Battlestar Galactica Finale - Final Thoughts

[horizons1]

SPOILER ALERT

If you are a fan of the reimagined BSG show, share your reactions to last night's finale and the series in general. If you haven't watched the final episode yet STOP READING.

Overall, I was happy with how they tied the series up. There were so many loose ends I was worried they'd leave us hanging - especially with Baltar who kinda got short shrift this past season. But they more than made it up for that character last night.

Also, that was an awesome space battle. You knew it was gonna be good, but woo! Cool.

I found it really hard to believe that everyone agreed so willingly to give up their material posessions to start anew. I mean, c'mon. When did the citizens of the fleet agree unanimously on anything? There had to be a faction or two that would insist on living out of their space ships down on the surface a la New Caprica. But that would've been a story that took more than two hours to tell. It just seemed a contrived way to make their settlement fit neatly with the early "Earth" history.

I've got more thoughts but let's see what you thought.

[Captain Schnemo]

I just finished watching it...

Lots of it seemed implausible...the people abandoning technology for one, which is more likely to get them killed by the natives than anything else.

The battle seemed a little drawn-out, and the entire second half of it was utterly pointless. Once they had Hera, they should have jumped immediately.

I'm happy Helo lived, but it seemed totally out of character for the show, which was pretty much designed to beat your emotions senseless each episode (in a good way!).

I didn't like all the religious stuff, since previously there had always been an explanation, or the promise of an explanation forthcoming.

I think the humans should have had more on Cavil before he started negotiating. I realize facing his mortality was a new thing, but to toss out the entire premise of the series with a shrug seemed a bit incongruous.

I wouldn't have minded all the sappy send-offs if I'd gotten that standard punch to the gut that the series usually delivers, but I guess had to settle for a whimper instead of a bang.

I didn't hate it, but I wasn't overly impressed either. Unlike the Season 3 finale, which pretty much detonated an atomic mindbomb in my skull. I still conjure that ending up on YouTube from time to time, just to experience it again.

The show was running out of juice, so I kind of feel a sense of relief. One fewer season pass to pay attention to.

I think the series really suffered from adding 10 extra episodes they weren't planning on, which caused unnecessary bloat and made them dawdle more than they usually do. It was in danger of jumping the shark in Season 3 with the boxing episode and such, but I think it actually did jump at some point during Season 4.

Once there were actually clear lines of good and evil, it became much more pedestrian. Part of the joy of the series is that it was never entirely clear that the humans were actually the good guys. At some points, they were pretty much daring you to continue to root for them.

I'm not sorry I spent my time with the series, though, which is about as decent an endorsement as you can give to any entertainment product.

[horizons1]

Some of your comments are right in line with my own thoughts, Schnemo. Now that you mentioned it, I remember the Cavil bit seeming like a really convenient end and not at all what I would've expected him to do.

Also, Baltar's speech right in the midst of all the mahem was a bit long and silly.

I am trying to remember back to the end of Season 3. Was that when they were on New Caprica? I have all the ep's on DVD but it's a little too fresh to review.

The religious stuff has been brewing for a long time, even way back in what, season 2, when we first saw the Opera House and Baltar grew his "Jesus hair." I liked the twists they took with each character - always having both good and bad sides. At the end it seemed they were just telling us who the good guys were.

[Captain Schnemo]

Good point about Baltar's speech.

I don't mind the religious stuff so much, as long as it's actually going somewhere. In this one, they just seemed to use the concept of God to tie up a bunch of loose ends without actually explaining anything. It didn't seem to have much of a point or a message.

The end of Season 3 was the reveal of four of the Final Five along with Starbuck's return. That was awesome, but it was such a massive story explosion that they were never really able to put the pieces back together.

They did that one Exposition Bomb of an episode a few weeks ago which left as many questions as it answered and still left so much up in the air that it was almost like they didn't explain anything.

I think they basically wrote themselves into a corner and there was just no good way out.

They certainly could have done better than this thing, which seemed oddly paced, and even a little too straightforward.

I love moments like the one where they finally destroyed the resurrection ship, and instead of getting the triumphant victory music, they basically played a funeral dirge and suddenly made you realize the humans were committing genocide.

