Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Hugo award winner for Best Dramatic Presentation of 2009.
Let’s break it down into categories with a minimum of spoilers:
BEST NOD TO THE ORIGINAL SERIES: The few bars of the original music just before Galactica meets its final fate.
BEST LOOK OF PURE MURDEROUS FURY: The Chief just before he furiously murders someone.
BEST USE OF A BLONDE ANGEL NAMED KARA: Me
SECOND BEST USE OF A BLONDE ANGEL NAMED KARA: Ron Moore
BEST SINGLE LINE: “You can SEE them?!”
BEST USE OF A GUN: Cavil
BEST POTENTIAL CAMEO THAT NEVER HAPPENED DURING THE LAST 45 MINUTES: Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent
BEST EXTRA ELEVEN MINUTES IN A TWO HOUR SHOW: The last eleven minutes of this episode
BEST WAY TO CONVINCE ME NEVER TO BUY A ROOMBA: Rewatching the last eleven minutes of this episode
PAD
• 
Engrossing and infuriating.
A great send-off.
Top notch performances all the way around, and a lot of good individual moments, but it just didn’t hold together for me. And I really could have done without having god (big or little “g”) shoved down our throats so forcefully. Yes, religion has always played a big part of this series, but in the sociopolitical sense. Making it such a major player in the metaphysical sense right at the end here just seemed to be…in the most classic sense of the phrase…deus ex machina.
BEST LINE LIFTED FROM ANOTHER SCIENCE FICTION TALE: “I think you overestimate their chances”, uttered shortly before something really bad happens.
My summary of the final episode:
God did it.
Peter, I thought the same thing you did when I saw the pre-historic ending. Even though it was one of the speculated endings for the original series (until they showed the TV broadcast being picked up in the final scene), the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series went there first, even before 1978.
I look forward to the howls of anguished fans all along the Internet for the next few days…
Oh, and best line in the review:
BEST USE OF A BLONDE ANGEL NAMED KARA: Me
I managed to catch the last half-hour and really enjoyed it.
Makes me sorry I never saw any previous episodes.
I loved the few shining moments when it seemed that the complete end of the show would entail all humans and all cylons living in peace.
…but then this was BSG.
Anyone else just feel a huge rush of relief when the good guys got their happy ending?
I could have done without the last eleven minutes myself — they could have ended on the last shot of William Adama, with that magnificent music from Bear McCreary. Of course, without the cheesy final eleven minutes we w0uldn’t have had that hilarious cameo (and it *was* hilarious.)
Overall, I’m happy with what we got.
As for Ford and Arthur — well, did you not notice Romo Lampkin in his bathrobe?
Such a phenomonal ending. With so much pressure to live up to for a brilliant ending to a brilliantly written series, they managed to hit one out of the park.
Enjoy the moment folks, because it’s going to be a long time before a series this good airs on tv again.
I dunno, as much as that line was cool, my faveorite is still “Can we NOT tell her the plan?”
“Can we NOT tell her the plan?” was an excellent line, granted. But “You can SEE them?!” was a payoff to a four year underpinning of the series. No comparison to my mind.
PAD
Well then “Can we NOT tell her the plan?” can be the best line that’s not a payoff to a four year underpinning of the series, and “You can SEE them?” is the best line that IS.
Everyone is happy!
-JC
I loved this series! The finale was very good and satisfying.I will never listen to All Along the Watchtower the same way again 🙂
The use of the old school Cylons was very cool as well as the the theme from the original series.
I will honestly miss these characters and this show
is it a Coincidence that watchtower was also in the watchmen?
the only thing i am shaky about is why Lee ws convinced that he would never see his father again? did adama send the raptor into the sun also?
But it was masterfull and tied all the loose ends up that i could think about
As much as I loved the show, and most of the finale, when I saw Sam sitting in the bathtub on the bridge, the first thing I thought of was Restaurant at the End of the Universe. And having them land on prehistoric Earth was too much; I told my wife that they’d better not start burning down the forests to prevent runaway inflation.
