Battlestar Galactica Finale Thread

Cafe Society
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[li]Admiral Adama: Somewhat unfitting, and depressing for the once great leader to just wither away in solitude. I didn’t buy that at all. How many others lost the ones they cared about? Where did his commitment to the survival of the species go?[/li][/QUOTE]
He had succeeded in keeping the species alive, and now he deserved to start over on his own terms, as did everyone else. He chose to live out his life alone, with no one else depending on him.

[QUOTE]
[li]Starbuck: Completely idiotic - an utterly random cop-out. Doesn’t at all fit with the “angel” conception portrayed by Head-Six and Head-Baltar. So, she’s just like that, except she can produce a corpse, materialize a Viper, screw a Cylon, and she’s visible to all? Then randomly disappears? Terrible, and completely incomprehensible given previously established standards in the fiction. Loved the character and they just threw her in the garbage seemingly because they couldn’t think of anything else to do with her.[/li][/QUOTE]

If you’re going to accept the idea of active involvement by some type of god, I don’t know why you think that god can only intervene in certain limited ways. He/it used the Head characters for certain purposes. He/it used Starbuck for others.

I prefer to think Starbuck was a normal human who happened to be selected (think Moses) for a divine mission. As part of that mission, she died and a ghost version was sent back to finish the job. When the job was over, Kara got to rest.

You have a point here. I suspect that the writers created the whole Hera-is-important angle and never really found a satisfactory answer for WHY she was important.

But within the confines of the story, my fanwank is that the Cylons were simply wrong that Hera was key to their survival. Cylons were fallible, just like humans, and they were searching for something bigger than themselves. Cavil & Co. seized on the idea that this human/Cylon hybrid had to be Full of Meaning. She was, but not in the way they thought. She wasn’t the source of a Cylon-survival technology; she was the forebear of modern man, who is a mingling of Cylons and Galactica-verse humans.

By the time the nukes launched, I had completely forgotten about them. So it worked for this viewer.

The rescue attempt also worked for me. There were the basics of jumping in, blasting the hell out of everything and ramming a hole in the colony. But I never expected them to use Anders to interfere with Colony defenses. I never expected Baltar to use real emotion to negotiate a truce. I never expected everything to fall apart because of the chief finally learning what happened to his wife. (Whoever called that Arthurian was dead on – perfect phrase.) Nor did I expect Cavil to eat his gun, but it still worked perfectly for his character.

I couldn’t care less about the other Cylons, so having them follow Cavil around and look worried was fine.

142

Are there still other skinjobs on the original Colonies? And I will repeat my question, since no one picked up on it: will the Cylons age now that they don’t have access to Cylon technology, or could they conceivably live forever, or for a very long time, like the biblical Methuselah?

143

I loved it, and I don’t believe in God.

In the universe of Battlestar Galactica, God exists. He works is mysterious ways, sometimes through angels. That’s cool. I don’t have to believe in God to enjoy that aspect of the story just as I don’t have to believe we’re actually descended from a human-Cylon hybrid borne of people who cut the corners off their paper. God is a critical part of the show’s universe and I thought they pulled it off.

It (and James Callis’s rendition earlier in the series) were Yorkshire, I believe.

144

I may easily be forgetting something that’s blatantly obvious, but I don’t get what you mean by age “now.” Cylons age just like humans, I believe. When they had resurrection technology, I suppose they could leap into young bodies to stay eternally youthful, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything to indicate that Tigh, Boomer/Athena, Tyrol weren’t growing older.

145

I don’t think it was established that they did age. I thought they were machines who basically stayed the same. We never saw old Sixes or Eights running around, even though the skinjobs existed for decades. They all looked to be the same age all the time. Based on that, I assumed that they didn’t age. Maybe they just jumped into new bodies when they started feeling older, though resurrection looked traumatic and not something to do just because you got a wrinkle, but who knows?

146

Fun first half. Lots of pretty. I knew one-half of this was going to be all characterey, so the second half was no surprise.

The ending is bugging me. Not like most people. I don’t care that much it ended up being 150,000 years ago. What bugs me is the little stuff. 40,000 people all decide to give up everything? Absolutely everything? People were walking away with nothing but a backpack. I assume 95% of the population dies the first year? I like to put myself in the place of the characters, and I just can’t imagine giving up all that tech. I really can’t imagine going off all by myself like Tyrol. Too unbelievable. I was almost expecting that at least some of them would keep some technology and set up on a continent that looks suspiciously like Atlantis, to later disappear. That would better explain their influence on some of our mythologies.

It was nice how Bill kept talking to Laura about their future cabin even though he knew she was fading as he spoke. I feel so bad for Bill though. Does he really want to spend the rest of his life alone? Could he even survive on his own, realistically?

Same thing with Apollo. He’s going to go explore? Alone? Really? These Colonials must get great wilderness survival training.

I understand Cavil offing himself. He just lost Rez-tech for good. That’s the end of his species. Why stick around and watch?

Moore didn’t really cheat with the Earth-1 fake out. He was fairly coy about showing us continents or a moon. Just as he was coy about whether they were still in Earth-1’s system. Guess we’ll never know for sure about that, but it’s the only way Ellen could have found them.

