I liked it.  The biggest loose ends got tied up, with the rest probably being saved for The Plan and Caprica.  We got an epic battle.  We got closure with a little bit of happily ever after.  I doubt it could have been done better.

Favorite bits:  Cavil’s last word.  “Frak!”  The angels wandering through New York.  “You know it doesn’t like that name.”  The beautiful final scenes with Roslin and Adama.

There is one thing I don’t get, though.  They found the nuked Earth, in part, by matching up star patterns that look exactly like our Earth’s star patterns, yet we now know that it’s not the same planet.  Maybe over 150000 years the stars adjusted themselves into a familiar pattern for us!  Or maybe the centurions got bored and figured out how to make stars for us.  Oh well, it’s a minor thing.

The plan to start living peacefully with the existing humans on Earth seemed a bit optimistic, didn’t it?  Seems more likely to me they kill a couple with their automatic weapons, call them cylons, and tell them to get to work.  It’s possible that the original Earth humans would have just continued living peacefully as hunter-gatherers without the colonial influence turning them into us.  God’s plan is a funny thing.

I loved it. It left a huge smile on my face. Hard to say why, but I like your analysis. A nice end.

My biggest problem was with Cavil agreeing to anything at all at that point.

I liked the ending for the reasons a lot of people hated it: it didn’t tie things up into a nice neat bow. It spent a lot of time saying goodbye to characters. It left things on an ambivalent note. In short, it was a lot like the show itself—messy, unkempt, and quietly brilliant.

I thought it was really well-done.  I was quite pleased that it was Baltar who got to deliver the “moral”—we create this Manichean divide between “good and evil” just to have something to fight about; it has nothing to do with God or gods or the universe or however you want to describe it.

Honestly, this episode has me brainstorming a paper about Battlestar Galactica and Flannery O’Connor—Baltar, it seems to me, becomes a character like the Grandmother or Hulga from “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “Good Country People”—utterly unlikable until that moment of violent trauma that puts it all in perspective and clarifies the universe.  Cavill is the grotesque Misfit or Manly Pointer character who provides salvation.  And the whole point, when you cut right through it, is that we’re all connected, and that no person—or robot—is superior to another.  I’ll call it “It Would of Been A Good Spaceship, If It Had Been Somebody There to Blow It Up Every Minute Of Its Life.”  Or something like that.

It was a little too pat and a little too tidy. It felt more like Moore’s ST:TNG finale than a BSG finale. Not crazy about the supernatural elements either.  Overall though, I still enjoyed it.

I loved the whole thing.  I thought wrapping up the war and giving the characters time to settle down was brilliant.  I’m so glad you liked it too.

Back in season 2 or so there was a writer’s meeting podcast.  Ron Moore said one of his ideas for an ending was for the survivors to arrive on our planet during Egyptian times or something similar.  Everyone in the room loved it.  I like how he basically stuck to that idea - of arriving during ancient times, but it still wasn’t exactly what I expected.  I also love the flash forward with the angels watching over humanity.

Also - I wish I had seen a little more context for Tory overall in the series, but it was a fitting end and very much in character for the Chief to react like he did.  I never like Callie at all and gave a little cheer when Tory shot her out that airlock, but she was wronged!  It would have been interesting to see some flashbacks about how Chief and Tory used to have a relationship and what that looked like.  Still, I was very caught up in the moment where he rages out on her.

How did the rest of the fleet find our Earth?  I thought they & Galactica went separate ways?

Kwillow- Adama sent a Raptor to rendezvous with the fleet.

I got the finale from iTunes, and for about six hours I honestly thought the series had ended with Daybreak Part 2, where Cavil lets Hera go and says “I’m as good as my word.” And you know, I thought that was kinda okay. It would have been a lot more pessimistic than the actual ending, though.

I like the way the Opera House visions were revisited and that the perceived menace of Six gathering up Hera turns out to be exactly the opposite. (A general problem with divination, it seems to me).

I like that Kara’s nature is never explained. One of the measures of characterization in fiction that I end up using is: Do the characters respond to their circumstances in a way that rings true? In bad fiction I find myself rewriting their lines in a way that makes sense to the characters and the plot. When Kara disappears, Lee doesn’t give a speech. He says exactly what I did a second before, “Goodbye Kara.” And that’s it.  (I know, I know… an overly subjective measure for artistic value. But that’s where things have to start… does the work connect to you or does it not? If it doesn’t then there’s not need to go any further with it.)

The dénouement is a little long, but it went where the story had to go. I think some people dislike it for getting preachy. Whatever.

The post-150K year Baltar and Six read more like ghosts to me than angels. They were angels to their living counterparts, but I didn’t see that they interact with contemporary humanity.

I’m not sure what I think about the ending.  I’m still digesting, I guess.

I was disappointed with how they ended Kara.  They kept implying that this Daniel cylon was her father and then that story just got dropped completely for making her… what?  An angel?  And I’m not sure how that meshes with “harbinger of death”.  It just seems like her story was a cop-out, which frustrates me as I think that she and Tigh were the two most compelling characters on the show.

I wasn’t satisfied with the resettling on Earth, either.  After all the contentiousness and civil wars and mutinies, everyone just decides in a matter of hours that sure, they’d like to abandon everything they knew about their civilization and go interbreed with primitive species that don’t even have language.  No problem.  Just send those ships into the sun, sounds great!

Kara as pigeon=dove=holy unforgotten ghost was very satisfying to me.

When I look across the entire four-ish seasons the single most memorable moment was when the cylons marched into New Caprica. That’s what the show was about. RDM turned a mirror on us and showed who we were. Most of us here already knew, but a great many of us didn’t at that point.

I didn’t hate it but I know I will be in the minority on this thread. I thought it could have been better. The flashbacks did nothing for me, we already knew the characters who had flashbacks were in need of a fresh start from the mini series, Adama puking on himself didn’t add anything to that and Lee and Kara almost fucking on a table not ten feet from Zak just made me think of them as both selfish assholes, and I lost all respect for Kara at that point (I’d given up on Lee seasons ago).

As far as the “happy” ending, I felt that over half of the fleet 1) would have never agreed to give up at least the medical advances they’d made and 2) those who did would’ve died from the foreign bacteria and in turn would’ve killed off a lot of the indigenous peoples with their bacteria. It’s as if no one in the writers room remembered what happened to the Pilgrims and Native Americans. Not to mention they probably would’ve been attacked by several of the indigenous peoples (and before you start with “it’s just a show” I know I’m not *supposed* to think about stuff but come on). 

After all the contentiousness and civil wars and mutinies, everyone just decides in a matter of hours that sure, they’d like to abandon everything they knew about their civilization and go interbreed with primitive species that don’t even have language.  No problem.

There was a joke on the io9 message board on the comment Baltar made about “we can breed with them” as if Baltar or anyone else would give up a groomed, literate potential mate for a primitive with a unibrow, bad teeth and hair all over who lives in a cave (and or hut).

I dunno. If I was stuck on one of those ships for several years, I’d be very ready to get off of it.

So, about them toasters out there…

I liked it a lot.  They were finally showed Eden and the Colonists and cylons were wise enough to stay in it.  I felt the whole last hour was a shout out to Daniel Quinn’s _Ishmael_, particularly Quinn’s explanation of Cain and Abel (where God sides with the nomads represented by Abel vs the farmers represented by Cain).  I also wonder if “you know it doesn’t like to be called that” is a subtle jab at today’s Christian/Jewish/Islamic fundamentalists who claim to know God better than anyone else.

Probably the coolest nerdcore scenes for me though were the rebel centurions kicking cylon ass alongside the humans.  I could really see them as emotional beings in those scenes, and it looked like the human soldiers felt really thankful that they were on their side.  You could tell just by their walking that they were different from the enslaved models.  They definitely earned their freedom in the end.

I too expected a lot of hardcore fans to absolutely hate it.  These seem to be the same people who hated Matrix 2 & 3 (whose moral isn’t too different from BSG’s).  Interestingly enough, it seems to me that all three major movie/TV shows featuring killer robots—Terminator, the Matrix, and BSG—are all basically saying the same thing:  robots have souls like us; if you can reach them on their own terms you can work with them for the good of all; it is wrong for them to be enslaved, either to their programming (Skynet / BSG), or to us (Matrix / BSG).  Since these robots are of course just mechanical metaphors for Othered humans, I have to wonder if this convergence on morals means that on some level modern audiences are getting close to seeing all humans as equal.  The 1950’s killer robot movies were more simply Humans are Good and Robots are Evil.  Maybe the great American propaganda machine is running out of steam on that particular message.

I liked the finale a whole lot in the moment, but looking back on it, I find the religious aspects are best seen through the prism of something like Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan.  Caprica-Six and Baltar, and the rest of the fleet for that matter, were somehow manipulated just to get Hera both alive and on Earth so she could pump out a few daughters and die at a young age.  That part of it was INCREDIBLY pessimistic.  All of the fury and warfare and drama was meant simply to deliver a flesh package to some cave-men.

Yet, despite all of that, there is unbelievable meaning in each of the characters and their interactions.  Trying to figure out what the hell ghost-Starbuck actually is just wastes time.

If I were to play director, though, I would have cut out the damned robot montage.  I think the shot that lead into it, with Hendrix playing as the camera panned over a homeless man, would have fit just as much into the show’s ethos without being so unintentionally hilarious.

For the seven years the survivors were stuck in the fleet, their technological advances got them monotonous gray drudgery, breathing stale air in claustrophobic ships, algae for breakfast lunch and dinner, and occasional bouts of horror as the machines they invented tried to wipe them out.  I don’t think a chance to live without that baggage would be too unpopular.

I wonder if all the ships really flew into the sun, though?  Surely there were at least a couple ships full of people who wanted to just keep exploring space without the constant threat of annihilation by the cylons.

The only thing that nags at me, is all the other Sixes, and Eights, and other odd Cylon rebels just flying into the sun with Anders and the fleet, and leaving only Athena and Caprica on the ancient earth. Well, and the remainder of the 5; Tigh, (young!) Ellen, and Galen.

What?  I thought the 6s, 8s, and 2s joined the humans.  Isn’t that what Leoben said near the end?

I thought the montage of contemporary robots was really stupid.  The Japanese are going to destroy us all!!!  A montage of all the problems we’re still facing would have been more appropriate and affecting.  150,000 years after the colonials supposedly settled Earth, and we still have famine, disease, and genocide.  Forget the stupid robots.

Caprica-Six and Baltar, and the rest of the fleet for that matter, were somehow manipulated just to get Hera both alive and on Earth so she could pump out a few daughters and die at a young age.

Using that logic, Kara only existed to execute a jump.

Roxanne- As far as “god” is concerned, that’s all Kara did exist for.  Hence her blinking away.

I was satisfied with the ending, but not quite happy with it. I liked that Kara was left a mystery, but it could have been accomplished without the disappearing act. And I would have been satisfied if Head Six and Baltar had made their final appearance with their flesh counterparts, rather than with the expository dialogue in NYC 150k years later. The enigmatic aspects could have been left even more in the audience’s hands in both cases, but the decision seems to have been “let’s make it crystal clear that these were angels/demons/mysterious-forces-of-the-universe.”

The final disposition of the colonists didn’t ring quite true, either. I had no problem with their deciding to settle on Earth after being cooped up in tin cans for 4 years, but sending the entire fleet into the sun? I doubt that all of the captains or the more adventurous souls would have agreed to that (Sam’s send-off on the Bucket was very appropriate, though—that really worked). And opting to scatter themselves instead of establishing a city (preferably under the wise rule of Romo Lampkin and Doc Cottle), and to abandon their technology and knowledge base in the process? Get back to us a year later rather than 150k years later, and we’ll see how many of the 39,000 and their Cylon friends survive the “joys” of The State of Nature and their Noble Savage neighbours (who’ll no doubt also pay a dreadful price for contact).

All that aside, though, it was a top-notch SF series on all counts, and most of the plot threads were tied up in accordance with the show’s internal logic and consistency. That’s a rare enough accomplishment in television that it allows me to forgive a lot.

Did anyone else do a massive head desk with Apollo’s “we will civilize these poor savages” speech? It went to well, right up to the massive RaceFail!! at the end.

It seems to me that Kara broke the cycle of birth-life-death and gained transcendence. That’s something no other BSG character achieved and it seems far more significant than the delivery of Hera to the new Earth. If there is a God directing things, the humans of the new Earth would have evolved exactly the way they did without Hera.

I’m with you, Roxanne.  They did a great job of making the ships feel very claustrophobic, and so it follows that people would be willing to trade a lot just to have the chance to walk around in the sunshine and eat real food.

