Battlestar Galactica Finale Reactions

[reggie14]

Given the high percentage of geeks on this forum, there must be some other BSG fans. What did you think of the finale? I have to say I was pretty disappointed. The first half was a mostly senseless epic battle sequence, and the second half was just cheesy. I think the writers for BSG wrote themselves into a corner, and waited too long into the final season before trying to explain everything that had been going on for the first 3.5 seasons. So, a lot of loose ends were left untied, and a lot of other ones had resolutions that were sort of lame.

Am I being too harsh? What did you think?

[Fluffdaddy]

The space battles were brilliant. But the story line sucked, big time. Mr Moore just does not care about plot development. They/he just made stuff up as they want along, not caring what happened in the past seasons. So many questions so little logical real answers

Never missed a episode, but I'm happy it's over with

[sleonard]

"You will know the answers." - NOT

It was a great SciFi series. A hard genre to make good shows in. Usually all fiction and little to no science. BSG did a great job overall but ended with a whimper.

BTW, it's not over with yet. They advertised a spin-off that tells the story from the Cylons side coming in the fall.

S

[sainswor99]

Originally Posted by sleonard

BTW, it's not over with yet. They advertised a spin-off that tells the story from the Cylons side coming in the fall.

A 2-hour special. They couldn't wrap up 3 seasons of plot development in 1 season, and you have hopes that 2 hours from the other perspective will help?

I wish it were so, but I'm afraid I'm going to be just as disappointed.

[SprDtyF350]

I remember watching the very first episode back in 1978. I was 19 at the time and could hardly wait every week to watch. I really liked the new BSG version also but the finale was just plain a disappointment. I'm not really sure how it could end and not be a disappointment though. Seemed to me that the whole final five build up was really a whole lot of nothing. Starbuck just up and disappearing was weird. The whole thing seemed as if they were just making stuff up on the fly with no thought of having answers for any of it.

Oh well, at least I can say I watched the very first when it originally aired, and the very last...

[Fluffdaddy]

Originally Posted by SprDtyF350

The whole thing seemed as if they were just making stuff up on the fly with no thought of having answers for any of it.
.

Ding ding ding...............we have a winner.

It's like they never expected the show to last more then one or two seasons

[stanger89]

I don't know, it seemed kind of fitting to me. BSG seemed sorta schizophrnic from the beginning. On the one hand there were the awesome scifi/space/battle elements to the series (I guess that's what really kept me watching) and on the other there was the odd, almost soap opera-ish side stories/development.

The finale was kind of the same way. First half was the great scifi/space/battle we've come to expect, second half was the kind of odd "side story".

In the end, it wasn't really a disappointment as it wasn't that much different than the rest of the series.

[Mitch G]

I was expecting something a bit more clever for the earth punchline. Something that weaved into earth's history and/or bible stories.
I had all sorts of theories (as I'm sure others did) about how it was going to play out.
And instead they end with the thing about the mitochondrial Eve which makes no sense given what they found on earth.
(I'm trying to avoid spoilers)


Mitch

[GKusnick]

I think anybody who doesn't want to read any spoilers should probably avoid this thread altogether until after they've watched the finale. (That's what I did.)

The mitochondrial Eve thing does make sense, given compatible DNA. Mitochondral Eve is great-great-great-...-grandmother to everyone on the planet, but that doesn't mean there weren't any people around before her. It just means that hers is the female line of descent that everybody else eventually married into, and any unrelated female lines have since gone extinct.

That said, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the idea that, after all that buildup, the great hope for the future turned out to be important mainly for her mitochondria.

[reggie14]

Originally Posted by Mitch G

I was expecting something a bit more clever for the earth punchline.

I agree with this, although I was looking for something entirely different than you. I was happy when the found Earth #1 destroyed because I thought that opened up a lot of possibilities for the show. A very, very common thought all along was that the fleet would eventually make it to Earth, somehow lose their technology, and become us thousands of years later. Since that was sort of a forgone conclusion early on, I thought finding Earth #1 opened the door for more interesting twists.

