I would have helped.
Hell, I’d still like to do that…
No, I liked the metaphysical/religious aspects throughout the start of the series. What disappointed me was the revelation at the end definitively proving that the supernatural powers exist. I would preferred a more realistic ending, in that, whatever you might believe about metaphysics/religion/supernatural powers, in the end, there’s never a definitive answer. It’s always ambiguous. That kind of ending would have been true to the tenor of the series.
But what bothered me most about the ending was the ridiculously impossible and patently unrealistic development that we evolved from humanoid beings from a faraway planet. That’s what really pissed me off the most. I expected more than that.
Deus ex machina.
Hopefully Chefguy has stopped reading by now, but in case not, I’ll spoiler my issues with the finale.
[spoiler]While I didn’t love the “life on earth evolved from the BSG crew” part, I can live with it. It doesn’t make a lot of sense if you start thinking about it too much, but it fits OK within the framework of the show and its world-building. Sure, the final scene was cheesy, but still fits completely with the rest of the show and the continuous thread of those two characters.
But I was bothered by what I saw as a copout with Starbuck. What was she. how did she come back? Who knows, who cares. I’m all-in on nebulous endings like The Sopranos, but this didn’t seem nebulous to me. It just felt like the writers painted themselves into a corner and didn’t care enough to do anything with it. “Eh, just make her disappear and no one will ask questions because we’ll distract them with this final scene.”[/spoiler]
Was that Earth?
I agree with you about Starbuck, but I thought that was also Deus ex machina.
The planet they ended up on was definitely, unambiguously proven to be our Earth. And the planet before that that had the Cylons on it was also definitely, unambiguously proven to be our Earth. And they were definitely, unambiguously two different planets. I can’t square that circle. Make just a few minor changes, and I’d say it was time travel (which they actually did a pretty good job of setting up for), but they ruled that out, too.
Remember, spoiler tags are broken on the new theme.
Specifically, spoiler tags in quotes. But there’s really not much of a good workaround for that.
The first planet they found was very much not definitely, unambiguously proven to be our Earth. We never saw the moon, we never saw the continents, we didn’t see anything that would make us think it’s this planet.
Dean Stockwell is gold.
We saw the constellations. Nowhere else would the constellations look the same. IIRC, they even pointed them out, by the same names we use.
I remember seeing constellations, don’t recall their being named. In any case, that came later as they were getting closer to our neck of the woods. Our planet was named (by Adama?) ‘Earth’ in memory of the Cylons’ planet. They’re different planets. Moore was messing with heads.
Spoilers
We arnt just the descendants of the Colonials but of Cylons too. We all came from the baby…the implication being that only someone with the combined genetics could survive the quickly approaching genetic bottleneck.
Also Starbuck was Starbuck. God brought her back til her mission was done and then she ‘went home’.
Full disclosure: Their was a ton of braying on the USenet BSG group after the finale. Mostly from atheists who had been peddling "Baltar is a Cylon/has a chip’ for over four years. I took great pleasure in saying “It was all there in episode one. You chose to disbelieve it.” Not that I’m some evangelist. I just thought it was funny.
HERE in this thread, I respect everyones opinions and reasons for disliking the finale. You lot are reasonable chaps.
Finally, I thought the point of the little dancing robot was to show we have avoided The Colonials mistakes by using AI as a toy and not a weapon.
This is about the most literal “deus ex machina” you can get. That’s not a good way to end a story.
This is true.
Don’t say “God”. You know it doesn’t like when we call it that.
That’s the thing - it was never more than a hard SF feel. BSG was not “hard science fiction”; in fact, it was so “soft” that it made *Star Wars *feel like The Martian. I’ve encountered few science fiction stories that cared as little about actual science, as this show. You know how they say how SW was just Tolkien, with spaceships? Well, BSG was just 2004 America. With spaceships. And magic.
And that’s fine by me. Hard SF, Space Opera and Science Fantasy are all equally legitimate sub-genres, with an equal number of great works in each. If pressed, I’d even argue that I don’t think science should stand in the way of a good story. It’s just that people mistook mature storytelling and complex characters for “hard SF”, which is a term that has absolutely nothing to do with story or character.
I didn’t actually have any problem with “Entity-that-doesn’t-like-to-be-called-God Did It”. I have a problem with how hamhandedly Entity did it. Giving Starbuck a dream of a song that can somehow be interpreted as jump coordinates for right where they needed to go, sure, that feels like appropriate divine intervention. Making that planet be already populated by people genetically identical to the crew of the Galactica? No. That’s not subtle, that’s just “nothing else in the entire show matters”.
Oh, and while we’re at it, if you’re going to toss in “You know that It doesn’t like to be called God”, you really ought to include some clues to what It does like to be called. The way they did it, it’s just pointless mystery for the sake of being mysterious.
I wish I hadn’t read this thread. I’m going to have to increase my blood pressure medicine.
Since the spoilers are being flung with open abandon now, what I was alluding to is that the “they were really Adam and Eve” twist ending was already ensuring that submissions to the cheap pulps never made it out of the slushpiles in the 1950s. It was already a gigantic overused silly cliché a half century before BSG used it.
They knew about Mitochondrial Eve in the 1950s?