Dan, I think the robot montage was intentionally hilarious.  It fits right in with the angel Six and Baltar laughing darkly about how all that sturm and drang lead us right to where we were before.  It’s a morbid joke that humans are unable to do the right thing before it’s too late, so why not make it funny?

A montage of other problems would have been heavy-handed and unfunny.  I like that it ended on a dark, dark joke.

I thought the 6s, 8s, and 2s joined the humans.

They did. They may or may not interbreed with the colonists and/or the indigenous people, but for all intents and purposes, their genome is part of the new human race.

I thought the montage of contemporary robots was really stupid.

Especially since the original toasters were just as much cannon fodder as they were slaves—it would have been more effective to show some of our less anthropomorphic war-machine robots in the montage. But the entire Times Square sequence was aimed at a different audience than the people posting here.

Did anyone else do a massive head desk with Apollo’s “we will civilize these poor savages” speech?

Nah, because it’s just the sort of thing I’d expect Apollo to say. Of all the characters, his core personality is the one that’s changed least over the 4+ years covered*. Even Baltar, at long last, experienced a significant change—although I doubt even Caprica Six will be able to keep him down on the farm for more than 2 years.

[* Jamie Bamber had a thankless task with that character, but none-the-less he came through as well as the rest of the cast]

It seems to me that Kara broke the cycle of birth-life-death and gained transcendence.

I would have liked to think that. Judging by the exposition at the end, though, it would seem that the cosmic joker (who doesn’t like to be called God) just put her in the bullpen for the next go-round.

Amanda, I agree that the robot montage was very funny, but I felt it was damaging to the point because it was funny for all the wrong reasons.  The robots they showed were all mostly toys, my internal response wasn’t that we should reassess who we are, but that how silly this show must be to think that a furby could be either sentient or a threat to us.  Maybe a car-manufacturing-plant-robot dance-party would have been a better fit.  Also, it would have been a dance-party.

Thematically, it was fine, but the sheer amount of “paper this over because we never thought it through” destroyed it for me.  It was pretty obvious they never had a plan, never had a solution, and so decided “it’s about the characters, none of that matters”. 

For instance, I think they have officially gone on record with the “we don’t understand why people thought Daniel had anything to do with anything” because they pretty much made Daniel up to explain the numbering system they had screwed up when they invented the final five.

Agreed, which is why I’m deciding to believe that Daniel was Kara’s father, even though that’s not their intention.  Dammit, it works better that way.  I do like that Hera is the First Mother, because Hera was, before she was appropriated into the Greek canon we know now, a well-loved mother goddess.  She was demoted to shrieking wife later in history, but she was initially a powerful god.

I agree with Amanda about the robot montage. That the toys were treated as ominous was funny; that they were flashy and consumerist and mass-produced was ominous. I’d venture to say that it worked better than anything else in part three.

One sequence that got me really teary-eyed was Boomer’s flashback/death. I found her plotline in S1 really compelling, and that scene before she triggered brought it all back with a vengeance.

And it was surprising, because I’d mostly stopped caring about Boomer after New Caprica. Even her screen-time in Kara’s piano episode didn’t do much for me.

*nod* I really liked the “Hera as Mitochondrial Eve” thing. It is one of the few things I thought they got right with the finale. 

  In the end, though, there was just too much clumsy for me to enjoy it. I don’t mind ambiguity, but just throwing up your hands about your own plot doesn’t impress me.

The “White Man will Civilize the Savages” bugged me, as did the “Man will teach you to Hunt, while Mom will teach you how to manage the cave” discussion.

The Mexican standoff gets stopped because Baltar says he sees angels? Please.

Abandoning all the tech? People have already pointed out how silly that is. Especially since you could make any number of reasons to have them abandon that didn’t strain credulity so much.

Now, I adored some of the farewells, and cried for Laura and Bill. But that doesn’t make up for the rest, IMHO.

I forgive this show its flawed ending. That said, I prefer the Golgafrinchans—at least they were deliberately absurd.

Q: Does head-Balthar actually say “it” rather than he or she there? And why silly, silly him? I just watched the ending again, and I remain perplexed. I even tried imagining that “God’s plan” doesn’t like to be called that. =|

I had three huge problems with the finale:

1.  Sorry, but there is no way that names like “Hera,” “Athena,” “Apollo,” “Adam(a),” etc. could possibly survive intact for 150,000 years.  That was was just plain dumb.  Also, why were almost all of the gods Greek or Egyptian?  If they’re our ancestors, what about Amaterasu?  Oshun?  Attis?  Yahweh?

2.  The whole “they end up on a primitive planet and guess what!  They’re named Adam(a) and (Mitochondrial) Eve” plot is such a cliche in written SF that it’s routinely used in writing workshops and guides as an example of something that will get your story shot right back at you, do not pass Go, do not get $200.  It was old when Hugo Gernsback was in short pants, and I was pretty stunned that a supposedly hip and cutting edge series used it so blatantly.

3.  Once again, we see the actual First Humans (who were Africans, and almost certainly dark skinned) displaced in favor of a light-skinned “chosen child,” and the local humans by the (primarily) light skinned aliens who come with superior technology and advanced knowledge (they may have shot the ships into the sun, but they still know about farming, metal smelting, the wheel, written language, and thrown/shot weapons).  Not only does it deny humans our own history, it particularly denies Africa and its dark-skinned inhabitants their rightful place as the original humans.* 

Add in that only *one* of the core characters was played by a visibly non-European actor, and that both the black characters in the original series were displaced (by a Caucasian and an Asian, respectively), and I’m forced to ask why there’s less racial diversity on BSG than, say, a forty year old relic like Star Trek. 

Not acceptable in any way, shape, or form.

*and in case anyone thinks I’m exaggerating:  the most recent research suggests that humans were dark skinned regardless of where they lived as recently as 13,000 years ago.

@ellid - thanks for saying it so eloquently.  I was also disturbed by the casual racism of those last scenes on the new Earth.  I understand the creators of Battlestar are/were Mormons and denigration of darker-skinned people appears to be a common thread in that religion.

Ellid makes me smile:). You put it far more eloquently than I did when I was ranting to my white friends, who understandably listened and at least pretended to feel my frustration.

(slightly OT but I’m sure my white friends were sick of hearing me bitch about these very things, especially coming after an episode of Supernatural where****SPOILER****the lone black character , who was already an asshole turned into a traitor and villain. It was not a good week for non-white characters in genre television)

Well, it was fine.

I don’t buy the throwing away all the tech.  It would have been better to say that since the Battlestar is gone and the civilian ships are also breaking down, that we need to go native just in case a Basestar or two of Cavil/Doral/Simons shows up.  They can’t see any Colonial shit, or we’re toast.

Remember, these were people who just a few days/weeks ago were canibalizing the Galactica for their own ships.  Yes, they’re now on a pretty planet that can support them.  And make them SICK with microbes they have no immunities for.  Their tech could help them set up shelter and farming.  It’s just stupid to throw it all away.

I hated Lee’s speech about how our science runs ahead of our souls.  FUCK THAT IGNORANCE SHIT.  Science is not evil, and ignorance is not a virtue.

I suppose the trauma of living machines might be enough to turn them off of all tech, but that ignores the fact that they have Cylons with them.  If they can learn to live together, which was the point of the show, then they can’t be scared of tech.

I suppose the Narchos are happy to get far away from the Agathons, but knowing that they were out there…wouldn’t that be enough to start the cycle up again?

I LOVED hearing the original music as the ships flew into the sun.  I do like the “some believe life here…began out there” Chariots of the Gods ending.  I think it’s a shame that they fell in love with mitochondrial Eve instead of landing them in ancient Greece where they belonged.  Or where ancient Greece would be.  There’s no way the names and mythology could possibly survive.

Not to mention how sad I feel for Hera, since she apparently bore daughters to some preverbal men.  Was that consensual?  How could it be?  Plus she died young, which isn’t surprising since they GAVE UP THEIR KNOWLEDGE/TECH.  Where did Cottle go, anyway?  Not only was he the only doc, but wherever he went was the luckiest ‘tribe’ of all.  He should have started a school.

My complaints don’t mean I didn’t get teary-eyed nonetheless.

The finale just really hits me as something better thought of in the abstract…the details just fall apart when you examine it.

Well, Boomer did get shot, but Athena got her kid back

Technically wouldn’t that be calling it even

CParis, Ultramagnus:

Thank you.  I’m glad I’m not the only person who noticed this.

Then again, Athena was the reason Boomer got shot. (seriously, I see what you’re saying and I concede. I just couldn’t resist )

Some of the Colonials may have children for Hera to mate with. In fact, that’s a much more likely scenario than her or her immediate progeny mating with the pre-verbal humans.

I’m surprised that you liked it, Amanda, given your frequent, um, cavils about overdependence on the “Let Go and Let God” theme. But of course you are right; the only way a person could enjoy this series (and I enjoyed it a lot) is to focus on the stories of people in the setting, and let both the SF geekery and the Cozmic Qwestions provide a vaguely plausible background without bogging down in their details. I’m the kind of guy who did a lot of wankery about the latter, but if I hadn’t mainly cared about the characters as people, I surely would have given up the show ages ago. Similarly for those who obsessed about “c’mon, do the Cylons have a Plan or not? And are they still following it?” also would have had to throw in the towel some time ago. (Yes, “they” did, if by “Cylons” you mean Cavil. No, they stopped being able to follow it some time ago when Things Went Wrong. No, I don’t think Moore et al actually knew what “the plan” was way back when they made the miniseries…nor was it all that sensible a Plan, and it certainly didn’t explain all relevant events).

I’m gonna reiterate this—it isn’t Earth, our Earth, until you see our Moon! Which they showed first this time! It’s a cheap shot for me to claim it as my “I called it!” moment but I’m living pretty cheap these days and frak it, I claim it!

As a nitpicker myself there is a lot I could gripe about. I have stated how I hate the theme of “we didn’t really evolve here; we are outcasts from Heaven/stranded colonists/some kind of alien-run experiment” in science fiction, though I’ve tolerated and even enjoyed stories and series with that theme in the background. They pretty much sidestepped the worst failures of that trope, but in a nitpicky way it’s still either wrong or tragic. 150,000 years ago, IIRC, humanity was, according to archeology, still not yet spread over the entire earth; I forget how many of us were even outside of Africa yet. So if the Colonials settle _everywhere_ that was decently habitable in those days, most of them die off with no issue, because otherwise the fossil record would tell a different story. If the Fleet had arrived a mere 15,000 years ago instead I’d have an easier time believing it.

Of course there are a host of other issues. My point is, they don’t seem that important to harp on, because in terms of what worked in the series, they worked it well to the end, and wrapped up what mattered reasonably well.

<delurk> I wonder how many people heard Baltar’s comment about running the “scenario enough times” and thought “Of course!  It’s the Singularity!”

God is the universal computer, running history over and over again, though “it” hates being called that. This happened before, and once history loops, will happen again.  Leoben’s speech to Kara while he was being tortured was the honest truth, that somehow he had insight into previous loops, where the roles were reversed, where he was the human and Kara was the Cylon, etc, etc.

Every time the Computer runs the universe again, it tweaks, and adds, and changes some parameters.  Some of the players in this drama have become aware.  Some of the previous “successful” characters are saved as “angels”.

Once I put it in the same sort of setting as “Darwinia”, it made perfect sense, right down to the characters who had prophetic knowledge, could come back from the dead, and loop through history… the whole thing is another loop on the simulation.  Which strangely means that the original Battlestar G could exist in the same universe as well.

Did anyone else have the same “A Ha” moment?

I interpreted the Robot montage at the end to indicate the We Humans are making a different type of robot: if they become self aware and sentient they’d be more likely to throw pies in humanity’s face than exterminate Us.

Mitchforth- I mostly agree with everythin in your post. The inconsistencies in the characters(particularly the cylons)drove me bananas, but you give too much credit to Cavil. He too was not a completely thought out character early on. At one point he announces that the cylons are giving up the chase to concentrate on being better machines. We all know how long that lasted.

Adama shifts unpredictably between boundless love and deep melancholy and unreasoning, often self-destructive rage.  Roslin is sometimes the matronly schoolmarm, and sometimes vindictive and murderous.

This is, of course, in stark contrast to real people, who always maintain the exact same demeanor throughout their lives.

150,000 years ago, IIRC, humanity was, according to archeology, still not yet spread over the entire earth; I forget how many of us were even outside of Africa yet. So if the Colonials settle _everywhere_ that was decently habitable in those days, most of them die off with no issue, because otherwise the fossil record would tell a different story. If the Fleet had arrived a mere 15,000 years ago instead I’d have an easier time believing it.

