Brad Ideas - The good, the bad, the horrible - Comments

MT Eve

brad — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 11:20:28 -0700

Isn’t somebody who was sequenced, though they can do some sequencing of very old DNA with difficulty. She’s something entirely different, explained above and in other links in the main review.

the mitochondrial eve is..

cor — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 12:27:09 -0700

..just a fossil they (err we) found, there is no DNA after 150000 years, there is no bones, only fossilized rock..they assume she is an ancestor because she was found on the same planet. anyone with any degree of knowledge about human evolution knows that 90% of the colonists would have died out as the human species only successfully left Africa about 80000 years ago (so only colonists who settled in Africa could possibly have passed on genes)...

they really didn't think the story through, i kept waiting for cylons to land on earth (2.0) after the got rid of their only form of defense, in the early seasons it was implied that there were many more base ships out there, but i guess the threat was taken care of by god. i hate it when characters do things out of character to satisfy the story, if they were so willing to burn their knowledge and tech, why didn't they do it back on new caprica?

Yes Brad... Some parts are completely horrible

The Answer — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:47:28 -0700

The Colony was a big let down for being a space base instead of a planet.

It was the the first issue bugging many people A LOT, but not the last one.

If we think about the numbers of the copies of 7 models ((MILLIONS)) there must be at least HUNDREDS OF BASESTARS out there, right ??

Of course during the Cylon civil war, we can assume that almost half of them must be destroyed.

I mean 1s + 4s + 5s destroyed the entire 2s + 6s + 8s fleets except the damaged basestar.

Even so, there must still be at least DOZENS of Basestars of 1s-4s-5s. They were the victorious side of the war.

BUT there were no basestars in the Colony battle !!

Where the frak were they, when their home, The Colony was under attack of the Colonials !!!

Don't tell me they were busy with God knows what missions...

What on earth could be more important than this battle for Cavills faction!!

MAJOR let down I have to say.

These two issues has swept away the brilliance of the finale for me. and I know for many too.

I was always expecting that Cavills faction would be in the battlefield with FULL OF THEIR FORCES in the final battle.

A Whole Impenetrable line of Basestars, Raiders and Heavy raiders spread all over the side, surrounds the colonials...

I mean this is the Series Finale for God's sake !! If they don't appear now, when will they !!

No... I totally disappointed with The Colony Battle.

And finally The Suiciding Cavil...

Oh please... The most pragmatist, rational, genius and cold blooded man of the show killing himself.

It couldn't be more unrealistic.

William, I think you're

Anonymous — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 06:27:07 -0700

William,

I think you're spot on with your answers to 1-7, but not 8-10.

8) Constellations of old Earth matching new Earth/Tomb of Athena/Flag of the 12 colonies - this is probably an oversight by the creators, but one way to rationalise it would be that the old and new earth systems are close enough that they see some of the same constellations. This is maybe not a great leap since we keep seeing that Jupiter-like planet pop up throughout season 4 (the site of the cylon civil war, and when Boomer and Hera stopover), and the season 3 ending shows the Ionian nebula to be in the same part of the galaxy as new Earth. The part about the flags of the 12 colonies is perfectly rational - if the 12 colonies had legend and scripture of the 13th's exodus to a colony called Earth, this had to have come from somewhere. Someone (probably the Lord of Kobol Athena) visited the 13th colony and came back to Kobol to build the hologram and pass on the symbols before the Great Exodus of the remaining 12 tribes.

9) Greek Gods existing before we invented them - RDM explains this as something that trickles down through the collective unconscious. Invented on Kobol and re-invented on Earth.

10) Caprica Six killing the baby in the miniseries - If you watch this scene, she looks like a child tearing off the wings of a fly. She doesn't understand humans in this early phase of living among them. Caprica is an emotional child at this point, but that child grows up.

No

JrzRob — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 07:07:25 -0700

The last Great Ice Age started 2 million years ago, and ended only 10 to 12 thousand years ago, and was at it's peak throughout the existence of Cromagnons and Neanderthals. There was warmer and cooler periods, but not enough warming to melt away the mile thick layer of ice that covered most of North America and Eurasia.

Nothing anyone could care about? REPLY

Gary — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 03:01:26 -0700

William, you are definately passionate & thoughtful about your liking of the finale.I watched it twice because I was in a state of shock of a what a clusterf!!K the finale ended up being after my first viewing. I watched it 2 hours later again to see if I had missed anything redeemeing and to go deeper in what RDM may have had in mind for the ending. Bottom line to all of your points: PAYOFF OR RIPOFF?

