I don’t think anything here will be a spoiler as we see it within minutes of the pilot episode, I’m up to episode 13 now.
On Caprica they seem to be developing “resurrection tech” like we saw on BSG, however Caprica’s version is really nothing like it. In BSG it somehow involved “downloading” memories from the brains of the synthetic humanoid cylons into a new vat grown identical body, it was like taking a snapshot of a brain’s connections and then replicating it in a new brain so it was like the person waking up in a brand new body.
In Caprica it involves instead creating an impersonator program from a person’s online message board posting, IMs, photos, and journal entries. A person’s actual chemical memories are never accessed, instead as said info on them is used to predict their personality.
Zoey is treated like the Graystone’s dead daughter of the same name, by everyone despite the fact. In fact in episode 13 Graystone’s company seems ready to bring this to market(recreating the dead based on writings they left behind) but he himself is creating one of these avatars and is getting frustrated as he says “you’re just reciting journal entries, you don’t have any original thoughts or real memories” which is exactly correct. I can’t believe no one ever points out this is nonsense, its not resurrection tech at all its just tricks to replicate a best guess at personality.
Is this addressed by the end 5 episodes away or did they forget that BSG style rez tech was totally different?
I haven’t seen Caprica, but wasn’t the resurrection tech in BSG brought to the Cylons by the Final Five from Earth? So it would make sense for it to be different.
Few things, part of the point was Graystone’s tech didn’t work as well as Zoe’s that’s why he was so bitchy about it just reciting things. Her’s had some unknown breakthru that took all that same crap yet some how connected the dots and came up with a realistic version of the person, silly as that notion is.
Second, Cylons resurrecting in BSG is a different thing, as they’re AI’s resurrecting in new bodies, not humans being recreated as avatars (which sometimes get placed into bodies) as Zoe’s program did. For Cylons it’s pretty reasonable to assume a straight info dump was going on.
For all the glitz about resurrection and all that, it’s really more of an explanation for why Cylons have monotheistic religion than for why skinjobs keep coming back after they get fragged.
I thought one of the more interesting things about BSG was how resurrected skinjobs who had suffered particularly nasty deaths suffered from PTSD after they returned. Like the 6 who had been pushed into a sewage treatment tank and drowned in shit, or the Cavill who had been shot & left to die slowly by rebels on New Caprica.
Not really. First, we have to accept the premise that Zoe is a computer programming genius who can run rings around her father. Second, Zoe created an avatar of herself while she was still alive. It wasn’t a random person and it wasn’t just a few files from blogs she uploaded. She knew when the avatar’s personality was off and had the time to tweak the programming to her satisfaction. Or, at least, as satisfied as she could be before she was blown up.
Part of the reason this programming didn’t work for anyone else is that it wasn’t meant to. It was a program created by Zoe, for Zoe, that only Zoe could control.