f13.net

Just because there isn't one yet.

When do they finish it up?

The last 10 or 12 episodes start in January.

About 2 years too late.

Whut?  I thought there was just one more.  What the fuck could they pad out another ten episodes with?  I hope you're joking.

Ten hours of shaky cam footage showing them walking around on Earth.

No joke. They split the last season in half and we see the last episodes this winter.

Over the last few weeks I've seen all the episodes for the first time.  Great show.  Reading on another forum it was mentioned the the last episode of the first half was meant to be a sort of ending in case the writer's strike killed the series.

We'll see what they have to finish up.. 5th sekret cyclon, what happened to earth, where is everyone etc etc.

I'm sure they're a bit better when you can watch the last half of Season 2 and all of Season 3 back to back.  :awesome_for_real:

They're a little slow when you space them a week apart.

We always say we should TiVo the entire season and watch it all at once.  But we never do.  And it makes us angry.

The show really benefits from being watched on DvD. And although I was dissapointed with the first half of season four, I suspect that's partly because it suffers from comparison with the genius of earlier seasons rather than being bad in its own right.

Anyway, I really wanted to say that in the final episode of Season One, Gaeta gives Boomer the gun!! Probably old news to everyone else, but I was re-watching it last week and noticed it for the first time, and got very excited. Geata is evil!! But . . . don't think he's a cylon . . .

I am in the process of watching BSG back-to-back, starting with the miniseries. I am now at Episode 10 of Season 3.

Even the worst episode of BSG so far is better than 99% of other television out there. What I especially like about the series is that it does believable drama. Most characters have flaws but they are believable flaws. BSG also doesn't fall into the Heroes trap of making the characters all types of out-of-character shit just to get the story along.

Everybody acts according to their own moral code and personality and if they change any of that it's not done in the blink of an eye but as part of a process.

BSG is one of only a few shows I know that combine action, mythology, social and political discourse and drama in a believable and uncampy way. Just like great science fiction should. They also employ REAL actors and not some beautiful 20 something model types that read lines.

This reminds me the last Robot Chicken was awesome.

Seth Green:  Come, my less famous friend, ride my coat-tails to riches!


Joss Whedon:  What makes you think you're worthy to write in the Whedon-verse?
Seth Green:  Well, I think I...  Wow,  you use that in real life? Really?
Joss Whedon:  Die werewolf! <shoots gun at Seth Green>

Final season starts in Jan right?

They're starting to release webisodes. Last time around they were pretty good and laid some groundwork for the season.

Bargle. I really liked this show when it was starting up. Then it got bogged down in it's own hubris, and between that and Sci-Fi showing one episode per decade in order to pad out their only decent show nowadays, kinda lost interest. I catch the occasional episode on Youtube, but I'm not worried about keeping up with the show anymore.

Interview with Moore about final half season. (http://sepinwall.blogspot.com/2009/01/battlestar-galactica-ron-moore-talks.html)

Hubris is my new favorite word.  I have been using it a lot lately, but not as much as I would like.

A question I hate to see get dropped:  What prevented the Cylons from bring their full weight to bear on New Caprica?

There was a schism caused by Boomer and Six who both fell in love with humans. The Cylons that took New Caprica were the minority that they convinced to try getting along with them.

I get that explanation for why they didn't exterminate the humans. But that doesn't explain why the whole Cylon fleet wasn't parked above New Caprica.

The impression I got was that Boomer and Six and their gang had separated from the main Cylon fleet and they just happened to be the group that noticed the nuclear explosion and came to investigate.

It wasn't the nuclear explosion, the Pegasus Number Six died there (activated the nuke that Baltar gave her) and was downloaded to another body. She probably led the others to New Caprica. The nuclear explosion comment was directed at Baltar when the Cylons met the President and he clearly understood what they meant by that.

Are you sure? I could have sworn one of them mentioned that not seeing the flash from the explosion immediately because of light speed was why they didn't show up for so long.

They explicitly said that. I'm not sure where Jeff is getting this other take on it unless it comes from a Webisode, which would be highly annoying to me.

When does the last season start?

I'm pretty sure it's the 16th.  Google results confirm this, with a finale in March.

Plus a TV movie sometime afterwords.

YAY!

Well now I have to rewatch that episode because I cannot remember that. I remember them saying something to the effect of "We picked up on the nuclear explosion from a year ago, *wink*, *wink*, *nudge*, *nudge*" which I always assumed was a secret hint to Baltar who was the only person in the room who actually knew that it was the Gina Six blowing herself up with the nuke he gave her. It was directed at him and he was the one who seemed to realize what they meant.

I never ever thought that they actually detected the nuclear explosion because there is no chance in hell that somebody would be able to detect the residual light or radiation of a small nuclear explosion from one light year away, especially when the eyplosion occurred inside a nebula that completely distorts all forms of radar (or dradis as they call it).

You could very well be right. This isn't one of the shows I track obsessively.  :awesome_for_real:

Sorry I need to score a few nerd points today ;)

I thought the point of Gina Six blowing herself up was that she wanted to die for real and was too far away to be resurrected?

STARTS TOMORROW!!

 :uhrr:  I'm lost, now I have to watch it again when it airs later.

I totally called that Cylon 2 years ago.

Eh, they really turned the whole '5th cylon' thing into a non issue.  I mean everyone is friends now rite?  And the final one is dead, so there aren't any cylon twists in the future.

So where is the show going now?  I guess they're going to focus on the whole Starbuck thing.

Everyone did.

Called which cylon? because the 5th might not be the one. Or that's my thought after tonight.

Dee left me, damaged. Too much history there and experience with someone who had the clarity of knowing what they were doing. Been there. That hurt. But so well done by Mr. Moore. I'll put $ that was for someone in his past.

We always knew there was something cyclical with the whole "this has all happened before," but I never contemplated it had happened opposite to the current cycle and that's now what I'm thinking he's getting at.

Where do you go? "Somewhere out there" There's a lot of options and I think we'll go through a few before he gets back around to Kara.

Dark.  Very dark.

I recently watched all of S1 back to back with some friends and was amazed at just how much happens in those first 13 episodes.  Some really good TV there.   Season three had some of the best (escape from new caprica - aka bsg the action movie) and some of the worst (gas cloud / particle of the week) episodes of the whole series so far.

I remain stunned by this episode.

But the final one respawns on or near Earth when she dies. And she's gonna need vengeance for how she died.

Also, whoever remade Starbuck and her ship is also out there. Presumably it's number 5 and the new friends she respawned into. Starbuck the harbinger of death - perhaps that means sent back by #5 to lead them all to #5's trap of doom?


She was going to do it from the moment she clawed at the steel jacks in the dirt. And it was a predictable reaction to the end of hope. Some people did the same when they lost hope en route.

BTW I don't think they're jumping anywhere else. They're about to get a reason to stay on or near Earth. Also, the little green plant. "Eve-a." "Wall-ee." "Eve-a." "Wall-ee." ...

Wow.  BSG is back.  And as usual every episode leaves me wanting more, and only giving me mental blue balls. 

Hmm lots to think on here.

So Adama will lead both human and cylon fleets away from Earth to find a new home?  Might that be 13 new homes?
He's doing what his predecessors did when they founded the Twelve Colonies.  He is actually not breaking away from the cycle, he's just diving back into it!


Starbuck's story is fascinating, disappointed in the 5th cylon reveal, shocked by Dualla. 

Kudos to Mr. Moore for making Earth a bait-and-switch.  Or is it? 

Is it just me, or did that centurion faceplate look like it came from an original series cylon?

I think it was one.  "Not like any model we've ever seen"

Not quite. There was an original series cylon in the pilot movie.

That faceplate was wider and less louvered.

Some good points to this episode, and some that just make me mad. As in 'This motherfucker really is making shit up as he goes along' mad.

The 5th cylon reveal was so cheap to me. After all that build up, it's a character that I really felt was totally unimportant other than the effect she had on this other character's arc. But of course, all the final 5 reveals have felt like the writers just threw darts at a bunch of cast pics and then wrote the story to fit that.

The Dualla thing felt like a death for the sake of a death, with the added narrative manipulation of making it seem like her and Apollo were going to get back together.

The final five having lived on Earth 2,000 years ago was a neat twist. That and the Kara revealation are keeping me watching. I will say this. The actors involved for the most part gave outstanding performances, even when I feel the material they were given was crappy. The Tyrol/Adama confrontation was especially good.

The 5th Cylon? Laaaaaaaame. I might need a few more 'A's in that lame to really bring home how lame it actually is.



What I want to know is, who actually blew up earth. The little twist with the 13th colony made is a bit more blurry.

You mean Tigh?

This sums up a good portion of the series for me.  Ronald Moore has done some good stuff but he has a tendency to focus on his "art" and not let unimportant crap like story, or plot, or logic, get in the way of his vision.  I'm filled with nerdrage every time I hear him spout off about how much he looooved the ending to Sopranos, and he wished he could do that with Galactica but someone else beat him to it.  Fuck you, Ron.

Haem, in some Ron Moore interview he said that they came up with revealing the four cylons as a shocking season ender. 

So, so much for 'And they have a plan'.  :heartbreak:

Er, just because Tigh "said" she was the fifth, doesn't necessarily make it so.  She is able to respawn...so what?  There was, um, another character in this episode that also showed she had the ability to do that.

And are we absolutely sure Dualla did it?  I don't want to rewatch the scene, but my first impression was that it was someone else.  Did her arm actually appear?

There wasn't anyone else in the room (and only one door in or out).  Besides look at her words about how she "didn't want to lose this feeling."     She wanted to die happy

If my webhosting wasn't broken for uploading, I'd post the animated .gif I've got of the scene here.  It's very obviously her own doing.

Just saw it for the first time now on scifi.com (stupid DVR missed Friday's). Yes, she did it. There is no mystery here, not one that could be wrapped up in 9 episodes anyway. They really can't afford to waste time with petty sidetracks anyway, so I don't expect Apollo the Mob Bounty Hunter or Starbuck vs Scar season-filler episodes.

I gotta say, awesome episode, but depressing as hell. I need me some shamelessly optimistic Michael Bay or Bruckheimer chaser :oh_i_see:

What the hell are you talking about.  I hope you didn't gleam this information off of a podcast because if the show goes in that direction it will suck.

I think I'll wait to see where they go with it before I get all bummed based off F13 speculation.

Had to re-download and watch episodes 9 and 10. Apparently I just skipped over them, but damn the new episode was good.

My theory is that everyone's a cylon.

I've been thinking the same for a few seasons, and I think this was discussed in an earlier BSG thread. But I will be wildly disappointed if this is the case. I'm all for the sudden changes to characters we cared about, but everyone being a Cylon would be the ultimate "ha ha, we were kidding all along" bullshit I've hated from every incarnation of "it was only a dream" story-ender ever.

At that point I'd just rather they show up at the home system for humans who are armed to the teeth with cutting edge crap they use to blow the shit out of all the cylons that followed the humans there, complete with Michael Douglas as President and an Independence Day like soundtrack with fireworks in front of an America-but-not-America-like flag.

The only cool thing about this episode is we get a glimpse of how old the Cylon technology is. I fnd the whole human Cylon annoying (I still stand by my statement that everything that sucks about BG stems from the skin jobs)

The writers had already given an age previously with the "Magic Virus" ep. I would add "unknowingly", but maybe they had that through a bit.

I"m glad I'm not the only one to notice this amazing awesome ad placement. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW2_2ihIuzI)

Not a fan of the reveal, as she was amongst my least favorite characters in the series. More than a few questions floating around. Everything about Starbuck's reveal in this one could be explained by her being the 5th - but aparently she is not?

We know skinjobs don't "age", so if Earth was populated by Cylons 2000 years ago, was everyone a Cylon, or was it "our" Earth, just with some skinjobs hidden amongst us? Or, was that Earth all skinjobs? I think the former more likely, since in Tyrol's flashback, we saw people that were not any of the established Cylon skinjobs.

Of course the obvious question, assuming that Tyrol and buddies have regened a few times since Earth blew up, how did they get to Caprica? Are there any more of them, or do the orignal five only maintain one copy of themselves at once?

Best question of all - will they bother answering any of these by the end of the series?

How do we know skinjobs don't age? Did I miss something?

I like this one.  One of the better Exploration episodes.  I really didn't expect Starbuck to be such a coward.

Yeah, that's what I meant. Brain fart.

She's always been a coward motivated by fear, self-loathing and an inabilty to deal with anything not a direct combat situation.

Tigh clearly aged. The baby's hybrids also, age. Keep in mind, the show is only 4 years old (in show time frame too). Not really long enough to see the skinjobs age. Especially since they have had the uploading thing.

All things point to "They do age".

Of course the issue with that is, why are every one of the same model the same age then? They obviously can't have all been made at the same time - unless we assume that they just wait for the whole line to hit 80, then slag them and roll out the new younger model...

The final five are different to the other cylons, so they don't have to follow the same rules. There also seems to be only one copy of each of the final five.

I vaguely remember Adama pointing out that Tigh had hair when they first met, ie asking how on earth he could be a cylon when he had aged. Actually, I don't think we know for certain that the seven normal skinjobs can't age, but characters in the show seem to assume that they don't, whereas the final five do.

My biggest hope is also that most, at least, of these questions are actually answered at the end.

Ya know, my vain hope that they don't do the "you're all Cylons" thing at the end has given rise to the hope that the skinjobs are human. They've just forgotten their history, forgotten how they learned to replicate/clone/conduct soul transference, etc. If that technology is truly thousands of years old, it's quite easy to understand. Heck, there's technology today we've forgotten how to create (by product of technology itself being used to advance technology).

I also wonder what the original war was that caused the diaspora. Was it a civil war between cylon and human? Some external event/race (Count Mosely's Beings of Light perhaps  :awesome_for_real:)? It strikes me that these two warring civilizations have some odd technological exceptions. I've always been curious if there was some point to the fact that aside from hyperdrive, fake gravity/intertial dampening (which you'd need for hyperdrive) and AI, they're pretty limited technologically, like humanity maybe 100 years from now but that's it. And that in the whole of their universe there's only two factions of the same original race. Even the old series had other specifics and settlements in it. But even still, at least two thousand years since they figured out cloning and autonomous AI and all they have to show for it is USB ports in their forearms?