1. We knew Kara Thrace's destiny,NO PAYOFF!!! She helped guide them to their key destinations and finally to their new home world. Her mortal body is later found dead and she is replaced by a new “angel-like” Kara who just disappears—SO WHAT?? Where is the payoff to her plotlines? There is none. If she is an Angel, then who does she report to? Which gods? Is Baltar & Caprica Six her angel superiors? In early BSG episodes she is full of faith a certainly has a destiny to fulfill--- getting the arrow, translating the drawing on her wall of the black hole thing to a particular star system that lead them to Kobol, figuring out the song notes & on an on. There was no continuity between her destiny and potential to do something great at the end and she went out like a whimper with a smile on her face.

It does not matter how many times you watch this finale and especially the last 8 episodes, there are no payoffs, no great meanings, just RDM betrayal, discontinuities in plots and location background.

Here are THE Real Meanings to the series of crappy plotlines in finale:

1. Adama, Tigh & Ellen drinking shot after shot of booze in the strip joint twice: MY GUESS OF RDM's hidden/real MEANINGS:
a. To show how normal and justified their subsequent alcoholism was when then eventually they were assigned to the Gallactica. Nothing about life changing decisions. RDM either is very anti-drinking or wants to show how sloppy and disgusting that drunks can get or look. Or, he wanted to excuse all of the shipboard boozing as not an aberration but a normal way of life that was already happening prior to the cylon attack and therefore the way that they handled their stress was normal and that drinking to excess-incessantly was surely not a real crutch but just a fun pastime….The Adama vomiting scene was either a tool to get the 13 year old demographics or RDM showing what he thought about the viewers. I checked on several Mormom BSG blog sites (yes these really do exist!!!) to see if there was some deeper meanings that I missed but the Mormons &(90%) thought that this spiritualism was idiotic blabbery at best.

2. Dinner party at Lee’s brother & Kara’s apartment: MY GUESS OF RDM’s hidden/real MEANINGS:
a. More sloppy drunkploitive hard drinking = a way to avoid character development. Theory on the writing: RDM must have been dead drunk when wrote these scenes. Bottle (bottom) line is that this was pure filler and an excuse to either fill 20 minutes of network time or set the stage for the CAPRICA prequel series which may take place entirely in a combo Irish Pub/Vomitorium.

3. Laura Roslin cougar blind date with her former student: More boozing cavorting with no connection to relevant plotlines or future Laura scenes. We have enough scenes already of her past life and did not need any more background for comparison. This can only be a sneaky way to introduce us to her friends and soon to be dead family for the Caprica prequel which is another betrayal for BSG hard core fans.

THE MOST LOGICAL WAY TO FOLLOW UP THE PITIFUL FIRST 45 MINUTES WOULD HAVE BEEN THE FOLLOWING: Battlestar Gallactica was really a metaphor for a large Drunk tank!! And that all of the humans on the gallactica were really residents in a drunk tank and the cylons were either bartenders or galactic prohibitionists or GMEN who came into each of their towns to destroy their stills, brewaries, liquor stores & bars. Adama leads a breakout from the drunk tank and leads his fellow lushes on adventures to find a new world that will provide them with all of the booze they can consume while keeping one step ahead of the cylon/ prohibitionists who will stop at nothing to keep the drunks from drinking. They finally convert the remaining cylons to the booze side and send the remaining cylon prohibitionists where Anders (one of the final 5?) is their leader and forced to lie in a tank of tequilla and babble in a DT way towards to a gruesome death in the sun. Then Chief builds a low tech still for each drinking region in the new world so that by diversifying their drinking cultures there will be less chance for booze boredom syndrome. Baltar and Caprica 6 end up being elected co-chairs of the Alcohol and beverage commission (ABC) and spend the next 150,000 years traveling from one drinking region to another to insure the preservation of the booze civilization. Little Hera ended up being “boxed” into storage into a 5 foot jar of grain alcohol so she could be fermented for all time and one day be used to brew “Eve” single malt scotch……………

Just a little bitter = Gary.

