I know people have a big problem with them dumping the ships in the sun, but I think more context could have helped.
Show the fleet basically running on fumes, its all almost gone fuel/meds/food/parts/equipment. One way or another in about ten years the survivors will either have become hunter gatherers or died.
I mean hell a couple of characters were drug addicts(Gaeta etc), where do you think they were getting them? Make more meds? Ok that takes chemists and specialized lab equipment and reagents, stuff they don’t have. At the point we leave them hell some vital meds are likely expiring like antibiotics.
They had very few doctors, we saw no widespread effort to train more.
Dumping the ships was stupid, but even keeping the ships would have not have provided much support.
I’m reasonably confident that Gaeta wasn’t addicted to anything at the time of the series finale.
And them dumping the ships in the Sun was far from the worst problem with the finale. Personally, my biggest problem was that they definitively established that the blasted Cylon world was our Earth, and then also definitively established that the hunter-gatherer world was our Earth, and that the two Earths had nothing to do with each other.
The blasted Cylon world was conspicuously missing a moon, and never had clearly establishing shots of the continents; it wasn’t our Earth, it was a red herring.
Several entire, dreary seasons prior to the finale set up the reasons everyone in the fleet wanted to chuck the fleet into the sun. All those forgettable episodes about enforced drudgery in the tylium ship, that stupid doctor episode, Baltar’s interminable cult plotline, etc., etc. No one in that fleet wanted to hang together.
Context would have been nice. So would even cursorily explaining how the Quorum (or whatever it was called; hey, it’s been awhile…) could have come to a unanimous decision supporting the fleet’s destruction, when we’d seen them from Day 1 pettily arguing with each other over the most stupid minor thing.
The destruction of the fleet and the stupid completely nonsensical decision for everyone to split off and scatter all over the planet are the worst parts of the finale for me and just thinking about them now makes me angry all over again. What a goddamn horrible ending. t:mad:
It couldn’t. Short of saying the ships would blow up the entire solar system if not thrown into the Sun, there is no circumstance in which throwing them into the sun is not a stupid idea. At worst, you’d want to dump them on the Moon, so that they’re there for your descendants to find, along with your warning about the dangers of developing AI.
I’m not sure how the lack of Moon could be conspicuous: I mean, I’m looking out my window right now and I don’t see it, either. Maybe it just happened to not show up in any of the shots.
We did see a clear shot of the continents. One can argue that that wasn’t the planet that they ended up on, but in that case the show was just plain lying to us: That zoom-out-zoom-in sequence made no sense at all if the planet they zoomed into wasn’t the planet that everyone went to in the next season.
And most importantly, it’s established without any possible doubt at all that the blasted Cylon planet really was the planet that had Earth’s constellations in the sky. There’s no way the writers didn’t know exactly what they were doing there: The one and only reason to do that is to make it clear and unambiguous that that planet is Earth.
Saving, at the least, two or three of the smaller and most useful ships, with fuel and spares cannibalized from the rest of the fleet, would have made sense.
“We’re in heaven now, let’s burn all our tech and refined metals and ability to go scout for help should we ever need it [this would be a very long list]” is stupid. It’s about the tenth most stupid thing about the entire second half of the series.
To the writers, I can only say, “Just say No to drugs, kids.”
The constellations thing made no sense no matter which Earth we’re talking about. Given the timeframe, the constellations could not have looked like the modern Earth constellations.
So glad I never got into this show and got burned like all of you And thank you to all of you who have alerted me to how crappily this show ends or I probably would have listened to my friends and gotten into it by now. You’ve really saved me!!!
I’m sorry but I absolutely refuse to get into any shows that have a crappy ending, no matter how glorious the early seasons are. Unless season 3 actually ends conclusively and I would be happy stopping there, I’m not going to get into it.
I actually started to write a post much like this, more to the effect that I can’t in good conscience recommend a show to a new viewer when I know it unravels at some point. I suppose there are any number of episodic shows where you can watch selectively and blow off whole seasons without losing much, but BSG was deliberately crafted as a closed-end, deeply-developed arc.
No matter how good the first few seasons are, watching only to stop halfway through makes it better to have never started. (I can’t recommend Carnivale to anyone for the same reason, as much as I love that show.) Roughneck Chronicles may be the very worst; excellent stuff if you’re into that genre… but literally missing the last reel. “Cliffhanger” is not the word for the last five minutes of the series.
I honestly don’t understand why people hate the ending so much. Maybe you would have liked the ending exposition to be a bit more sensible?
They landed on Earth, and in an orgy of PTSD destroyed the last vestiges of their technology and knowingly condemned their descendants to complete loss of all science and technology beyond the paleolithic. Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but we’ve seen season after season of the cast behaving in semi-suicidal ways, clinging to life after so much death but not really caring if they live or die. Throwing the fleet into the sun was one last grand middle finger to the universe.
It could be argued it was established that the cylons were completely gone, so there was no more significant threat to humanities future development, except for itself. The BSG universe is similar to the *Red Dwarf * universe in that there are no other sapient species, just humans and their products. And the ubiquitous smegheads in each case.
What made me throw my hands in the air and slap them on my legs was Brother Cavil, the hardest ass against the humans for the whole series, sucking on a revolver at the very end. He should at least tried to assassinate someone – Adama, Galen Tyrol … someone, and gotten shot for it. And don’t tell me it was despair … he was too cold and calculating to succumb to that.
Or maybe you could say, don’t write yourselves into a corner kids. Your series might end before your story arc is done, or it might last one season more. Leave easy loopholes to fill. Look at Babylon 5.
My point is the supplies had to run down to the bone at the time of the finale.
And thank you to all of you who have alerted me to how crappily this show ends or I probably would have listened to my friends and gotten into it by now. You’ve really saved me!!!