Yeah, there’s also the problem that farming didn’t really take hold until about 15,000 years ago, and it didn’t start in (sub-Saharan) Africa.  Clearly, the BSG writers don’t know much about paleoanthropology.

What also bugs me is that, apparently, if a civilization chooses to start over from scratch, it’s going to have to endure women completely giving up any and all equality and the civilization giving up all knowledge and embracing ignorance, and I’m not just talking about knowledge of science, technology, and medicine.  Head Six and Head Baltar had many better opportunities to chuckle over our fate.  In the 21st century, we’re better off than at any other point in the past 10,000 years.

That said, I prefer the Golgafrinchans—at least they were deliberately absurd.

I couldn’t agree more.  Sanitize that telephone for you, sir?

I’m with Ellid, Caren, and UltraMagnus.

I was banging my head doing “The Stupid! It Burns!” routine.  Beyond the whole White Egyptians/Atlantean fantasy issues…

1)  Colonials will never leave behind tech, and they will not leave behind mp3 players, computers, tvs, and books.  Do you *really* think, no matter how bad the old life was, that they wouldn’t bring much of it with them?  Check out the history of Australia during the penal colony phase. 

The thing that I find the most morally abominable aspect of the ending was this idea that some ambiguous “tech” is some kind of phenomenon that is seperable from the human experience—seperate from love or compassion or diligence or anything else.  That some “tech” is just a tool and just a thing.  A thing that might control you all!!!!!!  No.  We have relationships with specific individualized tech.  People name their cars, tools, blow up dolls, and they have relationships with these items.  BattleStar Galactica fundamentally misunderstands how we *could* have Cylons.

Incidentally, Baltar will not be able to farm without that tech.  Ooooh, like even the simplest iron implements.  No foundries, remember?  No hoes but the ones that could be made with wood and animal horns.  Hmmm, wonder how he is going to store seed, let alone procure them?  Is he going to be okay with stone-milled wild cultivar grain?  Gonna be hard on those teeth.  Saaaaay, how are all the dentists going to be doing?  It’s gonna suck when all those people start having infected teeth.  Maybe they can bring along that distillery from Galactica’s bar!  At least for the doctors so when they have to saw off limbs with a swiss amy knife, the “patient” will be stone drunk.  Wait, are we allowed to bring knives here?

2)  Colonials would be all be dead in about 12 months.  Again, check out Australia’s history with a like, but not like ecological system.  Moreover, I’m reasonably sure that colonials being colonials, would fundamentally recognize that a slow colonization of the surface would have been necessary.  Either way, this is probably going to inevitably involve quite of bit of subjugation of the natives.  I suppose there will be plenty of children from all the rapes (as there usually are in colonial situations).

3)  The idea of the 6’s, 2’s, and 8’s just working, and um, “helping out” until they die is creepy beyond all words.

4)  How will the MechCylons procreate?  Wouldn’t they have wanted to stay and colonize the rest of the solar system?  Faster economy, eh?

5)  I simply can’t buy that the rebel Cylons wouldn’t be on the same side as Cavil as far as tests.  I think people have a right to control over their reproductive cycles, period, and I also believe that most autominous entities would agree with me.  They would have wanted Hera to be well treated, but examined?  Hell yes.

6)  About what happens after your labor is gone?  Deflationary apocalypse, societal collapse, minor wars, shanghaiings, that sort of crap.  Check out Reconstruction Era South,  Haiti after the war of independence.  Usually, this doesn’t happen, the people on top would just snatch a different group—When native americans died, indentured labor, when they ran off, african slaves, when they became free, various forms of peonage.  They usually don’t look like Caprica Before the Fall.  In a more realistic world, Caprica would be a world of Bombays.

I always think about and analyze these peripheral issues while I’m watching.

In a sense, I find the whole anti-ressurection tech philogosphy half-baked in the same way as anti-abortion ideology is.  Full of moralistic preaching about the value of “life”, mostly by the people who isn’t going to be losing the tech. 

And I also <sarcasm>love</sarcasm> the whole creationist and anti-evolutionary premise.

I also thought the whole “God did it” ending was pretty annoying,

I’m nut sure what show you’ve been watching. For better or for worse (for better, in my view) this was a very mystical, theist show throughout its run.

I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed it, until I had time to think about it, at which point I enjoyed it less thoroughly. Still very emotionally satisfying; intellectually quite a lot less.

I found the colonials-as-civilizing-force thing bothersome, especially from the angle Ellid mentions above. The show was always much better as gender (coulda used more LGBT characters tho) than it was at race.

Also, as Mark Foxwell sez:

if the Colonials settle _everywhere_ that was decently habitable in those days, most of them die off with no issue, because otherwise the fossil record would tell a different story.

I had a problem with this too. Accepting this ending means rejecting certain apparent facts about our prehistory. Anatomically modern humans settled Australia 40,000 years ago and the Americas 12,000 years ago (this is from two-thirds remembered Guns, Germs and Steel). Furthermore, in both places they appear to have caused mass extinctions of large mammal species—not in Africa because there they co-evolved with us. The Galactica timeline would require such extinctions to have taken place 150,000 years ago. As kenmeshi points out, we would also find evidence of farming much earlier than we actually do (possibly in very different places too, like Australia), and assuming the colonials brought their own crops as seeds we would also not find wild ancestors for the earliest domestic plant species. These do not lend themselves very well to explanation through appeal to the divine, unlike the requirement for hominids with very similar DNA to have been seeded on different worlds. These lacunae are a mark of bad sf.

The obvious alternative is that colonials get to this Earth in our future: humans evolve on this Earth, destroy the environment, and flee to other planets (à la Firefly). This perhaps recurs on new worlds; in any case, at some point they end up on Kobol. In the meantime on this Earth various natural processes (including, say, an ice age) erase most traces of human civilization. The fleet finds this renewed planet (perhaps encountering wandering bands of gone-Galter descendants, living off squirrels and wild arugula; they use seashells as currency, backed by a flag lapel pin standard (or not)). The problems with prehistory disappear. Also it explains the cultural continuity between us and the colonials much more satisfactorily than the “collective unconscious” thing the writers have been pushing in interviews: cultural continuity between technologically advanced civilizational stages, even across thousands of years, is much more plausible than the same across tens of thousands of years of cave-dwelling (I suppose you could say that that culture is divinely inspired and therefore transmittable across infinite time, but I would find that much more worrisome than the other appeals to the divine in the show).

I didn’t think the Starbuck disappearance added anything, really. Her true nature would have remained just as mysterious if she had just stuck around or gone away like Tyrol and Adama. Also, “My work here is done POOF” is second only to “Take me to your leader” in the pantheon of sf clichés. (Speaking of which, you had to know the Colony was doomed when the Simon testing Hera pulls a Grand Moff Tarkin saying “I think you overestimate their chances”. A sure signal to be minding your thermal exhaust ports.) I’m with Amanda on the Daniel thing: not the kind of thing they should have passed up.

The head characters, right up until the very end, did very little that is incompatible with them being conscious manifestations of subjective experiences of spirituality, or of subconscious knowledge. In the end, I suppose they are the princes who keep the view, from the Dylan/Anders song.

See, shah8, these are examples of nit-picky details I could spend hours arguing, but they are largely beside the big points.

Which certainly include the whole stupid “technology is evil!” trope. I can buy the people of the Fleet burning their technical bridges behind them, now that they have good reason to think the Cylons are no longer at their heels. Not _all_ of them, but enough to back the Adamas’ authoritarian mandate that the refugees will scatter and blend in with the native Terrans.

I would _not_ have accepted the premise that they needed to eliminate technology to hide from Cavil. I forget now if Galactica witnessed the dead-hand strike on the Cylon Colony; further, we don’t really know that that strike totally ended that group. It might have tipped the battered structure into the singularity—but maybe not. The real safety of the Colonials lies in their having been jumped “at random” to a location the Cavils know nothing about. If the Fleet did not feel safe from ever being tracked down or accidentally rediscovered by vengeful Cavilites they surely wouldn’t feel safe just lying low! After all what would Cavil do with a world full of wild, primitive humanoids, even if he were sure they were unrelated to his own lineage? Either nuke them or enslave them, is my guess. So this whole thing would be unthinkable if they thought Cavil might ever find them.

But no, I would never buy that people accustomed to technical civilization would agree en masse to abandoning all of it. The gatherer-hunter life was not as harsh as some here assume—because actually they aren’t assuming GH lifestyle at all, and that’s right. The Colonials know nothing about that; some of them know how to farm. With, as sha8 says, implements.

The thing is, even if they were all dumped naked onto Earth, but dumped into one location, I do believe they could scrape together enough skill and relevant knowledge to recreate agriculture and basic civilization. Beause all human activity is basically social and cooperative, so vice versa—scatter them, and even _with_ a generous allotment of plows, pickaxes, iPods, and books, they will either die out completely or they or their descendents will eventually merge with native gatherer-hunter Terrans. That was Lee Adama’s goal after all.

The show sort of finessed the point—the people scattered, but took stuff with them, not thinking ahead that without a community of skilled people who have accumulated a lot of infrastructure, all their stuff will eventually become useless. So there is a gradual instead of abrupt transition to GH life; by then, years or decades later, the Fleet people would have gotten to know their various neighbor natives and their children could be accepted into these bands,

Because even GH people have society and knowledge and skills. Once the Colonials had merged into these bands, all their stuff would rut or rot, abandoned.

Count me in with those that were uncomfortable with the idea that the colonials were going to civilize the natives and bring them language and culture and stuff. 

And yeah, sure, after lots of trials and tribulations, everyone would be happy to settle the planet.  But settle without medicine, any kind of tech or transportation?  Not a single one of the ships decided this was a bad idea?  As others have pointed out, new planets are dangerous!  Although it was clear that the writers didn’t really care about this angle, as they ran out of antibiotics on New Caprica and somehow this wasn’t emphasized as the huge public health tragedy I would think it should have been.

Leaving behind all of their tech and medicine means that anyone on the fleet who was, say, diabetic, or uses a wheelchair, or is in some other way sick or disabled was essentially fucked, and they apparently all agreed that they should still go down to the planet without any technology, and their loved ones thought this was just fine, too. 

Sure, as a species, they’d have a pretty good chance at survival.  They have a lot of smart people with a lot of skills, and they could team up with the natives who would have had a lot to teach them about survival as well.  But I absolutely do not buy that they would all decide to abandon their technology peacefully.

Yes, but it didn’t lean on that as the explanation for everything.  I mean, I do tend to zone out during Baltar/Six’s God discussions but the show as a whole has always accepted both secular and a spiritual POV, and I certainly didn’t think it’d all come down to “god did it” as it seemed to in the finale.  Not to that extent.  It’s part of the reason the whole thing felt like a cop out to me - anything they couldn’t explain just got woo woo’ed away.

Yeah, there’s a reason deus ex machina is considered bad.  If your story is resolved by god doing it, then that’s not really a resolution at all.  I think that is unsatisfying at its core.  However, it might have been better if BSG weren’t constantly going back and forth over whether it wants to discredit its religion or not.  All the Cylons are monotheistic!  Oh wait, the final five just made that shit up!  Psych!  Wait, actually they were right, entirely on accident.  BSG fucks with us about Kara, too.  Starbuck mysteriously “resurrects” and oh by the way there’s a missing Cylon who’s been tampered with and is artistic and did we mention she has an absent father who taught her to play a Cylon song?  Psych!  She’s actually an angel or whatever.

Wait…

Did Paula give up her guns?

?:~)

http://www.gregnog.com/storage/angel.jpg

God’s plan involves hjs in the CIC, unnecessary daddy issues, and an over-elaborate scheme to keep one child safe?  God is apparently cooler that the atheists in the house give him credit for.

Which is my flippant way of saying:  If they wanted to go the God Route (something I’ve long anticipated), they needed to give a hell of a lot more explanation beyond “He doesn’t like that name” or, more charitably,  “he’s a force of nature” (stop me if you’ve heard this one before).  What of the fact that the *Centurions* invented monotheism?  What about the prophecies that came true?  Those that didn’t?  Those that kinda did?  The religion angle is too muddled, and so too many series-long mysteries were tied up with a literal Deus Ex Machina.