Anyway, in spite of the Hitchhikers references, I love all the little character moments, especially with Laura Roslin. Her farewell to Doc Cottle was very touching, and when she died my wife and I both wept along with Adama.
Still not sure where Moore was going with the “you know it doesn’t like being called that” statement by Angel Baltar at the end.
I just figured out why I got a sense of deja vu from the end. We have a civilization that’s been in space for a long time finally landing on Earth and realizing they’ve depended too long on their technology. They decide to chuck it and become simple, primitive farmers.
The this is the ending of Wall-E, except here the robot is a hot, six foot tall blonde.
I watched this show up through season 3 and gave up on it. I thought it was too depressing and bleak. I know humanity is almost wiped out, but I would think they would still show some humor, as they would need it more than ever.
Then a friend of mine told me about some of the shocking endings and reveals, so I caught up with most of the last half of this season I was really pleased with the finale. It was far more hopeful than I would’ve ever expected. The flashbacks were a bit annoying at first, but they did help bookend the characters in most cases. I’m a bit confused about the pigeons tho. Were they a metaphor for angels? What was the point of Lee chasing one around his apartment?
Entertainingly, I happened to be re-reading Hitchhiker’s Guide, and finished up ‘Restaurant’/started ‘Life’ right after this, right where Ford and Arthur are in prehistoric England…
This is completely off topic and I do apologize for that, but I could see no other way to contact anyone re this technical blog issue…
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I’m a reader of the PAD blog for several years now (though I have rarely commented). I follow the blog via its feed in iGoogle. (BTW, I have no idea if basic HTML is still acceptable in comments—it might get rejected outright or it might not display correctly, but I gotta try.)
I’d stopped seeing any updates in iGoogle’s PAD feed for a couple weeks before I finally realized something must be technically wrong, that PAD probably wasn’t just simply AWOL. So I visited the blog directly and found that things have been redecorated. OK. Nice. (Though personally, I think if the sidebar could be widened a tad it might be better—just looks kind of narrow to my eyes.) But obviously something was interrupting the functionality of the feed for me.
I couldn’t find the rss feed url on the page anywhere. I ended up copying Kathleen’s (also new to me) feed url and substituting in the corresponding PAD root part. That worked, so okeedokee at that point. Or so I thought. (BTW, I later finally noticed that mousing over the little pencil PAD guy in the top banner reveals the traditional orange rss broadcast symbol with the copyable url string. May I just say… not the most obvious way to display it, but that’s just my opinion. Most sites have an always-seen—therefore easily spottable— button or link for the feed. Consider that a friendly suggestion, but it’s up to you guys, of course.)
As folks can see (I hope) from my first (attempted) link above, clicking an iGoogle plus sign expands the post, but the feed is configured such that it only provides the introductory blurb (the way it’s always been). To read the whole post, one must click through to the corresponding PAD page—which I used to be able to do with no problem whatsoever.
Now, however, at first I was being taken not to PAD’s post, but to a generic Google (not iGoogle) front page with a simple numeric url. As of this morning that has changed and I get this Apache placeholder screen instead, which gives some details and says to contact the site administrator.
My understanding has always been that Glenn administers this blog (and therefore, I assume, his own as well). I tried to check both blogs, but I see no obvious way of contacting either Glenn or PAD directly off-blog by email or any other means (Glenn’s “about” page doesn’t seem to exist btw).
For now, I can watch my iGoogle PAD box (thankfully not a PADded box) and when there’s a new post, I can right-click the link, “copy shortcut”, then paste it into my browser’s address bar and click return. That gets me here where the simple left-click does not.
I’m hoping that Glenn (or somebody) will know what to do about this or be able to figure it out. In the meantime, I can get by easily enough now that I at least have figured out how to cope.
Thanks for any effort(s) made on this issue. To the PAD PTB… please feel free to email me if there are any further questions about what I’m trying to describe, but I hope I’ve made things relatively clear with my screen capture visual aids (assuming my HTML links work—cross my fingers and let’er rip…).
