Battlestar Galactica Finale Thread

I think Baltar’s house was far enough from the city. Caprica was killed by the force of the bursting window, not directly by the nuclear blast.

Alternatively, using a gun doesn’t preclude you from carrying a spear. Try to use the spear first; if it seems useless, the gun’s your fallback. And in five years time, the gun may keep you alive so that you do have some practice with the spear, unlike a displaced urbanite-turned-caveman having to urgently improvise their spear-handling in their very first encounter with a predator.

Really, this wholesale chucking of technology is a knee-jerk reaction and is throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Not only that, it sounds unworkable. The bulk of the human survivors are civilians who have grown in a certain type of environment with a certain level of technology, which has been sustained, however imperfectly, during their sojourn in space. Now, within the course of a few days(?weeks?), they have to irrevocably give up their ingrained way of life, like someone summarily thrown into solitary confinement indefinitely. It’s utterly unrealistic.

I just watched that scene again. The polygraph tech was a shaven headed black guy, but I don’t think it was the same actor as Simon. He looked younger, his nose was smaller, he didn’t have the big staring eyes Simon has.

Also, the wholesale rejection of the concept of a city seems a bit absurd in this context. We’re talking about tens of thousands of people, most of whom have zero survival skills, dropped onto a planet with some pretty incredible predators. A city would provide those people with a safe place to live, at least, until they could adapt to their new environment.

There was an exchange between Tigh and Adama, where Adama says to Tigh, “I remember when you had hair.”

Give that as much weight as you want.

We got a brief snippet of the music during the miniseries, right before Adama’s retirement speech.

Faulty assumption. Her’s are the only archaeological remains to be found.

That was a good one. Another, in CIC during the battle, was when Anders is doing something with the electronics (ACS? ACM? ECM? Whatever), endangering Galactica, and Tyrol shouts at him, “Sam, back off the ACS! You’ll blow the mains!”

Anders gives some typical Hybrid gibberish, but had this gem tucked into the middle of it:

:Hybrid Gibberish: “You got it Galen. Backing off the ACS.” :More Hybrid Gibberish: End line."

Not to keep harping on what is admittedly a minor point, but wasn’t it an issue early on in the series that Baltar couldn’t remember exactly how he survived the explosion? In fact, that was one of the reasons he thought he might be a cylon? I think that if he passed out and then awoke under the dead body of Caprica 6, he’d be pretty clear on what happened. Although I suppose there may have been some PTSD involved.

I think the final 5 would have to age, since they came from a planet with sexual reproduction. If they didn’t age & die, they’d run out of space very, very fast as the new children keep showing up, without the great-great-great etc. grandparents having the grace and good manners to die off and make room.

But I think the new skinjobs, 1-6 & 8, don’t age. We’ve seen a Cavil die & resurrect* (off-screen) at least once, and he came back just as old, so resurrection doesn’t give you a younger body, so they’d die off & not return (or keep coming back in 105 year old bodies that die within a few minutes) if they did age.

  • One of the New Caprica episodes, when the rebels ambushed him, but gutshot him & left him to die in agony. He showed up with the rest of the Cylons later in the episode (or maybe the next one) and tells the story to the other Cylons.

It’s a reaction, sure, but they’ve had plenty of time to think about it - the unwise use of technology has destroyed civilization multiple times. Adama’s comment about the people wanting a “clean slate” did not suggest that there was much debate about it.

Humanity did originate solely in Africa, yes - and already had spread to other continents at the time of the show, so the groups of colonists planted in Australia and North America (and Asia IIRC) could blend in with the locals. So, Galen could be an ancestor of all the Scots, or the Inuit for that matter.

I did like the robot montage - yes, we’re a far distance still from making them with self-awareness etc., but we’re closer than we’ve ever been and we’re on the way. Even the angels visiting Times Square were doubtful about our ability to keep allofthis from happening again.

The Final Five were different in that they were very similar to humans, except with resurrection technology possible. The skinjobs were much more recent designs, 3 decades old. The fact that Tigh and Ellen could age does not mean that the other Cylons would age. We’ve seen no evidence that they do, right? Did we ever see any Sixes or Eights that looked 20 years older than Boomer or Caprica?