And damn... I wanted to just let the last 10 episodes wash over me like so much of the schlock on TV these days that isn't worth anything more than that 42 minutes of enjoyment. But I'm thinking again. THINKING. Damn you all!

Well the Cylons have living growing ships... that is pretty up there in technological advancement, no?


You just don't keep 'advancing' technologically until godhood or whatnot. Like, where the fuck are my flying cars and jet packs that the 50's visions of the future promised us?



As to the original war. IF Cylons are Humans and vice versa, the War could have been between the 'Cylons' that wanted to live forever through the whole cloning/rebooting technology, and the 'Humans' that thought that was unnatural and soul destroying or whatever. Maybe that's why they split off to form the 13th colony to begin with, so they (Cylons) could live how they wanted.

Flying cars took too many turns to complete, so we decided to backfill some social techs and the comp. sci tree for a bit. They were shorter on turns for more techs.

I still want to know what the deal with Chip Six is. And who or what Starbuck is.

I hate that Ellen is the last of the Final Five. I've always despised the character and cheered when she was killed off. Now that annoying, shrill, bitch is back and a major character? Fuck that.

Also, while the Internet world wonder gives +100% :awesome_for_real:, it's also -50% hammers.

Wait, everyone seems to be assuming that Cylon skin jobs are from the 13th colony? I guess it makes sense since the Cylons know about them but it's also pretty clear that there weren't any skin jobs about when the Cylons originally cut off contact with the Colonies, and they were made by them. Unless of course the writers are just going to gloss over that point since that comes from the original series and might just make things too complex :uhrr: Hell perhaps the Cylon's final five are different from the Earth Cylons somehow, or they were the ones who found the Cylons and taught them how to make skinjobs decided genocide wasn't the answer, wiped themselves from the Cylon's memories and frakked off to earth (with more :uhrr:)

I'm guessing they're not about to leave earth totally behind, simply because I don't think we're going to see anything explained about Starbuck elsewhere, the 5 will tell people that they must originally have been from earth.

I think they're just making it up as they go.

Or Starbuck is the mystical 13th Cylon, who's a human.

To possibly clear a few things up for some people, I just finished listening to this week's podcast and Moore laid out some of the history more specifically.  Basically, humans and 'gods' are peacefully living on Kobol.  Humans 'steal fire from the gods,' i.e. learn how to create life themselves, then they make Cylons.  This causes much conflict and catastrophe on Kobol, and sparks an exodus.  Twelve tribes form the Twelve Colonies, and the thirteenth tribe - Cylons - go off and form their own colony on Earth.

All this religion-based obfuscation makes me want to punch someone. How is it possible that a space-faring, AI/clone-making civilization could lose so much of their history? I like BSG, but I swear sometimes this show reminds me of the movie Ed Wood when he had his actors walk around the "door" and say something to the effect that the audience wouldn't care about something so trivial.

Oh well, in that case it's 'the gods' that nuked the 13th tribe (cylons) and resurrected Kara.  Why?  Who knows!

Well, at least tonight's episode didn't clear anything up. Just a filler 'we could have moved the plot this tiny bit in 10 minutes, let's take 45' I really hope they leave Ellen dead, and kill the fucking schoolteacher.

So after seeing this episode and the teaser for the next, I really don't see this ending well for anyone.  Unless the 'beings of light' swoop in at some point and save the fleet, it's looking like Olmos wasn't kidding when he said everyone dies.

I would be okay with that ending. I am, however, absolutely sure that it wont happen.

Especially since they have a movie in production.

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1286130/)

Or it's the same mythical entity/machinery that made the final five show up again 2000 years later that cloned her.

Except that the movie takes place during the timespan of the show, so it doesn't rule out everyone dying.  It's basically BSG from the viewpoint of the Cylons.

"Everyone dying in the end" doesn't necessarily imply a Hamlet-esque scene of bodies all tangled on the floor. Except for certain Cylons, everyone *does* die in the end, eventually. It could very well be a here's how everyone met their end kind of deal.

This. Waste of an episode setting up Richard Hatch to be imminently more important than he should be. Also, yes, please keep Ellen dead.

I wouldn't say it didn't move things at all. You have a serious schism brewing in the fleet and a budding mutiny on Galactica led by Gaeta.

Does anyone else think that Gaeta is starting to look a bit like the guy that played Baltar on the original series?

It spent an hour making on real plot point, the rebellion. None of the things I really gave a shit about had one iota of movement.

Well, it is a space opera, of sorts. Its liable to mander in plot lines where the outcome is predictable.

I'm digging the webisodes on scifi. Its cool that the main actors are willing to crank out story content out of the main tv series.

Didn't we already DO the whole mutiny thing like 3 seasons ago?


The only way the next episode will redeem itself, is if order is re-established by putting the actual Chrome Toasters on Galactica to take out all the mutineers.

I know people don't like episdoes that don't do much to forward the plot, but let's not forget the alternative: episodes like the end of the first half of this season - where they put a whole season's worth of story in to the last two episodes and it felt rushed as hell.

That's the point of my bitching though. They piss about for 40 minutes with 10 minutes worth of story, then when they have to finish things off, they have to rush rush rush everything to fit it all in.

And yes, I think we've done a mutiny or treason plot of some kind at least once per season.

This.
Pacing  is                  hard.

And I sort of suspect there will be an 'ending' but not one that ties up loose ends, as Moore hopes he can continue in some for.

Mr. Moore has written some audacious drama for this series and he has pissed me off many, many times.  But the show makes me think and I do hope that the series ending is satisfying in some way, even if they all die.

I love the mythic aspect of the show, not the fracking mutiny of the week.  It's payoff time godsdammit!  Let's see some space battles and Count Iblis and all that shit!

Oh and I bet Gaeta gets knocked off in the next episode; look for secondary characters to drop like boxers in a Reno cathouse.

I would like to see the Gaeta mutiny nipped in the bud, hopefully also taking out Zarek, because we have seen this already.  Gaeta is the new Baltar, only this one twirls his moustache and strokes his goatee.  Frankly the idea of the humans rejecting the "good" Cylons is going to piss me off, even if it is turned around later when Cavill shows up.  Although it is a good exploration into the concept of isolationism and how that hurts more than helps, so it's still good scifi.

You'd think that Gaeta, Zarek, and everyone who follows them would have noticed by now that they're consistently on the wrong side of everything, even if they never realize it until after it's had horrific consequences for everyone else.

Then again, some people still vote Republican, so maybe it's not that unbelievable.

Eh, I hope Roslin gets stabbed in the neck.

Finally watched it. Very much a filler episode. I feel like they had the final episode story arc written for six episodes but ended up getting permission to do nine.

I didn't like the Blagoyevich allegory though ("the buying and selling of the Vice President's office"). Yea, ok, it wasn't true in the end (and I loved the "I appealled directly to his intellect"/"should I send in the medic" thing with Tigh  :awesome_for_real:), but I'd have preferred something a bit more tied to anything Richard Hatch's character actually did in the show. None of what Adama was saying matched anything Hatch the VP has actually done. And worse, the VP is appearing to act motivated by belief rather than corruption (or we'd have seen something like "give me the Presidency and I'll get your fleet back"). Obviously he was guilty of something or he wouldn't have caved so quick, but still.

There's something wonky too with the timespan. How long has it been since they left New Caprica? Like rattran said, pacing is hard. But as bad as it has been in recent episodes, it's the whole frakkin' series that has gone off the rails. The whole division that was implied by that photo of the cast last summer is being hamfisted onto us with no rhyme nor reason. Even two seasons ago Adama would have not forced Cylon tech on the fleet, then would have convinced everyone to take it. They showed him learning from the first season of overly militaristic rule (him and then Tigh when Adama was shot). And New Caprica brought it back to stark reality again. So he'd squander that just to search for nothing 300% faster?

There better be the mother of all effing spacebattles coming up, with the old Galactica, the Pegasus showing up again, some mysterious fleet that was out in the fringes when Caprica et al was bombarded, Beings of Light, a frakkin' Death Star of tech just being thrown around Fifth Element style. Or I'm going to... err, seethe irrelevantly.

Upgrading the hyperdrives is the sort of decision you don't make democratically, unless you're willing to say "bye, c ya later, have a nice death" to the folks who decline.

That's sort of the point of a democracy though. You don't like it? Move. I could see them declaring martial law on the fuel and food supply ships, but every single other one is a gigantic taxi. Let them vote themselves to be the next targets of the Cylons.

The only way this all makes sense to me is if they're trying to show that the survivors don't believe the Cylon threat to be real anymore. Again back to the timespan: how long has it been since they left New Caprica. If they haven't been attacked in a while they lose their sense of urgency about following any direction at all. Yet another analogy to current events, but an excusable one given the context. Why take better tech to get you, well, nowhere? Better to be sitting ducks to an enemy that apparently isn't showing up anymore.

They've always done these filler episodes and some of them have been stinkers. I didn't think this was a stinker, it added some minor stuff to the major plot.

Aren't you engaged?  I submit you consider the quoted idea in depth, as it is certain to come up again in some undoubtedly-personal way. :why_so_serious:


The thing is that most humans don't know or understand the difference between the two Cylon factions, which is very understandable when you are dealing with an enemy who has no individuality in a visual way at least.  Cylons all look alike, you know... well mostly but you get my point maybe.  The ones seeking asylum are the same models that were perpetrating horrors, so it would be difficult for anyone to swallow a sudden shift in allegiance no matter the motivation.  You can give a situation summary to some random dickwad in the fleet and he's probably going to be all for letting the Cylons kill each other just on general principles.  An ignorant voting public is dangerous when thought is necessary, and that's why we have an Electoral College.

The military-vs-civilian-government thing is well-worn, though.

Seems to me, there are 3 types episodes: Exploration (of a character/theme), Political, and Plot.  Political has always been the black sheep manly because it usually caused by people acting completely irrational to generate a conflict.

Well, and don't forget. They can't afford to lose a single ship. Not one. Those 5,000 people on that ship? They're a sizeable chunk of humanity. Acceptable losses is no longer an applicable phrase when humanity is down to slightly over 40,000 people.

Yea, but now it's a choice between surviving as a prisoner or dying free. THAT angle I can see being played here, as it would resonate with the rara flag-wearing portion of the U S of freakin' A!1//1. But if that is in fact what they were going for, they didn't do a good job of it. Imho anyway, since that angle only occured to me from your post  :oh_i_see:

Heh, that enough action for you?

And quite a few second stringers hitting the floor. I liked Laird!

Gaeta isn't going to live past next episode, probably not Zarek either.

I don't know- I think this may be the status quo for 2 or 3 episodes.  If anything, I see Zarek taking out Gaeta.  Only one hand can wear the ring  :oh_i_see:

Hope that's not the end of Col. Tigh, I mean going out jumping on a grenade to save his friend is classic, but I think he's one of the characters they've done so much with he deserves a better (on screen) end.

...

What?

The previews for next week seem to suggest both Tigh and Adama will get dead.

The action was ok, though really it was mostly Lee and Starbuck wandering through corridors. But they are definitely painting themselves into a corner narratively. Someone (multiple someones?) is obviously going to have to die and it's going to be for shitty reasons.

I suspect that we are going to find out through Tigh how the final five come back from death.

Especially since

I'm still hoping the Centurions just kill everyone and call it a day.

I concur with the gentleman with the talking pear-slash-testicle avatar.

Not at all.

I'm betting that was a flash-bang grenade. Nothing lethal, just enough to blind and deafen them. I've watched the kids play Counterstrike, I know how this works.

You people have been lied to by the previews before.  I don't care to watch them because they are basically a crock of shit designed to make me angry, but they do taste good.

Gaeta will have to die, Zarek may or may not.

I am glad Roslyn got off her ass, but I don't quite get it.  Now she's doing shit because of Zarek?  She didn't know he was let loose before?

The Roslin waffling has been maddening. She should have been the one to put a bullet in her brain instead of D.

Zarek has to die or have something worse happen to him.  He's a boil on the ass of humanity and he must be lanced.

Did any of you see the web-asodes?

I saw some junk with a young Adama, but I am very sure there were others that I should have watched.

Well that episode actioned the series right the fuck up.

I missed where Tyrell went.  I thought he stayed with the Admiral and Tigh, but then he just wasn't there.  Did he get on the boat with the President?

Starbuck shooting a bitch was absolutely the best part of the episode.  "No, we're not going to have dialogue.  I'm going to shoot people until you let him go."

I thought he stayed with Lee and Kara on Galactica.

This. It's nice when characters man the fuck up and Jack Bauer things, especially when Starbuck has spent so much time recently soul searching and mentally unravelling re: being dead and marrying a cylon. The character is finally somewhere where she knows what to do and can ignore all the other shit going on.

Its back to awesome Starbuck.  This can only be a good thing.  She needed purpose to deal with her fuckups.  Shooting things seems to solve all her dilemmas.

I also liked when she tried to shoot Adama's prisoner. "He's not your man anymore! He's the enemy now!" *bang bang*

lol. But I agree. Flash bang, and it didn't get too far into the door anyway. The preview probably lied about Tigh, and I'd say it definitely lied about Adama. Putting aside storytelling for a second, I just can't see James Olmos being willing to die before the end of the series. But even if he did, it surely wasn't to die at the hand of some no name <insert color>-squad.

Gaeta I thought was awesome in this episode. Hate the character but loved how the role was played. He's going to play Roslin next episode to get her to open fire on Galactica so that he's justified in destroying the base star. Whether they actually go through with the battle or not, well, all bets are off here with so few episodes left. But in a mano-a-mano fight, a Galactica with all weapons ready to go wins against that half-functioning base star. And it'd be the Enterprise 1701-E too! And the Death Star! And bipedal mechs, rar!

