BSG and Caprica creators Ron Moore and David Eick, showrunner Jane Espenson, and actor Esai Morales, who plays Bill Adama's Tauron father Joseph, spoke at yesterday's Caprica/Battlestar Galactica panel about what we can expect from the show's first season.

If you were hoping the show would retain the topless nightclub shots from the DVD pilot, you're in for a bit of disappointment; the network demanded all nipple-y bits be digitally erased for the television premiere (officially announced today as January 22, 2010). But fans of Battlestar Galactica should still keep their eyes open for other visual goodies, says Eick:

The relationship between the two shows is very tangential, but there will be easter eggs for fans along the way. I think as fans of Battlestar watch Caprica there are occasional nods to Battlestar, to some knowledge that I think the fans will have.

For example, many fans noticed that the nightclub in the Caprica pilot suspiciously resembles the opera house shown throughout BSG:

Yes, as a matter of fact, we're going to some of the same sets. In fact, where Esai [Morales] and Trow have a conversation about what he has to do is the same place where we shot a lot of Helo and Sharon running for their lives in the first season.

At the same time, you won't see any of the twelve Cylon models we know and love, and we probably won't meet any other younger versions of our heroes, or their families, apart from young Willie Adama.

Although the look and feel of Caprica is a world away from the gritty Battlestar Galactica, the design team is the same, and Moore and Eick assure us that they'll maintain the same attention to detail, but to a different effect:

We wanted it to feel like it's a bit of a period piece, because it is a period piece for the Galactica. It's 58 years prior to Battlestar Galactica, so we wanted to have this feel like it's a different time within this particular universe. And yet we wanted to communicate different cultural identities, so we saw that the Taurons feel more like they're in the 1940s, with these hats, ties, and smoking clove cigarettes, the cars more vintage, and they sort of have that flavor throughout...it's a different style, an aesthetic different from seeing the contemporary Caprica during Battlestar.

And in the press roundtables after the panel, Moore told us that there was a deliberate decision to make Caprica look and feel as different from BSG as possible. That includes a lot more outdoor and street filming, as opposed to BSG's mainly interior shots. It's expensive and difficult to recreate Caprica in Vancouver on a regular basis, shooting one episode in seven days, but it's totally worth it, says Moore.

At the beginning of the panel, Moore listed Caprica's major theme as being mankind's relationship with advancing technology and the ethics of dealing with artificial intelligence. But as the panel went on, he, Eick, Espenson focused most of their discussion on the political and cultural conflicts between the humans. We'll apparently get to see more of the world-building around Colonial life that we glimpsed in the pilot. Says Moore:

At this point in time, the planets, the Colonies, are at war with each other periodically. It's not a time of war...the colonies themselves are a loose commonwealth, confederation. There is no president, no equivalent to Laura Roslin at this point in time. There's a prime minister of Caprica and there are heads of state on various other colonies.

There are tensions, reservations, biases. There's a certain racist thread that runs through some of the relationships in terms of Taurons and Capricans.

So does this mean we'll get to see what armed skirmishes look like between the individual Colonies? All signs point to yes. During the press roundtables after the panel, Moore told us that "the twelve colonies actually war with each other" during this time period. And instead of the Cylons being the main "other" that our heroes are threatened by, the humans treat each other as the exotic threat, because the Cylons don't really exist yet. Moore says science fiction can address thorny issues like racism, because people who would get offended by the discussion of such topics don't take the genre seriously enough to care.

Jane Espenson noted that this different situation for the colonies allows the writers and designers to differentiate between the different colonies through their dress, traditions, and — she said rather pointedly into the microphone — their tattoos, like the one on Sam Adama's neck.

The panel's moderator asked Esai Morales whether his character, Joseph Adama, has a tattoo as well:

I may not have done what my brother did, but I may have a tattoo here or there somewhere. But we can't give it all away here. We have to save some of it.

In the press roundtables, Espenson added that she's trying to go against real-world ethnic stereotypes in portraying the twelve colonies. The writers have a bible describing all twelve of these worlds, saying things like "This one is like India, except," followed by a big list of differences. Each of these twelve worlds could be its own TV series, and they're trying to make sure each planet has a varied climate and its own mix of cultures and classes, rather than having planets that are purely homogenous. One example of avoiding stereotypes is Sam Adama, Bill Adama's brother — he's a gangster, but he's self-educated and always speaks with perfect grammar. So he's a total thug, but without any of the usual cues that would make it easy for us to identify him as such.

I'm not sure just what I should think about Caprica yet, but Esai sounded very Adama-ish right then and there. A pot-smoking Adama, but an Adama nonetheless. It should be entertaining, at least, to see how this big futuristic city soap finds its stride without all the space battles of BSG.

[via UGO]

Battlestar Galacitca's prequel series, Caprica, has a giant pair of space boots to fill. Can it live up to the critical acclaim and rabid fandom that has built BSG up as the most relevant science fiction show on television?

At the Syfy upfronts, we were treated to a new trailer for the show, which showed off Caprica city in all its zooming monorail glory (and which reminded me a lot of Gotham's transportation system, pre-Wayne death, in Batman Begins).

