Battlestar Galactica Comes To an End 852
On Friday evening, Battlestar Galactica ended its four-season run as one of the most popular science fiction shows in recent history. 2.4 million people tuned in for the finale, and reactions to the ending — positive, negative, and often a mix of both — are springing up all over the internet, as are tributes and retrospectives. Producers Ron Moore and David Eick held a Q&A session after the finale to discuss certain aspects of the story and spell out the final status of several plot lines. Fans of the show will have a chance to see the Cylon side of the story this fall in a two-hour TV movie titled "The Plan," and we've previously discussed the spin-off prequel series, Caprica, the pilot for which will come out on April 21st. Be warned: these links and the following discussion will contain spoilers.
Battlestar Galactica (Score:1, Interesting)
They got a decent production, good actors (for the most part), decent costumes and design, and plots and episodes ranging from very entertaining, to out right silliness and cheese.
That being said; I will enjoy seeing how they try to connect it all together and I probably will check out the spin-off series if/when it hit the stream.
P.S. Bring back Firefly ffs!
Five minutes too long (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:it rocked (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:it rocked (Score:1, Interesting)
Unsatisfied (Score:5, Interesting)
The finale was a decent episode. But I think that ever since the destruction of the HUB, the show was rudderless.
I think that this is one of the problems when the central premise of a show is a "mystery." It always ends up that the big reveal is a huge disappointment.
Also, what happened to all of the basestars that Cavil had under control? Not to mention, the "millions" of cylons on the colonies. Wouldn't they lay out to search for the final five to rebuild resurrection?
I think the finale needed a 20-30 year jump forward to show aging skinjobs scanning earth, and not detecting technology, continue searching for the final five. It would have given closure to the show's overall theme. Instead we just get a "spiritual" explanation. The reason I feel this way is back when they found the temple of jupiter, Cavil advocated nuking the planet and spending an infinite amount of time searching for earth. Even without resurrection, I think that the remaining cylons would have the same sentiment.
The other thing that had not been really discussed, and will hopefully come out in the next few entries, is what happened to the artificial intelligence that was the original cylon race? Maybe "the plan" will give us more insight to cylon society.
Great 4.5 Year Show, Weak Ending (Score:5, Interesting)
Honestly,
I thought it was weak. If you watched "BSG The Last Frakkin Special" that aired last Monday, there was a key comment in there. Ron Moore said that they were at a loss on how to end the series, and then they walked in and decided that it's about the characters.
That told me that they didn't know how to end everything, and decided to fumble through it and fill up time with these character things.
There were so many big stories that needed more elaboration, what was Starbuck, how does the one true god fit in? There was mention that he was a jealous god of the other Lords of Kobol. No mention of them? Starbuck, the one who believed in the polytheistic Lords of Kobol so much that she went back against orders for Athena's Arrow was instead an agent of the monotheistic Cylon God? That's it, head six and baltar, their story just ends so quickly? Things didn't really jive, and that disappointed me. After the whole Tigh and Caprica-6 love each other so much that they had a baby, and Ellen was jealous, that just ended? All of a sudden, we find out Baltar, the womanizer, loved Caprica-6?
It was not thought out, and by the end, they had no idea what to do. I'm really disapointed in BSG. And this ending makes me appreciate Babylon 5 even more. The value of a well thought out, planned and executed story arc where all the pieces fit together because they've been planned that way is AWESOME.
For about 4 and a half years, BSG was the best show I'd ever seen. However, ever since they came back with this last batch of 10 episodes, it's been weak. The big issues, the analysis of humanity in dire straits, the realistic depiction of events, I felt that all fell apart. BSG was still a good show, and the ending sentimental and did provide closure. It wasn't bad, but I had so much more high expectations of the ending, for it all to tie in rather than what we got. I mean that's why us SciFi fans are such continuity freaks, we want it all to fit, that's what makes it more real for us.
Re:Five minutes too long (Score:3, Interesting)
The finale was reasonably good, but I would have preferred the last scene to have been Adama on top of the hill next to Laura's grave.
I would have stopped it at Kara kissing Anders goodbye and the fleet flying off into the sun, butthat's just me.
Re:it rocked (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't like the ending (Score:3, Interesting)
I dislike using god and a hokey religion as an explanation for anything. I couldn't stand the last few episodes with Baltar babbling on about his angels. The show has always had a religious theme but I held out for a reasonable rational explanation of the head characters (something to do with cylon projection) and Kara.