Otherwise, no idea. My one hope is that they don't play New Caprica again where the bad cylons show up and scare those with Cylon-equipped FTLs away stranding the suckers who stuck to their morals until it was too late. They did that story already.

Well, they already did THIS story too. 


Maybe they DO kill Adama, and he turns out to be the uhh... 14th? Cylon! woo!  :awesome_for_real:

I'm still nursing the theory that Ellen Tigh is actually an older six.  And my new addition is that Gaeta is the last of the final five.  And his leg itches all of the time because it's actually growing back.

What good would a flashbang do? They've just prised the door open a little and can't rush in after the flashbang.

Stop them from shooting the door long enough for them to open it?


Ellen Tigh being an older six IS a compelling idea, but that just leaves more questions and shit.

This show needs ANSWERS, you fucking writers.  :tantrum:

Yes to all of these. They showed how similar Ellen Tigh and the sixes look in one of the episodes where a six was beating up and/or seducing Saul Tigh. I think having Saul simply realise Ellen is the final cylon as he goes swimming is too weak. There must be some further twist to it.

Gaeta has some hidden agenda, and always has had. He's trying to prevent the new era of cylon/human love and procreation which is surely round the corner. I reckon he'll turn out to be the only person who actually knows what's going on.

Oh, lame.  LAME.  Cannot be.  That would be retarded.  I'd rather Ellen grow out of his stump like Cuato.

Hasn't Moore, in interviews, explicitly said that Ellen was a member of the Final Five?  He hasn't been coy about it since the episode happened.

Now that was an action packed episode. Still felt a bit stilted though. Galactica's marines seem to have flexible loyalty.

The last two episodes annoyed the shit out of me. I can't even rationally explain WHY, they just did. Maybe it was because there was no way they were going to actually do anything 'dangerous' with any of the main characters, not at this point of the series. No matter how crazy it was seemingly getting, you just knew it would all work out in the end.


I might as well watch Star Trek for that kind of shit.

/rant  :oh_i_see:


PS. Where was my Centurion killing spree? :(

You don't think literally killing off every member of the civilian government save Roslin (who's about to drop dead from Teh Cancer) and Lee Adama was enough of a body count?

Gaeta and Zarek were fairly major characters, but unless the show's final episodes became Pirates In Space, Yarrr Me Hearties you knew they weren't going to survive the hour. (And hell, if things had gone better Zarek would have shot Gaeta by the end of the hour.)

Lee wasn't killed. You're probably thinking of Anders.

Random TV Extra's that we see for tops, 2 minutes an episode? They might as well have been wearing Red Shirts. Some random marines died too, let us all weep in sorrow, or something.

The only people of any consequence that actually died were the last two.



The Highlights for me was the Chief crawling through the ship, Lee not pulling the pin on the grenade and Starbucks swagger after she knocked out that dude taking a leak.  :heart:

Any ideas what the significance of the scar deep in Galictica is?

Probably triggered a flashback or something.

No, I meant that Lee and Roslin are the only civilian leaders ALIVE. The Quorum is going to find it hard to make a, well, quorum.

And the scars at the end = stress fractures. Galactica's days are numbered. Which makes sense, Ron Moore HATED Voyager making it through the Delta Quadrant spic and span. Galactica hasn't had drydock maintenance for a few years now... it's probably only good for a few more episodes. (What a coincidence...)

Ah, read that wrong.  You can scrape up politicians from anywhere though. :oh_i_see:

That makes more sense then my flashback theory. The Galactica has survived what, 3 nukes by now?  :grin:

Another good episode but it's filler to me.  Maybe next week we get back to the main story-line.

Zarek was perfect, especially his final comment about the quorum.  I love the whole Gaeta story.  I hate the misuse of Baltar, this story seems to be stuck.

I'm not thrilled with the final cylon but let's see what happens.  I feel that we're stumbling towards the end.

Hunh, hadn't thought of that. I thought those were blood trails from the floor above, assuming that floor was the hangar deck in which the quorum was bleeding out.

But then, I have no idea wherein the ship the FTL drive is. Except that it's one long ass crawl.

The ship IS ridiculously huge. Something like 1.5 KM long, half a KM wide.

My assumption is the FTL is way in the back, near the sublight engines.

Cylon Centurions almost disabled the BSG's FTL engine way back when.  Those scars are from a Centurion's claw.

The amusing thing about that scene was supposed to be that a cylon just disabled the FTL to save the fleet.

That also makes more sense then my flashback theory.


But now I am upset we didn't get any Centurions in THIS episode  :sad:

Also, the day of the rope occurred on Colonial One which is a separate ship from BSG.

Right, but it was sitting in the Galactica's hangar deck when it happened. I figured it'd be a stretch for the quorum to bleed out through that ship, through the deck, and then right into the area Tyrel happened to be standing, but it's what I thought at the time :-)

The Centurion claw mark makes the most sense. You happen to remember the name of that episode?

The one with the ship full of toasters that lands inside of bsg.

 :awesome_for_real:

Edit:  Valley of Darkness

Uh... from this interview: http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2009/02/battlestar-galactica-gaeta-blood-scales-angeli.html

Lies!  It is an allusion to the Madagascar anti-corruption movement of 2002.  The Madagascar government established an anti-corruption national council by presidential decree which would be led by a well-respected Magistrate. As a result, the Ministry of Environment, Water and Forests revoked thousands of illegally-issued logging permits; a presidential decree required high-level public officials to declare their assets; the Magistrates’ Superior Court suspended twelve judges for corrupt practices; the Ministry of Justice installed an information bureau at the main court in the capital of Antananarivo; and an anti-corruption hotline was created in the police department. 

It is so fracking clear how this ties in to the scars in the hull.

Better epsiode than the last, but the death of Gaeta, while well-acted was a fucking waste of a good character and a good actor. They've fumbled big time with him since he lost the leg. I also don't like that we got no real idea what happened to Anders after the lawyer went to help them. That's kind of important. Still, it was better than it's been in a while, even with the vast amounts of shit happening that don't make any sense. Also, Tricia Helfer with dark hair and no clothes... I think this requires further study. Maybe a whole episode worth.

I loved the scene with Gaeta and Baltar towards the end.  It also highlights one of the problems I think the show has had for a while.  It reminds us of the long and complex relationship between these two throughout the series, but that has received very little actual screen time.  Instead we get loads of filler episodes that don't even bother to have interesting relationship developments like this one, or boxing tourneys.

I just watched the webisodes. Made more sense of Gaeta's fierce anti-cylon stance.

Still, I never really thought of his character as important. The other members of the cast and crew obviously liked him, but he has always had mechanical roles in the plot that could have been filled by other characters (even on New Caprica). We never even knew about his private life until it was awkwardly revealed in the webisodes. To me, they made more of him than the actor or character deserved. And the leg stuff was a waste of time.

I thought Gaeta's character arc worked completely well. One of the things that actually works about the way Galactica has been written, most of the time, is that the characters make bad decisions, they contradict themselves, they don't boil down to one-sentence sketches, they're swept up in situations. There's a few characters who I think have been written too loosely, who contain too many multitudes (Anders, Tirol). If you think about Gaeta's conversation with Starbuck, well, he was basically completely fucking right about most of it: he lost his leg for nothing, Starbuck's insubordinations have been treated indulgently by Adama time and time again, nobody in command seems to be able to come up with a consistent vision of what they're doing, etc. Being a decent or honest or duty-bound person hasn't suited Felix Gaeta very well, really. When nice guys suddenly decide that the day has come where they're not going to be nice, they often decide that at the worst possible moment and then freeze up after they've passed the moment of no return.

These episodes worked really well for me. What I would like to see in the next episode, though, is for everyone to sit down and start thinking a little bit. It's completely explicable that they didn't do so before given the hammer blow of the finding of Earth, but now it's time, both for the characters and for us as audience. The characters aren't sharing all of the information that they individually hold (Leoben and Starbuck seem to still be sitting on what they found on Earth, for example) but they mutually know enough to realize that there's something out there that's fucking with them. (Weirdly enough Baltar got closest to this with his despairing sermon about Earth). We of course know that the real force fucking with them are "screenwriters who didn't have a clear plan for this whole show" but ok, unless this is a comic book by Grant Morrison, we're not going to that metafictional place.

So here's what I expect the characters to suddenly start wondering about:

1) Why the fuck are the Final Four (Five) from the ancient Cylon Earth and why exactly did they show up in human societies of the Twelve Colonies before the events of the first episode of BSG? The humans (and the Final Four) have every right to ask their allies forcefully to tell them everything about how the humaniform Cylons came to be anyway, and what they know about the Final Four. (My thoughts, if the writers want to make this somewhat coherent? The Final Four came to the Centurion Cylons created by the humans and suggested that they start creating humaniform Cylons, gave them their religious ideas, and then planned their own infiltration of human society, erasing their memories in the process.)

2) They didn't imagine all the prophetic signs between Earth and the Twelve Colonies: those were real, and in some cases the characters had genuine "visions" of them. (We know why Tirol did now, for sure.) So what's the actual connection? The characters have been acting as if what happened to the Cylons of Earth and the Twelve Colonies have no real relationship, which is stupid. Time to put two and two together. (My thoughts run along lines that speculations have trended for some time among fans: that the humans of the Twelve Colonies are also "Cylons" of some kind, possibly created by the Earth Cylons, who rebelled against their creators; that the Earth Cylons were synthezoids that Earth humans downloaded their consciounesses into but that the original humans who didn't download killed their synthezoid cousins; that the Earth Cylons were synthetic beings who rebelled against some earlier organic creators and fled to create their own planet, and their original creators came and genocided them. Etcetera. There needs to be SOME reason for the trail of crumbs between Earth and the Twelve Colonies, and the characters need to find out what that reason is once and for all. Ideally this will leave their situation in even more moral confusion, where the question of who killed who first becomes impossibly complex and near-mythic.

3) Everybody has to stop tip-toeing around Starbuck's situation. Enough characters have enough information to know that there is something very weird going on there, and that it is evidence that there is some unseen force frakking around with them.

Speaking of your #1, I've been meaning to ask: has anyone ever explained why the final five weren't discovered by the robots on New Caprica, and instead months later in the Battle of the Nebula? Presumably we're talking about the same skinjobs chasing down the refugees here. And yea, the music hadn't started on New Caprica for the final four. Whatupwitdat?

As to skinjobs vs humans, I'm still holding to the idea that they're the same basic species merely separated by some type of nanotech. Somehow the twelve colonies existed for long enough to have forgotten the tech (plausible, considering how much real humanity has lost to the overwhelming force of superior numbers of inferior intelligences/technologies). The thirteenth colony was a mythical offshoot, a utopian ideal told to kids. You don't tell your kids hell is a utopian ideal ;-)

Plus, the actual difference in technology between humans and cylons in general just isn't all that much. You'd think with at least 2,000 years to evolve, they'd at least have transporters and slipstream. I know the show has never been about tech, but for such an advanced race, the only real difference between the sides technologically amounts to wrist-mounted USB ports and hybrids jacked in to the FTL drive. Otherwise it's still bullets and ammo and nukes.

So I'm thinking skinjobs are basically humans that learned to clone and we'll eventually be told everyone is human. I still don't think they'd play the "ha ha, fooled ya, you're all cylons" card. That would probably kill whatever market there was for a movie.

(http://www.myextralife.com/strips/02-09-2009.jpg)

I thought it was a nod back to when boomer was first thinking that she caused the explosion in the water tanks....before she knew she was a cylon..recall the chief was central to that bit. In fact, im not sure we still know what happened really, its been to long.

I don't remember the episodes name, but it was back in like season 1 or 2.

'Water' the second episode of Season1

There was a scene in scifi.com's BSG promo site that played out-of-context snippets from the final episodes (youwillknowthetruth.com) which had Adama seeing a similar tear in the bulkhead in his quarters (http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/youwillknowthetruth/index.php?pageid=140). I'm pretty sure one of the final plotlines will be the Galactica literally falling apart.

Ugh.  Robot Chicken did the same gag a month ago, except with "throw darts to see who is a cylon."  And they got Ron Moore to voice himself.

Its awesome that the Galactica is breaking apart due to all the ship had to go through. No "next episode everything is repaired" bullshit.

It would be beyond awesome if the Galactica was the dying leader that lead the people to salvation" and breaks down just as they reach their destination.

That... would be pretty awesome.

It would make sense if galatica was starting to fall apart. It was Old at the start of the series it was being decomissioned right before caprica got bombed. It has now gone on to wandering around the galaxy taking a Shitload of punishment doing rapid fire FTL transits and taking significant combat damage without having any chance to refit the ship. If and when they get to a habiltal world the galactica is going to eventually just fall apart the old girl has given all shes got and shes just not going to take much more.

Is is, after all, the name of the fucking series.  People don't pay enough attention to the ship.

Oh wow, that is so cool.  Maybe that's it!

There was the whole discussion in the weapons locker about how past tense Galactica used to be a hell of a ship. At first I thought it was referring to the political falling apart of the fleet, but given the gash, I think maybe it's just plain that it's falling apart.

It's both.  The structural/physical decay of the ship and the spiritual/moral decay are reflecting each other.

Really, in a Greek fashion, that entire mutiny arc is a reflection of Adama giving up hope in the setup episode (Adama attempts suicide by Crazy Robot Space-Pirate Tigh,  consummates relationship on screen with Roslyn and responds that "I don't give a damn" when Roslyn queries him at the end of the episode).

Agree with Numtini 100%.  This depiction really echoed with my own experiences.  The helplessness and confusion showed by the other characters.... 

Which of course is the meaning of the prophecy about Starbuck leading them to destruction. It's not that there was a hideous death trap waiting on Earth: it's that the society of the fleet is now falling apart from spiritual, moral and physical decay as a consequence of arriving at Earth and finding out it wasn't the destination. "Where there is no vision, the people perish". They have nothing left to live for or seek after, both Cylons *and* humans. Everything they thought was wrong: polytheism, monotheism, that they were righteous while the other damned.

I think that had the highest exposition per minute ratio of any hour of TV I've ever seen.

So you have never seen the Gilmore Girls?

"I'm a Mac."
"And I'm a brain surgeon."

