I’ve received a few queries about the end of the Battlestar Galactica series, and I can’t offer an opinion — I didn’t watch it. Since there seems to be enough fans here, though, I’ll turn you loose on it. Great? Sucked? Eh?
I didn’t watch it because I haven’t watched much of the series at all. There are a couple of reasons: 1) I’m old enough to remember the original BSG, and was not at all interested (I know, it’s radically different, but I didn’t know that at the beginning); 2) it’s on the Sci-Fi Channel, which has become the label of instant recognition for cheesy formulaic crap; 3) I did see a few episodes early in the run, and was turned off by the god-happy nonsense in those few shows — again, I heard that they went off in some interesting directions after that, but the damage was done to my impression, and 4) it’s the kind of series that demands long investment in the full story, and I’ve never had the time to catch up with it all. I may grab the DVD of the whole series at some point, just to give it the attention so many people tell me it deserves.
Hihi
Interesting ending although I was expecting something like it, we have to wait for The Plan now -.o
Notice how they said they have a plan through the intro sequence for the first few seasons then that part quietly disappeared?
I watched the entire series, loved it!
Didn’t care for the gawd stuff, but there was enough other good story arcs to keep me interested. Also, liked the music, the charcters and the special effects got better as the show went on.
BSG was not perfect, but I thought it was compelling TV.
“Eh?”
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/6mb592
I final episode was better that the previous 3 or 4. Which isn’t saying much, but I actually expected it to suck more.
Hideki,
Well, they definately had a plan at the beginning…but I think that the best laid plans of Cylons were also thrown into confusion. That was my impression. They had a plan, and then…ooops…it didn’t go the way it was supposed to and suddenly they are reacting to unforseen events and scrambling to catch up with the curve just like the humans were.
I liked the ending. I didnt care for the anti-technology anti-intellectual overtones that could be read into some of Lee’s lines…but then again, I’ve never cared that much for Lee.
Bears,beets, Battlestar Galactica.
*** Spoilers! DUH ***
As my friend Nick put it, the series’ overall message seemed to be “anti-religious but pro-God, whatever that means”. It was pretty clear that the supernatural (angels and extreme coincidence) exists in the BSG universe, but at the same time much of the social commentary was against organized religion.
I actually didn’t want a happy ending. I wanted everyone to get nuked, or at the very least nothing but a few dozen survivors. I wanted the human struggle to mostly fail, in no small part due to the supernatural nonsense many characters got sucked into. I wanted the prize to go to those who embraced hard work and critical thinking and thorough planning.
But it didn’t turn out that way. Nobody would have survived without god injecting miracles into the plot. Instead of something that made sense, we got a cheesey message about “hope”, as if wanting something magically makes in manifest. All the toil for survival didn’t seem to matter because, duh, God has a plan anyway.
Oh well. The journey was genuinely great, even if the destination sucked.
The god stuff at the end was pretty bad. I thought this was some great TV throughout, and could basically ignore the cosmic muffin stuff, but yeah, it was laid on pretty thick in the last show. It just seems like a lack of imagination from the writers. With all the myriad of potential explanations, they go with the plan from the cosmic muffin? Oh dear.
The original BSG was a thinly veiled fictionalization of the Book of Mormon. (for a superiour fictionalization of the BofM, read Homecoming Earth- Orson Scott Card) Kobol, the origin of the colonies was an anagram of Kolob, the planet God lives on in the Mormon mythos. This version was more based on the Greco-Roman myths. Loved the whole thing. Especially the “this has all happened before and will all happen again” idea.
No Cylons resplendent in silver armor, no interest from me.
Those are ultimately nearly the same reasons why I was never able to watch Lost, or any of the other popular network programs. Most of them are quite cheesy, and since there are no active Trek series, it’s tough to garner interest. It seems the shows today revolve around Medicine, Law, the paranormal, and situational sitcoms. Where’s the originality? The network execs have the finger on the pulse of the ignorant, and provide them the same toxic and catchy garbage that they crave, with nothing original to provoke thought and philosophical discussion.
<spoilers>
Angels? Seriously? I never expected them to go that far. Kara a frekking angel and not the child of No. 7 and Ellen (or something)? I expected Ray Comfort or Kirk Cameron to walk into screen, going on about how the banana proofs gawd.
Most touching moment, Baltar breaking down saying that he “knows about farming”.
>/spoilers<
Josh: Huh? There were a ton of silver Cylon centurions (say that five times fast) in BSG-New. They were just mostly on the sidelines, tools of war and oppression…
The observations on the series finale that I posted at Lawyers Guns & Money were so astute that I’ll just repeat them here with a few tweaks:
I always thought the show was about 50% space opera to 50% exploration of agonizing moral ambiguities. People who watch BSG often complaint about too much of one, or too much of the other. It’s the nature of this particular beast; if it bothers you that much, watch something else.
I have mixed feelings about supernatural resolutions; but the show has pretty consistently been about people discovering traces of the supernatural as they’ve pursued their quest. That something supernatural steps in explicitly at the end is hardly discordant with what’s gone before.
The decision of heroes to pastoralize themselves, in order to “break the cycle of violence” (ugghh! I think Ellen actually said that), was thoroughly cringe-inducing. Archeologists and anthropologists have exploded the myth of the noble savage too completely for people of any sophistication to fall for such a project. (Not to mention what another poster observed somewhere: a society with sexual equality wouldn’t condemn its women to the pre-industrial death rate for childbirth). This really bad plot twist is partially redeemed, however, in the last scene, when Chip Gaius and Chip Six (or is it perhaps angels in the guise of Gaius and Six?) take a stroll through the earth of today and cheefully admit that going hunter-gatherer didn’t work.
As for the long scenes of people saying goodbye as they wander the unspoiled, prehistoric wilds, I found it all very moving (except for those commercial breaks!). It was reminiscent for me of “The Gray Havens” in Tolkien (I loved him as a dorky adolescent, and that conclusion reduced me to tears when I first read it). And why shouldn’t it have ended this way? Voyagers, who’ve shared the most extraordinary adventures, are now parting. Lingering and tears all around seem (to me) perfectly appropriate. A further note on these partings: Kara Thrace is now a spirit or angel of some sort; everyone knows that a being of that kind can’t stay.
As for our heroes turning out to be our ancestors–well it was either going to end that way, or they were going to arrive on present day earth (the terminus of the first, godawful BSG). They were looknig for Earth, were they not? How could they not find it, if one wanted a satisfactory ending?
A few other remarks: in the last episodes the show gave us plenty of that moral murkiness that we sophisticates all love: I thought Torie’s effort to preempt being strangled by Galen sounded almost laughably silly; but plenty of moral chiaroscuro there! Perhaps in the universe of BSG you always kill the one you love? To go back a little bit: Dualla’s suicide worked perfectly for me. In the midst of despair to salvage one perfect day, and then put out the light–it was entirely believable (though heartbreaking).
I’m sorry, did you write “fictionalization” of the Book of Mormon?
I enjoyed it immensely. I doubt we’ll have another series that good in the next decade.
Yes, there was a something directing the events, that some of the characters chose to call “God”, but Moore managed to leave it somewhat ambiguous. I liked Baltar’s statement when asked which side “God” was on,”God isn’t on any side, God is a force of nature; beyond good and evil, we make good and evil”.
And then the last exchange between the two “guardian angels” (for lack of a better term), “All part of God’s plan?”, “You know he doesn’t like to be called that”. Seemed to me that implied that what appeared to be supernatural may have been more like Clarke’s sufficiently advanced technology.
Anyway, I thought it was a perfectly satisfying conclusion to the series. Many little mysteries were left unanswered, but they didn’t really need to be answered fully or it probably would have ended up sounding like Star Trek technobabble.
Lazy, lazy writing. “God did it” is the big reveal, really?
**spoiler alert**
I believe you don’t have to invoke anything supernatural to explain the “mystical” aspects of BSG. Just slightly more advanced versions of “resurrection” and “projection”, technologies well accepted within the show. I liked the line of earth 6 when earth Baltar mentions “god” and she replies “You know he doesn’t like to be called that!”. This phrase encodes many human feelings that an actual deity would not need or have.
I find it interesting that this “god” is likely Kara’s father. Consider that he is the origin of the song that ultimately leads them to earth! Cheers!
You didn’t miss anything PZ. It was alot of spiritualist drivel and the ending was just plain poor storytelling.
i love the series. i ignored the gods crap and enjoyed all the other stuff.
btw, there is a fun boardgame put out by Fantasy Flight Games that is based on the the new BSG. it is very fun.
I don’t think they were supposed to be angels in any supernatural sense. Closer to a race so advanced they appeared to be supernatural.
The last half of the last season felt very forced. Kara’s origin was never explained. Why did Hera matter at all? And the whole thing happening in our distant past? Ugh. The whole thing came off as “technology is bad, gawd has a plan for y’all”. Pretty absurd really, let’s give up the secret of FTL travel and resurrection and go be pre-tribal. Yeah. The fleet was fractured through the whole series but oh man they all hopped on the bandwagon at the end, everyone signed off on giving up all the tech, even with technologically superior Cylon centurions roaming the universe. I thought it was decent when I watched it, but now that I think about it I don’t like it anymore.
It was awful. Ron Moore painted himself into corner and his way out was “goddidit” as Erik stated. Mind you that Moore is agnostic! How stuck do you have to be as a writer that you have to go Deus Ex Machina on us? Goddidit + Angels + Luddism = FAIL.
SteveM @17: What he said was “You know it doesn’t like that name.” It seemed like a winking hint that “god” was a machine of some sort. An interesting concept, but it was left so ambiguous that, after weeks of being assured that I would “know the truth,” I found it gratingly vague.
*** More Spoilers ***
Yeah, I was glad that Baltar “learned his lesson” and developed as a character. But still, there was a strong implication throughout the series that atheists like him are selfish and arrogant, and they need to be “knocked down a peg” and/or converted to some wishy-washy deism in order to become decent human beings. I kind of resent that.
If they didn’t intertwine his atheism with his extreme self-centeredness, I would have been fine with it. But even Adama went through a smaller version of the transformation, where he became “more humane” as he backed off of hardline atheism and acknowledged that scripture and miracles produce results (which, in this universe, they did).
Really? Crap! I never gave the show a chance after a very (apparently much too very) quick look. I didn’t see anything that really reminded me of the original BSG, so moved on. Oh well.
Brock wrote:
“I actually didn’t want a happy ending. I wanted everyone to get nuked, or at the very least nothing but a few dozen survivors. I wanted the human struggle to mostly fail, in no small part due to the supernatural nonsense many characters got sucked into. I wanted the prize to go to those who embraced hard work and critical thinking and thorough planning.”
Brock, you gloomy Gus, that’s what we have reality for. It’s called escapist fiction for a reason. That said, some dei ex machina are more pat than others. That the significance of the mysterious song is to enable our voyagers to escape sure death AND make it to prehistoric earth–well, I agree that’s entirely too easy an extraction.
Alternately, Kara Thrace plucked from the time stream one nano-second before her death, living on borrowed time.
The decision of heroes to pastoralize themselves, in order to “break the cycle of violence” (ugghh! I think Ellen actually said that), was thoroughly cringe-inducing.
No, Ellen said that she hoped that by giving the Centurions their freedom they would break the cycle of violence.
And clearly Kara was not an angel, she was a ghost with a task to complete, lead the humans to their “end”. When that was done, she vanished, like so many other ghosts in literature.
Hera ‘mattered’ because in the final scene ( where Moore hisself was holding up a Nat Geo ) 6 says ” Scientists announced today that they have found the remains of mitocondrial eve….” So, it looks as though Hera is…us
My favorite episode was “33”. Frackin’ awesome. Jump every 33 minutes just to find out the Cylons were gonna jump after ’em.
The ending left to many questions for me.
OK, so Anders said “See you on the other side” after Kara walked out. Interesting. Letting on that he knew what Kara really was. The original BSG score playing in the backround as Anders leads the ships into the sun..most cool.
I agree with #23
They can’t agree on anything, yet they all suddenly decide to give up all their technology etc and revert to primatives? I call bullshit!
The finale was a messy cop out that they tried to cover up
and distract with an extended CGI effects battle.
Early on after Hera was born I thought she might be the mitochondria Eve
but thought nawwww, they wouldn’t do something so trite and obvious…
Starbuck, Gaius, Ellen… they didn’t resolve any of it
and the invisible god BS really pissed me off.
They ruined a great series and led us on a wild god chase.
Aaron:
Gloomy? I would have laughed my ass off if everyone got nuked. It would have been great if Eick and Moore gave the middle finger to fanboys like that. A rude awakening from the fantasy, rather than easing us awake with tooth-fairy lies. Are the viewers children, that they need to let go of imaginary characters so gently?
There’s a really simple drinking game you can play with the final episodes. Every time someone on screen takes a drink, you take a drink, too. By the time you reach the frackin’ farrago of an ending, you won’t care.
I never did like the dependence on supernatural causation to keep the plot running, but I also understand that they didn’t have much else to work with. I thought the series was satisfying, because it wasn’t so much a Sci-Fi series as it was a Drama series set in a Sci-Fi universe.
I find the “all this has happened before/will happen again” stuff a bit annoying in its supernauralism, but I also see that it could be interpreted as simply failing to learn from history. Plus, we can now blame the colonies and cylons for bringing religion to early mankind. In fact, according to ID, it’s a perfectly viable alternative.
Also, I agree above that Gaius’s comments about “God” not being on anybody’s side was a good one.
I could handle the open endedness of the Kara story, and the agrarian/destruction of the fleet, but I found Hera’s story unfulfilling. I appreciate they had to do SOMETHING, but she wasn’t that important to the survival of both races, she’s half 8, but what about the rest? And of the cylons that sided with the humans, Ellen and Saul are too old, Galen is a hermit, Anders and Tory are dead, 3 has been boxed, so it’s only 2, 6 and 8 who get to breed with the humans anyway.
Aside from that, I loved it and thought it was a good end to the series, but I don’t know what to watch next…
Well, I stand corrected; but in my defense I’ll say that the statement (“break the cycle of violence”) sounds just as stupid to me in its correct context.
I have no problem with religion in my science fiction. It’s been a powerful force in human history from day one, I don’t see it changing anytime soon. But faith drives _people_, not plot. If you actually make a script which has God… oh _I’m_ sorry, he doesn’t like to be called that… just reaching in and conjuring songs, characters, ships, species, whole fucking planets out of thin air, then you might as well just quit and start writing the next Left Behind novel.
We got a real high-pressure BSG immersion experience. First, we ignored the series for four years. Then our son came home from college to live for a year, and told us we had to watch it. Moreover, we had to be all caught up (including Razor) before the final season started. (He always was a demanding child.) So, it’s been several episodes of DVD each week since last fall; finished the day before the final series. Bought the new episodes off iTunes (since we don’t have cable).
I actually recommend the DVD/iTunes approach — no commercials, and watch at your own pace (OK, just don’t have a bossy 22yo breathing down your neck about it). Amazing how much stuff you can rent of buy, with the money you save on cable….
Oh right, the ending: that was stupid. Yeah, touching in a dramatic-closure kind of way, but stupid. These people really consented to go back to a stone age existence, with no medicine, no electricity, no running water, no….you name it? How many of them would have the faintest idea how to hunt, or farm, or fabricate the tools, weapons, shelters etc. necessary to Neolithic survival? Our ancestors didn’t just pull those things out of their asses one day, they started figuring them out way back when the chimps were still their kissing cousins, and gradually innovated them as they moved into new environments.
The whole damn lot would have been dead within a year or two. If it were me stuck with this bunch of back-to-nature nuts, I’d ask the centurions for asylum aboard the base-ship.
Oh, one other thing. I was bummed about them finding Earth mk II. I wish it had been in modern times…
Bill Adama says something to the effect of ” We jumped millions of light years.” Maybe figurative? But still, that would mean they had to leave when Earth mk II was a cooling rock.
Wich would mean their galaxy was a gazillion light years from Earth mk II….ugh
There is a similar discussion going on over at skepchick today with carr2d2 summing up this finale perfectly, imo : http://skepchick.org/blog/?p=6574
In short, I found the whole “goddidit”, repeated deus ex machina (mainly the ones that ‘end’ the cylon colony and Cavil) and, perhaps more disturbingly, the final anti-science / progress message more than a bit annoying. I guess I had come to expect much better writing from this show !