Related to that, I thought Lee's decision to not build up a city was a pretty lame. It seemed like that was just thrown in there so it wouldn't screw up our history of our Earth. It seemed like an awful decision for all sorts of reasons. First, lots of people would die since they wouldn't know how to live like that. Sure, they're not going to be able to build a post-industrial civilization, but they could have done much better technologically than hunters and gatherers. Second, it seems like the perfect way to start the cycle again. The show strongly implied many times that the robot versus human thing happened many times before. I always wanted to know why there wasn't a historical record of that. You'd think a space-faring civilization wouldn't have a hard time recording a near-permanent history of events. But, it's awfully hard to keep passing down an accurate history verbally for thousands of years, which is what they limited themselves too.

The finale was mostly rather predictable, and didn't really explain a lot of the parts of the show that made it great, as opposed to just good. There wasn't that many things that were terribly clever in it. The resolution of the opera house vision was pretty clever, but that's about it. I'd maybe say the song thing was a little clever, had there been more to it than that. The battle was entertaining, but there wasn't anything about it that was particularly clever or interesting. It pretty much went down exactly how you'd expect.

I felt a little cheated about the explanation that 'God' was really responsible for everything (that's not quite accurate, but close enough). I think they could have gone that route if they really wanted, but there should have been more to it than that. Religion and mythology played a much bigger role earlier in the series. Sure, Baltar has been going off on the 'one true God' for a while, but in a much different way than how it was addressed early on. Baltar was really just going off on philosophical nonsense mostly, whereas they had potentially interesting ideas early on. On Kobol, the humans and Gods apparently lived together before the calamity that caused the twelve colonies to split off. I wanted to learn more about that. And, I would have been perfectly happy if that would have found it's way into a supernatural finale for the show. I wanted to know why the thirteenth tribe left Kobol, and what happened to the Kobol Cylons and what happened to the Earth cylons.

And, I was even potentially fine with Head Six, Head Baltar and Starbuck all being angels, if they would have just explained the religious backstory a bit more.

As a couple other have you have mentioned, I think Moore and the other writers just didn't have a good idea of where they wanted the story to go. But, they were committed to ending the show this season, and needed to come up with something. They must have really struggled, because it really seems like they kept putting off the show's resolution over and over again until the last 5 episodes (really, they started resolving it when Anders got shot).

[Fluffdaddy]

No way would people completely abandon their technology and live out their lives working 10+ hour days of backbreaking labor trying to grow crops and build wood/mud/grass cabins. These were people that were use to and loved technology.

Fly their ships into the sun............No way.

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Fluffdaddy

No way would people completely abandon their technology and live out their lives working 10+ hour days of backbreaking labor trying to grow crops and build wood/mud/grass cabins.

But that's not what they did. True, there was some talk about farming, but remember this was supposed to be 150,000 years ago. Labor-intensive agriculture in the sense you're talking about didn't arise until much later, roughly 10,000 years ago. So what the survivors opted for was more of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle with perhaps a small vegetable plot or kitchen garden -- which (anthropologists tell us) is a pretty low-stress lifestyle with lots of leisure time compared to modern technological life.

[Kryspy]

I dunno I thought the finale was right up there with the "Tears in Rain" ending of Bladerunner and that is quite a feat to match.

That came to a hlat when they did the 150,000 years later portion. Should have ended before that as it was like "Umm ok I got it already mankind came from them... got it when they showed the cavemen....didn't need the fast forward"

By the way did I sleep through the episode where Baltar was given immortality ?

Kryspy

[Jesse]

It was occasionally uneven, but I am really going to miss this show. It never seemed like an open ended story to me, so I am glad it had a proper end. Lately it seems that a lot of the stuff I like to watch gets killed before it wraps up, so from that standpoint it was satisfying. So ends a great space opera.