Instead pooft she magically disappears into thin air, after magically entering the coordinates of a single magic planet in all of space from a magic song that her magically disappearing dad taught her when she was young and that Hera magically happens to know as well. How? What? Why?
I disliked the get rid of all our technology and live like the natives bit. Both the god explanation and the luddite attitude seem to me to be a diservice to many science fiction fans who overwhelmingly like science and technology and reject hokey explanations for things like flying spaghetti monsters. Seriously, what happens the next time someone needs to get a tooth pulled now that all their technology is gone.
I disliked the Cavil suicide bit because it seemed out of character along with actually listening to Baltar's stupid little speech on coexistence and angels. I'd like Boomer's redemption to not have been followed with her getting shot in the gut again. I didn't need to see Adama puking.
And finally, Tyrol is an idiot for not realizing that killing Cally was the nicest thing Tory or anyone else in the entire fleet did for him.
subtlety schmutlety (Score:5, Interesting)
Serious question: what the hell for? What do you gain from subtlety? A bit of smugness that you "worked out" the oh-so-subtle meaning? The right to ignore the show's message, and still claim to enjoy the show because you "didn't see it that way"?
It's popular lately for all messages in media to be subtle, but that's just a cop-out so it can be mass-sold to everyone, and the many will buy it. It doesn't actually add value. If anything, it dilutes it.
Re:Great 4.5 Year Show, Weak Ending (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, what I found kind of disappointing was that, even knowing it was coming to an end, they seemed to falter. If the last episode had seemed cobbled together last-minute because they were informed a couple months before that the series was being cancelled, it would have been more understandable. But they knew for years, and basically had a whole extra year to prepare after the writer's strike.
I enjoyed the plot of the mutiny and some of the other things that happened near the end, but given that those plots didn't go very far, it seems like a bit of a waste when they could have spent that time wrapping things up.
To me, probably the most disappointing thing was how they wrapped up the opera house dream. What? All those dreams and all that worry about them, and it was just that Caprica and Baltar were supposed to carry Hera 20 feet down a hall? That's retarded. At the very least, I think they should have killed of Helo and Athena and had Baltar and Caprica end up rescuing and then raising Hera. It would have explained them ending up with Hera at the end of the dream, as well as the Head-Caprica telling Baltar that Hera was their daughter.
In general, I've been impressed with the writing on BSG, but the finale is yet more evidence that writers should have an endgame roughly planned from the beginning. The ending wasn't bad so much as it felt unplanned and inelegant, tacked on and not fitting to the rest of the series. Worse yet, the message of the finale seemed to be that God has a very elegant plan for us all, so having that message come in an inelegant and unplanned form makes for a bad kind of irony.
Re:Five minutes too long (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. I wish that they would have kept the suspended disbelief unexplained, much like the force was before metacloriates (blame firefox for not having a star-wars enabled spell checker). The god thing was a major cop-out for those of us that don't believe in magic.
Wait, you're pissed that they scientifically explained away the 'magic' in Star Wars, but didn't scientifically explain away the 'magic' in BSG?
The thing that annoys me more is when they are not self-consistent. That's the problem with Star Wars. The Force is a mystical thing, then it's suddenly just some funky magic germs. BSG always had this gods/one true god thing going, which at the very end isn't really 'God' god, but more of an Arthur C. Clarke sufficiently advanced technology god.
Re:it rocked (Score:3, Interesting)
No no no, it wasn't that God did it, but God led them to the New Earth by using Kara and reincarnating her and bringing her back to life after each time she died.
God created the 12 colonies, the 13th colony was Cylons, but they killed themselves 2000 years ago as their on creations turned on them. Just like the Cylons on Caprica turned on the humans there.
What BSG showed was that while God was not all powerful and could not stop the genocide, he was able to lead a part of the Cylons to be good and lead Caprica Six and Baltar with "Angels" that only they could see, and sent Kara to lead them all to Earth.
That when Humans or Cylons tried to play God and create new life, that life turned on them just as Humans and Cylons turned on God in the first place.
After they reached "New Earth" which I guess was our Earth 150,000 years ago, their lives were less eventful and they mated with the natives on New Earth to create what we have now.
This ends racism, as it creates one race, the Human race, the best of Humans and Cylons merged into one, and speaks out against violence and trying to play God and creating new life, which might turn on us and try to kill us all.
That everything has happened before and will happen again, unless we are careful.
It is a story on morality, really. We shouldn't abuse technology and create Cylons.