It did have its moments (I’m a sucker for space battles, even if this one was less cool than what we’d seen before on the show) but, surprisingly, I was actually much happier with friday’s Dollhouse than the end of BSG.
Also, I’m now much less excited for the final TV movie and the spin off series :(
Haven’t seen the last nine episodes yet (those completed post-strike, airing this season). Have cached them on various disks, will get to them eventually. But I can post in here without much fear of spoilers, as actually, I’m finding I don’t even care that much, now.
And y’know, I think a lot of what’s being griped about here are is the main reason. I found the series incredibly good in some ways, vastly stronger than most TV, but then incredibly weak in others, in final analysis…
I mean, I liked it overall, I will make the time to watch those final nine eventually, but there’s been this sinking feeling in my gut for the whole damned series watching them draw closer to this end, knowing more and more as it got closer and closer exactly the kind thing those last episodes were going to have to contain in large measure as a matter of course, now.
Here’s the thing: BSG’s writers are very, very good in a lot of ways, and their cast are very, very good in an awful lot, too, and the whole of that made for some really great stuff. But the writers–man, sometimes, I just wanna slap them, all the same, too.
The thing is: they’re *great* at writing interesting, multifaceted, compelling characters, putting them in interesting situations. They’re great at avoiding shopworn SF cliches in favour of real human drama…
And yet, somehow, they *still* felt the need to build their larger arcs on some of the mouldiest, oldest, silliest pseudophilosophical BS questions of all time. Questions which, if our species had any maturity, wouldn’t even be questions any more, in my ever so humble opinion.
And that’s why honestly, I’m just not that in much of a hurry. Sure, I care what happens to the characters, and hey, I’m sure they’ll get some good drama in there. But it really doesn’t matter how they resolve the larger arcs–with Clarke’s sufficiently advanced beings or what have you, when questions of predestination and humans as pawns of gods with or without some independendence to play it their way to some degree or other are actually treated as suitable territory to mine in, still. And when so many cycles get wasted on those, ultimately. And it kept letting the air out of the thing, for me… They’d be cooking along with some of that good stuff, even some good material playing close to the boundaries of religion and politics, too…
But then the gods or what have you would drop into the stage on a wire, and you’d have these perfectly capable cast wrestling with that rot (are we pawns? or are we Devo?) and it’d be like: pfffft… And I’d be sitting there thinking: what the fuck is this, ancient Rome?
That said, yeah, I’ll still see it. Flawed as it is in its larger arcs, there’s still some really good work in there, despite all that.
@28
Escapist fiction? The show was about people attempting to eke out an existence after a nuclear war, and episode by episode it was filled with almost nothing but desolation; that’s not very good escapism, I don’t think.
The show wasn’t about happy endings; it was about the struggle. As such, giving everyone an out of character happy ending was antithetical to the show. Moore et al couldn’t figure out how to put their plot elements together, and just tossed something together.
I’m a big fan of BSG, and LOVED the finale up until they reached “Earth.” It went downhill, badly, once they arrived on terra firma.
Also, to be overly nitpicky, are we to believe that we get “Earth” from our 150K ancestors? That’s laughable, considering how quickly languages evolve (though I realize it’s far from the point).
They can’t agree on anything, yet they all suddenly decide to give up all their technology etc and revert to primatives? I call bullshit!
Well “New Caprica” was only barely less primitive before the Cylons showed up.
It was awful. Ron Moore painted himself into corner and his way out was “goddidit” as Erik stated.
I disagree. The “hand of god” was a consistent aspect of the story throughout the series. What I liked about it is that it was consistently written to be ambiguous as to whether it is really God, or a very advanced technology. For example, the way the colony was finally destroyed. We don’t know where those two rocks came from (the first the killed the Raptor crew, the second that pointed it at the colony and fired the nukes) could have been god, could have been some previous generation of cylons that have evolved beyond our imagination.
Never mind the so-called astute observations or the deep analysis. This series was entertainment, that’s all.
It was enjoyable to watch the scary toasters and it was entertaining to see the attempt at the supernatural shenanigans. The writing was so-so. Some of the characters were well developed and others went in bizarre directions after being developed.
It had sex, It had violence, It had betrayal, It had religion, It had drunkenness, It had rage. It had people being blown out of airlocks. It had Americans, It had Brits, It had Brits with American accents. It had men, women, and ethnic minorities.
It was something to DVR on Friday nights and then watch Saturday mornings because I am way too old to watch cartoons.
For my wife and me it was a fine series, not rooted only in sci-fi, but an allegory of the times we live now. Maybe all the pokes at god and religion was just a way for the writers to tell how silly religion is anyway. It pretty much say how humans have blundered in history over and over, but maybe someday we’ll learn.
The religious aspect was troubling for a large amount of the series, but at the end I find myself in agreement with SteveM. The comments and actions by the “angels” could easily be interpreted as intervention by an outside force, but one of technological superiority, not supernatural ability. The characters on the show, however, would have no way of distinguishing magic from technology they cannot even fathom, so I thought it left it suitably open.
The very end was very interesting to me, in its final bit of social commentary about robots and artificial intelligence. I am of the opinion, probably common here, that our consciousness/personhood/minds are simply an outcome of the physiological makeup of our brains. If that’s the case, I think, there’s no real reason to suspect that similar consciousness could not be created with other sufficiently dense and advanced neural networks of physical rather than biological signaling nodes. The key at the heart of it could be hardware or software (whether consciousness is a function of a sufficiently advanced set of rules, or whether it arises spontaneously out of a sufficiently complex network of processing nodes), but both are required to get there.
So, with all that, I think it’s prudent to envision our reaction, as a species, to our “creation” of an independently conscious, self-aware “artificial” intelligence and what our reaction to it will be: enslavement or emancipation. BSG ends the series with a final prod of our social consciousness where it regards autonomous technology and the rapid progress currently being made, which I think we can only expect to accelerate further.
When (if) consciousness first arises in a machine, we will probably not recognize it at first, and then there will be a worldwide struggle to figure out how to deal with it. Battlestar Galactica now stands next to The Matrix as a fictional exploration of the possibilities surrounding this issue.
“Spoiler if you care..”
The religious overtones were annoying in both the origianl series and the dark remake. Living in Utah, I’m painfully aware of the source material for Kobol (Kolob, the planet where the LDS God lives), and the “lost tribes” mythology.
The science in this scifi is poor. After the remaining space-wandering humans and cyborgs give up their technology with plans to interbreed with humans that evolved independently on “our” Earth, we get a “150,000 years later…” flash forward to here and now. So despite bringing language, agriculture, and at least rudimentary toolmaking and building techniques to a stone age human culture, it took ~138,000 years for the Neolithic agricultural revolution to take place? I guess we can assume that all the space settlers were killed, eaten, or were just so annoying that the stone age tribes wanted nothing to do with them.
There was some good writing and acting on the series, but I frankly got tired a long time ago of the show’s relentlessly dark, twitchy aesthetic.
Yeah I watched a bit of the first season and wanted to get into it. I rarely can follow a show from week to week. I work to late too often and can’t keep up. Same reason I haven’t gotten into lost or heroes.
Maybe I’ll get it on DVD and watch it non stop.
Oh yeah, that bugged me too. There isn’t _anything_ a million light years away. There’s Andromeda at 2M ly, and the Magellanics, Fornax, and some globular clusters closer in, but halfway is nothing but intergalactic vacuum, with a handful of rogue stars. Seriously, it’s as empty as you can get without leaving the Local Group.
Battlestar Galactica was dogshit. It crashed and burned in the 3rd season and never recovered. It’s got too many writers who are just making random shit up and too many fans that will eat up whatever’s set in front of them.
It would be a terrible awful show even if its worst faults did not include nonsense religious obscurantism, trying to pass off bogus melodrama, plots that went nowhere, plots that didn’t even make sense, inconsistent characters, etc.
Given the above comments, I’m glad I’ve never wasted time watching BSG. Why is it so much “science fiction” falls back on “goddidit” in one way or another? Lack of imagination, or failure of nerve?
The end of this space opera was awful. It isn’t the existence of magic in the universe that dooms it, but rather its application: it serves to suspend disbelief for a cascade of ridiculous events, and thus fails. The invocation of goddidit still manages to be less retarded than the spontaneous abandonment of knowledge, so that the writers can Planet of the Apes the whole thing. I stopped watching and deleted the finale from my DVR when they floated that idea.
i have a write-up of my thoughts here…
battlestar galactica of the gaps: a review of the final episode
http://toomanytribbles.blogspot.com/2009/03/battlestar-galactica-of-gaps-review-of.html
New England Bob, you are NEVER too old to watch cartoons. Go to Adultswim.com immediately and do your catching up.
but I found Hera’s story unfulfilling. I appreciate they had to do SOMETHING, but she wasn’t that important to the survival of both races, she’s half 8, but what about the rest?
But she was important. Her very existence is what got the humans and Cylons united. It was the rescue mission that finally ended the war and got the fleet to Earth.
I don’t mind stories about god(s) in works of fiction, because that’s where they belong.
I think that one of the final lines, “You know he doesn’t like to be called that”, opened this up to debate about the nature of the Cylon god. Is it, like someone here mentioned, an alien so advanced that his technology appears divine? Or perhaps it’s like “His Dark Materials”, where an angel is masquerading as God?
Throughout the show, the Caprica and Baltar “angels” can’t be seen by anyone except Baltar and Caprica. So at the very end I was wondering if they could be seen by people in the modern world? A friend of mine noticed that as they walked down the street, one of the extras “checked out” Caprica (as would I, she’s yummy). Question answered!
honestly? first half was mostly “Booyah! goin out with a bang!” and then the second half… meh. just meh. Additionally, considering how much they risked to rescue hera you think that she would do something more. like run into the CIC and dip her hands into Anders’ goo-bath and kill all the bad cylons, something.
Plus, I hated the luddite ending. it was stupid. Lee doesn’t get to make that decision for everyone (and I’ll note HIS tent had a lightbulb in it.) they could have used those ships for shelter initially and let time and history take it’s toll. I guess I’m saying that the ending felt too jury-rigged into making the Colonials the progenitors of the modern human race.
plus I’m gonna miss Tyrol, he was a lot hotter with a shaved head.
I disagree. The “hand of god” was a consistent aspect of the story throughout the series. What I liked about it is that it was consistently written to be ambiguous as to whether it is really God, or a very advanced technology.
Well, a powerful underlying plan was definitely a consistent aspect of the story throughout the series. But I honestly never thought the origin of the underlying plan would be supernatural (or so technologically advanced it’s almost supernatural). The ambiguity you like there between supernatural and very advanced technology, to me, amount to the same cop-out. When you bring in omnipotence (or so close to it there’s no difference) into the picture you can justify any mystery you’ve written in the series. Who was the one who said, “If anything is possible, nothing is interesting.”?
Not quite as bad as the X-Files’ finale, but nearly.
So much potential wasted. Kara’s denouement (perhaps with Lee Adama?) had so many interesting ways to go, but instead she hangs around long enough to save everyone, then *poof* – a non-resolution, a complete disappointment. Hera as “mitochondrial Eve”? The figment of Caprica that Baltar has seen/hallucinated throughout the series turns out to be an “angel”? Please.
Thank goodness for small mercies: Edward James Olmos’ Gruff-But-Tenderhearted Admiral Adama act, that wore thin long ago, is over, at least for this series.
Oh yeah, that bugged me too. There isn’t _anything_ a million light years away.
By that logic, my car can’t have more than 24000 miles on it because that’s how big around the earth is. “Millions of light years”, not necessarily in a straight line.
I enjoyed the finale. Wasn’t perfect, but I think that’s because RDM, unlike his god of the story, didn’t have this whole thing planned right through from the beginning. I really think that in the last two seasons the producers couldn’t make up their minds about where the characters were supposed to go. There were too many dead ends, too many unresolved questions. Deana boxed for the whole final season? What a waste! And who the hell was Daniel–the sensitive artist–anyway?
There were some good moments. Boomer’s “Tell the Old Man I owed him one” was a great line, and Baltar’s emotional release when talking about farming was genuinely moving (BTW James Callis was *the* best actor on the show).
As for the religion, there was always an undercurrent of supernaturalism in the show, and all of the confusion prophecies, visions, etc. started really racking up toward the end. Even Adama–“Admiral Atheist” as Roslin once called him–seemed to mellow to the possibility that some mystical force was guiding humans and cylons with a master plan.
Still, simply having a plan doesn’t guarantee it’ll be executed well. Did god really have to nuke several billion humans out of existence, and then have a rag-tag fleet of terrorized survivors flee halfway across the galaxy, survive relentless cylon attacks and a brutal occupation on New Caprica, only to escape captivity, flee some more, have any number of improbable supernatural encounters, discover that the Final Five were living among them all along, and finally be guided by a ghost’s vision and Bob Dylan to a blind-jump rendezvous with ancient Earth?
Was that god’s plan? If so, he’s as inefficient and amateurish a planner in the BSG universe as he is in ours.
You guys need to lighten up a bit. It’s just a show.
I’ve followed it from the beginning. I think it’s main strengths is the depth of the characters and their interactions. The special effects were top notch for TV.
The final ending was a little over the top, but it is only fiction. You shouldn’t take anything like that too seriously.
Eamon Knight #39:
I was also totally unable to suspend disbelief on this. There’s no way the people in the fleet would consent to living without modern technology and, especially, medicine.
I mean, their immune systems wouldn’t be adapted for this new “Earth.” Wouldn’t they get malaria or something in pretty short order?
My review of the series:
First it sucked, then it sucked some more, then it showed promise, then it sucked utterly, then goddidit. Which is a convenient way to end an utter mess.
At no point was it ever “science fiction.” There were sciencey excuses for some of the sucking, and religious mumbojumbo excuses for the rest of it. Mostly they were all squished together and seasoned with laziness and cost-cutting. Then the resulting mass of sludge was labeled as “character-driven.”
That’s just my opinion, inarguable as it may be.
Kara go poof.
I’m so sure.
Ok, I considered the idea of Starbuck as a “ghost on borrowed time” (not an angel). It’s not too far off from, say, the transformation and time travel of Dave Bowman in the 2001: A Space Odyssey series. I think you could safely call that a sci-fi cliche.
But it explains exactly nothing about Virtual Six and Virtual Baltar. Those two characters were shown at the end to exist independently of their ‘real’ counterparts’ minds (hence not implanted chips). They were able to travel time and space at will (even arriving in modern USA on Earth). There was not the slightest hint at any technology explaining their abilities (once chips were ruled out). Ergo, for the sake of the story, they were 100% supernatural.
Also, I’ll second both Brian Hogg (#43) and NewEnglandBob (#45). The appeal for the me was the sex and violence and desolation, enhanced by dynamic characters and good CGI.
“Starbuck” is a name for a male character. (See Dick, Moby.)
They should have called her “Stardoe.”
Pfft.
*Spoilers below but I think that’s obvious in the thread so far*
I was content with blasters and vipers and toasters and epic space battles despite the god/gods stuff until about half way through this season when Six miscarried suddenly because Saul didn’t LOVE her enough. Really? How completely stupid, contrived and trite, ugh. Even after that I was determined to see it through (especially since there were only a handful of episodes left) and was left completely and utterly disappointed.
The sudden “evil” technology transformation was pretty jarring and I didn’t think it fit at all. Above all what bothered me the most is that so many of the characters we’ve known for the entire series suddenly did things not at all like themselves and we’re just supposed to cheerfully skip along and accept it. Deus ex machina is the absolute opposite of storytelling and I really dislike it as a plot device.
Thoroughly disappointing is an understatement.
I’m just upset they killed off all the hot chicks. Dualla, Boomer (the other eights just don’t cut it), Starbuck, Toree.
And if someone says “at least six is still alive,” you and that gangly toothy ghost can go get a room.
Umm, NOBODY here thinks it ended rather reminiscent of “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”? The guy in the bathtub piloting the ship? The new technologically aware people landing on a planet that already has “cavemen” (they don’t live in caves!)? C’mon, my roommate and I totally think it was Douglas Adams and his influence!
I thought that the scene at the end with the robots and “Watchtower” was interesting. It seems that there is no way outta here, it’s happened before and is going to happen agtain. It all starts out with innocence and ends up with Cylons, just as humans start out as primitives and end up with high technology that destroys us. Happened before and will happen again.
And Baltar *finally* learns his lesson after being a total schmuck for so long. And his statement near the end about the stupidity of trying to divine and act upon “God’s plan” is a lesson that needs to have a God should heed.
