Battlestar Galactica Finale Thread

Cafe Society
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So you’re basically taking what was presented, making it needlessly more complicated in your head, and are now having troubles figuring out what was going on.

The Kara body they found on Earth was the Kara who died on the Maelstrom gas giant. Full Stop. That was the point of her finding the dogtags with her wedding ring on them. To indicate that it was her body. Also note that the Viper had been utterly wrecked, as was shown in “Maelstrom”.

There is utterly no point to postulate another body, anywhere.

Whatever it was that reincarnated Kara, and created her spooky new Viper with its spooky radio, and powered-down the entire fleet and the Cylons when it dropped her back into the fleet is fully able of snatching her remains from the Maelstrom gas giant and dropping them back on Earth.

There is, therefore, no reason to obsess over some third Kara Thrace. There were only two: the one dead in “Maelstrom”, and the angel Kara that later comes back.

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While I agree it was ridiculous to leave all their science & tech behind, they at least did appear to make the settlements large enough to be viable. There were about 20 settlement sites on the map Adama and the others were looking at, so that’s around 2000 people per site. Large enough for a variety of skills, yet small enough to support in the immediate area via farming. I’d think that 40,000 people in the same location would be very difficult to support via farming - you’d need tech or at least domesticated animals just to transport the food around.

And something that I just realized - in every other outdoor shot in the series, whether on Caprica, Kobol, New Caprica, the algae planet, or nuked Earth, they did something when filming to make it a bit off - either too bright (algae planet), washed out colors (New Caprica, nuked Earth), or something else that made it look just a bit wrong. But on our Earth, they filmed it just like a National Geographic special - the colors and lighting were perfect.

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(insert joke about best third-hander in the fleet here)

-Joe

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Better: have them arrive ~50,000 years ago, to coincide with the “Great Leap Forward,” when culture and complex tools exploded with, seemingly, no real reason (or, at least no reason our anthropologists have been able to find). Landing groups all over the planet also better meshes with that timeframe as well: no Out of Africa to worry about (it’s already happened) and IIRC, the great leap forward happened pretty much simultaneously everywhere there were people. That is, anthropologists haven’t found groups in that timeframe that were hugely more advanced than others (excepting the Neandertals); everyone pretty much seems to have had the same tech.

Lightray, I don’t think they did. To be clear, I don’t think that the BSG writers said anything like “a scientist has discovered a fossilized human body that’s ~150,000 years old and claim that this is mitochondrial Eve.” Instead, they just relayed the m-Eve story (exactly like what happened a few years ago when the story broke, that by using the markers you can trace back human evolution matrilineally to one ancestor) and said “she” (not a specific individual that they’ve found but the “Mitochondrial Eve” we all descended from) lived in the area of Tanzania. We’re the ones making the connection that “Eve” was Hera; the story the angels read to us didn’t claim that, IIRC.

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True, but they did do the segue straight from Hera walking to the magazine stand, IIRC.

So, no, they didn’t flat out say it, but they used storytelling devices to imply the hell out of it.

-Joe

286

Thank you. I was wondering where in hell we got a Mark 3 Starbuck.

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:confused: I thought there was a comment to the effect that Mitochondrial Eve had been identified – the remains of a young woman found in Tanzania.

Baltar and Six then supply that it was Hera.

However, I distinctly recall thinking that it was a bit cruel of them to have made Hera die young. Which would have necessitated them, you know, actually making that connection.

288

The Viper’s tail number matched, too.

Are we counting angels (dancing on the head of a pin)? We’ve got Starbuck 2.0, Head Baltar, Head Six / Shelley (I agree they’re the same), Piano Man … is that all?

Snickers, I like your idea better.

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Ellen - when Tyghe was fracking Caprica - That;s how there was enough “love” to go around.

Lumpkin’s Cat - Apollo was seeing it as well tho.

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I liked the ending overall. It is very difficult to wrap up so much in such a small amount of time. I do agree that a few subtle changes would have improved the ending and made it more realistic/satisfying and less dreamy.

Episodes back, when Lee talks to the Council and they discuss salvaging Galactica, a quick reference to “My ship can’t function much longer without supplies” would have better set the stage for abandoning technology when they reached Earth.

When Cavil snatches Hera in the CIC and threatens to kill her, Tigh would had shouted out “Resurrection Technology!” and then Baltar could have started his spiel. Then the calm and the listending to Baltar would have made more sense. It seemed odd for Cavil to listen for so long without backing out of the room and ignoring Baltar.

