Battlestar Galactica

[murlough23]

I forgot Hot Dog existed for a while. Funny reminder I guess.

Amusing way to give a minor character something to do (and his apparent promiscuity explained the weird rash he mentioned having in an episode in Season 3), but come on. This plot development came about because:

1) They decided Tyrol and Cally should get married and have a kid.
2) They decided Tyrol should be a Cylon.
3) They decided Hera should be the only Cylon/human hybrid.
4) OH FRAK. We gotta retcon something now...

[spacebrat311]

The end.

[murlough23]

Frak. That's gonna take a good week to process.

[enemy anemone]

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[murlough23]

Alright, since we all apparently have a bit of trepidation about making sense of what we saw here, I'll just repost my ramblings from my blog.

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I spent a good chunk of the evening watching the Battlestar Galactica finale (***SPOILER WARNING!***), which I did all by my lonesome since Christine declared the series "too depressing" after the episode where Caprica Six lost her baby. Her loss. I thought it was pretty fascinating up until the end, with the events of the lead-in episodes such as the Sharons playing switcheroo and the Galactica crew herocially embarking on a final one-way mission, being particularly riveting. At the same time, shows like this, where part of the appeal is their ability to make you feel for the characters and to punch you in the gut with surprises that remind you the bottom can always drop out farther, tend to be better in the middle than at the end. Because there's a sense of "damned if you do and damned if you don't" - end on a happy note, and it doesn't seem true to the tone of the series. End on a nihilistic note, and what was the point of telling that whole story? BSG has some isolated moments where an episode or a season has ended on a hopeful note - either small things like when Seelix became a pilot (a hint that people's hopeless roles in the social caste system could actually change), or big revelations like when Starbuck returned and said she'd been to Earth. But ending the series is final. You can't really have it both ways.

Judging from the responses of various Internet denizens that I stayed up late reading, the BSG finale was a bit of a disaster. I didn't think it was terrible. I definitely thought it was bottom-heavy, though. The first hour was a total shoot-em-up blast, pulse-pounding action every minute, and of course this show couldn't go out without a CGI bang. But they got Hera back and basically blew the enemy Cylons to hell halfway through. Some more metaphysical stuff like the "Opera House" vision was finally explained, and we even got a little vigilante justice for Tory's murder of Cally (which happened so long ago I figured people had forgotten about it). Good stuff. Then the show took a huge gamble - namely, that we'd be able to follow a "realistic sci-fi" series down a sudden path that firmly clinged to the "leap of faith". Head Six and head Baltar revelaed themselves to be angels. Starbuck's constant puzzling over a Bob Dylan song turned out to be the big deus ex machina - punching in the notes as coordinates somehow led Galactica to Earth 2.0. No, really. The first Earth we saw was just a decoy. They faked us out in Season 3, showing us identifiable continents and stuff, and then taking us to a demolished planet that we only assumed was the same place. All bets were off. This was no longer science fiction. This was fantasy taking place aboard a spaceship.

And so we spent the last hour of the series crawling along as the BSG crew found themselves at peace, amidst a prehistoric National Geographic documentary somewhere deep in the heart of Africa. This wasn't bad - a little slow for my tastes and with as many "you only thought that was the end" act-outs as Return of the King, but to be fair, the show was about the characters, and it made sense to meditate on who these people were before the fall and who they had become over the course of the series. But it also made things a bit predictable. Now we knew we were going to be subjected to the chick flick cliche of Laura Roslin passing away slowly and peacefully. (I do like that Eddie Olmos and Mary MacDonnell played it so low-key instead of trumpeting the melodrama and going for too-obvious Emmy moments... and it did totally kill me when she passed and he silently put the ring on her finger.) And I get why they'd choose to play it coy and leave the nature of Starbuck's rebirth ambiguous... but seriously? Having her just disappear into the wind like that during an innocuous conversation with Apollo? I didn't want Starbuck and Apollo paired up as a couple at the end of the series, so I guess this beats "And they lived happily ever after and had a bunch of little nuggets with tons of angst and mommy issues on top of their frakkin' daddy issues", but I kind of felt cheated to go for almost two years expecting some sort of "She's the daughter of a Cylon" type explanation, only to get not explanation at all. Can you imagine the uproar if Lost finished its entire run and never explained what the monster was or why Christian Shepard was alive on the island? Yeah. This feels kinda like that.