P.S. I also tried to look back through the posts from after the apparent Apache transition and I didn’t see anything mentioning technical details, “please bear with us” notices, or “Let us know if…” requests.
Perhaps you’re already aware of this issue and working on it, but since the iGoogle placeholder page specifically instructed me to contact the site administrator, well, that’s what I’m doing the only way I could figure how.
Or, you could do what I do. Just use a simple Internet browser, such as Firefox, and go to http://www.peterdavid.net/ not ‘rss’, not ‘iGoogle’, not other things. Works for me. First time, every time.
Except that I’ve followed this blog and many others via the rss feeds for several years now. It lets me quickly see what sites have new posts and some let me read the entire post text right there. Saves me from having to visit 10, 20, 50 sites individually in sequence. And my choice of browser is irrelevant.
The system is supposed to work. Ordinarily it would. I’m sure it’s just a technical glitch of something that needs to be adjusted and I was “told” to contact the site administrator. So that’s what I did.
In short, this is the way I do things and the way I’ve found that I LIKE doing things. It worked before. It should still work. Please don’t try to tell me I’m wrong or that your way is better. We just do things differently.
I don’t want to get into a long sidetracked discussion so completely off the post topic.
However, in somthing sort of BSG-related I AM curious as to what PAD thinks about the Sci Fi channel changing its name to SyFy. The announcement has provoked a flood of negative comments on the relevant posts over at SciFiWire.
BTW, I don’t get the Sci Fi Channel, so that’s why I have made no mention of any BSG reaction or thoughts..
Even if the Feed button is not shown,the feed links are in the HTML header of the page (in our case this page).
In Firefox the browser recognizes them and you get a button inside the address bar that you can use to subscribe.
In browsers that don’t, just view the page source code, search for “rss” or “atom” to find the links and copy them to your RSS Reader to subscribe manually. Easier than it probably sounds.
Same goes for most pages that have a feed but no link visible
Thanks, Andreas. I used your view source concept to find the “other” feed url, the one ending in only the word “feed”, not “rss”. That one seems to give me the full post over in iGoogle and better formatted as well. So yay! (I’m familiar with doing the “view source” thing btw, but just never noticed the rss url listings before.
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But I still stand by my suggestion that I think it would be helpful to have a more obvious button present without having to do the mouseover, just as there already is such access to the rss urls for Kathleen and Glenn’s blogs.
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The direct clicking to go from my iGoogle page to a post on PAD’s blog here still is giving me only the apache placeholder screen, but I can continue to work around that if I must. Having the full post present in the iGoogle feed box especially helps me cope with that limitation/glitch. (Though I still hope it gets sorted out soon enough.)
From the original series:
“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. That they may have been the architects of the great pyramids, or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis”
While the ending was a masterful work, in some ways it left me a bit dissapointed. To think that after four years of struggle just to stay alive, watching the sacrifice of various characters only to see such a vital people fade into history without a single thing to mark their existence left behind.
Plus we find that all along, God is pulling the strings?
It is a dissapointment to know that after all of that, their existence to us is nothing but a short article in the paper noting the discovery of the skeleton of Hera. A partial let down in a monumental saga.
To think that after four years of struggle just to stay alive, watching the sacrifice of various characters only to see such a vital people fade into history without a single thing to mark their existence left behind.
I completely disagree with that assessment. For starters, they named the planet. Second, it’s my assumption that, no matter what they may have initially resolved in terms of living an agrarian life, it was their descendants who were for the most part responsible for shaping the world that we saw 150,000 years later.
PAD
On the other hand, a base star set loose with free Cylons is a hope for the future (not to mention a potential sequel story). And the ruins of the 12 Colonies are still out there to be rediscovered one day.
Oh, and the potential is still there for OTHER survivors not known to the Colonial Fleet who reestablished their same, flawed civilization (and who might still be trapped in the cycle yet).
Alternatively, they may have found their own solutions to the cycle that we don’t yet know of.
As to the Twelve Colonies…is there still a remote chance of survivors thereon rebuilding in their own way?
I kind of thought that somewhere along the line they were going to end up on prehistoric Earth. I mean Six kept saying: “This has happened before, it will happen again.”