As to giving up technology – how can a society of a few thousand people maintain it? Regression to the primitive is almost inevitable.
I thought the ending was left up to the viewer in regards to that whole godly bit. I viewed the Angels more as Aliens etc- so advanced it’s like magic- nothing supernatural at all.
#71 I also caught the Douglas Adams-like(lite?) references. “The guy in the bathtub piloting the ship?” Yeah that made me smile.
“Lighten up; it’s just a show”. — Sorry, but I follow the Discordian principle of taking serious things as utter jokes, and stupid humor as deadly important. Thus BSG is far more important than oxygen :p
Had they ended the series with the beautiful blue dot of Earth filling the tv screen I would have been thrilled with the ending.
After that, it pretty much sucked.
Don’t bother with “The Plan” or “Caprica”. After all, we already know the ending. God did it and humans are just pawns. There is no freewill, there is only fulfillment of prophecy.
And Starbuck, who I identified strongly with? She’s a frakking angel?
Weak and stupid and demeaning.
The existence of god was never called into question, I don’t think, but rather the how many there were was a running bone of contention between the cylons the humans.
And then the ending, the last episode, at least the last hour of it, was just an excuse for an ID discussion. (which we had when the show was over… Oh aphid, don’t get all sciencey on us ok?) And it was done in the typical ID framework which is something like “Look, here’s a story I’m going to tell you where humans from space find hominids on “earth” and they look the same, and can interbreed so this is proof that there must have been an intelligent designer at work!” (they leave out the part where the intelligent designer is the script writer/bible writer). It was just very annoying. Even my family thought there was too much god as designer in the last hour.
And then, ok, off the god topic, how the hell to 35,000 people agree on anything, let alone to spread out over an unexplored globe, live without any creature comforts, live off the land, leave all technology behind and “start over”. It wasn’t even clear that they had any seeds or tools.
And Starbuck is what? Some kind of angel or something? Disappearing like that. Awful god schizer going on there.
It was some kind of gob-fearing x-tian ending that probably rang true for a lot of middle americans.
Of course I’m going to watch the Caprica series when it ocmes out.
The finale was the epitome of lazy writing.
A second planet of the apes ending in the same series, goddidit, everybody in the show suddenly agreeing that technology itself is evil and that the best way to end cyclical History is to forget the lessons of History.
I guess it was consistent with the rest of the series in all of those respects, but honestly I was still expecting a shocking swirve at the end to prove the magical tunnel vision of the characters wrong. I certainly didn’t except Baltar’s newest gush of nonsense to be presented as the literal truth of things, but it was.
The ambiguity escape clause (“He doesn’t like that name”, the vague suggestion that everything about Lee Adama’s plan has gone wrong) and put into the epilogue only makes things worse for me, because half of my problem with the face value of the ending is that it’s backed up by the characters’ already established “magical consensus” ability.
There’s the previously mentioned wave of out-of-nowhere and frankly off-topic base luddism, but there’s also that everybody in-story buys the idea of “no rational explanation”, even Cavil. You have visions and people coming back from the dead, sure, but these people live in an universe where these kind things have rational explanations.
First, thank you PZ, for hosting the open thread, especially since you didn’t watch the show.
I’m satisfied with the way it ended, but it definitely could have been better. Mainly, I wanted them to find some sort of peaceful end, and they did. I didn’t really buy the “shun technology” decision, or that the colonists, who never agreed on anything, would suddenly want this. I also wish some of the characters hadn’t gone into a self-imposed exile, and the “Kara go poof” thing, as Adam K called it…wasn’t a fan.
I thought the hybrid we met in Razor would turn out to be the cylon god–some sort of hybrid intelligence that had propagated itself through many cycles, and was manipulating events to try to bring it to an end. That would have been far more satisfying than the ‘touched by an angel’ ending.
I was getting pretty pissed at the writers ever since the ‘final five’ cylon reveal. That’s when it became painfully obvious they were making it up as they went along, and were likely to frak it all up. Which they pretty much did.
That being said, I wouldn’t be upset about the ending if it wasn’t such a fraking good show in the first place. In the end, I can’t be really mad at it. For all the times I got to see Adama scowl, Tigh smirk, Baltar snivel, and Starbuck do anything in a really tight shirt, it was worth it.
They blew it.
** SCHPOILER ALERT **
Emotional ending, but sucky nevertheless
.
The show lost a lot of its appeal going into the third season. Too much mystery stuff going on and resorting to some “Higher Power” to “solve” those nagging questions left from season 3 and season 4.1: Bullshit, I say, utter bullshit.
They could have done better. Much better.
But here we are and I admit I cried a bit when Roslin died.
Meh! Perhaps, like PZ, I was spoilt by the awfulness of the first one. I missed the beginning but did then watch it later along with a few random episodes as I am a big SF fan and many of my friends were raving about it. I don’t even have a problem when a series introduces a god or mystery ghost in the machine element, as long as it makes ‘sense’ to the story. But for whatever reason, at best I found BSG2 meh and at worst I found it god-awful. Where is the good SF today, and no, another ST incarnation or Dr. Who doesn’t count as good SF.
Well…story-wise it was good. By story, I mean they told a good story on psychological level. I’m very happy with how they ended the characters’ stories. At the same time, suspension of disbelief cannot be attained.
1) Ep 12 Earth was not our Earth? WTF. It was the Zodiac we saw in the Tomb of Athena. You cannot tell me that a similar arrangement of stars occurred 154,000+ years ago on a planet thousands of ly away. The odds are far too long.
2) No civilization can go from high tech to no tech and expect to survive. They’d be dead in months.
3) And what was Baltar going to plant? They had no seeds.
4) What is Adama using to build the cabin?
5) What does Hot Dog think of his son dying. Yeah…the boy with liver problems. He’s dead in weeks if not days. Not to mention the other kids and adults with health problems without medical technology.
6) I can accept Kara and the Heads as manifestations of forces beyond our comprehension, but the rest of the episode stretched too much beyond an acceptable suspension of disbelief.
@63: BSG doesn’t have deep complex characters. It has fraudulent melodrama that follows a formula for convincing middle-brow TV fans that it has deep complex characters, which is not the same thing. The characters aren’t even consistent.
And I’m sorry, but any show in which THE BABY DIES BECAUSE DADDY DIDN’T LOVE MOMMY ENOUGH deserves to die in a fire. Oh yes, and what happened to that relationship? Introduced in the last season, writers changed their minds, dropped it completely when Ellen turns up again, and then 6 goes all squishy for Baltar again? This show is the epitome of bad writing.
To everyone bitching about God and the supernatural . . . was this the first episode you watched? As has been mentioned several times this has been a consistent part of the universe since the first season, if not the first show!
I enjoyed the series for what it was, and enjoyed the ending because it was fair to the characters. Within the universe that the writers constructed, it was extremely well played. As a side note, the soundtrack in this series easily goes down as one of the best ever for TV or film. I highly recommend anyone interested check out the excellent blog of the composer, Bear McCreary: http://www.bearmccreary.com/blog/
I thought the last scene with the “angels” was interesting, because angel Six, who spent four seasons talking about God’s plan then turned around and hypothesized that a complex system with inherent variability might turn out a surprising result. How is that compatible with a universe run by God’s plan? I just thought that bit was fascinating.
Watch “Firefly”. A lot more fun :)
BSG is science fiction. Emphasis on the “fiction.” It is a great story about people who defy the odds and struggle to find a new home; in the end, whether it was through some divine being’s machinations or through an epic confluence of events, the impossible happened. I read fantasy stories all the time about worlds with gods in them; this is a cool story that maybe inspires people to be strong or to hold to their ideals, whatever they may be. In that, this is a great humanistic series.
You could even speculate that the “god” referenced at the end is to humans what the “Final Five” were to the Cylons – part of the appeal of this show is the way the cycle of people->gods->overthrow->creation is created. A person who creates another becomes a “god” to the creation, who struggles to find their own identity separate from their creator, often by creating in their turn. Is this not what every child goes through as s/he grows up?
Similarly, while I don’t have the direct quote, Lee Adama’s comments on technology were criticizing how our technological development outpaces our moral/ethical development. This is true – we grow smarter, but not necessarily wiser – and we ought to encourage more discussion on how we can use our wonderful technologies more carefully and to implement better policies that help humanity. It brings to mind my favorite quote from H.G. Wells – “old passions and new weapons” – if we cannot grow as moral and rational human beings, then all the technology in the world will not save us.
Just as tortoises and hares do not actually talk, yet we appreciate Aesop’s Fables, so too should a reference to divine beings in a fictitious television show not turn us off to some thought-provoking ideas about the great potential humanity holds and the pitfalls we should be wary of.
Memegene: you confound “science fiction” and “fantasy” and are content to do so. So were the “writers” of this dreck. Does internal consistency matter? Because BSG did not have any. At all. In any regard.
It reminded me of the Bible in that way.
http://atheistbiblegroup.blogspot.com/
Another creationist school board member!
Get in there PZ! Ignore the god rubbish and enjoy it for the good stories.
For those who wanted shiny cylons, here are links to a sculpt for the helmet for the cylon armour that was designed for the series.
cylon helmet side view
cylon helmet rear view
When the series was in pre-production they were going to actually have armour made for the cylons. There was a complete suit designed by Ugo Serrano. However, at the time there was no idea how the series was going to fare. There was simply no budget for that first year to spend on sci-fi armour and it was decided they would go with human looking cylons instead for the main interaction. They then began to integrate in CGI cylons for some encounters as their budget increased.
Yeah- I’m in the opinion that the Angels/Aliens/advanced-created-life-calling-themselves-angels aspect didn’t bother me in the end… WHAT did though was the idea that they should ditch all technology and live in separated small pockets around the planet- that didn’t strike me as such a good idea.
I was so waiting for a lion to come out and eat Doc Cottle from the bush.
And the 1st Earth wasn’t “our” Earth… I want to go back and re-examine the footage to see if the continents are the same- but eh, I’ll leave with the suspension of disbelief that I have now… and wondering why no one has uncovered a Raptor in Ethiopia yet….
The shows really been about contemporary American life and politics- Iraq war, abortion etc have all been (kinda) covered, the last episode had less of that, but in the end I did like it… and wonder where Adama is going to exactly get those trees from on that barren grass covered hill….
From now on, I’d like my televised SF to have a)cool spaceships, b)kick-ass battles), c)well-written characters, d)really hot guys e)really hot guys getting it on with other really hot guys and showing lots of skin, f)moderately decent plots to keep me coming back week to week–oh, and Bear McCreary doing the music. Seriously. He was the best thing about BSG.
What I don’t want my televised SF to have: stupid plotting that culminates in a bunch of goddidit fucking nonsense along with an annoying character delivering an anti-technology bit of frakkin’ nonsense. Ugh.
I loved BSG from the mini and frakkin’ loved the first season. I still think the first season is virtually genius. However, over the series–and especially around season 3–I think the writers began writing themselves into a corner. We didn’t know who the rest of the 12 models were, so then we get this convoluted revelation of the “final five” that, on paper, seemed kinda cool, but turned into a soupy mess. Kara dies, and comes back–but how? What is she? Well, the final resolution to Kara seemed cool, but, to me, wound up a godbotty mess. We’ve been told Hera is super-uber-specially-important…she’s the Shape of Things to Come and what-not. Well…was she really? Essentially, she served as a freakin’ plot device to get this huge (and gorgeous!) final battle between the humans/rebels and the Crazy Cylons and so Kara can remember her piano lessons and play All Along The Watchtower and then Earth…huh? If, as Ron Moore says, that “the Entity” was moving things along, this Entity is buttfucking stupid.
For me, I gave the first hour and a half of the finale an A. The last thirty minutes? Ginormous FAIL. (except for the music. Seriously. McCreary deserves an Emmy)
Battlestar Galactica – the series – sucked.
More stuff… I did find it touching the way they let Laura Roslin go. But she shouldn’t have died! In a universe with a deist god and angels, there was no cure for cancer? What, she used up her one personal miracle the first time she survived? Come on. And then the humans (particularly Baltar and Doc Cottle), knowing full well that they had a strong anti-cancer agent within Hera’s hybrid cells, agreed with Lee that humans should give up technology? Re-tard-ed.
I’ll agree that science was depicted poorly through the series, with Baltar as basically the only competent person in nearly *every* field. Gaeta could calculate a FTL trajectory as good as anyone, but that was about it. Guess they had to keep Baltar around because he was like the Professor from Gilligan’s island in that regard.
And the 1st Earth wasn’t “our” Earth… I want to go back and re-examine the footage to see if the continents are the same- but eh, I’ll leave with the suspension of disbelief that I have now..
They were very careful to not show any continents of the “cinder Earth”.
… and wonder where Adama is going to exactly get those trees from on that barren grass covered hill….
Well, he does still have the Raptor…
How to write a better magic-free ending:
1) Cara should have been the hybrid daughter of Daniel. The guy who taught her “The Music” should have been revealed as her father.
2) Baltar’s father should have been revealed as the same character, making him a hybrid as well.
3) The president, not Helen, should have been one of the final five.
4) Their “brain people”/”Virtual Beings” should have been explained as “projections”, similar to what Hera experiences.
To make it more scientifically accurate:
4) None of that finding the fossils of Mitochodrial Eve shit! God that pissed me off. And I believe the implication was that the lineages of everybody else on earth died off, so if it weren’t for Hera, none of us would be here. NO!
And for fuck’s sake, why did Athena have to kill Boomer.
“To everyone bitching about God and the supernatural . . . was this the first episode you watched?”
Not quite relevant, as someone could have not minded/liked it in previous episodes BUT expected it to go somewhere, or even hated it and not expect it to devour the series alive like it did.
The problem is with the execution.
That ending sucked.
Watch Farscape – much better.
Much, much better.
Plus, it’s got muppets.
I liked some of Bear McCreary’s tracks (the compositional pieces) quite a bit, but the All Along the Watchtower cover was mediocre. If you liked that, then you don’t know much about psychedelic music. Try some Acid Mother’s Temple, or something old like Hawkwind or Silberbart. If a track is under four minutes, something went wrong ;)
The music for Baltar and Virtual Six really grated on my nerves, since it was a just a single note repeated. Wasn’t so bad when they *finally* (60-some episodes later) developed it into, you know, music.
Zombie #51:
Hang on, are you talking about BSG or LOST?
you confound “science fiction” and “fantasy” and are content to do so.
AdamK, please share your definitions of the genres of “science fiction” and “fantasy.” IMO, science fiction can have fantastical elements to it (and often must), even if its main focus is on exploring how a technology would influence how people would exist.
Just as “any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic,” so too is it feasible that a parent entity could be so shrouded in mystery that they may seem to be a “god.” That is one of the core themes – the “Final Five” were revered by the Humlons as akin to gods, even as they officially were monotheistic. Turns out (spoiler) the FF saw the Humlons as their “children”. Extend out to the whole complications from humans creating intelligent machines, and we see a core science fiction theme straight from Isaac Asimov that is highly relevant today with the advanced artificial intelligence technologies we are developing today.
We don’t know what the “god” at the end was – ChipBaltar even said that “god” was not the preferred title. So while most would interpret that being as a divine entity, it is entirely feasible to read that ambiguity completely differently – an alien, an ancient ancestor of humanity.
Seems pretty SciFi to me.
Concerning religious content in BSG: Yes, I am aware that this was part of the show. I found it interesting that the humans believed in many gods and that the cylons were monotheists.
Though I would have imagined that the cylons “believe” would have been part of their programming and a way to control and manipulate their behaviour, similar how pastors, bishops and the pope do it over here in the uncivilized part of the galaxy.
I think they should have turned into the Vong, totally.
I enjoyed the God-happy ending — exactly because it was God happy. The “God” who does the deus ex machina at the end is clearly a monster — the real villain in the series is clearly God, not the robots or the humans.
I have no idea whether the writers intended it — but there’s no other way for a reasonable entity to interpret it, other than that the show is premised upon their being an extremely powerful sadist in charge, who enjoys watching the same cruelty inflicted repeatedly over 100s of thousands of years.
It’s the humans and cylons belief and willingness to go along with the Sadist-In-Charge that is their fatal flaw.
Hate to disagree with some of you, but Kara as a ghost was the only plausable explanation. Having a Cylon daddy doesn’t magically get you a few spare bodies on the resurrection ship, so she couldn’t have been a cylon without one of the others recognizing her. Not to mention that the cylons don’t show any signs of having Viper factories and certainly don’t seem to have the ability to transport dead bodies from the center of gas giants to other planets. Silly as it was, ghost was the only way out and once your stuck with one supernatural character, the rest kinda falls into place.
but the All Along the Watchtower cover was mediocre. If you liked that, then you don’t know much about psychedelic music.
