BSG Watch: A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away
SCI FI
Spoilers for the series finale of Battlestar Galactica coming up after the jump:
Series finales are hard, but they're especially demanding of sci-fi series. People expect many things of the end of a realistic drama—closure, catharsis, justice, maybe—but sci-fi has the special burden of providing explanations. Why did this thing cause that thing? What's the big secret? Where did it all come from and where does it end up? What are the answers? A non sci-fi series may be savaged for its finale, like The Sopranos or Seinfeld, but only the most aggrieved will say that these finales retroactively ruined everything that came before it. Whereas with sci-fi, a finale is often not just the end, but the culmination of the show—it is the answer, and there's a great temptation to judge on whether the answer was right or wrong.
Battlestar Galactica has always been marked as being not just a sci-fi show, which is to say that it was not just about the mythology, the science or the special effects but the ideas and the characters. (This is unfair to pretty much every good sci-fi show ever created, but there you have it.) Which if anything just doubles the expectations of it.
This is all way of leading up to saying that—yeah, I had some problems with BSG's finale. I also loved it: I was thrilled by big chunks and cried big wet tears at others. And the things that did and didn't work for me reflect a lot on BSG's dual demands as a sci-fi drama and a character drama.
Let's start with the most superficial thing I loved: the action—really, the entire first half. We all know that BSG is not about eye-popping special-effects, that it made a virtue of being low-tech and grungy. But for the finale Moore, Eick and Michael Rymer clearly broke the piggy bank on the CGI and the visuals generally; from the moment Galactica jumped in front of the Colony and the firefight began, BSG was like the mousy girl who took off her glasses and let down her hair. Ba-BOOM! Where have you been hiding, miss?
Fields of pulsing gun turrets! Galactica getting lit up! Old-school Centurions! But underpinning the dramatic fight, and the cat-and-mouse mission to recover Hera from the Colony's beehive-like tunnels, was a characteristically BSG sense of finality and grit. Just take the logistics of the battle, for one thing: the battlestar crunching headfirst into the Colony was a close-quarters clinch unlike nothing I recall seeing in a previous space battle. It wasn't some breathtaking, balletic dogfight—it was like a barroom brawl between two spaceships, locked in a deathgrip, determined to scratch and choke and swing broken bottles until one of them could not get up. It would be a gun battle, Adama said, in one of his last, best speeches before a mission: "Then I want [you] to start throwing rocks."
As thrilling as the battle, or more so, was the cat-and-mouse chase of Hera, particularly the way in which the visions of the Opera House came together as a kind of road map out of the Colony. As for the resolution of the battle, it was satisfying in some ways and frustrating in others. The idea of swapping Resurrection technology for Hera, then parting ways, seemed like classic BSG: the idea of humans and Cylons breaking the cycle and reaching a truce--or here, an amicable divorce--seemed like where the series was headed. The idea, or at least this was what I thought the series was telling us, was that human and Cylon had to find a resolution other than one side obliterating the other.
So while the surprise resolution—Tyrol killing Tory after learning of Calie's murder in the mind-meld, then Racetrack accidentally nuking the Colony from the grave—was a cool, chaotic twist, I'm not sure I like the human-Cylon war finally being resolved, essentially, by an accident. Was the fleet right to cut a deal? Was Cavil finally to be trusted in the end? (He was, at least, funny in his last moments: "Hey, I don't mean to rush you, but you are keeping two civilizations waiting!") Would they have broken the cycle? We'll never know. Although Cavil, blowing his brains out, must have gone to his grave believing that he was right, that the humans betrayed him, and that he and his race died in a noble failure because of the perfidy of man.
And Baltar's speech, declaring that much of what humans and Cylons had witnessed—the visions, the appearance of "angels" like Starbuck—was explicable only by a spiritual force that "our two destinies are entwined in." In other words--not explicable at all, in the traditional sci-fi sense. Want to understand Starbuck's return? Head Baltar and Head Six? The Opera House? Humans evolving separately on two planets? Shrug. It's a miracle.
I don't mean to sound flippant. I kind of like the audacity of a sci-fi series getting this explicitly spiritual in explaining its mythology. (And this, I expect, is a foretaste of where we're going with Lost, with some phenomena explicable by scientific forces, others by spiritual ones.)
