Brad Ideas - Battlestar's "Daybreak:" The worst ending in the history of on-screen science fiction - Comments

The show ended horribly, but

Domonic — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 16:22:22 -0800

The show ended horribly, but it never was all that good to begin with.

It wasn't realistic. The fighting was mostly WW2-style with missiles and unexplicably rare nukes. The Cylons were inexplicably able to transfer astronomical amounts of data across lightyears of space instanteneously without any form of detectable trasmitter. Thousands of sentient minds repeatedly reached concensus despite diverging experiences because they were of the "same model".

The characters were horrible and unbelievable. They included virtually no role-models, and generally seemed far worse than the average person today. They were genocidal, racist, hypocritical, childish, brutal, stupid, and petty. Modernity has many flaws, but it has also made significant moral advances that this civilization, supposedly more advanced than our own, lacks. The characters weren't inspiring, they weren't reflective of an honest accounting of us, they were instead repulsive extremes. Repulsive extremes exist, but modern society is very diverse and contains many angels alongside its demons.

The show was not particularly intelligent. It included many long scenes with no dialogues and not much happening. The plot was self-contradicting, emphatic, all over the place, and undersegmented.

One of the most offensive

Anonymous — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 01:11:42 -0800

One of the most offensive aspects of the ending was the twin heavy-handed, father-knows-best Public Service Announcements shoved down our throats by the writers:

* Technology is evil!

* Pantheism is the one true religion!

And best yet, if we (primarily) Americans and Westerners embrace these bulletins, we can prevent a robot-wrought apocalypse in the future and break the cycle!

Suck it, writers.

Truth.

Che — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:52:12 -0800

I just want to say: WORD. That is a great summation. While Brad has listed many flaws, and I myself have outlined some major character issues, this is a brilliant point. Creating a "big bad" -- and one that manipulates everything... well, within Gog's framework, I guess -- robs the show of its original, wonderful shades of gray. The episode where Starbuck tortures Leoben was brilliant. The show both offers justifications and critiques of torture, and makes a reasonable argument for both (along with the airlocking). Afterwards one finds oneself thinking about one's own opinion on torture. IS there ever a time when it's a great idea? Is it justified? Isn't it? And in order to ask those questions, one must ask whether or not this Cylon, this thing, is actually a person. And this is fundamental to human conflict. The dehumanization of our enemy. You can't ask non-sociopaths to keep slaves unless you dehumanize them. The show was great at examining this stuff. And then... shades of gray disappeared. The whole, "does humanity deserve to survive?" question is less relevant, or maybe completely irrelevant when the challenge they're faced with is a petulant child of a Cylon who pulls the strings of every other cylon and plots his revenge from the get-go. It's almost more contrived and damaging than Gog who pulls the strings and plots its plan from the get-go. Eesh.

Not "always"

brad — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 10:02:46 -0800

BSG was based on mormon mythology, and the creator, Larson is LDS. However, Moore and the new crew are not of that faith, and while the names and a few of the plot points come from that, the 2nd show was not really reflective of mormon mythology.

BSG is Mormon Myth

Anonymous — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:46:03 -0800

BSG has always been based on Mormon myth. This is no secret and can researched on google by anyone who cares to know what BSG actually is.

Good TV Sci-Fi Endings

Thomas — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:28:07 -0800

I thought Star Trek: Next Generation's ending was good; it seems fitting that the series began and ended with Q, whose final line seemed to summarized humanity's real challenge nicely.

Quantum Leap's ending was also pretty good; the last line always leaves me a little shocked and sad.

Can't think of any other good sci-fi series endings, which is sad in a way.

Think I'll Google great sci-fi endings to see if I can find any more.

Couldn't watch past the first few episodes

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 16:27:39 -0800

I can't give BSG the credit you do.

His character driven story might have worked if I didn't hate them. A number of the characters were so lame it was painful to watch. If I want to watch lame people I can find all I want down at the bus stop.

Mostly I think the geek boys just wanted to see the blonde naked. The rest they just invented as justification

Nice article. I confess to

Kauphaart — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 10:48:27 -0800

Nice article. I confess to watching and enjoying SOME of BSG, even though its simply a retelling of the mormon mythos; 13th tribe, kobol/kolob, and so forth. Enough with the gawd damned religious bullshit already....

I agree. Galactica's ending

Drew — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 12:12:38 -0800

I agree. Galactica's ending sucked...

I would have done it differently...

I would've actually liked to see it link up somehow with the 1978 series...

A reveal that the 'gods' of the colonial faith were pilots from the original series era, remembered only by their callsigns and inflated by legend into divinity, maybe the fleet finding a new home on a world populated by the original Ragtag fleet, long since forgotten how to use their original tech, venerating the skeletonized wreck of the TOS Galactica as a holy place, something like that...

