Sci Fi oriented shows that turn metaphysical in the end like Lost & BSG. Are you OK with this?

Cafe Society
61

In fact, the early BSG episodes explicitly included many, many elements that demonstrated the mysticism to be objectively true in-universe. Many viewers apparently rationalized those away as coincidence, and were shocked (shocked!) when they turned out to have been intended to be taken at face-value.

  • Roslyn’s predictive chamala visions
  • Baltar’s accurate guesses without sufficient information (as in “Hand of God”)
  • accurate prophecies by several sibyls
  • the biblical curse alluded to for returning to Kobol
    etc. Later seasons continued the mysticism, with the shared Oper House visions/dreams, Starbuck’s spooky Viper, etc.

Not only did HeadSix show up claiming to be an angel from God as early as the miniseries, but even in the first season the mysticism was presented as present and effective.

62

[spoiler]It’s not mysticism if the god-like alien isn’t a God. We’ve manipulated wolves to become pugs, but we aren’t gods.

In fact the ending of BSG doesn’t answer anything definitively, we don’t know who was behind the scenes. If you’d rather that the ending was ambiguous as to whether the head-six and head-baltar were real, that’s fine, but the writers going the other way doesn’t make it crap.[/spoiler]

63

Prophecies come true all the time. That doesn’t mean that the assumptions of the prophets are literally true. Prophecies that don’t come true are usually forgotten. Real people also see visions that include apparitions claiming divine origin. Nothing in the early episodes required the mysticism to be literally true, exactly as no supposedly mystical events that happen in our world are necessarily literally true. In fact, it was far more interesting when there was a strong probability that it wasn’t.

64

That’s the 2nd miniseries, V the Final Battle. The original V just ended with the resistance sending a message into space hoping to attract enemies of the Visitors or something like that.

As for Lost, I have to wonder what show people have been watching the past 6 years. The one I watched wasn’t ever any more “sci fi” than “metaphysical”. Smoke monsters, frozen donkey wheels, taller ghost Walts, dead fathers, dudes that don’t age, cursed numbers, walking paraplegics… now that I think about it, take out the time travel and you barely have sci fi at all.

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It is, of course, merely my opinion that that particular aspect of the ending was complete and total bullshit. The writers, and others in this thread, obviously have different opinions. My opinion is not better than theirs. Etc.

But the rest of this is simply not right.[spoiler]If it walks, talks, and quacks like a god, then complaining about the term “mysticism” is just empty quibbling. This thing is not bounded by time–its life span is on the order of hundreds of thousands of years, at minimum. This thing is not bounded by space–it can deliver messages directly into the brains of humans and robo-humans with no known technology, even if said people are traveling on ships that can do FTL jumps. This thing is not bounded by any obvious technological limits–it can awaken memories at will, manufacture Vipers, resurrect exploded humans, teleport people, and more. It is not bounded by any known limits in its knowledge–it knows perfectly the location of old nuked earth, earth junior, the temple of five, etc., its knowledge being so extensive that it can arrange a cosmic coincidence that both humans and cylons reach places at the same time. As far as the show is concerned, this thing really is a god, even if it’s not capital-g God.

And we do, too, know some things definitively at the end. The most notable thing we know is that this crazy-ass being with no known limits exists.[/spoiler]

66

I threw five years of DVDs I burned from BSG of Sci Fi away. I contemplated sending my store bought copy of the mini series to Moore, but figured it would be considered a threat. :rolleyes:
Such a great start, such a horrible ending.

67

All of the prophecies we had presented in the series ended up being true. Furthermore, the visions of the HeadAngels were not the only visions – Roslyn had her chamala-fueled visions (that came true), and both she and (later) others shared the Opera House vision. And, of course, there were at least two sibyls whose predictions were accurate. And the Cylon Hybrids who were obviously plugged into something prophetic, as well.

Do ‘real people’ share the exact same symbolic dream/vision?

All irrelevant, of course. The complaint is that the series finale suddenly switched over to mysticism and woowooism. The prophecies, visions, and other mystical elements were present from the beginning of the series. It wasn’t manufactured whole cloth for the finale. It was there from the beginning, and its appearance in the finale was a logical progression from what came before.

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Starting in ambiguity and ending in revelation is no more logical than starting in ambiguity and ending in ambiguity.

Some of us prefer the latter to the former.

69

The outcry that would have followed a BSG finale that didn’t explain what the Hell was going on with all the odd mysticism would have been far, far greater. Same with the Lost finale.

70

Hmm.

Well, you might be right. I can only speak for my own tastes.

71

I think that Lost was seriously insulting to its audience.
It threw in a load of things that were weird/mysterious for their own sake and basically made it all up as they went along.

After stringing along their audience for as long as they could, they more or less said screw you we’ve had your viewing figures all of this time; heres a lame, silly, ending and if you don’t like it, then up yours!

You can’t "unwatch "the several series now; suckers.

It will be a cold day in hell before I ever watch anything made by those con artists again.

Fool me once ?then shame on you.
Fool me twice then shame on me.

72

I’m sorry but this is wrong. In the very first season head Six materialized physically to frame Baltar then simply disappeared once her job was done. There wasn’t going to be any scientific explanations for that, from that point on you should have realized the supernatural stuff was real.

73

I don’t understand why those who are unsatisfied with the ending of BSG are so often accused of denying that mysticism was part of the show. Obviously, it was; and I have never seen anybody deny it. Nobody claims that the finale “switched over” to metaphysics.

The complaint is not that the finale resorted to metaphysical answers; the complaint is that the only resolution that the finale offered to the numerous metaphysical mysteries and practical plot threads that had evolved was that “it was all metaphysical, so there is no need to resolve any of it”.