In some ways, it's poetic. In the Q&A after the finale screening this week, I asked Ron Moore what he thought were the origins of The Song, which, by one reading, led some fans to believe that Starbuck's father. (The implicit chronology being: it originated on Old Earth, where Anders recalled playing it; The Five passed it on in Daniel's consciousness; Kara learned or absorbed it from him.) Moore said that for him the song represented a recurring thread in consciousness, an inarticulate idea that occasionally arose over the ages in the mind of human, Cylon, hybrid, Bob Dylan. That's certainly more moving than saying it was programmed into Daniel's brain like an operating system.
Then we get to Earth. Actual Earth, our Earth. Which is where some of the finale's most stirring moments, and its biggest problems, transpired.
Earlier this season, I hit on something about the destroyed "Earth"--not that I was the only one to notice this--that I wish I had followed up on more: There were certain things that simply did not add up if it was our Earth, and we were the Cylons. "Now that we know the origin of the Cylon models, " I wrote, "what does this mean about the relationship of BSG's "Earth" to our Earth? Is it our Earth or, as it would now seem, a similar planet that, in this story, happens to have the same name? That is, the Earth Cylons, if I'm not mistaken, knew that they were Cylons, and knew how they came to Earth, correct? They didn't believe they had evolved from Australopithecines and later come to discover their true origins, right?"
I didn't guess, though, that the Galactica would discover Earth for a second time, and find ours. So: points for surprising me.
The longstanding prophecy was that Starbuck would lead the fleet "to its end." And she did, in an unexpected way: the fleet decided to commit a sort of cultural suicide, giving up its technology and blending in with Earth humanity's hunter-gatherer forebears.
OK, intellectually, narratively, structurally that makes sense. The story ends where ours begins. Kara leads them to their end, but it's a voluntary one. The war-ravaged civilizations choose en masse to strip away everything that led them to war and start again, and hopefully start better. They become us; we never know they existed. It ties up nicely. And it syncs nicely with the opening credits of the original BSG. ("There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans, who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans...")
As an idea, I like it. As a fact, do I buy it? No. A population, ravaged by war, more than decimated, emerges from a hellish odyssey into the promised land. And then decides to give up every technological advantage it has, and embrace a pre-civilized, red-in-tooth-and-claw, nasty-brutish-and-short, hunter-gatherer existence? They agree to die of exposure and starvation and watch their babies die of once-easily curable diseases?
Keep in mind we've seen the civilian population of the fleet willing to revolt over Cylon alliances, poor living conditions and so on. Now they've unanimously embraced a future existence that's maybe one step above Cormac McCarthy's The Road? I mean, I'm sorry, those African vistas were gorgeous, but it rains there too. And come drought time, I'd like a Raptor to head north, please. And maybe something to shoot the odd sabretooth I encounter while I'm there.
OK, I'm snarking. But this is a big leap, one that takes more than an offhand line about "the desire for a clean slate" for me to accept.
My final big beef: the very ending, with Angel Baltar and Angel Six walking through Times Square, which was disappointingly tell-don't-show and on-the-nose for a show as sophisticated as BSG: "The question remains—does all this have to happen again?". (Though I enjoyed Ron Moore's cameo reading National Geographic.) After Angel Six argued that Earth was likely to break the cycle, for some unsatisfying reason having to do with complex systems, I half expected her and Baltar to turn to the camera and say, "Well, will you? WILL you break the cycle?" (And didn't you have to wonder: if this is our Earth, then clearly they failed, right? I mean, holy wars, Hitler... looks like a cycle to me.)
Reading over this, my complaints seem very long, and I feel like I'm being unfair to a show that I loved. Partly it's that, because I love the show, my complaints need more justification than my praise. But I guess my issues with the ending amount to this: the Times Square scene, the robot montage, flying the fleet into the sun--it all put the emphasis on runaway technology getting ahead of morality. That's an ancient sci-fi theme, but it's not the BSG that I know. Lee talked about jettisoning the machines so that the newcomers could give our ancestors "the best part of us." But so much of what we've seen in BSG says that the problems of man and Cylon ultimately come down to what's inside of them. You can toss away your jump drives, but if you don't fix your soul, you've fixed nothing. Over four seasons of this fine series, the warning hasn't been: Don't lose control of your robots. It's been: don't lose control of your gods.