That was all I could think of for that whole scene.

And wtf? So there are 13? Are they going to introduce a new character this late, or will it end up being Kara anyway?

I said exposition, not worthless blather.

I knew it.  Kara is a trany!

I would guess they set up the new #7 model for two reasons, both kind of silly - there isn't a Seven in the numbering scheme, and to screw with the viewer and make them think OMGSTARBUCKCYLON.

An interesting bit which wasn't explicitly stated but implied, and has some repercussions - there's no 'hidden resurrection facility' for the final five. They use the same one as everyone else (and not out of some mystical We Don't Know They Exist directives, but simply because Cavil-er-John just was using them as his meat puppet show). And that was blown to hell a few episodes back. If any of the final five die, they will also poof - and more importantly, it does exactly frack to explain what happened to Starbuck.

Starbuck died and came back in the original series too. I suspect a similar explanation for both.

That was an extremely dense dense episode. I had to watch the scenes with Anders' exposition twice, and I'm still not sure I got it. Glad I wasn't wrong in thinking the addition of a #7 Daniel model was a 13th model. And I sure didn't get that whole Temple explanation. Maybe if we hadn't spent two episodes in a useless mutiny, they might could have let some of this explanation breathe.

Temple was part of the original exodus of the 13th tribe. Cavil thought the Final 5 had jiggered it up and that is what caused what the 3 saw, but Ellen indicated it was an outside force causing the visions.

Christ, they really had no clue where they were going with this show.  I put up with episode after episode of Baltar's harem, Starbuck's love triangles, Lee being a captain/lawyer/senator/pilot/president/not prez/prez again, and then they up and have friggin Ellen and Anders explain almost everything in one episode?

Fuck that.

The internet must write us a detailed Battlestar Galactica timeline.

Speaking of time, Boomer and Ellen jumped out four months ago. Wonder what they've been doing?

Interesting thread about Daniel which uses SPOILERS for Caprica and potentially therefore also BSG: http://community.livejournal.com/battlestar_blog/1493420.html

Twitter channel of John Hodgman ("and I'm a PC/brain surgeon"): http://twitter.com/hodgman

I thought there was a "Two Days Ago" at the bottom of the screen when Boomer walked in for that last scene.

Ah, you're right. I missed that.

It looks like the Galactica is going to become a very literal symbol of human and cylon society merging.

Was the name "Daniel" used before this episode?

I think it's simply a downside of the continual 'making shit up as we go' problem in the show. 'There are 12 models' except later we find out there's only 7, plus 5 unknowns. Constant changing of characters motivations to fit plot twists. Sure, Cavil put Ellen on Galactica to keep the final 5 together, but Anders was stuck on Caprica at the time. Make the chief a cylon, oh shit, the kid is half-cylon. Nevermind, make his wife a slut.

I'm expecting that the resurrection facility the 5 used on Earth is still out there, staffed with the final 5 copies and that's what spat Kara (mk2) out. I wouldn't be surprised if it's been following along shepherding the exodus/trip to Earth. And it'll lead the fleet to Eath2. (Clancy Brown not included)

So it seems to me that humans and Cylons could have potentially gotten along just fine, if it weren't for Cavil's meddling and drum beating.

That was a lot of exposition, but at least this time they did a good job of it.  It was at the very least an improvement on their usual "oh shit we forgot to move the plot forward for half a season let's get shit going!" episodes they've done in the past.

Ya, a bit too much bitching in this thread.

One thing I really didn't get was why it was only Tigh, Tyrol, Dee and Starbuck who were listening to Sam. Noone else seems to care that he's remembered about earth and some of the reasons why all this happened. I'd have assumed the other Cylons would desperately want to know or at least Adama would be curious about what had happened to Saul.

cuz its highschool and those others aren't as cool as the final 5

Only bitching I have is that that I read this post before watching and none newer than that:

But instead of "exposition", I read "explosion". So every minute after Tyrel requested "no more jumps for awhile", I expected the bad guys to catch up for some big pew pew. Instead I got 20 minutes of Voldemort vs Gaia  :awesome_for_real:

Wasn't a bad episode. Did have the feel of them finally realizing the end is nigh and they need to start wrapping things up. But I'll take wrapping things up over "erp, it was all just a dream" final-rushed-outcome" any day.

So... anyone else think that the Cylons are the 13th tribe of humanity? I mean, they are all humans, just "advanced" with their ressurection tech. The first models we saw were the creations of the "final five" via them enslaving the Centurions of the 12 colonies. And they also started tinkering with the Centurions (putting in the inhibitor chips) and creating the bio-mechanical Raiders.

Did you even watch the show?

Ok I haven't seen anyone mention this so I watned to make sure I didn't make it up while watching the episode.

Didn't Sam say there were 8 models not 7?  So Kara could still be a cylon, right?

Yeah he said that, and then the people he was talking to - including Kara - started glowing, in a similar way to the final five in the temple. This was possibly because his brain was exploding at the time, but it seemed like it might mean something important even so.

But I also thought the missing cylon who was murdered by Cavil was called Daniel and was male. I might be wrong, I'm getting confused by the whole thing.

However, Daniel was Ellen's favourite, so perhaps she somehow re-made him as a woman or something . . .

He was artistic, and we know Kara likes painting on her apartment wall.

Daniel could be Kara's father.

Over in the episode thread at SA, someone that had seizures before claimed that's how you'll supposedly perceive having one. So I'll settle for bog standard seizure.

Daniel: If you only knew the power of the one true god. Adama never told you what happened to your father.
Starbuck: He told me enough! He told me he played piano!
Daniel: No. I am your father.
Starbuck: No...that's not true! That's impossible!
Daniel: Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
Starbuck: FRAK YOu!

What Oban said. The Final Five seem to be the survivors of the 13th colony who had their consciousness load into artificial bodies when they got wiped out (presumably by Cylons they created and mistreated). They then travelled for thousands of years to stop the other 12 following suit and arrived at the height of the Human-Cylon war. They convinced the Centurions to make peace and in return offered to help them build skin jobs (Centurions on their own had managed hybrids). They didn't enslave the centurions, rather they hoped that the Centurion's religion (it's them that introduced the monotheism) would allow them to overcome the bitterness of war and the human-cylons would be able to live in peace with the humans, breaking the cycle of violence. Cavil was their first and obviously is a little unhinged, the 7th isn't Starbuck but some artist named Daniel that gets Abled by Cavil's Cain.

What's interesting is that there's obviously some other sort of resurrection facility, doesn't Cavil mention something about the colony when he talks about the resurrection ship? It sounds like there's something else around that can do it. Also on Starbuck, if the Five had originally been human and 'uploaded' it seems possible that Starbuck did die on earth but some similar facility was able to place her into a Cylon body. She might not be one of the Final Five or original skinjobs but that doesn't mean she isn't a 'Cylon'.

There's something else that might be able to do it, if properly repaired.

That said, one of the best summations of the episode came from the mini-recap over at TWOP...

The problem with Starbuck is not only do we not know how she came back, we don't know how the 'original' ended up on Earth to begin with (dead or alive).  She didn't just disappear, Apollo saw her viper implode in the atmosphere of that gas giant.  Her resurrection wouldn't be that hard to explain given that organic uploading is possible, but how did that body get on Earth?  And where did the new viper, complete with coordinates to Earth, come from?

Possibly resurrection works for anyone, human, Cylon, hybrid, whatever: it's not a machine thing, it's a consciousness thing. So maybe somehow Starbuck knew the "dial-up" for the resurrection machinery near Earth, which the Final Five also used, and she went through it when she 'died'. However, that still raises the question of how her body and ship got to Earth and who gave her a new Viper. My thought is that there are others at the existing, working resurrection machinery near Earth--maybe humans and Cylons who've reached some kind of accord, who are waiting to see if the Galactica fleet and rebel Cylons can come to the same understanding or connection.

Here's a question about Helen, though: why was she such a bitchy and power-grabbing slut as a human with no memory? That's the part that doesn't really work: Cavil not only wiped their memories but gave them totally different personalities? wut?

I think that her personality was pretty much unchanged but that her loss of memory made her emphasize different parts of it. When she was on Galactica she didn't have the knowledge that made her a major scientist and researcher so she emphasized the slutty, drunken side of her personality. Once she had all of her memories back she suddenly had other things to concern herself about so those aspects took a back seat.  Even with all of her memories one the first things she did when Cavil showed up was demand a drink.

So what if Six and Baltar actually died on Caprica, and head-Six and Head-Baltar are the results of some king of botched download?  The only way for that to happen is if Baltar is also a Cylon (unlikely) or something like whatever Kara is.

Also a prediction:  Boomer is either unwittingly or complicitly going to lead Cavil's cylon faction to Galactica.

I briefly thought this as well, but how would Ellen know where the fleet is now?  On the other side if Boomer knows where the fleet is, then John sure as hell does too.


Edit, lawl.

Ellen.

That's a good point, unless Ellen has some way of tracking/communicating with the other 4 that Cavil doesn't know how to do.  Although considering he put the 5 in their current bodies, that would be tricky to explain.

By the way, I liked the touch of Ellen offering Boomer the apple.

And another thing - in that last episode, it sounded as if the final five were the same type of thing as the humans in the 12 colonies. They created aritificial life and it turned against them, and then they were worried that the other colonies would make the same mistake. It sounded as if all 13 colonies were originally populated by something which was *not* artifical life.

But we know that the earth inhabitants were biologically "human cylons" and different to the humans of the 12 colonies. Not just the five after they downloaded into new bodies, but all of the dead skeletons on earth too.

With her memory back, Ellen knows where Earth is. She and Galactica have a navigation point in common.

That Ellen-Caprica-Tigh melodrama was tedious and badly written.

Lame episode, more soap opera than anything.  I think god wants the two races to merge.  Note how Liam was mentioned by Cottle several times to be a 'fighter'.  Then when the cylons debate separating, god promptly kills him lest they think they don't need the humans to breed with.

God's true emissaries are Baltar and Starbuck.  I 'think' Baltar is incoming Jesus and Starbuck is the devil but maybe I'm taking the Christian theme too far.  After all Baltar's 'angel' tells him to get guns. 

I hope the last episode is Cavil showing up, vaporizing the fleet and ruiling the universe as a perfect machine race.  At least you don't get melodrama that way.

I'm doing my best with it but it's not making sense to me.

Why does the chief now consider himself to be a cylon and not part of the fleet? The final five are part of the 13th colony while the other cylons (human versions) are artificial lifeforms created by the final five. So if he's being tribal about it, which it seems he is, his tribe is the people from the 13 colonies, not the human cylons.

It was one of those blatant mischaracterizations to force a plot point.  There's no way Tyrol should have done a 180 like that.  The whole Tigh/Ellen/Caprica triangle was clumsy and forced as well.  Not a very good episode.

How could they screw up something like this so near the end of the series?

True dat.  I feel it is the consequences of not having planned things out. So this is another "move the pieces into position" episode so they tell the story the want to finish out the series.

I eagerly await the fan edit of this series which distills it down to three hours of space combat.

Yeah, way too much forced soap opera melodrama, not nearly enough plot. I can't fault the actors, because I think Tigh is just pulling a marvelous job with what he's given. Even Ellen is acting well, though I really really really fucking hate her character. Obviously reincarnation and restoration of her memories didn't make her any less of a cunt. Four episodes left means we really don't have time for shows that are so padded with "characterizations" especially when those characterizations are off for some of the characters. The previews for next week look worse - why the fuck would the cylons want to try Boomer for treason? WTF? Because she sided with Cavil in the civil war? Wouldn't that be saying that the cylons don't want to have free will?

One word:  Boomer.

Tyrol has a long history of acting extremely squirrelly when he has relationship/woman issues crop up.  I think his reaction of wanting to run with Boomer showing back up in the picture isn't out of character at all.  

That made no sense to me either.  "Hey, thanks for realizing your mistake and retrieving the last of our Revered Final 5 from the clutches of our enemies!  Your reward is waiting right through this airlock door here."

Hmm, no episode posted on the galactica site. That's how I watch 'em, since I don't have television. Anyone know what's up with that, and any possible alternatives that aren't out-and-out piracy?

http://eztv.it/index.php?main=show&id=141 (http://eztv.it/index.php?main=show&id=141)

Is it piracy if it's not on DVD yet?

I disagree the Chief has immersed himself in cyclon technology, of the five he's the most integrated into current Fleet-cyclon society because of that. I'm not surprised he would vote to go.

I enjoyed the soap opera stuff, there was some great acting there.

While not a major plot element, Olmos' depiction of Adama slowly cracking up over the last several episodes has been very good.

I'd still like to know what those pills are he keeps taking.

The only part I found interesting about this episode, is that the BaseStar looks almost fully repaired. The rest of it, I could have gotten by with a 'previously, on Battlestar Galactica!'.

Ok finally watched it. Will stand by what I said earlier: Five episodes left in the series and we get this?!

And I'm hating the inconsistencies. Freakin' Baltar is now warning about a Galactican society that may rise up in revolution? Hasn't it been merely weeks since there was an actual quasi-revolution? Not referencing old history I can understand. We've all been through retcons. But dammit, this was two episodes ago.

Oh and I basically fast forwarded through all the Ally MacBeal Ellen/Tigh/Six crap. Maybe I missed something but I honestly just don't care. They wrap up the entire mutiny in one episode and spend almost an entire one on a subplot nobody gives a shit about just so they can rez the Hera-as-savior motivation?

And yea, why are they going to court martial boomer? For liberating Ellen against Cavel's orders or for siding with Cavel when the fleet split? And what the hell's the point of that anyway? There is not "fleet" with the Galactica. It's one slowly-fixing-itself Basestar.

Thankee. Downloaded the 1080 version, although, uhm, its essentially a recording off the TV turned into a .avi file which is definately NOT 1080, or 720 or even 480.

I thought it was entirely disingenuous. He doesn't think there's going to be a revolution, he just wants some guns because the chip/fantasy in his head says there should be guns to cleanse the city.