Paid stars often praise

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:22:26 -0700

Paid stars often praise shows they don't like because they're actors and are paid to say it. People believe it because they're convincing enough and they do it because if they didn't they'd never work again. I'm not saying this is routine or everyone sells out like that but it happens.

The story became so bad at the end that hammy and confused acting started becoming obvious. Hearing the actress who played "Tory" go on about the script as if it gave her role some great meaning or stretched her acting talents was laughable. Then we're got others going on about how the script made them cry or how it worked out better than it looked on the page.

This is what some people call "The Con". I know what I think of it and I quit listening to RD ages ago. Other people are welcome to think different or backwards rationalise their failed investment but I moved on ages ago. Brad's topics and people's comment has given me more than the show itself since then.

Ice Ages

William — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:55:55 -0700

Ice ages come and go. It's very likely the North America was the globe in a temperate phase, 150,000 years ago.

Nothing anyone could care about?

William — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:49:38 -0700

Nothing anyone could care about? I cared about it. I thought it was brilliant, and I'm somebody. The cast and crew have effusively praised the finale, so it's not just Ron Moore.

Most of those questions were answered before the Finale anyways, so I don't see how it was overloading at all, 1. we knew Kara Thrace's destiny, 7. they made a point of talking about "Home" in "Islanded of a Stream of Stars", so we know Roslin's actual wish (the cabin) was what she wanted, and her "promised land". 2. and 3. are not questions ever to be answered, so you don't focus on them on the finale. 6. was the entire theme of the show, going all the way back to "Flesh and Bone" in season 1, supported by "Kobol's Last Gleaming", "Exodus", and "Revelations". 10. is from the miniseries. 9. Is something to think about after the show ends. 8. is an oversight, but hardly the point of focus of the story, as any explanation would have made the story more cumbersome. So only 4 and 5 are actual relevant to the finale.

I did blow a fuse about the characters when I fist watched it. So I watched it again. And I found the purpose I wanted. I would really recommend watching the finale again, you might appreciate it more with some time.

The end was was just too

Anonymous — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:01:53 -0700

The end was was just too much and nothing anyone could care about. No disrespect, but that's why I just skimmed through your post. Beyond a certain point people blow a fuse. There's too much to process and it doesn't mean anything anyway.

My interpretations (maybe an answer for you)

William — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 01:43:54 -0700

1.) Did you miss the first half of season 4?

First Hybrid:

"Kara Thrace will lead the human race to its end."

She led humanity to its end. Hera is the only mitochondrial common ancestor of all humans alive in the present day. Hybrids. Neither human or cylon. But more on that later. "Humanity" in the form of William Adama et al. is over.

"She is the herald of the apocalypse. The harbinger of death."

She brought on the apocalypse of Cylons. As a direct result of her actions aboard the Demetrius, the Hub was destroyed. Dooming millions of Cylons to one day die. But some of them were grateful, hell Natalie even praised her. She brought them the death they needed to be whole, as Leoben said.

"They must not follow her."

That is the opinion of the Hybrid, not prophecy. This was the hybrid who was willing to jump away to avoid being controlled by the Final Five, so he seems to have liked to buck the trend.

2.) There are many possibilities to that.

For example:
A group of survivors from a previous cycle moved the remains from the planet to Earth, and are capable of manipulating the Final Five at will. They also copied Kara's memories with an advanced device, perhaps disguised as the Aurora statue, and cloned her (which, in the scheme of things, isn't that hard to do).

There, science fiction explanation. Another example would be that God did it. Or maybe something else happened.

"Take your pick."

It doesn't change what the characters went through, the battles they fought, all of it the real things the show has always been about. Humanity, our nature, our desire to change, etc.

3.) For example:

A group of nanobots that work together as a swarm, Cylons from a bygone era. The made the Earth here habitable, with compatible dogs, humans, cats, and plants. The bots manipulated Kara, Baltar and Six. It infected Six and Baltar, communicated and manipulated both of them as needed, until they got what they wanted. Who knows what it/they wanted, though one explanation could be to get a pure breed of mechanical Cylons away from the flesh variety for a long enough period of time to actually explore the entire Galaxy. The "answer" could be anything. But, as with the last one:

"Take your pick."

4.) Cavil lost the war. He was hoping at that point to get back to what he had lost. From his stand point he was a Von Neumann machine who had lost its ability to replicate. He had to do anything to get that back.