Kara deserved better than to be reduced to the instrument of some half-explained divine force (or worse, to be to instrument of Lee “Hooker Ship” Adama’s salvation/fulfillment/de-skepiticization, as the flashbacks and their final chat perhaps suggest).  One of the things I’ve hated this season (and that Amanda neglected in her feminist apologia) is the slow transformation over the seasons of Starbuck from a no-apologies hard-living sensualist to a fucking Earth Mother Goddess. WTF.  Wack.

I didn’t really see a “technology is evil” vibe in the ending, even though I do think there’s a nod to _Ishmael_ (haters can call it the Noble Savage if they want) in there.  I see it more as leaving technology behind is the inevitable price to enter an Eden, one where most people can get by on 3-4 hours of work per day and have very few real dangers from predators.  How many people here on the real Earth would trade their various cubicle hells for a lifelong camping trip, even if it meant no more doctors?

(Plus, how cool is it to actually see a real end to Wagon Trail In Space?  What other TV series managed to close the same story they started with?  Buffy and Angel certainly didn’t.)

As for the God angle, again it’s not all that important to me who or what the Cylon God was/is.  Is the Head Six/Head Baltar being the same Lord of Kobol who shall not be named?  Is it the Centurion God?  Is it an AI from many cycles back?  I’m not sure, but it does seem to be distinct from the Christian God so it lacks all the contradictions inherent in omnipotence + omni-benevolence.  It’s a force of nature (like from the book of Job), not on any one side (like from the teachings of Jesus), capable of bringing (some) individuals back from the dead, and maybe limited in its absolute power.  But it’s not making claims about Heaven and Hell and requiring adherence to ancient tribal customs to stay on its good side, so it’s not at all the cosmic Bad Guy we see in other parts of the Bible.

The main moral question for me is:  if this god did not exist, would humanity/cylonanity have died out long ago?  It seems to me that the answer is yes, that this being’s actions are on the whole about preserving survivors of what seem to be inevitable genocidal wars to maybe stop the cycle at some point in the future.  So I’m willing to buy this as a legitimate way to tell the story.

Maybe I’m losing my cerebral edge, but I find that nit-picky whodunits aren’t all that fun to watch as serialized TV over several years.  I hear people bitching about whatever happened to the Great Cylon Plan.  Who cares anymore?  The plan was obviously Cavil trying to squeeze every last drop of misery from the survivors—even though it’s a retcon, it works OK for me.  (The only hole is whether or not recreating biological reproduction was part of that plan.  If so, it explains both Athena and the medical center Starbuck broke out of.)  These days if I want a better whodunit I’ll pick up a low-budget flick like Memento or Primer.

I’m glad I’m not the only person who noticed this.

I definitely noticed as well, which is unusual since I’m usually blinded by privilege when I’m relaxing with a TV show. But it was glaring, especially on a show that incorporated gender equality and homosexuality into its universe’s societal norms.

The “memorable” black characters: Dualla; Skulls; the doctor Cylon who wasn’t given more than one line of dialogue outside of two episodes; the commando that Adama found, who might have been an extra in his own episode for all the lines he got; the black-market kingpin on Prometheus. One positive primary character, one positive tertiary character, and a bunch of non-entities and/or villains.

We have relationships with specific individualized tech.  People name their cars, tools, blow up dolls, and they have relationships with these items.  BattleStar Galactica fundamentally misunderstands how we *could* have Cylons.

THIS.  Seriously, the show is named for a specific piece of tech.  You think it wasn’t painful for Adama and Tigh to give it up?  THEY WROTE SCENES ABOUT IT.  They sent her off to the sun with the original theme.  The writers do understand how much you can care for a thing…

...and then they don’t. 

How many people here on the real Earth would trade their various cubicle hells for a lifelong camping trip, even if it meant no more doctors?

Not so many women.  Periods can be extremely painful for some of us without medication.  Like, knock you down in agony for a day or so.  Birth?  Dangerous as hell, no matter what crunchy granola types try to tell you.  Yes, most of the time it works out okay, but that’s b/c we have doctors for the times when it doesn’t.  Go back less than 100 years and you find women dying in childbirth to be an extremely common phenomenon.

No one with asthma, diabetes, or more serious illnesses that are manageable with proper medication.

I admit I’m a city girl, and I hate camping, but seriously, the ending is stupid.  They went back one order of magnitude too much.  Much better to have them show up so that the Mayan/Egyptian/Whatever “artifacts” that look like astronauts are actually Colonial ships.  Why not have them show up where their names can actually be carried on.  No reason there can’t be scions of Hera…in fact it’s more in the theme of this BSG…some of us are Cylons…guess which ones.

Eh. I was disappointed in the ending. Three things bothered me:

1) The “abandon technology” thing. They couldn’t think of a more realistic way to get rid of technology, like it falling apart over time?
2) It’s corollary, that getting rid of technology will end the cycle of violence. It’s insipid of a show that has long used the conflict between man and machine as an allegory for the violence between humans to all of a sudden start claiming that robots, in and of themselves, cause violence.
3) The “Goddidit” explanation. Yes, I know mystical forces have long played a part in the show, but tehy were always ambiguous. You could believe that characters like Adama could be atheists without being blindingly stupid. Not anymore. Making it explicitly god is a cheap cop-out. It was way more interesting when it was mystical and vague and you could make your own answers.

From reading some interviews, I think Moore seized on the Times square idea first and worked backward from there, causing the papering over everyone talks about. So, as I see it, Moore tied threads together haphazardly so he could preach at the audience in a gimmicky way. And this is what Moore said he got away from Star Trek to avoid!

(Not that I completely hate it. When it was focused on the characters, it was great. It was all the ad hoc thematic end-tying that put me off.)

Back to loving machines…if your family and friends were all dead and the only thing you had to remember them by was a digital photo album (powered by nukes/solar/whatever; battery life is not an issue) you’re not giving that up.  No more than a child would give up a teddy bear.

People love their tools.  Inventors like to make things.  And even if they did decide to rough it, they aren’t giving up their knives and guns are they?  No guns?  On a new world with enormous predators?

Dumb dumb dumb dumb.

The first half of the finale was one of the best things they’ve ever done. As tightly scripted and executed as the mutiny episode. The second half was utter shit.

“We’ve learned so much… so let’s saw off our thumbs and move back to the trees!”

WTF ever Apollo.

Is she a Cylon? Nope! Angel.

See, they can’t just go there.  Yes, belief in a god and in BSG being a religious show is a fine interpretation, but it’s not the only one, even if that is the explanation Moore et. al. want us to come away with.  (reader response theory, damnit)

You can’t just claim it’s GOD.  Not when the Original Earhlings and Cylons have the tech to resurrect.  Not when it has all happened before.  Someone out there survives with the previous tech—even in this iteration, the Centurions keep the basestar.  They keep learning and inventing and eventually their tech is sufficiently advanced that it appears like magic to the poor dumb superstitious survivalists who gave it all up.

If you follow this path, there is another pattern—civil war and near annihilation followed by a splitting off of people, some who start over with nothing; others who keep and improve tech.  The things the Gods of Kobol could do seem miraculous to the Colonists and become the stuff of legend, just as the Colonials, had they shown up when they were supposed to, would have been the godlike ‘ancient astronauts’.

Now, the Centurions in the basestar, who no longer have anything restricting their behavior, are free and roaming the universe.  They—somehow—came up with the idea of a One God on their own, that’s not something the 5 invented, though they liked the notion and taught it to the 7.  They have an interest and a fondness for the people left behind, and there’s no reason they might not come back and take an interest in us in the future.

And who knows what they will have come up with in the 150,000 years since they left us? 

——————-
So many interesting ideas of what sentience is, how it comes about, when someone/thing deserves rights…so many stories untold.  Blaming it on God is not only lazy, but boring.

The Hand of God is my favorite episode.  It’s the 1st season one where Baltar, forced by Head!Six, points out the proper place to attack the Cylon tyllium mine.  Was he lucky?  Was it truly inspired by an angel?  He’s clearly batshit insane at this point…and either explanation “works”. 

What is Head!Six?  Is she an angel of god, as she claims?  Is she remnants of Caprica downloaded into Baltar?  Is she a projection b/c whatever allows Cylons to project is something humans can do as well?  Is Baltar part Cylon?  Lots of interesting questions, not answered in the episode, but allow for either religious or non-religious explanations.

THIS is why “God has a plan” and “Kara was the Angel of Death” are unsatisfying as conclusions.  Yes, she was an angel, but HOW?  There has to be room for the scientific explanation that was there throughout the series to have an acceptable end as well.  And they just didn’t write it in—more than that, they had poor, under-utilized and abused Apollo whinging about how science marches ahead of our souls, condemning the science aspects and embracing superstition as the way to live.

I enjoyed it enough watching it, but the more I think about it, the angrier and less satisfied I am.

I’ve just got suspension of disbelief issues with the end.  I can’t believe that they all wouldn’t be eaten by lions, die of tetanus, etc. in pretty short order. 

It occurs to me that some of the strongest plot elements, Kobol, the Pegasus, are the stuff they took from the original series.  When they got away from that it became very hit or miss. 

Makes me think that they should have seriously thought about using the ship of lights, silly as that originally was.  They might have made something interesting of that.

Hawes:  See, that’s the thing—the whole story was not about religion. In the earlier seasons, it was a part of a larger whole. What Galactica was most about was war. Mythology only came to dominate the series in its later parts—since they left New Caprica, really. What was so jarring about the finale re: religion was how poorly it was done. Compare the finale to even a fourth season episode, like “Faith”. There the religion and mysticism were subtle and thought-provoking. The finale’s device of literally having angels come and tell everyone it was all God is facile in the extreme in comparison.

I know, after “Lost” alienated a chunk of audience with its high amount of filler and digression in Season 3, the creators mapped out the show to a planned end after six seasons. <blockquote>

I don’t know, I felt alienated after the high amount of filler in the first season.  Hubby managed to make it through season 2 before agreeing.  I hear claims that it’s better now, but now that I’m out, they aren’t pulling me back in!

Which leads directly to…
<blockquote> David Chase had a runaway hit with the Sopranos after the first season and pretty much had carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, and he supposedly had his idea of what would happen to Tony from the beginning.

David Chase wrote a one season show.  It went over big, so he didn’t kill off Livia as planned and did Season 2, which was just as great.  HBO kept pushing for more seasons, so Chase had to keep stretching out the story he wanted to tell.  Ralphie was Richie II, and stretched over 2 seasons.  There was a lot of filler and it never lived up to the glory days of the first 2 seasons.  But it was still better than most everything else on TV, even if it was a bloated mess of a 13 episode story.

The Battlestar finale was disappointing because the end didn’t come organically from the story and the Deus ex machina solution didn’t fit the show’s theme.

This however?  Says what I said in many, many fewer words.  Deus ex machina is fine for this series, should it leave some openings for it not actually being Deus.  Abandoning everything to split up and die in small batches across the planet?  Stupid, even with the Religious ending.

With everything they’d been through, they would have formed tight bonds with some and deep hatred with others.  Lee shouldn’t be left all alone, though.  The Tighs and Bill shouldn’t be separated.  Whatever cobbled together government Romo headed shouldn’t be totally chucked.  There is only one doctor!

Life on Mars (BBC) got away with a suicidal main character (or was he?).  BSG?  Not like this.  Dying on the Galactica defending the colonists?  Sure.  Randomly deciding to suffer and die on a pretty planet when there were other options? No.  Dumb.  They should have founded Atlantis.

The only requirement I see to tie in 150,000 years prior and the very ending was (and even that’s not explicit) that Hera passed her mitochondria into the general populace.  Perhaps all of the Colonials died a joyful free death after a year or two?  I mean, how much longer did they have to live in space?

I had had three scotches by the end of it though, so I might have missed something.

I see it more as leaving technology behind is the inevitable price to enter an Eden, one where most people can get by on 3-4 hours of work per day and have very few real dangers from predators.

You know, I’ve seen several comments to the same effect in this thread, and the only response I can really give is to bloody well laugh my ass off.  I work with people whose parents and grandparents were hunter-gatherers, hell, some of the older people I deal with were born in skin tents and igloos.  Generally speaking, the people who grew up with that lifestyle tend to have one comment to make to people waxing rhapsodic about it: “Are you fucking insane?”