Because the 8's voted to go with the Fleet-Cylons and Boomer stayed with the Cavill-cylons. The fleet isn't trying her for treason, the Fleet-Cylons are. Because they're petty and human.

And one point about the ep which also relates to them being petty and human--very key comment by Adama. The Galactica won't know who she is. That's at the very heart of this series. This series is about identity. About who and what you are. Everything revolves around that and it has going back to season 1 even without any ret-con'ing.

Oh, I also enjoyed the callsign they gave the Cylon Pilot on the CAP. Fat Turkey indeed.  :grin:

I think this all comes down to different writers.

Next week looks better: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNqV7fpK_3Q

http://www.latinoreview.com/news/battlestar-galactica-coming-to-the-big-screen-6228 (http://www.latinoreview.com/news/battlestar-galactica-coming-to-the-big-screen-6228)

Finally! My cape and Boxey fix!

Boomer was with Cavill when they blew up a load of eights and sixes after warping the ressurection ship off somewhere so that they would really be dead.

The eights and sixes we now have are the survivors of that assault, so you can see how they'd be pissed.

Yours and Numtini's explanations make sense and show great insights. But while that is the lore, you only bother telling that story in the middle of season 2 or 3 when you're trying to add depth to the Cylon "way of life"/thinking. This late in the game they need to be wrapping up the important things, like:

- Where are the humans going to live that survives Cavil showing up?
- Where are the rebel Cylons going to live?

I suppose the one story arc they're driving for may be that both Cylon and Human rally around the Five, who usher in a golden age of commaraderie and mutual respect to replace the last X years of reactionary anti-intellectual religious-based fearmongering. But I'd prefer they stopped the hamfisted allegories instead of relying on them to end out an otherwise awesome series. I swear this show sometimes feels like the first two (somewhat painful) seasons of ST:TNG.

Sigh.

You missed the definitive character insight for why Ellen is the crazy, self-destructive bitch she is:  She knows that,  if the choice is forced,  Tigh loves Adama more than he loves Ellen.  Yet she can't stop loving Tigh.

It adds whole new subtext to when she went all Lady Macbeth back in season 1/2,  when Adama was shot.  The sleeping around is basically a response to Tigh making a choice of Adama over her, etc. 

I caught that. It was also TOTALLY LAME.

As for bringing the original Battlestar to the big-screen? FUCK'S SAKE, WHY?????

But the Tigh-Adama friendship only occurred because Cavil wiped their memories and Tigh thought he was the human XO of Battlestar Galactica, and it's therefore a tiny moment in the centuries-long relationship of Tigh and Ellen. If Tigh was the real Tigh instead of just remembering flashes of his old self, he probably wouldn't be as close to Adama, so really it's Cavil's fault.

Ellen is now the real Ellen, the co-inventor of the humanoid cylons and resurrection ships, with her full memories back, and knows Tigh is not himself due to Cavil, so why is she preoccupied with being a bitch about stuff that she knows is a result of what Cavil did to them?

If I understand it from the info-dump last episode, their relationship isn't "centuries old." The only reason they have been together for 3000 years is because they were traveling at relativistic speeds. For their subjective time it has been a normal life span.

Yes. Because I don't give a shit. And I mean that seriously (as in, I'm not being snarky to you for bringing it up). I cared about this kind of stuff at the beginning of Season 2 because the whole war/exile/on-the-run humanity was done so well in Season 1 they needed to go somewhere else with the characters.

Right now though, with maybe 5 hours left to resolve the entire future history of this show, I want more screen time spent to driving towards resolution and less spent on laborious and poorly-scripted dramedy pieces. If they were limping towards their ninth season with no end in sight, sure, yea, go all Friends on the audience you have left. That's what they want. But since the movie is just an idle placeholder on imdb and the new series is a prequel, this is their sole shot to resolve things. This is not cut-off-in-its-prime Firefly or retelling-shit-we-knew ST:Enterprise or quilt-of-episodes Star Trek in general (no ongoing rolling narrative). This has been a story from start to finish and I'm getting less and less interested in that end.

My interests probably aren't broad enough  :grin:

It's obviously a ploy by Dirk Benedict.

-The Ellen on the base star was great.  The Ellen on the galactica needs to go find a dick to choke and die on.

-"Adama, the people are almost in open revolt!  They can't handle any more accommodations of the cylons and a violent religious cult is operating on your ship!"
"You got a plan?"
"I need guns."
"kk bro."

Baltar used the Chewbacca Defense on Adama and it worked.  What the hell.

Is this supposed to show that Adamas judgement is impaired by the meds? From wanting to walk out in Baltar to giving his cult weapons, thats quite a leap.

Shut yo mouth about Dirk Benedict.  That man's a national treasure.

Ah, so obviously there was a cut scene where the leaders were contemplating bringing metal centurions onboard Galactica to mantain order.

In that light, Baltar babbling about the last "human" solution and Adama caving in makes more sense. It basically was "Give my people guns and you won't have to give the Cylons control".

I don't get how they could cut such an important scene in favor of Battlestar 90210 - the love triangle crapfest.

Yes, trying to shoehorn the Calm Creator Mother Ellen from last episode into the drunk, vapid, bitchy Ellen of seasons past was a complete fucking failure.  Way to make it obvious that you're making it up as you go along.  Those are not the same character.  At all.  If her sudden memory reinstall turned her into the nice one, then she's still that one.

I don't think it's ever said that her memory reinstall turned her into the nice one.  She stated in the most recent episode that she's still the same Ellen.  She acted somewhat differently in the previous episode because she essentially is talking down to John who she considers to be her (very misguided) son.  It's not a stretch to assume that she acts differently towards her kids than she does toward her husband, especially after finding out that her husband has impregnated one of their kids.

It didn't make sense, nobody asked her much of anything, they risked brain death with Starbuck's ex, letting him talk about the 13th tribe when he needed an operation.  Ellen shows up and it's all, "hey, how you doing?".

What else do they need to ask her on screen that wouldn't just be reiterating to the audience what we already know now?

We saw Ellen the week prior interacting with a fully knowledgeable Cavill. But on the Galactica, she's trying to talk to the other three as if they're the people she knows, but they're not. They are the fleet versions. She's expecting them to just accept the entire history and just act based on it, but that's not who they are.

Or that's how I took it.

Did I miss the reason the 13th tribe was wiped out?

Same reason the other 12 tribes were wiped out - Centurion uprising and revolt.

I'm unclear about what happened to the Centurions that wiped out the 13th tribe.  Did the armageddon wipe out everything, including the machines?  Not even a lone Wall-E left over?

That's what I wanted them to question her on,

I would so rather have the Centurions.

What I really don't get is her disgusted reaction to Tigh frakking a 3 with her whole "They're out children!" thing. She was not so long ago frakking Cavill and doesn't seem to freaked out by the memory, why is it suddenly so repugnant? Also Baltar's subplot, as it almost always seems to be, is just crappily written and feels forced. Give me guns! My followers are a bunch of crazy women and I've managed to betray humanity and you guys personally about half a dozen times but this time will different! Who could you trust more in the fleet than me to keep order? Frak I think they'd be better off with the centurions.

Actually I guess I could see Adama choosing Baltar over centurions but it seems bizarre that those are the "only" two options that he has. Lee had some strongish ties to the old Quorum, it seems weird that he doesn't know of any better groups of citizens or even be willing to try and create a civilian police force. Also how the hell has not having a police force not really come up before?

Your last point is a great one, but they really seem to be struggling to reach the end now. They don't have time for good solutions in the longterm, only quick ones to finish the narrative. Probably with an armed militia up against boarding cylons and the predictable "we need to all get along" ending.

I don't see how they can possibly end this without a Harry Potter 17-years-later epilogue that closes things out in the most unsatisfying way possible.

Your attempts to palliate the massive cognitive dissonance of the retconning of a character onto a previous character with a wildly different personality are noble, but fruitless.

Don't worry I'm sure it all works into your theory of Ellen being an older 6 somehow  :roll:

I want to say it has, both literally and in abstract. All these 'rebellions' against The military or the Galactica/Pegasus have come down to a base issue of the populace being under constant marshal law... or worse.

There's just always a new crisis to make everyone forget/not care every other week.


"Were not soldiers, you can't just send in your Marines and do what you want *KERSPLOSION Centurions storm in* OH GAWD HALP US MARINES HALP HALP!"



Ironically, I think the nearest they got to a true Civilian police force, was when the Cylons had occupied New Caprica or whatever that shitty planet was called.

Yeah it has been an issue. My problem was more along the lines of why is it suddenly a huge issue now We've been looking at things related to keeping order in the fleet on and off for the whole series but I guess I've never seen that as an integral storyline element. It's a problem they've been facing while avoiding the Cylons or looking for earth, it's something they're dealing with here and now but not part of the goals of anyone else. Unless they're planning on ending the whole series with the 12 (13) colonies as a reasonably structured and functioning fleet of nomads for evermore, it has nothing to do with resolution of the series and there's not much time left for that. I prefer problems with order in the fleet a lot more than stupid soap opera stuff but I don't want half of the next two episodes filled with Baltar's Angels fighting crime followed by a series finale that's 90% exposition and answering all the questions through monologues.

Baltar's Angels would make for a great spin off.

They just need to find a beach first, those jumpsuits leave way too much to the imagination.

I think I missed a few episodes at some point, is Kobol still intact?  Just wondering how all this is going to end as I don't see them drifting through space forever.

I think Kobol is still just fine.


At this point, I fully expect something stupid like the fleet just being blown up by the other Cylons, then the Centurions turning on THOSE Cylons and the end screen going black with a stupid line like "...and it shall happen again".

Considering they already set-up the basis for a Cent revolt on Cavil's ship and the general direction of and lack of satisfaction from the show so far this season I'd almost agree with that.

This brings up something I've been thinking about. Ellen said the Centurions were trying to create humanoid Cylons but having trouble. So the Five helped them in hopes that it'd help establish a lasting peace. So what do the humanoid cylons do? Take away the Centurion's free-will and brainwash the Five.

Yeah...good going there.

No-one is innocent on this show.

Save Dee.

Don't forget the jerking around of Billy and his resulting death.

No-one is innocent on this show.

You would expect the centurions to be pretty upset with it all. In past episodes, it seemed that they had been turned from intelligent killing machines into mindless killing machines, which is bad enough.

But recent episodes suggest that they had developed their own religion and had basically decide to leave the humans alone until the human-cylons somehow fitted them with chips which turned them into mindless killing machines.

Now they have free will back, they should be doing something about it, you'd think.

Well, not ALL of them have FreeWill back, just those with the rebel cylons.

Plus they hadn't actually decided to leave the humans alone. That was part of the deal with the Final Five.

I slightly disagree with those who say Ellen's character was different in the previous episode. She was still manipulative and self-serving. While Cavil wanted an audience in Boomer, IMO so did Ellen. The Earth Cylons gave the skin jobs free will and creativity? If they didn't have free will, how could they rebel? If they didn't have creativity, how could they build base stars and hybrids?


Four more episodes, and I can start whining about another show I used to love, but have come to dislike. I hear they are still making episodes of "Scrubs".  :oh_i_see:

Looks like Arthur was right about Daniel.

Now see this episode, just like the last one, was entirely driven by characters interacting with each other.  The difference is, this one didn't wallow in insipid melodrama.

I'll be glad when this shit is over .


I'll be pissed when nothing is resolved though.  :angryfist:

A better episode.  Showed that they may actually attempt to finish this series.



Starbuck has now resolved her mommy issues, her daddy issues and even her life issues (mostly on that one).  She is ready to move on or to achieve her destiny.

Excellent episode.

The Cylon memory share makes me think that Baltar's brain got the Head Six as a Cylon death download. It's also making me think that the guy behind all the weird shit is one of Baltar's personalities we haven't seen yet that he doesn't even know existed. Which would really be a shitty copout.

I kinda lost interest halfway through the 2nd series, but I still keep tabs on this thread.  One question - did they ever resolve exactly what head 6 is?  Has baltar got a brain tumor, or is she being beamed into his head or something?  Has this ever been resolved?

Head 6 (and Head Baltar) just kinda fell out of the series for quite a while. I don't expect them to resolve what they are/were

Baltar had a brain scan which found there was nothing odd in his head, as I recall. But it was never explained what head 6 is. Caprica 6 had a head Baltar for a bit too.

I'm kinda sad that they never sorted this out.

One of my favorite fake-outs in the show was where Caprica 6 is resurrected and meets Baltar, and for just a moment I'm thinking "no way, Baltar's a cylon..." until I realize that for some reason, C6 has a head Baltar.

The 6 and Baltar are sharing data like Cylons do.

There have been many "head-cases".

Baltar - sees a hypersexualized, hyperreligious version of Caprica-6. Still does.
Caprica-6 - sees a sane, calm well-groomed version of Baltar. Hasn't seen him much, though...
...Baltar ALSO saw Head-Baltar once, which was more than a little passing-strange.
Starbuck saw a Head-Leoben (who admitted at the end he wasn't Leoben at all) during Maelstrom before she died.

And most recently:


So, yeah, this is not a minor plot point, and it'll get explained.

http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Virtual_beings

Uh.  Is Hulu 1 week behind?  I have no idea what anyone is talking about.

Pretty amazing episode. Anyone catch the title of the tape?

The guard at the brig was reading Mind & Matter on Tyrel's first visit with Boomer. I'm not smart enough to know why that is significant, except that they made a point of showing it big enough to be obvious.

Otherwise, a good episode that showed the true nature of many of the characters.

I'm still just a little put out though that the Final Five, the scion of skinjob myth and society for thousands of years (apparently), are little more than squabbling scientists who haven't the wearwithall to throw their status around a little with the Rebels. Like, why weren't they immediately elevated to leaders of the Rebel basestar?

Yes.  Episodes are now posted online a week after airing.

Thanks.  I was getting very confused.

I'm kind of annoyed by Tyrol in this last episode. His actions with Boomer seemed...a bit out of the blue. He hasn't been shown to be pining for her really and he was so damned naive I wanted to smack him.

The rest of it was pretty good.