5.) He realized this all was pointless. Up until when Baltar talked to him, he probably thought himself to be the most powerful thing in the Galaxy. After all, he controlled the entire Cylon machine didn't he? He killed the model he was jealous of, indirectly controlled the other 6 models, and even captured his creators just to play games with him. But what happens? An Eight falls in love, defects and has a baby, a Three starts seeking out memories that Cavil had blocked, ignoring his control, and even worse she discovers the five. Even to someone like Cavil, it was obvious that something was doing this, something greater than him. Be it a more complex set of Math, or a God or Gods, it didn't matter, Cavil had no control over the situation, and really, he had had no control to begin with. I can see where his mind went after that. He knew he could be killed or live to see the "plan" come to fruition, a plan he felt he had no part in or control over. But he had the power to kill himself, so he did.

6.) Kobol to Earth to the Twelve Colonies to our Earth. Man makes machine, man abuses machine, machine tries to kill man, machine becomes man, and it repeats. The bet that Head Six and Baltar make after all: "But the question is, does all of this have to happen again?"

7.) She knew she going to die. She believed in the prophecy. Sickbay is where she believed she would die, before reaching Earth. She was coping with her own death. Maybe Elosha was an angel sent to comfort the leader, maybe it was her head, but her death in sickbay was shown to prepare Laura for the end, not to describe how it would happen. Also, we were wrong about the prophecy. She was dying of a wasting disease, and she led them to Earth that part was correct. She saw the Human and Cylon promised land, but she did not see her own.

She wanted Home, she wanted that Cabin and Adama and that wedding ring.

Like she told Billy in the miniseries, "I wish I could say [the cancer] was the least of my worries. But the world is coming to an end, and all I can think about is that I have cancer and I'm probably going to die." She played her part, but she didn't get home that she wanted, she didn't get the dream.

8.) I've heard the explanation that the stars around the real earth looked the same as or similar to the stars around our Earth, but with a 150,000 year difference. It's possible that the real Earth and our Earth and all the stars moved over time so that what the Colonials first saw above Kobol, what the Five saw when they left their Earth, and what we see when we look up, look "close enough" to be mistaken for the the same. Unlikely, but possible. Go to nanobots or God if you need to.

9.) You mean a group of Gods representing all the phenomena in our world? A god for the Moon, for the Sun, for Fertility and the Ocean?

A group of humans trying to figure out the world regularly makes a Pantheon of Gods to categorize and explain the world. Assuming the worlds of Kobol and our Earth have the same set of phenomena, that Pantheon will always end up looking pretty similar.

10.) She did it as a mercy gesture. That baby might have survived the initial bombs, but succumbed to radiation without its mother or father. Caprica, even all that time ago had feelings. Even though he would be dead in a matter of weeks, she still helped Julius find his peace. It wasn't right what she did, but it wasn't the worst wrong possible either.

Galactica didn't wrap the show up with a nice little bow for the audience, but it did leave the show open enough to have naturalistic science fiction explain everything. But it could also be explained by theology, or something else entirely. What it cared about was getting from point A to B, and to have the people live or die throughout. You fill in the blanks if you want to. I know I do, and it's rewarding to come up with my own theory and know that now it can neither be proven or disproven. That's better than Stargate taking away the mystique of the Ancients in Season 7, or have the Borg be reduced to confused robots in Star Trek, or have Episode One explain that midichlorians somehow make the Jedi capable of knowing the future.

We'll never know why Starbuck vanished, but we can always think we know why.

PS: Hera is the mother's mother's mother's mother of all the humans alive today. Who knows what mitochondria the Colonials or our Earth's evolved humans had? It doesn't matter. Hera overruled all of that. Maybe something in mitochondria in the humans living on our Earth before Galactica would have caused them to be wiped out. Perhaps the violence the humans harbored towards their robotic creations was caused by the DNA in the mitochondria of Colonial humans, and that will allow the cycle to break. Your explanation can make as much or as little sense as you want it to or be as rational or theological as you want it to be.

Take your pick.

You are so lost and upset BSG finale

Gary — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:37:48 -0700

You are very justified in all of your comments and I feel your pain. You did not miss anything and you are correct to be pissed off. There are no hidden deeper meanings that you can't see--- just poor writing period!! There were literally NO payoffs in the series finale and almost none in the final 10 episodes. No payoffs = a rip-off and fraud by Ronald D. Moore (RDM).