Somehow I thought that was what was going to happen.
All and All BSG has been a challenging show. There are things I wish they would have done better, things about characters we could have gotten into more. But over all it followed in the fine tradition of Star Trek by taking our world, our here and now and showing it to us from a distance so we would all have better perspective.
At times that mirror has not always been a comfortable thing to look at. But the writers always made many people around the world to look and question their own ideas of right and wrong. Sometimes we need to look at it and then decide will we find our better selves as Balter did or will we give into that dark side of our souls as Admiral Kane did.
Godspeed, People of the Fleet, so say we all.
I think Baltar’s line about farming was when the full weight of the entire series hit me, and yet if someone asked me why I don’t think I could give them a reason.
Because when you get down to the guts of it the story, the REAL story of Battlestar Galactica, was the redemption of Gaius Baltar.
I generally enjoyed the story itself….but I’m a bit annoyed as well. For a series wrap-up whose tagline in the advertisements was, “You will know the truth”, there’s a hëll of a lot of mysteries left unanswered. If this is where the series was going all along, fine and dandy, but “God did it” as a blanket answer (and I’ve been seeing that all over the place on the ‘net this morning) seems about as far away from telling viewers “the truth” (as in genuine answers) as an answer gets. Maybe “the truth” should have been in the advertising.
Chuck
Gotta wonder:
If He doesn’t like being called “God”, does He perhaps prefer to be called “Iblis”?
And Kara, did she “pull a Cordy”?
But part of the point is that Goddidn’t do it – well, except for the part about putting the human genotypes on at least two different planets. People did it, despite God’s attempts to steer them away from the same old conclusion. And last cycle, it had a slightly different ending – so maybe this time, we can learn from the lessons of the Colonials in BSG, and the quarren in Mass Effect, and not treat our robot servants like slaves…
(Yes, I know It doesn’t like being called “God” – but It hasn’t let us know yet what name It prefers. I needed to call It something!)
Agreed. We want a different ending, a better one. We’d prefer that our machine heirs/children/partners-to-be evolve in the direction of Data(for one example). I seem to recall another David, David Brin specifically, proposing some ideas for future law and attitude changes we could make to prevent this particular Worst Case…?
That was my favorite line too. Laughed out loud when they said that…’YOU CAN SEE THEM TOO??’ So glad I DVR’D it. That was THE greatest final episode to a series EVAH!! The whole battle on the colony I kept going ‘HOLY FRAK! THIS IS GREAT!’
So, Hera is the ‘mother’ of the human race, on Earth (our version)? Good thing they saved her then! 😉
I have so many comments to make on the episode..I don’t think there’s enough room here for it!
BEST POTENTIAL CAMEO THAT NEVER HAPPENED DURING THE LAST 45 MINUTES: Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent
This was basically my thought as well. The whole “cycle” concept made me think of The Matrix, as well.
And I only watched the last 15 minutes of the episode and caught these two things. Maybe it shouldn’t have been quite so obvious? 🙂
Might be caught up in “the cycle” thing. That’s a bit of a misdirection in my book, because they all point to things that are inherent in human nature—things that can’t be overcome unless we really, really think hard about it.
So this week, Battlestar Galactica leaves me with a resolution and The Office leaves me with a cliffhanger.
Surely the end is nigh!
What a horrible waste of five years. Total garbage. How about plan out your series ahead of time so you don’t have to literally pull God From The Machine…
Ok, so the Hera thing..The whole point of her WAS to be the ‘mother’ of humankind, right? I didn’t miss that point? Also, yeah the conversation at the end between ‘Gaius’ and ‘Six’ was very reminiscient (spelling?) of the Matrix…might be my ONLY complaint, albeit a minor one, of the awesome finale. And yeah I was waiting for Mr. Dent and Mr. Perfect to show up..Would’ve been funny to have two people at the end of the line of survivors walking past the new presiden straggling behind, one in a bathrobe and the other carrying a satchel/shoulder bag.
