You have to give the producers some slack in that they aren’t scientists.
If you look carefully, the colonial survey map of Earth has the Great Lakes, in their modern form, on it. That’s pretty amazing survey work considering the Great Lakes did not exist 150,000 years ago, or even 15,000 years ago.
So they’re the ones who get stuck in Australia. Very sensible.
Just to further clarify the colonists’ reasons for discarding the technology that eventually led to the war, remember Adama’s speech way back at the decommissioning:
I’ve been too busy to get back here until now, but I hope to expllicate my thinking concerning the question of how many Starbucks we saw throughout the series:
What these arguments from Lightray, jackdavinci, and others have in common is that they neglect or ignore the overwhelming extent of the destruction of Kara-A and her Viper!
The audience sees the complete and total destruction of Kara-A and her Viper. Nothing larger than a thimble could have remained intact after that! But when we get to Earth1, Kara-C and the audience discover an unreasonably intact big chunk of a Viper complete with an unreasonably intact big chunk of a Starbuck!
Lightray says I’m “… basically taking what was presented, making it needlessly more complicated in [my] head, and are now having troubles figuring out what was going on.” No, sir. I am taking what was presented on its own terms and pointing out how flawed it was and how the pieces didn’t fit together properly in the finale. Because there are only two possible resolutions within that universe to what we actually saw on the screen:
(1) “God” incarnated an entire intermediate Starbuck (Kara-B, complete with resurrected dogtags) and entire intermediate Viper (Viper-B), which could fly to Earth1 and crash there in the big pieces we see on Earth1, or:
(2): “God” sloppily grabbed up (perhaps just some) of the several quintillion pieces of Kara-A and her Viper that “God” could get its hands on, whereupon “It” transported them to Earth1, then glued those parts together into larger separate pieces like a jigsaw puzzle!
I still insist that option (1) is less contrived – in an Occam’s Razor kind of way – than option (2), but in any case, as I wrote in my first post in this thread: “It” [“God”] sure as hell picked some ridiculously contrived moments to act and bizarre methods to intervene (and please don’t give me that completely arbitrary “god works in mysterious ways” cop out).
Of course, the actual, real-life explanation for what we see is that Moore, et al., simply fucked up again! The Maelstrom explosion was a vitally important scene, and he either cheated or, more likely, he blew it because he hadn’t thought everything through sufficiently well and so was forced to fudge parts of the story as he went on.
In previous threads, you’ll see that I’ve criticized various parts of BSG on the same grounds: i.e., that they hadn’t thought through some of even the biggest plot elements with sufficient care. That is and has always been my only general complaint regarding Battlestar Galactica.
Please don’t get me wrong: I loved the series! But there is one word above all others that best relates my opinion of the series’ finale…
[INDENT][INDENT]
Kludge.[/INDENT][/INDENT]
There’s one on every corner, man.
The Kara on Earth 1 was just the leftover bits from building the New Improved Crazier Kara 2 with Invisible Poofing Power!
In one of the flashbacks, Starbuck said she wasn’t afraid of dying–but of being forgotten. So I’ll be drinking my lattes in her memory!
Looked to me like a few chunks went flying and the rest of the wreckage destruction was covered up by the fireball. If you watch real explosions, they have big bright fireballs too, but that doesn’t indicate disintegration. In any case wasn’t the premise of that episode that the ship was destroyed by pressure? The fuel and munitions probably exploded around the wreckage.
I agree that you can’t tell much about the wreckage from that video. The fireball covered up the bulk of the ship.
I also agree with Ambushed that Moore & Co. made it up as they went along and so the finale had a certain “kludge” feel. The jigsaw pieces didn’t all fit together perfectly. But I’m OK with that. This was art and storytelling, which isn’t always neat and perfectly planned out.
Heh, maybe Obama should send a “Stimulus Package” to Joss Whedon for the sole purpose of restarting Firefly 
and while he’s at it, have him call for a decree to restart Farscape and MST3K, and to outlaw “reality” TV…
Posted on April1st, I note. 
“God’s plan is never complete”, said Angel Six.
So, maybe we should hire someone else already?
