Thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica finale

Like all good series finales, the Battlestar Galactica finale is still churning up some controversy. I'm of three minds about how they ended a show that I feel like I could have loved a lot more, but that ended up just being a guilty pleasure:


Getting Off Too Easily

First, everything wrapped up just too neatly for me -- a suicide mission into the cylon colony succeeds in grabbing Hera. (For what purpose, who the fuck knows. I mean, could somebody please explain to me, without resorting to mystical mumbo jumo, why the hell everybody had to risk their lives to go and get Hera? If we needed a cylon/human hybrid, why couldn't Gaius and Six and/or Helo and Eight have just gotten it on in the peaceful confines of earth? There seemed no point to the snatch-n-grab aside from fulfilling some goofy "prophecy.")

Then Gaius, the least-credible person in the universe, manages to talk the extremely unsentimental Cavil into ending a milennia-long war for civilizational survival with a speech heavy on more of this destiny and God stuff.

Then, oops, a dead Racetrack's hand slips and launches the nukes she'd conveniently loaded, which are enough to destroy the entire cylon colony, which apparently was prepared to defend itself against anything but that. Right.

I've got more of these, but you get the picture. The show didn't get famous for tying up plot lines this simply. This was all well-executed and exciting, but only satisfactory on a surface level and not true to the show's history.


Techmology. What Is It?

The most interesting thing to me about the finale was the decision for all to abandon technology forever and melt into a pre-verbal human race on earth. Being a Luddite (who has a blog?), this has a certain appeal to me. But I'm also a Luddite who enjoys arch support in my shoes, heating and air conditioning systems in my home and the ability to take an Advil when I've got a headache. Killer robots suck, I think we can all agree, but not all technology is so bad. Couldn't they just have agreed, ixnay on the iller-robots-kay?

Again, from the standpoint of working the show into our actual mythology, this was a really cool plot decision, and I'm OK with it. But from a logical standpoint, from the characters' perspective, this makes no fucking sense, and I doubt all 38,000 survivors would have gone along with it. I sure as hell would have fought it.

What might have been cooler to me is if they'd dropped the characters a little later into our history, had the earth people actually notice them (and they probably weren't easy to miss, even for the pre-verbal people of 148,000 BC) and worship them as some sort of gods. Our heroes would succumb to the flattery but would also help instill their own theology into earth humans, warn against techno-worship, build pyramids and such. Probably stupid, too, but it seems a little easier to believe, from a motivation standpoint.


Enough With the Deus

Finally, speaking of motivation, what a cop-out to have everything be directed by God and angels. These guys say it a lot better than me.

This sort of mumbo jumo has bothered me about this show for a long time (it's a beef I have with "Lost," too). Why do we all have to be pushed around by a big spooky sky man somewhere? Isn't it more interesting if we get shit done on our own? Why couldn't Kara have figured out the coordinates to earth without having to be pushed their by the ghost/angel of her father, for example? Why, for that matter, did she have to be an angel?

And why did the Heads Gaius and Six have to be angels wandering around giving advice all the time and, most irritatingly, tut-tutting our modern foibles and techno-worship at the end? Wasn't there a more-subtle way to imply we're on the slippery slope toward killer robots without this sledgehammer of divine intervention?

All in all, this was an entertaining two hours of television, but a real let-down for what could have been a truly great series.