In the end, Hera didn’t matter to the human race. They were able to mate with the Earth humans without her. She didn’t do anything that helped them survive on Earth.
Hera was basically the bait that “God” laid out to get Cavil in the command room with the BSG people so they could all negotiate and then kill each other. Other than that, her only other contribution was reminding Kara of the song.
It’s another problem with doing the show as they went along, but building in things that were supposed to be very important. They had to say that Hera was important and it had to be in some way that involved Caprica 6 and Baltar taking her. This was what they came up with.
I can’t wait to watch this thing tonight on my break so I can post something!
Hmmm. Loved the last episode even though I was wrong about Kara.
So does this make the original Battlestar Galactica a sequel? If I recall correctly, the original show’s Cylons were supposed not created originally by humans. Perhaps they were?
Just two little things:
Being a high budget production, I expected something more. For the fun factor it was god, but not grate. I was waiting to see if these were the Atlantean predecessors, but I also think that in the end what is important is the message. And I liked it a lot.
I´m realy sorry that the show ended. I like real Sci-Fi, the one that speak things that we all can relate. No offense Stargate, but this is the real deal!!! Good to see some content. Really don´t like the god idea, but it´s ok.
I really didn’t like that the “new Earth” is a different planet than the old Earth, because I felt that was a bit of a cheat… The renaming doesn’t work for me, because, duh, modern humans don’t have a single language. So they named it Blah, after an old planet of theirs called Blah — but if they were not actually seeking Earth, our Earth, that’s a bit of false advertising, when the series told us they were.
Besides, (though I need to recheck old episodes to make sure), didn’t they see once, in Kobol, an image of the heavens of the Earth they were seeking, and weren’t they filled with the constellation of *our* Earth? But as I said, I need to rewatch that to make sure.
Bah, I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end.
Loved the “You can SEE them” line too. Loved the sudden collapse of the truce due to an unpredicted event — very Arthurian, where the drawing of the blade to kill the snake leads to the final battle at Camlann and the killings of Arthur and Mordred alike.
It wasn’t a cheat. It said, if I recall correctly, they were in search of a home called “Earth.” And they found it. What’s fascinating and brain scratching is determining whether they initially found our earth in the future and it was a smoking ruin…or they wound up settling on what became our earth and it’s all part of a vast repeating cycle that will continue to repeat no matter what we do.
OAD
It was a bit of a cheat.
When Starbuck came back from the dead, she said she knew where Earth was and was going to lead them there. Then the camera pulled way, way, out and zoomed in on Earth.
Our earth. With clearly visible continents.
So they were telling us that our Earth was the one she was leading them towards, then they backed out of that.
Not really a cheat when you look at what we ourselves have done and do. Travelers left their homes centuries ago, went to far away lands, colonized them and then named everything in sight after people and places from back home.
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Hëll, I live in Virginia. 3/4 of the names on our state map are identical to names in England. People like the comfort of the familiar or the comfort of getting what they were after. They were promised Earth as an end point for their journey and they were given “Earth” in the end. Kinda makes sense really.
I have been thinking, did I like or not? I liked the happy end. I kindof felt that Kara was a cheat. In a way, the store became a sci-fi fantasy, bc the ending made us realize there has always been a supernatural element to show (the Six Vision of Baltar.).
Part of me doesn’t feel like this isn’t the ending they had in mind when first mini-series came out.
However, it does explain how the angel-Caprica knew things she could not have known unless she was real. (A dilusion couldn’t have known all those things.)
On to another point, the back to nature decision really didn’t make a whole lot of sense; Surely there is a something btwn no tech and super-cities.
And what in the universe did Angel-baltar mean when he says that god “doesn’t like to be called that.”?
Still despite those thoughts, good ending.
And favorite lines is a toss up btwn the two–“you can see them” and “let’s not tell her…”.
And what in the universe did Angel-baltar mean when he says that god “doesn’t like to be called that.”?
Maybe God prefers his original name of “Lucifer.”
It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it.
PAD
Um. Wow. Yeah.
Maybe God prefers his original name of “Lucifer.”