That part—the human part (in the broad sense)—has always been what BSG has done best. And it was what was best in this finale, so let's get back to that. Starting with Adama and, especially Roslin. Mary McDonnell has owned this series, and here you could practically feel her shaking flesh and sense the cells dying as she willed herself into a few more days of life to see her people through until the end. But for me her crowning moment was that last scene, sitting outside with Bill, minutes of breath left in her. She admires the herd of antelope. He asks her if she'd like to get a better look. There's this wonderful sly flash in her eye as she says yes. She's tired, she's dying—and yet, for a flash, she's that cougar who took her old student to bed, she's a young woman on a date, she's a girl seeing the world for the first time again.
Which, of course she is.
Like a lot of finales, this one seemed to have a lot of ending scenes before it actually ended, and I'm fine with that. Tyrol's closure—not regretting killing Tory, but realizing that a life among other people was no longer for him—was suitable and sad. (There were fewer deaths of major characters than I expected, but in a way, and ending like his—essentially accepting his stay on Earth as a kind of prolonged suicide—was even more wrenching.) I was deeply relieved to see Helo (who I thought was going to bleed out), Sharon and Hera together and happy on Earth—even if I believe they must have a rough existence ahead of him before Hera goes on to have a million Earth babies and become great-great-grandma to all of us.
I even found myself mourning characters I didn't like that much in the series' run. Anders was always a bit of a blank space for me, but his 2001-like starchild ending was, if nothing else, beautiful. Likewise, I never cared much for Lee Adama, but his final scene moved me—probably because it was also Starbuck's. Katee Sackhoff has been the Kiefer Sutherland of this series, playing with such intensity and commitment that she completely sells a character who, with another actor, might have seemed over-the-top in her pathos. I suspect some fans may not be happy with her just vanishing while Lee's back is turned, but what matters to me is her resolution: "I'm done here. I've completed my journey. It feels good."
And then there's the old man. There are several scenes I could single out here—his last moments on Galactica, "She will not fail us if we do not fail her," that gorgeous, awful pullaway from him at Laura's grave—but I have to come back to watching the antelopes with Laura, when she asks him what this beautiful planet is called, and he says, "Earth." She laughs. He's serious. All they have lost and suffered, everyone they have lost, have brought them to this tauntingly living planet. No: it is Earth. "Earth is a dream. One we've been chasing for a long time. We've earned it. This is Earth."
That, to me, more than any part of the ending, is pure BSG, a distillation of why I love this series. What finally makes your destiny is not prophecy, not gods, not a certain set of coordinates and constellations. What tells you you have reached the place where you should be is that you journeyed there. You fought and grieved and loved, did the right thing as much as you could, did the wrong thing more often than you care to remember, and did the necessary thing as often as it took. You spent nearly every ounce of life and will and got somewhere with as many people you loved as you could bring along with you. You have expended yourself and provided for the next generation and are getting ready to die, and you are in your last place.
And that place is Earth, no matter what planets were destroyed, no matter what prophecy says otherwise. It is Earth because it is where you are. It is Earth because you have made it so. It is Earth because you say so.
And so say we all.
I've written so much, I can't believe I have leftovers for a hail of bullets, but one last round before I fire the rest of them into the sun:
* Anyone surprised by how not dark the finale was generally? No unexpected major character deaths—if you don't count Boomer and Cavil—the fleet survives, good guys win, Earth found. (I was betting on, at least, Baltar having a Sydney Carton moment of self-sacrifice—instead, Boomer did.) Didn't you suspect they'd leave you wanting to kill yourself?
* Maybe I'm being dense, but... so why was Hera essential to humanity's survival? Yes, I know she proved to be the biological Eve (a real scientific concept), but that doesn't mean that without her we would not exist. Kara translated the song into the numbers that made the jump to Earth possible. Am I missing something? (That's entirely possible.)
* I am not joking about this: I thought it was surprisingly touching to see the Centurions being sent off on their own with the basestar to start again. They only ever wanted to be happy! And considering they didn't return to incinerate the cavemen, I'm guessing they did a better job of not breaking the cycle than we did.
