After six years of Battlestar Galactica, it’s hard to adjust to a different show with a whole new look and feel. But after the pilot and just two episodes, Caprica is starting to turn into something interesting in its own right.
After a passing comment in last week’s episode that was easy to miss, this week revealed one of the characters as both married and gay. What makes this different from most American TV with married gay characters is that he’s married to another man…
[SPOILER ALERT – Don’t go any further if you don’t want to know who it is…]
Sure, BSG brought us bisexual and gay characters before: Gina "Six" Inviere, Admiral Helena Cain, and Lieutenants Felix Gaeta and Louis Hoshi.
But if I may be honest for a minute, it seemed sort of late in the game to reveal the first lesbian couple after three seasons and the guys only as an Internet webisode five years into the story…
Some will argue that homosexuality is such a non-issue in BSG that there was no need to highlight same-sex relationships. I will gently challenge this as a heterosexist assumption, blind to the myriad hetero couplings (and hook-ups for that matter) highlighted in the show in the first three years. After all, what’s space drama without relationships and sex?
But with Caprica, we have models outside of the North American norm from the word go. In "Rebirth" we find a group marriage that appears to comprise at least four men and four women, plus their children.
In last night’s episode, "Reins of a Waterfall," we find that Uncle Sam Adama (Sasha Roiz) is not only a Tauron gangster/assassin, but also a husband with a handsome husband of his own (Larry, played by Julius Chapple).
Young William Adama didn’t bat an eye last week when his Uncle Sam was telling stories from his own childhood. While walking through Little Tauron, Sam explained to Willie that all the Tauron kids loved hanging out in the neighborhood as kids: "I’d be hopelessly trying to flirt with some guy. Meanwhile you’re dad would get a date with a sister."
This week’s interactions between Willie, Sam, and Larry were just as normal.
This feels a lot better than the way things were handled with BSG. Some might even call it progress. And there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that the Bill Adama that helps to lead the human race to its end was nurtured along the way by his gay Uncle Sam.