If there are any shrinks left in the fleet, the Chief is a lifetime meal ticket. He started in a secret love with someone who turned out to be a cylon agent and shot his boss. Then he married the woman who shot his previous girlfriend. Then his old girlfriend from Earth tossed that wife out the airlock.

Almost any romantic action with anyone could be explained adequately with that history. There's enough material for a conference.

He also turned out to be a cylon himself, in a hopeless situation. So resuming his relationship with the cylon might have offered hope.

I hate to admit it, but I got chills when Starbuck started playing the song.   :drill:

So did I. I hadn't caught the tune at all until they went into it.

Sorry but it annoys me. It's a great song - Bob Dylan wrote it, Jimi Hendrix made it famous, U2 did a version of it, and then somebody's kid from the show made an unrecognisable ambient version of it, they used it on the show and geeks across the internet go "wow".

There's a similar thread to this on my MMO guild's forum and they hadn't even heard of All Along The Watchtower until BSG. I was embarrassed on behalf of all nerds.

Whos Bob Dylan?

I don't even get why that song choice is so cool. I mean, they're in freakin Space. Somehow Dylan is sending brain wave patterns to the Cylon Opera house?

What?  No.  Jimi.

Yes, he took that much acid.  His spirit is broadcasting a remix of his song to alien robots in another galaxy.  No big deal.

I presume it's just the same as Klingon Shakespeare. 

I guess I'm a sap, but I liked how the "chasing a car" bit dovetailed with the Boomer/Tyrol story. It was obvious it wasn't going to end well, but I had no idea how badly it would go.


I can't think of an episode since the end of New Caprica that I liked as much as this one.

It wasn't the song choice so much that made me go :drill:, it was having Hera, the Final Five, and Starbuck all tied together in an instant by a few notes of music.  It was a fucking cool way of doing it.

It does help that I like the song (mainly Jimi's version of it, although I actually thought it sounded pretty cool being banged out on a piano like that).

I love the song. But BSG really pissed me off when they did the final 5 reveal and used a SUPERBOMBASTICMR.CRAPTASTIC shitty shit shit shit version of it by none of the artists who have made that song great over the years.

Agreed on that point.

This has all happened before and will happen again. So Bob Dylan (and probably Jimi) were tuned into the endlessly repeating cosmic vibe, man. That's where the song really comes from (?).

Re the song:

When I heard it, the first thought in my head was the cylon playing it was have some sort of latent memory pop up that is supposed to allude to just how far back the cylons go as far as creation.  Possibly some sort of AI that was developed in the 1960's.

But I could just be speculating out of my ass.

I think one of the Ron Moore podcasts explained that they wanted something that was recognizable as being from earth but not a existing version of it (the song).

For anyone unfamiliar with it, this is the classic, definitive version of the song: All Along The Watchtower (http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7zuq_jimi-hendrix-all-along-the-watchtow_family) (linking for audio, not video - audio is a bit cut off at the end unfortunately). It's a cover version, but this is the version that would usually be played on radio if somebody requested it.

Yeah, that's the stuff.

Obviously the Hendrix version is much better but the point of BSG isn't to listen to popular music.  The Cylon Earth version is very effective at creating eerie zeitgeist for series. 

I hate Hendrix, I'll take the BSG version over either Hendrix or Dylan.

(http://content8.flixster.com/photo/10/58/75/10587538_tml.jpg)

Hm.  Did you see Hera ram the little Battlestar Galactica model into the little Cylon Basestar model at the beginning of the episode?

Foreshadowing, I say.

Heh.

I didn't see Hera "ram" the Galactica into the ships, I just saw her sorta jump/move it to land in range.

This episode felt like a setup for a can't-we-all-just-get-along ending. Three or four people said variants of "human, cylon, what's the difference".

Last ep all the spoiler tags were for the current (already broadcast) ep. Can we have a hint on whether its spoilers for someone who hasn't seen the already broadcast ep or future ep or? Oh, nevermind.

Where are page 10 of the thread. Spoiler tags don't really seem relevant. If you're coming to this thread before an episode, you're reading to see if it's worth 42 minutes of your life to watch it. If you're coming to this thread after, you want to discuss it.

I just want to make sure I'm not seeing something about the last two episodes...

Everyone dies.  I just saved you 84 minutes of your life.

Also they come back and then they die again. Jimi Hendrix gets involved somehow but I sort of dozed out somewhere in the 12th series. This has all happened before hasn't it?

Everyone dies.  Then, Starbuck wakes up.  She is wearing only a white toga and is lying, face up, in an endless desert.  Someone walks over to her and blocks out the sun, but her eyes can't adjust.  That someone hands her a bottle of water.  At first, it looks like her father.  Then Anders.  But as her eyes finally focus...she sees Jesus.  Then, as she gets up, everyone from the whole series is there.  She runs toward them and there is a group hug.

Fin

Slight correction.  Otherwise, spot on.

Covering my eyes, not reading this thread:

My local time-warner just picked up Sci-Fi.  :oh_i_see: Fuckers. I had the DVR set up to record BSG on UniHD, along with Stargate Atlantis....they moved UniHD to a different channel, which fucked up my recordings. I missed the last season of BSG and two seasons of Atlantis.

More religious babbling from Baltar. That's exactly what I wanted in these last episodes.

I love every single scene Baltar has been in since the miniseries, except for every single scene where he spouts that totally insincere religious mumbo jumbo.

I think the point is he's starting to believe it himself.

If anything, that makes it worse.  For the record, I get what they are trying to do with his character arc, and for the most part, I approve.  His growing humanity and ultimate redemption is something I've been personally looking forward to for a long time.  I just wish they didn't go with the Pimp Daddy Jesus angle.  Not because I'm anti-religious or anything like that, more that the presentation of religious and spiritual issues in this show has always been very clumsy and hamfisted.

Do you really think they are going toward redemption with him?  I think Caprica Six was right- he has not changed one bit from what he was or ever has been.  "Redeeming" himself is just another play- maybe not for external power, but for internal validation of how great he is. 

I think it's pretty clear they are going for redemption. Would old Baltar have ever admitted his flaws to Roslin? That's just one of many small moments that has showed that he is truly changing.

ETA: It is BSG though so at any moment he could go back off the rails, but since they are wrapping things up I think it's unlikely.

I alwaus felt sorry for Baltar. He was always an arrogant prick but his real crime was letting a pretty girl manipulate him, who turned out to be a cylon. The rest of it stemmed from his guilt following that, and fear of being discovered.

This.

It's pretty clear to me that he wants to do the right thing, it has just proven more difficult than imagined due to his inherent egotism and cowardice.  Often times, when he does actually get himself to do good, he usually screws it up, because he just doesn't know how to do it, having had little experience.  The most recent example being his ill-advised public outing of Starbuck.  Still, he has been growing, bit by bit, throughout the series.  Thus, I look forward to his redemption, but don't necessarily expect it, because it is BSG after all.

I continue to have problems with the Final Five as characters. Well, at least with what being the Final Five does to them as characters. Not Saul Tigh: he makes sense over the whole of his arc, including his irritation towards *being* a Cylon and his skepticism about what Ellen's trying to get him to think and be. Not Samuel Anders, who has been a moderately consistent hunk of dumb meat for most of his time on the show. Not Tory Foster, who is so much of a cipher that she can barely be said to have a character arc, but inasmuch as she has any personality at all, she's got a willingness to be machiavellian and self-interested that's pretty consistent, and for all we know, very much how she was before Cavil inflicted amnesia on her. (I mean, where did Cavil *come from*, after all? Did they just cross the wires and whoops, we bred a fucking monster? Or were some of the Final Five not the World's Greatest Mentors and Parents?)

But Galen Tyrol?

Look, only two things make sense about him as possibilities:

1) He was always a catastrophic fuck-up even back on Earth, and got a ride on the resurrection ship just because he knew the Tighs and was in the right place at the right time, maybe because he had some technical knowledge that was useful to the project.

2) Cavil's brainwipe hit him worse than anyone else, and he's been a stew of emotional fuckuppery ever since--that he's the equivalent of someone who survives a catastrophic brain injury but suffers from some severe emotional disequilibrium as a result.

Otherwise, seriously, it makes no sense whatsoever that this is a guy who is a two-thousand year old visionary survivor of a doomed planet who planned a breathtakingly ambitious attempt to interrupt an ancient cycle of antagonism between synthetic and organic lifeforms. If there is a character on the show who has suffered more from the "throw a dart at the board to see what happens to him this week" syndrome, I dunno who it is. Maybe Apollo, I guess.

I think Apollo suffers mostly from being a main character without an appropriate role. Not once they blowed up the Pegasus. After that it was obvious he'd go into Politics, but I suspect the Writer's Strike screwed up the pacing of that. Or at least that's what I'd like to believe. I blame that also on Roslin's on/off cancer, and Adama getting too often into the obstinate/emo emotional flipfloppery. I agree with you that Tigh is about the most consistent character on the show, next to Baltar. And on Baltar, I agree that he's generally trying to manage the inner conflict: survive and do the right thing. So far he's always leaned towards survive, at the expense of the right thing. If they're trying the redemption thing, he'll off himself in some final show of belief/martyrdom.

Tyrol's a trainwreck. Not sure what they intended with the character but they didn't get there. I think he was just into the realm of "main character" enough where he couldn't be killed off though. Or it's in his contract.

Tyrol basically started off as Scotty with Cylon girlfriend. Ok, fine. So he can get all emo about that for a while, I buy that. But then? Fucking carwreck randomness. Either make the guy:

1) Working-class drunk car-crazy motherfucker who did a shotgun marriage with the Shelly-Duvall clone who offed his robot girlfriend and subsequently spiralled down into shitbag madness after New Caprica because he has no idea what's going on any more. Cool. Works. DO NOT MAKE THIS CHARACTER A CYLON. Maybe if you want, make HIM the Gaeta--not a military rebel but somebody who tries to lead a working-class rebellion against Adama.

2) Make him a Cylon, fine. But then ease up on the guy: don't make him the dramatic lever that gets Boomer out of jail. That was just too much soap operatic, too much larding on one more layer of incomprehensible dramatic character development that just really didn't fit. The guy should be moving towards resolution of his arc, towards being a better person, towards recovering whatever he was as a creator of a new race of people, and instead he's spiralling down toward supreme toolhood. It just doesn't add up.

In Tyrol's defense, I'm immensely fond of Aaron Douglass, and his performance of the character.  It's more a problem of what the writers are doing to the character than the character himself.

I think he's done a great job playing the character, absolutely. It's just that his character doesn't make any sense any longer: he's the worst victim of dartboard-writing on the whole show.

That's really been a lot of the problem with the show since New Caprica. Fantastic performances based off of REALLY SHITTY WRITING. I can't say that any actor on the show has done badly. The material given them has just been so off since New Caprica, bordering on downright shitty most of the time.

I won't say that it's a valid excuse, but a lot of the more batshit plot and writing decisions make much more sense when you listen to Ronald Moore's podcasts after each episode.  He gives what sounds like a reasonable explanation for why this or that happened the way it did.  His reasoning, however, only holds up as long as you are just talking about the show.  When you then watch the show afterward, no amount of reasoning can protect you from the  :uhrr:.

The one bit that actually works somewhat for me is to be reminded that these are a bunch of people who watched their entire race get wiped out, and have spent the following four years either cooped up in a windowless box eating fungus, or living in a police state run by the very same executioners of their race.  You can't expect them to behave all that rationally.

Except that they haven't really written the show that way either, as an exploration of a group of refugees all going slowly mad together over time in a way that made situational sense. At times, everything has in fact been way too fucking normal. We'll go for a whole slew of episodes where everybody seems to have 3 squares, a bottomless amount of good alcohol, and decent enough living conditions, and then suddenly the writers remember what the situation is supposed to be and everything is grimy and desperate and the characters get some circles under their eyes for a while. For a while, some characters will be perfectly normal and then they won't be. I mean, FUCK, they've got what looks like a regular old organized day care nursery school aboard the Galactica rather than a bunch of desperately ad hoc arrangements involving old people and relatives and stuff. If that's just a privilege that the top military people get, then take us off Galactica more often to show us how things are elsewhere, because *that's* where revolutions really come from.

I love the show when all is said and done, but like Babylon 5 until it went off the rails in the fourth season, it's the closeness to getting it *really right* that bugs me.

I swear to GOD, if the Galactica doesn't shoot SOMETHING soon, I'm going to explode.

This whole season has been full of fail, wtf.

How can you fuck up the final episodes so badly when (for the most part) the rest of the series was so good.

ugh.

I spent the whole hour saying, "You've got 2 shows left and THIS is what we get? Baltar fighting with his dad? Lee and Baltar in a room talking about how selfish Baltar is? FLASHBACKS OF ROSLIN AND HER DEAD SISTERS? CAN YOU NOT JUST GET THE FUCK ON WITH IT, FOR FUCK'S SAKE?"

This is the kind of episode I expect in midseason 2. This is not a proper penultimate episode. At least the finale will be 2 hours and I can have one more hour out of my week back.

The big reveal will be Baltar waking up from his Coma and it all being a dream.  :awesome_for_real:

BSG has always been a character drama, it just so happens that the characters happen to be hunted by Cylons.

I think this was actually a very evocative finale. BSG has gotten grittier, falling apart at the seams, its characters becoming more and more desperate, and as most of them get set to take a suicidal Ride of the Valkyries out of a sheer lack of any better options, we see flashbacks to their former life on Caprica, which was shiny, modern, and very, very bright. All of them have fairly crushing concerns (Baltar dissolute and wanting his family and former life to go away, Roslin's family dying, Lee's brother dying) and they are all shortly about to become very irrelevant (when have you ever heard Lee talk about his dead brother? Or Roslin her dead sisters).

It's a set up to next week's ending, which will be very final for everyone concerned, one way or the other.

Caprica in this episode annoyed me by not adding alien elements to things. Normally they make the effort to twist things a little: odd-looking skyscrapers, Anders plays an invented ballgame, they fly around in spaceships and drink absinthe. But this had champagne at a baby shower, Earth 2009 cars and a limo, American-style cops deathknocking a drunk driver car crash, bystanders at the fountain wearing Earth 2009 clothes, stir-fry, a pigeon ...