Overall analysis: the first half was equally as horrid as the final half. Many people have said that they enjoyed the first half more than the second. If you enjoy 100 drinks of alcohol consumed by Tai, Ellen, Adama, Roslyn & boy toy, Kara, Lee & Lee's brother in 45 minutes, mundane strip locales, nonsense back stories that were out of place (should if all been told in season 1 or 2)--we already cared about them and knew enough about their back stories.

Also, the sets were a total betrayal. In all prior Caprica scenes the appearance of the buildings and room interiors were at least futuristic and non-earth looking. Did RDM run out of money for sets? The location shown where Kara lived with Lee's brother could be my apartment which is not how Caprica looked in prior seasons.

All of your questions above were never answered and the plots (character development is important but plot needs to be complete) were left hanging in my opinion. The following plot lines were never paid off:

1. HERA--- she ended up being nothing but a cute little girl. The mitochondrial eve crap is just that. She sort of navigates them to their final home. Her importance as the future of both races was BS.
2. STARBUCK (KARA THRACE) ---- was she an Angel or was she a harbinger of death? She ended up being a drunken sloppy joke that disappeared. Was RDM trying to show us how she developed from an angry little girl into a super fabulous angel chick?
3. THE BALCONY THEATRE DREAM--- another letdown. Cheated with the hoaky looking galactica bridge scene, by the way where was D’eanna as one of the final 5/6? They used that dream sequence 50 times to foreshadow something important happening there and nothing ever did.
4. CAPRICA SIX AND BALTAR--- you asked what they ended up being? In my opinion, nothing more than mischievous meddlers of time and space sort of like “Q” from the Star Trek franchise (maybe that’s where RDM ripped it from). Baltar should have gone out in a pool of blood or have been exiled for his past deeds and the two of them ending up prattling around in a future world (our current earth) was ludicrous at best. Caprica 6 should have been beheaded and her body used a spare parts for the useful remaining cylons. Justice for all a recycling theme covered in one shot.
5. THE BS ABOUT ABANDONING TECHNOLOGY TO TRY TO BREAK THE CYCLE OF THE PAST (SO HISTORY WOULD NOT REPEAT AGAIN)--- more crap. This show was never about technology, although the theme about humans creating the Cylons and the Cylons (machines) turning the tables was integral. If they were going to stay on their new planet and abandon all technology then THEY WOULD HAVE TO DESTROY ALL OF THE CYLONS OR NOT LET THEM ON THE PLANET BECAUSE CYLONS ARE TECHNOLOGY!!!!@!!!!! How about a disclaimer at least that says we are abandoning our technology but will keep a few 1000 cylons with us…….
6. CAVIL QUESTIONS--- more bad writing. Boomer literally stealing back Hera was like taking candy from a baby. Too easy. Cavil surrendering and killing himself were stupid attempts to tie up his character. Cavil could have taken the final five off of the bridge by force and why would he surrender now when this was not in his nature?
7. ELLEN TIGH --- so what and so what?? She was totally unnecessary for the last 10 episodes. It looked like she was pivotal but she digressed to nothing but what she originally was: a jealous, power hungry slut period!! Her role in the 1983 movie “Chained Heat” was a bit part but had more impact than her BSG role ended up having.
The other plots and characters not tied up:
• Chief killing Tory the way he did was completely uncreative. He should have shoved her out of an airlock. Letting Tory get away with killing Callie would have been preferred than the way it was tied up on the finale.
• All of the prophecies and foreshadowing came to a big ZERO. The 13, the 12, the final 5 or the final 6 etc. They ended up being nonsense at best.

Anyway, I could go on and on and I am going to abandon my technology (and sign off from this email). I am going to try to move on and will see RDM at a scifi convention in early summer and will surely give him a piece of my mind (nicely).

Gary

I was referring to the

Anonymous — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 06:03:38 -0700

I was referring to the previous comment, and expanding on your agnosticism versus religion thing. Religions can be as full of cruft as agnosticism, and some religion can be more sensible than agnosticism. This is a bit of hazy perspective where you're juggling 100 balls in the air but it's doable.

Intellectual confusion over labels and possessiveness are ego. Piling more ego into something just confuses and seperates things even more. This circle of confusion keeps going around and around, and travels through time like a train perpetually coming off the rails. It's quite simple and rather daft.

