“God has a plan for all of us.”
SPOILERS
So what did you guys think? I enjoyed it, I think. I confess I had a feeling that what happened would happen – Galactica being the spark that helped civilize earth. But the way they did it was pretty cool. I don’t know if I buy Cavil being talked down so easily, it kind of went against his character’s grain.
I also wonder if the “And they have a plan” from the first few seasons can really be stretched into this being what the Cylons – at least some of them – had in mind all along. And if so, I guess it was God’s will that the 12 colonies were nuked?
I could have done without Adama’s puking scene. It served the plot but I dunno if I buy everyone going “Yeah, let’s ditch our space junk and just live in the wild on an unknown planet”.
At the end of the day I think my favorite character turned out to be Baltar. I still think he’s a weasel though.
I feel robbed…
I was hoping that the writers of this thing had a plan other than “god did it”.
It is cheap and boring… It invalidates every choice made in the show, after all god was doing it. weaksauce.
Cavil offing himself? What the hell kind’ve antagonist just says, “aww fuck it”. It might as well have been a lightning bolt from god, it would have been just as random.
The space battle was the shit though.
It WASN’T just “God did it.” These people had choices to make, and could easily have made the wrong ones.
Ultimately, I respected the outcome. They tied it into our lives, suggesting that in some ways we walk the same path, but it may not have the same outcome.
I did like the idea that the Six and Baltar were witnesses. It suggested that the Colonials, at least metaphysically, were not forgotten.
I would argue that it was not God’s plan for the Colonies to be nuked. That was the plan of the Cylons, who thought it was God’s plan. I think the ultimate point is that God was working to save both races from their folly, and we are the result.
And, in all honesty, I was relieved that the Colonials found a measure of peace, even as the ending was not all sweetness and light. I teared up when Bill put his ring on Laura.
Baltar’s “I know about…farming” read was the best coda to any character ever.
We missed the first 3 episodes of the season, and sci-fi ripped us off by not showing them again back to back.
We’re just gonna wait for the DVD.
Maybe they can sell this: the Cyclons had a plan, at one point, but things got away from them. I bet the “They have a plan” bit persists too late into the series for that to really work, though.
I know some people are disappointed, but I found the ending satisfying.
Complaining about a Deus ex machina ending to a series that had a thorough dose of deus ex throughout seems unreasonable to me. When a significant part of the discussion is about the nature of the gods, or about certain people having special destinies (not to mention the liberal use of oracles, both human and cylon) you’ve opened the door for supernatural agency on a large scale.
So, no, within the logic of that universe, things unfolded in a way that might have been expected. We got enough answers to have a handle on things, and enough was left unanswered that it wasn’t neat to the point of ridiculousness. We don’t get to look at the answers in the back of the book, and live in the midst of uncertainty and mystery. Good fiction doesn’t remove all ambiguity from its universe any more than we can remove it from our own.
I felt the series ended strongly, after being disappointed with some of the episodes leading up to the finale. For me, Adama and Roslyn were the heart of the show, and I was gratified to see them reach their destination together.
Maureen Ryan, the TV critic for the Chicago Tribune, has the most extensive coverage of the finale:
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2009/03/battlestar-galactica-daybreak-finale-moore-mcdonnell-olmos.html
Considering the way other famous TV series have ended, I was afraid we’d have something like Adama waking up next to Crockett and Tubbs, or Hera staring into a snowglobe with Galactica inside. And once they mentioned there was a black hole, I was afraid of some time-travelling loop episode.
So, it could easily have been worse. It was an acceptable ending, but not a strong one.
I was pretty open to the whole thing, until we got to “and there are primitive people here that we can breed with”. That’s pretty absurd (even compared to the ridiculousness of cylon/human breeding, which at least could conceivably be through the technology of the cylons, although that would lead to wondering why the cylons weren’t capable of breeding themselves), and while I’d expect it on Star Trek, it was a bit disappointing seeing it on BSG..
I enjoyed it, but I have to say that they could’ve ended it before beating us over the head with their stupid “150,000 years later” ending. Like we didn’t already figure out where they were? Or that technology racing ahead of morality was a major theme of the series?
I also agree that the “let’s give up all our stuff” plot line was weak. The writers tried to cheat it by having Romo point out how weak it was (”I must say I’m surprised…”), but that only made it worse.
I really couldn’t suspend my disbelief when the people gave up all civilization- metal tools, clothes, heat, antibiotics, etc., all the things that make life non-miserable. The magnitude of stupidity this decision represented, the fact that it happened with apparently no debate or dissension among about 38,000 people, really took me out of the show. It was disturbing and impossible to believe at the same time.
It also kind of made me wish that Gaeta’s rebellion had won. There’s no way he would have given up technology.