Caprica is going to show how they first created the Cylons. It is going to be a Frankenstein type story where a scientist's daughter died in a terrorist suicide bombing attack but he had backed up her mind on computer and created the first Cylon in an attempt to play God and bring his daughter back to life. But his partner wants nothing to do with it and leaves. But then a greedy corporation steals the technology to create Cylons as servants for the Twelve colonies.
All will be revealed? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, I suck at writing, but you get my drift.
That's alright, so do the BSG writers.
After some of the major plotholes left and advertising that 'everything will be answered' they didn't live up to the promise. I didn't want everything gift wrapped and handed to me. I'm alright with Starbuck being an angel / ascended being/ whichever. While overall I think BSG was probably the best sci fi show I've seen there were enough plotlines hanging that I wasn't satisfied. Here's some of them, major and minor.
Then again I'm also the type to wonder why the idiots stranded on the island in Lost didn't put up a wooden palisade around their camp the first time a boar ran through it or someone was abducted. Advancing the plot is one thing, being stupid is another.
Re:Two changes that could've been made (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree completely. While the whole "man vs. technology" message was kind of obviously implied throughout the whole show, I was able to overlook that message and enjoy a show that was about humanity's struggle for survival. The show was amazing in that regard.
Yet in one foul sweep, the ending actually managed to sour the entire series for me :(
Exaggerated ? I tried to convince myself that it is, and that I should relax and realize that the message was implied throughout. But the more I think about it the more I realize that for me the show was about humanity's struggle for survival. It didn't matter that it was survival against technology gone sour. It could just as well have been against aliens or a severe natural disaster, or even a human hegemony that was bent on ethnic cleansing. Whatever. At the end when Lee decides to arrogantly and shortsightedly take it upon himself to condemn the vast majority of the fleet to certain death, it was an insult to the extremely costly struggle that people were involuntarily forced to endure over the past several years.
It strikes me as misguided when people fail to realize that ingenuity and the division of labour is what has allowed humanity to survive against extreme obstacles provided by nature. Darwin's "survival of the fittest" did not mean survival of the most physically fit. It meant survival for those species best able to adapt to the conditions imposed by nature. That's exactly what humans have done by forming social groups and developing technology that has improved our chances for survival and our standards of living. Every single human alive today has that evolutionary process to thank for being alive.
I love nature just as much as anyone, and I hate pollution. I go for walks in parks and I'm an camper and a very "outdoors-man" type of person ... but I'm not naive enough to fail to realize that I and my ancestors would not be alive today without ingenuity and the division of labour. Shoving a short-sighted environmentalist message down everyone's throat at the end of the show caused me to look at the whole show from a different perspective and has soured all of the time that I really enjoyed watching how humanity worked out it's issues and conflicts at the brink of extinction.
Re:Two changes that could've been made (Score:4, Interesting)
I totally agree. I actually felt like the ending ruined the entire series.
The BS that "it's about the characters" even falls apart under any sort of scrutiny, because I feel like it's very out of character for a number of main players and a good portion of the 38k survivors to decide to throw all their technology into the sun.
A lot of plot holes were left. We can only assume that the destruction of the colony didn't mean the destruction of every single cylon. They made it clear there were basestars jumping in and out -- those basestars are still out there somewhere, probably searching for the humans to wipe them out, because they are crazy Cavil's aboard.
And what about all the quirks about living on a new planet? What about the water? Unknown diseases? Something weird about the food sources. I would guess a good 50% of the colonists that settled wouldn't survive the first couple years because of mundane things. I mean, if Hera is so important, why throw the only sick bay capable of providing her with pediatric care into the sun? It's retarded.
And to me, the absolute worst part is at the very end: We see the 150k-years-late cylon/human hybrids on our earth making proto-cylons. THE WHOLE CYCLE WILL REPEAT AGAIN!
Does it even MATTER that the inhabitants of earth are "half cylon" like Hera? It won't matter one damn bit when they start making toasters.
I guess the point is, we had SO MUCH effort on the part of the characters to save their civilization, and then at the very last episode, after they'd FINALLY WON they decide to just throw it all into the sun.
The last episode turned the entire series into a single political statement about not creating subservient AI. That's it. That's all BSG was about.
Shades of mysogeny and role reversal (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not talking about the Starbuck character's sex change. That, taken by itself was a great decision. Women in action/sf movies are almost exclusively portrayed as tough-as-nails, drink the guys under the table, A-type overachievers, and in that regard BSG was no different. But what disturbed me was the repetitive and gruesome nature of the violence that seemed to be more focused on women.
