Battlestar Galactica Series Finale

Sorry for the delay in reviewing the final BSG, but it's been a busy weekend preceeded by an even busier week. There is a lot of material to go over, so let's get started.

I'm going to divide the content up into four separate categorized lists, followed by my take on the series' conclusion vs. other sci-fi. So as not to come off as totally negative, I'll start with the parts of the finale that actually worked:

• Tori's comeuppance. Did everyone cheer when the Chief found out how Tori's murdered his wife Cally, and then strangled her? Aaron Douglas has the "enraged bull" look down pat.
  
• Since I still have a soft spot for the Adama-Roslin story, I did get a little misty at Laura's death and Adama's grief. I didn't full-on bawl the way I did for the comparable scenes in Hub, but it did bring their arcs to a satisfying close.

Well, that was a short list. Now let's move on to the complaints:

• More flashbacks. Flashbacks that in the end, only told us how our characters got to be where they were (as opposed to a revelation that would pay off in present day). At best, they were "oh, isn't that interesting" moments that would have been more appropriate in a 3^rd- or 4^th-to-last story.
  
• Mr. Hoshi promoted to Admiral and Romo Lampkin promoted to president. Seriously?
  
• Cavil shooting himself in the head when he couldn't get resurrection. Perhaps it was shocking in that it was unexpected, but not to say this was anything other than writers quickly writing off a character that they didn't know what to do with.
  
• Racetrack and Skulls (in a final, posthumous display of functionality) blow up the Colony, when an asteroid hits their already-smashed raptor, causing Racetrack's dead hand to hit the "fire" button. OH COME ON.
  
• The whole business with "Angel" Six and Baltar was just weak, from the god explanation to the terrible dialog ("your lives will be less eventful now").
  
• NO WAY IN HELL do I buy that even after 4 years of hell the survivors of the human race would abandon their technology, send their ships into the sun, and just "go native". No way.
  
• For a series with its own science advisor, and one that has gone out of its way to portray a realistic universe (very sparse, no alien life, hardly any habitable planets), they certainly are making a 180 with this whole "being genetically compatible with the separately-evolved humans on New Earth" idea. Why didn't New Earth just have lower primates and no hominids, and Hera +39,000 humans just fill the gap?
  
• So what could have been a compelling story moment was during the raid on the "colony", when Helo is shot in the gut and Hera runs away. Athena has a terrible choice - save her dying husband or rescue her daughter? Helo tells her to leave him, Athena reluctantly complies. The audience figures Helo is dead, because you don't see him again for an hour and a half. Then all of a sudden he's alive on New Earth, walking with a limp. Methinks there was some conjoining material left on the cutting room floor. Still, way to take the wind out of some high-drama, RDM + crew.
  
• Speaking of RDM, some of you may have noticed his cameo in the final scenes of present-day New Earth, reading a magazine about Hera, the Mitochondrial Eve. Now, this scene neither diminished nor added anything, but:
  1. it's already been done on B5 by JMS
     
  2. it would have been more powerful as a signature if the caliber of Daybreak were closer to Sleeping in the Light.
• The "OMG FEAR TECHNOLOGY" montage at the very end, where we're supposed to get the heebie-jeebies for our accelerating advances in robotics. *groan*.

And the confusing:

• What was with the old-school centurions on Cavil's ship? Initially it seemed as though it was BSG:TOS fan pandering (like with the anthem playing towards the end), or perhaps just to distinguish in the battle scenes which centurions were on which side. Then I had an "aha" moment and figured that since the 2s/6s/8s gave the centurions free will, that they would ditch Cavil's side entirely, forcing Cavil to dig up older models. But that hypothesis was blown to hell when later I spotted new-style centurions on Cavil's side. Dunno!
  
• So Kara is, what, a ghost? One that everyone on Galactica saw for a year, and had blood samples taken from, and one that had its own halluncinations? Anyway, I think BSG has played the "disappearing hallucination" card one too many times (e.g., Romo's cat, piano guy).

Lastly, here is my list of unresolved plot arcs. Feel free to add to them if you've got more. I suppose it's possible that some questions will be answered in The Plan, but I'm not holding my breath.

• The creepy spiritual/stalker relationship between the Leoben model and Kara Thrace. This one was dropped like a stone after Kara found her charred corpse, no explanation.
  
• Anders revealed a few stories back that Tori and Chief Tyrol were "madly in love" back in their original lives as the research scientists under Ellen Tigh's leadership. Absolutely nothing further was made of this, despite Tori's murder of Calli and the return of Boomer.
  
• the 13^th model Daniel.
  
• How Kara's father knew the "all along the watchtower" song.

I had lots more, but I've been writing this review for an hour and a half and my brain is tired. Plus a lot of arcs I consider "unresolved" are technically more like half-assed resolved. Mostly where the buck is passed to the supernatural, which of course in my mind doesn't qualify as much of an explanation. Like I said, feel free to tack on your "unresolved"s here too.

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Looking back on the series in its entirety, my opinion is this - RDM, David Eick, etc, were really good at opening new and compelling plot arcs, but fumbled in attempting to close them. The series was, by their own admission, done pretty seat of the pants, with no planning ahead on how to resolve the mysteries that were pitched. Unfortunately, even though it was brilliant seat-of-the-pants, the chickens did come home to roost. That is why (network/cancellation issues notwithstanding) Babylon 5 was able to successfully tie up 95% of its threads by series' end - JMS had planned this story ahead of time and was working toward that aim the whole time. On the other hand, the BSG crew was left scrambling to tie up dozens of disparate fragments, and also make it all look like they'd been planning it that way all along.

And in that, sadly, they failed.

Tags: sci-fi
Mood: contemplative