* Also a serious question: what if the remainders of the fleet did NOT, in fact, pass "the best of themselves" on to us when they merged with Earth-humanity? What if they passed on the myths (carried on in our Greek legends, etc.) and planted the seeds for our wars? Earth humanity would have existed with or without them. Would it have been better off had the Cylons and humans exterminated each other? (Asking this question is not a criticism: it's testament to how thought-provoking BSG is. Or to how big a cynic I am, take your pick.)
*As poignant as this finale was, I was glad it still had a sense of humor. Case one: the crew ribbing Baltar about looking for a cavewoman booty call when he talked about perpetuating the species. Case two: Roslin's bittersweet words to the Doc, after he gave he enough shots to keep her on her feet: "Don't spoil your image. Just light a cigarette and go grumble." Case three: President Romo Lampkin. (That brought down the house at the finale screening.)
* Loved, loved the musical callback to the original Battlestar theme as the fleet flew into the sun. Any other original series shout-outs that I missed? Where were the Lucifers?
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1
wow...that's a lot to write in so short a period of time. I agree with most of what you wrote. The ambiguities left open about Starbuck and her connection to Herra... the fact that they both have the coordinates to Earth and that the coordinates are a song that Starbuck's father taught her... but that song isn't written for another 150,000 years.
This ambiguity is wondrous and leaves me thinking that perhaps Starbuck is an allegory for Christ... (so we know who her father could be) and her inexplicable resurrection and knowledge of Earth was no accident.. and her final disappearing act... also in line with Christ. So what to make of Herra? Why did she also know the song/coordinates... I could keep going, but this is your blog.
Nice article. -
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Overall, I was pretty satisfied with this finale. Series finales never really live up to our expectation. My two gripes here are Starbuck and the Angels. Starbuck just disappears? What the frak?! Such a lame way to end this character. I can understand why Katee Sackhoff was disappointed in Starbuck's resolution. Then Angels Six and Baltar. Again, what the frak? This whole ordeal was just some experiment by a being who doesn't like to be called God?
Really, the stars of this finale were Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell. These two actors have been the anchor of this series since day one and both of them deserve so much more recognition. This finale alone should earn Olmos and McDonnell Emmy nominations, but sadly they'll probably get passed over again -- as will the whole series.
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[...] BSG Watch: A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away :: Tuned In - TIME.com. (WARNING: TONS OF [...]
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Agreed about both the strengths and weaknesses. On the point about "the human-Cylon war finally being resolved, essentially, by an accident" - I'm not sure we're to read these events as accidental in any conventional way. There's so much about fate, having roles to play, destinies, etc. (which sounds a whole like Lost as well!) that I see the nukes as part of the destiny once Tyrol breaks the truce. Plus Chekhov says that you put a loaded gun on the mantle, it needs to go off...
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You said:
"* Maybe I'm being dense, but... so why was Hera essential to humanity's survival? Yes, I know she proved to be the biological Eve (a real scientific concept), but that doesn't mean that without her we would not exist. Kara translated the song into the numbers that made the jump to Earth possible. Am I missing something? (That's entirely possible.) "
I think you are missing the really big picture. Hera spurred Kara to remember the notes, actually she drew them (as dots) for her, and helped her get past that roadblock. More than that, it was that rescue mission to save Hera that put Galactica in the position of having to make a final, desperate jump. And that jump, of course, to coordinates Kara took from the song that Hera helped her remember. If they hadn't gone to rescue Hera, would the fleet ever have discovered the real Earth?
I suppose you might argue that had the fleet never found Earth, the primitive humans that were there already would eventually evolve and grow and become us. Or maybe they wouldn't - maybe it was those survivors of the 12 tribes that were the spark of discovery and creativity that really made the greatness of humanity on earth possible.
Or maybe not.
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As far as the humor goes, nothing has made me laugh as hard as when Cavill shot himself. I'm sorry, but that was one fictionalized suicide that will always make me smile. I did thing the stuff with Caprica and Baltar angels was a bit silly but I'll let it slide. Speaking of Caprica Six and Baltar. I was glad to see that they ended up together. I hated Caprica when she was with Tigh. And no one ever pointed this out but I think that there may had been a connection with her baby dying in the womb and the baby she killed on Caprica during the miniseries. I don't mean to sound cruel and offend any parents out there. I am just reminding people that that is the same Six who snapped the baby's next in opening minuted of the 2003 Miniseries. So maybe fate didn't feel she deserved a child of her own.