As for the epilogue, that was pretty fascinating, but also more than a bit heavy-handed. Really strange, for Ron Moore to play up the ambiguous morality and not wanting to preach directly at the audience for the entire series, only to tell us at the end, "All of this war and terrorism and inventing artificial intelligence that outsmarts its creator sort of crap doesn't happen to happen in the real world if we don't let it, get it you knuckleheads?" Absolutely awesome that Hera turned out to be "mitochondrial Eve", but really, Head Six and Head Baltar turn into Earth's guardian angels, serving a God who doesn't like to be called God and is neither good nor evil? Whatever.

I liked more than I didn't like about that finale, but I guess I was expecting something a little more ironic, or at least more subtle about the message that I think a lot of us already understood to be the underlying theme of the series. BSG always treated its audience like they were smart (except for occasional episodes like Black Market that were a bit of a diatribe). I guess it just goes to show that even the geniuses who make some of the best TV I've ever watched (this show was seriously feature film quality at most times) can be suspectible to the temptation to get overly sentimental.

On the upside, at least we still have The Plan. I don't mind spending a couple hours rooting for the bad guys!

[spacebrat311]

I didn't see anything ambiguous about the nature of Starbuck's rebirth. She's an agent of God, literally resurrected to fulfill a purpose and removed when that purpose was complete.

I liked but didn't love the finale when I first saw it, but the more I think about/rewatch it the more I really do love it. I agree that the 150,000 years epilogue got too preachy, and I think some things could have been better executed, but overall the more I let the episode itself rather than my expectations for it speak for itself, the more I think this show could have ended no other way.

[murlough23]

I didn't see anything ambiguous about the nature of Starbuck's rebirth. She's an agent of God, literally resurrected to fulfill a purpose and removed when that purpose was complete.

The problem is that it seems arbitrary. The "rules" they established with Head Six and Head Baltar were that only certain individuals (namely Six and Baltar) could see them. OK, I could accept them as angels. But everyone saw and interacted with Starbuck. She can't be an angel. If resurrected, fine, but how? The black hole could have somehow explained the time discrepancy she experienced, and the existence of download technology among the Final Five could somehow possibly explain how they might do this to a human? But the show didn't give us enough to connect the dots. it set us up for something big without a true payoff for it.

[enemy anemone]

the main thing I got stuck on about the ending has to do with Lee's rather offhand and idealistic idea to get rid of their technology and scatter and how all the colonials agreed to it. I have issues with the practicality of the thing, especially since we saw so many of our beloved characters either go off by themselves or in "groups" of two or three. as much as I identified with Chief and thought Lee's "I wanna explore!" was cute, I don't see how it would work very well, practically speaking. and I can't believe that everybody unanimously agreed to do the same, even if they went off in slightly larger groups. didn't we just finish watching a mutiny and a red line? people don't unanimously agree. are we supposed to think that after all the not-agreeing, all 30-odd thousand of them just decided to agree? 
I did think that the big-picture idea of them scattering and imparting elements of their culture to our collective unconscious was pretty cool. and sending the ships off--I can understand that to some degree. but the way they arrived at those decisions just doesn't work for me. I've been reading different perspectives on this, and it's not eating at me the way it was earlier, but I still don't like it. 

now that I've gotten that out of my system, maybe I will be able to focus more on the stuff I loved.

[spacebrat311]

If resurrected, fine, but how?

By God. I don't see what was vague about that. She was not an angel, but she was a literally resurrected person, placed by God to lead the fleet where they needed to go. I see why you might see that as a bit of deus ex machina, but I don't see any way in which this was unclear.

[spacebrat311]

the main thing I got stuck on about the ending has to do with Lee's rather offhand and idealistic idea to get rid of their technology and scatter and how all the colonials agreed to it. I have issues with the practicality of the thing, especially since we saw so many of our beloved characters either go off by themselves or in "groups" of two or three.

They may have given up technology, but it is implied that they distributed their existing supplies. And the groups of two or three that we see separating seemed to be all in the same general area- I don't see anyone except Adama and Tyrol climbing into raptors and flying off from the larger settlement group. While the people distribute themselves in groups across the globe, it seems to be in large groups in general geographic regions, with subdivisions of family-ish units within the regions. I didn't read it as true isolation so much as everybody picking a big tract of land to grow on- and they will need to grow. It seems that this is the beginning of agricultural society, so each "family unit" would require a growing tract.

[murlough23]

By God. I don't see what was vague about that.

