Yes, but Head-Six tells Baltar a lot of things. She also claims to be a chip in his head, or a delusion produced by his own tortured psyche. And as Baltar points out, she’s never entirely rational. I don’t think we were meant to believe Six when she claimed to be an angel - if she’s even real, we’re meant to think she’s a religious fanatic.
Look, if I am a Cylon - and I’m not saying I am - then sending me out the airlock is pointless. I’ll just be downloaded into a new body. And I think … I’ll tell them exactly where this thread is.
Yeah, but it will be fun. And I’m told it hurts a lot.
Count me in with the people who think it stayed good the whole way through. I think a lot of the enmity comes from the “You got magical realism in my space opera!” sentiment, which makes sense, but it’s something that was there, at least bubbling under the main story, all the way from the very beginning, and it’s certainly a more mature treatment of it than the original series gave us.
Do the DVD sets contain the webisodes that came out between seasons 2-3 and between 4 and 4.5? I heavily encourage the OP to watch them if they’re on there - they’re not plot-essential, but they set up some great character moments and explain something that becomes relevant in the final episodes but doesn’t get mentioned explicitly, i.e. that Gaeta is bisexual and had an affair with Mr. Hoshi, and was possibly in love with Baltar as well. The season 3 finale and the mid-season finale of season 4 are some of the best big reveals/cliffhangers in any series ever, so just consider yourself lucky that you don’t have to wait an entire year after 4.10 to find out what happens.
I thought the ending was fine, all you have to do is assume that
God is just a post-singularity AI (which is why it doesn’t like being called God) from an earlier cycle. You know when the robot cylons fly of on their own, an earlier version did that and ending up evolving at machine speeds until they transcended. All the magic/psychic stuff is just quantum entanglement communications and picotech technology
The quality declined in the 3rd and 4th season, but it was still easily good enough to be worth watching. The series finale, though, was utterly inconsistent with the finale of the previous season, and should be criticized on that basis alone, even if for no other reason.
And I find it amusing that the existence of FTL is held up as proof that it’s science fiction, rather than fantasy. I believe that it was Niven who pointed out that werewolves are a lot more consistent with what we know of science than FTL is, yet any book with werewolves will inevitably be called fantasy, while any with FTL will be called science fiction.
I also enjoyed the last two versions of Buffy, and did enjoy all of BSG. It’s not my favorite show ever (hello, uh, Buffy Or maybe Angel. Or Doctor Who), but I’m good with the ending.
I endorse DeptfordX’s fanwank.
“the very best hyper-syncretist ancient astronaut woo-woo” is that a new term for Mormonism? Because the 70’s version had some really strong underpinnings of Mormonism running through it, not that I caught any of that at the time (hell, I didn’t know Mormons existed back then, but I wasn’t even in kindergarten yet, so I have a good excuse). But the remake ditched most of that, other than the name of the “home planet” Kobol (taken from Moromonism’s Kolob.)
Science Fiction is based on speculating what would happen if we could start a colony on Mars, for example. What would happen? Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars…I never got through them. What someone like Horatio Hornblower had FTL spacecraft? Star Trek.
It goes bad when there is too much speculation on too many things; FTL, ray guns, robots, aliens…well, except for Forbidden Planet. What if there was an Empire based on an FTL navy? Poul Anderson’s Flandry and Nicholas van Rijn.
To many things speculated on turn the story into a magic show, unless the author is of the caliber of Poul Anderson, which Ron Moore is not.
I still believe the ending of BSG was deus ex machina.