The people who are romanticizing it are people who’ve never run a real risk of dying from a bout of diarrhea, or of septicemia after a minor injury, or of pregnancy and birth being a godawful more life threatening than it is now, or of infant mortality rates that would make a person used to the present day choke.

a) Kara Thrace story arc ending was disappointing to say the least (I was pissed). It was emotionally empty and void of any real ‘human’ substance and Lee’s reaction to it? No. No realism there. I was wondering if they really were cylons…no emotions whatsoever. It was like a slap in the face to Kara Thrace fans especially the ones that were expecting Kara and Lee to walk off into the sunset together. Ron Moore said it was all about the characters stupid, but neglected - utterly failed - to apply that formula to Lee/Kara. Katee Sackhoff did such a wonderful job portraying my favorite BSG character.

b) The god/religion arc was a bit excessive for me. I am still ruminating over that part of the storyline trying to be objective even though I am an atheist. I like the idea one commenter posed about singularity and am now thinking in that direction. Could this be what R&D;were insinuating? Dunno, but interesting. I need to watch it again, but am still emotionally reacting to it so that will have to wait.

c) The spreading out all over and rejection of technology…medicine? I’m VERY skeptical of that and find it not very believable in the least. And what of the human emotions of socialization? Why would it be unwise for Lee to stay near his father? He’s going to be alone the rest of his life??? It was all very cold and emotionally unrealistic and I personally didn’t connect to it at all. If they did spread out I would expect them to reach back out to each other in their future. People who go through those types of emotionally and mentally traumatizing events forge types of unbreakable bonds not easily severed by ‘I’m sick of technology’ quips.

After Kara led them to Earth I felt the entire story was hurriedly penciled in with no thought to the characters and all this after watching Ron Moore say it was all about the characters stupid. The one exception was Adama/Laura death scenes, but then Adama sitting on top of a hill alone for the rest of his life…no. Very cold. I guess some geeks would react positively to it because there is no emotional drama, but where there is humanity there is drama people, geeks or no. I felt maybe the loud fans that had complained about all the drama really backed R&D;into a corner and that was/is unfortunate and one of their failures as writers.

Overall, I loved the finale up until they found earth. I will not totally dismiss the show because of the failure to satisfy me in the end. I can imagine/write my own end. The show is still one of my absolute favorites and the characters and the cast are brilliant…the crew excellent. I guess we could say the writers and directors are as humanely fallible as the people/cylons they wrote about, but still delivered an excellent show.

Caren—I like your explanation of abandoning the technology a lot better. The idea that everyone would just agree to give up everything without any fuss just seemed like turning everyone else into two-dimensional background for the sake of wrapping things up neatly (not helped by the decision not to include any of those extras in the outdoor shots, creating a “there are only ten people in the world” feeling.) I haven’t followed the series very closely for the most part, so I didn’t have strong feelings one way or the other, but “going native” had a very Noble Savage feeling to me, and as others have noted, the “mitochondrial Eve” bit just emphasized for me how white (and particularly non-black) the cast was. (Ironic twist on “colonial,” eh?)

(And I loved the ending to the original Life on Mars, btw. For me, that’s a textbook example of how to end a “mysterious happenings” series, wrapping up all the plot threads in a satisfying way without giving a definitive answer to the central mystery.)

And Cyan—at some point late in the episode, I suddenly burst out laughing, and explained to Ms. Redshift: “Galactica is the ‘B’ Ark!”

Kara Thrace story arc ending was disappointing to say the least (I was pissed). It was emotionally empty and void of any real ‘human’ substance and Lee’s reaction to it? No. No realism there.

The best good-version of that I’ve heard is like

:: Kara disappears

:: Lee’s all “Kara! Kara!” not knowing what’s going on.

:: Lee cries a bit and he’s all like “Goodbye, Kara Thrace.”

:: Kara pops up from behind a bush and goes “What the frak is wrong with you, y’big jackass?”

Wow.  I’ve got the flu and am having trouble making mental connections.  I so picked the wrong thread to try and read and understand.

:: Kara disappears

:: Lee’s all “Kara! Kara!” not knowing what’s going on.

:: Lee cries a bit and he’s all like “Goodbye, Kara Thrace.”

:: Kara pops up from behind a bush and goes “What the frak is wrong with you, y’big jackass?”

Man, that is SO much better and much truer to the characters than what we got!  I’m laughing at how much better it is.  I can see and hear that scene.

That is now how that wraps up.  Lee being pompous, and Kara puncturing it.

I enjoyed it enough watching it, but the more I think about it, the angrier and less satisfied I am.

Me too. I’ve been conversing with other BSG fans, one of which is my dad who got me into sci-fi as a kid and who I watched the original show with (Saturday morning Sci Fi baby!) and we were both big fans of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Babylon 5 so when this came around we had one more show to bond over and talk about (there were lots of calls back and forth when I went to college) so when we talked about this yesterday he was clearly disappointed and talking out everything that didn’t make sense about the finale, and just this season in general only made me like it less and less. I could reiterate but I won’t, it’s been said over and over again.

Generally speaking, the people who grew up with that lifestyle tend to have one comment to make to people waxing rhapsodic about it: “Are you fucking insane?”

This. I grew up on a farm, a few miles outside of a town. As as much as there were things that I loved about it, I would not give up the technology that made our farm life a lot easier than what my grandparents had.

How many people here on the real Earth would trade their various cubicle hells for a lifelong camping trip, even if it meant no more doctors?

Caren beat me to it but probably not as many as you’re thinking. It’s a romantic notion until someone actually does it and ends up dying cause you ate the wrong plant or getting eaten by a bear. If you’re going to do it you’ve got to become a hard core survivalist and even most of them use some sort of modern technology to get by.

The “memorable” black characters: Dualla; Skulls; the doctor Cylon who wasn’t given more than one line of dialogue outside of two episodes; the commando that Adama found, who might have been an extra in his own episode for all the lines he got; the black-market kingpin on Prometheus. One positive primary character, one positive tertiary character, and a bunch of non-entities and/or villains.

Thank you for bringing this up. Even Dualla as some point became a pathetic sap. And when I saw that Bill Duke (the black market kingpin) was gonna be guest starring I got super excited. And then I saw the episode and he was playing a pimp. It was heartbreaking. Even in galaxies far, far away black men are still reduced to pimps. If I remember correctly, David Eick was aware (after the fact) how much of an issue fans had with it but he swore up and down they just cast Duke because they were fans of his. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt but I think even Moore’s wife, when she saw the episode, pointed out how shitty that it was.

But my major thing is that for the “mito Eve” thing to be plausible, pretty much what has to happen is the remaining Eights have kids with whichever convenient human dudes and then kill off absolutely everybody else, either colonial or indigenous native.

Which is to say - Gaeta was 100% frakking right!

I really loved the end, and the more I think about it the more I like it. I thought it was really true to the characters and the things they have had to respond to over the years and how they would grow and evolve because of those things.

My friends couldn’t get over them leaving the tech and flying the ships into the sun either. But it made perfect sense to me.

With the exception of the main characters we followed the vast majority of survivors did not appear to live well while they were part of the fleet. They lived in spaces that were changed to fit people but not in any comfortable way.

After that much loss and years and years of having no idea what was going to happen to them I can not imagine they would care about anything *except* the pictures of their families.

When 9/11 happened I lived right across the street. I couldn’t go back to my apt for weeks because we were so close. When they finally let me in I had less than an hour to grab whatever I could carry on foot. I took a few clothes since I had been wearing the same outfit I left the house in on 9/11 for weeks and I was broke. But myself, nor my roommate who is a very different kind of person than myself gave a single crap about any of the rest of it. A few clothes, and pictures of family and friends. We couldn’t move anywhere because we had no money so we slept on floors and sofas at friends’. This went on for months. We were so close to ground zero that we couldn’t bring a vehicle to move anything out of the apt for months. When we finally were able to get in there neither of us wanted anything that was in there except for more clothes and we kept our beds since we would need some in the new room we had rented. We proceeded to sleep right next to each other (in separate beds) because we had the smallest room ever and we didn’t care at all because we just wanted to be settled and know what was going to happen the next day.

I imagine that the people of fleet had a similar feeling times 1000.

Also, who would have provided the fuel? You think the guys on the tillium ship wanted to just keep hanging out there working like dogs while everyone else settled on the planet so they could make fuel for those than wanted to be jaunty, if any?

Also, who would have provided the fuel? You think the guys on the tillium ship wanted to just keep hanging out there working like dogs while everyone else settled on the planet so they could make fuel for those than wanted to be jaunty, if any?

Why would the workers on the tyllium ship be slaves?  Why wouldn’t they live on the planet and go up to the ship to work.  Even if it didn’t make sense to run raptors daily, they could work like firefighters: 2 days on, three days off.  Tyllium workers unite!  They had a strike.  They had a union.  There’s no way they’d agree to be slaves.

It could be communism—they make tyllium while the hunters and farmers provide food/textiles.  They could re-institute money.  They could barter.  THIS is why Romo needs to be arranging things and writing a new constitution/articles of colonization.

Plus, how long would they have tyllium?  Time to go solar/wind/water power (or, okay, fossil fuels).  I fail to see why any one group of people would be forced to suffer.

You know what this ending is?  It’s Left Behind.  They aren’t actually thinking about the colonists and how they would live, what would be different or difficult or would be important.  They came up with “Hera is mitochodrial Eve” and then wrote a ‘goodbye’ for the major characters <i>and just dropped everything else.

Would have been better to leave the colonists out there among the stars…then we really would only have a few handfuls of people to deal with.

But my major thing is that for the “mito Eve” thing to be plausible, pretty much what has to happen is the remaining Eights have kids with whichever convenient human dudes and then kill off absolutely everybody else, either colonial or indigenous native.

Not necessarily.  When you look into the math of human descent with a founder population what happens is that they will fall into two categories: the ones who all the descendants will be related to, and the ones who no one will be related to because the family line died off.

It’s why that “direct descendant of Jesus” bit some people keep spouting is a crock.  Either Jesus (assuming he existed) has no descendants today, or he has millions, which doesn’t make descending from him very special.

All that has to occur for this explanation to hold is that the Eights (and their children), even for just a few initial generations, have slightly more children.  Assuming the Eights share a basic psychology, they may be more inclined to having more kids for whatever reason than the other Sixes or the Colonial women (who, coming from an advanced human society like our own present one, would be more likely to want less kids, which isn’t a survival characteristic in primitive conditions where you’d expect a high infant mortality rate).

Another thing to bear in mind, since we’re fanwanking here, is that 150,000 years ago the number of humans present on earth would have numbered, at best, a few thousand, possibly as low as the hundreds.  They would have been swamped by the new arrivals in pure numbers, so that their genetic contribution would have been washed out isn’t surprising in the least.

And, one other factor.  The genetics indicate that 70,000 years ago humans went through a genetic bottleneck which restricted our genetic diversity.  For whatever reason it happened, the human population is believed to have gone down to as low as 2000 individuals.  We were thatclose to extinction.  So, all the Eights need is have their descendants be some of the lucky survivors.

I didn’t say slaves actually, I said dogs, which means to imply that it was hard physical labor. Which everyone would have to do at that point, but they could all do it while breathing clean air and feeling the sun, which would likely feel good.

And with the Mito-Eve thing, I think there were supposed to be a lot of cylons that settled on Earth. They said the 2s, 6s and 8s (the models, *not* just the Athena, Caprica Six, and Leoben that we know) would stay and if you think about the scenes where they are fixing Galactica, there were lots of them. They cant resurrect anymore but we were always supposed to think there were a lot of each one left.

If they all fall in love with humans there is no reason all of them couldn’t procreate and if a few of them went with each group, why not?

Oh. You’re saying Moore was wrong and should have said 70,000 years ago instead of 150,000…

I think 150,000 is pushing it.  Around 70,000 or just after is nice because it fits into the time when modern humans really started pushing out of Africa and you’re getting close to the Upper Paleolithic, when the human toolkit explodes, art appears, and there’s evidence of the start of religious thinking (or at least, looking at the world as deeper than it appears).

That said, it’s understandable while the 150,000 date was chosen: in real life, that’s the estimated date when Mito-Eve lived.

I’ll be honest, I hated the ending as much, if not more, than I hated seasons four and five which I thought to be a complete psycho-babble/relgio-babble woo fest.  It was too pat and too much religious woo.  Really, the ultimate answer is that BILLIONS of people killed so one girl can become the mother of the human/cylon hybrid race?  That goes beyond WTF.

Thirty-eight thousand people will just give up medicine, technology and everything they’ve strived to preserve because they’re tired of living on space ships?  Are you high?  You can go live on some stinking rock and die at 35 of a preventable disease.  The war is over and I’m exploring space.

I like the opening paragraph of Jacob’s recaplet at Television Without Pity, it really expreses my thoughts: 

What a silly, bloated, preachy, half-assed mess. It’s embarrassing to see such great actors saddled with such unvoiceable, pointless activity, for so very, very long. After all the talk about holding something back and pacing yourself for the marathon, one would think the creators would follow their own advice, but then, this episode could have easily been written in 1992 when TV still had an excuse for sucking, so maybe they did.

