BSG Finale Thoughts

[sunnyskywalker]

My reactions under the cut.

• My question of who is running the fleet was answered! I did not expect Hoshi and Lampkin, but I guess that makes sense - they sorta have experience and are pretty much the only ones left behind Adama can halfway trust.



• The pre-nuke flashbacks were about 80% useless. What does Roslin sleeping with a former student (wasn't she a kindergarten teacher?) have to do with anything? Other than her inexplicably joining Adar's campaign, thus setting her up to be a surprise president someday. And okay, Lee and Kara hit it off right away...so? Didn't we already kind of figure that? I'm not opposed to having "in the beginning, these characters..." flashbacks to contrast with the end, but these mostly felt like filler. Seeing how Six maneuvered Baltar into giving her access to the defense mainframe was pretty cool, though.



• Is crashing your ship into the enemy base actually a viable strategy when your ship is already falling to pieces? It was fun to watch, but I wondered why the Galactica didn't break apart right there.



• Racetrack apparently did more damage dead than anyone else did alive on that mission. Funny :D



• Tyrol was channeling Titus Pullo for a minute with that strangling-the-woman-who-killed-my-wife thing. Except he wasn't as stone-cold as Pullo. Tory might have done better to apologize before they communed via goobath. Maybe she hoped they'd finish before he had time to see that and react?



• I had a hard time buying that uber-hardliner Cavil would get amenable to solving things through a diplomatic exchange of assets all of a sudden, especially when the conversation starts with "angels tell me this is the way to go." I propose that he had realized he wouldn't get out of there with Hera alive and was salvaging the situation as best he could.



• I love the reversal of Boomer snapping a fellow Cylon's neck so she could take Hera and run back to the Colonials this time! (Remember the scene with Caprica Six and Boomer? Already awesome. Now even more awesome.) And I love that she owns her choices, and accepts that this will probably get her permanently dead but does it anyway.



• Wow, Athena has now not only stolen Boomer's memories, job, and basically entire life, but killed Boomer too. Ouch. And poor Boomer - it never goes well for her when she puts aside her bitterness and tries to do the right thing, does it?



• Why would the mutineers want to go on this suicide mission? If they stayed in the brig, odds were good the people who locked them up would die, and maybe the new leadership would let them out soon out of necessity.



• Roslin dying while Adama was talking to her did make me tear up even if they have been annoying me lately.



• So...that's the whole significance to the opera house vision? Six and Baltar get Hera behind a door to a few minutes of safety until other people can get rid of Cavil and co. and get her back to her parents? Kind of a let-down, if you ask me.



• Hera's special significance isn't all that special, either. She did not usher in a new era of Cylon-Human cooperation, or a new hybrid race (given how diluted the Cylon heritage must be after 150,00 years, it hardly counts). She didn't even help the human race survive. All she did was grow up and have babies with the thousands of other humans hanging around, who in turn had lots of descendants; they would have done just as well without her.



• Unless being a teeny bit Cylon gave her grandkids a survival advantage over the Neanderthals that the Colonial humans didn't already have. Extra toughness? But even then, the bunch of Twos, Sixes, and Eights who moved in could have had hybrid kids too. So I guess Helo and Athena were the only Cylon/Human couple ever to love each other enough to reproduce?



• Kara's part was...confusing. I mean, the music being a representation of the coordinates to Earth #2, fine - I can buy that for this sort of show. But her destiny? Huh? I guess it depends on whether Kara #2 was an angel programmed to think she was human (so, kind of like the Boomer to Head!Six and Head!Balter's Cylons, if you take my analogy), or a very solid ghost who maybe became an angel or had angelish attributes. If she was just an amnesiac angel with Kara's memories, then that means Kara's destiny was to off herself so an imposter could take her place and do the important stuff. That SUCKS. So I will go for "Kara was a very solid ghost, unlike Head!Six, who had to die to access some important info in angel-land to fulfill her destiny. Maybe she became an angel after she died and now appears in various guises, maybe not."



• If it's version one of Kara Thrace and Her Special Destiny, though, there needs to be fanfic wherein Boomer and Original Kara bond in the afterlife about getting their lives stolen by identical copies with identical memories.



• Sam! He must have agreed to fly the fleet into the sun, or he wouldn't have done it...right? And his "see you on the other side" was so sad. But it gives me hope that Kara 2 is actually SolidGhost!Kara (possibly Angel-in-Training) rather than Imposter!Kara.



