caprica up to a wider audience, or plan to keep the the BSG folk around for awhile, they definitely have some improvements to make.