Or “Iblis.”
Having just watched the finale… that was *my* first thought. There was just something kinda sinister about how he said it…
All in all, I highly enjoyed the finale. For me, it basically came down to watching this on tape, or watching the WBC game (with one of ‘my’ team’s pitchers starting for Japan) – and I chose this, figuring I could pause and keep tabs on the score every so often.
I didn’t check the score once.
I was too busy sitting on the edge of my seat yelling “HOLY FRAK!” every so often.
And occasionally cheering, such as during the Best Nod To The Original Series moment (and the runner up in the category, the old-style walking toasters).
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“On to another point, the back to nature decision really didn’t make a whole lot of sense; Surely there is a something btwn no tech and super-cities.”
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It seemed to me that Lee was hoping that if they went back to the basics, when their tech gets back to the point of creating artificial lifeforms, hopefully humanity’s soul (which evolves more slowly) would have gotten to the point where said artificial lifeforms wouldn’t be enslaved.
The thing about this finale that had ME wondering the most about, though… how the frak did Kara disappear so quickly?
You know, they missed out another possibly wonderful call-back to the original series. Patrick McNee, the guy who voiced Lucifer/Iblis and the Imperious Leader in the original series, is still alive.
How cool would it have been to have his voice in the finale?
Surprisingly perhaps, the most moving line for me was:
“I know how to farm.”
Hm. Yes. Now that I think about it, yeah.
Chained to the flashbacks (which were a thematic callback to the cycles or lack thereof).
As J. Alexander pointed out, this could open the door to the original Battlestar series being a sequel to this one, since it was established in the final episode of the first series that it was set in Earth’s future, as evidenced by the Galactica picking up the transmission of the Apollo 11 landing. With over 150,000 years in between the two shows, it would be possible for a new set of 12 colonies to be established and for legends of the 13th tribe who left Kobol to find Earth to filter their way back to those colonies.
There is a certain elegance to that idea.
But given the ancient Egyptian architecture on TOS’ version of Kobol…I wonder if perhaps the TOS fleet already visited and left Earth and never realized it.
I think I figured out what was missing. OK, God was behind the scenes manipulating things, but what wasn’t answered was Why? What is the endgame? OK break the cycle, but why? What is the endgame? The Goal? And how much did God intevene? Was he just rescuing humanity at the last moment? Or was the war his way of clearing the deck? Was the last four years about reducing the human population to a manageable level and eliminating the cylons? Or was the return of Starbuck meant to be deus de machinia? (I know, spelled wrong.)
Even at the end, the Caprica Angel says, she doesn’t think it will happen again, but a “not” is not a goal, it’s avoiding being drailed. But being derailed from what? I mean, human and cylons living in harmony? Is that the only goal?
Probably not the only goal. “God”, if he/she/it/they is one thing besides a creator/artist…then “competent multi-tasker” is the other accurate descriptor.
I can accept the “God” explanation given if I look at the series as an expanded version of Moses leading his people to the promised land, but overall I felt the ending was a little weak. There were too many things that felt too much like deus ex machina moments thrown in as a last ditch effort to explain mysteries written so cryptically that even the writers started to lose the ability to adequately explain them.
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The opera house scene being the scene in the main battle, Hera being the most important thing for the future kinda not being so important, Kara being, I guess, an angel of sorts, etc. A lot just seemed like it was thought up as they were writing the final three hours as the best idea they could come up with at the time.
.
Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy more of it than I didn’t and I was mostly pleased with the final outcome of the series. I just found a lot of the long running mysteries and plot points resolutions to be not as well done as they could have been considering the rest of the series.
I despised the final, in large part because it finishes ruining the series for me.
BSG was always very frustrating as a series. Excellent acting, good, if often depressing, character building, etc. But, particularly as a former AI researcher, almost nothing about the Cylons and their culture and desires made any sense, and the writers relied way too much on what amounted to mysticism in what was otherwise a hard sf series (certainly one with a hard sf premise and tropes).
