the hilarious thing about the way caprica six is written

where by “hilarious” means “cheap as shit, fuck these fools” but which, in some ways, is interesting in spite of the cheap lazy badly-prioritized bullshittery of it all is that she’s the most important machine-woman in the robot universe and the show just doesn’t give a goshdarn fuck.

no, listen. i’m going to try to keep this as objective as possible (i know, what a beginning), because i talk a lot about caprica and maybe you’ve noticed that tends to get glutted with Feels; yet, it was pointed out to me yesterday, you know, she’s not around a whole lot! huh! where do all these feels come from, isabel, you nut! and i thought, upon hearing that, huh in-fucking-deed, because i can’t even gainsay that, she’s in the text a stupidly small amount, does that invalidate her universe-wide imprint? i mean, let’s talk about how this works. what do we even know about caprica? the answer is A HILARIOUS AND SIGNIFICANT LOT given that WE GET LESS THAN INSUFFICIENT TIME WITH HER, and—how does that even work?

saying that caprica is the literal most important machine woman in the robot universe isn’t feels, it’s text. it’s repeatedly text. by which i mean, “literal most important machine woman in the robot universe” is not in fact in any of the scripts because that is stupid internet dialect from yours truly; what is in the scripts, in the action of the overarching plot of the story, is this that follows:

she seduces gaius baltar, gains access to the defense mainframe, and destabilizes caprica (the planet)’s defense, thus allowing the cylons to invade, bomb, and exterminate the center of human civilization without much defense. caprica is treated as the geographical and cultural center of the former human world. it’s the most important planet, she is credited nearly singlehandedly with enabling its easy conquest. this is a prominent cylon victory. this is why they call her “caprica six”. (“like you’re the only one on the planet.” this is the planet they raze and rebuild for their own. this is the home of the constant “meanwhile”-ing through s1. this is the planet. and it’s credited to her.)
framing that, the six model is the face of the war/genocide from moment one: when we learn “they look like us”, we learn first that they look likeher. this is not caprica-specific and should not be treated as such. however: she is the first six we meet with a character. we know her face going in. we watch her and look for the evil robot under the perfect skin, we wait for her to reveal herself. which brings us back to:
she seduces gaius baltar, which is treated as a volatile mission because of its emotionality. the six who will become known as caprica six was not a sleeper agent. she lived among humans, constructed herself in their image, and knew what she was all along—all of this is essentially paraphrased out of “downloaded”, when she’s talking to boomer, who was a sleeper and whose emotional risks were thus coded in humanity. not so, hers; subsequently, she has no excuse when:
she feels. love, then guilt. again, she has no claim on humanity, the way boomer does. she is pure, self-knowing, god-knowing, world-knowing cylon. and then:
she doubts. (“genocide, murder, vengeance—they’re all sins in the eyes of god. that’s what you and i know. that’s what they don’t want to hear.”)
she mobilizes that doubt into leverage. (“our voices count. more than hers. more than others’.”)
why does this succeed? because she is iconic to the point of destructiveness. (“we’re celebrities in a culture based on unity.”) both she and boomer are war heroes, but while boomer’s act in the war is based on having come back out of assimilation, caprica’s act was knowing and her reaction is organically cylon. she feels, loves, dwells, and doubts outside of her programming, and that destroys the collective. the revolution that happens in s4 is seeded in this. and before that:
she shapes the government on new caprica, arbitrating between cylons and humans in an effort to make peace. this is her project. “downloaded” is about making that her project. (the project fails, of course; we’ve two more seasons to go.)
she is the outlier when the sixes vote on baltar’s survival on the baseship—meaning, she breaks from her line (again, seeding for a great deal of cylon conflict in s4).
she is imprisoned, essentially voluntarily, on the battlestar, among the humans—survivors of her genocide—and coded as the carrier of the cylon future (a potential cylon/cylon child; see also, her place in the opera house, which are her dreams as well as laura’s and athena’s and which is eventually physically realized with her).
she survives both the human-cylon war and the cylon civil war as one of four cylon models who make it to earth.

take that list. none of which are extrapolations, or inferences, or pieces of performance, or questions about her internal life, only facts that make up the history-in-progress we watch on the show. then separately, say we have the cylon metaplot, which, in rough broad strokes, is about destruction, then conquest, then civil war, and finally extermination (with the human-cylon power dynamic inverted). take that metaplot and we find caprica six, specifically caprica six, unique to her model and not acting on its behalf, in every step of it. if you talk about things that are important to the cylons, you talk about caprica six, and vice versa. she changes the world by volition (e.g. new caprica) and by the accident of her general existence (e.g. why she has the power to try to make new caprica a peace project). she’s an imprint on cylon society and it cracks around her. first significant individual mind among the collective (from an actual cylon never-been-human mindset), constantly and inevitably in the lead (the six model is a leading model).

you’d think that would transition to her place in the narrative. however, where do we get to spend time with caprica six, and what’s she doing when we find her?

the mini
downloaded
fragments of the new caprica plot—none of which are about her status as cylon leader and armistice advocate, all of which are about her and gaius moping around each other* because they’ve grown too used to their idealized head!versions of each other.

*and i LIKE the moping—”stay.” is a perfect, clarion moment to me—but it’s the only time we get with her and meanwhile the new caprica plot is being commandeered by, like, chief the labor union warrior. really? this is how we elect to distribute arc time and character space? really?

s3: on the basestar with baltar and d’anna, shoved into the background because that plot becomes primarily about d’anna’s search for god interacting with gaius’s knack for false messianism
s4: nowhere to be found in the cylon rebellion plot; instead, getting impregnated by saul tigh in the battlestar prison as he mentally photoshops his wife’s face over hers, then losing the baby because ‘he didn’t love her enough’
and then the finale, which blithely, totally ignores the entirety of s4**

**which i’m okay with as a feeling person, but i’m not dense and i’m not amnesiac, so what good does the show’s selective memory do me when i still watched s4?

and i find it baffling. i find it baffling that we can speak in objective terms—about things which happened, textually, in the story, and are hugely significant to the people depicted in the story, to the shape of the war, to the history in the making—about her importance, which gets an entire episode’s worth of spotlight, but have so little to say about her place in the story. that the show has so little to say for her. that the show gives her so little to say. she’s integral to the worldbuilding, exists on the screen, and gets fuck-all to do on an episode-by-episode basis.

how does this work? no, genuine question, how does this work? how do we treat a character who is so embedded in the metatext and so absent onscreen?

maybe i’m meant to sit back passively and eat what the show tells me as it comes. caprica never had show space of her own and thus caprica is not important, thus it is okay when caprica is a vessel for other men’s toxic feelings, thus i should not expect her to have a voice, or agency, and when the actress playing her suggests that, wait, actually she wouldn’t lie back and passively be punched by some dude with feelings because she’s a damn war machine with more-than-human strength and ought to have something to physically say about the subordination of her body, maybe i should, like the writers, be SURPRISED and find this NOVEL. i mean, she’s only a piece of tech long-run and who gives a shit about a robot? (s4 asks me. s4 asks me a LOT. “i do,” i reply, “because i watched your show, assholes.”)

you tell me, kids. but the infrastructure of this entire world, the shape of its history (and thus the shape of things to come), thinks caprica’s important. and she’s treated like a tertiary. and i think the universe these showrunners allegedly created would have a fairly large bone to pick with that.