Today’s PvPonline is somewhat appropriate to this thread.
Religious? They spent most of an entire episode building up the “We Are Fam-I-Lee” theme, how they all need each other and depend on each other like a family does, and godsdammit, *their own *little girl was being held captive. Most of them volunteered because that’s what a family should do.
Perhaps we should stop calling some angels “Head etc.”. They weren’t in the characters’ heads at all; they were really there, right in front, visible to those they wanted to be visible to.
Just finished the series last night.
I for one had little to nitpick; I thought it was awesome.
Some strands they did sort of abandon/leave unanswered (‘harbinger of death’ for one, and what did Leoben think he knew about Kara, and why was he so afraid of her when they found her corpse?), but as far as all the big points go I was completely satisfied.
I’ll be the first to admit that this show is more about the people than the science for me (as is most of the Sci-fi I enjoy; the original Star Trek was this way mostly).
I understand the arguments about ‘why would they abandon their tech and doom themselves to death?’ But, I think that it’s because their role in events orchestrated by a higher power was completed. They have arrived at the end of their quest, they are tired, and are ready to leave the past and make way for the future.
To quote my favorite book:
*‘But,’ said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, ‘I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done.’
‘So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.’*
This is the ending we were given for BSG, and as endings go, it’s a fine one.
Moore clairified in podcast (I know, I know) that while the viewers were able to see the Raider along with Starbuck’s and Apollo’s Vipers, Apollo never saw the Raider. And when Kara accuses that Leoben of not really being Leoben, he replies “I never said I was.”
That’s clearly into the angel territory.
When he helped her find her crashed Viper on Old Earth, (the real) Leoben was clearly freaked out upon learning what the Hybrid had told Kara, and even more freaked out by the discovery of her body. He didn’t seem aware of what was going on with her, at all, anymore.
Yeah, this is the real reason that they went back for Hera.
People are having an awful disconnect from the series, because they keep expecting these characters to make the choices the viewer would make from the viewer’s dispassionate and omniscent perspective.
All those people volunteered to go back for Hera because it was the right thing to do. There was a little girl out there, whom the Cylons were probably doing horrible things to. They’d had no chance to save all those other victims of the Cylons, and they’d reached their limit. They weren’t willing to let one little girl be abandoned, even if it was for the good of all humanity.
The entire point of this series – what they’ve been exploring all along – is “how do you prove that you deserve to live?” Adama voiced it way back in the miniseries, that humanity had to prove itself worthy of continued existence. All along, we’ve seen noble and horrible choices being made by these people, and the question in the background has always been “is this something that made your existence worthwhile that you’ve just done?”
Going back for Hera was their final answer to that. It is why the viewers’ perspective follows only the mission to the Colony – we don’t even get a cursory glimpse into what went on back in the fleet, because those people are irrelevant to the story. The story is about the people who proved they’re worthy, because they went back to save one little girl and damn the consequences.
Because – as Adama had realized – people who’d leave a little girl to be experimented on when they could do something about it, would not be worthy of going on living. Hell, even Baltar figured that out (eventually); I’m perplexed how anyone who has been watching this show all along would have been surprised at that decision.
What made this difficult to fathom was that I kept remembering Adama talking to Helo and saying that they couldn’t save Hera. So the sudden turn around to go on a rescue didn’t seem to fit. Taken in a broarder context, I can see that he reconsidered and realized that being all pragmatic at this point isn’t really living. He realized that everyone was sacrificing too much life/humanity to remain alive/human.
There was a whole scene dedicated to this. One of the pilots (EJO’s son - Hotdog?) was walking down the hall with pictures from the remembrance wall, and said people were taking them down, but there were still a lot left up - there must be no one left who remembers them. Bill went down, saw that one of the pics was Hera, and decided HE remembered her.
BTW, there’s a video blog on the scifi website of the final script readthrough. In the script, there’s a scene where the survivors are walking away from the last Raptors, which are on fire. Very Cortez-like. So in RDM’s view, they didn’t even want to be able to fly around the planet. I’d be pissed as hell if I was in a group that didn’t include a Doctor and I got a nasty case of appendicitis.
It’s worth noting as well that we’re looking at their actions from the perspective of wealthy, pampered, safe citizens of 21st-century Western civilization. We have the easiest lives any living things have ever had, so far as we are aware.