So, what do they do in the ending? Establish that the “plan” wasn’t the Cylons, but “God” and some angels (who, for some reason, still look like Baltar and Six 150,000 years after those characters’ deaths). Well, gosh, just writing in literal deus ex machina bits to explain everything, particularly in their setting, is just cheating and lazy.
Said “God” btw, seems to be from the Old Testament, given its lack of actions resulting in the deaths of billions of people in the initial attack, the wiping out of the humanoid Cylons sans resurrection, etc.
Then there was the Earth cheat. They found Earth, as a barren radioactive cinder…oops, then, via that frakin’ mystical overpower bit, they find the *real* Earth (at least what the audience considers such). Bait and switch anyone?
But the last few minutes filled me with loathing towards Ron Moore, who I presume either wrote or at least approved of the sentiments given and shown. First off was the “Let’s dump all our tech. Hey, and let’s just destroy all our starships, even the ones that are still in good repair and functioning. We’ll never bother to explore or investigate anything, and we don’t need their nasty evil tech!”. ‘Cause, y’know, people so enjoyed living in tents and scraping out an existance on New Caprica with some tech. Oh, but this planet is sunny and nice and has grass and trees, so it’ll be OK!
If you want to keep trying to ensure the existence of the human race, I’ll go with tech over trying to teach primitives language and interbreed with them (which, if you think about it, has its own messy bits, such as effective coercion due to the extreme societal level differences).
Then there was the bit at the end which basically implied “Oooh! Earth’s developing robots! Which are evil and will start the nasty cycle all over again!”. No, that’s not a requirement. And one thing I liked about the last season was that humans and what passed for robots with the Cylons were working together and becoming a unit. All tossed out the window in that epilogue.
So, at the end, I have to consider BSG the series fundamentally flawed and wrongheaded. There’s still a number of individual episodes and character bits which were excellently done and executed, but the over all framework relies so strongly on unneeded mysticism and anti-tech/science know nothingness that, to me, the series as a whole is now a major failure.
I don’t agree with *all* your criticisms, but I agree that the anti-technological message at the end of the finale is a major disappointment.
You don’t “break a circle” by removing knowledge. Ignorance never leads you to break any chains at all. What the abandonment of technology does is merely take you back to the circle’s very beginning, with all the suffering and disease and (human, not robotic) slavery, and so forth and so forth.
Strangely enough I feel a better ending would have been to *increase* the role of the so-called angels. If, for example, they had been revealed to be evolved creatures from some portion of humanity (or even an alien species) that DID manage to break the circle of oppression, and were now trying to communicate and help less advanced folk.
That might have connected well with the hints about the twelve gods of Kobol, etc. In my mind I keep identifying the “angel” that spoke to Kara before her “death” as being Hermes for example, the messenger who was also a psychopomp.
And it’d be nice if the name that “God” preferred, was “Zeus”. 🙂
Still haven’t figured a good enough connection for Head-Six and Head-Baltar, not from the Greek mythology anyway. Head-Six would be a good Hathor/Sekhmet though, the goddess of sexual attraction that can become the goddess of vicious genocide.
I think the “lets throw away our tech” vibe was just so they could connect BSG to our history. They come to Earth and 150000 years later they’ve turned into us. That can’t work without explaining where the advanced tech went and why it isn’t part of our history.
Yeah, Jason, but there are ways to do that that’ll come off as a little less, well, dumb.
Probably. They could have said that all they’re tech was destroyed in the battle, though that would have seemed a little contrived to have them still have the tech to get to Earth but then it all breaks down right when they get there. I think the ending they were going for was just such a stretch that any way of getting to it would have had logical holes.
“We’ll never bother to explore or investigate anything, and we don’t need their nasty evil tech!”. ‘Cause, y’know, people so enjoyed living in tents and scraping out an existance on New Caprica with some tech. Oh, but this planet is sunny and nice and has grass and trees, so it’ll be OK!”
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Hëll, Tom, I’ll do you one better. I was a bit iffy on that idea for much more logical reasons. You have a population made up of military men and civilians that have just had their home world destroyed and spent the last several years being hounded by genocidal machines and they know that there are still some evil Cylons out there and that there is at least one group of Cylons that are a question mark. Throw into that little fact of life the fact that they’re now in an unknown part of the galaxy.