----I was worried I was going to dislike the finale. But I really liked it. I still don't understand some of the history (maybe when I watch some reruns I'll get it).
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A few random thoughts/questions: If the show did integrate into our world I am assuming that the Colonials really weren't speaking English. That basically we heard them speaking that way so we could understand them, kind of like when animals talk in cartoons but then don't when around humans.
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And I king of thought we would see the Colonials have a hand in making the Pyramids of Giza. Maybe the Centurians built them in order to leave their mark on the planet. Speaking of the Centurians, I agree with James. That part when they showed them leaving made me sad. I always thought the humanoid Cylond took advantage of them. Especially when you consider that it was the Centurians who came up with the concept of the one true God.
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I actually really liked the message, but they did tend to get a little preachy there at the end.
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Having Starbuck vanish into nothingness would have been okay, except for the fact that there was absolutely no resolution to any of the mystery surrounding her. So, what, she was an angel too? She died once 2k years ago, then again when she disappeared in S3 (I think)? Was she cylon or not? That was such a huge part of the past 2+ seasons that leaving it completely unexplained left a huge hole for me. (And having her and Apollo almost shack up upon knowing each other for three hours, with his brother and her fiance sleeping 20 feet away? I think I threw up a little. All-in-all a very unfitting finale for my favorite character.)
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I agree the part about giving up their technology and so forth was forced a little, but overall I like the idea (and that it came from Apollo). I thought it might have worked better if they were forced into that choice somehow, but then that would have taken away from the message I guess.
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Overall I rather enjoyed it, but I can't think as far back w/ BSG as everyone else, so I'm viewing it from a much narrower focus I think. (Having these short seasons so far apart made it really difficult to follow for me because I would forget things from one season to the next, so I ended up more of a casual BSG fan.) Apart from Starbuck, the only thing I was disappointed in was, unless I'm mistaken, they never worked "so say we all" into the finale at all. That's just a giant swing and a miss. -
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I understand your point about the survivors giving up their technology. But I guess it didn't bother me with all the other great character stuff that was going on.
Personally, I loved it. Here are my thoughts: http://tinyurl.com/dj3d6g
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9
Thanks for the awesome summation of the finale!
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Reading it was kind of like when you get to the end of The Lord of the Rings and you read through the glossary because you just don't want it to stop. Kind of an extra soft landing
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I am quite happy with the ending, specifically that it didn't just end with stupid blowing up of things and a capital V for Victory. The beautiful shots were warm and a truly nice way to say goodbye to the characters.
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I agree about Hera... it was still a little loosey goosey for my Tolkien/Herbert loving self. But I am super glad to see that Baltar didn't just die in a blaze with some wanting last look at Caprica which you would expect from TV Land. I always wanted to see the two of them together, I guess it also makes guys like me think that one day I may have a chance at a hottie like Caprica!
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How could you not love the Music! I have the original Vinal record of BSG theme music and have it on my iPod! Ha! beat that for total geekness Ana Marie!!!
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lastly to your serious question about passing on of information etc, in all seriousness, as a former cynic myself, I like to think, and I like to believe. -
10
If you would have told me after season 2 or so that the explanation for the way Baltar and Caprica 6 saw each other in visions was that they were 'angels', and that Starbuck would ultimately die and become another type of these angels, I probably would have quit watching the show right there.
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But I actaully liked it. The show was always about religion in one form of another. For the big reveal to be that there is a 'god', and that post-death Starbuck, and the visions Baltar & 6 had were agents of that god to lead humanity to a new beginning is a pretty epic and bold wrap-up to a show that was originally about killer robots.