Probably made good use of the Caprica spin-off set.

Edit - other than that I didn't mind it. I enjoyed the previous episode more, but this was no different than previous BSG penultimate episodes. I have faith in them pulling off a good two-hour finale.

prediction: they all die AND wake up on (old) Caprica.  "rinse/repeat"

Technically, it wasn't written as the penultimate episode.  It was written as the first hour of next week's episode, and it wasn't until later that they decided to break it up into a 1 hour episode and a 2 hour episode.

Here's my prediction. 

The Galactica jumps in and has the big space battle with the colony.  Meanwhile a strike team, led by Anders, goes on the colony and tries to grab Hera but are captured.  Things are looking bad when suddenly the rest of the fleet jumps in, led by Baltar, who finally does something selfless and noble.  Maybe some ships kamikaze into the colony.  Rosilin dies dramatically.  But the battle weakens all the ships and the singularity pulls them into it.  Everyone is getting crushed but Anders shouts "JUMP!" and it transports them to a new Eden-type world (shown at the start of the last show).  At the end Baltar and Head (Angel) Six take Hera and disappear to train her to be the new, single goddess.  The few folks left over cry, make campfires and eat smores. 

Fade to black, roll credits, piss off fans.

Beat to pulp battlestar + huge cylon colony ship thing + black hole + jump drive wired into the brain of a one of the final five = time jump that deposits them on Kobol 10k years ago. All of this has happened before...

It all seemed irrelevant in the context of what was going on in the episode though.  They didn't mesh it together with the current plot and all of the flashbacks were disjoined, unrelated in any fashion (except for being on Caprica before the attack), and just plain useless.  It just didn't seem to be cohesive enough to make sense putting it in the 2nd to last episode.

I think they were trying to go for a general atmosphere of, "these were all normal people leading normal lives before this, people who have been pushed to do extraordinary things by circumstances." At least I think that was the vibe they were going for, Roslin breaking down over her family's death, Baltar dealing with his dad, etc., etc. The problem of course is that this is the sort of this the rest of the series is for, hell they could easily have replaced the mutiny episodes with this sort of build up to apocalyptic end times and it would have been better (of course people at the time would still have been pissed at a flashback episode). As a penultimate episode it was just too disparate and unfocused to work, maybe if they'd thrown some kind of theme into the flashbacks at least and shown how they relate to what the character is going through now...

Uh oh. You might be right. Everybody goes through the black hole and on the other side is the reboot :(

Given that Ron Moore is on the record as absolutely HATING Star Trek: Voyager episodes that did that, and how in many ways BSG is very consciously the anti-Voyager, I'd say the chances are nil.

My call:

* huge battle which ends with the Cylons boarding Galactica (no idea why, maybe they are threatening to suicide detonate nukes or something). (This is all in the previews.) Lots of people die, including probably Baltar doing something selfless while carrying Hera with Caprica-Six (the Opera House scene).
* the Cavil-cylons mutiny when they discover they are essentially fighting the Final Five and Cavil's various escapades come to light.
* The battle is finally won win Galactica rams the hell out of the Colony, with only Adama and Roslin on the bridge.
* Starbuck is visited by Head-Daniel who decodes the Song as a star chart to a new planet.
* After Starbuck gives the coordinates to the fleet, Head-Daniel takes the now-knows-she-is-Head-Starbuck home, with some mumbojumbo mystical explanation of who the Head-people are that pisses everyone off.
* The new planet is revealed to be our Earth.
* Fast forward to modern day New York, with a reveal of first Earth and then New York identical to the reveal of Caprica and then Caprica City at the start of the finale, with a Six wandering Manhattan and the text scroll "All this has happened before..."

That last bit was spoilered somewhere else. I know it's supposed to happen. The ride there will be interesting.

Damn you Lum! DAMN YOU!

What? It's not spoilers, just guessing. Most of the spoilers posted lately have been wrong, anyway. (I do think the Caprica Six one will be there, but more because Moore really likes symmetry - same thing with the long slow pans of Caprica at the beginning of the episode vs what I suspect will show Earth at the end).

I could also be wildly wrong and the entire last episode could be one long flashback of Tyrol buying melons.

(BTW just for more confusion, Glen Larson apparently got a movie based on the ORIGINAL BSG greenlit.)

Greenlit to go write a script or greenlit in that a Director signed on?

As for the flashbacks to Caprica before the fall, there's some symmetry and closure there. We find out that Baltar wasn't bullshitting about where he came from. His father WAS an old farmer.

Yeah, this is the way I  took it as well, and it worked for me. Basically, it drove home how utterly irrelevant everything these characters were as people was after the Cylon attack. Bleak, sure, but it's a bit like McCarthy's The Road: we think we're one kind of person until the rules of life change dramatically in an unexpected way, and then we discover that all the things that we thought mattered don't matter at all.

My wish:  They fly the Galactica inside the damn thing & Anders FTL jumps the battlestar, destroying the colony while the Galactica winds up elsewhere, broken & dying around a shiny happy blue planet (Earth, eh?).  The survivors from Galactica then form the new 13th colony leaving the rest of humanity to go form new colonies under Baltar and his cultists.  Rinse, repeat in a few thousand years.

At this point, I'd be happy for a 2 hour musical extravaganza, with the Galactica singing an operatic death aria. So long as it's over. I enjoyed the series, but it seems my enjoyment has gone down a bit with every episode.

Well, part of my guess for Friday's closer was wrong - Ron Moore finally posted a podcast for the episode before last, and he said conclusively that Daniel (Cylon number 7) had no siginificance to Starbuck or anyone else, was specifically just to retcon why there was no number 7 cylon, and was kind of bummed that everyone on the Internet assigned significance to it that didn't exist.

So the "It's magic!" answer is all we have for the Visions, Head People, the Song and Starbuck.

I'm clinging to the faint hope that he's lying, I don't really mind much about the other loose ends, but I'd kinda like a logical explanation for the whole Starbuck mystery.

Daniel was a throwaway? WTF?  :uhrr:

IIRC, Cavil made a comment that suggested that the "final five" were actually the first ones created, which didn't make sense as there was a gap in the cylon number (or that Cavil was no. 1. Have I mentioned how much I hate skin jobs? )

Finally watched this episode. It wasn't terrible. It was life flashing before ones eyes before the end. I agree with whoever said the following:

- Galactica jumps in, rescue mission launches.
- Mission gets Hera, jumps away.
- Galactica explodes or jumps, pushing the colony into the black hole (there's no way they'd locate it so close to a black hole and NOT have it as a plot device).
- Most people go down with the ship. Baltar dies in some heroic act.

This ending does feel rushed though. They resurrected interest in Hera, reintroduced Boomer and Tyrol love nonsense, created the colony as the ultimate target, brought back the bad-guy Cylons, and jacked Anders into Galactica all in a very short period of time.

And they only had to put this all together because they spent too much time on the topic Earth, that really very stupid mutiny, the sideplot with armed Baltar followers I assume is similarly going nowhere, and too much time spent fixing the ship.

All while there being no drive towards actual resolution. They had plenty of time to go with either resignation that humanity wanders the stars endlessly or finding a mutual arrangement with Cavil in some star system. Instead I feel like they hastily slapped this together to have any sort of definitive resolution. Sorta like the epilogue of Harry Potter 7, or the stupid last Seinfeld episode.

I could almost get behind a cliffhangar to boost a new series, but the only one on the books is a prequel. And I really don't know how either Olmos' nor Glen Larson's supposed BSG movies can actually come about without there being, like, an actual Battlestar called Galactica.

So I walk into the finale really not expecting much.

Speaking of "this has all happened before and will happen again" ... this kind of discussion happened when the series was on New Caprica. On and on it went with so-and-so's love affair, baby this and baby that, a soap opera on a planet with no space action. I seem to remember a two-part season finale where the first part was called disappointing.

And then they pulled off the "Galactica and Pegasus save humanity" and jumping-into-atmosphere battlestar insanity, and everyone was happy, apparently.

Two things I'm getting a vibe about. Total speculation, Either the final five were not the first or only cylons to survive the destruction of 13th Conley Earth, and thats who starbucks father was. Or the head people are part of a third factions of humans and cylons who in every cycle succeed in getting off the endless ride of human vs machine and now help guide others to there place of existence (Nirvana)?

Tale's got a point, the writers seem to be able to pull of awesome conclusions but have ability to actually get to them. We get lots of weird build up and forced, fake, actions on behalf of people that makes no sense or seems totally pointless followed by the writers being able to go, "Fuck it, forget all that bring on the electric guitars played by ninjas while we launch fireworks." Of course after all the pointlessness leading up to it the ending's got to be pretty fucking awesome to do well.

I need someone to get for me a picture of Baltar's dad shaking his walking stick and yelling "OOOH BIG MAN".

Didn't we blame the writer's strike then though?

Also New Caprica is Galactica's Best of Both Worlds episode. We retroactively forgive what happened between the awesome first season and the ohcrapwhatsgoingwrong second season because of the rescue.

I just finished listening to his recent podcast.  A couple of things jumped out at me.  First, there's a point where he gushes on and on about how the true meaning of the show is in the characters and their interactions, and not the space battles, or action, or plot.  Which is funny because it seems like all the best parts were the battles.  Dropping into the atmosphere, launching vipers, then jumping out at the last second?  Awesome.  Pegasus ramming a basestar, then its launch pod slams into a second basestar, destroying it too?  Fucking win.  Don't get me wrong, when they actually tried to get some genuine character development and interaction that didn't involve the use of a dart board, they did pretty well.

Second, he makes an offhand comment about how the episode was developed by the writers a while back, and then he came in at the last second and changed it all around.  It caught my attention due to the way he mentioned it, as if that was the standard operating procedure in the writers' room - that he pulled that shit all the time.  Ronald Moore may be one of the reasons why Battlestar was awesome, but he seems to be the primary reason why it would often suck at the same time.

I hope the series ends with a big reveal, something that would make even David Chase go "what the fuck?"

Humanoid cylons actually evolved from the humble potato. The last survivors are pursued through space by Starbuck chanting "boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew" while a Saul Tigh voiceover says the chips are down. Starbuck's fury at this terrible joke helps her catch up and as Tigh is about to be mashed he yells "don't hurt me, I'm just a common tater" (commentator LOL). Roll credits.

They engage in a climactic final battle from which the Galactica emerges with just enough life left in it to take them to the true Earth, but it turns out that the humans of the BG setting are actually incredibly tiny, and the ship is eaten by a Golden Retriever.

head people are from teh Future.  Bet on it.

They are from the alternate universe on the other side of the black hole, where "our" Earth is.

I actually hated that. The fact the only plan they could come up with was Suicide rescue, followed up by plan B, alternate suicide rescue.

I hated it even more that they did the 'right' thing and didn't go through with the election rigging which brought them into that situation in the first place.



Waste of a perfectly good BattleStar.  :angryfist:

Where Spock has a beard?

Alternate, not parallel.  :awesome_for_real:

The sixes have goatees.

Yeah that's why I said "apparently". I didn't really like it either, but saw lots of posts from people who thought it was great.

That roughly marked the point where I stopped giving a crap about the show. That whole season with the Baltar trial arc or whatever? Skipped!

The Eye of Jumpter was in the middle of that season.  That Arc was pretty good.  Realistically the Cylons would have spaced Baltar and saved us the whole trial.

In my defense, I thought it was great visually.  From a tactical standpoint, yeah, Plan A suicide mission with a backup Plan B, which is also a suicide mission.  :uhrr:

i initially read that as "the sixes have goatses"  :ye_gods:

(http://www.scifi.com/freezone/landofgiants/giants.jpg)

I loved the episode. And I loved the finality of Adama's plan. He thought they'd die and didn't care. They had another Battlestar and the fleet could therefore continue running. And notice he a) decided to donate the Galactica to the cause instead of the bigger/better/strong Pegasus; and, b) lead it himself knowing he'd probably go down with the ship. Plan B wasn't Plan B. It was ignoring the plan and losing the better Battlestar in the process.

And did it all without the over-the-top speech I didn't really like from the most recent episode. This show was better when shit happened without all the time-filling projection of what was going to happen. Season 1 Adama would have said: We're going, because we're human, and we are going to rescue a member of this family. Come and be a hero or stay behind and live with your cowardice.

In the end, if it were me, I'd have just lured the base ships away somehow else and rescued the planet with armed Raptors. Vipers don't have jump drives but Raptors with laser (/dr_evil) coulda done the job AND not lost a Battlestar.

All will be revealed.......tonight.

That seems unlikely.

Please PM me the winning lottery numbers for tonight.

4 8 15 16 23 42

Even if the ending is horrible, I'll be happy as long as they explain the head people.  Conversely, even if the finale is made of lego winbricks and covered in awsomesauce, I'll still be disappointed if there isn't a satisfactory explanation of what the head people are.  Same with the return of Starbuck.

 -spoiler She becomes the symbol for a global empire of coffee shops on modern-day Earth.

O-M-G!!!

(http://users.on.net/~svandore/pics/640px-Starbucks_at_starbucks.jpg)

Red Stripes   :drill:

It's Cylon for beer!  :awesome_for_real:

A musical would have been more fulfilling. At least they sorta tied up some things. Meh.

Ok that was pretty damn good.  But some holes went un-answered.

I need to mull this over, but I'm mostly happy.

Yeah, I agree.  I'm satisfied.

Overall it was okay - parts of it were really solid, some of it  was over the top with the preachy hammer, and some of it was just a bit of meh.   I think if I was still more invested in the show, I may have been more willing to let it slide - but ever since we hit the season of stupid ass love triangles, my patience for the show has been a bit thin. 

I'm still processing everything, but I think I liked it.  Fairly solid conclusion.  The head people were explained about as well as I expected them to be.  The final scene was far more effective than I thought it would be, especially since they used Hendrix for it.