:: Kara disappears

:: Lee’s all “Kara! Kara!” not knowing what’s going on.

:: Lee cries a bit and he’s all like “Goodbye, Kara Thrace.”

:: Kara pops up from behind a bush and goes “What the frak is wrong with you, y’big jackass?”

Hahaha! Nice Dan! Nice! I love it!

Periods can be extremely painful for some of us without medication.  Like, knock you down in agony for a day or so. 

But that’s just a small minority of women, and even then, the trade-off here is for a right to live in the world, eat real food, work a minimal amount, and live in peace.  That’s huge, and I think a lot of people are missing how huge that would especially feel after years of war and living in a cramped space.

Conceding the point that living as a hunter-gatherer might not be so great, I have to point out that the ending was not a dissertation on the relative benefits of different lifestyles.  It was a symbolic return to Eden after humanity redeemed itself. The kicker is that Eden isn’t really possible—-people will continue to fuck ourselves up over and over.

I also reject the notion that Kara and Lee should have ended up together.  The whole point of the flashback was that they transgressed so badly by betraying Lee’s brother that they never be able to pay that karmic debt back enough to be happy together, especially since Zack is dead.

So, honest question, because I’ve only seen the finale once:

Where is the idea that the Colonials were foresaking absolutely all technology coming from?  I understood the plan to be that they weren’t going to do the New Caprica thing again—no central Colonial city, no landed ships, etc.  But I wasn’t under the impression that they were going to be giving up medicine or other things needed for survival (like, I don’t know, heating elements).  Maybe I’m wrong.

Three other things on the no tech point:  First, it’s not at all clear to me what tech the Colonials still had that would’ve been useful for settling a planet, anyway.  They certainly didn’t seem to be living in luxury on New Caprica even before the Cylons came, and that was when the fleet was substantially larger, had more resources, and they were using landed ships for some purposes.  It’s not like the Colonials were choosing to give away a chance to build New New Caprica City on Earth.

Second, getting rid of the spaceships makes good sense.  Galactica wasn’t going anywhere and was no longer capable of putting up a fight against any Cylons who might show up with hostile intentions.  The civilian ships had no ability to protect themselves and nowhere to go, even if they remained jump-worthy.  It seems very plausible that none of the survivors would want to see the inside of a ship ever again.  And getting rid of the ships would make it at least a little harder for Cylons to detect the Colonists, because there would no longer be a Colonial fleet in orbit around the planet like there was on New Caprica.

Finally, I think it’s a little unfair to see the “no tech” solution as luddite or a move to blame technology.  I thought the point of Lee’s proposal was that Colonial civilization needed to die, and that wouldn’t happen if they kept living together, held on to their tech, and tried to rebuild.  In other words, while Colonial technology wasn’t the problem per se, getting rid of it was part of the solution.

And this solution wasn’t at all surprising from Lee.  Remember, he was the one who claimed at the end of Season 3 that Colonial civilization had already basically ceased to exist—they were a gang, not a culture.  He said something similar in Season 1, when he promised Zarek that there would be an election at the end of Adar/Roslin’s first term without bothering to get approval from Roslin first—because if there wasn’t, they were just a bunch of people wearing funny clothes who had no real authority to give orders to anyone.

ACG:

For what it’s worth, Moore and Eick have claimed that they’ve known for a long time (maybe since the first season) that the final shot of the series would be Six walking through modern-day Times Square.

They did say something about no tech, but that I took to mean no spaceship stuff.  They were obviously scattering with backpacks full of supplies and tools.  It was noted that they intended to farm and build houses, so they really weren’t going hunter-gatherer.  I think you’re right, vlad, the main idea was trying to break the cycle by doing something completely different than they had before.  But of course, the audience knows how that all ends—-humans started to multiply, spread out, and just destroy everything in sight.  So they had to address that.

At first I didn’t like the robot montage; felt it was too preachy of an anti-technology message, and resented that the writers felt the need to beat us over the head with it.

But the more I thought about it; what struck me was how much I, and presumably most people, were severely underestimating the moral implications of Artificial Intelligence*.  Starting from a humanistic** premise; that the capacity for rational thought, self-awareness, consciousness, whatever you want to call it, comes with the right to be treated with dignity. 

So for us to create some other set of beings with an equivalent level of consciousness to humans, with which comes a moral obligation for us to treat them with the requisite dignity i.e. the same way we should treat another human.  Given that we have major problems treating other humans that way; imagine how badly we would create beings that we created, and had mechanical bodies.  Think American-style slavery x 100 at best. 

I now really want to watch the series from the beginning with this in mind; the massive moral stain on colonial society that was their treatment of cylons.  It certainly makes Adama’s statement about whether humanity deserves to survive from the miniseries much more poignant. 

It also makes the rebel cylons attempts to create human bodies make more sense.  Given the toaster label , and other similar abuse; it’s not much of a leap for the cylons to see their metal bodies as the source of their oppression, so looking the same a humans would make them equals.  –Obviously this does not happen as humans seemed to hate the human-looking cylons even more. 

So, I’m glad the writer’s decided to hit me over the head with this; I wouldn’t have gotten it earlier

* I’m defining AI as a consciousness of equivalent capacity to what humans possess created by humans (The term no strikes me as problematic in that it belittles beings of equal stature because of the identity of their creator)

** This concept needs a new label; as should be obvious from this discussion

Given that we have major problems treating other humans that way; imagine how badly we would create beings that we created, and had mechanical bodies.  Think American-style slavery x 100 at best.

Should read

Given that we have major problems treating other humans that way; imagine how badly we would treat beings that we created, and had mechanical bodies.  Think American-style slavery x 100 at best.

The idea that any hunter/gatherer culture, or subsistence farming culture, at any time, anywhere, in any climate, can survive with its members doing only 3-4 hours of work per day, is not merely unrealistic slop of the type that nearly condemned the entire Alcott family to starvation during the Brook Farm disaster.

It’s utopian, privileged ignorance that ignores the hard, ugly realities of primitive life, where every waking moment has to be spent making food or finding water or building shelter or grinding grain or making medicine or doing *something* simply to stay alive.  Even in the best climate, with local knowledge of the plants and animals and survival skills, Eden is not possible, and I would suggest that anyone who thinks otherwise has fallen for the Rousseau/Garden of Eden myth.

If Hera is Mitochondrial Eve, what about the 35,000 other survivors?

The whole “mitochondrial Eve!” thing is a statistical thing; since mitochondria are inherited only from the mother, every identifiable “lineage” survives—or not—based largely on chance. That is, assuming everyone is equally fit, some individual women will have many children in a given generation, others will have none—and statistically this means that, given the probability that a random woman will have x number of children, you can compute an expected average time in which a given matrilineage would die out. Some would terminate sooner, others will, by sheer chance, last longer and claim a bigger share of the total population. “Mitochondrial Eve” is the logical conclusion of this analysis, nothing more.

What happens to THEIR DNA?

Most of it survives, because most human genes participate in the mix-and match of sexual reproduction. The genes of the women—and men, who don’t figure in mitochondrial lineages at all, since every man is a mitochondrial dead end, no matter how many children he fathers—get spread around.

What happens to the diverse human cultures - based on language, culture and the idea of technology that would have necessarily cropped up around the world?

Ah. Eliminating all that (except language itself) was pretty much the logical conclusion of what Lee proposed. I agree it is absurd that the Fleet population all went along with it, but if they hadn’t—well, if even a tenth of them had remained together I’d think that would be enough to produce a town, which would have had to have been agricultural, and supported diverse crafts such as rudimentary metallurgy—and civilization is off to the races again. Since, even if they went into a period of ignorance after the first generation died off, they would have legends (probably books) telling them what could be accomplished technically, if not necessarily how, I imagine they’d create advancing technology in short order, rediscover science, probably at some critical mass replicate capitalism (passing through other stages on the way, and their civilization would surely span at least one continent if not the globe at that point). Even if they eventually went into yet another self-destructive cycle, they would surely leave an unmistakable fossil record on a massive scale—they’d blast roads through mountain passes, make dams, strip mines, canals. We’d know if a technical civilization, of whatever origin, had ever used this planet before ours came along—at least if it did so only a sixth of a million years ago.

Mind you, if I were a Colonial I’d not only argue that such a civilization should be allowed to arise, I’d suggest that it would be better if all the Colonial/Cylon colonists stayed together, on another continent from the native Terrans, and that the business of relations with Terran natives be mediated by an organization dedicated to humanely, scientifically understanding them, preserving their freedom and social autonomy. All Colonials who wanted to go live with, or just visit or even only observe the native Terrans should be required to be trained in anthropology, subjected to something like the Federation Prime Directive, carefully innoculated to prevent spreading disease…someone upthread mentioned the Colonials would be exposed to diseases unknown to them—this is actually far less a problem than the reverse! The Colonials presumably had their own history of epidemics and probably carry some bugs that are pretty harmless to them but would decimate native Terrans, since the latter would not have provided the sorts of ideal conditions for breeding epidemics that civilized peoples do—and this alone is a good reason why someone—Doc Cottle for instance—should have spoken up and put the kibosh on Lee’s notion immediately. Anyway, such an idealistic scheme would require quite a strong social movement to enforce it; perhaps this could be achieved if the Colonials had made a city in America or Australia, neither of which would have yet been settled by Terrans—the rich resources of an entire continent made available to less than 40,000 people, worked by their high technology, could easily make for such favorable economic circumstances that a majority would accept the “luxury” of careful, scrupulous relations with the natives.

But that would be a whole different world history of course. Perhaps people who believe in Atlantis could fit it in somehow, but as I say, such a civilization, even if governed by zealous environmental ethics, would leave traces.

I liked the ending well enough. I would have preferred it if they had mashed everything together after No Exit and done it miniseries style. Of course, if I were in charge it would have been canceled in the first season.

I’m kind of up in the air about the medical tech aspect. I get the feeling it might have ended with them killing each other over the last bottle of ampicillin. They probably should have at least cannibalized one of the ships to use as a hospital or something. This is one of the reasons I kind of wanted them to never mention a real Earth and just land on some planet. Like Star Wars where Earth is never mentioned or in fantasy novels.

So, I’m glad the writer’s decided to hit me over the head with this; I wouldn’t have gotten it earlier

Should have had some predator drones in the montage to make it a little more ominous.

The “memorable” black characters: Dualla; Skulls; the doctor Cylon who wasn’t given more than one line of dialogue outside of two episodes; the commando that Adama found, who might have been an extra in his own episode for all the lines he got; the black-market kingpin on Prometheus. One positive primary character, one positive tertiary character, and a bunch of non-entities and/or villains.

Simon. It looks like he’s going to get a more expanded role in The Plan, thank god. That’s probably the one thing that bothered me about the series. The Cylons didn’t even try to sneak a brother into the fleet? God knows he could have done as much damage as he wanted since black characters are largely ignored.

vlad makes a point I’ve been thinking of. 

“I thought the point of Lee’s proposal was that Colonial civilization needed to die, and that wouldn’t happen if they kept living together, held on to their tech, and tried to rebuild.”

I don’t know if Lee had thought it through that far, but it’s definitely what happened.  The colonials with any level of tech didn’t last long or it couldn’t be our Earth with them arriving at 150,000 BC.  Implications would be a bit different if they went the Egyptian/Greek route.  The civ that persisted was that of the natives, not of the Colonials.  I tend to think that fairly solidly counters the imperial read of the proposal.  Letting your civ die is not the least interventionist approach by any means, but I don’t think it’s a proposal any cultural chauvinist would ever adopt.

I also think it’s a nutty idea.  I’d land the ships and build the city in a second.  But it does represent one of two unflinching decisions by the Colonials to break the cycle of violence.  The other obviously being letting the Centurions go although I’d have been happier if some of the skin jobs and humans went with them.

That said, I do think they should have gotten some POC characters aside from Athena through to the end.  Was killing Skulls really necessary?  I’m just grateful Simon got some lines, unlike the PR guy Cylon.

Even in the best climate, with local knowledge of the plants and animals and survival skills, Eden is not possible, and I would suggest that anyone who thinks otherwise has fallen for the Rousseau/Garden of Eden myth.
Ellid on 03/23 at 03:42 PM

The thing is, Ellid, I was taught in Anthropology classes that actually, gatherer-hunter peoples did average very short working days.

First caveat: that’s average. Specific case studies made it clear that it was a widely varying average—they’d come onto rich pickings one day, and glut themselves and loaf around, then other times they’d have severe difficulty keeping themselves alive—but typically they wouldn’t actually starve to death before their luck turned again.

