** Spoilers for Battlestar Galactica Series Finale **
Are you fucking kidding me? Adam & Eve meets There Are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know meets Touched By an Angel? The second half of this abomination has got to be the worst hour of television I’ve ever sat through. If I hadn’t been at a party with a bunch of friends I would’ve turned it off forty-five minutes before the end. This was so bad it nuked the whole series. I can never watch Battlestar Galactica ever again. Just the prospect makes me nauseated. What were they thinking? Hey, let’s take the lamest, hoariest, most notorious science fiction cliche, mix in the sort of reflexive anti-science hysteria that makes real science fiction fans despise media sci-fi hacks, toss in a generous helping of patronizing, soft-headed ecumenical hokum, and top it all off with a bunch of crass sermonizing and really shitty dialogue.
I remember I was at a con once where David Brin was on a panel. This was between Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions. He said it was possible to watch Reloaded and believe that the filmmakers actually knew what they were doing, but he was extremely apprehensive because, as he explained, it is an ironclad law of the universe that the third movie in every sci-fi film trilogy must suck, and must completely undermine and betray everything that was established and done right in the two preceding films. And, of course, that is exactly what came to pass in the execrable Matrix Revolutions, which resembles the finale of Battlestar Galactica more than a little. Both share the same contempt for the audience, for delivering upon the answers that were promised, and for basically just conforming to some minimal degree of logical coherence. Both also share the appalling tendency, which is lamentably all too common in our culture, of trying to pass off vapid pseudo-mystical gobbledygook as profundity. Why does nothing in the whole Battlestar Galactica series make any goddamn sense? Oh, simple really — the whole plot is part of a divine plan that is sometimes benevolent and sometimes malevolent and which is all beyond human comprehension. Talk about the mother of all deus ex machina endings. What a sad day for science fiction. What a sad day for television. What a sad day for anyone who cares about good writing. This is a fiasco almost beyond comprehension. The whole time I was watching it I was thinking, “I must be dreaming. This must be a nightmare. I’m going to wake up any moment now, and then I’m going to go meet up with my friends and watch the real series finale to Battlestar Galactica. Any moment now I’ll wake up. Any moment now…”
When it was — mercifully — over, my friends were all like, “Why did I ever start watching this stupid show?” “Dave got me into it.” “Yeah, Dave got me into it too.” “Yeah, me too.” “Thanks a lot, Dave. It’s all your fault.”
Mea culpa, all. Mea culpa maxima.
On the bright side, they did play a non-shitty version of “All Along the Watchtower” to go out on.
Seriously, I have had this problem for a long time with the show, and actually FOOLED MYSELF in the last few weeks they they were not going to go completely down this supernatural path.
By midseason I had good reason to believe they were going to leave all the religious and prophetic stuff at LEAST ambiguous. That’s about the most I can really expect from mainstream (I choose that term carefully) television, but I even had hope that the prophecy stuff and Starbuck’s resurrection would have rational explanations based on the history of the Five, cylon genetic sense-memory or what have you.
This bit about angels and Starbuck disappearing, is especially hurtful from a series that made a special point of not adding in rubber-forheaded aliens of the week. It really postulated a universe where life is rare. Now we are asked IN THE LAST FIVE FUCKING MINUTES OF THE 80TH EPISODE to believe that angels and God (but It doesn’t like to be called that) are immortal, and run everything (through vision, ghosts, dreams and the occasional dead pilot’s hand falling on the nukes) while taking responsibility for nothing.
Well so what? What’s it all worth anyway, since apparently (we also learn these past few weeks) all anybody ever did before the war was drink themselves blind.
Don’t be too upset Dave, though, because most people won’t look that hard at it. Casual viewers I believe, have a way of filtering out the banalities, the platitudes. They’ll not realize they have just seen the oldest and frankly, at this late date, most inexcusable Judeo-Christian biased cliche in SF — the Adam and Eve ending.
And then the white people came from the sky and taught the aboriginal Africans how to farm. The End.
Now no one can pull this shit again on the present generation. In fact, I think you have to go back to the Twilight Zone for the last time is was on TV, though it was ridiculously trite then. So we are good for fifty more years. See, Mr. Moore, I DO have faith.
The greater catastrophe to me, and one that I also have hope most people will miss and accuse me of over thinking a TV show (which is what I am doing) is the sad old jape that is adjunct to the Adam and Eve plot: the incorrect, unsupportable, anti-scientific notion that we, human beings, evolved separately from the other species on this planet. We have enough trouble teaching people century old evolutionary science without being undermined by our SF.
All this could have been avoided if Moore hadn’t jumped at the sexy big non-surprise surprise prehistoric ending. All this could have been avoided in fact, if he’d just read a fucking book.
And another thing. Alfred Hitchcock used to put his cameos in the first act of his movies, because he knew they would interfere too much later.
Moore puts his cameo in the last scene, right with the two smug, highly stylish venal angels looking over his shoulder. Why, because he’s having a laugh now. And then the two angels saunter off, sneering at the clueless organic things milling about oblivious to their roles as entertainment for these bored, jaded, fey uberbeings. Cue the dancing Asimo’s because that’s what we should be worried about — robotics and research, not ignorance and religious strife. Yeah, right.
I couldn’t agree more, David. My reaction was pretty much the same: They’re Adam and Eve!! Really? I mean, really? Are you really not aware that’s the single most common cliche in slush piles everywhere?
And then they give up technology? Medicine? En masse, without any debate – after all the political argument of seasons past? Utter idiocy. Plus this wasn’t even a story arc – they just plonked down Lee & gave him some lines about breaking the cycle, and that was it.
Plus yeah, the whole jump-coordinates-from-God thing. . .
And just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, they added that little bit at the end 150,000 yrs later: Let’s further insult the audience’s intelligence and explain everything in terms a 3-year-old would understand (although the only thing they really explained was that they had no clue how to write an ending).
Admittedly, endings are often the weakest part in sci-fi tales, but I was expecting more from the BSG writers.
That said, I don’t agree with you that having watched BSG is now a waste of time. There was a whole lot of good storytelling in between, and on the balance I think the show will have done sci-fi a world of good. It’s the journey, not the destination, and all that kind of thing.
Still a letdown.
BSG was good, until they showed the series finale. Too cliche. A cheap shot at how life started on earth. The writers could have been more creative in the finale rather than adopting a Scientology-like plot. Real cheap ending. I’m not collecting this series.