My problem with the VERY ending is this: I had assumed that the “all of this” that “has happened before and will happen again” was war, subjugation, all of the big no-nos that lead to the extinction of entire races. Instead, we find out that the moral of the story was “don’t screw around with robots” and that this time around the Japanese apparently will be our undoing.
It seems like a pretty small and narrow lesson after four years of fairly decent space opera. I think the very end of BSG will go down in history as one of the most serious missteps in TV history. Having Adama wake up next to Suzanne Pleshette would have been preferable (although, sadly, not possible).
Zylon
1822
My problem with the ending is that Moore pretty much literally explained it all with “A wizard did it”.
All wiped out instantaneously by disease? No, of course not. It was fucking hyperbole. How well, though, do you really think however many thousand people would do, abandoning every piece of technology, bar informational, since the stone age, to merge with prelinguistic tribal humans? How long would their lives be? How happy would those lives be, compared to the lives they’d left behind on Caprica? Shit, how happy would YOU be to give up your lifestyle to go become a hunter-gatherer? It’s ridiculous to think they’d just happily merge right in, teaching the various tribal groups language, farming, what the fuck ever. Lee Adama’s decision, pragmatically, condemned most of those people to death within a few years. It may have been a poetic ending to the series, but it was also the second most laughable point in it. (The most laughable bit being the ACTUAL endng, with the bickering angels.)
Yeah, that’s what I got from it as well. Cavil was the master manipulator, he always had to be in control. One of his very first actions was to dominate his ‘parents’ and place them under his thumb. So his plan has failed, he thinks he’s been deceived and outmaneuvered, he’s surrounded by enemies, and all his guards are dead. What else is he going to do? He’s sure as hell not going to give them the satisfaction of killing him. The only two things, at that point, that would have rung true for the character were offing himself, or somehow offing Hera in a final spasm of vengeance, before being gunned down. And Hera has Plot Armor + 10000, so that could never happen.
I must’ve blinked and missed the part in the opera house rescue scene where someone hauled Hera up 75 feet of rope back into Galactica.
She was back in Galactica before the opera house bit started. It started when she ran from her parents, after Helo was shot in the… thigh, I guess.
Hugin
1827
Ridiculous. You’ve built up a model of human fragility in your mind that is flatly contradicted by history. Yes, disasters, plagues, genocides, there are ways to wipe out entire populations, but they’re the exception, not the rule. They’ll lose people, here and there, to mistakes, to accidents, to stupidity, but overall there’s no reason to not believe at least some of those settlements will be fine, especially considering the vast amount of technology they retain. Not spaceships and guns and whatnot, but the knowledge of your average modern farmer would have been hot shit back in prehistory.
Also, lifestyle wise, why are you comparing their lives to that on Caprica? Have you seen the “belowdecks” living conditions? For 4 years most of those people have been living in tiny metal carrels and eating algae and dogfood.
It’s not that I don’t think human beings, in the general sense, are durable survivors. It’s more that I don’t think a specific group of human beings who have, through cultural and technological evolution, become accustomed to a certain type of lifestyle, would be well adapted to returning to the stone age at ages of 30 and up. I’m sorry, I just don’t see that being plausible. And as far as that ‘knowledge’ goes, it obviously dies out pretty fucking quickly, doesn’t it? If we’re meant to believe that they land 150,000 years before our modern life, well, we know how life was one hundred and fifty thousand years ago, and we damn well know that modern knowledge didn’t make it forward from then to now. So clearly, the vast majority of the knowledge they brought with them is dead in one or two generations.
Case
1829
Put me in the camp of people who went along for the ride in the finale and enjoyed it.
The only thing that really bugged me about the finale was the bit about going native. It wasn’t the “going native” part that bugged me, but how it was handled in such a hamhanded manner.
Humanity is down to a handful of ships. There isn’t really a lot of tech left. And despite having defeated Cavill, we know rogue basestars are still around, and still might want to kill off humanity. So the conversation could have gone like this:
"There are already indigenous humans here. It’s a beautiful world, and it will be easy to get small settlements up and running. But we need to minimize out technology footprint, so if the remaining hostile Cylons find the planet, there are no emissions and no evidence we exist after a few years. We’ll bury the stuff we need deep in caverns, until it’s gone.
Oh, and we’ll send the ships into the sun. Can’t leave them orbiting Earth as a giant “shoot here” bullseye."
Or something.