Second, most important, caveat—the key to GH society was that they had very low population density. A band of less than a hundred would have a territorial range, pretty much exclusive to themselves, as big as a typical American county. They’d move around within that range, making and breaking camp over a period of weeks, exploiting the resources within a few miles of the camp before some combination of exhausting the site and seasonal change forced them to move on to another.

Third: it was Utopian only in certain senses. You clearly overestimate the sheer drudgery involved, which is much more typical of agricultural peoples. But the positives—no social classes for instance—had flip sides—none of the specialized skills that a diversified society can support.

I was quite dumbfounded when my anthro professor at Caltech backed up our source material on GH peoples and asked, “If starvation, overwork, disease, or war (or severe violence internal to the group) are all pretty much unknown to GH peoples (those that is not being subjugated or displaced by more advanced societies) what do they die of then?” His answer was, “Accidents.” Which was very puzzling, but Colin Turnbull (our major source, but his claims were largely backed up by other anthros I studied in another course later) gave examples—there was a girl who had broken her leg. Turnbull made her some crutches, using tools and materials widely available to the people he studied (the Mbuti of the Ituri rainforest). But she didn’t keep using them, and none of the Mbuti picked up on the innovation. Basically, when something happened to such GH people they either managed to keep up with the group when it moved, or got left behind-and if that happened to them chances were they were doomed.

So, no, not an earthly paradise. But I do think it was the way of life we are adapted for, and agricultural civilization is not, and it is not easy for human ingenuity to compensate for what we lost.

Still more when to manage the potential of specialization of labor and an increased resource base, we have evolved the dominator society, oriented around militarism and competition. I actually think the more important cause of general human misery is that we have societies that actively use fear and force as basic organizing principles. And one reason we feel this is wrong is that we evolved in societies that had no such institutions.

I also reject the notion that Kara and Lee should have ended up together.  The whole point of the flashback was that they transgressed so badly by betraying Lee’s brother that they never be able to pay that karmic debt back enough to be happy together, especially since Zack is dead.

That is so fucking Victorian!  Like so Victorian I’d be throwing that book across the room.  Mill on the Floss Victorian.

First, they didn’t actually fuck.  Secondly, even if they had, why is that a karmic debt that’s unrepayable? 

Fuck, you’re making flashback to all these Victorian characters who are so hung up on doing the ‘right’ thing, which means even if they’ve not done anything wrong, they end up destroying their lives so someone ‘better’ can have a perfect life. 

It’s good Zac woke up.  What should have happened next is Kara breaks up with Zac b/c Lee is a better match for her and she knew it. 

Sucks to be Zac.  But he’s not such a special snowflake that he deserves to destroy two other people’s happiness for all time in an unrepayable karmic debt.

More than that, they didn’t frak, and behaved themselves while Zac was alive.  Then Kara still held Lee off a bit out of the memory of Zac.  Zac’s dead.  There’s no reason for him to come between them.

I’m sure this is coming off harsher than I mean it to, but **shudder** that was my concentration in my English major—the Victorian novel and it’s relation to 20th century film.  I read way too many just so stories of self-sacrifice.  A little bit of selfishness is a good thing.

——

They were supposed to end up together.  The actor who played Sam was in a horrible car accident and almost lost his ability to walk, not to mention his life.  It’s why he appears in the hot tub in the flashbacks—he couldn’t walk and they scripted that scene around him.

Katee Sackoff gave an interview where she talked about how she felt after the accident and how it made her realize how much she cared for the actor and how that affected her performance AND how they then changed the character arcs so that Sam became her Twue Wuv.

I’m glad Michael Trucco is okay.  I just don’t think his real life accident should have changed the BSG storyline.

Just re-read that, and it does sound much much harsher than intended.

Sorry about that.

You know what I really hated about the ending (well, one of the endings) of LOTR. Frodo rode off to something akin to Valhalla. And everyone so like KNOWS Valhalla doesn’t exist.

They were supposed to end up together.  The actor who played Sam was in a horrible car accident and almost lost his ability to walk, not to mention his life.  It’s why he appears in the hot tub in the flashbacks—he couldn’t walk and they scripted that scene around him.

He was up and walking before production started.

Hey Mark and LauraB that is one of the best thread drift discussions I have ever seen.  It seems like many problems faced by modern society are te problem of population density.

The ending was garbage, but you could have predicted this from the way the rest of the season was going. Frankly, it was the same bullshit worship of the main characters that plagues all television shows. They are the PC in a roleplaying game or video game: invincible by fiat. For example: the mutiny should have popped a lot more main characters. Fuck, the mutineers were justified. The very existence of the mutiny was the result of complete and utter political failure. Adama (sr.) and Rosilin failed. They failed not because things were hard, but ultimately, because they were selfish. End result: mutineers become villainous, gain villain stupidity (kill side characters but make a production out of killing main characters) and die themselves.

And that gets rid of the queer before we need to explore his personality any further. Whew. Glad that’s over.

I’m not gay, but I was actually mad for gay people when that happened. That was so fucking insulting I think it bleeds over and insults heterosexuals, too.

But that’s what’s got to happen to make sure the PCs win, and win in all ways: moral victory (mutineers can’t bear to shoot their beloved political leaders—the same ones whose failure caused them to shoot dozens of their peers), combat victory (all main characters survive—weee, god gets to keep all of his pawns!), even wins in characterization (Zarek and Gaeta were such an amazing combination of stupid and confused that I actually thought that this might become a humor episode halfway through). After that debacle, the finale was not a tremendous surprise.

The show LITERALLY ends with deus ex machina. Think about how shitty that is. They didn’t end the show—they just stopped it. Ultimately, nothing the PCs did had meaning. Everything was preordained. It seemed that no one in that team of writers ever recognized that a story where every decision humans make has gravitas because of how few humans were around pretty much fucks over that theme by having god take a crap on free will during the show’s last two seasons. You can find greater weight to human volition in Greek tragedies where Apollo appears on stage.

It wasn’t character driven. Characters didn’t drive a goddamn thing. They had a soap opera, then they died—or ceased to exist if they were angels. It had the logical coherence of a particularly bad anime.

The show ending was supposed to showcase the characters, but the character arc was bullshit by this point. Boomer does whatever the writers want her to do (last minute betrayal and sucicide RIGHT AT THE END—complete fail, writing staff). Roslin bounces from supabitch to fucktard not merely at random—that would be realistic (we’d just conclude she’s bipolar, and hey, there are bipolar people irl): she switches only when the writers need her to in order to hold up their shitty plots. But hey, so does Adama.

At least Gaeta was well develo—oh yeah.

Fuck you BSG writers.

The obsession with Hera was completely nonsensical. Neither side really justified it. Humans are perfectly capable of fucking, thankyouverymuch. And cylons—oh, where to fucking start?

First of all, there are no humanoid cylons. None. This was completely bad SF—there was no science. The final five et. al. were genetically engineered humans. Period. Calling them cylons was nothing more than a source of deliberate confusion. They can even breed with humans (the very definition of a species is usually an interbreeding population). Upon this confusion was built a crisis pertaining to the survival of the pseudohumans. But since they already have the ability to create an infinite number of copies of themselves, they can already continue their species. What was that source of tension again?

Plus, in an amazing act of complete genre failure, the AI—the actually interesting, alien faction in the show—is completely unexplored. In fact, BSG is pretty much proven to be utterly space opera/fantasy now, with virtually no science fiction getting in the way. It’s just modern humans—sorry, modern white Americans—in space. Any technology that may have a serious cultural impact is completely ignored. Discover the very basis of sentience and create an entirely new species? Ignore that shit, too. BSG is actually inferior to Star Wars, another science fantasy, when it comes to integrating tech into culture. Star Wars is actually, in at least one way, more realistic than another story in the science fantasy genre. My God, I can’t believe I just typed that. In any event, the one thing that I thought might be worth waiting for—serious, substantive communication and interaction with an AI, a truly different sentience—was something the writers didn’t even thing was important.

And Cavil in the last episode—eh, he was the bad guy, so he has do die, and no one really fucking cares how stupid that process is, so long is. It doesn’t even deserve a “wtf.” What they made Stockwell do reminds me of a right-wing screed: the combination of gibberish and logical incoherence makes it impossible to even analyze in good faith. You just point out the writer’s severe mental deficiencies and move on.

The very premise of the ending is nonsensical. So the angels want to end the cycle. They do this by ensuring that the cycle starts again. They actually make it IMPOSSIBLE for humans to learn from their mistakes (Adama jr. is a tool doing the will of a dumbfuck god, we are implicitly taught, so his actions are equivalent to angelic action). Giving up technology means giving up memory—a freakn’ five year old can figure that out. There is NOTHING, nothing at all, that makes the “new breed” of human less likely to build AI than the old one. Think about how amazingly fucking specific this is. Humanity isn’t doomed because it will poison its oceans. It isn’t doomed because it will slaughter itself in war. It’s doomed because it likes the Eliza program way too much.

Keep the tech and put a sign up over the computer lab saying “no sentient subroutines” and the problem is solved.

Adama claims that humanity’s “head outraces our heart.” Is every writer for this show a complete fucking imbecile? Humans have been murdering, raping, and torturing each other for fifty thousand years and when we started doing it we had no technology whatsoever. And before some dumbfuck says we developed technology and then discovered how to use it to cause even more pain than we could while primitive, keep in mind that one of the main motivating factors to develop technology is the overwhelming need of our species to kill and rape and torture each other. We actually think about new ways to kill each other and then, after perfecting such technology, spin that technology off to less fun pursuits. We aren’t too clever. We’re too fucking evil.

The absurdity that causes the colonists to go along with Adama’s plan sans protest is actually LESS absurd than Adama’s dumbfuck philosophy. That being said, Romo hangs a lampshade on it: I suspect that despite the assurances of the head writers, at least one of them was a little embarassed by the script they had excreted.

The show wasn’t ambivalent. It didn’t even have enough substance to be ambiguous. It was just fucking stupid. We’re talking fundie religious novel stupid. If someone told you 2+2=37, would you accuse them of being ambiguous?

A good chunk of the population thinks that this is science fiction, not (“science”) fantasy. This is deplorable.

And, oh—all of humanity is basically descended from a bunch of white people from space (remember, all our mitochondrial DNA comes from Hera). Seriously, fuck you, BSG writing staff. That trope was tired before hacks decided to shovel it into science fiction. The fact that people are still doing it. . . this is just tiring. I’ve seen race handled intelligently by the whitest people one could ever find—but those were hard sf novel writers. The writers clearly considered blacks to be second-tier, if not second-class, creatures before, but hey, they picked the Greeks to model things on so that would have been excuseable—until a) they reveal that it was completely fucking impossible for the Greeks to have anything to do with BSG while implying that the same is the case and b) they silence the black cylon while c) making the other black guy a pimp. But that’s not the worst of it. The fact that the BSG writers used the spare dialogue in the show’s last hour to point out the native humans’ dumbness, combined with the quick-shot of their clay-painted brown skin, was enough to make me swear off watching, or even indirectly purchancing, anything these writers ever produce. Seriously: fuck you BSG writing staff. Black people were the first human beings in existance. Deal with it, assholes.

Worse, most white people won’t even see the problem with this notion. It’s hard to criticize the positive reception of this story without implicitly insulting whites. While there is plenty of reason to dislike the shite that hit the airwaves Friday, the racial implications are my sole reason for hoping the majority of Americans watching this feel like I do. This isn’t about taste. If whites aren’t bothered by this, there is something seriously wrong with white people.

Still. I mean. Still something seriously wrong with white people. Like there has been for the last few centuries.

Oh, fuck.

Psss, No One of Consequence

I like sea salt and vinager potato chips too!  Would you like to come over and watch Dollhouse?  That last eppy was good.  Might be a better Fringe.

Also, one of the things that took me back was that the finale of The Wire and BSG were thematically almost the *same*.  Yet one was mild dissappointment, mostly at not enough threads being tied up, and the other was…ambitiously stupid…

I don’t remember anything about comparative lifespans, though.  (I’s sure the data exist, I just don’t remember.)
LauraB on 03/23 at 05:32 PM

Barring “accidents,” gatherer-hunters lived about as long as humans in any era—into their sixties or so. The thing about accidents is, they are sort of random—“sort of” in that experience will make one cautious, and that knowledge is transmitted in part by observing the mistakes of one’s peers. So presumably the older people are by inclination or learning more careful. OTOH the point of human culture is to convey this kind of advice to the younger generation, and I suppose elders were proactive in minimizing the risk neophytes were exposed to, which would mean either forgoing opportunities or taking more risk on themselves, so it kind of evens out. The upshot is, an individual’s live expectancy would have an exponential drop-off—only a fraction would make it to being truly elderly. But those elders were respected for their accumulated knowledge, and they would not have been debilitated by the sorts of systematic stresses that lowered the life-expectancies of many agricultural peoples at the high end, as it were, by systematically ruining their health from infancy through middle age and causing what looks like “premature aging.”