Yep.

Anonymous — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:34:31 -0800

Really rotten ending. Stupid and pretentious.

Of course, it had been going down hill since the Final Five mess, but it still is amazing how bad the end was.

Horrible End. I'm really ticked off.

Twister — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 08:03:00 -0800

My husband and I just finished watching the entire series over the last few months. It was a great show but there were plenty of occasions that irritated me. The final few episodes were without a doubt, the worst thing I could have imagined.
First, we had to sit through silly backstory stuff on the characters that didn't really further any of the plot. I was left wondering if these scenes had been shot before and they didn't want to waste them. Plus, I really didn't want to know that Lee and Kera almost cheated together on HIS BROTHER. WTH!? I wanted to barf.
Then, we are supposed to believe that everybody is perfectly happy to give up ALL of their technology and live a life of grinding hand to mouth existence, complete with dramatically reduced life spans, death in childbirth and rampant illness. Lee even talks about the nice life he imagined for himself. Meanwhile, the viewer know it is now going to filled with wretched hard labor. Additionally, they break off into small groups, thereby increasing the likelihood that they were going to die out. Finally, Adama goes to live on a barren hill by himself (sure to die with a year or so), leaving his son to go on alone. WHAT!!!?? How stupid can you get?
At the most, they should have spread out in a fertile valley no bigger than Rhode Island.
The ending was an insult to people of intelligence.

Writers' Strike Ending....

Henry Kim — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 10:52:04 -0700

All good things go to ruins when people try to mess, it seems. I'm in full agreement that the Writers' Strike ending was the far more fitting ending to the show than what they eventually gave--and I confess to having spent time looking for Brooklyn Bridge amidst the ruins as some other fans on various discussion boards claimed to have found.

I agree. The ending was so

Anonymous — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 07:14:09 -0700

I agree. The ending was so stupid that it still bothers me every time I think about it. In my mind I try to imagine another ending--for example, the Cylons come back and some of the main characters have realized that they made a big mistake and leave Earth.

I am so glad I am not alone

Falkenherz — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 14:24:00 -0700

I am so glad I am not alone with that horrid feeling of failure about such an otherwise outstanding sci-fi-series. A better ending should have solved at least some of the many many loose ends and chosen any other sollution but the luddite ending.

Just one example from the realm of wasted possibilities:
For a moment, when Anders became a Hybrid and connected to the Ship, I was thrilled. Here we have the chance to transform the good old BSG into a organic, self-regenerating being like the Cylon´s base ships; to change from the rusty old heap it was since the beginning of season one into the most sophisticated ship in known space. And the truth between the stars, as perceived by those delphian hybrids with their fully extended projection-abilites, could have unveiled. Something with the lords of kobol and the cylon god, but different than the babylon-5 plot...

...well, whatever, I think the series would have needed at least two more full blown seasons to truly string most loose ends.

It wasn't as bad as all that

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 09:20:23 -0700

I would say Moore deserves all the credit he got for the first two seasons. They were well done. But the show did peter out, with Season 4 pretty much an extended cry for help. And I am convinced the last episode can really only be appreciated as some kind of weird monument to creative hubris. But the reason people were so disappointed is because it had been good. End an always mediocre show like that and people would just shrug.

As a comparison, I was simply mesmerized with an episode of Breaking Bad last night ("Crawl Space"). The characterizations are so great, their evolution so seamless for a TV show, the shocking moments so justified by writing and context. It kind of made me sad for Battlestar all over again, which wasted its last season on mostly tired, soulless stunts pleading for attention. For all its fantastical elements, all its claims to great character drama, it became a dramatic joke compared to a structurally simple tale of two guys running a meth lab. Battlestar's ultimate failing was that it didn't respect its own characters; it strip mined them for cheap stunts until it had no story left.

I know that sounds pretty harsh, but I'd still contend the first two seasons were good stuff.

Battlestar's "Daybreak:" The worst ending in the history of on-screen science fiction

brad — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:38:15 -0700

Battlestar Galactica attracted a lot of fans and a lot of kudos during its run, and engendered this sub blog about it. Here, in my final post on the ending, I present the case that its final hour was the worst ending in the history of science fiction on the screen. This is a condemnation of course, but also praise, because my message is not simply that the ending was poor, but that the show rose so high that it was able to fall so very far. I mean it was the most disappointing ending ever.

(There are, of course, major spoilers in this essay.)