Hugin
1830
Oh god, really? I mean the show posits that Hera is mitochondria Eve, and that Earth 2 has humans biologically compatible with the colonial humans, and your argument is “Well we didn’t have microwaves 100,000 years ago, therefore they must have all failed and died, Q.E.D., aren’t I clever”. Yes, I guess it might have been nice if the writers had been like “Oh, here we are in the Ur valley and boy these people don’t know anything, let’s kickstart civilization as we know it, starting with beer.” and then matched up all the dates and whatnot. Or like someone else wrote, maybe if they’d taken a few more drugs they’d have gone with “Here we are on this nice Island, let’s make an awesome super civilization, what’ll we call it, I know, Atlantis, hopefully nothing disasterous happens later.”
I’m not arguing about the mapping of the finale’s mythology to real human history. I’m saying, 30,000 people from a modern, urbanized civilization with a reasonable mix of skills can make some rural settlements and survive. They’re not going back to the stone age, they’re leapfrogging a lot of that shit, the difference between, I dunno, Renaissance Tuscany or Colonial Virginia farming and true stone age is huge, but relatively little of it has to do with whether or not you have to retrain some Space Accountants and Space Taxi drivers to grow vegetables and fish and hunt game and remember to maybe experiment with shooting air and straw into some molten iron ore and maybe try that whole charcoal and sulfur and bat shit for kicks. It’ll be backbreaking, they’ll suffer, they’ll take losses, but they aren’t helpless infants.
Thanks for summing this up better than I could.
It was double unnecessary because even if they had gone through with downloading the resurrection data the colony was about 2 minutes away from getting nuked to pieces.
Athryn
1833
How I saw it is that they probably got folded into history as things like the Tuatha Dé Danann, and other legends of somewhat more advanced peoples. I think they purposely left it up to interpretation as to how they were integrated into our collective history.
Doesn’t making Hera the “Eve” of the world conclusively prove that all of the other Galactica remnants died out?
That’s the last post for me on this show. I’m not wasting more time trying to rationalize what was obvious nonsensical gibberish, or at best, senseless fluff. The more I think about this stuff the more it ruins fonder memories of the show.
They survived, but none of their knowledge lasted. If it had, it would have taken them a very small fraction of 150,000 years to get back to interstellar travel.
And there are many good reasons why they would not survive, in spite of knowing things about a lot of stuff. Drastic climate fluctuations, lack of agrochemicals, no way to synthesize vaccines, drought, floods, lack of sanitation, and lack of domestic animals, just to name a few. They also spread themselves very thinly across the globe, believing that having a few thousand here and a few thousand there will increase their odds. In anthropological practice, that’s way below critical levels if you want your village to weather the effects of all those things I just listed.
Keep in mind that the colonials have no idea what kind of geography, weather patterns, and wildlife are conducive to living from scratch. People learn about survivalism, and they learn about the beginning of civilization, but that crucial space in between is largely a dark area.
Nah, I think it means she was the only Galactica remnant that was found.
At one point in human history, there were roughly 10,000 humans on the entire planet. We stood on the brink of extinction and came back. As a species, we’re pretty damn tenacious.
I find it incredible that people actually have a hard time believing that they could live on Earth without their technology. Would they all live to be 90? No. Some would die off. But if they’re at all like us, most would innoculated against common diseases and they’d also know that two ways to prevent a lot of other diseases is by taking a bath and not eating out of your latrine.
XPav
1838
I liked it.
One thing that I think they chickened out on – killing Helo. He was obviously dead, but I think they kept his character alive because they couldn’t bring themselves to kill off Helo, the character with the truest morals in the entire show.
I liked the flashbacks more and more, in particular the Lee/Kara one, which demonstrates where their tension started but also the doomed nature of their relationship. They were perfect for each other, but fate or circumstances or the universe were never at the right time together.
I also liked to see the characters happy, as they were before the fall.
The one I liked the most was Boomer’s, though. It just felt right to me.
And I have to admit I teared up with Roslin dying, and then Baltar of all people made me tear up at the end when he suddenly remembers his father.
If you don’t like the 150,000 years thing, you an always edit it so the credits roll with Adama sitting on the ridge with Roslin’s grave at his side and the final version of Bear McCreary’s awesome The Shape of Things To Come theme. Word is that there’s so much great music in S4 that Bear may have to put out a two-disc soundtrack. A lot of people really hope that’s the case. The finale itself is worthy of its own disc.
Kara was actually cute in the flashback, even with her short hair.
