rogdodge75

[rogdodge75]

Love this Durham building set against a blue sky. #lovedurm

[rogdodge75]

Beautiful Image

Lemy

[rogdodge75]

Sequels.  Received wisdom is that they’re hit and miss.  For every Godfather Part II there’s a Godfather Part III, for every excellent and even numbered Star Trek movie, there’s an appallingly bad odd numbered one (until Star Trek: Nemesis – i.e. number 10 – came along and rained all over that particular galactic parade), and for every Goldfinger, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, GoldenEye or Casino Royale there’s, well, all the others.*  So making a sequel or a follow-up is a mug’s game and, chances are, you’re on a hiding to nothing.  Unless you’re Kate Bush, that is, and your second album is a handful of songs taken from the same cache of 200 or so you drew from for your first crazily successful and mad-as-a-box-of-frizzy-permed-frogs album.  Though, to be fair, album number two somewhat over-egged the Gothic element.  See Exhibit A above, m’lud…

The reason I’m waffling on about sequels and follow-ups isn’t just because this is Entify Engine’s second blog post, it’s because one of my current projects is an article on the much-derided TV programme Caprica, the short-lived spin-off of the critically-lauded Battlestar Galactica – commonly regarded as a Science Fiction television show so brilliant that even people who hate Science Fiction television shows loved it (The Guardian put it at Number 25 of the top 50 Television Dramas of All Time).  Although technically a prequel, rather than a sequel, Caprica shouldered the same burden as all follow-ups, no matter the media or the art form: that being the need the give the cultural consumer more of the same of what they liked about the original, whilst also offering something different enough to avoid accusations of being a straight copy and, therefore, pointless.

Ultimately, Caprica committed the cardinal sin of being too different.  Whereas Battlestar Galactica foregrounded the militaristic aspects of its narrative, featuring spectacular battles in space and gritty combat scenes, Caprica centered on the domestic lives of its characters, focusing primarily on the emotional fall-out of the death of teenage daughters from two separate families in a terrorist attack. The impetus of the show’s narrative being the Graystone and Adama families’ need to manage their grief and to come to terms with the traumatic event that haunts them.  Which ardent Science Fiction nerd could resist such a thrill-a-minute premise, right?  Not surprisingly, most of them, as it turned out.  Which is a real shame because, throughout its one solitary season, Caprica kept getting better and better, until it approached a point of narrative and emotional complexity that Battlestar Galactica took twice as long to arrive at.

Caprica’s untapped potential makes me sad every time I write about it (and this article I’m writing represents the second time I’ve found myself engaging with it in an academic context).  It seems unfair that a programme that tried to do something really different with the Science Fiction genre and which expanded on the fascinating mythology of the Battlestar Galactica universe in such an unexpected way appears destined to be remembered as just a footnote in the history of its parent show.  This feels especially unjust in light of the recent announcement of the Blade Runner sequel’s official title and release date.  The official Blade Runner Facebook page is now the official Blade Runner 2049 page.  This impromptu renaming was enough to send both myself and my “aca-wife” Sophie into paroxysms of rage.  True, the movie isn’t out for another year so we’ve not seen even a frame of footage yet.  But Ridley Scott’s tinkering with that other beautiful Science Fiction behemoth he helped birth (giving the Alien franchise an unnecessary prequel in the form of the ludicrous Prometheus) does not bode well.  Maybe we’re wrong to wig out the way we did, or maybe we’re right to be weary.  I guess we’ll find out soon enough.

Sequels.  They’re just so hit and miss, aren’t they?

*This may sound harsh but, trust me, I recently watched every (canonical) Bond movie from Dr No to Spectre.  That’s 24 movies.  And most of them are rubbish.