BSGood Riddance

Battlestar Galactica is over. Thank god. Of course the fact that I’ve been watching a show that I haven’t been enjoying for two seasons probably says something sick and perverse about me. I guess knowing that the end was around the corner was enough to make me come back and “finish the show.”

In short, I found the last few episodes and the finale to be very unsatisfying. The last few episodes were basically treading water because they had the story where they needed it for the finale and they didn’t actually need or evidently want to advance the plot. The penultimate episode had needless flashbacks for crying out loud! They were blatantly just killing the clock. But enough of that. I’ll spend a bit of time nitpicking it later on…but first let me address the more grievous crimes of the series.

I’m addressing the big picture here so I’ll be painting with a broad brush. In the end I found BSG to be ultimately disappointing because I feel betrayed by the series. The show started off as one of the best shows on televisions. As such, I threw my support behind it and praised it to anyone who would listen. It was that most rare of science fiction endeavors, one that realized the key good science fiction revolves around stories and characters that would be interesting regardless of the setting. The setting just so happened to be sci-fi. But along the way something changed...

The crime I charge BSG with is around the 2nd and 3rd season the show changed from an interesting sci-fi show into a poetic meditation on faith. I’ve talked to a number of people who enjoyed the end of the show. I think it may have something to do with how you view actions based on faith when in obvious contradiction to reason.

The motivations and actions of the characters stopped being coherent and understandable, they were no longer grounded in reason - they just started to do whatever felt right. This had all sorts of consequences. Characters changed jobs at a drop of a hat. Where at once the survival of humanity and the conservation of scarce resources were paramount…they now had time to dedicate a ship and a crew to finger painting in space looking for music. The goals of various groups and factions in the show swung drastically from episode to episode. No hair-brained scheme would be denied if it had a poetic justification. Ultimately the show ended clumsily with the heavy handed message that faith is all important and technology is evil.

Now to pick on the last episode a bit…

Who are undeniably the best pilots in the fleet? Perhaps people who have served as CAG during the course of the show… well guess what…now they’re marines! That’s right in this toughest of tough battles they decided to turn their ace pilots into marines? I guess that’s a military tactic.

They’ve been pedaling that opera house metaphor for how long now…. That shared hallucination between all the pivotal members of the cast…and it that was it? Some kid running threw a ship? Talk about an anticlimactic build up.

Whereas the fleet was tearing itself apart just a few episodes ago, to the point where the Galatica suffered a mutiny, does anyone believe that all the people would be of one mind about anything? Everyone wants to ditch technology for the chance to have a new beginning and rough it on fake earth? Yeah right, screw medicine that stuff is for chumps. It’s been holding us back. How can anyone be happy with all the knowledge and learning? Time to scuttle that garbage.

Seriously does anyone in their right minds think that Ty and Ellen are going to let them send the last bars in the galaxy into the sun without a fight? I don’t believe for a second that the people of the fleet were willing to give up their boozalators.