Even better, I think it was, “You betcha, Galen!”

Galen Tyrol isn’t a descendant of Hera, so far’s we know, so if her status as the common ancestor of all humans is true (of course, logically, Athena would also be Eve) then Tyrol cannot be ancestor of any living human in a modern Earth.

And Homo sapiens did not leave Africa until about 75,000 years ago, IIRC. 150,000 years ago we were still restricted to Africa. We didn’t get to northern Europe until 20,000-40,000 years ago, the Americas until 15,000 years ago. (That might not sound like much put to put it in perspective, there have been humans in North America longer than the Great Lakes here been there.)

Well, they must have aged at some point or else I’m sure William Adama, as well as many other people who knew them for decades, would have been very curious as to why Saul and Ellen Tigh weren’t aging.

Of course, that starts to break down pretty quick if you overthink it, so meh, I just accept it.

The Kara that died on the Maelstrom gas giant is the body that they found on Earth. That is the body that supplied the necrotic blood that Baltar tested, since those were where Angel Kara got the dogtags from.

In “Six Degrees of Separation”, Head Six vanishes during an argument between her and Gaius about God. Shelley Godfrey then shows up on Galactica, accusing Baltar of being a Cylon collaborator. Gaius thinks that Shelley = Head Six, but the way that Shelley reacts makes him believe that not to be true. Shelley’s accusations are proven by Gaeta to have been doctored up, thereby reinforcing Baltar’s position in the fleet. While being followed through Galactica’s corridors by marines, Shelley turns a corner and has inexplicably disappeared.

The implication, now, is that Shelley Godfrey (Godfrey = “God-friend”) was Head Six, manifesting to interact with everyone. Which would mean that Angel Kara was not the only angel-type who had done so.

No one was forced to give up their technology and live as hunter-gatherers. Anyone who objected was allowed to stay aboard the ships. :slight_smile:

The only question I still have is who exactly were the Lords of Kobol?

That’s what they were doing, no matter what Apollo may have alluded to.

We know they were using the Raptors – they’re transporting people to settlements, Galen mentions he’s going to get dropped off in one, and they’re distributing maps of all the settlement locations so everyone knows where everyone else is. If the places they settled in need Raptors to reach, then there is no reason for the maps unless they’ll still have Raptors to reach them.

They’re all planning on building houses, farms, settlements, and teaching the natives language. This is not the plan of a Luddite going back to nature; it is the plan of a pastoralist civilization.

And as mrsmith537 astutely points out, they couldn’t’ve maintained their level of technology, anyway. The fleet was falling apart (not just Galactica; air purifiers were failing, other parts couldn’t be replaced). They don’t have a strong technological information base – the fleet consisted of random passengers, not doctors and engineers. Their best engineers are dead (Laird) or going off to commit slow suicide (Galen). They’ve got about three doctors (the murderer, the brain surgeon PC-guy, and chainsmoker Cottle). They’ve got no more fuel without the tyllium ship, and no one wants to work on the tyllium ship because its air is going bad and it’s like Hell, anyway.

Settling down as farmers and pastoralists is, quite simply, facing the reality of their situation. And it is not at all surprising, given that all these people in the fleet have gone through. Their technology has been trying to hunt down and kill them for the past five years or so, after it had killed off the rest of the human race. Maintaining their technology, to them, means living under cramped and horrid conditions (like the tyllium ship), never knowing if you’re about to die from Cylons or equipment failure, and eating reprocessed algae.

Or they could salvage what they could (which they did, judging from all the crap we see them schlepping around on New Earth), and settle down to a relatively comfortable pastoralist existence.

I’m a little skeptical of the plans for farming, mind you, since New Earth is unlikely to have any cultivatable crops. There might have been some seed crops on the botanical ship, but it’s never really clear what they were growing there, nor whether anything had survived the famine they ended with algae.

There was 150,000 years in between there for all that to have been lost again.