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Re: James P.'s note that the idea that everyone would just drop their technology and walk off into the jungle was unbelievable. I had the same thought at first. But I changed my mind after considering it for a while. If I'd had seen my entire civilization destroyed (because of runaway technology), then lived on a tin can in space for four years while in constant danger from my enemies and the odd coup or mutiny, endured a hellish occupation the first time I tried to settle down and build new cities, seen my biggest hope for a new future turn out to be irradiated ash and essentially been stuck in space with no other options and realizing that humanitity was going to wither and die out there, I very well might have chucked the laptop and cellphone to go gather berries when a new home is found via a 'miracle'. -
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@James -- one more point/theory on why they gave up technology to echo a bit what Kemper said: maybe they gave up technology to permanently hide?
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I've read elsewhere that the clear implication of Racetrack's nukes firing on the Cylon Colony ship was that it knocked it into the vortex of the black hole and it was destroyed, but even so, remember that key to the Galactica plan was that it had seen Cylon baseships jump into the place where it was jumping, so it knew it would "fit"...presumably, those baseships (and the Cavil-affiliated Cylons upon them) still exist, and would probably be pretty pissed that the Galactica humans and Cylons had destroyed them, particularly through treachery involving giving the Cylons back resurrection.
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So how else to save humanity from any rogue Cylon elements but to ditch all the technology, fly the fleet into the sun, have the Centurions jump away, and "meld" into an indigenous species? Maybe, then, all of our UFO myths aren't myths at all, but rather old Cavil-affiliated Cylon raiders scoping our planet out, and then deciding "nope, not them, no technology"...
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Overall, I loved the ending. Very poetic, very moving (it got really dusty with Roslin's goodbye, but I was HOWLING when Cottle got his VERY appropriate goodbye from Roslin), and it wrapped it all up in a way that nodded to the spiritual/holy, in the sense that there may, truly, be a God, and God DID create Earth in the sense that he brought "us" (or our Galactica ancestors) here through his angels Kara, Six, and Baltar..... -
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Anyone else hate it?
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I am still trying to process and articulate my reaction, but I hated it. Mostly for the weaknesses James outlined, but also because it felt... cheap.
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I was expecting something darker, I think, and the ending strikes me as a touch to clean.
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The whole divine intervention bits really bug me.
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Makes me wish I hadn't invested so much time. I normally don't have that kind of reaction when a show ends. -
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I for one loved the finale. As for the idea that it was cheap to just so easily abandon technology... I think that the technology was ultimately crippling them. If you think back to New Caprica, after being there for over a year, most of the people were still living in tents. I'm talking pre-occupation. Everyone was huddled together in one city--a tent city. They did it so they could share the technical resources. I think the idea of starting over, of spreading out, was not only beautiful, but also practical; by spreading 36k people out across the planet and living off the resources of the planet, humans have a better chance of survival. Ultimately it's a step forward by taking a step back.
I do think that Kara was a Christ-like figure in the story. Her mother (the beast that she was) knew there was something special about her; her death/resurrection to lead humanity to salvation, then "ascension" at the end all fit the pattern. I know some people want everything to make sense, but spiritual & faith-based ideals don't always make sense to us.
Overall, I'd have to grade the episode as a 99.5/100. There was very, very, very little I found wrong with it. My .5 probably comes from the ending with Angel Balter/6 sort of spoon-feeding everything. I think if they'd of just shown the 150,000 years later with no dialogue, just a montage of our time, our technology, the robots, etc., playing over "Watchtower", most of us would have understood the implications and it would have been more artistic. but even that is a very minor complaint.
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14
[...] recommend that you run to your DVD shop and start with season 1. TIME magazine reviewed the finalehere - beware though that it is full of [...]
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15
Wo! slow down my brother Ashman! Why all the hating???
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Open yourself up to the BSG love brother!
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I am happy that at least some people (namely the creators and writers of BSG) prefer to envision a brighter future.
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It is our perception that shapes our vision, and our vision that shapes our world. -
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I liked it except for the religious bits. As you pointed out, Hera's role in the grand scheme of things seemed inconsequential; they already pointed out that all the Galacticans could interbreed with the Earth humans.
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And to the claim that Hera was solely around so that she could assist Starbuck, half the cast had to be given visions to help one child survive to help someone that was a flat out divine intervention already help the rest of humanity? What kind of bush-league god are we dealing with here? -
17
"Why all the hating???"
