How will we communicate in the future? We already have ascended far in the world of digital communications, with e-mailed and texted and Skyped messages incessantly pinging though cyberspace. Hand-held, touch-operated devices receive instantaneous memos from almost anywhere in the world. Landlines and telephone wires will soon become a memoir, reminding us of what it used to mean to be connected. Not connected by virtual nets and imagined webs. But the old, literal connection—an electric current, zooming across metal conductors, linking people across great distances, across cultures, and across religions.

The TV series Caprica explores a destiny fraught with angst. In a rapturous, futuristic world that has run amok with the glamours of technology, we are presented with genuine dilemmas from our actual past and present. Slavery and sovereignty, personal identity and prejudices, and religious zealotry all rear their heads, cloaked in a rich family drama. While the adults experiment with robots and indulge in greed, addiction, and extravagance, the youth have withdrawn into a virtual world. Avatars—identical three dimensional replicas of their human counterparts—visit an interlinked virtual domain where anything is possible. Except the sex isn’t real, death doesn’t really kill, and drugs don’t actually affect the body. The fabricated v-world is many things; an escape, a rebellion, a prison, and the future of civilization.

Yet the future doesn’t look futuristic. It looks like the past. As one Caprican character finds herself trapped in a dark and dangerous v-world of gangsters and thieves, we are transported to the 1920s. Pale face and red lipstick. Silk stockings, black Mary Jane pumps, and a white fur boa complete the period ensemble. She robs a gilded art deco bank, visits dark speakeasies with swing-dancing patrons, and swindles a fat mobster in a white double-breasted suit with matching fedora hat. The thorough design of this alternate reality encapsulates the tenor of the game: lawlessness.

Back among the living on the planet of Caprica, the streets don’t look futuristic either. Between glass and steel skyscrapers the roads are populated with vehicles much like the ones here on Earth, today. A Smart Car, Jaguar, and a Chrysler 300 are not what you’d expect in a world of advanced technology. We’d likelier anticipate traveling with jet packs in mag-lev vehicles. Production designer Richard Hudolin explains his selections. “They’re a good counterpoint to the glass and chrome of the sets. I wanted to balance that out, soften the look.” Design on modernist Caprica is filled with this paradoxical balance; a robot answers the door to receive a delivery of beat-up, old leather school books. Levitating police vehicles chase a plain, retrogressive white van. A robotic reincarnation wears retro spectacles—black, Audrey Hepburn-inspired cat-eye glasses with bejeweled corners. The resulting mood is a noirish van der Rohe meets sinful decadence.

“God is in the details,” architect Mies van der Rohe famously quoted. On Caprica, God is in school—a stone gothic revival monolith with medieval touches. A shield of arms on a tarnished plaque outside the great doors of the school reveals the institution’s motto, Cast Aside the Temporal, Reach for the Eternal (of which eternal life is achievable in v-world). The school is home to a radical faction leader of the monotheistic group Soldiers of the One. In a world where many Gods are worshiped and religious tolerance is unfamiliar, the belief in one God must be held in secrecy. Throughout the show, monotheism is often represented by a lack of technology. Sister Clarice Willow, headmistress of the school, finds herself befuddled at a robot-butler who answers the door of a friend. “I take it I’m supposed to respond to you?” she queries. She receives secret messages through photocopies, rudimentary technology even by today’s standards. And the mood of her flowery and welcoming home is inverse to the stark modernist residences seen elsewhere on the planet. The gothic school, instruments of communication, and comfy domestic love nest—ironically the monotheistic zealot practices plural marriage—give us insight to the characters in this story who believe in only one divine being. The nonconforming design choices are symbolic of a spiritual alternative, and offer a possible future which goes against the seemingly unstoppable march of technological progress.

Because Caprica is a prequel and takes place 58 years before a human-cylon war that is the basis of the Battlestar Galactica series, we know that monotheistic subscribers are actually in the beginning stages of developing something of a national identity. Humans will continue on an ethically precarious path of robotic expansion. Cylons will unite as a sovereign population against their former slave drivers. In retaliation against everything human, cylons will embrace natural beauty instead of the built world, seek divine purpose in one God, and act as agents of equality rather enterprise.

Designing Caprica isn’t about speculating on what our future will look like. The show doesn’t let the possibilities of an unborn world get in the way of meaning. Antiquated technology can coexist with imagined technology. We can go backward in time to imagine our future. After all, in the words of Caprican scripture from the Book of Pythia, “All this has happened before. All this will happen again.” The underlying stories of morality, racism, and religious tension are merely recycled from our own history, as are the designed objects and environments in the show.