What? Why the hell would anyone have to know anything about psychedelic music (or classical or jazz for that matter) to like a piece of music? And I wouldn’t classify the McCreary cover as psychedelic anyway. The Hendrix cover was, but Dylan’s original was not.
Though I would have imagined that the cylons “believe” would have been part of their programming and a way to control and manipulate their behaviour, similar how pastors, bishops and the pope do it over here in the uncivilized part of the galaxy.
I think they actually discussed that; that belief in God was indeed programmed into the Centurions to control them.
Why does being an atheist mean that the mere mention of god in a story turns us off? It’s TV for god sakes. BSG was one of the greatest shows ever. Watch it. Enjoy it.
I’m watching it on hulu, haven’t seen the last episode. So I’ll read this thread later.
So am I.
I missed the episode where they explained how/why Starbuck got his sex-change operation….
Hate to disagree with some of you, but Kara as a ghost was the only plausable explanation. Having a Cylon daddy doesn’t magically get you a few spare bodies on the resurrection ship, so she couldn’t have been a cylon without one of the others recognizing her. Not to mention that the cylons don’t show any signs of having Viper factories and certainly don’t seem to have the ability to transport dead bodies from the center of gas giants to other planets. Silly as it was, ghost was the only way out and once your stuck with one supernatural character, the rest kinda falls into place.
==
To be fair, we didn’t know about the existence of the colony until the last few episodes. We also didn’t know that the #1s were aware of the identity of the final five.
There certainly could have been a body hidden for her somewhere. And there are wormholes, etc. (BS science, but that’s why it’s called SCIENCE FICTION) to explain other things. God is the easy way out.
Plus, if we modern humans are supposed to be descendants of hybrids in some way (although hopefully not the icky mtDNA Eve way), it could *suggest* that there may actually be life after death for us, leaving the religious aspect open, instead of deciding the matter one way or the other.
A good ending would have been amenable to both a scientific and religious explanation. (A flat-out annihilation of the religious aspects of the show would have been great, but too much to hope for.)
I really didn’t think it was too bad. Was it the best ending evar? No… But it did wrap things up fairly well.
As Eisnel said @57, I don’t mind religion in fiction (I love Raiders of the Lost Ark), it’s real life where we run into problems with it… I accepted the supernatural in BSG back when it they starting hinting at Starbuck’s destiny. I wasn’t thrilled that decided to take that route with the show, but there wasn’t any other good scifi on, and I was invested in the characters; so I went with it.
I think the NY scene did a decent job of casting a little doubt on the certainty of God in the situation. And maybe the humans of “Earth” were leftovers from a previous cycle of destruction. I would have liked a little more about Hera or Starbuck, but maybe Hera’s role was to get Baltar & Caprica into the control room at the right time to say what they said. And yeah, whatever happened to the Ellen-Saul-Caprica love triangle? It just kind of poofed out of existence.
The rejection of technology was predictable, and a little reminiscent of Daniel Quinn’s writings. And after all they’d been through, I could see the appeal to “just walking away.” (‘Course, Daniel Quinn always makes it clear that he’s not advocating a rejection of science and technology – just how we put it to use)
And when it comes down to it, the ending was really what we were being led to through most of the show and was fairly consistent within the fictional universe. As it was, it had been a while since we’d seen an interesting fantasy story in a scifi setting, and that it took an entirely different route from Star Wars.
In the end, OK. I will say that Mary McDonnel had some really great acting in these last episodes.
Katie Sackoff will be in Denver next month for Starfest.
I intend to get in the question line immediately to ask her what she really thought about the finale.
I am incredibly bummed at the BSG finale. I was already going to be upset that the series was over. But to get the ending that god did it all? That freewill is trumped by prophecy?
I’m so let down. I’m convinced more than ever that Family Guy is the only intelligent thing on TV.
I’ve seen a few mentions of the fact that the romanticization of giving up technology as some kind of noble or moral gesture is harmful to women and to anyone with disabilities or health problems (and therefore ableist as well as sexist). But there must also be those among them with mental illnesses.
Considering what the survivors have all gone through, it seems more than cruel to expect those with severe trauma and PTSD to endure a stone-age existence without even the choice of medication.
On top of all the other problems I had with the finale, this was another thing that just made the suspension of disbelief impossible.
@SteveM: You read my statement too literally; relax. I just meant that there’s been good psychedelic music around for many decades. The sitars and overdriven/reverbed guitars in the McCreary version are kind of a giveaway. To me, his cover is way too short and out-of-context compared to the rest of the BSG soundtrack. It left me wanting.
http://allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=77:380
Hey, it is fiction. The Bible is fiction. It would not be that much of a deal if strange Sky Goddesses or Earth Goddesses or strange ghosts, vampires, magicians, fairies, phantoms, moon rabbits, Stygian ferrypeople, curse dolls, Sky or Earth Goddesses, or evil underground spirits come about in fiction.
to Drekab@106
I don’t think that’s true at all, they could have worked something else out for Kara. There are all sorts of Sci Fi gems dealing with temporal disturbances that could explain what happened to her and create a situation where the ship she found on burned up Earth is actually something out of her future instead of her being dead already. Oh, and even with their ghost/angel/whatever scenario they didn’t at all deal with HOW or WHEN her ship ended up there with her burned up body.
Didn’t care for the gawd stuff,
Well, it was written in parts, especially the last line on the last scene, to leave a door open for it being superduper aliens instead of anything divine. Replace the “angel” #6 and “angel” Baltar and “angel” Starbuck with a few Clarke monoliths and you see what I mean.
But I don’t like that either. I was waiting for the “god” of Haldeman’s “Forever Free” to show up.
OK, so a civilization gets a bit too commercialized and this unknown force brutally murders endless billions of people and irradiates multiple biospheres just to start over? What, a decent plague or societal collapse not good enough? Most rational deity-like beings would just sink a continent or something. Sheesh! Or maybe appear in a ball of fire and deliver a warning? Something? Anything? Beuller?
Why does being an atheist mean that the mere mention of god in a story turns us off?
I generally don’t have a problem. It’s *speculative* fiction, after all. I just ask that it’s done in an interesting manner. See the Warren Ellis’ “Preacher” graphic novels for a prime example. Zelazny’s “Creatures of Light And Darkness” has humanity reaching a level of technology where one man can stand and do battle with God. God is a background presence in Giaman’s Sandman series, and even Lucifer and a couple angels appear here and there.
It all depends on how it’s handled.
I’ve watched much of the show and teh ending made me want to throw things through the TV. Baltar’s mystical nonsense turns out to be almost true? What the flying fuck!?
The show turned out to a vapid morality play with a moral of “trust in god.” Which of course is the path to disaster not to success.
I want the time i spent watching the entire show back.
I would have liked a little more about Hera
She became our Mitochondrial Eve, thus providing Humanity 3.0 with… something.
NP #109:
It doesn’t. I imagine most people here loved Lord of the Rings. However, gods can be used to cover up badly conceived plots, the whole deus ex machina of ancient times. “Goddidit” is never a satisfactory answer.
Gods in SciFi are more problematic, IMO. I did like Q in Star Trek: a god-like being who toyed with various species as a child might play with insects.
Quoth frog (#105):
“The ‘God’ who does the deus ex machina at the end is clearly a monster — the real villain in the series is clearly God, not the robots or the humans. […] It’s the humans and cylons belief and willingness to go along with the Sadist-In-Charge that is their fatal flaw.”
You win! This is my new favorite explanation :D
A good journey with a satisfying ending. The series was so epic though that not a single episode- not even the finale- can top the whole thing. In that sense, there were disappointing elements to the ending. I like that some things were left ambiguous, my problems had more to do with two tired old sci-fi cliches that informed the second half of the finale: AI is always rebellious; and the Adam and Eve plot. I thought the religious commentary, as was usual, was brilliant- as in Vonnegut’s masterpieces, “God does not care.” But I was disappointed by “cranky AI is inevitable” and “And WE ARE THEIR ANCESTORS in the future-present!!!!!!!”
As to being an atheist and being instantly turned off by spirituality in fiction nothing could be farther from that for me. One of my favorite series of short stories ever is the People stories by Zenna Henderson.
I’m convinced more than ever that Family Guy is the only intelligent thing on TV.
I actually think American Dad has passed it up in the satire department this season.
Watch Farscape – much better. Much, much better.Plus, it’s got muppets.
“Pilot” was one of the best animatronic/CGI aliens in any SF TV show or movie ever. Loved that character. Broke my heart the episode where they has to (very painfully) detach him from the ship’s control system.
Yeah, it pretty much sucked for many of the reasons already described (lazy writing being the worst offense). It was, however, a glorious failure.
A few points about the complaints: yes, Hitchhiker’s did it first and better. My biggest problem was the timeline that making Hera mitochondrial Eve presented. Sorry, don’t have enough interest to check the actual evolutionary chain of hominids, but dropping in modern humans about 150K years ago? Way too early. Guiding an emergent homo sapien civilization 6000 to 8000 years ago? Sure, go for it.
While I found the “back to nature” trope disposed of far too easily, what else were they supposed to do? Their supplies were exhausted. Take your chances in the wild or die in the vacuum of space. Both choices suck, but one sucks less. Yeah, a lot of them are going to die as opposed to all of them if they tried to go on.
My biggest objection though was that the only major characters who got the most unalloyed “happy ending” were the two who were responsible for the destruction of the colonies in the first place.
As for the divine agents, that was really a throwback to the original done better. Remember Count Ibli and the glowing ship made of selenium crystals (and those amazing white Colonial Warrior uniforms)?
It’s still a genre high-water mark. Enjoy the parts of BSG that resemble “City on the Edge of Forever” and “Trials and Tribblations” and ignore the parts that are more like “Enemy Within,” “Spock’s Brain” (though I have to admit a certain fondness for the immortal line, “Brain and brain! What is ‘brain’?”), most of Voyager, and the entire run of Enterprise.
KenS: The show turned out to a vapid morality play with a moral of “trust in god.” Which of course is the path to disaster not to success.
Not the way I saw it — “trust in god” is the problem, not the resolution. At the end, you have the whole shebang repeating itself, with the angels gibbering about God, yet not a hand lifted by these ultra-powerful, million year old entities to do anything about it.
They can bring someone back to life, build a faster-than-light ship, but they can’t put out an infomercial about what can happen if you treat your AI’s badly?
What can you say about a story where the whole thing boils down to: God killed the human race to teach Baltar how to love? It’s the original flood story — the Gods kill mankind because we interrupted their nap. The Sumerians did not like their Gods at all!
The gawd stuff didn’t phase me at all. I just considered it a part of the context of the story. It is fiction, after all.
The final episode was just fine. Cavil’s exit was perfect, and the space battle was very well-executed. No complaints at all.
People need to stop Complaining About Shows You Don’t Watch. You know who you are, Zombie. Seriously, nothing pisses me off more.
As for BSG, it’s a narrative. It has always been a narrative. If you have a problem with mainstream narrative television following the Laws of Narrative, there’s something wrong with you.
I can accept the whole ‘abandon space’ idea, even if they’d actually (in the real world of reality and not narrative fiction) have died from disease right away. At least they can pass on their knowledge and wisdom to our forebears if not their genetics. And hey, Narrative Fiction. The secret to enjoying things is allowing yourself to have a Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
Hey, it is fiction. The Bible is fiction. It would not be that much of a deal if strange Sky Goddesses or Earth Goddesses or strange ghosts, vampires, magicians, fairies, phantoms, moon rabbits, Stygian ferrypeople, curse dolls, Sky or Earth Goddesses, or evil underground spirits come about in fiction.
Why does everyone keep missing the point? The problem isn’t that supernatural beings appear in the story. The problem is that their appearance is arbitrary and a result of poor storytelling. The story has been about the strange occurrences and unusual coincidences and the hope that they would be explained in an interesting way. But it turns out the explanation is that it was all exactly what it appeared to be: magic. Magic from a source completely outside the story that is in no way contextualized or explained in the actual narrative. That is lame and people who tell stories for a living have considered it an unforgivable copout since at least the first century.
Look, I liked the series. I still do. I think the characters and a its explorations of complex themes was quite well done a lot of the time. But the resolution of all of its “mysteries” which it took dozens of episodes to build essentially boils down to “a wizard did it.” People arguing about whether that wizard is God or some advanced robot hive mind or whether Kara Thrace is a ghost or an angel are missing the point of the criticism entirely. The point is that, in the end, its really a kind of handwaving and very lazy storytelling.
Yes, as you say, its a story. It is being judged as a story and found wanting. That’s the point.
It was a total let down. They dug themselves into a plot hole and couldn’t get out. So instead of just leaving some things unexplained they called it all god and ruined the whole series. Additionally the vibe was off, BSG is a relatively dark show, and coming up with a 95% happy ending was cheap and unfitting.
A point of much less significance than the general picture is that they actually used our Earth in the shots of it from space (the African continent specifically)… but when they found Earth in the series not too many episode before it was in the place OUR Earth is; with our zodiac constellations. How many places in the Universe have our same sky?! It was much better when BSG was a story about a parallel-ish universe of people, or maybe even humanity in the very very very distant future. Trying to make it our past was just stupid. If they were determined to have a happy ending they should have made up a planet.
God is a background presence in Giaman’s Sandman series, and even Lucifer and a couple angels appear here and there.
There is a sort of spinoff series by Mike Carey with the Lucifer character which is quite excellent.
Why all the upsettiness about Goddidit?
This is exactly where God exists – in frackin’ fiction.
Although, a better ending would have seen the BG crew succumbing to inevitable destruction, with the Baltar and No 8 angels, on observing the final awful silence ringing out through the cosmos, quipping:
“Well, THAT didn’t work out particularly well for them, did it?”
Frog:
Not the way I saw it — “trust in god” is the problem, not the resolution.
Plausible if Baltar had died for his treason or for his repeated sojourns into woo. But he got the happiest ending so it is reasonable to view him as the moral paragon of the series and for most of the series he was a simpering doddering fool blindly following the directions of an invisible sky fairy.
And hey, Narrative Fiction. The secret to enjoying things is allowing yourself to have a Willing Suspension of Disbelief.
A request from a degree-holding English major: Don’t talk about narrative and the rules of fiction when you clearly don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
The suspension of disbelief must be supported by the writer. Narrative fiction does not exist in isolation from the rest of life, nor does it get a free pass from being analyzed for its consistency, believability and originality, as well as the ability to communicate themes and ideas. Indeed the literature which has survived hundreds of years has done so because it stands up to the most rigorous analysis.
No.
All it means is that Hera would have been the Most Recent Common Ancestor by Maternal Line of everyone on the planet. Sperm have no mitchondria. Ova do. Mitochondrial DNA is thus passed down by maternal line only. The lineages of everyone else on Earth could have survived just fine: All of the Baltettes could have pumped out progeny with present-day descendants. It’s just that there’d be at least one male ancestor in any line of descent tracing back to someone other than Hera.
What the conceit DOES mean: Hera got HER mitochondria from her mother, which means you did too, which means you’re walking around with purebred toaster mitochondria in all your cells. That’s a far more satisfying detail, to my mind, than each of us just having some unknown mix of homeopathically diluted Cylon genepool maybe having survived since the Pleistocene.
I don’t mind god stuff in fiction at all if it’s handled well. In fact, I rather like it.
What I don’t like is mixing bad, unbelievable, unclear sciency explanations with bad, unbelievable unclear goddy explanations, especially when the characters’ motivations and reactions are inconsistent and bear no resemblence to those of human beings.
Also, with 30,000 people, limited tech supplies, and one surviving general practitioner MD who’s gonna drop dead of curmudge within a few years, building a modern city would be approximately the worst possible public health decision possible on a new planet with unfamiliar potential pathogens.
KenS: Plausible if Baltar had died for his treason or for his repeated sojourns into woo. But he got the happiest ending so it is reasonable to view him as the moral paragon of the series and for most of the series he was a simpering doddering fool blindly following the directions of an invisible sky fairy.
A scientist marooned on a pre-holocene planet, left to farm and raise babies after having murdered most of the human and cylon race, is a happy ending?