People in situations where death lies just around the corner don’t necessarily behave the same way. The Colonials have been at death’s door for years; all the characters have lost almost all the family and friends they have ever had, have lost about a quarter of all the fleet survivors, and have (at the time of this decision) no reasonable expectation of survival. They’re living an existence of unimaginable shittiness, sealed in tin cans for years and eating gunk made of algae and wearing the same goddamned clothes week in and week out.
When survival is never an issue and things are sweet, the idea of death is remote, alien and horrible, and you regard it as a terror to be avoided at all costs. But when the Reaper’s standing over you all the time, the choice between death and an abstract concept like honor, or redemption, might not seem like such an obvious choice. If you stand an excellent chance of dying tomorrow, well, maybe today is a better day to die, if you’re going to go down shooting.
Another TV series where this sort of thing comes up is “Rome.” There’s a bit where one of the leads, Lucius Vorenus, insults a crime boss and is ordered by the crime boss to kiss his feet in the public square or else the boss will kill Vorenus and his whole family. Vorenus doesn’t even consider doing it, not for an instant; he and his friend simply pick up swords at the appointed time and prepare for the crime boss and his thugs to attack. His WIFE doesn’t even consider it remotely acceptable; when asked why her husband won’t acquiesce (by either one of their kids, or her sister, I don’t recall) she reacts as if the very suggestion is ridiculous, as impossible as asking someone to sprout wings and fly. Now, if I, living in comfort in 2009 Canada, had a choice between kissing some jerk’s foot and my daughter dying, I’d pucker up, in part because I expect I’ll live decades more if I survive a crisis, and my daughter decades more than that. A retired Roman centurion and his wife would tell the crime boss to go fuck themselves. That’s quite realistic, exactly what you would have expected of similar people IRL, because Julian Rome was a different place, and part of what made it different was that life was just a lot cheaper. You didn’t expect yourself and your whole family to live long and comfortable lives, with the occasional younger death being a rarity and a tragedy; people just died, all the time, for good reasons and bad reasons. So standing up for your honor and dying for a GOOD reason might seem like a better choice than living with dishonor and maybe dying pointlessly two weeks from now.
The folks in BSG are living in a time and place where life is cheap, where the survival of the human species takes precedence over individual survival, and on top of that they’re exhausted beyond belief. The only thing I found unrealistic was that MORE people didn’t say “the hell with it, let’s go out with a bang.”
Eloquently put, RickJay.
I agree the show isn’t really about the science, but the show has always been hard, gritty and all about trying to be realistic. It was jarring when the second half suddenly switched to being poetic and symbolic, and forget realism. All of humanity marching off into the sunset single file, just like the natives, but in the other direction. As I see it, it don’t get more poetic & symbolic than that. I wasn’t prepared to switch gears and watch a symbolic passing on of humanity. I almost expected the narrator from Lord of the Rings to chime and and something that starts with “and so it was… blah, blah, blah.”
Heh. Awesome.
That wouldv’e really punctuated the point that they’d decided to do the right thing (for them), even if it wasn’t the smart thing (for the omniscent viewer).
They went to rescue a little girl and damn the consequences because that little girl deserved something better.
And they settled down and to hell with the future because they deserved something better.
lol I guess YMMV 
Bear Mcreary has updated his blog about composing the music for the finale(both parts). It’s a good read and he pulls out some points about the episodes
By the way, was Narcho in the episode?
Lightray and RickJay, excellent analyses on why they went to save Hera, and why they chose to live on Earth. I wasn’t questioning it and enjoyed the finale, but what you two wrote really put their decisions in perspective for me.
Not that I saw.
And the one killed by the asteroid (who eventually fired the nukes) was Racetrack, right?
-Joe
Yep.
Sorry to toot my own horn, but holy crap, I called it! (post 5)
How about Seelix? Or any of the other muntineers?
Woah! Thanks for that link. I’ve been enjoying the score to this show very much; and as a musician, this is an incredible window into the process.
Good call, and great link, everyone should read it as it answered a lot of questions. I have one though - the beginning of the show always says “The Cylons were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. There are many copies. And they have a plan.”
Do we have any clue what the plan was? Or is that what will be revealed in BSG: The Plan? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica:_The_Plan
The best I can guess is that the plan was to form a hybrid, or create a painful set of circumstances for the Final 5?