Um…no. Nothing about Starbuck is remotely close to any reasonable definition of “adorable”. She’s the stereotypical hard drinking, hard frakking fighter pilot. It’s edgy because she’s a chick with bigger balls than most men.
Strong, competent woman? Yes.
Hot? Yes.
Adorable? Not even close.
I liked the finale too! Sure, the last season was rocky at best despite Dee providing one of my favourite TV moments ever, but the finale was great. Not New Caprica great, but pretty damned great nonetheless.
How wasn’t it obvious? The visions, angels and ancient prophecies were right there from the beginning. Add to that science fiction so soft it made Star Wars look like Tom Godwin, and how could it be seen as anything other than fantasy?
As for the end -
It fit with the themes of rebirth and renewal, of breaking the cycle of “all this has happened before, all this will happen again.” Was it perfect? No, but for me it worked.
There were religious people right there from the beginning, but I don’t recall anything suggesting it was actually divinely inspired. If I’m wrong, post the earliest example you can think of.
No, it doesn’t. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” They didn’t break the cycle, they just reset humanity back to the start of the first iteration, without any kind of knowledge that could otherwise have let them make a better decision next time around. It’s like a Groundhog Day loop where you don’t retain your memories - you’re not going to make any progress if you have to keep starting completely from scratch.
The Scrolls of Pythia, which described events that occured in the series.
Laura Roslin’s visions, which always seemed to come true.
And of course, Head Six, who right from the start claimed to be an angel of God, and - surprise! - was telling the truth all along.
[Spoiler]
When was the first time this occurred, and not just by stating their civilisation keeps making the same dumbass mistake?
Again, when was the first time one of her visions came true?
Was she actually proven to be an angel any time before the final episode?[/spoiler]
But all those things were (deliberately) ambiguous.
The Scrolls could have been so much religious claptrap as the Bible is. Rosslyn’s visions could have been coincidence and confirmation bias. Baltar could simply have been nuts.
Until the end where suddenly bam, it’s not ambiguous at all any more but becomes the hard, factual basis of the entire universe. It bothered me as well - the last innings of the show felt like they were being hijacked by Evangelicals to me. YMMV.
Speak for yourself - I usually consider ambiguity to mean that the writers don’t have the courage of their convictions. It’s the coward’s way out.
Grumman:
Sorry - it’s been a while. I do remember that the scrolls had some relevance to the modern plot, and besides, ancient scrolls telling a fragmented tale of a lost civilization are very much a fantasy trope.
Laura’s vision of whatshisname flying out the airlock before she ever met him, the snakes, and of course all of the Opera House visions… it was quite clear that prophecy was a real and present force in their world.
When was Head Six ever shown as anything *other *than an angel? She wasn’t a chip (Baltar checked, remember?), and the Cylons obviously knew nothing about her - as one of them had an angel of her own. The fact that none of the viewers *believed *she was an angel until the end doesn’t change the fact that the writers were perfectly honest and forthright about her. It was a fine bit of storytelling: all of the pieces of the puzzle were right in front of us, but it took us the length of the series to piece them together.
I’m with **Alessan **on this one. A lot of people felt cheated by the final, but they *really *weren’t. They cheated themselves. They’d just let their modernist cynicism dictate to them over the evidence of their own eyes and ears.
It’s like people saying Star Wars isn’t a fantasy series. Yeah, the other one has bells on.
I’m rewatching it from the beginning with my sister, and I agree with those who say it was all there from there start. Along with the stuff already mentioned, there’s the really obvious (once you know what’s coming) part in the 5th episode (“You Can’t Go Home Again” part 2):
There’s Starbuck, stuck on the planet or moon or whatever. She’s running out of air. Her leg’s fucked up. She prays to the Gods for help getting back to the Galactica, and BAM, walks over the hill and there’s the downed cylon ship. Which she then manages to pilot back into space, make contact, and bring it home without further injury.
Except there are no Gods within the BSG universe, only the one God.
Are there people who still claim that Star Wars isn’t fantasy? Huh.
I just want to say I have found much of this thread to be rather entertaining, but it looks like the OP has been addressed so there’s no further need for me to. 
I don’t complain that it’s fantasy (and it certainly developed into fantasy as the series progressed, even if it didn’t start that way), but I still think the ending wasn’t very good fantasy. OK, OK, “God did it”. But show me how God did it; don’t just have Him wrap everything up by literal fiat in a literal Deus ex Machina. Using filling pages’ example:
[spoiler]
OK, that’s fine: She prays, and her prayer is answered (by whomever) by a ship having crashed nearby, and her having the ability to repair it and to learn to fly it. That’s perfectly acceptable. But her ship blowing up into tiny smithereens in an atmosphere she couldn’t survive in even if she had ejected, and then poof, she’s got a corpse on a completely different planet and she’s alive again somewhere else? That’s just sloppy writing. Sure, God could do that if He wanted, but it makes for a lousy story.[/spoiler]
I didn’t mind most of the ending, but when I saw a robot doing the robot I entered a psychotic rage.
You know it doesn’t like that name.
Yes. I thought the “miniseries” was fantastic. I never had a problem knowing who the characters were, although that is a big problem for me for other shows (Game of Thrones right now, although I’m starting to catch on).
Of course, I have memories of TOS, so I kinda new a lot of names and relationships already.
Clarification: I don’t really mind overt and active gods per se. It’s the bait-and-switch that I object to. It’s like the writers were saying “well, there are multiple ways to interpret the series and all viewers are equally valid in analysing it the way they HAHA psych fuck you !”.
Statement: If you’re going to do space fantasy then fine, do space fantasy, I like that too. Just don’t sell it to me as post-apo space punk for god knows how many episodes, because throwing god in the works makes every single aspect of post-apo space punk entirely irrelevant, and takes a huge steaming dump on the people who were invested in those aspects of the show.
Now here’s a thread I can get behind. I managed just 3 episodes of BSG before turning off in discust, and I made it through the whole series 1 of Dollhouse. DOLLHOUSE!
BSG is soap-opera fantasy with pretend sci-fi sets and less emotional depth than Star Wars. Characters do stupid things for inexplicable reasons and the plots I saw were not only completely transparent but incredibly dull in their resolution. Case in point is the episode where Starbuck crash lands on a planet and literally the entire episode is people humphing about in overwrought dramatic tension (as if Starbuck is going to die in episode 3) while absolutely nothing fucking happens. Incidentally they’re risking the entire human race looking for a pilot who by any reasonable terms is dead (she only survives by finding a tube in a living alien spaceship that convieniently dispenses human breathable air - wft!).
The show was a train wreck. I may as well have been watching Eastenders, at least that’s somewhat more plausable.
So anyway, this thread reminded me that I wanted to check out BSG. Watched the first few eps and it’s… alright.
I like the “we’re the last survivors of our race, struggling to keep things together with no resources/help/under constant attack/etc” angle of it. But I have to say the “omg who’s a cylon?!!” stuff bores me to death.
Which is more prominent throughout the series? If it all ends up being secret cylon drama I might as well bow out now.
It ends up being philosophico-mystical claptrap and remedial theology. No, really.
But there’s a fair bit of post-apocalyptic struggle for survival and questionably rash-but-necessary-or-are-they? decisions along the way so it’s not so bad while it lasts. Just remember to quit watching the show once they get off New Caprica and it’s just fine - the whole Cylon infiltrators paranoia is just in the beginning that I recall. They identify the limited number of Cylon models rather quickly.