What seemed obvious to you is way more specifically defined in your mind than it was in the mind of the person who wrote it. I listened to Ron Moore's podcast the other day; he said it felt cheap to him to put a specific label on it, so he just kind of left it ambiguous. That's all artsy and stuff, I guess, but it's also immensely dissatisfying.

She was not an angel, but she was a literally resurrected person, placed by God to lead the fleet where they needed to go. I see why you might see that as a bit of deus ex machina, but I don't see any way in which this was unclear.

I can allow some degree of "deus ex machina" in a show that had religion in its DNA from the very beginning. The problem I have is that there's really no precedent for it because nothing else in the series has been explained away as just being "God's will" without some sort of real-world cause behind it. It wasn't something that we could sort of get a clue about based on the events of previous episodes - it just came out of nowhere. Good writing strikes a balance, I think, where you can see signs and hints along the way, and the surprise revelation might still knock you off your feet, but looking back at the things leading up to it, you can say, "Oh yeah, that totally fits the evidence and I just hadn't connected the dots."

We spent a good two years wondering about Kara Thrace and her special destiny after she blew herself up and was reborn. Events such as her reappearance and her explanation of having been to Earth (along with the time discrepancy), finding her own corpse and her old Viper burnt to a crisp, and the connection she had to All Along the Watchtower via the visions of her father... these all led us to expect some pretty spectacular revelations in the end. It basically all just amounted to "It was magic. Poof!" That isn't good writing. It's a cop-out.

[enemy anemone]

I've noticed that among the BSG groups I've been reading that some people had no problem with Kara being an angel while others found it utterly unsatisfying. I think I kind of shrugged it off. "mystical stuff turns out to be...mystical. great." in a way it seemed like they painted themselves into a corner with Kara so now she has to sprout wings and fly, so to speak. I don't like it but it didn't bug me like the scattering thing did.  which to me was like "practical stuff turns out to be...not practical! what?" (I do have less of a problem with it if I think of them as scattering in larger groups than 2 though.)

[murlough23]

in a way it seemed like they painted themselves into a corner with Kara so now she has to sprout wings and fly, so to speak.

A lot of Ron Moore's intention with the series was to let it grow organically. This is a great idea, in theory - you're open to changes and you're up for suggestions and adlibs as they come along, and there's something very "zen" about that. On a practical level, there comes a point where you need to reign this in. You can put something like a bird being trapped in Lee's apartment into the script without knowing what it means. You can throw symbolism at the audience just for art's sake. But I think it's incredibly unwise to put something so pivotal to the plot as a dead character coming back to life, or that whole opera house vision, into the script without even knowing for yourself what it means yet. I was willing to give Ron Moore the benefit of the doubt until I heard him explain how on-the-fly some of this stuff was in the final episode's podcast. It makes me feel like we invested four years of our TV viewing lives on his art school experimentation.

The writers of Lost get accused of pulling stuff out of their asses on a regular basis, but when they introduce a big mystery like the hatch, they know how they're gonna explain it. Smaller details might get past them or get referred to inconsistently later, but there's no way in hell that show's gonna end and Christian Shepard will turn out to be an angel of God.

I don't like it but it didn't bug me like the scattering thing did.  which to me was like "practical stuff turns out to be...not practical! what?" (I do have less of a problem with it if I think of them as scattering in larger groups than 2 though.)

All I have to say about that is that it's really ironic in light of the whole WALL-E discussion. When I was defending WALL-E for its simplistic solution of having all of humanity agree to return to earth and become farmers at the drop of a hat, the point I made was that the target audience was essentially kids and that this sort of oversimplification was acceptable for that reason. Secretly, I was thinking, "Serious sci-fi for adults like Battlestar Galactica would never pull that shit."

[enemy anemone]

recently someone exclaimed to me that Christian must *be* god. I was like "so Jack must be Jesus!" :-s the person took it back. XD

overall I think there was too much convoluted and weird stuff on BSG that turned out to be "part of god's plan". maybe they should change the early line about the cylons having a plan. it was god all along. :-s sure, the show had an emphasis on religion and stuff from the beginning, but...I don't know. I don't feel that it really works.  I read a comment to the effect of "is it still a deus ex machina if god was there all along? yes. it is." I tend to agree.