The Lords of Kobol bungled the job when they had it. That’s why we tried God.
I’m trying to put into words what is satisfying and unsatisfying about the ending. The entire series has been about the characters, their motivations, and what they do when presented with … life. The ending didn’t have enough of the characters dealing with the end - it had exposition about the characters dealing with the end and then exposition about the characters affects in the world.
Adama has a bittersweet ending that was 98% complete. He committed to Roslin, married her, and buried her. What was missing was that I wanted to see what his next commitment was. He will build their cabin, but will he stay alone or continue to lead the colonists way to surviving?
Lee and Kara were incomplete. Lee expounded about exploring but wasn’t doing it. Kara didn’t even expound herself - she just said she was complete. I almost wish Lee’s final shot would be him climbing a great mountain in a blizzard, loving it, and talking to a Head-Kara (we know because she’s standing without a coat in that blizzard). They speak about moving on and yet are still together. They speak about fulfilling their dreams and doing it on their own terms. Lee keeps climbing and the shot tracks back and shows him in a beautiful wilderness.
Galen just expounds about leaving people and going north. I would rather have seen him trudge over a hill in the highlands and see a baeutiful valley to the right and a cozy village to the left and have him pause as we wonder which way he’ll go. Does he want to be alone or try one more time to give a new people a chance? No one has to mention “northern lands”, just fly him to an area recognizable to Scotsmen and let the scenery inform the audience.
The others just walking away, where we assume they went on to have some life is less satisfying than seeing them create a final choice. Tigh and Ellen should have setup a campsite. Tigh is commanding a group of farmers. Ellen is lounging in a chair and pulls Tigh down to sit. They laugh and Ellen hands Tigh a drink from the makeshift still next to them.
Baltar should have some people listening to him talk about farming. Someone talks the yoke of a makeshift plow to follow his instructions and he gently, under the others protest, takes the plow and shows them how to do it instead of relying on others to do the work.
Some scenes like this would be more in keeping with having the characters show us their future and make it rather than espouse it.
The epilogue was great as far as a plot ending. It just jarred me away from the character’s ending. I loved the robots and the All Along The Watchtower end for the plot. But, besides being less than 150K years later, it should include this (plagarised from James Hogan’s Gentle Giant’s series): A student runs up excitedly to an archaeologist. he holds out a tarnished and worn pair of Adama’s admiral rank pins, a recognizable portion of Laura’s glasses’ rims, and something we should have been setup to recognize as Kara’s dog tags. He says he found them in the umpty-thousand year old soil of the dig. The archaeologist looks, pauses, and throws them away disgustedly on the similar pile of nonsensical junk on the table. He tells the student that these stupid jokes of placing modern things in the dig has got to stop and if he finds who did it he’s gonna shoot 'em into space. Thus ends the series showing Adama and Laura’s eternal love and Kara’s wish to be remembered both fulflled and lost.
I think many of us will be amending & expanding the BSG characters’ stories in our minds. And on discussion boards. (Not to mention fan fiction.)
Perhaps Lee will look up his dad in a while. To see if he’s got any ideas about boat building…
While I really enjoyed the finale, the one thread that I don’t think was ever resolved was Leoben. When we first met him he made it seem like the cylons, or at least his model, had a more concrete connection to their god and to the workings of the universe. This seemed to imply that he had special insight like a hybrid, or maybe he had his own head angel guiding him, or maybe the cylon god was a mainframe somewhere and he could see into it’s prophetic calculations somehow. That he was just lying doesn’t seem satisfactory because he always took a special interest in Kara and seemed to know she would be special. And he was always spouting prophecy. Then again, he seemed genuinely shocked about Kara’s dead body duplicate. These things never added up for me. We should have seen why he seemed connected to special knowledge about prophecy and the cylon god, and why he was surprised about Kara after always being the one to say she has a special destiny.
I’ve read that Callum Keith Rennie had other commitments that limited his appearances in Season 4.5. (Xena stayed on Old Earth to die for similar reasons.)
He will be in The Plan.
Too bad that “real life” got in the way. I’d have started watching the show earlier if I’d known he was in it…
I think it would have been much better to leave “real life” entirely out of the finale.