But the average life expectancy would be lowered, in accordance with the likelihood of disabling accidents, and the average age of group members would be young.

Of course when GH elders, no matter how respected, became too frail to keep up with the group’s migrations, that was the end for them too.

<blockquote>Hey Mark and LauraB that is one of the best thread drift discussions I have ever seen.  It seems like many problems faced by modern society are te problem of population density.
John Rove on 03/23 at 09:33 PM
</blokquote>

Thanks, John, but despite the way I may sound, I’m kind of fond of our current dense-population civilization; I just want it reformed. A lot. But the trick is, to get the psychological advantages I associate with gatherer-hunter society with the power and abilities that come with a highly populated society capable of supporting much knowledge and many specialized skills. Doing this is not easy, apparently, but it is worth doing.

Lee went the wrong way. It was the only way to square the arrival of the Fleet on primitive Earth with our known history.

What I wanted to see was the arrival of the Fleet in our own day. Cut from Adama asking “Starbuck, where have you taken us?” to the surface of the Moon, pan to Earthrise over Luna—zoom to the ISS! Fade in lots of radio chatter and the arrival of the Colonial Fleet over the nightside of Earth, with city lights outlining the continents…and a Space Shuttle rising to join the Fleet.

LauraB
I agree that n our current state high density cities are the way to go, but if their were only forty thousand “modern” people and a few thousand more less devoloped people spreading out and living in a more primitive manner might make sense.

What I liked about yours and Marks commennts were that living in a hunter gatherer society is not synanamous with death and disease.

Yeah, LauraB, Clan of the Cave Bear was a crock of shit, too.

No One of Consequence: bringing high-level discourse to the internet for fifteen fucking years.

I didn’t need anyone to point it out to me when I was a kid—as in pre-teen. Whenever the main character is blonde, in fact, I pretty much expect it.

And white people—hm, more properly, pale-skinned peoples, since I mean the physiological quirk and not the complicated heavily socially-privileged class—probably haven’t been around that long. 50k years max.

Despite that fact, I garauntee you—garauntee you—that all ancient humans in fiction are white as possible. When Stargate SG-1 first did their big reveal that the precursor race of the show, the Ancients, were basically humans, I groaned because I knew the implicit racism was coming. You see, once you name the beast, you have to show it. You can’t just point out the Ancients and not show them. And not only did they do so, they made them so absurd and stupid that the show ceased to be even reasonable coherent as the Ancients moved to the center of the plot.

And, of course, they were all white.

My understanding: lighter-skinned persons can create Vitamin D more easily than darker-skinned ones, which is why nutritional supplements are recommended for darker-skinned people living in dimmer climates. Sunlight plays a role in Vitamin D production. The upside of darker skin—more resistance to damage from sunlight—is the reason why the mutation isn’t a complete advantage.

Of course, as someone pointed out way upthread, 150k years ago probably everyone was dark-skinned.

Maybe.

It’s worth pointing out that dark skin only becomes relevant if you don’t have a coat of hair; the other apes have pale skin under the hair.  The assumption is that humans lost most of their hair fairly early on, but there’s no evidence that I’m aware of about how fast that happened or how long it took before the skin became really dark.

This has been said elsewhere, but the basic problem with the finale was trying to over-tidy everything. EVERY Colonial agrees to stay on Earth. EVERY “villainous” Cylon falls into the singularity (which didn’t actually happen on screen, which I’m glad about.) They didn’t have to tidy things up that nicely—either have a few humans decide to keep exploring, either on the basestar or on their own, or show a quorum vote, something. Because it looked like Lee had decided to make everyone’s decision for them, which would be completely out of character for him.

Mitochondrial Eve might be a misstep—Hera was already special, why would she need an extra statistically abstract destiny? Of course, Head Baltar just said human father and Cylon mother—he didn’t say who the parents were, or the child. Maybe the Heads were extra smirky because it was Baltar and Caprica’s child.

So the only leads who died were Kara and Boomer—Kara was already dead and Boomer chose suicide-via-Athena. I dunno, I don’t think Boomer needed to die, especially since Chief got to live with his equivalent number of sins. If he’s going to go found Ireland she needed to go found Korea, it would have been perfect, the two of them islanded (or peninsulaed) on opposite ends of the Earth. And Chief snapping at that moment—I mean it was more preposterous than Racetrack’s dead hand, you know? Racetrack’s nukes had the element of the divine to them—get them out of there at that moment, with Kara on the bridge with the song in her head. Chief’s actions affected nothing, the Colony was about to be destroyed anyway and resurrection with it. Was Tory that unpopular that she needed to die?

These are just the negatives that are sticking with me for some reason. But I loved Kara’s disappearance, and the fact that they didn’t say what she was (they should have unexplained more things in this episode.) Baltar and Caprica’s kiss might be the moment of the series. The robot montage I’ve decided I love—that whole sequence, homeless people to sports car to robot montage with Hendrix in the background was wonderful. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit, it’s just that the false notes are ringing a bit more loudly for me than they usually do (and I’ve always been able to forgive the clunkier bits of this show.) Maybe I’m just sad it’s over.

It was a disappointing finale. In retrospect the two episodes before the last episode were a waste of space and totally just filler. They could have used that space to build up to something far more interesting and unexpected. The Starbuck as angel thing is incredibly insulting to viewers and just plain lazy.
What if they had just taken the Starbuck “will lead them to their ends” thing literally and she jumped the fleet into a star or something? That would been a total “What the Frack?!?” choice that would have been much more fitting with the tone of the show. They could have had Baltar and Six take Hera and escape the ship just before the jump on a raptor and jump to present day Earth in another “What the Frak!?!” moment that would have made Hera still important and possibly gotten Moore the shot of Six and Baltar walking through Times Square that he wanted. The idea of them finding pre-history Earth was always a bit stupid in my opinion, it would have been interesting to find present day earth or future Earth. Both of those ideas could be played out in stupid ways as well but I think they would have more potential just by the sheer boldness of that kind of conceptual move.
But no, instead we got a sloppy silly ending that was all hugs and cuddles, bad science and stupid religion.

Am I the only one who noticed that, after all of the beauty of the friendship between Tigh and Adama, they didn’t say work frakking one to each other before Adama went to build a cabin and live with Laura’s corpse?

Don’t get me wrong - I love the way they did that, with Adama and Roslin.  It’s partially because I’m a musician, and Bear McCreary suckered me in with the repetition of, in the Raptor, Roslin and Adama’s theme, and then, when they segued from Caprica and Gaius to him sitting out on that hillside where he buried her, the Opera House theme with awesome drums.  But, still, um, he never said goodbye to his oldest friend, who loved him more than his wife of a few thousand years and stuff, and that suddenly leaves me feeling a little void and sad.

The rest of it I have chosen to accept as it was given, and I’m simply grateful for a wonderful story beautifully told.  There was no way to end this correctly, and this episode was musically a tier above most of the others, which, for me, is three quarters of the battle.

Of course, as someone pointed out way upthread, 150k years ago probably everyone was dark-skinned.
Maybe.
It’s worth pointing out that dark skin only becomes relevant if you don’t have a coat of hair; the other apes have pale skin under the hair.  The assumption is that humans lost most of their hair fairly early on, but there’s no evidence that I’m aware of about how fast that happened or how long it took before the skin became really dark.
KeithM  on  03/24  at  01:45 PM

Degree of hairiness is irrelevant. The mutation that makes white people white is only 150,000 years old. No older. Thus, we know humans were relatively hairless by that point, for some time, as, as KeithM mentioned, thick fur makes skin pigmentation (usually) pointless.

@INTPagan: I think their need to recreate the end of Blade Runner (taking a flying car into a better, more natural place, “she won’t live—but then again who does?”) overpowered the need to give Bill a satisfactory resolution with Lee or Tigh or anyone else. That’s symptomatic of the greatest strength and the greatest drawback of this show: to do something interesting and—and I hate to use this word—“cool”, even if it didn’t exactly make sense or if it made more trouble down the line. “Caprica’s pregnant? Great! Throw that in there.”

The assumption is that humans lost most of their hair fairly early on, but there’s no evidence that I’m aware of about how fast that happened or how long it took before the skin became really dark.
KeithM on 03/24 at 09:45 AM

The most recent recap I’ve seen of the general state of human knowledge about the sequence of human evolution (The Singing Neanderthals by Steven Mithen) relied on the suggestion that one driving factor behind the early hominids’ adaptation to a bipedal gait was that they colonized the African veldt, and so were exposed to very heavy sunlight; the bipedal stance supposedly minimized their exposure to the heat of the sun—which is why we lost hair on most of the body (to facilitate cooling by sweating) and kept it on the head, for obvious reasons. IIRC very early bipedal hominids (such as Lucy, whose species designation I believe has undergone some changes) go back well over 2 million years, long before H sapiens sapiens. Thus we’d be both relatively hairless and quite dark-skinned from the beginning.

The subject of Mithin’s book BTW was not human evolution in general, but specifically the theory that language arose from musical ability, which in turn was something he believes the hominid lineage between the early bipeds and ourselves shared strong reasons to develop—related to dance as well, which in turn emerges from bipedality itself. Mithin occasionally indulged in rather sexist evo-psych assumptions, but not the point that I think he is wrong about his basic theme. It’s been almost a year since I read it and I can’t recall where he thinks human language development was 150,000 years ago.

EVERY “villainous” Cylon falls into the singularity (which didn’t actually happen on screen, which I’m glad about.)

I hope you don’t get the impression that happened just because I suggested it; I haven’t heard anyone else say that. It was something I mentioned as a possibility, and that was largely because that was how I imagined the final battle would play out before I saw the episode. We certainly didn’t see it. Presumably the only reason for the Hand of God to drop dead Racetrack’s (and hey, I liked Racetrack!) hand on the nukes was to suggest that Cavil’s loyalists were all wiped out, but I didn’t think a cluster of nukes would necessarily kill all of them—last we saw of the Colony, a lot of it was still “standing” and presumably there may have been thousands of survivors. Who would presumably seek to avoid getting sucked in to the singularity—though if they did, they just might survive a trip through it and pop up elsewhere and perhaps elsewhen in the Universe.

Hey—maybe they went way back in time, and became the ancestors of the whole sequence? Yeah yeah—they can’t breed—but I’d think they could solve that problem. Or go Cavil, become pure, humanoid-hating machines, but dozens of iterations later some might change their minds…

They didn’t have to tidy things up that nicely…

Well they did if they were going to prevent a huge inconsistency with the absence of any evidence of an industrial civilization on this planet 150,000 years ago or any time since until our own era. Which is why showing up that long ago was dumb.

Maybe the Heads were extra smirky because it was Baltar and Caprica’s child. wink

That’s actually what I thought they were saying, forgetting what a big hairy deal RDM had made of Hera.

Was Tory that unpopular that she needed to die?
justinslot on 03/24 at 10:17 AM

Not to me; I liked her a lot the moment they first introduced her, after Billy died. Of course RDM et al totally blew her potential; I had a very hard time understanding why she’d be so mean and vindictive—well, I suppose once her Cylon identity was revealed to her and it began to sink in she resented Roslin’s anti-Cylon prejudice (and the general hatred of Cylons among everyone), but then again Roslin was a bit nuanced about that already. I really feel they blew her off as a character—yet another point for the tokenistic approach to non-white-looking characters. (The only one among the Five!)

Of course at the moment they were all about to merge minds, she would have done better to first verbally confess to what dark secret specifically she thought might set Tyrol off. But I totally understand her nervous coyness, and don’t really understand Tyrol’s rage. Not to the point where he’d kill her on the spot anyway.

Mark - what climate are we talking about for these primitive cultures?  Some areas it will work.  Others, it frankly won’t.  I’d love to see a reference to this because it sounds a bit too close to the “oh, the Tasaday are so primitive and they barely work and it’s so wonderful!” nonsense back in the 70s that allowed the National Geographic to fall for a hoax.

Also, the Colonials don’t know the climate, the flora, the fauna, and the diseases.  Whether they work 3 hours or twelve hours a day, I don’t give them much of a chance.