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That is a completely fair question idenil. I am, sadly, not a well paid tv critic with years of experience of rationally explaining my emotional respons to a television episode, so I may be a tad out of my reach here, but I'll give it the old college try.
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As Tom Shaw mentioned, by introducing (that is a bad word choice, exposing, revealing, confirming, not sure what to use there) by introducing God(s) as a central figure in the finale we are now left with a whole slew of questions directed at or about that character.
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Why resurrect Starbuck and give her visions, why not just spacebeam the coordinates for happy earth into Bill Adama's head right at the outset? Why not work a little more directly through your 'angels'? etc etc.
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The fact that I found myself going into these metaphysical questions about why the God(s) acted in this way completely undermines all the other characters in the show. It makes them seem small and inconsequential. Pawns being manipulated about by some capricious master.
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I loved this show for its *people*. Even if those people were evil robots, and I don't want to have all been about some stupid surveillance camera in the sky who was intervening all willy-nilly because he judged us to be mean.
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I didn't really believe that the fleet would abandon their technology, but meh, I guess. Even without the tech though, the whole they landed here on our Earth is just a little to um, lame. Yeah, not a very sophisticated comment, but it just felt like a cheap Battlefield Earth moment. The sort of amateur narrative trick L. Ron would pull to 'make you think', but when you do think about it, doesn't really make sense or add up.
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If they were so worried about the future, how about writing something down and explaining the potential pitfalls of artificial intelligence?
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So, yeah, just rewatched it, and still processing, might change my opinion over time, but right now, hate. Even if there was a lot I loved. -
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@James -- one more point/theory on why they gave up technology to echo a bit what Kemper said: maybe they gave up technology to permanently hide?
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I've read elsewhere that the clear implication of Racetrack's nukes firing on the Cylon Colony ship was that it knocked it into the vortex of the black hole and it was destroyed, but even so, remember that key to the Galactica plan was that it had seen Cylon baseships jump into the place where it was jumping, so it knew it would "fit"...presumably, those baseships (and the Cavil-affiliated Cylons upon them) still exist, and would probably be pretty ticked off that the Galactica humans and Cylons had destroyed them, particularly through treachery involving giving the Cylons back resurrection.
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So how else to save humanity from any rogue Cylon elements but to ditch all the technology, fly the fleet into the sun, have the Centurions jump away, and "meld" into an indigenous species? Maybe, then, all of our UFO myths aren't myths at all, but rather old Cavil-affiliated Cylon raiders scoping our planet out, and then deciding "nope, not them, no technology"...
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Overall, I loved the ending. Very poetic, very moving (it got really dusty with Roslin's goodbye, but I was HOWLING when Cottle got his VERY appropriate goodbye from Roslin), and it wrapped it all up in a way that nodded to the spiritual/holy, in the sense that there may, truly, be a God, and God DID create Earth in the sense that he brought "us" (or our Galactica ancestors) here through his angels Kara, Six, and Baltar.....
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Indeed this last point, i think, addresses your questions, Ashman. I read that Ron Moore stated that we all recognize that spiritual type things surround us, and the supernatural (in the sense of God or gods) do seem to exist, but they also exist within free will -- all of us have choice, and we are not mere instruments of destiny but players in the flow of history as well. The Gods don't "beam Adama" the coordinates to Earth because that's just not how God(s) work....besides, perhaps part of the God(s)' plan was to have the fleet learn something -- i.e. the need to let go of technology, or rebuild their civilization on simpler terms, prior to getting to Earth.
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I will agree, though -- I think the ghost Baltar/6 ending was a wee bit too spoon-feedy. Something simpler, and without them would have been preferable, at least to me....but I really can't criticize much when the BSG team gave us 80 or however many hours of epic television. -
19
@James -- My initial reaction to the finale was that I kinda hated it. Hard to explain why -- the pointlessness of the opera house symbolism ("Oh no, Baltar/6 have Hera and Roslin/Athena can't follow! . . . oh, it's okay, they just took different routes to the command center); the lack of Starbuck explanation (and the unsanitariness of her flashback sequence); Tyrol turning into the world's worst person these last few episodes; the cheesiness of the robot montage and the unsatisfactory explanation of Hera's importance; the oddly tidy, major-death-free nature of the final showdown with Cavil; etc. -- well, maybe not THAT hard to explain. Anyway, I've got to watch it again and see if I revise my opinion. In the meantime, though, your review actually made me like it more than my initial reaction -- so thanks!
