Yep, it has been finished on NZ screens for a couple of weeks now but I've been too busy to blog about it. In the interests of not ruining things for anyone who has been following it via DVD, or might in the future and doesn't want to know how it ends, I'm going to state clearly now this is going to be SPOILERIFIC
That ending was pants. Total pants. I hated it. Do you get that world? HATED IT!
Why?
1. Too derivative. Douglas Adams was a genius. Let's try to avoid crapping on his memory.
2. Starbuck was a whatnow? A ghost? An angel? Some kind of extra special cylon human hybrid thingy? And all that stuff about not forgetting her. A friend quipped that she is remembered due to the Seattle-Based Coffee Brand That Shall Not Be Mentioned. Otherwise I draw a blank. Anyone else got any clues?
3. How oh how could it possibly work that the Fleet humans and cylons could interbreed with the homo whatevers on the New New Earth without rape?
4. Hera was not the only cylon-human baby. Maybe this was dealt with in an earlier episode that I missed, but what happened to Chief and Kallie's baby which Tori stole?
It's been a couple of weeks since I watched the final and these are the things still rankling. What did you think?
9 comments:
I thought it was great.
I see why you might not like the Starbuck thing, but it made sense to me: Starbuck was an angel.
That's why I liked it: the answer to all of the mysteries that had built up for four years was "God did it" and, against all odds and reason, that was a satisfactory answer.
And Callie's baby wasn't the Chief's - it was revealed earlier that Callie had had an affair with Hotdog. It was a bit of a copout, but there you have it...
I worried a bit about the interbreeding thing, but they did go to pains to point out that the locals buried their dead, so possessed customs and rudimentary culture, and such forth. So, you know, still icky, but arguably less so. (I'm not making the argument - but I get the feeling the script for the episode was.)
And honestly, I didn't think of Adams at all when it flashed to the 150000 years later part. I mean, they were either going to find Earth in the present (ah, Galactica 1980 - it's like the dirt just won't wash off...) or the future (which is what they tricked us into believing at the halfway point) or the past, so that seemed to me to be pretty much the only way it could go.
Oh God am I with you. In fact, I have pretty muc
The only thing I liked about the finale was that they acknowleged Callie's death. Callie was always my favourite character, and her death made me very, very mad.
But the thing that I can't get over, the thing that has me hissing and seething whenever I think of it, is that they gave up their technology. Lee Adama thought it was a good idea and everyone else says sure.
Because women won't mind dying in childbirth in large numbers. Anti-biotics and morphine - why would we want such things?
The idea that technology is all luxury is so ignorant, it shows a life of such unthinking privilege and never having been without.
Oh and the evil robots montage? Mind blowingly stupid.
pay attention - Hotdog was the child's father, not Galen - did you even watch any of this?
I watched the finale days after it played in the US - too many of my SF friends were going spare about it to wait for NZ's lacidaisical approach to SF programming.
Count me in the camp that absolutely HATED the finale. If there's one trope that I despise more than any other in SF (and I'm a SF geek) it's the Deus Ex Machine/Hand of God. They built the story around science, not faith (faith was only a crutch/salve for the masses), and to end the story on a massive dose of religosity was a big kick in the nuts. I will fully admit that is also the aetheist in me complaining - I feel religion has no place in hard science fiction.
Hera as Mitochondrial Eve - I don't even know where to begin on how wrong the science is on that. An evolved society eschewing technology without complaint - does. not. happen. And angels - f-ing angels? Gah, if they'd just shown "god" as some evolved sentience of another species, manipulating humans and cylons for his enjoyment - no problem. But using "god" is a just lazy lazy LAZY way out.
Great build up over 3 1/2 seasons, good writing, great acting (much love for Edward James Olmos), brilliant politics/themes...absolutely horrible follow through in the finale.
Let me go away and re-initiate banging my head against a brick wall.
The athiest within wanted to spew. The crappy starbuck jesus allegory was signposted well in advance of the ending, with the whole "rise from dead" delusion. I was really hoping they wouldn't do a "Matrix" but unfortunately they went ahead and did it anyway.
All in all a very disappointing finish to a great series.
I didn't get to see the end of Battlestar but now I don't want to. About Hera, if Helo (whatever the spelling) was the father, and he turned out to be a cylon, then Hera isn't a human/cylon mix. She's pure cylon.
I liked it.
Frankly, I'd put all the "god" stuff right up there with spaceships - something to include in the "willing suspension of disbelief" filter.
The anti-technology thing at the end was a bit much (although I can fully understand people wanting to get off a resource-scarce spaceship at the time), but then I thought the quorum was always a bit of a Year 7 school essay "why democracy doesn't work". That and they so couldn't see that they were up for getting shot.
At least there's now a show I've liked in the past 10 years that has had 'closure' within the series, rather than sudden cancellation. It's an arc thing.
Too derivative. Douglas Adams was a genius. Let's try to avoid crapping on his memory.
Um, so how the frak was it doing any such thing? Sorry to tell you this, but Adams had no copyright on the idea that we are the descendants of 'ancient astronauts" -- just his rather blackly comic spin on it.
The idea that technology is all luxury is so ignorant, it shows a life of such unthinking privilege and never having been without.
With all due respect, Maia, in the frame of the show the unthinking pursuit of technology (i.e. the creation of sentient machines) ended up in the near-total genocide of the human race, and the handful of survivors fleeing for their lives -- and its been pretty clearly spelt out that for the majority, life has sucked. You don't have to be some kind of Luddite to think that the prospect of breaking the cycle of endless violence and destruction -- no matter how hard and uncertain -- would be attractive.
They built the story around science, not faith (faith was only a crutch/salve for the masses), and to end the story on a massive dose of religosity was a big kick in the nuts. I will fully admit that is also the aetheist in me complaining - I feel religion has no place in hard science fiction.
Since C4 is replaying the whole series, I'd take another look at the idea that religion is only presented as a "crutch/salve for the masses". If nothing else, a grossly simplistic reading of Caprica Six.
Regarding this comment: "I feel religion has no place in hard science fiction."
Couple things:
1) BSG is not hard science fiction. Not even close. It's a fantasy.
2)The concept of God has a place in any storytelling that involves humans, because humans believe in God. Right or wrong, good or bad, silly or smart, far more people believe in divine forces than do not. It's ingrained in our racial programming, so to speak. Ecstatic experiences are a cross-cultural phenomenon.
It also seems like a strange comment to make, since religion has been a major part of BSG from day one.
Post a Comment