Hooray?

[horizons1]

The Exposition Bomb episode this season is evidence of an "uh oh, we have too many loose ends to tie up" moment with the writers. I would've thought they would take their 8 month hiatus and re-watch the whole series in preparation for the final episodes.

I can only hope Lost does a better job getting us to the end of the story.

Oh, and back on BSG - there's a TV movie due out in June. Not sure what that is about but it'll be interesting to see whether it is completely free-standing or if it fits neatly into the series arc.

[sockfire]

I didn't think I would agree with Schnemo, but we seem to be on the same page when it comes to BSG.

It was a little on the weak side to just abandon technology. Very implausible that everyone would go along with that plan.


All that aside, the new Caprica show looks pretty interesting!

[Captain Schnemo]

The Exposition Bomb episode this season is evidence of an "uh oh, we have too many loose ends to tie up" moment with the writers.

Definitely. They still never explained how Adama saw Tigh age. Even if the Final Five were reborn as infants, they were all different ages. And what was going on for the thousands of years between the invention of the tech and the original Cylon attack?

And if Starbuck was an angel or an instrument of God or whatever, how come we saw her mom die slowly of cancer? Why give a tool an unnecessary backstory?

And why did she take everyone to fake Earth (or at least a useless version of Earth) before eventually taking everyone to a useful one? Hmm, I suppose you could rationalize that one by saying that everyone had to see that to learn their lesson and "break the cycle"...which they completely failed to do. But whatever.

They also never really reconciled the resurrection tech with the evolving robot tech. They were kind of parallel storylines that never met. If that were the only problem, I don't suppose it would have bothered me, but they left so much unanswered that I spent a fair amount of time thinking about all the problems.

I did like Adama "marrying" Roslin. I thought those scenes were nice and in keeping with the spirit of the show.

But why spend the whole series bringing Adama and his son together, and then have them go separate ways for no explicable reason? And if Lee wanted to be an explorer, don't you think he could have used some of that tech they sent off into the sun?

Most of the other twists and turns in the plot seemed reasonably organic, but everything that happened in the finale obviously existed to get to certain points the writers were trying to force. Baltar needed redemption, the humans needed to seed our Earth so all their tech needed to be sent away, etc.

And I still want to know about All Along the Watchtower. Does this mean Bob Dylan is God? (My friend had been hoping that would be the resolution ever since the end of Season 3.) Or does it just mean the writers like that song?

I can only hope Lost does a better job getting us to the end of the story.

I gave up on Lost very early. I read an interview where the guy talked about how the writers had a "Bible", but then he immediately said they violated it frequently. Once it was clear that no one (including the writers) had any idea what was going on, I decided to opt out of the ride.

Oh, and back on BSG - there's a TV movie due out in June. Not sure what that is about but it'll be interesting to see whether it is completely free-standing or if it fits neatly into the series arc.

I wonder, if there's a strong backlash to the finale, if they will try to retcon some answers. I'm not sure I can be convinced to care. I never did watch Razor, though it sat on my TiVo for about a year before finally getting bumped.

It was a little on the weak side to just abandon technology. Very implausible that everyone would go along with that plan.

Exactly. When did all the humans on that show ever agree about anything? You'd figure at least a few of them would say "we'll take our chances" and either use their tech on Earth or take a ship and go back to the colonies, now that the Cylons are toast.

All that aside, the new Caprica show looks pretty interesting!

Well, we disagree there. It might provide some clarification, but it just didn't look that interesting to me. I'll probably give it a try, though.

[Jacca5660]

Never really got into it. I did watch the last one and it seems that they left themselves plenty of room for some movies.

Now if they just bring back Eureka. Now there's a bunch of lose ends.

[Future Guy]

I knew, once they started explaining things, that people would say "well that was lame". It's much, much easier to set up all these mysteries and plot threads than it is to give them a satisfying payoff.

Take Starbuck and the mystery of her destiny and true nature. The writers could either explain it by not explaining it (which is what they did) or give a talky, technical, cover-all-the-bases explanation like Star Trek was prone to do. Either way, it was impossible to satisfy everyone.

