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TV: Battlestar Galactica is over
Mon, 23 Mar 2009

This is the part of the programme where I bag on a TV show. The following is all spoilers (insomuch as I can spoil what they have already spoiled... zing!)

Now, before I get into it I must admit that I've greatly enjoyed much of the show the last few years; its has generally pretty tight writing, and they managed to even make you think they'd plotted a lot of the action out in advance. I will accept (though loathe) that the studio made them write in a bunch of filler, and I will accept that like a lot of this new style of show the last few years that are mystery, character and high drama driven (Lost, Desparate Housewives, etc and so on) that pacing is a difficult thing. All in all, an excellent and gritty science fiction show that I'd recommend to others. I will miss it, but I'm glad its over so I can have a piece of free time back :)

It is hard to end a dark show since you naturally want to end on a light foot; it is hard to end a show that has primarily been based in 'mystery' and fear of the unknown, since its a big switch to suddenly start revealing things without it just looking like you could stitch the first and last episode together and ignore the rest. You don't play a chess match for 19 hours and then switch it to checkers at the end .. the transition is tough. But mostly I think the writers got very good, got into the flow, of writing dark and gritty and when it finally came to spinning a happy thread at the end.. they just didn't know how to keep the gravity. To keep that tense and tight writing. They opened the door into fairy land and well through it. They admitted by their lack of tight finish to "we didn't plan it so much ahead, we're just going to cap off as much as we can and hope for the best!"

Spoilers!

I can sort of deal with the explanation that the two 'ghost' characters were just that - angels from god or some really advanced speces or whatever. Seems like a biiiig set up with a cop out ending, but okay. Seems like they were a little too personally motivated or felt (perhaps assumed by the watcher?) to be on one side or another, but .. okay, I can deal with that hand.

I'm not really sure I can accept that these little dreams and visions that characters have been having the whole show, that have been built up into something large, that really they just were planted by God or whatever to help the characters do a 20 foot walk at the end. Thats it? Find the girl, walk her through a door, you're done. Great, thanks, glad you set that upf ro 5 years. OKay, sure, maybe all this ghost and vision business was to guide Baltar to stick around and give a speach at the end.. but weak sauce. Course, Cavil decided it was all a trick at the end, so the speach was for nothing, and thus the whole multi-year plotline was basicly for naight. Yay! Seems the writers sure didn't know how big a part these visions were to play in the end, but they did know how it would play out.. so write it big, and then.. fizzle.

After battling for several years for the very survival of the species, they all decide to just give up all technology and rough it with some primitivies. A romantic idea for sure, especially after the hardships endured... but realistic? Ignoring for now the fact that bad guys were left out in space (and the Centurians were trusted to not come back and exterminate everyone), you're a society fighting for survival who just says 'hell, shit, lets destroy our ships and gear, and see if we can survive the first winter and guess which berries are safe to eat.' Seriously? We're supposed to believe that would happen? And that everyone goes along with it? Sounds like they wanted to write another half season about this, but just rushed it into a 5 minute sequence at the end since they didn't plan their timing out many episodes in advance. Maybe the military could handle hunting, but we'd love to see how Baltar's cult fairs alongside the other startups. Take those used to high tech living and let them scrounge for food.. good odds! (Queue up playing Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, however.)

Now, as Lee put it, this could be a way to break the cycle; by starting from scratch and basicly ignoring the entire history of both species so that no one learns anything.. just a random shot in the dark, and thats the future. As opposed to perhaps taking this new situation of Hera, and the two allied species, and trying to make a go of it together, say. Of course, this whole show was a set up for how Hera was the agent for survival for both species ..... and so what, are they saying all the other humans die out from starvation, disease, war with the natives, childbirth, etc, and only Hera's children survive long term? Thats pretty bleak, but it sure didn't seem that was suggested. It really just seemed like hera was..... fizzle. Another fizzle. The other humans have babies, too, yeehaw.

I can accept that Kara was some short term ghost, unlike the long termed head-vision ghosts. But with all that writing that she was going to carry both species to their doom.. and really it was she was going to lead them to their happy place. Fizzle.

But okay, all this is fine because they're safe now? A dead Racetrack accidentally launches nukes into the Colony; maybe the hand of god, or maybe Racetrack wasn't fully dead then.. whatever. Colony dead, or crashed into the black hole as later commentary suggested (they over-snipped the footage.. more proof of rushing it?) What is not explained is what the pile (a few? dozens? hundreds?) of Evil Cylon Basestars are up to for these thousands of years after the humans go all native on us. Do they just wander aimlessly in the big sky trying to find new Earth and die of old age? (Remembering that we don't know if the human-like Cylons age, but certainly the pure-machine ones do not.) Certainly, all those Cylons that took over the twelve colonies and New Caprica, they're still around. This pretty much seems a hard counter to the fealing of "we're safe now, lets burn our only defences."

Anyway, a great show with a pretty exciting ending. The show tried to feal realistic and consistent, and suddenly went implausible in the end. An okay ending, but just not where I'd hoped it would go.

Or maybe, as the SyFy (!!) channel likes to jerk with its customers and introduce filler and long delays between seasons, maybe this was deliberately a weighted copout, to leave room for the next two hour movie in the fall ("The Plan" from the Cylon perspective) or to lead into the new TV series ("Caprica", about birthing of the Cylons.)

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