Surrounding the electronic map of Earth, Adama could have just added, “Now that we’ve decided how we want to live, here’s where we’ve decided to do it.”

On Earth, simply having Galen sport a beard (when saying he was finished and going off to live alone) would have established that enough time had passed for discussions about how/where/with-what to live had transpired.

There should have been jokes about have to get their hands dirty instead of living in skyscrapers instead of suggesting that all of the 38000 people agreed to become farmers. And a mention of dissenters going off to start their own groups.

Three details that I remember most are 1) how well they meshed the Opera house dreams with running through Galactica at the end, 2) Tori backpedaling when she realizes her secret is about to be discovered, 3) and Starbuck saying “Uh, don’t tell her the plan”.

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I think the list of angels we’ve seen is:

Head Six (Shelley Godfrey)
Head Baltar
Dodona Selloi (oracle on New Caprica who talked to D’Anna)
Head Elosha
Head Leoben (in “Maelstrom”)
Dreilide Thrace
Kara Thrace (v2.0)

Heh to both calling Lampkin “Lumpkin”, and to adding the cat as an angel.

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Coincidentally, when I saw Aaron Douglas at a convention at the end of January, he already had a full bushy beard. He must have started growing it immediately after they wrapped shooting…

Regarding why technology was lost (theory of germs, etc) - keep in mind that we “lost” most of the technology of the ancient greeks during the Dark Ages - and that was within just a thousand years of the height of Greek civilization. They had plumbing, rudimentary sanitation, elevators - shit, we just are figuring out the Antikythera mechanism. Burn a couple strategic libraries (Alexandria), and you can wipe out a lot of old knowledge. Imagine what 150,000 years will do.

Speaking of Greeks… I, for one, would have liked to see them have shown up on Earth at the beginning of the classical period. That would have nicely explained how the names of the Zodiac, along with other things nicked from Greek mythology would be in the BSG universe. But that would have messed up the ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ thing, which I consider a slight bit of a let down anyways.

And speaking of Eve, why didn’t any of Baltar/6’s future children become the Eve? I thought there were lots of cylons locating on new-Earth (whole models!). There should have been 100’s of human/cylon hybrids, human/new-earthican hybrids, cylon/new-earthican hybrids, 3-way hybrids, etc. Why was Hera so special? Oh, I guess she was cuz God decided blah blah blah… but she certainly wasn’t “essential” - any of those other hybrids would work to be the Eve. But I guess they needed her kidnapping/rescue to happen so all the players could be united, and the opera house and things could happen the way they were “supposed to”.

Ok last one… speaking of the Opera House… I did find it funny that during the series there was much apprehension in the ‘visions’ because Baltar and a 6 were picking up Hera and taking her away. Oh no! Evil Baltar and the cylons were getting her! But that wasn’t the problem. All of them (the president, athena, baltar, 6) were all on the same side. Any/all of them would have brought Hera to CIC. Athena and Roslyn weren’t even necessary to be there. What mattered is what happened in the Opera House… which we never saw, besides a glimpse of the 5.

And yeah, what about the Lords Of Kobol? Besides a great name for a heavy rock band, I expected them to play a roll. Another red herring…

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I think it has been pointed out several times before, but just because Hera is Mitochondrial Eve does not mean that the other characters did not also have descendants and their heritage survive 150,000 years later.

Hera was special because

  1. She represents that humans and Cylons have become one species/culture/thing.
  2. She becomes the common ancestor of all Earth humans.
  3. She is connected to the something bigger that doesn’t like to be called “God”, and hence serves as the excuse for later Earth use of the names of Lords of Kobol as Olympian gods, the Prayer to the Cloud of Unknowing, and both the writing of and widespread use of “All Along the Watchtower”.
  4. She is tangible proof that the BSG characters got the happy ending they deserved. (And then, they died.)
  5. (almost forgot) Her rescue is the evidence that the humans and Cylons have proven they are worthy to survive – the question posed by Adama way back at the beginning of the series, which the entire series was basically about answering.
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Who knows what being half-cylon would have done to Hera’s aging process? For all we know, she could have been a biologically ‘young’ woman well into her fifties.

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I think the in theory ending: settling down and blending into a world, is really where the series was heading and was the best ending they could give to this human struggle.

On the details though…

The whole God stuff was just a mess. I’m down with the idea of God playing a part, but as others have noted, it really seemed more the like the concept was used to fill in plot holes quickly rather than being a thoughtfully crafted plan. Making the head creatures be angels seemed to be largely arbitrary to the plot and just bizarre, if that’s what they were. The Thrace as angel thing just wasn’t well couched or set-up. “Daniel” felt like a throwaway explanation for the model # discrepancy.