Maybe the writers meant it as a happy ending — or maybe there was a great deal of irony there. If the former, the writers are pretty damn stupid. How could saving, almost accidentally, one child redeem one from galactic murder? I vote for irony…
Remember, this is all on the background of multiple nuclear wars that had killed, multiple times, almost every last sentient entity. And “God” never even tried to stop it — he actually goaded it, over and over again.
The Christian-Muslim God to a tee! The folks left were so exhausted by the entire ordeal, they vapidly accept it. But it’s hard to see that as a happy ending — just an exhausted ending, that in the end resolved nothing, since it inevitably starts again with the murderer in charge laughing gleefully at the fun!
This is exactly where God exists – in frackin’ fiction.
I don’t understand why people keep misunderstanding this but its been pretty clearly explained a number of times in this thread. The problem that most people are having is not that God appears in the story. Its how it is treated as an element of the story which is basically as a lazy writer’s all purpose plot device. Its just a random force that magically pushes the plot in certain directions whenever it needs to move forward. It has no character, no discernable rules that guide its powers or actions. It just, every now and then, makes something happen in the story which just so happens to coincide with the need for the story to continue.
What if when we first started watching Star Wars, there was no real understanding of the Force. All we as viewers knew was that every now and then one of the characters would find themselves in an impossible situation and would, all of a sudden be able to manifest some previously unacknowledged ability, like say, leaping 30 feet in the air, to escape. What if that went on for 3 or 4 movies and then finally at the end there was some explanation like: see the reason people are able to do these sorts of things is this thing called the Force…
That is essentially what has happened here. A bunch of weird stuff happened which some unknown mover – a mover that remains at series end, entirely inscrutable – made it happen with its own mysterious magic and for its own mysterious reasons. That’s it. That’s the whole explanation. Weak.
Regarding the old/new Earth sky and constellations…
1. The adventurers first saw the constellation pattern (our ‘zodiac’) after some sort of spiritual vision at the temple on *Kobol*.
2. I don’t think they ever genuinely checked the sky of the first ‘Earth’ (that is, the lifeless ruins of a cylon colony) for comparison.
3. Of course, the new (‘real’) Earth in the final episode had constellations that matched the vision on Kobol.
I could be wrong on point #2 though…
That second “possible” is for purposes of emphasis. Yeah, that’s it.
No. All it means is that Hera would have been the Most Recent Common Ancestor by Maternal Line of everyone on the planet. Sperm have no mitchondria.
==
I realize that. Hey. I’m a biologist.
What I’m saying is that is NOT what the show implied that it meant. The show was implying that if she were dead, none of us would be here. THAT was her importance. And that’s why it pissed me off; it’s bad biology.
Also, with 30,000 people, limited tech supplies, and one surviving general practitioner MD who’s gonna drop dead of curmudge within a few years, building a modern city would be approximately the worst possible public health decision possible on a new planet with unfamiliar potential pathogens.
But! They could use the technology they have to adapt as well as possible to their new world until they can no longer sustain such high levels of tech. Dianosing illnesses, allergic reactions, developing good ways to cook and farm, etc, could go a long way in making their lives something other than hell for those used to using a high level of technology. Without technology to assist them it seems almost impossible to believe they could survive at all.
Series had a couple of good moments, ending sucked.
Speaking of stupid, so’s this ‘explanation’:
Unbelievable. The song communicates that the story is set in the past – if you’re filming a goddamn episode of Cold Case! It does not communicate that we are talking about anything before the 1960s.
The best thing about the final episode is that it means the damn thing’s over.
This has never happened before, and it will never happen again.
The main problem I had with the ending was essentially the same as with the ending to the Matrix trilogy. Throughout the series there were hints that the backstory we have been told isn’t the whole truth, and that the series was building up to some big twist, but then we get to the end and it turns out that everything was exactly how it seemed.
The Thirteenth tribe set out specifically for the planet Earth, the Scrolls of Pythia tell the story of their journey despite the fact that the people of Kobol shouldn’t have had any contact with the Earthlings after they left, and the symbols of the Colonies were somehow based on constellations visible from Earth which they apparently knew about before setting off… it almost seems as if they weren’t looking for a new home but rather returning to their original homeworld. Then there are the Lords of Kobol who were strongly implied to have been real beings living on Kobol and who created the humans, and we are told “all this has happened before and will happen again”… are the humans an earlier machine race who turned against their masters?
And then in the end it turns out that Earth v1.0 was just some random planet, humans are humans, Cylons are Cylons, god is pretty much exactly what Baltar has been saying and the one twist they can manage is randomly pulling out “Starbuck is a ghost!” despite the fact that they had already built up a decent explanation for her in previous episodes.
Just for anyone who wants to know, Ron Moore is a militant agnostic.
Just for anyone who wants to know, Ron Moore is a militant agnostic.
This makes the ending even more disappointing AND telling. If an agnostic had to shoehorn God in to make the puzzle pieces fit, you know he was in trouble.
Actually, the “god-happy” elements got worse…much worse in seasons 3 & 4.
Besides losing me plot-wise (I had no idea what was going on by the time they opened up this season, and I haven’t missed an episode), I just couldn’t relate to the spiritual bong-water they kept trying to not-so-subtly interject.
The first 2 seasons were incredible. But to get to the conclusion they wanted (actually a very recycled concept), the could have skipped all of season 3 and most of season 4.
If the explanation you’re talking about is Starbuck being the daughter of Daniel, Number 7, I read an interview where Moore implies that they didn’t even think about that. The fans read it into the show on their own.
From here: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2009/03/battlestar-galactica-daybreak-finale-moore-mcdonnell-olmos.html#more
I agree with you, though, that that would have been a more satisfying explanation than what they did.
I was disappointed quite a bit, actually. One aspect of this BSG that intrigued me so much WAS the religion– this conflict between the humans’ “gods” and the Cylon “God”… and naturally, the atheist characters. It was enjoyable to see the initially skeptical Baltar become increasingly trusting of what he first took to be a delusion, and see how various takes on faith/prophecy/etc played out over the span of the show.
I really didn’t have a well-thought out idea of how the show might end, so I was really looking forward to the otherwise-brilliant writers whipping up something great and satisfying at the conclusion. You can imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be something so lame.
Also, it bothers me that Admiral Adama abandoned everyone at the end. Kinda sucks for Lee.
I’ve never forgiven the SciFi Channel for giving up on Farscape. Just like my hatred of Fox increased dramatically when they cancelled Firefly.
I didn’t watch this version of BSG because I remember the first Battlestar Stupidica. Besides, if I like a show, it’ll be cancelled (Babylon Five being the only exception, but it almost got cancelled). So I did the rest of you a favor by not watching BSG.
I didn’t walk away with that implication, but fair enough.
Loved the ending. Didn’t answer all questions but was the better for it. The God stuff didn’t bother me any more than the presence of FTL or the dubiousness of finding the actual fossil of mitochondrial Eve. It’s fiction, and compelling well-written fiction. Probably the best, most cohesive science fiction series ever written. I like to imagine Firefly would have been better had it survived, but sadly it did not.
I haven’t had time to read all the comments, but BSG was as good as anything ever written for television. It was the only show that dealt with suicide bombers, the politics of extermination camps, and tendency of societies in crisis to gravitate to despotism. Treachery and passion were always on display. It was as confusing and unsatisfying as real life. Nothing was neatly wrapped up, and the explanations were insufficient and somehow true to life. The whole theme of that there is something out there screwing with us is exotic but not impossible. Who knows what a civilization that is ahead of us hundreds of millions of years would be like? Religious robots! Ha! They must be Liberty University grads.
There was no good-bye scene between Adama and Tigh. WTF??!!
I think they slyly tried to dodge this criticism for deus ex machina in the “last frakkin’ special”, where they say that they had to wrap it up rather than doing more seasons ad infinitum, that they struggled for ages for satisfying answers to all the questions of the show, but that when they considered that the show broke the scifi genre and was more about the characters than the backstory they wrote the finale with the tagline “it’s the characters stupid!”
In the interviews following the finale airing they also say regarding several of these issues that they discussed many different avenues of thought, but that most weren’t satisfying, which is why they went for what they did.
I’ve only watched up to the end of the third season as of this weekend, but I’m enjoying it immensely. I’m a person who doesn’t like religions in books that I read very much (I’m inclined to think “yeah, right,” whenever someone mentions a god, even when it seems like there’s a pretty good chance there are in fact gods in that fictional world), but it’s pretty tastefully done in BSG I think; at least, I don’t have a problem with it for once. I think it’s actually pretty interesting that they’re a space-faring, highly technologically advanced society that still has an aspect of spirituality; so far it’s always seemed like something that is slowly introduced in a “they’re either crazy or right” manner, and it’s told honestly enough that I can accept that there might actually be something crazy and spiritual going on.
I enjoyed the series, however I can’t give it a four star rating. Some of the religious episodes bogged things down.
However, the episode named “33” was fantastic. You could do worse than just watching the series up to that point and then stopping.
One other annoyance was that they never resolved the human/machine dualism bullshit that kept coming up (not that I was expecting to be that lucky). We *are* machines: get used to it, bitches. Bio-chemo-electrical machines; human, cylon and half-breed alike. There’s enough stochasticity in the works to make the behaviour indeterminate at any practical level of analysis, so hang your “freewill” on that if you like, but there’s no animating, non-material ghost in there that makes us fundamentally different from a skin-job toaster.
Of course, people in our world have enough trouble with that insight, so it’s hardly reasonable to expect it from a society that has all kinds of reasons to hatehatehate the machine-folk.
Sometimes PZ, you can a little hard headed, it’s a story, they ain’t trying to teach this in you know Science Class.
Jeepers, learn to relax and have some fun. It is ok to say you liked it, and if an ID’er says,… “Oh, so you like BSG, some intelligent design is ok then, eh?” The correct responce would be, “Only if the designer is creating killer robots and is gratuitously using laser beams to kill off stoopid humans”
~wink~
Anyhoo, “God” is more of a,… how to say it,… and “Intelligent Meddler” and there is real proof that “it” create the Universe. Seems to this version of “God” relies solely on evolution (macro and micro) and is only interest in “tweaking” here and there once every 10000 years. Call him the Mad Biologist of the Universe.
I still think it was go yarn, just LoTR, B5, fantasy and science porn fer sure, but ya need to have dreams even though you know they will never come true, it’s Teh Stoopid in human nature.
Regression to the primitive is almost inevitable.
nawww.
remember the Professor from Gilligan’s Island?
Yeah, coconut machinery baby!
BTW, I was always disappointed with the supernatural story arc, but as others mentioned it was flexible enough for the whole series that they COULD have done something much more interesting with it at the end… like shown how it really was all primitive superstition; the six and gaius “ghosts” really were just parallel projections of their own minds, etc., and maybe there really was some sort of chaos effect going on which ended up inevitably causing the same patterns to repeat themselves.
seriously, ANYTHING would have been better than the way they wrapped it up.
*sigh*
we’ll have to wait at least another 5 years before there is sufficient money and interest to try another sci-fi series that actually HAS science as part of the fiction.
overall, great characterizations, acting, directing, and cinematography, which WILL influence future sci-fi series for the better, I think. Extremely poor story arc and poor resolutions, which will do little to further the cause of good sci-fi.
net gain to fictional, operatic dramas, net loss to sci-fi as a genre.
NEXT
In hindsight I wish they had come to earth in DC-8 like spaceships and that someone of them had been named xenu. Now THAT would have made more sense.
Well, I didnt read all of the posts so somebody may have already said it. But big Adamma stayed agnostic to the end. Thats the best thing I can say about it. After Baltar speech, I decided had this not been the last episode, it would still have been the last I would have watched.
Gah.. People keep whining about “They wouldn’t have given up all their technology.” Who said they did? They certainly had many of the smaller raptors left. Maybe they did all die off, or failed to reproduce, since otherwise how do you get one “eve” out of the whole damn thing? And, for that matter, half of them, including Hera, are names of Gods in some civilizations, so that could be seen as either a remnant of the true origin of early civilization. We have them “starting out”, but nothing explaining how, when, what and why, you get stories like Atlantis, the Greek/Roman gods, or a whole mess of other stuff that “could” be explained by remnants of the original survivors being remembered, or elevated, to something more than just a memory, by people who where only “partly” aware of all of what took place (the primitives might not have even been able to manage to get any of it right).
But, despite the fact that I also found it annoying how they ended it, in some respects, I don’t have as big of a problem with it as some here do. If it was pulled out of their butts at the end, with “no” mention of god/gods the entire rest of the time, and nothing spooking at any point, then I would have more of a problem with it. As I see it, the next time some moron babbles about how ID could mean, “made by space aliens”, we can now go, “Oh, you mean like the super advanced computer/race that made a bunch of different earths, and guided survivors from one to the next, in Battlestar Galactica? Yeah, pretty neat huh? But… that ‘god’ doesn’t want, need, or desire ‘worshipers’, or really care if this world ends or not.”, then watch them cringe and freak out at how you, “Just don’t get it.” lol
It was good overall, but they waited too long to wrap up too much.
But they did show flashbacks of the five cylons living on cinder-Earth supposedly 2000 years ago, in conditions exactly like modern day Earth. If they were so “careful”, what was that about?
I’m in the middle of watching the DVDs now (midway through season 2), so I’m not reading any of the comments, but despite all the god (or gods) in it, it’s a show that I’m hooked onto. It really isn’t amazing, but once you watch a couple of episodes, you’ll get hooked. I’m ok with the god stuff since it is science fiction.
Oh, PZ…who cares about the religious stuff…ITS SCIFI! It’s not hard scifi as such, where you have to obey all the laws of the universe…it’s got a touch of fantasy in it. The nice thing about fiction is it at least ADMITS it’s making it up….
Mur Lafferty (goddess) writes SF. Her “Heaven” series is one of the coolest ever! (I volunteer to rub bellies in dog heaven please)
Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series is about human colonists on Pern who use the technology that got them there in order to adapt. Interestingly, once they lost religion — it never came back.
MUCH more satisfying than BSG!!
I thought it was excellent; a great end to the series.
I actually like to see religion in shows like this. This is a fantasy show and religion is fantasy – appropriate!
There were two things I really loved about the series.
1. It seemed to be very much about demonising enemies in conflict and then slowly realising that the enemies are essentially the same as you and resolving those differences.
2. The recurring theme of the imperfection of humans. Like how the chance of peace between the human/cylon alliance and the bad cylons is destroyed by the Chief being effected by his personal emotions.
The opera house scene at the climax was awesome.
The biggest problem with the show is that Ron Moore’s technological cynicism is stuck in the cold war era. I agree that it’s a grossly facile anti-science/progress message.
What burns me is that BSG runs for how many years while the much better Firefly gets canned after half a season.
I tried to get into BSG but I couldn’t find anything to latch on to, no characters that make me want see them again – quite the reverse, incredibly irritating and unbelievable neurotics like Kara Thrace – and no sharp, witty writing like you get from Whedon or Straczynski. For all its excesses and occasional silliness Dr Who is far more entertaining.
When I heard about Mitochondrial Eve at the end, I was actually hoping that there might being SOMETHING in this finale that could partially redeem it after all the magical stuff that happened. I like genetics.
However, the show incorrectly defined Mitochondrial Eve! They called her “the most recent common ancestor” of every human being on Earth today. She’s actually the MATRILINEAL most recent common ancestor of every human being on Earth today. That’s a huge difference. Even a Wikipedia search could have prevented that error.
In talking to other BSG viewers since the finale, I’ve also found that very few of them have a correct understanding of how Mitochondrial Eve is supposed to be related to all of us. Most people seem to think that Mitochondrial Eve’s line is the only one that survived till the present day. As comment #136 above well explains, that’s completely wrong. I suppose the “Eve” in her title gives people the wrong idea.
I’m sure that the writers intended for Hera to be Mitochondrial Eve, but it is worth noting that they never explicitly confirmed that in the finale. They just implied it.
Head Six and Head Baltar only say that Mitochondrial Eve’s remains were found in Tanzania, where she lived 150,000 years ago with her Cylon mother and her Human father.
I like to think that Mitochondrial Eve was actually the daughter of Caprica Six and Baltar.
If that were the case, then there would be a theme to the whole series. God’s plan was to make Baltar and Caprica fall in love so they could reproduce and make Mitochondrial Eve. That’s why God assigned Head Six to possess Baltar and Head Baltar to possess Caprica Six. In the finale, Baltar finally did a selfless act, thereby making it possible for him to love someone more than he loves himself.