Jesse

[ChaOConnor]

All in all I thought it was good. I mean, it was one of those situations that going in I told myself, "How are they possibly going to end this?" so I kind of set myself up for the big hurt. But all in all, I was fine w/ the way it ended with a few caveats:
- Kara being an angel... ghost... what? I mean, if she was an angel, how come everyone could see and interact w/ her, but Angel 6 & Angel Baltar (shudder) are only visibile to their counterparts & their alive opposite?
- Pilot their ships into the sun, okay. What about all the landers? Did they pilot them into New Jersey?
- Lee pussed out... nuff said.

I thought the battle was cool, not as cool as when BSG dropped into New Caprica's atmosphere (still my favorite scene of the whole series).

I'll re-watch it this week after my emotions have calmed down and see what else I think about it.

[mikejaner]

Originally Posted by Kryspy

By the way did I sleep through the episode where Baltar was given immortality ?
Kryspy

Baltar was an angel, just like Caprica was. Not the ones you saw walking around in the episodes, but the ones in the heads of their opposites. Remember Baltar was seeing Caprica in his head? Caprica was seeing Baltar in the same fashion. It turns out they were angels, who were guiding them.

[Rogue9]

Originally Posted by GKusnick

The mitochondrial Eve thing does make sense, given compatible DNA. Mitochondral Eve is great-great-great-...-grandmother to everyone on the planet, but that doesn't mean there weren't any people around before her. It just means that hers is the female line of descent that everybody else eventually married into, and any unrelated female lines have since gone extinct.

That said, I was somewhat underwhelmed by the idea that, after all that buildup, the great hope for the future turned out to be important mainly for her mitochondria.

This. And the importance of it, is that we are ALL "part" cylon. We all descended from a half-human, half-cylon entity. Pretty neat that our "Most Recent Common Ancestor" was half-cylon.

Originally Posted by Kryspy

That came to a hlat when they did the 150,000 years later portion. Should have ended before that as it was like "Umm ok I got it already mankind came from them... got it when they showed the cavemen....didn't need the fast forward"

That was only a very small part of the reason for the "present day" exchange between Head Six and Head Baltar. The whole point of that segment was to show that even tho the colonists gave up their technology to prevent a repeat of the Human-Cylon war, that we were getting dangerously close to repeating the cycle ourselves, by continuing to advance in technology and robotics. The moral is that if we are not careful, we could unknowingly re-create the cylons and doom ourselves in the process.

[dvd_maniac]

My only problems with the show that started off as awesome...
1. Half of the final season seemed to be about Admiral Adama CRYING???
2. I thought Starbuck was suppose to be the harbinger of death for all humanity?
3. The series Finale reminded me of watching a home video of a family I didn't know on vacation. I thought the character building that started off so well in the begining of the series took too many turns and became lost.
4. The plots that they started with and made such a big deal about became trivialized.
Ex. The Cylons - They Have a Plan! What the hell was it? The fifth Cyclon - Could have ended up being anybody without much of the storyline changing. Really anticlimatic stuff...

[Rogue9]

Originally Posted by dvd_maniac

2. I thought Starbuck was suppose to be the harbinger of death for all humanity?

They never said humanity at all. The hybrid actually said:

"You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace. You will lead them all to their end."

No mention of humanity, or even Cylons at all. We don't know who "them" was intended to be. Nor does it say what "end" that would be. The end of the fleet's journey? In which case, she did lead them all to their end.

[dvd_maniac]

No mention of humanity, or even Cylons at all. We don't know who "them" was intended to be. Nor does it say what "end" that would be. The end of the fleet's journey? In which case, she did lead them all to their end.

OK, I conceed that, but the ambiguity is my point. If you say you have a plan at the begining of every episode for however long they did that then what was it? What end? harbinger od death? What death?

You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace. You will lead them all to their end."

harbinger of death being the key term I do not understand?