Specifically certain parts of it…
[spoiler]The scene where Laura Roslin dies. That makes me well up even after the twentieth viewing.
The point from 1:32 (the little half human half cylon girl walking and then the ‘god’ baltar and caprica six 150,000 years later[/spoiler]
Seriously, whenever I feel I need to feel better I replay these two scenes.
I am currently acquainting myself with Lost, and I think it is excellent, but so far (I’m up to near the end of season two) It is not a patch on BSG.
Lost was about my only other appointment show and I like it well enough, but it is candy. “That was a pretty good episode!” -DELETE-
There were plenty of weeks with BSG that ended with “Holy Shit!” and then rewatching my favorite bits over the next few days.
For the finale, one of my favorite moments is when Baltar says “I know about farming”
My favorite clip from BSG is “The Adama Maneuver”, then again, I’m a fan of CGI Spaceship Porn anyway, and the Adama Maneuver leaves almost every other CGISP in the dust, a close second place is the Farscape episode where Crichton uses the Wormhole Generator on the Farscape Module to create a wormhole next to a star, it pulls a core fragment from the star through it, and traps an attacking Scarran Dreadnought in it’s gravity well, pulling the Dreadnought into the star’s chromosphere
Lobsang, FYI, spoilers need to be a lot farther down in the first post, or in a separate post. Otherwise they show up on mouseover when looking through the forum list. Like this one does. If you’re trying to keep it secret, make sure it doesn’t show up in the mouseover preview.
I love the entire last season, just the sense of hopelessness and depression. I can totally understand the suicides and the discontent that led to the mutiny. Humanity was truly fucked at that point, their ships were breaking down and they had no hope left. Going out on one last suicide mission to rescue one lost little girl made as much sense as anything else they could have done at that point. Also, i know this isn’t popular but i always liked Baltar and was glad he was sorta redeemed in the end.
Balty was okay, as long as he wasn’t spouting all that god-bothering crap, I liked him better in the early eps where he was jaded and cynical, he should have stayed that way, instead, he got assimilated by the Invisible Sky Pixie…
Agree with Lobsang, with the addition ofthe segment which begins with “Let’s go around the horn” and ends with the jump to the Colony.
That said, and at the risk of sidetracking the thread, I have one nitpick and one plot hole that have been niggling at me:[SPOILER]Nitpick: Tigh’s damage report (“But there’s red lines through her lateral structural members. She’s broke her back.”) He should either have said her longitudinal structural members, or that she’d broken her ribs. Curtains for FTL either way.
Plot hole: assuming that the combined teams retraced Assault One’s path exactly, it seems to me that there was a patch where the air was kinda chilly, not to mention thin. Did they run really fast, or what?[/SPOILER]In any case, I have a feeling that these two hours will be pretty much the last to go when I run out of space on my DVR. Unless I spring for the DVDs, that is.
The thing that bugged was that they blamed the battlestars deteriorating condition on cost cutting when it was built rather than the fact it was 50 years old, fought in two wars and had taken an incredible pounding for the past five years without any chance for some real repairs. Cost cutting my ass, the bucket was a tough girl.
I was kinda hoping they’d go with “she’s not 50 years old - she’s 5000 years old!”, and the Galactica had survived several iterations of civilization, and always managed to be repaired/rebuilt each time. I loved the last episode and the conclusion of BSG - but I think Moore gave himself a LOT of different options to go with near the end (which is why it was so strong of an episode, I think).
Really? I loved Battlestar Galactica and the ending just ruined the whole show for me. I can’t watch any of it anymore because the final episode was such a piece of unutterable garbage.
[spoiler]Even though we know that everything will repeat itself, we are going to live the lives of neo-luddites instead of establishing a society that recognizes the worth of human and cylon living together. Nope, after all this we are going to drop our responsibility to make a better world and just forget about it all and let future generations suffer the way we have suffered.
After all of the suffering, after everything, they learned nothing. No one in the entire show, not Adama, not Six, not Baltar, not Roslyn, no one learned a damn thing at all. It was all for nothing.
The overwhelming nihilism of the ending was just incredibly bleak and sad.[/spoiler]
No ending of anything has ever been a greater let down.
There is one criticism of BSG that has just occured to me:
The short previews that began each episode.
It’s like “We are willingly going to spoil this episode for you”
I closed my eyes or looked away for nearly all of them. The ones I didn’t I only saw by accident because I’d forgotten to look away or close my eyes.
Serious Question: Why did they do that? Were they insecure enough to think that people wouldn’t watch unless you gave them a teaser of what was to come? Are their target audience generally that lacking in attention span?
From an old Q&A blog with Ron Moore:
I didn’t mind them, since they only showed what RDM wanted us to see. What caused problems sometimes were the “scenes for next week” that Ron didn’t choose or approve. The network did, and some felt they were fair game because they counted as having aired, some felt they were spoilers that revealed too much.
I didn’t like the ending at first, but after a little thinking I really like it.
[spoiler]
With this setup they didn’t have a choice, really. The Fleet was running out of everything, probably breaking down, galactica was dead, the population shrinking (they mentioned humanity “would be gone in 3 generations at this rate”). People were basically living in submarines for years now, morale was really bad. Medicine and all sorts of supplies were running out. The only chance humanity had was to mix in with the natives and hope the following civilization would do better. And after all that, god basically told them “Here. This is your chance. Take this planet. Try again. Trust me.” There really was no choice, the alternative was extinction. And as we have all the same gods in out history, even some of their culture must have survived.
They did learn - they liberated the centurions and let cylons and humans mix. They did break the cycle. All the previous iterations just kept going on.
And if Gaius Baltar did something that wasn’t only for the benefit of Gaius Baltar, there’s hope for the humanity in BSG. ;)[/spoiler]
And yeah, the “You know, I know about farming”-Part with his backstory was really great.
Spoilered just in case
So was someone whooshing me when they said the Cylons won?[/spoiler]Because that’s the reason I decided to never watch the series. [spoiler]The idea that both sides essentially won is incredibly satisfying.
Umm, yeah BigT. You got whooshed. Go watch it!!!
Well, in the miniseries the Cylons did win - they destroyed the twelve colonies with galactica and the ragtag fleet as pretty much the only surivers. But thats really only the premise of the whole series after that.
Uh…what? The crew of the Galactica believed they were doing the right thing - stopping the cycle. How in the world did you come to conclusion that they thought they were letting it continue?
Well, I’ll say it.
Best. Series Finale. Ever.
I like it better than MAS*H and Babylon 5, both of which had excellent finales.
Perhaps because your interpretation is precisely backward.[spoiler]They came to Earth together to form a society that DOES “recognize the worth of human and Cylon (and Cro-Magnon) living together”, in fact by interbreeding. The hybrids were the most precious children of all.
They learned, they learned a lot - and most of all, the lessons about creating a second-class citizenry whose rights could be suppressed or ignored. They had no way to be sure the lessons wouldn’t be forgotten 75,000 years later, no, but come on now.
If there had been no lesson learned, there wouldn’t have been rebel Cylons permitted in the fleet at all, would there?[/spoiler] The ending couldn’t have been more optimistic.
I didn’t whoosh you, check out mswas’ post.
I’m annoyed to hell
with the
religious stuff, too.
Spoiler to show it’s not a whoosh
continues. 
The humans end up in a neolithic culture without technology presumably eating nuts, berries and grubs. The child they rescues dies young. They dissapear without a trace, save for Lucy. The Cylons control all the civilized planets. Galactica, the fleet and all their technology is flown into the sun. That qualifies for a Cylon win.