Battlestar Galactica

[Grinning_Colossus]

Alright, now that I've thought about it, I'm ready to say that it was emotionally satisfying, yet I strongly disapprove of the way the writers gave into temptation and went with the obvious and sort-of-stupid resolution. Even a hint that 'god' was some sort of remorseful machine intelligence from the first cycle would have improved it...

[Syt]

The colonials have the same fate as the Golgafrinchams on B Ark? How fitting.

[Grallon]

Here's a post lifted from SCIFI Forum.



G.

-----

The amazing thing here is just how horrible the ending was. Really, it was... well I'd have preferred Apollo to wake up in a penthouse after a horrible dream or an autistic apollo being taken to Universal Studios' by his parents and dreaming the whole thing while looking at that Cylon standup they had during the 1970's.

The anti-technological message at the end was sickening-- it made Apollo into a prehistoric Pol Pot. (Another case of someone who decided to set us back to "year zero" by evacuating the cities. Didn't work so well). Somehow he got 38+ thousand people to go along with the insanity even though just two episodes back they had a screaming match over stripping Galactica and a number of the ships were willing to follow Gaeta. there are some sins in story telling and the mortal one is being inconsistent to the characters and this was that failing on crack.

Not only that, but they DIDN'T change anything. Nothing at all. They walked out and died in a few years (because given that most of them were from a technological society, learning to live without technology would have been rather fatal the first time a storm showed up. Hunter gatherer cultures have a very important skill set. They also die. A lot. It doesn't get better with primitive farming, since up until very recently, most cultures involved 99% of the population slaving away and dying horribly to support a tiny upper class that didn't have too much fun either).

But beyond that, they vanished, their language, their culture, all the struggles they went through vanished. Hera ended up starring on a nation geographic page... bones in a dig where there was no sign of technology so she died alone...and if you want creepy to get her genes into "our" gene pool, she was mating with beings that had no language. Even the more favorable estimates about the emergence of language stop at about 100K BCE, and more conservative ones have language emerging at 50K bce. Given how fast techological or civilized humans can expand thier numbers (remember, even a "ranger ricks guide to health' puts you ahead of 99% of the doctors who have lived in human society and new fangled ideas like "make a still and use the alcohol to sterilize tools and hands" radically, enormously reduce infant mortality, the only other answer is that they died out. Probably in most cases died out within a year, or a few years of landing.

In other words, at the end of the day, the four year crusade would have ended in about the same way had Adama gone with his first impulse, to go out, guns blazing, with the rest of the colonial fleet.

A for "doing things differently" this time. They didn't help that either. Mankind at the end was in the exact same place the colonials had been, both times...and of course since nobody knew that there was anything different (might have been nice to leave a ship on the moon, with a warning), there's no reason to believe the same mistake wouldn't be made, since mankind showed no reluctance to enslave himself. They left no message, no warning, no wisdom.

But again, the biggest, most unforgivable point was that at the very end, characters went 180 degrees of where they had been established. I'm not even going to get into to Starbuck as a head angel, but we had people accept this, with no body so much as saying: nope, I'm bringing down ship X which ish MY ship (remember the council of captains), and we're going to strip it for supplies and use it's engines so we can have light for a medical set up and power and the ability to purify water while we get established. Everyone decided to wander into the woods with what's on their back. This includes people like "President" Lampkin, for whom such an action would be a fast death sentence. (the oft stated: nomads were healthy is true. It misses the reason: those who were unhealthy or who were injured either got better, fast, or they died. This is also why so many primitive cultures have the practice of infanticide. It's not that they're evil, it's that they do not have the resource base to afford the luxury of useless mouths. That's something that comes along with "ebul" technology. If any of you have siblings with disabilities, or elderly parents, (both of which existed in the fleet) it's important to consider lee's decision in the view of the fact that he condemned them, all of them, to a very unpleasant death.

And of course what made it worse was that they had won at this point. They had made peace with the Cylons, even to the point of agreeing to let Cavil have ressurection tech and go their own ways. They could have gone for vengeance, seeking to kill him no matter the cost, but they didn't, the fact that it didn't work was due to Tyrol...and perhaps "God" (and if so, it's intervention was not benevolant). They gave the centurions their freedom, even without any assurances that they would not turn on them-- because it was right to do so. At the end of this series, the colonials have learned thier lessons, learned them in blood and fire, and paid the highest price for them...