Nope

Alvin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 20:02:52 -0700

I was not responding to the confusion of agnosticism with anything. I was giving my opinion on the subject, being an agnostic myself.

Responding to confusion of

Anonymous — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 18:03:28 -0700

Responding to confusion of agnosticism with confusion of atheism is poor reasoning.

Buddhism is essentially about yes, no, and maybe. I tend to subscribe to Zen Buddhism mostly because I'm lazy and it sounds cool, but one can equally embrace something as fluffy as Taoism and clinical as martial arts at the same time. None of these things is mutually exclusive.

The good, the bad, the horrible

brad — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 21:25:18 -0700

Readers of this blog won’t have to guess my disappointment with the 2nd half of the finale. And yes, I will tear apart how silly, and pointless the way Moore wanted to end it was.

But first, there were some good parts. The space battle fans were looking for. They last Betrayal by boomer and her flashback. And for one moment, I was impressed that they were able to completely surprise me by making it look like they would have a negotiated settlement with Cavil. That would have been bold TV, for it is actually how many wars end. But Tory’s secret made it not to happen, and Tyrol’s emotions once more muck everything up. They didn’t show it, but this could have been made more complex if he could have restored some memories of his happy life with Tory when they were shacked up and engaged, overwhelmed by the murder. But he is forgiven again.

I felt the Colony should have been, as Simon said, vastly superior militarily. They did much better against it than you would think, and the few nukes in that raptor should not have been able to do that much damage. However, fortunately the singularity, in spite of all our speculations, played no part in the result. Cavil’s suicide was surprising but quickly cast aside in the story. His other copies may or may not have died if the colony was truly destroyed. Since it had many base ships which could jump away, one should presume many of them survived.

The song did turn out to be coordinates for real Earth, as many expected. And of course, this is where the show hurt itself, undid so much of the good it had done to this point.

Now, of course, readers will know I am particularly bothered by it being set in the past. Moore said long ago he knew man evolved on Earth, and he kept that — sort of. But first I’ll start with the criticisms that have nothing to do with when they set the story, for literally up to the last 2 minutes they could have fixed the story so easily by zooming to a broken Statue of Liberty on the beach. And that is the great shame, for there was so little story need to ruin everything. It’s often been written by fans that they don’t care about the science, that the writers will have a story to tell, and if the science has to bend to tell a good story, they can. But they could have told 99% of the story they wanted without screwing up the science very much. The great shame is they took what could have been greatness and dashed it on the rocks for one little hook.

Leaving out the science…

I simply could never find it credible that they would fly their fleet into the sun. (Nor, for that matter, did it make sense that Sam should die to do so, because he was certainly not a lost cause at that point, and in fact one imagines the remaining 4 might have knowledge together to help him. Or the 5 if Galen had not been so rash.) A computer could easily have flown the fleet into the sun. (Though I did smile at the re-use of the original music at this point. I didn’t like a lot from the old show but I did like that theme.)

Yes, they wanted a new start, a clean slate. But throw their hospitals into the sun? Most of their planes? It boggled my mind. Those who had any health problems would not be so ready to destroy their technology. Yes, the virgin Earth is full of game and fruit, and life there could be idyllic — with medicine — but this was brushed over completely. There should have at least been factions opposed. And those factions would have won, of course, because they would soon have been militarily dominant.

Laura did see the promised land. That doesn’t bother me, the cycle was broken, at least for a while.

Minor issue — Adama says they came a million light years. There is no other galaxy a million light years from Earth. . We will presume he’s just using it as a big number, though. (In fact, on further reflection, this must be the case as they are able to jump Raptors back to collect the fleet. So they are actually quite close to the other scenes of the show.)

I was surprised to see that Baltar knew that Six had nefarious “Employers.” This makes him way more evil than he ever ways shown to be at the start. I had always presumed he was duped, just letting a hot, bright assistant get more access than she should, not assisting a known spy in exchange for sex. This somehow hurt his redemption in my eyes.

And Kara’s resolution just didn’t work for me. Fine, she’s been an angel ever since she crossed into the maelstrom. That whole plot seems to provide so little now. She had physical form, her DNA could be tested, but “poof” she disappears when she feels her task is done.

And why all the fakeouts about sadness and death? Laura dies, as everybody expected for 3 years. Sam dies, to no real purpose. Boomer dies, because Athena is vindictive and forgets she has valuable intel. Starbuck doesn’t die, not really. Tory dies — who cares? And yes, Galactica dies, but because they drive her into the Sun.