Hera being the Eve of all surviving humans makes sense. I’m sure lots of other humans go on to interbreed, but Tigh said it was human/Cylons together are the only thing that would be strong enough. They said she died as a young woman though. Depressing again.

When Baltar said “he/it doesn’t like to be called that,” it gave me an out about the religious aspect. If it doesn’t want to be called God, it may not be God. I’ll go with super-advanced being/society that went through the human/Cylon cycle itself long before Kobol, and their technology seems like magic.

Starbuck: Not much to say right now, but I’d still like to know why Boomer told her back on Caprica she “was special” and all the Cylons know it. How? And what happened with the Hybrids calling her “Harbinger of Death?” Doesn’t seem to be the way it worked out, except that I think most of these people will die within a year or two.

I can’t help but wonder what becomes of the Centurions. Before the FF showed up, they were already experimenting with flesh bodies. They just couldn’t get it right. What’s to stop them from eventually wanting to resume those experiments and possibly succeeding, and starting another human/Cylon cycle somewhere?

Is Earth really a million light years from Kobol? Or was Adama exaggerating?

Another little detail that will continue to bug me. They were resettling the colonies, and they should still be there. Even if the current gen of flesh models grows old and dies, there are still a lot of Centurions there, and I’d have to believe they kept a few Basestars around too.

Overall I’m satisfied by the ending, but pretty depressed about people just wandering off and dying. I just can’t emphasize.

147

I’m not going to nitpick a thing. This was just beautiful. Even the divine intervention stuff worked, for both the story and the characters.

Thanks to all involved in its creation for four seasons of a fun ride.

148

That’s what I think too. I don’t watch an awful lot of tv and it’s been a long time since I’ve watched a show lasting five years, but I blubbed a bit at the end because I’d come to care about many of the characters in this, even Baltar.

All ahead, flank speed

149

Yeah. Being alone, really alone, is a death sentence for a human. It only takes one broken ankle to starve to death or die horribly of an infected wound, gangrene, blood poisoning.

Some of our more famous modern “hermits”, like Thoreau, regularly went to town and had frequent visitors. If he was injured, someone would notice his absence. That’s not being “alone” in the sense that Tyrrol, Adama and Lee were proposing. It struck me as odd that so many characters were in effect embracing a lingering painful death. Perhaps that was intentional.

Secondly, ignorance kills. They have no maps, no knowledge of local flora and fauna and no knowledge of handcraft… they are in a worse position than the Jamestown colonists, of whom 2/3 died the first year, and rest were saved by resupply. Compared to the Galactica refugees, the Jamestown settlers had vast relevant knowledge.

But, you know, as endings go it was a pretty good one. That one aspect just rang strangely.

150

They aren’t really choosing to be alone. They aren’t that far from each other.

Besides, most *are *choosing to go frak the Cro-Magnons.

151

Oh, one more thing: I had interpreted the last jump as being backward in time (God/whoever helping out again), not just a spatial relocation - to the same Earth as the nuked version, just our past. Was there any fact or statement confirming that it was really a different planet, with no time travel?

152

The fact that they kept saying it wasn’t Earth? They actually saw the continents and solar system that planet was in. We didn’t, so we just made assumptions, but they would know, I think.

153

They called it Earth when they landed on it, didn’t they? I certainly recall Adama saying the name disgustedly while looking at all the rubble.

154

The first Earth was the original. The planet they ultimately settled on was not Earth, but they decided to call it by that name anyway.

155

I think he was exaggerating. Our own galaxy is only a 100,000 light years across. Roslin’s death scene was well done. Slipping away without Adama noticing. That really does happen when you’re waiting for someone to take their last breaths. You start talking (to them or someone else in the room) and look over an notice they’ve stopped breathing. It happened with my grandmother. An then to see Adama crying and frantically putting his wedding ring on her finger.

Kara was the “Harbringer of Death”, and she did lead the “human” race to it’s end. She did lead the human and Cylon races to their end; both went extinct. A new hybrid race was born from Hera and her progeny. It’s not even clear if everyone interbred with the local hominds. They could be the other hominds we homo sapiens wiped out. How does resurrection work for human-Cylon hybrids? Humans can’t resurrection at all and Cylons need advanced technology. If hybrids can simply “transfer” into a nearby fetus upon death it’s reincarnation. It’s the same thing as having a soul.

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Admit it, folks - I know I’m not the only one here who expected to see a giant black monolith right behind the ape people.

157

BTW, if Mary McDonnell gets stiffed at Emmy time for this one, there ain’t no justice.

158

Buckets of tears ensued. I loved it. I loved the whole series, and I literally mourn the loss of this fantastic show. Bill and Roslin’s story was beautiful.

I seem to remember Bill putting his ring on Roslin’s hand once before. Anyone else?

I thought Caprica was going to be a new series, but from the ad it sounds like it’s just a direct to dvd movie. Really?

And there’s going to be a 2hr. special in the fall?

Is there a way to get alerts on both of these events?

Does anyone know when the whole series will come out on dvd?

159

An extended cut of the premiere episode is being released on DVD in April. The rest of the series is going to air in 2010.

160

Wasn’t there an interstitial of “150,000 Years Later”?