All I have to say about that is that it's really ironic in light of the whole WALL-E discussion. When I was defending WALL-E for its simplistic solution of having all of humanity agree to return to earth and become farmers at the drop of a hat, the point I made was that the target audience was essentially kids and that this sort of oversimplification was acceptable for that reason. Secretly, I was thinking, "Serious sci-fi for adults like Battlestar Galactica would never pull that shit."

just to clarify, is it that you find it ironic that BSG did pull that shit or that I said I have less of a problem with them scattering etc...?  because I still have a problem with them scattering, etc... (and it is pretty closely related to my issues with the Wall-E ending), especially the unanimous thing. but it has lessened enough that I think I can move on to focus on other aspects of the finale, such as stuff I liked.

[murlough23]

I read a comment to the effect of "is it still a deus ex machina if god was there all along? yes. it is." I tend to agree.

Did you ever watch Deep Space Nine? That was the show that Ron Moore really cut his teeth on after working his way up through the ranks of TNG. There was a built-in pantheon of gods from the very beginning of that show - they lived in a wormhole and the Bajorans worshiped them while most of the other species (including the official Starfleet position) simply recognized them as "wormhole aliens" who weren't bound to linear time. Captain Sisko was regarded by these wormhole aliens, and thus by the Bajoran people, as their "emissary". They got some good faith vs. science tension out of that early on, then the network got on their case to knock it off with the religion stuff and give us more space porn.

Anyway, there was a particularly interesting incident in that show's sixth season, which came at the end of a very long story arc that culminated in a hopeless battle against the Dominion forces that had come through from the other side of that wormhole. Captain Sisko, who had long been a skeptic about the existence of the "gods", ended up beseeching them to help him defeat the enemy at the end of this arc. And poof! The entire enemy fleet just disappeared in transit through the wormhole. It was a total deus ex machina, but I thought it was done in a very clever way. The groundwork had already been laid within the series for these sort of thing to be conceivably possible. Whether it was truly a divine act or just the wormhole aliens whisking the enemy off to some other point in space and time was left to the viewer.

I bring this up to point out that (a) Ron Moore, who doesn't consider himself religious, seems to be perpetually fascinated with the idea of a god or gods actually existing in a sci-fi setting to the point where he's made pivotal events in both series revolve around that idea, and (b) that it's not so much the supernatural stuff that bugs be, but whether the story as written thus far does an effective job of foreshadowing the ultimate explanation for things (or at least making it somewhat feasible within the framework of the "rules" established by the show).

And it's ironic, because I obviously believe God exists in the real world, but I tend to get annoyed when fiction falls back on God as an explanation for strange occurrences. To a lot of people, this likely seems backwards.

just to clarify, is it that you find it ironic that BSG did pull that shit or that I said I have less of a problem with them scattering etc...?

The former. I kind of thought BSG would have more of a pragmatic, messy, but ultimately workable and believable denouement.

because I still have a problem with them scattering, etc... (and it is pretty closely related to my issues with the Wall-E ending), especially the unanimous thing.

It was one of those "fridge logic" things where I didn't have a problem with it at the time, but thinking about it later, it didn't make sense to me. Of course, the moment where they made Hoshi the Admiral and Lampkin the President was sort of a harbinger of things to come, as far as the credibility of the events of this episode. Because I couldn't buy that Romo Frakkin' Lampkin could just be suddenly appointed President of all humanity without there being a major uprising over it, given all the crap they had to put up with every time they tried to pass or change a single mundane piece of legislation in the series leading up to this point.

Then again, there was New Caprica, so maybe there is a precedent for the whole "rash decision to just settle down on a planet" thing. Then again, we were at least given a year jump in time to see how this paradigm shift in society had been (presumably gradually) accepted.

[enemy anemone]

interesting stuff about Deep Space Nine and Ron Moore. (I haven't watched the show.)

And it's ironic, because I obviously believe God exists in the real world, but I tend to get annoyed when fiction falls back on God as an explanation for strange occurrences. To a lot of people, this likely seems backwards.

actually I think it makes sense that people who believe God exists in the real world would take the idea of a deity or deities seriously enough to want any fictional one(s) to be believable in that particular universe and not mere devices.

I didn't have a problem with the religious stuff in BSG earlier, when it looked like prophesies were fulfilled and stuff turned out to be where the scriptures said it would be. now that I think about it, I am not clear about the role of the prophecies or scriptures or the gods/one true god or whatever, and that makes the "it was god's plan all along!" even less satisfying to me than it already was.

eventually I'll get around to talking about the stuff I did like.

[enemy anemone]

Obama Depressed, Distant Since ‘Battlestar Galactica’ Series Finale