And Apollo tosses it away. The colonials didn't lose... They surrendered. They committed suicide. It was a contemptible ending completely out of character for the individuals and it shows the casual contempt for technology that can only come from someone living in an advanced, first world nation, where that technology swaddles them in a lifestyle that the vast majority of human history would consider a literal paradise.

[DisturbedPervert]

and if you want creepy to get her genes into "our" gene pool, she was mating with beings that had no language

More likely raped by beings that had no language.  Along with a good portion of the female fleet members that didn't die right away.  The scattered, starving bands of colonials probably ended up selling off their women to the grunting savages for scraps mammoth meat.

[grumbler]

So what the show demonstrated was that those who died swiftly at the beginning of the war were the lucky ones?  The survivors simply chose a complex, long, and painful suicide in the end?

That's kind of a neat answer, though nihilistic.  The poster Gral quoted didn't see that coming.  Did anyone here?

[Darth Wagtaros]

I would have found my original idea of original Boxey (not the one in Galactica 1980) looking into a snow globe with re-imagined Galactica floating in it better. 

It demonstrates the contempt the writers have for their fans.  They buried the plot under a knotted spaghetti of different lines and characters and then just dumped a blob of shit over that to cover it up.  Asses. 

[grumbler]

It demonstrates the contempt the writers have for their fans.  They buried the plot under a knotted spaghetti of different lines and characters and then just dumped a blob of shit over that to cover it up.  Asses.

To be fair, the writers are just supposed to attract viewers show-by-show.  That's what they get rewarded for.  They get no extra pay for "fan satisfaction when the show is finished."

It is the show runner who is responsible for maintaining overall coherence, and Moore has never been a very strong show runner, though he is a very good director.  His shows are visually striking but seldom coherent.  Roswell's second season and Carnivale's first were examples of that.

Moore was Peter-principled to the top, and he needs to step down a rung or two.

[Neil]

I would have found my original idea of original Boxey (not the one in Galactica 1980) looking into a snow globe with re-imagined Galactica floating in it better. 

It demonstrates the contempt the writers have for their fans.  They buried the plot under a knotted spaghetti of different lines and characters and then just dumped a blob of shit over that to cover it up.  Asses.

The ending was Alexandrine in it's simplicity.  The writers had written themselves into a knot that could not be untangled, and so they just clove through it as best they could, transformed everyone into luddites and made the whole adventure for naught.

I win.

[Ideologue]

What's terrible is that there was still the possibility for rational, satisfying explanation, and they said "fuck it."  They didn't cut this Gordian knot, they set it on fire.

[Darth Wagtaros]

I would have found my original idea of original Boxey (not the one in Galactica 1980) looking into a snow globe with re-imagined Galactica floating in it better. 

It demonstrates the contempt the writers have for their fans.  They buried the plot under a knotted spaghetti of different lines and characters and then just dumped a blob of shit over that to cover it up.  Asses.

The ending was Alexandrine in it's simplicity.  The writers had written themselves into a knot that could not be untangled, and so they just clove through it as best they could, transformed everyone into luddites and made the whole adventure for naught.

I win.

No, I disagree.  I think they avoided the knot entirely.  They left it behind, took a walk and hid behind a tree and crapped this out.  By jingo.

[Neil]

No, I disagree.  I think they avoided the knot entirely.  They left it behind, took a walk and hid behind a tree and crapped this out.  By jingo.

Not at all.  They didn't leave their plot behind, they just said that it didn't matter, and then proceeded to annihilate the entire colonial population.

I win.

[BuddhaRhubarb]

My new favourite show is the Batman: Brave & The Bold, anyways. I've transitioned away from BSG already.

[Cerr]

More Q&As from Moore and Eick:
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/03/battlestar_galactica_ronald_d.html

[Berkut]

More Q&As from Moore and Eick:
http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/03/battlestar_galactica_ronald_d.html

Wow. He had no fucking clue where he was going with this story, did he?

[Cerr]

I enjoyed the finale up until Lee's idea to abandon civilisation and technology. Which makes absolutely no sense.