It’s not even clear why there needed to be a final battle in the first place. Did wiping out the colony wipe out the “bad” Cylons? No: it was established that baseships were jumping in an out of the area regularly, and we saw no baseships appear or get destroyed in the finale. Did the “bad” Cylons learn anything? No, they got double-crossed and blowed up. So once we had both Hera and angel Thrace on Galatica, we already had everything we needed to head to “new/old/good” Earth and get exactly the same ending.

Also, from the perspective of the crew why was Kara the only one who could put in jump coordinates? I mean, in the time it took, Adama could have just crawled over there and punched some in himself. And since jump coordinates are just a string of numbers, you’d think they could just pull up a favorites list or something! I suppose it might have been important that the ship not jump to the middle of nowhere since it might never jump again, but as we learn soon after, they can just send a Raptor to meet up with the rest of the fleet who could then come back and ferry them off.

The problem I have with this is that it didn’t actually play into anything. The fact that Baltar and Six take Hera, and Athena and Roslin lose her in the opera house, has real emotional resonance: it seems like a big tragic turning point: something that makes all the difference. But it wasn’t. It was a prophecy basically of just one of any random arbitrary events that happened in the final that happened to lead towards the end. They might as well have all had dreams paralleling Adama breaking into mantears and whitewashing his wall the entire series.

That’s because nothing that happened in the opera sequence was actually permanent or necessary to actually get to the end. Roslin and Athena were not cut off from Hera forever: they caught up to her and everyone else like, five minutes later! There was no real significance to Baltar and Six taking Hera: sure they took her to the CiC, but she could have just walked there on her own. Baltar was critical to getting Cavil to stand down, but he could have simply gotten there himself separately, or been there. The prophecy happened to mirror the five standing there… but again, so?

It felt more to me that the original intent of the opera sequence WAS to itself be a major turning point in things… but they decided to plot things out differently and so just sort of tacked it in there. I loved the mirroring, but it just didn’t play into anything that paid off as promised.

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So, 150,000 years later, Dylan can’t be sued for copyright infringement because All Along The Watchtower is in the public domain? How about plagarism?

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Yep. Again with the poorly explained God stuff, that all seemed mostly thrown in at the ending. It really seemed in the human mythology that the there really WERE extremely powerful god beings that lived with humans on Kobol. And there was that stuff about one spiteful god causing the events that led to the diaspora. Which we still know nothing at all about the actual cause of, or how it relates to this one god being.

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And we don’t!

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And like so many plot points we can interpret multiple meanings, or no meaning at all. The two most difficult facts that are hard to reconcile are very small nitpicks.

  1. Adama saying that Earth is one million light years away from The Colonies. One million light years away is in intergalactic space. This felt like fingernails on a blackboard.

  2. Really really minor, but Roslyn saying she had to put her glasses on to get a better look through her binoculars. This is the statement of someone who has never worn glasses.

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We actually do know something of the Lords of Kobol – Dodona Selloi, on New Caprica, talks to D’Anna about getting messages from the gods. When D’Anna points out that her god isn’t the same as the Lords of Kobol gods, Dodona says that she has a message for her from her god (about Hera).

Apparently, Dodona communed with her gods the same way she did with the God that the angels worked for. Assuming that Dodona wasn’t, herself, an angel… as seems likely, given her vanishing act.

And the point of the vision of the Opera House was not to provide an outline of events that were going to occur on Galactica. That’s not how any of the prophetic visions have worked. The Opera House vision was important to get the people who needed to be involved, involved.

Laura needed to have the urge to go looking for Hera, so she could shelter her from the Cavilcade passing by.

Both Athena and Laura needed to get to the CIC for the showdown aftermath, which they did.

Caprica needed to get Hera into the CIC, so Cavil could take Hera hostage, and the whole thing subsequently play out.

And Baltar needed to be in the CIC to reveal the whole bit about the angels, standing there right now, to everyone.

The visual cues linking the Opera House vision to Galactica – people glimpsing each other through doors, the door closing ahead, etc. – were to tell the four of them that what they were supposed to do was now. For Caprica and Baltar, it was “take Hera into the Opera House/CIC”. For Athena and Laura it was “follow Hera into the Opera House/CIC”. Without those visions impelling them, they might not have made their way there – Laura would have stayed in the med bay, Athena with Helo.

Now, whether they each actually did anything of relevance in the CIC once they each were there… that’s something to debate.