I’m sure the writers didn’t mean that, but it would be better in a literary sense. Baltar and Six were much more central to the series than Helo and Athena were. Aside from her role as a McGuffin in several episodes, Hera was mostly irrelevant.
I don’t understand why God (or whatever it likes to be called) would choose to exercise its will in such an indirect, vague, and cruel way, but that same criticism can be made of the Bible.
Thanks for this thread, PZ. I’ve been wanting to read others opinions about the finale, and the show in general.
I’ve watched BSG from the beginning, but it’s been a hard show to track, being that it has taken these looooooong hiatuses between seasons. When it started back up again, I would think “wait, where are we? What’s going on?”
When the show first began, I loved that it was treating our modern day concerns about terrorism, religious extremist violence, the iraq occupation et al through a scifi lens. The miniseries, and the first season in general, is solid, gripping stuff. And I liked the setup of the humans and Cylons having different religious belief systems, as it seemed that the writers would also be commenting on HOW religious belief systems have contributed to the cylon war and the human genocide.
And then, over time, the show morphed. It became ABOUT the religious themes, and which side had “the Truth”. Commentary became plot, and the show dissolved in woo.
And what’s worse, the character writing became weak weak weak. Who can forget that ridiculous episode (I think in season 3) where suddenly we are introduced to Lee Adama’s prostitute lover (since before the war) and his illegitimate child that he’s supporting in secret? WTF? Again and again, the BSG writers committed the sin of breaking character integrity to force the plot in a new direction. Lazy. What started out with the focus of a lsaer beam, slowly became mud.
My favorite relationship throughout the series, was betwen Kara and the cylon Leoben. It’s fucked up and very interesting. All along, he’s played as having more knowledge than she does, more wisdom and more insight. I loved the scene on Earth 1 where she finds her burned out body. She turns to him and screams out her frustration “WHAT AM I???”
And he, for the first time ever, is gobsmacked. He’s got nothing to offer, as lost in the dark as she is.
I felt a spark of hope, that this would signal a break out of the prophesy woo that the writers had been drowning in. How cool it would have been if ALL the characters had realized they had been following a delusion all along.
But alas, no. Goddidit. What a let down.
(I also felt the coda on modern day earth was just a tad disingenuous. Bringing the show back around to man’s relationship with technological creations seemed forced, as the show hasn’t really been about that relationship since maybe season 2. Meh.)
And I won’t even mention that dogawful metaphor of the Galactica being slathered with cylon bondo to hold it together through the last few episodes.
Can you hit me a bit harder with that metaphor please, Mr. Writer? I don’t think I quite got it the first six times you mentioned it. Kthx.
For what it’s worth, I thought this show lost all hope when they started “revealing” the final five. Bob Dylan is/was a cylon? wait…What?
The biggest disappointment I had during the finale was that neither Starbuck nor Apollo sat in the cockpit of a viper. I’m not sure what show that was Friday night, but it wasn’t BSG.
There are two recurring themes in this discussion that bother me.
The first is the idea that “Hey, it’s fiction! Lighten up!” Fiction may be exempt from the laws of physics, but not from the rules of good storytelling, and that’s what people are complaining about. Brent has already made this point well in #130 and #140, but apparently it bears repeating for latecomers who haven’t read the whole thread.
The second point, which I have not yet seen adequately addressed, has to do with the question of why the survivors would abandon their tech to lead a Stone Age life of hell. News flash: Stone Age life was not hell. In some sense it’s the ideal lifestyle for humans, the life our bodies and brains are optimized for. Backbreaking drudgery is an invention of “civilized” urban life in which parasitic priest and noble classes freeload on the labor of the underclasses. Some posters are worried about diseases, but even most of those are products of urban life: typhus incubates in untreated sewage, and smallpox didn’t make the jump to people until after cattle had been domesticated. Small roving bands of people are much less vulnerable to disease than concentrated urban populations; the selective pressures that produce virulent disease didn’t exist in the Stone Age.
Brock:
When they got to “cinder Earth” Gaeta announced the constellations matched.
I think it far more likely that no one ever checked that the constellations in the “planetarium” on Kobol actually matched our constellations. I seem to remember at the time people talking about how they looked distorted and then speculating about time difference between us and them.
Well, I do remember the original Battlestar (Buck Coulson called it ‘Cattlecar Galactica.) Which is why I didn’t watch the new BG. Perhaps a mistake.
gaypaganunitarianagnostic @181- “Well, I do remember the original Battlestar (Buck Coulson called it ‘Cattlecar Galactica.) Which is why I didn’t watch the new BG. Perhaps a mistake.
I watched the original too (at 16) and was amazed they were actually going to resurrect it on the scifi channel. Even though IMO it ultimately failed to come together, it still stands as one of the most bold instances of finding a completely new and original take on an old piece of material that was hackneyed even in 1977.
Watch the miniseries, at least. It’s absolutely brilliant.
Several commenters seem to think that what the “good” characters do on the show is presented as the “good” or “right” thing to do. Or that what they say they’re going to do is what gets done.
For example, strengthofmind mentions Tyrol says he’s going to be a hermit, so we have to discount his genetic contribution. But characters can change their minds after the story is over.
The part that seems to stick in a lot of craws is that the BG survivors decide to split up and populate the planet by interbreeding with the locals. They hope that it will result in a better world. And readers here say, “that’s all a bunch of happy horseshit.”
And they’re right. It doesn’t result in a better world. **Head Six and Head Baltar confirm it**.
So, how could anyone ever get the idea that the writers want us to think that humans learned from their mistakes and did the right thing? It’s explicitly denied. The cheerful doing of things with a wild excitement and great intentions is PROVEN to fail.
The whole point is that the BG survivors landed on Earth with all kinds of advantages and good will, having learned all kinds of things about the value of cooperation, the humanity of others who don’t look like us, and the horrors of war. And we end up with the same civilization as before.
We are what we are, which includes our susceptibility to pretty stories and panacea and violence and manipulation and stupidity and genius. God, angels, magic, technology, none can prevail over human nature. It’s the ultimate in reproducible results.
Oh, and Corey. I love your question about where Baltar would get seeds. You *really* don’t know where seeds come from? Really?
I rather enjoyed the finale just as i’ve enjoyed the rest of the series for the most part.
I wasn’t bothered by the “goddidit” ending as the “angels” and “god” could just as well be far more advanced forms of cylon or some sort of unintentional creation of cylon projection technology just as the cylons were the creation of humanity’s imagination. The nature of the angels is never explicitly said to be supernatural by anyone but humans and cylons. Either way all the religions shown in the show are ultimately fictitious within the mythos and end up steering their followers wrong time and time again(I especially enjoyed Baltar blatantly exploiting his followers, very realistic)
This is a far more awesome finale though:
Small roving bands of people are much less vulnerable to disease than concentrated urban populations; the selective pressures that produce virulent disease didn’t exist in the Stone Age.
that is just so, so wrong.
unless there is good gene flow between small populations, they are MORE susceptible to disease.
In THIS case (the BSG case), that would be mitigated by interbreeding with other local populations, but in general, what you said was entirely incorrect.
as to there being no selective pressures for virulent disease existing in the “stone age”, again, that’s entirely pure fantasy on your part. There is lots of evidence of malarial death during the “stone age”, for example. You have to recall that humans aren’t the only mammalian vector out there, let alone the only animal vector.
The cheerful doing of things with a wild excitement and great intentions is PROVEN to fail.
again, incorrect. even if you are speaking ONLY of what happened in this final episode of BSG, do try to recall what the six and gaius “avatars” said of this current iteration of “earth”. Did they say it had failed?
no.
I find your entire analysis to be without merit, regardless of whether you are only speaking in specific terms of this fictional episode, or trying to extend your fallacious arguments outwards to reality.
don’t take it personally. I just wouldn’t want anyone to think that your analysis of population genetics and epidemiology had any merit in reality.
BSG – blech
i just never understood where the doctor got all his cigarettes from. i mean seriously, he brought a 4 year supply with him?
plus didn’t they say something like kara was the destroyer of everything? WTF?
I liked the series but i think it could be redone, even darker with much less god overtones.
I would totally like to see Star Wars done this way.
perhaps torture the ewoks for good measure the way they tortured me when I first saw them.
I confess I don’t know where Baltar would get seeds of domesticated plants suitable for farming on Pleistocene Earth. Maybe you’ll enlighten us. Maybe Galactica had seeds, but wouldn’t they be alien plants?
(Not that I expect small details like that to concern the writers, since they assume that even cylon mtDNA just magically fits into the nested hierarchy of life on Earth.)
Who decided Anders would lead all the ships into the sun?
Did he volunteer and I missed it?
Did Kara get another revelation in addition to the harbinger of death?
Anders was just thrown away?!
arghhhhh!! I wish they would have just left out the landing on Earth!
I’m so pissed about the ending.
Anybody want to buy a used BSG T-shirt? Black, size L?
I think folks here are missing the very center of why this is bad, bad storytelling. There is a force with a plan pushing all of the pieces around; there is in any work of fiction. This force is the author. Having the characters explicitly invoke that force is just hanging a rickety lampshade on sloppy writing.
Yes, I got choked up at the conclusion of my OTP’s storyline. But I still nerd-rage pretty hard at the ridiculous cop-out of and ending, which boils down to “RDM wrote it, you watched it, now shut up”.
I am reminded of Nick Lowe’s The Well-Tempered Plot Device.
Sure, God isn’t good or evil. God is entertaining. I liked that story better when Grant Morrison was writing it; at least he took it seriously.
@85: Thank you thank you for the link! I’m going to be poking around Bear’s blog for a long time to come.
Spoilers:
I came away with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was really frustrated by several of the narrative arcs they gathered up and tied off at the end, which I felt had been completely neglected in seasons 3 and 4. I think that this was the main problem with the finale–that many of the arcs leading into it were flat or nonexistent by the time they got there, which means that anything that the writers did to tie things off was going to be seen as a deus ex machina. Of course, the literal deus ex machina they actually threw in didn’t help matters either. Just about every leap the plot took in this episode felt forced to me–except for the pivotal one involving Tyrol; I thought that one worked pretty well, actually.
On the other hand, I can’t dismiss the finale entirely. There were some beautiful moments in that episode, and I think the show’s attention to character was ultimately what made most of those moments possible. And I thought the music was superb.
Jeremy @172:
You mention the recurring theme of the imperfection of humans, and give as an example Chief Tyrol’s being affected by his personal emotions. But he’s a Cylon!
Ichthyic @ #185: Maybe I expressed it badly, but the point I was trying to make is the same one Jared Diamond made in Guns, Germs, and Steel: that the Colonials are more likely to carry pathogens fatal to the natives than vice versa, because the Colonials came from an environment that favored the evolution of such pathogens. Are you saying Diamond has it wrong? (Not arguing, just asking.)
@frog (#139), regarding Baltar’s “happy” ending:
“A scientist marooned on a pre-holocene planet, left to farm and raise babies after having murdered most of the human and cylon race, is a happy ending?”
Given the circumstances, it’s extremely happy for Baltar, because 1) he survives, 2) he (probably) gets to pass on his smug, selfish genius-genes with a hot cylon playboy model, and 3) he gets the single thing he truly wanted (other than NOT DEATH): a clean slate!
There were so many opportunities for the cylons to nuke him or the humans to space him (out the airlock), yet the sophomoric Baltar clung to the thread dangled in front of him by an angel. ANY ending not at the hands of the two species would have been pretty happy for him. I mean, god have the frakker a free pass on war crimes just because, long after the fact, he partially overcame his pathological self-absorbtion. Whew. Lucky break.
The Godly elements were inevitable for this series, considering the original BSG, but what kept me watching as an atheist viewer is that they kept it ambiguous until the end. I gathered that Adama went along with some of the woo because he figured “well, maybe there is a rational basis/history underneath the mumbo-jumbo that I can actually frakking use…”
This ending, for all its flaws, was still better than the truly AWFUL Galactica 1980 nonsense that capped the original series!
First half of the finale was awesome, last half just pretty retarded. The only thing wrong with New Caprica experiment was that the Cylons showed up again. That and they didn’t re-start an industrial base again and start pumping out Vipers like mad and building more Warships while the war was still on…they let their defenses down.
I will always love the series for the much darker Pegasus/Admiral Caine episodes…that was some great story telling, plus the Razor episodes.
I thought when they reached Cylon(cinder) Earth, that would be the last of the religious woo; I was a little miffed when “chip Six” turned out to be Angel Six. I agree with the earlier poster who observed that the God of the BSG universe is a cruel, capricious, uncaring prick.
I side with those who agree the Luddite/Hippie end was bullshit, but I think the writers desperately wanted to avoid a Galactica 1980 and so they couldn’t bring themselves to plant Galactica into orbit above our contemporary Earth. But it would’ve been different, since the Cylon threat was effectively neutralized (minus the toaster Cylons running their own Base ship…a big unknown).
Still, it would’ve made for interesting programming to watch the Earth of now undergo crash re-modernization up to BSG levels of tech and all the conflicts and social disruptions that would cause, plus the humans having to accept not only other humans from outer space, but also metal and “skin-job” cylons, etc. Galactica 1980 wasn’t necessarily a bad premise, it was just under-funded and poorly executed…
And yeah, Farscape and Firefly are still better, but I will walk away still a fan of BSG, and as someone who watched the original BSG as a kid, I think they topped the campy old series with ease. The ending leaves me vaguely dissatisfied…I watched with great sadness as the fleet headed off into the Sun (especially the agriculture ships!! GAHH!), though playing the old flourish from the original series was a nice touch.
I’ll view the second half of the Series finale the same way I view “Star Trek V”–that part of the canon I’ll pretend never existed.
Ichthyic: “I find your entire analysis to be without merit, regardless of whether you are only speaking in specific terms of this fictional episode, or trying to extend your fallacious arguments outwards to reality. don’t take it personally.”
Since you’ve mixed up what I said and what Gary Kusnick said, I’m not sure I could take it personally. Even if you were making sense.
Windy: “I confess I don’t know where Baltar would get seeds of domesticated plants suitable for farming on Pleistocene Earth. Maybe you’ll enlighten us. Maybe Galactica had seeds, but wouldn’t they be alien plants?”
He didn’t say he’d be using domesticated plants. I think the idea was that he’d be doing the domesticating, using existing plants. Domestication of plants is possible, right? Unless of course you believe goddidit.
Posted by: lurker_above | March 23, 2009 1:34 PM
And who the hell was Daniel–the sensitive artist–anyway?
I haven’t read the whole thread so maybe someone already answered this, but just in case they haven’t – Daniel was Abel.
Cavil was the first creation of the final five. (The numbering system is completely incoherent, but “the final five” is what they were called, so we might as well keep calling them that even though we now know they existed long before the other seven.) He’s all bitter and resentful and arrogant. Daniel was number seven, the last model until the eights, the Sharons, were made. So by that time, they had got it right. He was a sensitive artist, etc. – every parent’s favorite child. So Cavil killed him.
I took the last episode as a confirmation of the idea that the whole thing is just iterations of a complex program generating increasingly unpredictable results. The whole point of the Baltar speech to Cavill seemed to me to backfire utterly. Convincing Cavil that it doesn’t matter about the specifics as long as we allow ourselves to follow the driving force ended in a clusterfuck in the CIC.
I thought it was all just a looped program allowed to retain some of the bits that had turned out well in the previous loop.
This really bad plot twist is partially redeemed, however, in the last scene, when Chip Gaius and Chip Six (or is it perhaps angels in the guise of Gaius and Six?) take a stroll through the earth of today and cheefully admit that going hunter-gatherer didn’t work.
I don’t know about that. We know of at least two apocalyptic human vs. Cylon wars in the 3,000 years of recorded history of the show; the one that wiped out nuked earth and the one that wiped out the colonies in the miniseries. Maybe three wars, if you count the one 40 years before the miniseries as a separate occurrence. Maybe more, depending on how and why the 13th colony split off from the rest; I don’t remember. But at least two in 3,000 years.
Then they go hunter/gatherer (after trying a lot of other stuff as well, including creating skinjobs), and more than 150,000 years pass before the next apocalyptic war. That’s not success if success is defined as permanently and for all time breaking the cycle, but it’s definitely a step in the right direction.
BSG was one of the worst shows I’ve ever seen. The characters were all complete idiots, particularly the guy that was supposed to be smart. His scenes with the hot blonde were there only to titilate the 13 year olds watching as she spouted off 10 more minutes of nothing. It was a bad soap opera dressed up as Sci-Fi. I went through 2 exruciating seasons only because a friend thought it was great. By the end of that I was hoping they’d all die. There wasn’t a likeable character on the whole damned ship. Honestly, if you loved this show, you’ve got really low standards in writing and character development.