• I also got a little suspicious that the writers spent so much time harping on God's Mysterious Ways^TM because they honestly had no idea how to make some bits make sense and just used Mysteriosity as a band-aid. "No, it isn't a mess, it's Mysterious!"



• Lee wants to teach the Neanderthals language and give them "the best parts of us"? Lift up the White Caprican's Burden. This is even more disturbing when you consider that the Colonial humans probably displaced the locals eventually (since evidence of Neanderthal/Homo sapiens interbreeding is scanty so far). Not that interbeeding wouldn't have been problematic in its own way.



• Flashback!Adama thinks it's bullshit that he has to pass a background test involving lie detection to take a sensitive government job. (How has he lasted that long in the military? Don't they do stuff like that, or does the Colonial Fleet just take your word that you've never robbed, killed, smoked pot, given anyone access to the defense mainframe, etc.?) I think it's funny that he decided it was bullshit after they asked him whether he had ever engaged in petty thievery. Why taking that so personal, Bill? Hm?



• Flashback!Adama/Tigh/Ellen in the strip club: boring. Drunk-and-vomiting Flashback!Adama and waaaay-too-drunk Flashback!Lee and Zak and Kara: is everyone on this show an alcoholic?



• Continuing in that vein, is it normal procedure for a commander and his XO to give performance evaluations while drinking and making snarky comments to each other?



• I assume one of the groups in the Colonial diaspora settled in Greece, but I also wonder how they kept their religion more or less intact for the next 147,000 years.



• This episode had lots of anvilicious moments. Laura's "All the way to the end" was actually kind of nice, but then they made her repeat it just in case we didn't get it the first time. And as much as I like Head!Six and Head!Baltar wandering around modern Earth, turning to the camera and going, "Hey look! You're greedy and etc. just like those other guys! And have robots! I WONDER IF YOU WILL REPEAT THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE?" is juuuust a little much. They could have scaled it down considerably and made the same point - maybe just have them reading that article over Ron Moore's shoulder so we knew what happened to Hera and her much-vaunted destiny, then turning to notice the homeless people sitting in front of the TV showing the robot and looking at each other with a "hmmmm..." expression.

Okay, quiz time!

[Poll #1369622]

Comments

[plasticinecupid.livejournal.com]

You've pointed most of the issues with the finale, I think. But I have another: Where the frack is Deanna? She's been in... 1 episode from season 4! And why haven't we seen her or Leoben on Galactica?

The ending is pretty silly, and when they decide to be Luddites, I'm going, "No, no, that is not BREAKING the cycle of anything. You're just returning to square 1 in order to repeat it all. Only now, you'll lose the lessons you just learned, because your culture will disappear. People will be too busy surviving with stone age tech to keep reading books and studying history."

As a sort of light joke I liked the very end, though. The show has from the beginning been about the present, since the depicted human culture is 21st century US, not even thinly veiled. When we think it out, it's ridiculous. So I just took the whole Hera as mitochondrial Eve thing as a joke about the implausibility of the whole show, and a reminder of what the show has been about all along. (*Sigh* More on that later. Gotta watch it all again some time.)

[sunnyskywalker]

Deanna must be hanging out at the Cylon spa until the base star and the Colonial Fleet agrees to pay her more. Or she got sick of being the last Three and jumped into a maelstrom like Kara. I know the actress probably wasn't available, but couldn't they have mentioned her? "Deanna says..."

Maybe Papadama didn't want Leoben near Starbuck after that New Caprica thing? Would he care that much?

Yeah, I do not see how running free in the fields is going to help anything either. (Splitting into two or three settlements to maximize chances of survival, sure. But not this.) Because you're right, how are they going to learn anything if they just chuck all the hard-won lessons?

Two other odds and ends:

- What was the point of Daniel? If they needed a backstory for How Cavil Showed His Evil Stripes, wouldn't secretly reprogramming the chromejobs to shoot the Five so he could wipe their memories and dump them in the Colonies be enough? Maybe they were trying to retcon the numbering issue: since they didn't come up with the Final Five idea until Season 2, they'd already designated a Number Eight, assuming there would be skinjobs One through Twelve. But with the Final Five, we lost that, and there should only be seven numbered models. And why would those numbers be One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Eight?

- How exactly does Baltar plan to start a farm? There aren't any domesticated plants around, so he's going to be stuck with - what, a few tiny and barely nutritious wild grasses?

That is true about the show not even trying to be anything other than 21st-century US. Will have to rewatch end with it being a joke in mind.