The reduction of "All Along The Watchtower" to solely a method of conveying the coordinates of our Earth kind of disappointed me. I really thought it would have some kind of deeper, Cylon-specific meaning. After all, Anders supposedly wrote it 2,000 years before, it alerted four of the Final Five to their true nature, and in "Islanded in a Stream of Stars" a dying Eight quoted some of the lyrics to Tigh. Perhaps it would have made more sense if Kara had been Daniel the 13th Cylon's daughter, but for some reason Ron Moore chose not to go in that direction.

On the renunciation of technology, there's a good post at Galactica Sitrep about it, and one of the opinions is that while we might not be able to picture ourselves in a situation where we'd make that choice, the people on BSG have been cooped up in spaceships for the last four years (many of them under squalid conditions) and eating nothing but algae for the last year or so, all while being pursued and killed off by their own technology run amok. So it's easier to see how they'd reach that point.

Finally, I'm going to go ahead an predict that Caprica will flop. The basic premise of BSG was an intriguing one. But a "family drama" (which is what Caprica is supposed to be) will just drive away the young male audience that BSG attracted, but it won't attract many new viewers to replace them because many folks will dismiss it as geeky sci-fi (and calling it SyFy won't help at all). I may very well be wrong, but I think that that Caprica will be to BSG what the Prequel Trilogy was to Star Wars.

[Captain Schnemo]

Take Starbuck and the mystery of her destiny and true nature. The writers could either explain it by not explaining it (which is what they did) or give a talky, technical, cover-all-the-bases explanation like Star Trek was prone to do.

I think the problem is that they went with the middle ground. They explained that she's an "instrument of God" or whatever, but didn't explain how everything we've seen before that contradicts the idea. I know they were making it up as they went along, but they should have pulled up little bits from past episodes and roll those into this idea.

They explained everything is a result of "it" or "God", and that everything happened towards some greater purpose, but didn't give the slightest shred of an idea of what that might be. Even Christianity made up a decent backstory.

The problem is that God very, very obviously became anything the writers couldn't reconcile.

The reduction of "All Along The Watchtower" to solely a method of conveying the coordinates of our Earth kind of disappointed me.

Absolutely. Especially because it was so jarring the first time you discover that the music is a song with know from 20th Century Earth. If the whole purpose of it is to tell Kara the coordinates (and there's the other issue about space being relative, so how would someone possibly know what scheme people would be using in the future to get the proper X,Y,Z), then why do we still know the song now?

What made it re-emerge in the 1960s?

...while we might not be able to picture ourselves in a situation where we'd make that choice, the people on BSG have been cooped up in spaceships for the last four years (many of them under squalid conditions) and eating nothing but algae for the last year or so, all while being pursued and killed off by their own technology run amok.

I think that's clearly the explanation that the show pushed, but at the very least it happened too fast. As I said, part of the point of the show is that you can't get every member any group of people to agree to do anything, ever.

Additionally, while it sounds nice in theory, in practice, they are going to be starving to death, dying of exposure, and attacked by vicious creatures (including early man) withing weeks of landing. Earth sure looked pretty with the wind and the grass and the clouds, but wait until the rainy season or winter or whatever. Even if you were anti-tech, you'd be a fool give up the shell of the ships, just to have some shelter.

I guess the point is that they were going to be nomads, but what about the elderly and the sick...and the Helo who should have been dead, but can suddenly and miraculously walk?

Finally, I'm going to go ahead an predict that Caprica will flop.

I agree with your analysis.

My major problem, I think, is that the ending was just so lazy, on a show where we're used to sharp and smart. I probably could have been happy with one or two of these cop-outs if it had been truly satisfying in some other way, but it failed on almost all fronts.

Never mind the philosophy, even the rescue had too many elements that didn't make sense, and while it had some cool scenes, the action was sluggish and drawn out.

They had so much time to think about getting this right, it was a real bummer. It actually gets worse the more you think about it. I was just sort of disappointed when I saw it, but the more I think about why, the more annoyed I become at Moore. He spent the whole series redeeming himself for his awful work in Star Trek, only to slap us in the face one more time.

He tricked us.

[indysoarin19]

Despite the sudden abandonment of technology storyline, I thoroughly loved BSG's finale. Then again, I was a late arrival and only started watching this season.