Science Avenger: Got a recommendation for something better? Don’t just troll this thread without mentioning your favorite pet show. If it’s good and I’m missing it, I’d like to remedy that.
As an aside, this is a television series based on the development of characters and plotlines through multiple episodes.
As a medium, this has only existed for about fifty years. It hits, it misses, and its conclusion is still only as unsatisfactory as Pip’s in Great Expectations.
If nothing else, it’s a good example that every show has points that attract an audience, and those same points are galling to everyone who isn’t the audience, and sometimes to those who are, or were.
I’m reminded of an interview with Bob Saget, in which he tells of people bitching to him about Full House because it was so stupid that it was only funny to little kids. He responds to that criticism by noting that, yes, it was. That is exactly who it was made to appeal to, and it did it very well.
BSG aimed for an audience, got it, lost some of it, attracted some different bits of it, and was wildly successful as a basic-cable series, which was its whole point.
I mostly enjoyed the new BSG all the way through. I particularly liked that they *could* bring in as many deist/theist ideas as they liked, but still left the door open to explain it all away as superstition or programming or both.
The only thing I really hated about the finale was how they handled Starbuck. What, all this time she was some kind of corporeal ghost that could dematerialize? An unrestful spirit or some such crap? Please. For the most part I could tolerate the reeeeeaching for that LOTR-style mythicistic ending, but that was just crap.
If I was writing it, I would’ve had her steal a raptor and go off to find some planet of her own, or at least fly herself into the sun if she was done with life. Even the ghost thing would’ve been tolerable, IF it was explained in some minimal way – was she Lee’s Harveycylon, Like Baltar and Six? WTFrack?
As for series suggestions, what continually gets my goat is that Babylon 5 still hasn’t gotten its due as the first SF series to have a fully-plotted storyline from episode one. The series took a season or so to fully get its shit together, it’s true, but the basic story arc was always there, no inventing crap to explain loose ends or any such Lost-ish garbage.
Anyone who enjoyed BSG and has yet to sit down and watch Babylon 5 from start to finish, here is your notice that now is the perfect time to do so. Getting through Season 1 may take some patience, but I promise you that by the you start season 2, you will be fully addicted, and your patience will be greatly, greatly rewarded. It is everything that good SF should be.
JUST FRACKIN’ DO IT.
I also like Farscape, for completely different reasons. It’s just lots of Hensony fun, with great characters as a bonus.
Autumn: Still, it seemed to want to aspire to cultural status, like Star Wars/Trek.
For me and a couple friends, the climax was the rendezvous and conflict with the Pegasus. That was *tense*. There were plenty of episodes where I would have liked some characters to die a horrible death, but in the Pegasus episodes, it was hatred stripped raw. The xenophobia and womanizing and blatant abuse of power by Pegasus officers made my stomach churn. If that powerful writing and characterization persisted into seasons 3 & 4, the series would have been legendary.
Never made it through a single episode.
Way too boring.
Look, snark is a lot more effective if you have some clue as to what you are talking about. It took hundreds or thousands of years to domesticate plants and it probably started by unconscious selection on wild grasses. Very different process from someone just deciding to up and start “farming”. If Baltar did intend to domesticate plants, it would have been much more useful if he knew genetic engineering (and still had his lab!).
But anyhow, the “farming” comment wasn’t by far the worst idea in the finale so I didn’t mean to start nitpicking it to death, I just wanted to point out that it was perfectly obvious what Corey meant by the seed comment.
My 2 cents
Not bad television . Way bad science fiction.
Watched some 2 seasons but the bad bad sci-fi stuff and the character jumping around aka “development” , bumped me out.
Star-trek was sometimes bad tv but mostly good Sci-fi.
I would kill for some good sci-fi on the telly.
I really hated what they did with the human vs robot theme.
The new cylons make no sence whatsoever.
Some funny comments over at Tor.com, especially this
I have a writeup of my thoughts here BSG 0 DEM1
I agree with DimiP, this was not bad TV, but this was very bad SF. Obviously their science consultant (if they had one) was not listened to. All the science/technology part was bad, or pure nonsense, sometimes laughable.
As for the rest, it was mostly soap in space, with typical american “values” and “problems” (strange for a culture which was not meant to be derived from Earth). The anti-intellectual messages were heavy handed. I stopped watching after the third season because I had better shows to watch.
I tried it, but the woo was too much.
I dragged out my Babylon 5 DVDs instead. At least that was a series that had a planned story arc, some interesting characters, and an ending that was ambiguous(moliari) heartbreaking(marcus) and redeeming(G’kar).
But for a REAL ending, Blake’s 7 still holds the crown.
I haven’t read any comments because I’m just finishing Season 1 on HD-DVD. It’s all right, but the Watchmen-like über-enthusiasm of its fans both have me interested and a little worried it might just be another Star Wars or Star Trek.
One of the best scenes in Babylon 5 was the juxtaposition of a religious ceremony with the death of Lord Refa: And the rock cried out ‘No hiding place’.
As someone who never watched the show, I’ve found this comment thread interesting.
I get the impression that most of the characters were theists of one sort or another. Were there any atheists, and if so, how were they portrayed?
Terrible ending to a mostly bad show. God this angels that. /face_palm I keep hearing how “great” the writers are…wtf?!?! I think they are terrible. When your show needs magic and angels to make any sense…it sucks.
It was a great science fiction series in the beginning but deteriorated into fantasy as more episodes relied of references to the “gods” to make the story line work. What a fracking disappointment….this was NOT the ending i had hoped for……full of references to god and making science look like a plague on society! They also take liberties with human evolution in a unlikely to impossible breeding with the natives on the “new Earth” to bring about the current human species (us). Not only that, but it ends unhappily for virtually every character in the series….and to top it off…..Starbuck just vanishes with no explanation! Boooooo!
Starbuck didn’t just vanish; she traveled back in time and transformed into a pidgeon (or was reborn as one; whatever), in order to harass Lee Adama in his apartment on Caprica. Or so the writers seemed to imply :( How incredibly lame.
Really, for everyone who doesn’t understand it, the deal with Starbuck isn’t rocket science.
The BSG God (whatever it is) that Head Six and Head Baltar were acting for brought Starbuck back, first to lead them to Earth 1 and realise exactly what the cycle was, and then to lead them to a habitable home. When that was done, she departed, presumably to join Anders on the “other side”, whatever that might be.
That was the destiny that Leoben kept bringing up whenever he met her, and which she finally accepted in Maelstrom before dying.
Sure, but why have her die on Earth 1 and discover her own body? That seems superfluous. Why keep calling her the “harbinger of death”? Those could have led to a lot of possibilities, when in the end all they did was indicate she was another ‘angel’ of some sort. But the disappearing act alone would have been sufficient to give that away.
@Jupiter (#183):
You need to review your knowledge of the agricultural revolution. All the cultivars we currently have were developed over long periods of time through artificial selection. How would Baltar know which plants to select for cultivation? What tools would he have used to farm?
You also need to review the history of the show: in the Passage, their food became irradiated and inedible. If they had seeds for farming, they’d have just grown more and would have been growing more. Ergo, Baltar would not have gotten seeds from the Fleet.
The writers didn’t respect a simple rule “If you see a shotgun hanging on the wall in the first act then it must go off in the last act” (Lev Tolstoi). Many sub-plots in the series lead nowhere. A lot of pieces of information are meaningless. Probably that’s because they were improvising on the fly (e.g. the last 5 cylons were almost selected based on dice rolls). Raising questions without offering any clues is just bad practice.
You cannot have a great journey, a struggle for survival ending with something based on random or *cough* “god did it”. Yeah, I know, actually Starbuck’s father told her the earth coordinates encoded into a song when she was a lil girl. Also she was an angel.
What the heck was with those pointless visions induced by the little girl?
Why would Cavil listen to the mystical mumbo-jumbo Balthar said?
However the board game based on BSG is really fun :)
The final BSG was not as bad as I’d feared. I was prepared to witness a total frak-up, and wasn’t entirely displeased with the show. Yes, the last portion was an apparent rewrite of the Golgafrinchan “B” Ark story from Hitchhiker’s. No, the Caprica flashbacks didn’t add much. The Opera House is actually Galactica’s corridors and CIC? Uh, okay…. And the “robot montage” at the end is a little ridiculous.
Even so, I didn’t hate the final BSG.
Please remember: science fiction is (usually) not a science lesson. The “science” here was Deep Space Nine Meets Touched By An Angel meets a bunch of half-understood National Geographic articles, but this is not an educational program. Did you see Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan–or even the Mythbusters–on BSG? Me neither. BSG IS NOT SCIENCE EDUCATION.
Want to see some great Battlestar Galactica, PZ? Please look at the first two seasons on DVD. The writers’ strike and bizarre retconning eventually made a great show merely good; neither of those had happened yet during the first couple of years.
TheFridgenometer
But doesn’t “God-happy nonsense,” BELONG on the Sci Fi channel? It’s not science (although neither is telekenesis, or ESP, or ghosts, or UFOs or much of the rest of it) but it sure is fiction.
I had some problems with the finale, and some praise for it too.
I get the distinct impression that Moore and Co. wanted the “God” stuff to come off as more ambiguous than it did. Based on his interviews and commentary, anyway. Dude’s a pretty vocal agnostic, at any rate. And while the first time I watched the finale it bothered me a bit, the second time it did less so. I guess if I can accept a universe where robots die and then can resurrect halfway across the galaxy, I can accept some extra-natural force messing with things. And there’s weird supernatural crap happening all the way back to the miniseries, it’s just back then I was writing it all off as eventually explicable by my own hypoteheses. I think most people were expecting some straightup man-behind-the-curtain-revealed answer and are ticked off that they didn’t get one. But then again…how do you write one that *isn’t* incredibly anticlimactic and technobabbly? I mean, we’re starting the whole series from the basic Panspermia/”Chariots of the Gods” nonsense premise anyway, so again, a weird spooky ending should really surprise nobody.
As for the agrarian ending…also, I think, another case of them glossing over things likely in the interest of time. I think it’s entirely believable that people forced to live 4 years in misery on cramped tin cans that are slowly falling apart, might wish to just try making a go of it and living off the land. What wasn’t believable was that there wasn’t more of a discussion about it. Given they didn’t really have the supplies, or manpower, or knowledge to keep all their colonial tech going indefinitely anyway, it seems probable that they’d just abandon what they can’t carry after a while…and they *were* sent off with “supplies.” Woulda been nice to know what those supplies were, though. Medicine? Seeds? Books? Hand tools? Ketchup? There was something in their backpacks, at any rate.
Besides, if Hera is the mother of all modern mankind, then…well, did the other 38k people really survive to contribute much? Their writing system, language, agriculture, and basic cornerless-paper technology didn’t survive for 150,000 years, so I’m guessing after a few generations the colonists just died out.
Eric in comment #224 said:
“Besides, if Hera is the mother of all modern mankind, then…well, did the other 38k people really survive to contribute much? Their writing system, language, agriculture, and basic cornerless-paper technology didn’t survive for 150,000 years, so I’m guessing after a few generations the colonists just died out.”
That is a misunderstanding of what “Mitochondrial Eve” means.
Read comment #136 for a good explanation.
I watched a few episodes but I couldn’t get into it at all. Just to much God(s) this and that. I just seemed to hokey.
WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?!
Doesn’t anyone but me care that they used Anders like a Judas goat?!
Anders wasn’t exactly Terry Schiavo!
(He does look hotter with hair tho)
Sherry (from comment #227):
I wondered about Anders, too.
He didn’t seem to be brain dead, but I doubt he had the capacity to consent to a suicide mission.
If BSG taught us anything, though, it’s that it doesn’t matter how many innocent people get killed so long as God’s inscrutable plan is carried out in the process.
Jesus tap-dancing Christ, you people are as bad as Christians being anti-Harry Potter or Pokemon because they think it promotes Satanism. I had to stop reading the comments after a while.
BSG was just nice fiction, period. Nobody’s worshiping it. Nobody’s faith is stronger or weaker as a result of it. Get over it and just enjoy.
I personally enjoyed the last episode and I couldn’t care less about the religious overtones. They were there from the start and everyone always knew they would be there until the end and yet we all watched anyway, which must have required some amount of enjoyment since that’s an awful lot of time. But I guess if we’re commenting on the show on Pharyngula, we have to put on our best angry atheist costumes…
C’mon guys, if Anders were real, he’d certainly understand us, probably even BE one of us.
Listen to him talk about being inspired by the beauty of physics and the wonder of mathematics.
Brandon @229- “blah blah blah”
BSG isn’t being criticized because it’s woo-soaked, it’s criticized because it’s very poorly integrated into the plot. And because invoking god to bring the whole shebang to a close is extremely lazy writing.
I know there have been some “Lost” bashers here, but the writing on “Lost” has been of a much much higher caliber, especially the character work, which IMHO has been extraordinary for a TV show. I’m an atheist, I love “Lost”, and it’s been woo-soaked from the first episode.
I hear you Sherry, Anders deserved better. ALL the characters did, really.
The more I think about it, the more I really hate those flashbacks in the finale. They were lame attempts to get us to believe that the characters fates were somehow expected, or fitting, or noble. Or something.
Especially Kara’s “what I fear most is being forgotten”. If this was so fucking vital to her, and was a vital part of what made her tick, we should have known that in the first season, and it would have reverberated in the choices she made and her reactions to events.
Again, lazy writing.
Brandon:
It’s obvious you didn’t read too far, since this strawman has little to do with the criticisms people have been making in this thread. Once again, brent @140:
I don’t understand why people keep misunderstanding this but its been pretty clearly explained a number of times in this thread. The problem that most people are having is not that God appears in the story. Its how it is treated as an element of the story which is basically as a lazy writer’s all purpose plot device. Its just a random force that magically pushes the plot in certain directions whenever it needs to move forward.
The series showed some promise, which is what made the ending such a fart of a disappointment.
I thought that the finale definitely had some missed opportunities, the biggest one being Starbuck.
I wanted to see something along the lines of: Starbuck is the daughter of Daniel… one of the 12 Cylon copies that got boxed. He was mentioned once. Remember they said he was “the artistic one”? (They cut to her Father playing the piano in the flashbacks) The music, the art, the messages…
Well what I had HOPED they would have done is say something to the effect that a copy of Daniel was still alive and was the one who had actually sent Starbuck back to guide the fleet to Earth. Yes that means Starbuck was actually the FIRST hybrid…not HERA.
Basically I thought the Starbuck arc could’ve have been wrapped up soooooo much better, but maybe they’ll explain more in The Plan? hmm
I generally liked the show, but I sure couldn’t agree with the underlying philosophy the writers expressed through Baltar in that god-soaked final episode speech. I called it a philosophy of ignorance:
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2009/03/it-is-finished-battlestar-galactica.html
I have watched from the beginning and like many here found Series 4 a little below-par, mainly because it all felt rushed. I am not sure they needed an entire fifth series, but plot lines definitly happened rather quickly.
I found the final episode a lot better than I hoped, and pretty emotionally affecting in many ways. Personally I think the elements of ‘fate’ present as well as ‘god’ being a more advanced sentience were perhaps not the most atheist-satisfying storyline, but as other have said, it’s Sci-Fi not reality. It had FTL as well but no-one ever complains about that because it makes the story cool.
Perhaps the supernatural stuff could have been explained better, but I gather than a lot more material was filmed than was shown, and will be available on the final DVD (like with Razor), so hopefully it might be a bit more satisfying.
Overall very sad to see BSG go, but I’ll still watch the DVDs and listen to the music for years to come.
I actually thought the ending was beautiful and the religion/god thing added to the story. The story had the supernatural in it from the end very beginning so why anyone would want to complain it was present in the end was beyond me.
And I don’t think people should be comparing it to the original , Babylon 5 or any other sci fi a better comparison would be the blble. And while BSG can be interpreted in a few ways it has a more clear moral story than the stone age bible sh*t.
Maybe in 2000 years people will be worshipping Starbuck and how she can back from the dead to save us from our sins
Fail, IMHO.
Jon S wrote:
No, when you introduce transhumanist concepts like uploading you imply technologies so advanced they can appear supernatural. Certainly it would have implied such an understanding of the brain that it would have made inducing visions and mystical experiences child’s play.
