Battlestar Galactica - The Final Episode
Posted on April 15 at 19.02, 2009 by Eric Mahleb
Attention tons of spoilers ahead.
Well, BSG is over and i feel a sense of loss that i will no longer be able to immerse myself regularly into this well-crafted, intelligent, challenging and believable world of lost humans, Cylons and hybrids. But after four years of raising salient questions about politics, religion, racism, terrorism, war, technology, good and evil and almost everything else that is pertinent in a post 9/11 world, the conclusion of this much revered show has left me somewhat dissatisfied. It has also made me wonder about the writing process for a TV show, a subject I know little about.
I think the majority of viewers will agree that BSG is an incredibly well-written show. Dialogues, character development, plot movement, the flow of the scenes, all have been admirably handled and are the main reason why BSG is considered to be one of the best shows ever written for TV. Yet, I can not help but ask myself if, in spite of all this, a lot of the plot points were not just thrown together at the end, the writers having sacrificed long term coherence for short term impact, viewers and season renewal. There are simply too many loose ends at the end and too many resolutions that feel forced. That being said, the overall idea of having them land on our Earth to become our ancestors is actually powerful and interesting. But after years of building the suspense and raising our expectations about Hera, the Opera House, Kara, Baltar and 6, the resolutions from this last episode have a bit of an anti-climatic feel to them. So it was all about chasing Hera through the ship and the CIC? These fantastic and grand visions were about the CIC? Disappointing. And the religious and spiritual undertones which were effective until now because they were just that, undertones, and perhaps because they suggested something more, ended up being in fact an end in itself. Unlike some viewers, I am not criticising the idea of bringing religion more concretely into the series, I am simply stating that as with other elements in the last episode, the way the religious angle was brought to a close did not feel properly thought-through and smelled of last minute resolution. It had worked until now because we weren’t quite sure what it was all about. We might have suspected, but the mystery kept it interesting. By turning these religious possibilities into a concrete reality, the mystery has been removed (assuming you don’t associate mystery with lack of answers) and with it, the only thread by which many viewers were still hanging to the religious angle.
I won’t even go into the idea of abandoning all technology so quickly, without any apparent discussion or rebellion by anyone, these space farers suddenly in love with the idea of farming and living in tents for the rest of their lives, assuming they don’t get killed first by the multitude of dangers that populated the African Savannah 150,000 years ago. One of these days, I will watch the entire show again and it will be interesting to see how much does and does not make sense. I suspect there are a lot of inconsistencies.
Yet, and this is where my criticism ends, this shaky ending far from cancels out all the marvellous aspects of the show. BSG has taken us on a wonderful journey over the past four years and it has helped restore Sci-Fi’s good name. It has proven that Sci-Fi does not have to be shallow and mainly visual effect-based, that it can challenge us intellectually and affect us emotionally as good and as deeply as any non Sci-Fi drama. So goodbye BSG and thanks for all the fish!
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5 Responses to “Battlestar Galactica - The Final Episode”
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Konstantin Says:
May 28, 2009 at 18.25I agree wholeheartedly with everything you wrote. Like you, I feel a sense of loss, and like you I couldn’t shake the feeling that some of the major revelations seemed awefully contrived and thrown together under some TV deadline pressure. However, I think I’ll have to go one step further here. I can’t let you off with a 5 Star rating on this one, Mr Mahleb.
Going into the closing chapter I already felt uneasy about all the plot points that would have to be tied up in this one and a half hour episode. But then I calmed myself with the thought that 90 minutes is feature film length, more than enough to open and close several storylines. Not to worry.
When they were still shooting each other around half-time (and the action wasn’t even good! Every Corridor in their Base looks the same(Budget?), you have no sense of where everyone is… Suddenly they ALL run into each other. The Space battle is captained by Hot Dog! And 1 minute into the fight they turn off their guns!? Where are the stakes here? I’ve seen so much better in this series) my worries began to return, and they never quite left after that. As the Threads finally started to unfurl there was a definite dissatisfaction spreading. I kept thinking: some stuff is still missing… what about the others? So many no-shows in the final episode. At least it felt like that. And why did everyone have to go off in solitude to live in abstinence..? They finally find their new home and the last 15 minutes of this episode are spent looking at the sky, breathing in deeply; Alone, or in pairs. I wanna see people forgiving each other, patting each other on the back. I want to see these broken people healing, making love, talking smack and talking about the future. I wanna see that life goes on. Looking at these “farmers” I couldn’t shake the feeling that they would all die alone. And not years later, but two weeks after the closing shots, about the time when their rations run out.
No wait… the closing shots take place in… 2009? And Baltar and Caprica are still alive? Now that might be a small feat for a Cylon (given all copies of a line are always the same age lends to the notion that they don’t age), but Baltar? After they abandon all their technology? I need to know that trick for sure.
So, after four years of brilliantly holding up mirrors with space suits drawn on them (oh look! it’s us, just in space!), the final episode of this series spends it’s dying breath betraying itself by becoming “An Inconvenient Truth 2: Guns and Technology -or- What we have learned since we went to space”
Don’t you get it? It was never about space you dummy!And what you said.
The series gets a solid 5 Stars, but the final Episode gets 2, and that’s with some bonus points thrown in for old times sake. -
Konstantin Says:
May 28, 2009 at 18.54I feel like in the subjective part of my thing there (I want this I want that) I failed to argue my point.
What bothered me so much about the 150.000BC earth Scenes was not the skygazing but the “Well, been nice flying with y’all. Now it’s every man for himself” of those scenes. They spent how many years together on that ship now? And then they finally breathe fresh air the first thing they do is run away from each other. That seems like the sane thing to do…
Also those precious final character moments are so bad. Mommy and Daddy gonna teach you to hunt? Okay, they better learn to make spears first though, cause they flew their assault rifles into the sun.
Unlike other characters Helo and Athena never had to make any moraly ambiguous decisions, they’re also the best parents in the bunch and carried sympathy and morale throughout the series. That final scene of theirs makes them look a little below average.Again, it’s still subjective, but I just don’t think the closing of the characters was well handled.
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Virtuality - Cinema, Sci-Fi, Futurism, Technogaianism and other banalities by Eric Mahleb Says:
July 10, 2009 at 11.52[...] “There’s more humor probably in the first 10 minutes of Virtuality than there was in the entire run of Battlestar Galactica.” This comment made by Ron Moore in an interview with Wired Magazine illustrates exactly why i feel that Virtuality, had it been picked as a series up by Fox, would have ended up being 10 times less interesting than BG. [...]
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Werbetechnik Says:
December 9, 2009 at 20.03The final episode in german is almost brand new.
I’ve loved this series from day 1 but i dont unterstand the ending
completely. Wich role took Baltar in the final scene?
Was it just an “illusion” like in almost every other episode?
Or is he the cylon god? Can’t really find an answer. -
Eric Says:
January 29, 2010 at 19.59yes i think some of the ‘answers’ that were provided were more about finding a way to end the series rather than to provide us with logical explanations…