Loved the Starbuck jump scene (confronting her whole history and gaining a sense of purpose) and the scene between her and Lee - that was a gutwrencher but made total sense. That scene with Lee and Starbuck almost made me cry - an extremely rare feat. You totally feel for Lee being close to the girl you love, then suddenly losing her...ouch.

Appreciated the religious bits as well. Now I gotta go watch Season 1.

[Future Guy]

The problem is that God very, very obviously became anything the writers couldn't reconcile.

I certainly agree. A big part of the problem was that they set up all this cool stuff (Starbuck's destiny, the Opera House, the significance of Hera, etc.) without any idea about how they were going to pay it off. And it's always easier, as a writer, to write mysterious and vague things than it is to explain them later.

Another part of the problem, I think, is that they waited until the finale to explain all this stuff. We had 19 episodes of slow, measured reveals (well, except for the Anders Info Dump episode) and then they tried to hurry up and explain everything in the finale. It was like a high school kid scrambling to do his homework at the last minute.

...while we might not be able to picture ourselves in a situation where we'd make that choice, the people on BSG have been cooped up in spaceships for the last four years (many of them under squalid conditions) and eating nothing but algae for the last year or so, all while being pursued and killed off by their own technology run amok.

I think that's clearly the explanation that the show pushed, but at the very least it happened too fast. As I said, part of the point of the show is that you can't get every member any group of people to agree to do anything, ever.

Additionally, while it sounds nice in theory, in practice, they are going to be starving to death, dying of exposure, and attacked by vicious creatures (including early man) withing weeks of landing. Earth sure looked pretty with the wind and the grass and the clouds, but wait until the rainy season or winter or whatever. Even if you were anti-tech, you'd be a fool give up the shell of the ships, just to have some shelter.

Again, I agree. Especially with the disease thing, there's no way they could have an immunity to all the many viruses that swarm all over our planet. Most of them probably died within a few months.

and Helo who should have been dead, but can suddenly and miraculously walk?

I was really surprised to see him alive, but I think that was an intentional misdirection on RDM's part. I was glad he lived, though, I was rooting for the Agathons to make it to the end with their family unit intact.

And for all of its imperfections, the finale had one undeniably cool thing: old-school Cylons! I'm only disappointed that they didn't talk.

[Captain Schnemo]

It was like a high school kid scrambling to do his homework at the last minute.

It definitely had that feeling.

Most of them probably died within a few months.

If it were sold this way, it would have been more in keeping with the show. Humanity basically choosing mass suicide, just for the chance to have a couple of nice weeks with the grass beneath their feet.

I don't really like that either, but it's no less plausible than what we were given.

I was really surprised to see [Helo] alive, but I think that was an intentional misdirection on RDM's part.

Definitely, it was just too cheap. There's no realistic explanation for how he didn't die in the first place, and even if he survived by some massive stroke of luck, he wouldn't be walking a short time later.

And for all of its imperfections, the finale had one undeniably cool thing: old-school Cylons!

That was interesting, but very obviously a sentimental gimmick. They tried to set it up just seconds before actually seeing them in action with the one in the display case.

I really liked the idea of the "red stripes". I thought that was a nice touch.

I don't mind the old skoolers, I just wish it had been set up earlier (even with just a few images dropped here and there over the years). It just seemed tacked on, like everything else.

I suppose the other rationale was to make it easier to tell one side from the other, but the show has never been about clarity in battle. The bigass battles were like Black Hawk Down, where there are a bunch of guys who look the same and you hardly have any idea what's going on, to give you that sense of confusion on the battlefield.

[horizons1]

I think the problem is that they went with the middle ground. They explained that she's an "instrument of God" or whatever, but didn't explain how everything we've seen before that contradicts the idea. I know they were making it up as they went along, but they should have pulled up little bits from past episodes and roll those into this idea.

They could've flashed back to season 1 when Starbuck went back to Caprica to get that sword from the museum and had to fly the Cylon ship back. That seemed a little odd at the time and would've been a cool tie-in.

[horizons1]

This is short but kind of interesting:

http://io9.com/5180872/the-battlestar-g ... -didnt-see