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Until recently, were anyone to ask me what I considered to be the best current television show, I'd be hard pressed to choose between my golden boy Lost and the Battlestar Galactica remake. So with Galactica completed and sailing off into the sunset, does that mean Lost has no competition for my affections? Not if Ron Moore has anything to say about it.

Caprica is Moore's prequel to Battlestar Galactica. Set 58 years prior to the apocalyptic cylon attack on the 12 colonies, Caprica tells the tale of the creation of the cylons, and shows us a window into Caprican life.

As is the curse of any prequel, Caprica runs the risk of being a bit of a head-trip. Rather than going on an emotional ride into the unknown, we know where things are headed, so it has the potential to be an intellectual exercise of watching pieces fall into place. No doubt there can be some thrill in that, as we see how differently we get to point A than we had imagined. Nevertheless, it's still the experience of watching prophecy fulfilled.

The way around this potential emotional blandness is, as with storytelling of any stripe, all in the characters. Complex, relatable characters are what bring us back, week after week, even if the storyline is fait accompli. To use a radically different example in order to illustrate my point, House follows a pretty basic formula, week in, week out. You don't tune into House to be surprised, you pretty much know what you're going to get. Yet Hugh Laurie's House is a rich, complex individual, certainly due in no small part to his brilliant performance, and it's the very expected behavior he exhibits which provides the bulk of our viewing pleasure.

Now Caprica, much like Galactica, purports to be far less of a formulaic experience; nevertheless, we know going in that Caprica and the other colonies are doomed. We know these cool robot slaves are going to turn on their creators. We know that one day this little kid named Will is going to lead some 30,000 survivors to Earth. So to capture a viewer's heart with the ending of his tale foretold, Moore needs to present rich characters for whom we can feel and relate. Problem is, as of the pilot, he really hasn't.

And that's just it; all we have thus far is a pilot, not much to go on. Exposition is the necessary evil of a pilot. So I realize that moving forward, these characters will grow and evolve. As of episode one, however, they come across more like pawns in a morality play. There a slew of side characters, as in all series, but the pilot centers on our two leads, Daniel Graystone (Eric Stoltz) and Joseph Adams (Esai Morales). These are both accomplished character actors, and they certainly bring life to what amounts to opposing mouthpieces for a philosophical question as old as storytelling itself; can, or should, we bring back the dead?

Yes, the Caprica pilot's central theme is similar to that of Frankenstein, Pet Sematary, Jurassic Park. And I don't see this as a bad thing. It's certainly compelling and, unlike those other tales, Caprica doesn't seem to necessarily take a stand for the negative. I have no problem exploring this ethical quandary over the course of the series. It's certainly rich enough to drive us along for years. I just hope that our two leads develop beyond just a representation of the pro and the con of the issue. Right now I get little feel for who these two men are, and what their point of view is. Yes, I know their jobs, their backgrounds, their roles in the story. But that's just my issue; they're just fulfilling the roles necessary to get to where we know this is all going.

Look, there's no way around the inevitability of it all. Much like season five of Lost, we know where this is all going; we know the inevitability of everything. There is some fun in seeing how we get there, but Lost has the advantage of well-drawn characters with clearly defined points of view accompanying us on our ride. Bottom line, given the brilliance of Battlestar Galactica, I have faith that, in time, this will be just the case with Caprica.