The finale provided no comprehensible or satisfying answers to real questions that the series had hinged upon for years. The finale was a simplistic metaphysical thud that was so divorced from the nuanced and complex story that preceded it that one can only conclude that the writers pulled it out of their collective butt. What really pains me is that so many former BSG fans are willing to fill in the blanks in an effort to deny that they were strung-along.

Now Lost fans are suffering the same abuse. I gave up on Lost in the second season because none of the intriguing mysteries offered in the first season had been addressed in any way. I suspected that the object of the show was to tantalize the audience with polar bears and black smoke, but never give any explanation. Years later, I hear that nothing was resolved, and that “it was all about the characters, not the setting”.

Why should science-fiction fans accept this bullshit?

Would murder-mystery fans accept a 299-page story that was so intricate that they couldn’t guess which suspect was the killer, only to see it ended suddenly on page 300 with a statement that the clues were all red herrings and only God can judge?

74

The BSG ending was significantly better than the LOST ending. While BSG had a couple ongoing “mysteries” which were never adequately explained in the show (Starbuck, “they have a plan”), it was less a part of the show than the mysteries of LOST. Moreover, BSG had far more references to relevant mystical matters early in the show. At the very least, we had the example of Head Six.

I also think it’s very, very important that Baltar actively attempted to discover the nature of Head Six. He was curious. He came up with hypotheses and tested them. This is how you’d expect someone who is smarter than celery to act. The LOSTies never did squat. Showing us a character trying to figure out the nature of Head Six and failing to find a (relatively) mundane explanation is a great setup for revealing her to not have a mundane explanation.

The problems I had with the BSG finale were
(1) the unnecessary, cheesy robot montage at the very end,
(2) the cheat with Earth not being Earth, but not-Earth turning out to be “Earth”
(3) the deliberate regression to neolithic technology (although this doesn’t bother me quite as much as it bothers some, it’s still a bit hard to swallow)
(4) the complete non-answer of the long-established mystery of Starbuck’s return

I think it’s safe to say we get an answer for what she is - the same thing as Head Six. But that’s only a partial answer. How did she get resurrected? Why did she get resurrected? Why did she show up exactly when she did?

I never thought LOST would have a strictly accurate scientific explanation. I did think, during the early episodes, that it might well have a “TV-science” explanation. Eventually I realized that wasn’t going to happen. Then I thought it might possibly have a science-fiction explanation. Eventually I gave up on that too.

But while I would have preferred a more realistic LOST, my problems with the finale (and really, the entire final season) are that we do not get answers for important, long-established mysteries. Also, some of the few answers we do get contradict earlier episodes, or are just plain bad.

I do prefer science fiction to fantasy, in general, but that’s a very general preference. It’s not the mysticism of the finales itself that bothered me.

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I think there’s a distinction between having religion in a Sci-fi series, and having the supernatural. In the beginning of BSG, there are religious characters who are acting on their beliefs (and a few hints that maybe there’s something to those beliefs), but it doesn’t really become supernatural tell later in the series when miracles and it turns out the religous beliefs are true. I don’t mind sci-fi series where there are religious characters, but I usually loose interest in Sci-fi that starts wandering into the explicitly supernatural (as I did with BSG).

Someone mentioned Deep Space Nine above, I thought that show did a pretty good job with the concept. There are religious characters, and their beliefs are based on something vaguely real (the Wormhole aliens for the Bajorans, the Founders for the Dominion), but in both cases the “Gods” are aliens with fairly limited abilities rather then supernatural beings.

76

People keep saying this but it is just simply not true. The show had blatantly supernatural plots from the very beginning. Just because people chose to ignore them or think “there must be another reason why Baltar know things he has absolutely no way of knowing or why head six can physically manifest and disappear at will” doesn’t mean the show did not have supernatural elements all along.

77

Sixes appearing and disappearing is kept ambiguous though, and the show suggests a naturalistic explanation (Baltar has a chip in his head). It doesn’t become explicitly supernatural until considerably later in the shows run.

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No, she appeared to EVERYONE to try to frame Baltar when he claimed to stop believing in god. At the end of the episode Adama had her followed and the guards said she “simply turned a corner and disappeared”. That coupled with Baltar having info he simply should not have (like telling Lee exactly where to shoot at the cylon base in order to make it explode) while still slightly ambiguous it at least should prepare you for the notion that all the supernatural stuff was in fact real. Some people just wanted it to not be real and expected plausible explanations for every instance where it appeared to be supernatural, when it turned out to be true they were disappointed, that doesn’t mean it came out of nowhere or that it was a bad ending it just wasn’t the explanation you wanted.

79

The point of BSG was never “what’s going on with the mysticism?”

The point was “what’s going on with these people?”

The simple ‘metaphysical thud’ was to explain the extraneous, unimportant bits. The HeadAngels. Starbuck. The visions and prophecies. That crap. The finale spends very little time on that, and relegates most of it to a brief epilogue.

That’s why most of the finale deals with what happens to the people we’ve been watching – whether they blow their brains out, fly into the sun, or go off to build a farm someplace far far away from their technology which chased them across the universe to kill them.

So when those who are dissatisfied with the finale of BSG do nothing but complain about the mysticism in the finale, those of us who caught on that the mysticism was a sideline to the actual finale point out that it had been a sideline in there all along. And if you would be dissatisfied with a finale that had a mysticism sideline… you’d been watching the wrong show all along.

No. There was a scientific explanation for that. You just had to have watched “The Plan” to learn it. It was pretty much what had seemed likely at the time, too (i.e., no ‘mysticism’).

80

The Plan came out much later than the series, you don’t need to have watched it to understand something that happened in the first season. That they retroactively changed what happened does not change what was actually shown on the show.