I go into more depth on my complaint here:
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2009/03/it-is-finished-battlestar-galactica.html
You’ve missed my points.
No! Galactica was much better than that horrible sci-fi novel called the Bible.
I think the ending was perfect!
Many people have a problem with the decision of humanity to abandon technology etc..
However they do have a point.. at-least in the show…
If you’d been chased by killer iPod’s all your life… I’m sure you’d prefer to just listen to a radio instead…
I think the point made by Lee.. and one which is quite valid.. is that although our technology moved ahead.. humanity doesn’t achieve the maturity to use it at the same rate…
All through the history of BSG technology has been in the hand of the religious and it has always led to death…
I thank the main point to take from the show is that even our society would have been much better off if we’d gotten rid of idiocies like religion before for e.g… the nuclear bomb was invented…
As for the presence of god and angels in the show…
Atleast the god is cool! I mean ‘HE’ only interferes when humanity is going to be destroyed, gives a bit of a helping hand… and then stays away ;)
Anyway… even otherwise.. the show has amazing acting, special effects, storylines, direction, everything! Most if all its SciFi and the Fi is you didn’t already know.. stands for Fiction…
I love LOTR too… doesn’t seem cheesy just cause it has wizards and elves….
I think people are missing the point in our universe there is no evidence for the existance of any god in the BSG universe there is and god makes a great adversary or ally or a great plot line in general.
To be honest I would have been disappointed if a supernatural force hadnt been evoked at the end. It would be a bit like watching the Omen (classic film unlike the remake where the only dark forces were Hollywood) and then finding out Satan doesnt exist or imagine Star Wars withouht the Force.
In fact Star Wars the prequels were a good example of letting science get in the way of mystism (the force being midiclorians now that was vomit enducing)
*sigh* People, PLEASE stop saying “it’s only fiction” as if that’s some excuse to just make shit up. It’s patronizing and I’m starting to hate you for it. Good sci-fi maintains an internal logical consistency, and while it certainly skirts around the limitations of real science/technology, it always imposes some other limits (e.g. the Galactica’s FTL drives had a certain range; Cylon resurrection required a nearby basestar or res. ship).
Invoking a limitless, inscrutable deity breaks the rules of Sci-Fi. Period.
I mean, would you enjoy a murder mystery if, in the end, the crime was committed so clandestinely that even the brightest investigators were truly stumped? Would you feel satisfied if the characters resigned to the fact that they would never know the name of the perpetrator or how the act was committed? Of course not, you’d be infuriated that hundreds of pages of clues and evidence end up with no meaning and no connection.
Why did the BSG god seem to only interfere when humanity was doomed (and still allowed billions get nuked on Caprica)? We’ll never know. It’s completely inscrutable — unless you recognize that “god” is just Ron Moore grasping for a plot device.
I hope this is settled.
Brock: Given the circumstances, it’s extremely happy for Baltar, because 1) he survives, 2) he (probably) gets to pass on his smug, selfish genius-genes with a hot cylon playboy model, and 3) he gets the single thing he truly wanted (other than NOT DEATH): a clean slate!
Doesn’t fit the character. Sure, he’ll think he has a happy ending for about a week, until he realizes that no one knows he’s banging a hot babe, and he’s been reduced to his despised father.
They clearly built up Baltar as a character driven by ego, by self-importance, by public esteem. Now, the only people impressed by his genius will be his brats — I’m sure that the local tribesmen will see him as an imbecile who can’t distinguish the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones, and doesn’t know how to properly build a hut.
He has to quietly and meekly submit to nature, like a good Christian serf — within weeks his hot babe will start to show the wear of no baths, no blow-dryers, and skin infections; he’ll be left dreaming of the days when he held the future of worlds in his hands, where he was an interstellar genius as he digs tubers and huddles in fear from the primate-lovin’ carnivores. That’s the logic of the narrative.
For comparison to The Force of Star Wars, consider that it had limitations too. All the Jedi Masters combined couldn’t stop the Death Star from blasting Alderaan into its constituent atoms. There was no Force Teleportation (at least not in the movies); they still needed starships. One of the most powerful uses of the the Force was Bastila’s “Battle Meditation” (from the KOTOR game), which was really just an improved Mind-Trick to sway the morale of opposing combatants. Jedi predictions were always heavily “clouded by the dark side”.
So yeah, The Force wasn’t much like a deity, because a) it could be manipulated by the characters, yet b) harnessing it to an advanced degree was almost exponentially difficult. “God”, OTOH, always commits the manipulation and “prayers” require no skill and produce mixed results (at best) even in fiction.
Oh, and “mitichlorians” sucked as an explanation because it flew in the face of the idea that *anyone* could become Force-sensitive with training. But now I’m rambling.
frog: Hm. Actually, you’re right. Point taken :)
Brock: That’s what I found interesting about the final episode. On the face of it, it’s a feel-good, happy-ending where everyone lives in utopia. Maybe the writers meant it that way — who knows?
But if you put it in context of the entire series, it’s pretty sinister. Everyone has been reduced to nothing, lost everything they’ve ever loved in order to entertain the deity. He has tremendous power — knows how to resurrect the dead, can at least predict novas and the arrival of intersteller travelers to the second, knows the future to the tiniest detail.
And He manufactures a holocaust. I always found the angels sinister — the fact that they are the representatives of a God only makes them more so.
On top of that, he then refuses to take action when a repetition is in process — if he could build a viper in 150k BC, why doesn’t he send us a Starbuck in a viper today? That would solve that problem pretty quickly.
“He’s” done this at least three times! If you don’t take the viewpoint of assuming what they’re selling you, there’s another story here.
Regarding frog’s comments in #243:
Baltar did have a character-changing event in the finale. He finally committed a self-less act when he voluntarily risked his life to save Hera.
Baltar’s redemption was one of the few things that I did like about the finale. Even though it was probably partially inspired by an angel, it’s not something that was hard to believe. Selfish people do sometimes see the error of their ways and start trying to make amends. An egotist can change, if his ego becomes sufficently broken.
Baltar’s acceptance of his father (and, therefore, his own modest origins) was an indicator of how much he had evolved.
My own theory is that God was only concerned with the rehabilitation of Baltar’s psyche. That’s why only Baltar and Caprica Six (who played a major part in bringing Baltar around) had angels in their heads.
Except originally they introduced a conflict between polytheists and monotheists, with some apparent evidence for both religions. Towards the end they apparently decided to wipe their asses with the groundwork that had been done so far, and mostly forgot about explaining the polytheism (unless the message was that polytheism (what with all the failed prophecies) sucks, monotheism rules?)
Randall: My own theory is that God was only concerned with the rehabilitation of Baltar’s psyche. That’s why only Baltar and Caprica Six (who played a major part in bringing Baltar around) had angels in their heads.
Reasonable interpretation — God kills 12 billion people to teach Baltar how to love… I believe that upthread I included that in my analysis.
On the other hand, I’ve never known someone who is born-again to change radically in their personality; it’s the same old personality who’s found a new way to rationalize it. Rehabilitation is usually recontextualization of orientation, not a change in basic orientation.
I guess it’s possible, but it would be more believable if he had taken a blow to the head.
Brock: Oh, and “mitichlorians” sucked as an explanation because it flew in the face of the idea that *anyone* could become Force-sensitive with training. But now I’m rambling.
It sucked for the same reason that Goddidit sucks. When you write literature with some great mystery in it, your ability to resolve it is always much worse than your ability to create it. The answer has to be HUGE — the same reason why most writers only have one or two really good books in them.
You’re better off leaving it as unanswered backstory that your fans can argue over for decades while renting old copies and putting royalties in your pocket.
Dear frog (comment #249),
I agree that it is unlikely that someone like Baltar would change as much as he did, but literature frequently deals with the exceptional cases.
Also, having a Six-type angel in your head for a long time (especially one who can actually take control of your body and throw you around) may be very similar to a blow on the head.
In the second half of comment #175, I elaborated a bit more on the reason that God may have taken such an interest in Baltar and Caprica Six. I still can’t imagine why God would have been motivated by something so small, but It does work in mysterious ways.
regarding 246:
my interpretation is that god didn’t interfere the first three times…
but like any person who seeks a record skipping… he decided to slap the record player…
the same thing was happening again and again… and he decided to finally interfere.. AFTER the nuking of the 12 colonies…
you can also see that the scale had been increasing…
firstly kobol was a discarded planet but not destroyed….
secondly earth was nuked..
finally the 12 colonies were nuked!
lets see what happens this time ;)
Sobti: my interpretation is that god didn’t interfere the first three times…
But it was clearly implied! On the third try, the cylons were already monotheistic, and the earth-cylons somehow showed up just in time to get the whole thing going.
On the first try, somehow the eye of jupiter indicating the way to old-earth via a supernova occurring just as the humans reached the way point was known to the nomads, and Pythia got her prophecies of the far future.
Your analysis just doesn’t fly… A supernatural (or supertechnological) guidance is required to hold the show together.
frog wrote:
The difference between a supernatural and a supertechnological explanation is that supernatural explanations tend to incorporate a “philosophy of ignorance” in that you have to give up understanding them, but supertechnological explanations imply that some understanding is possible – but it usually leads to technobabble.
And it was that “philosophy of ignorance” that Baltar expressed so well in his speech. More here:
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2009/03/it-is-finished-battlestar-galactica.html
windy: “Look, snark is a lot more effective if you have some clue as to what you are talking about. It took hundreds or thousands of years to domesticate plants and it probably started by unconscious selection on wild grasses. Very different process from someone just deciding to up and start “farming”. If Baltar did intend to domesticate plants, it would have been much more useful if he knew genetic engineering (and still had his lab!).
“But anyhow, the “farming” comment wasn’t by far the worst idea in the finale so I didn’t mean to start nitpicking it to death, I just wanted to point out that it was perfectly obvious what Corey meant by the seed comment.”
I don’t think it’s obvious that you have to have those seeds to start farming. Farming in a way to feed entire populations, yes, you would have to either have those seeds or hundreds or thousands of years to get to that point. But I think after 30 years, having the agricultural knowledge he got from his father so he at least knows about good soil, correct drainage, and so on, plus knowledge from the indigenous people about what plants are good to eat, he could be growing something, and it could well be much better than what he started out with. At least it would be growing somewhere predictable, one of the reasons to domesticate plants even if you don’t understand selection.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume Baltar does understand selection, even if he doesn’t have a lab in which to alter the genome of the plants he’s working with.
Corey: “You need to review your knowledge of the agricultural revolution. All the cultivars we currently have were developed over long periods of time through artificial selection. How would Baltar know which plants to select for cultivation? What tools would he have used to farm?
“You also need to review the history of the show: in the Passage, their food became irradiated and inedible. If they had seeds for farming, they’d have just grown more and would have been growing more. Ergo, Baltar would not have gotten seeds from the Fleet.”
Not sure why you added the Fleet history bit, since I never said that Baltar would get seeds from the Fleet.
How did anyone know which plants to select for cultivation? He will be working with the indigenous populations, I would assume, to determine which plants are eaten, and choose from those.
What tools would he use? The ones that he and the indigenous people would build, of course.
You don’t think that this guy who knows a bunch of sucker tricks from his religious leader days, and this tall blonde superstrong woman, wouldn’t impress the indigenous people enough to get them to follow his lead? They are the perfect traveling religious hucksters.
But suppose frog is right, Baltar is a failure, it doesn’t happen, he dies before he reaches the fertile land between the mountains and/or finds anyone who will listen to him?
This criticism still apparently assumes that what someone says he’s going to do *is what actually happens*. I mean, it’s not like Baltar never had big dreams befor.
There’s no evidence anyone else’s plans come to much fruition, either. The entire point of the end of the show, it seems to me, was that there’s no evidence that any of these Galacticans or Cylons left any mark on civilization whatsoever.
It’s not certain it didn’t, because we don’t know if there were societal remnants the previous times to carry forward some civilizational concepts. Maybe that’s all that the angels are.
The only physical indication that the precursors were ever there is the Cylon DNA in “our” mitochondria. Whoopee, Head Six thinks it makes a difference. But what has it done for us? Earth looks like Caprica to me.
So, no, Baltar is not going to have rolling fields of wheat harvested by combines to feed millions. If you took that as his idea of what he was going to do, yes, he’s going to fail.
But for a small and limited sense of “farming,” including using techniques and designing tools he doesn’t have to use trial and error for because he learned stuff from Dad, he can do some farming. And I think that’s what he’s envisioning.
Of course, being Baltar, he assumes his contribution to civilization will live on after him, which may or may not be true.
frog:
On the first try, somehow the eye of jupiter indicating the way to old-earth via a supernova occurring just as the humans reached the way point was known to the nomads, and Pythia got her prophecies of the far future.
Why do you assume that humans are following gods plan?
Humans wrote the books… and god used the books to lead humans…
Human priests just made some stuff up (much like our own!) and god just made it happen to lead humans out of the mess…
anyway.. it doesn’t matter… if you didn’t like the ending i doubt I can change your mind! I loved the show to the very end… and i doubt anything anyone says will make me feel to the contrary…
I enjoyed it.. nothing wrong with that… nothing wrong with anyone disliking it either…
even things that happen the REAL world wont stand a barrage of tests, if they go on long enough and deep enough…
RickR:
Man, you nailed that. There is so MUCH they could have done with this beyond the first and second seasons.
I was hoping for a serious and critical treatment of religion. The Cylon religion was used to rationalize genocide, for heaven’s sake! WHY were we supposed to get all touchy-feely and mystical with it later?
Beyond that, they could have done so much more with the theme of demonisation of the other. How far will we go if the object of our sadism is defined as “not a person”?
For that matter, what does it mean to be a person? How do we recognize other people, as opposed to machines or animals? What does it take for us to accept a sentient consciousness as a person when it comes packaged in a non-human body? The centurions were sentient. Why were they cast as slaves? (Though I gather from the spoilers that they were set free in the end.) But nobody TALKED to them.
I was disappointed with the failure to elaborate on these themes in favor of Lost-style histrionics. I think we stopped watching midway through season 3. Maybe they did some of the things I hoped they would do, and there really were nuggets buried in the deepening woo. But I didn’t stick around to find out.
After all, the thing was DARK and sometimes searing to sit through; I needed a bigger payoff to compensate for the pain.
And after hearing about the last episode, I’m thinking, “Good decision, Leigh.”
Those who were jarred by the aliens-as-our-ancestors theme may not be aware that this is an old, old motif from the Golden Age and before. I remember it most fondly from The Haunted Stars by Edmond Hamilton, 1960.
The ending would have been palatable but for two things: the wildly improbable coincidence of finding genetically compatible native hominids; and the unbelievable explanation given for throwing away their technology. They would have done better to delay the broadcast while they thought this through.
I haven’t seen much of the series before this last season. hulu.com is pretty good about showing the first 2 seasons, at least, of defunct series. I sure hope they do this with BSG, since I have it on such good authority that those 2 are worth watching.
MH
Please don’t tell me the writers of Lost are just improvising! They’re damn good at it, if they are. I thought they had lost it at the end of the last season when they showed “Jacob” and the smoke monster, and moved the island; but now the loose ends are coming together and it looks like a seamless, preplotted story.
I was hoping for a really good explanation of all the coincidences. Some natural unseen hand behind everything. But Noooo we just got a lazy God did it.
Disappointing.
I find it interesting that this “god” is likely Kara’s father. Consider that he is the origin of the song that ultimately leads them to earth!
God is Bob Dylan? Who knew? :)
They just about left it open to the possibility that “God” was in fact some advanced (and somewhat sadistic) non-supernatural entity running iterative experiments on humanity, but the last 30 minutes looked more like someone had tacked an episode of Highway to Heaven onto the end. They could have satisfactorily ended the series with the shot of Earth from space.
And the Apollo: “Let’s give up all our knowledge and tech”
Rest of humanity: “Uh – ok” bit was utter bollox. Not one person thought that might be a really bad idea?
Literally a Deus Ex Mechania and not a satisfying one.
I don’t think you would have liked the show. Actually, the whole point was that science and people who say things like “god-happy nonsense” tend to be like Baltar in the beginning. Baltar’s true transgression was that he only believed in science, a fault which you seem to share with him. I think the spiritual transformation he goes through would really offend you. It was a throw back to the first star trek series where Bones and Spock would debate morals v logic. Ron’s point is that without that debate, we (or our creations) are likely to destroy ourselves. Since you have such a closed mind, I don’t think you would get much from it.