Sharon/Athena's frequent facial beatings, complete with long-lasting bandages and bloody scars. Many instances of Sixes being beaten, tortured and raped, usually with lurid shots of bloody wounds and scars to the body and face. Countless beatings taken and given by Starbuck, usually accompanied with much blood. Callie gets tossed out of an airlock, but not before she gets beaten to a pulp by Tory, who in the end gets strangled to death with Ty's bare hands. Pilots killed in space battles seem to be disproportionately women, and they die not so much in a ball of flame as usual, but in a way where we can view the lifeless corpse. There's Dualla's pointless suicide, ironically just after the character drops the "killer chick" facade. For years we witnessed the slow and painful deterioration of Laura Roslyn, with plenty of humiliating shots in a hospital bed, and years of moaning and grunting in pain. It was such a relief just to see her die peacefully. Ellen Tigh gets poisoned by her husband, and then barely escapes being dissected alive. A similar fate awaited the innocent child Hera, who only had to face days of terror, starvation and isolation. D'Anna dares to speak out against authority and in return she and her clone sisters are "boxed" and ultimately all destroyed save her. Sure, Baltar got his ass kicked a lot, but he deserved it. The only gruesome and painful injury to a male that I recall is to Felix, with his nagging amputation. Of course, the ancillary BSG episodes show him to be gay...
So in typical BSG ambiguity, it leaves us with a question. In the eyes of the producers, are these women truly "liberated", or do they have to pay a price for living in a man's world? Similarly (even congruently), are men weakened when surrounded by strong women?
My ending is better (Score:4, Interesting)
I predicted the ending... and I was totally wrong. But mine was better. They totally set it up, they went another direction.
First of all, Baltar has to be a Cylon. The fact that he is not can be nothing other than the writers making a mistake. That would explain how he:
- Shared visions with a Cylon
- Survived the nuclear blast on Caprica
- Why Caprica 6 told him something like "How can you pretend so well?"
- Knew intricacies of Cylon technology (Ex: Recognizing Cylon structures in the attack on the cylon base on the Asteroid - season 1 or 2 I think)
- Was inherently monotheistic
My ending would have involved time travel. They should have jumped into Earth, of the past, before the 12 colonies separated. I know, time travel is sorely overused, but it would totally have fit:
- Explains why this has happened before and will happen again
- How the 12 colonies were able to leave a marker about a Sun going supernova.
- The "earth" in the end is the same Earth they found, only in the past. That is why Kara's body was found while she was still alive: She time traveled back to Earth of the past
- The last episode involved a singularity and some magical coordinates - total time travel setup. She should have jumped them straight into the singularity and thus back in time.
That's how I'll try to remember the series. It ties things up quite well.
This ends racism, as it creates one race... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was thinking just the opposite.
Instead of all mankind deriving from some African tribe somewhere around the Olduvai and all men being derived from a common black eve, I though the series reconfirmed a more eurocentric view point that inferior backwards Africans were lifted up through the combination of a superior more advanced people.
Re:Two changes that could've been made (Score:3, Interesting)
Deciding to abandon technology guaranteed their decedents would forget any hard learned lessons the survivors gained. How can you teach a Earth 2.0 born child about the dangers of mistreating AIs (or other sentience in general) and other modern day ethics when he/she couldn't begin to comprehend such a concept, and is spending most of his time learning how to gather enough food and water anyways. Like the last scene stated, we're doing it all over again. Abandoning technology didn't save us; it just delayed what might not have been inevitable.
I would say though destroying the colonial fleet did make sense assuming one believed Lee was right. If tech moves too quickly for our good, then it would do no good for future (present?) day humans to gain access to the advanced remnants of Galactica and co.
Re:Dissenting opinion: Jumped the shark then drown (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember the lives they lived aboard the ships. Almost half of the original survivors were dead. Civilians lived in castes tied to their ship and essentially powerless about their destiny. They lived as prisoners of technology. After a few years of that existence, many average people would like to return to a simpler life. To be truly free and farm, fish, feel the grass on their feet and warmth of the sun.
Such rejection of technology is not unprecedented.
They were off by a magnitude (Score:3, Interesting)
A good computer engineer would come up with something like an abacus, simple enough to make with his tech and useful for the types of problems they would face.
The more I think about what the colonials would have brought in their heads, the more I think early civilization would have made the perfect landing time.
They would have brought the ideas of Farming, writing, math, building houses, organization, etc. all of which occur around the same time period.
It also would have been easier for them to approach and interbreed with earthlings who were at nearly the same stage of technological development.