Other SF shows have ended very badly, to be sure. This is particularly true of TV SF. Indeed, it is in the nature of TV SF to end badly. First of all, it’s written in episodic form. Most great endings are planned from the start. TV endings rarely are. To make things worse, TV shows are usually ended when the show is in the middle of a decline. They are often the result of a cancellation, or sometimes a producer who realizes a cancellation is imminent. Quite frequently, the decline that led to cancellation can be the result of a creative failure on the show — either the original visionaries have gone, or they are burned out. In such situations, a poor ending is to be expected.

Sadly, I’m hard pressed to think of a TV SF series that had a truly great ending. That’s the sort of ending you might find in a great book or movie, the ending that caps the work perfectly, which solidifies things in a cohesive whole. Great endings will sometimes finally make sense out of everything, or reveal a surprise that, in retrospect, should have been obvious all along. I’m convinced that many of the world’s best endings came about when the writer actually worked out the ending first, then then wrote a story leading to that ending.

There have been endings that were better than the show. Star Trek: Voyager sunk to dreadful depths in the middle of its run, and its mediocre ending was thus a step up. Among good SF/Fantasy shows, Quantum Leap, Buffy and the Prisoner stand out as having had decent endings. Babylon 5’s endings (plural) were good but, just as I praise Battlestar Galactica (BSG) by saying its ending sucked, Babylon 5’s endings were not up to the high quality of the show. (What is commonly believed to be B5’s original planned ending, written before the show began, might well have made the grade.)

Ron Moore’s goals

To understand the fall of BSG, one must examine it both in terms of more general goals for good SF, and the stated goals of the head writer and executive producer, Ronald D. Moore. The ending failed by both my standards (which you may or may not care about) but also his.

Moore began the journey by laying out a manifesto of how he wanted to change TV SF. He wrote an essay about Naturalistic science fiction where he outlined some great goals and promises, which I will summarize here, in a slightly different order

Avoiding SF clichés like time travel, mind control, god-like powers, and technobabble.
Keeping the science real.
Strong, real characters, avoiding the stereotypes of older TV SF. The show should be about them, not the hardware.
A new visual and editing style unlike what has come before, with a focus on realism.

Over time he expanded, modified and sometimes intentionally broke these rules. He allowed the ships to make sound in space after vowing they would not. He eschewed aliens in general. He increased his focus on characters, saying that his mantra in concluding the show was “it’s the characters, stupid.”

The link to reality

In addition, his other goal for the end was to make a connection to our real world. To let the audience see how the story of the characters related to our story. Indeed, the writers toyed with not destroying Galactica, and leaving it buried on Earth, and ending the show with the discovery of the ship in Central America. They rejected this ending because they felt it would violate our contemporary reality too quickly, and make it clear this was an alternate history. Moore felt an alternative universe was not sufficient.

The successes, and then failures

During its run, BSG offered much that was great, in several cases groundbreaking elements never seen before in TV SF:

Artificial minds in humanoid bodies who were emotional, sexual and religious.
Getting a general audience to undertand the “humanity” of these machines.
Stirring space battles with much better concepts of space than typically found on TV. Bullets and missiles, not force-rays.
No bumpy-head aliens, no planet of the week, no cute time travel or alternate-reality-where-everybody-is-evil episodes.
Dark stories of interesting characters.
Multiple copies of the same being, beings programmed to think they were human, beings able to transfer their mind to a new body at the moment of death.
A mystery about the origins of the society and its legends, and a mystery about a lost planet named Earth.
A mystery about the origin of the Cylons and their reasons for their genocide.
Daring use of concepts like suicide bombing and terrorism by the protagonists.
Kick-ass leadership characters in Adama and Roslin who were complex, but neither over the top nor understated.
Starbuck as a woman. Before she became a toy of god, at least.
Baltar: One of the best TV villains ever, a self-centered slightly mad scientist who does evil without wishing to, manipulated by a strange vision in his head.
Other superb characters, notably Tigh, Tyrol, Gaeta and Zarek.

But it all came to a far lesser end due to the following failures I will outline in too much detail:

The confirmation/revelation of an intervening god as the driving force behind events
The use of that god to resolve large numbers of major plot points
A number of significant scientific mistakes on major plot points, including:
- Twisting the whole story to fit a completely wrong idea of what Mitochondrial Eve is
- To support that concept, an impossible-to-credit political shift among the characters
- The use of concepts from Intelligent Design to resolve plot issues.
- The introduction of the nonsense idea of “collective unconscious” to explain cultural similarities.
The use of “big secrets” to dominate what was supposed to be a character-driven story
Removing all connection to our reality by trying to build a poorly constructed one
Mistakes, one of them major and never corrected, which misled the audience

And then I’ll explain the reason why the fall was so great — how, until the last moments, a few minor differences could have fixed most of the problems.