The city is glimmering with a shiny gold hue, and Daniel Graystone (Eric Stolz) and his gorgeous wife play tennis. Meanwhile, Papa Adama (Morales) talks on the phone to his family. Then boom, the old monorail blows to bits, and we all assume that everyone that was on that train is dead. The trailer doesn't reveal too much, but it did showcase Caprica's glowing writing (or maps?) that move about on the folded parchment in front of our characters' eyes. I know that Caprica isn't supposed to be the Jetsons, but these little futuristic nods here and there are still pretty exciting, and remind us that we are, in fact, on another world.

Later, we caught up with Esai Morales, who is playing the troubled father of William Adama and asked him to talk, as much as he could, about the new series. (The pilot will be released as a DVD and on Itunes in April, nine months before the network premiere.)

When you found out you would be related to Admiral Adama did you practice the low voice at all?

[Lowers his voice] I thought about that [laughs]. They told me I didn't have to imitate him. I was prepared to have at least half of my genetic material compared to him. It's a thing that I really evolve into... I don't want to start right then and there with the gravity. I start this character very light, before certain things happen in the very early parts of the pilot. The stress that makes him so intense isn't there [yet]. So I start him different, and by the end of the first season, you'll see something of where he gets that intensity from. But Edward [James Olmos] has put his own stamp on this character. I think it would [be bad to] limit myself to his wonderful work - I have to find characteristics that make sense, that he then picks up.

What about Eric Stolz's character (Daniel Graystone)? You two work a lot together, would you say that you are his moral compass?

I think so. He's such a brilliant actor and such a brilliant intellectual, I watched him in the pilot, and I was just blown away. And Paula [Malcomson who plays Daniel's his wife Amanda Graystone] they are such a great couple. She is passion personified, and he is cool keen intellect. Not just intellect - you can tell that his character lives in his mind. My character lives in his heart. And I think that's what really makes these two interesting, the dynamics.

From the brief previews I've seen there are plenty of intense moments between you and Eric. What was it like filming these moments?

Believe me, the fireworks are there. And that's what I love about Ron, David and Remi, who created the show. [They] understand the special effects aren't that special, unless they come from a human context. For example if you see something blow up, it means nothing, unless you know what's in that explosions. The emotional effects are really what take this show off the ground.

Who has been your favorite character to go off on or argue with thus far?

I can't say. Really it's Eric and I, that's where the passion comes out. I love my brother Sasha Roiz [Sam Adama] - who technically looks nothing like me, so I guess mamma had a little affair. But we're brothers in spirit, and in heart. We share a heritage that he handles differently than I do. I want to go through the system while he skirts around the system.

What do you think is the big moral issue that Caprica struggles with, BSG deals with a lot of moral issues like whether or not robots are people, how is Caprica different?

I'm looking at this character more on the sense that, he doesn't know what Cylons are really, he doesn't know. By the end of the piece, obviously, I'm freaked out at what this could be, but my character is not as versed in the philosophical side of what is happening. He just knows [that] it ain't right, there is something wrong with this. They're not people, they're machines. And it [raises] the question: What are we? Are we just emotionally unbalanced machines?

Since you're on Caprica long before the big attack - the futuristic world that we never really get to see that much in BSG - what was your favorite futuristic gadget or machine that was used in Caprica that we should get excited about?

The first cylon. I was blown away. I don't want to give it away, but the ending is haunting. It's so funny because I finally saw the pilot and I was scared, because I'm afraid to watch my own work because all I see is where I missed my mark. But I was very impressed, the technology is amazing. I like the butler, the robot thing, that's cool. But it's so similar to how we're living today, it's so similar. It's eerily like today's world. I like the games [such as] Pyramid... Oddly enough, I saw something and I want to approach the writers about it, there's a game now called slam ball. It's basketball with three trampolines on the basket, that looked like somewhat to me like some sort of space-age game. I loved that.

While the Hollywood Reporter described Joseph as a, "deeply passionate man with a strong sense of justice, someone you wouldn't want as your enemy," we know him as the widowed father who lost both his wife and daughter in a suicide bombing. This DA with mob ties also agrees to help create a robot version of his lost daughter with the help of fellow bereaved father Daniel Graystone. I'm sure it will all only end in tears — cold cylon tears. [Hollywood Reporter]

Deadlocked, the sequel to 1991's Deadlock, stars Morales as a master thief who has to break Nia Peeples out of Playland. In Deadlock, every prisoner has a "partner" whose collar is locked to his/her own. If you go more than 100 yards away from your partner, your head goes splodey. But you don't know who your partner is, so it's safest to stay within the bounds of the prison, Happyland. In other words, all you need to do to escape Happyland is figure out who your partner is. Not surprisingly, that happens pretty quickly in Deadlock.

The sequel's approach, to have the collars that blow up your head if you get too far from a central transmitter, makes way more sense. It also gives Morales a purpose: to use his leet skills to hack his collar and Peebles'. Of course, he hacks their collars so they're locked to each other just like the collars in the original movie. So if Morales and Peebles get too far apart, they get headless. At one point, Morales have to skydive out of an exploding plane, and of course their parachutes drift just a little too far apart.

Deadlocked shows up on cable pretty often, and it's worth watching for all the zany my-head's-about-to-go-splat hijinks.