Re:it rocked (Score:3, Interesting)
You are making the mistake in thinking that Kara Thrace is the same as everyone else. I don't think she is.
In some mythologies, there are multiple classes of beings besides just god and people. You have angels, demons, spirits, and any other number of creatures that have special treatment. For example, in Judeo-Christian mythology, Angels are special creatures that can do all kinds of things and yet they don't really have free will - that's reserved for humans.
So, in Galactica, I thought they did a pretty good idea of making it clear that Kara Thrace isn't like "people" - she's something else. God can manipulate her in any number of ways that it might not be able to manipulate "real" people. Kara was a tool to accomplish something - it just happens that she didn't know what she was, and happened to have a more complex inner life than other tools. At least, that's what makes sense to me - it lets miraculous things like Kara's return happen, but doesn't invalidate the other characters.
And I agree - Moore making shit up kinda wrecks it, but I think it's actually pretty entertaining to try and figure out how to account for the inconsistencies. I'm not remotely religious, but I enjoyed it as entertainment.
My Rant (Score:1, Interesting)
Okay, I have to vent. SPOILER ALERT!
The writers should be sent home in shame. They should not be allowed to ever write again. These people have taken one of the best shows on television and thoroughly and completely destroyed it.
This episode was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Where to start?? History. After 2 excellent seasons, the show began its nose dive. They killed Starbuck. Why? No reason! Just for the fuck of it! And then they had to deal with that dumb-ass move the rest of the season. And for episode after episode leading up to the finale, they taunt us with "what happened? is she alive? is she dead? find out in the finale!" and guess what? They had no idea what to do! So they just pretended it didnt happen and had her disappear! She turned into a fucking angel or some dumb shit and disappeared into thin air!
What is this entire plot, too? For no reason, everybody starts believing that Hera is the only hope of both cyclons and humankind. FOR NO REASON! Nobody has any explanation as to why they all suddenly believe this. They just do. For plot! And the entire plot of the last 4 hours of the show revolve around this nonsensical assertation. In the end, they rescue her, and does she do anything special at all? NO! Nothing! Then she's called Eve? What, did everybody else become sterile and did she mate with a thousand aborigines?!?! What the hell sense does that make?
Then they decided that the robotic military cylons had "earned their freedom" and they set them free with their own base ship! Everybody agreed! Nobody could see the possibility at all that cylons could come back to do them any harm. I mean, why would they? Cylons only destroyed 12 worlds and almost every last living human. But these? They're not going to hurt us. MY GOD. So they shoo their great enemy away and destroy all their own technology so that they can only defend themselves with sticks. Writing this bad should be considered a crime. Seriously.
Why did they have to bring back the loserest character ever written - that smarmy douche with sunglasses who somehow has the power to sway the minds of everyone on the ship. That absolute loser star of the episode when Lee decides he needs to become a LAWYER for fuck's sake and defend this great traitor AT ANY COST. Yeah, that made sense. And then they bring this asshole sunglasses douche back and suddenly, HE'S THE FUCKING PRESIDENT! After seasons full of the entire fleet fighting over who gets to lead, Lee just says "Congrats, you're the president for no fucking reason." Right then, I turned off the show and turned off the TV. Could it get any dumber?
YES! Probably the stupidest moment of all is when Lee goes "hey, I have an idea! Let's just throw all our technology away and live in dirt huts!" and the douche president later says "I was surprised everyone agreed to it." YEAH, ME TOO. So nobody at all had a brain. None of the 35,000 people thought that maybe throwing away all their resources to live on a completely unknown planet was a bad idea. No, apparently not. The first virus would have wiped them out. They didn't know if ANYTHING there was edible. They didn't have tools or seeds or anything! They had a stick. They had one stick and they were going to build a civilization with it. But not working together - oh no. They're going to spread out all over, one person per 100,000 miles, and each one is going to find a stick and cultivate crops and build a house and town with it. EVERYONE AGREED!
And what of this stupid song and the stupid notes that imaginary Kara was obsessing over. Never explained! What, somehow her dad knew that someday she'd be on a Battlestar and need the coordinates to a planet? Is that what we're supposed to believe? Not to mention, how could an interstellar location be converted into a single 10 digit number? What in the hell???
And what was the purpose of this big long opera house garbage? Nothing! All these dumb visions and years later it sort of reminds them of this scene that plays out? What the hell? Why did they bother us with all that?
My god, I'm just so amazed that this got past anyone in production. I'd have tore this script up and fired the lot of them.