~
@ankushnarula: I find your Starbuck/Christ angle very helpful. I'll have to think about it a bit more, but it at least resolves some of my frustration that Starbuck turned out to be, apparently, an angel, but a corporeal, angst-ridden angel with no idea of her own nature and purpose. See, the thing that's always bothered me about the Christ story (am I allowed to be bothered by the Christ story?) is that the impact of Jesus' nobility, and the scale of his sacrifice, seems lessened by the fact that he knew his nature (God's son) and knew the plan (get crucified, go through some really hellish pain and die, but rise again and live forever with/as God). I'd be more impressed if he went through all that without knowing how it was going to turn out. So if Kara is a Christ figure, then she's a Christ figure WHO DOESN'T KNOW SHE'S CHRIST . . . which makes her strength and sacrifice, and the hell she went through to get to the end of her story, pretty amazing. I'm still not thrilled with the treatment of Kara in the finale, but the idea of Kara out-Jesusing Jesus pleases me. -
20
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21
JP, thanks one last time for giving us a wonderful preface to our weekly BSG discussion.
I'll add another to the 'loved it' column. Not what I was expecting, but lovely all the same. It wasn't so much that I had prepared myself for more major deaths; after all Roslyn, Kara and Boomer represent 3 of the original top 7 billed characters, while Anders, Tory, Racetrack, Skulls, Cavil, Doral and Simon don't exactly make a short list. It was that the 'good' folks got to pass away on their own terms, having either led the fleet successfully to earth or else at least redressed earlier missteps. In that sense it deviated from the rest of the series' sensibilities (and certainly deviated from real life), but in the end I feel that it was an earned reward more than a cheat.
On the issue of giving up the tech, I beleive that H sapiens' life expectancy 150,000 years ago would have been about 20-25 years old, and that the vast majority of the survivors from the fleet would have been dead within 10 years on earth. Would they have voluntarily given up the benefits of medicine etc, just for the notion of 'breaking the cycle'? Impossible for me to say, though the cynic inside me would like to say that it was one last autocratic decision by the head of the fleet's military before demobilization.
In the 'what if' category, I got the sense that Gaeta would have fit in had he been able to resist the temptation to mutiny. Zarek, not so much. Any other thoughts on the fleet members who fell on the wayside during the long journey?
Chaddog- I had thought about the "we were lucky enough to see 2 basestars jump in" line as well. A bit of untidy dissonance there- I think that the intent of the show's creators was clearly that the 'bad' cylons were completely wiped out in the final battle, whereas that line clearly implies that there are other cylons out there, and they're still actively searching for something. Of course, the implication of Tigh's 'aging' while Adama knew him is that without resurrection technology (or even a female model), the Cavils, Dorals, and Simons were all doomed in the long run anyway, and any future visits would have to be by the (potentially more friendly) Centurion models, who were rather poorly treated by Cavil et al.
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22
Thanks for a passionate, thoughtful piece. I'll be thinking and watching my BSG DVDs for a while, or at least until "Caprica". The only thing that bugged me about the ending was Kara's fading away. Didn't feel right to me. Thanks to you and to the creators and fans of a great series.
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23
[...] on this show like I did for The Shield a while back, but it’s late and I’m tired. This review in Time (spoilers) does a pretty good job of summing up my thoughts. Of course they couldn’t answer [...]
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[...] Time Magazine: Let’s start with the most superficial thing I loved: the action—really, the entire first [...]
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25
@Chaddogg:
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"@James -- one more point/theory on why they gave up technology to echo a bit what Kemper said: maybe they gave up technology to permanently hide?"
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It's funny, yesterday I was thinking over this point and was wondering, What explanations for their giving up technology WOULD have been plausible? This was one that came to mind--say the ex-fleet gang feared attack by the surviving Cylons, realized they could not out fight them, and decided the only way for humanity and the "good" Cylons to survive was to go native.
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I think I would have bought that. But, it explicitly wasn't the explanation Lee did give, so that's kind of moot, I guess.
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