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Me? My mindset would not be that it was just fine and dandy and all peachy keen to destroy every bit of protection we had as well as every means of escape. Call me crazy, but I think I’d like to keep my chances of staying alive a little higher than just average.
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Now throw in the fact that they made that decision after only being on that planet for a relativity short period of time. Didn’t anyone raise their hand at the vote and ask if maybe, just maybe, they should wait and see what the weather conditions on the planet were like? What, they just decided that the great weather they found was the year round planetary conditions? They didn’t even for a second think about the fact that they might be in the mild season and that the summers or winters where they were at might be just a wee bit beyond their ability to survive?
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Like I said before… I did mostly like the thing, but the brain farts that they had in the writing of those final two hours were huge.
if they were there long enough to find out they could interbreed with the natives, they were there long enough to figure out it’s hospitable….
Ron Moore has revealed in interviews that the Fleet knew the bad Cylons were all gone, because they were all aboard the Colony. There was a sequence that wound up on the cutting-room floor in which we would have seen the Colony, wracked by those last-minute nukes, falling into the hole they’d been orbiting.
The cycle seems to have been one of survivors of the previous cycle settling in somewhere, using their leftover tech to make things more comfortable for themselves, developing AI before they’d developed the wisdom and compassion appropriate for the creators of a new intelligent “species”, and going to war against their own creations. You will note that the Thirteenth Tribe took less than a thousand years to hit their own end-of-cycle (they’d left Kobol between three and five thousand years before the story opens, and it took the Five almost two thousand years of sublight travel to get back), and the Colonies only bought another two thousand because their internecine wars knocked their technology back a bit.
Lee Adama’s hope, in sending the Fleet into the sun, seemed to be that by buying even more time, he would increase the likelihood that by the time we were able to create AIs again, we’d know enough to treat them like the children of humanity, not animals and slaves. No sentient species (besides maybe the Vorta) enjoys being enslaved.
So far, we’ve beaten our previous best by 147,000 years… 🙂
Given the lineage implied to modern-day humans, I think Starbuck fits as more of a mythical character — she proves to be very over the top in her behavior throughout the series and would fit into a fable-like existence. In other words, in the bigger picture maybe she didn’t really exist after the crash and it was their determination that got them where they needed to go. Sort of like a mythological backward loop into the story….
No matter what the details add up to this was a great series in every respect.
It was a bit of a cheat.
When Starbuck came back from the dead, she said she knew where Earth was and was going to lead them there. Then the camera pulled way, way, out and zoomed in on Earth.
Our earth. With clearly visible continents.
So they were telling us that our Earth was the one she was leading them towards, then they backed out of that.
But Kara led them to BOTH Earths.
The radioactive cinder – through her ship.
And the OTHER Earth by punching Bob Dylan into the jump computer.
roger tang: “if they were there long enough to find out they could interbreed with the natives, they were there long enough to figure out it’s hospitable….”
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Not really. If you have the ep on the DVR/Tivo/whatever still you should look at the scene where they point out that little tidbit. They’re showing Adama the natives for the first time while telling them about the fact that they’ve run some genetic tests to find out that they’re genetically close enough to interbreed. The way that scene played along with a few others; it seemed like they’d barely been there any time at all.
Jonathan (the other one): “Ron Moore has revealed in interviews that the Fleet knew the bad Cylons were all gone, because they were all aboard the Colony. There was a sequence that wound up on the cutting-room floor in which we would have seen the Colony, wracked by those last-minute nukes, falling into the hole they’d been orbiting.”
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That scene being cut might actually have been a good thing. The Cylons have Hera, they know roughly where the fleet is and they should have some idea that Adama might try to launch an attack since Boomer getting back to the colony meant that the Cylons could get a much better fix on their fleet. So they recalled every single base star and Cylon and had them sitting at home doing nothing.
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That wouldn’t have been a really great addition to the plot.