The horrible, horrible science

Now some will say, all of this can be accepted because it’s the sudden will of God. That there would be humans, DNA compatible humans from another galaxy is so impossible it could only happen by divine intervention. Which I find highly unsatisfactory in a show of this type. Once you start solving your problems with sudden divine intervention, literally God in the Machine in this case, you make your story much less meaningful. Everything is as it is not because of the characters and their strengths and their story, but because God set it up.

God also had to do something rather un-godlike. If the colonials are the same species as our ancestors, then the diseases of Earth would have wiped out the colonials pretty quickly, and the diseases of the colonials would have done serious horror to the Africans too. The colonials came with dogs, cats and other animals, and God must have made them be exactly the same as the dogs and cats of Earth, who of course have been here for many millions of years. And their diseases too. God has to do a lot to make this story work. And God can indeed do anything. But I’ve already read that book, and didn’t much care for it.

Strangely, though it is 150,000 years ago, Adama plans to spread people all over the place. This actually makes little sense, and doesn’t match the pattern of human migration. Humans spread out from Africa in several waves, but only the last one (about 80,000 years ago) stuck. The expeditions Adama sent died off, leaving nothing. No faction decided to build cities or technology. In fact, all the people pretty quickly collapsed to primitive states, without technology and without writing, which didn’t come to us until quite recently.

It would have made more sense if they had timed this to the “Great leap forward” when human culture suddenly accelerated, which was 50,000 years ago. Once you accept God doing all this magic stuff to make this plot work, at least that could have had some consistency with history. But instead, the colonials quickly came to the life of our ancestors, nasty, brutish and short, with a lifespan of 30. No happy ending there.

New York

All of this plot could have been saved if in a final pan, they had come to a modern ruined artifact, changing the date — and of course removing that final scene of the Angels in New York. Of course a Statue of Liberty would have been very cute, but anything would have done.

Suddenly all of it can make sense. No need for god to be creating DNA miracles — of course they are the same species. They are just the remnants of humanity on a war-destroyed planet, reduced to primitive life. Perhaps even by choice, just like the colonials. Write that story and you could have told this very same episode without bogus science. You just could not have put the Angels in New York to make a few snide comments and melodramatic warnings about the dangers of robots.

Was that short scene worth it? Not at all. Because the truth is, a logically consistent, realistic ending would have done far more for the show’s message. Made it far more respected and remembered. By doing it well, the whole show’s overall message about the dangers of robotics would have been far stronger, far more lasting. It would have been saying, “We just told you a story of how misuse of AI did bring this world to ruin” rather than “This story of danger comes from a distant and fantastical past which makes no sense, and is not really our past.”

What a great waste. While I do crave more realism and less mumbo-jumbo, even those who don’t have that taste can realize that the fault here is not simply a lack of attention to science. It’s a lack of attention to meaning. What could have been one of the greatest SF shows of all time, with a lasting message, cuts off its own legs in the last 3 minutes for highly unimportant reasons. I suspect that for years to come, people will say BSG was “Great, except for the stupid ending.”

And if Starbuck was going to be an angel who can just vanish, could they not have let her have a scene in New York with Baltar and Six? Yes, the Ron Moore cameo was cute. The mitochondrial Eve story, which is where they got the 150,000 years from, is widely misunderstood. This woman is not “Eve” like in the Bible, she is just the most recent of a million common ancestors we all have. They mucked it up just for that?

Loose ends

Baltar’s women and their weapons
The reason for Starbuck’s long strange fate and journey, if she’s really a non-corporeal being of sorts.
Just who is this God and why does he work in these strange and mysterious ways? Why does he not like being called God by his minions? Who are they anyway, and where did they come from? Is this just some strange new theology thrown in at end without explanation, to roughly parallel our notions of angels?
Why did the 12 tribes take their flags from the sky of the 13th colony?
Why did D’Anna say “You were right” to Baltar?
What was the Ionian nebula about? Why the strange power shutdown? Why did Roslin faint? How were the Cylons waiting?
Who wrote All along the Watchtower? (Looks like it’s God.)

Broken promises

No time travel? That opera house scene was indeed a vision of the future, very concrete. It goes beyond simply being made to happen by the beings who planted it, or so it seems. Ditto some other prophecies like that of the First Hybrid.