Furthermore, since Hera ended up as Mitochondrial Eve, humanity probably went through a population bottleneck sometime during that period. Ice age, maybe.

They rejected the concept of building a city because of their experience on New Caprica. That clearly was not going to work.

Remember, they’ve also been dropped onto a planet with some pretty incredible prey animals, as well. Megafauna that are now extinct, for example. As long as it wasn’t Karl doing the hunting, they’d’ve been able to get by. Not that some people won’t die, or that those people wouldn’t have been able to had been saved by the advanced tech they just weren’t going to be able to hold on to… but I don’t think that living in a “city” would have made much difference in that. (whereas a “city” would have made establishing an initial food supply much more difficult).

In the course of the Colonial history, it’s happened once i.e. the Baltar-assisted apocalypse (what happened on Kobol is unclear). Apollo suggested the move, de novo, with no precedent of this attitude hinted at before. Certainly, the problem on New Caprica wasn’t the city, it was those pesky Cylons showing up again thanks to the self-indulgent action of one particular individual. Actually, that was the case with the events that necessitated this whole journey. Hardly an indictment of technology, well, except for radiation signature detectors and mainframe viruses, I guess.

Oh, I can believe that - that there was not much debate over it. Fits in with the political process shown during the show. I wonder how that would have played out. Did they hold a straw poll? A voice vote?

What happened if 10,000 out of 38,000 said ‘No’? “Completely give up old way of life. Sure thing. I bet those leaves would make a nice set of briefs; don’t itch as much. OK. Seriously, why don’t you leave the ships with us? We’d sure like to go starseeing or just sightseeing across the seven seas sometime. Y’know, it will get boring here with no artificial light, no talk wireless and I’ve already read each of my books a hundred times”. “Sorry, I’d really like to help you out but I already filled out the paperwork for a one-way trip to Sol”

The more I think about it, the more ludicrous the decision is. Didn’t humans get pared down to less than 2000 survivors within our recent evolutionary history? It’s a matter of luck that we weren’t wiped out then. You’d think folks from an advanced civilization would have some appreciation of the rigor of long-term boot camo. If the aim of the fleet’s mission was to ensure long-term survival of the colonial species - who aren’t genetically identical with the native hominids despite any dialogue in the finale since the brain that defines modern humans as modern is the result of some genetic jumpstarts within the last 10,000 years - then the “resolution” is all for nought.

Lightray, all those plans, for maps et al., were made before Apollo’s suggestion. The Raptors were only around till settlement. There’s no hint or imagery of a planned development, as you suggest. Keeping the ships wouldn’t mean living on them; just using them as tools whenever the need arises, say, for a surgery in sick bay or exploration of nearby systems for Tylium or meeting friends on other continents. Heck, just for the occasional reminder of their original civilization, where they lived for most of their lives.

Tyrol could have lots of descendants, it’s just that his descendants didn’t spread their genes as widely as Hera. You could still have some Tyrol in you, but at this point your ancestors bred with Hera descendants making you a Hera descendant (but Tyrol too - he’s just not a genetic Adam).

You’re right though, there probably aren’t any humans where he’s going. Even if there were, they were part of an earlier migration out of Africa that died out.

And how do you know that the Raptors were only around till the settlements were set up? You don’t.

But we do know that the settlements were far enough apart that they needed Raptors to get people to them, and that they handed out maps to everyone so they could get to them, too. Ergo, they needed Raptors to get back and forth.

Furthermore, it has been well established that those ships needed continuous maintenance, and that even so they were all falling apart around their ears. Having left the ships in orbit, mothballed as it were, would have simply meant that they’d have come crashing down onto the planet at some point when they deteriorated beyond repair.

If they needed to visit other continents, they have Raptors and whatever those other landers we saw leaving Galactica were. (Until the tyllium runs out.)

By this point, I don’t think any of them wanted a reminder of their original civilization. They might regret that, later, but for now they were just tired.

The inclusion of the original theme in the pilot and finale just underscored (Get it? I slay me!) just how much better that music was than the new theme.