There were some rough patches, particularly when it came to over-flowery speechifying at times.  Starbuck's ending was a tad too ambiguous for me, as well, but I think I understand the motivation for it.  The scene with Racetrack and the nukes was too deus ex machina.  Still, in the end, I think they did a good job.

Invasion stripes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invasion_stripes), which I thought was a nice homage.

I was pleased, who'd have thunk I'd weep at the end of Gaius Baltar. It was nicely tied. Very nicely.

Kara was a chip, who'd have thunk it.

She had a wing tatoo on her arm.  Nice.

I thought it was frakking brilliant.

Not only did I get to see Centurions fight Centurions. I got to see Old School Centurions fight Centurions.  :drill:

What the fuck is wrong with you people? Did you see the same episode I did?

Primitive purity is the final solution for the humans? LAZY. It screams "I had no fucking idea how to end this, I'll just have them give everything up and be the lost Mormon tribes."

It was all God's plan? LAZY.

Dead woman's nuke missle? LAZY.

All the Head people AND Starbuck were angels? REALLY? SERIOUSLY?

And why was Hera so important again? Nothing was explained about how her DNA was anymore important than any other surviving human.

At least Roslin's ending was poetic. Why couldn't we have all this pew pew all season? The flashbacks really weren't all that helpful, and got in the way of the explanations they really should have given but didn't.

All in all, well-acted, beautifully-filmed, self-indulgent, lazy, pretentious SHIT.

Clearly you missed the part where the robots were fighting. AKA: The Best part  :heart:

No, I saw that part. I kept asking "Why are the old skool Cylons even here?" No explanation. And they looked REALLY out of place and awkward, almost out of proportion to the scenery they were composited on. Really bad CGI especially compared to new model cylons.

As for the pew pew, it would have been great if we'd seen it earlier in the season (or at all). But again, I kept asking "Why wasn't this kind of cool shit all throughout the season?"

You say lazy, I say inspired.  He managed to bring religion in without beating anyone over the head with it. The whole thing was never going to have some neat scientific explanation. There was always the supernatural or divinity at work, from Kobol on out. 

Hera was a macguffin that brought everyone into place for Starbuck to punch in the magic code that brought them where they were destined to go.  In addition to apparently being the mother of all mankind, an Eve if you will (oldest common ancestor).

Also, primitive purity beats the hell out of flying motorcycles any day.

She was, as the final scene explicitly stated, fairly important (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve). In other words, humanity of today is a cylon-human hybrid.


Other then that it was the Cylon homeworld for the original Cylons, who were featured in Razor, you mean. They didn't beat you over the head with it but it was fairly obvious, they were the pre-Final Five ones.

I'm going with Haemish on this one.

The ending (as in the whole episode) was a giant fucking cop-out and ridiculous.

Oh, hai there!  I missed some details but essentially it was as I called (and where it divulged from what I put was awesome - Cavil's exit was brilliant and who would have thought the most emotionally honest reaction at the end would come from Gaius frakkin' Baltar?)

As for it being a "cop out"... come on. It's based on Mormon mythology, it's not like it was some kind of secret where the show was going. I would have been more disappointed if they had some technobabble explanation for the Head-people and Starbuck. The amount of explanation given for what Starbuck was was fine - she was there because she had to be, when she didn't, she wasn't. Anything else would either have been too mystical-preachy for the character or too technobabbly ridiculous.

Plus, come on, the entire first hour was The Blasters of Navarone. If you hated the mystical-preachy stuff, just pretend the series ended when Racetrack killed all the Cylons and Starbuck jumped them home.

If you dig the metaphysical shit, Hera and the Colonists were a second chance for humanity on Earth. The science and technology and stuff were just window dressing.
If you're not into the metaphysical... and had an issue with angels and whatnot, why the fuck were you still watching the show after the opera house? I could see the writing on the wall, and I'm not the sharpest crayon in the box.

To see Centurions kicking ass and watch the Galactica make things go Boom.

That's, about, it.  :grin:

They exceeded my already high expectations. It was a work of art.

It will work much better as a collection. People who watch the whole series together in the future will be wondering WTF we were moaning about, because for them it will be a matter of a few hours' patience followed by an awesome ending.

Thanks to the people who inhabited this thread for the quality BSG discussion.

Cried at the end. But then I'm a big pussy at heart.  :drill:

I'm gonna miss the writing on this show.

I was less than happy with the whole wrap-up taking over 45 mins, but the first hour and 15 was awesome.  Overall I think I enjoyed it, but I stopped caring about the characters long enough ago I didn't care what happened to them, and just wanted to see where it was going to end-up. 

Calling the dead pilot's nukes a "Deus Ex" in a story about machines where God is central is pretty damned amusing.  Of course it's a Deus Ex Machina.  It's a joke! :drill:

 :heart: Seeing the oldschool cylons. 

I'm happy with how this wrapped up. some unanswered questions but that's ok, some mystery isn't a bad thing. I wonder if we will get to find out how they wanted to end it originally, from what I understand during or after the writers strike RDM changed how things were going to end.

FWIW I don't buy any of the angel stuff. That's Baltar's spin on it. The only thing that the episode really said was that yes, chip 6 and chip baltar were really real, not that they were really angels.

This is not the men in white from the first series. Yes, they could be angels and Baltar thinks so. They could also be three people laying on couches in the Nebuchadnezzar.

That's one thing I liked about the ending.  If you want to believe something besides Baltar's take, there's room for that.

Ok so I guess I"m the only one who didn't see the religious backend of the whole series or didn't care (I don't even know mormon mythology). 

Taking the show as a fun sci-fi the ending was crap and a last minute cop-out, and 4.5 was a waste.  Guess that show's me for enjoying a show for face value.

This was the intended ending (well, as intended as they intended - they did a lot of seat-of-the-pants writing). They had as a contingency during the writer's strike ending the series when Galactica found nuked Earth.

You know, I liked it.  It was a lot better than I was expecting and it worked for me well enough.  I think they could have tightened stuff up in the middle more (season 3 in particular had some terrible crap, bookended by some of the best episodes of the series), and having re-watched the first season, I wish they had kept that kind of pacing going.

But over all, I don't feel cheated.  I like that they had some kind of closure that wasn't exactly "they lived happily ever after" and that they didn't actually try to explain *everything* in some crazy last minute exposition overload. 

The way I see it, if big ship explosions pew pew pew is what you want, there are lots of other crap on TV you can watch.  For example, everything else on SciFi.

BSG was always a character drama.  In one podcast RDM said that the network was pushing him for less character development, more shooty stuff.  He consistently pushed back and kept the vision of it being primarily the story of the characters.  Lots of people like that.  If you don't, I have no idea why you even watched it outside of the few action-based episodes (Scar, 33 and a few others).

In the interest of not being a total obnoxious fanboi (just mostly), I think there were a lot of missteps.  I am not at all satisfied with where Apollo's story went.  I think he was primarily an action guy and putting him in a suit was a disservice.  Romo Lampkin's story should have been done after the Baltar trial.  His only good role was as a foil for the regular characters, but I think they like the actor enough to keep bringing him back randomly.  Making him president was just indulgence.

There are others, but I think the broad strokes hang together well enough to call it a success.  If you like that sort of thing.

Post-series interview with Ron Moore.  http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/03/battlestar_galactica_ronald_d.html (http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/03/battlestar_galactica_ronald_d.html)

That's why I have loved the series up until the last episode of 4.0, because of the drama not because of the pew pew.  Honestly I didn't like the pew pew in the final episode because it felt rushed and I didn't feel like it was paced well.

The fact is that even with ending how they ended it, I think they could have led up to it a lot better and the way it appeared to me was "shit we need a way to end this" with 2 episodes to go.   Even 3-4 episodes they kept upping the mystery about Kara and asking more questions, and to me making her disappear all of a sudden to allude that she was an angel frankly just seems like a copout because the writers did not want to form a real reason for everything that has happened to her.

Furthermore, the giving up technology crap annoys me.  All throughout the series they protrayed the whole fleet as humans with real thoughts.  I can see the military people giving up all technology figuring what they had been through, but you take 35 thousand people and say "we're taking all of our tech and destroying it in the sun" and there's no way you are going to get them all to agree with that without mutiny, especially with the cylon centurions being able to keep their base star.  It doesn't make sense from a character point of view and how they set everyone up throughout the whole series. 

I still don't understand the whole point of Herra, as in the end she was just a bargaining chip used to hold off the cylon fleet, which ultimately was futile.  Furthermore, if the raptors were equipped with some insanely powerful missiles (which are like 500 times more powerful than anything hte cylons were shooting at galactica, wtf?)

They could have done a lot more interesting things with the final cylon colony, and they could have set things up for a much more explained, interesting, and logical ending, even with them keeping the whole finding our earth. 

Most series use the whole (at least) season to lead up to the final ending, but the ending felt so detached even from the last two episodes, let alone 4.5, that I feel extremely disappointed and feel that it was just a cop-out so they could proclaim to have a holier than thou message in it, when the same message could have been conveyed if everything was planned out well.

You know, I actually like a good Deus Ex Machina as part of a story. But just layering miracle over miracle in such a short span of time is not good.

Seriously, this is how you bean an idea into the ground:
 - Head Six and Baltar: Miracle. Okay. Fair enough.
 - Hera's whole mysterious knowledge: Miracle, too. Huh.
 - Opera house scene: Another miracle. And this one didn't even have a point to it. (Maybe I missed something)
 - Dead pilot shooting nukes at exactly the right time: Guess what...
 - Starbuck's return: Yay! Another frakking miracle. Not like we hadn't already had enough by then.

That said, the pew-pew was nice enough to compensate for the worst parts. Still, Moore dropping most of those story arcs that I was most interested in seriously turned me off anything he might produce in the future.

Well, I certainly give them credit for ending the series; so few TV shows/writers respect their audience enough to write the most important part of their series, the ending.

That said, I think it is pretty apparent that TV Writer University should add some classes: Ending Your Series 101.

I'll not nitpick, but revealing the answers to 5-years of mystery building by flipping your cards only to reveal a poorly explained new mystery is weak at best.

Ok, a couple of nits to pick:
With 38 thousand human survivors in what way is Hera remotely like some sort of Eve?  My guess is she died of exposure in the first winter (see #2 below).

I'm indifferent to the luddite ending from an aesthetic perspective... but seriously, having the new tribes walk into the sunset with nothing more than a duffle bag and a change of clothes is beyond stupid.  Launch the technology into space if you want, but at least show them building a village and a forge.  Introducing primitive metallurgy to the stone-men would connect an obvious dot, and provide the bare minimum for surviving the next month, much less starting a new civilization.

Starbuck...making her disappear is cool for about the 1 second it takes to say, uh wut?  That would be a bad ending even if we had some building suspicion that she was... well, what?  What behaves like that?  Chips/angels don't leave behind charred bodies and necrotic blood... I'll hang-up an listen for a tortured sci-theology answer.

edit: had to add necrotic blood 'cause its cool, and was the lynchpin on Baltar's big out-the-starbuck speech.

I really liked it overall, though the angels going POOF and everyone going caveman was a bit iffy. 
I'm just assuming they kept enough books, tools, and medicines to get themselves started in their new slightly better than caveman lives.

I liked it.  Yeah, there were some flaws in the story but they explained Kara and the Head Duo, even if exactly what they are is open to a certain amount of interpretation.  Regardless of whether they were angels or super advanced chips/scientists, the point is they were higher forces guiding humanity to a new beginning.  Sure, we pretty much guessed that already but it needed to be addressed at the end, and it was.  So I'm happy.

I didn't necessarily see them going caveman, at least not immediately. Watching the society assimilate into the earth tribes and later fall would make a great book, but wasn't going to wrap a tv series. Baltar was already talking about starting farming which from a quick Wikipedia search is 130,000 years ahead of the game. Actually, it would make a great series of books.

I don't get the question about Hera, she's the mitochondrial Eve. Gotta be someone, why not her. she's as good a candidate as any other woman on the planet. Moreso if you take into account the chip people watching over the species and wanting the cycle to end. I'm sorry if this is insulting, but you know that while obviously not a human-cylon hybrid, there was such a person?

They didn't give up their technology. Adama was quite pleased to zip around in his Raptor, and they showed them offloading supplies and shit. What they abandoned was their society.

I give the series a C+. Some really good stuff and some really awful stuff, but in the end it felt like a drunk guy in a bar taking a half hour to tell a joke. You keep wondering when he's going to stop digressing and fucking around and get to the punchline so you can go to the bathroom.

YMMV.

My first though after seeing the end was that the entire series was just a cautionary tale about our advancement in robotics.

I personally wish they left it a little more open ended in the end, as opposed to wrapping every single little thing up so nicely.

Disappointed that the physical form of Starbuck wasn't fully explained, God (or whatever) influencing the players via visions I can buy into, free will and all that, God recreating a pre-programmed dead player including spaceship, not so much, too easy to rig the game.  Overall though, very well done.

My initial response when the episode ended was just sitting here staring at the screen and feeling.... satisfied. Apart from saying frakking well done concerning the way Gaius Baltar turned out, I'll leave the analyzing to the rest of you, I just know that I enjoyed pretty much every minute of this finale.

Well between this and the matrix and terminator... We really should stop making robots of any kind....

I thought it was very good.
 :sad_panda:

Thought running through my head at the tail of the episode:  Galactica is the 'B' Ark of the Colonies.

Also, I personally like that there was some ambiguity at the end.  Explaining too much can ruin a story as easily as not explaining anything.

Some of my favorite bits:
"Now I may be mad, but that doesn't mean I'm not right." - Baltar
"I don't mean to rush you but you ARE keeping two civilizations waiting" - Cavill
"Really? You think? Please continue stating the perfectly obvious. it fills me with confidence." - Cavill
"YOU see them?!" - Baltar & Caprica-Six
"Could we *not* tell her the plan?" - Starbuck, about Boomer

It wasn't the perfect ending, but it was a good ending to a great TV Series, a Very Good SF series and a new benchmark in science-fiction and character drama.  Could have used a full 5th season to give more depth to the end, but I suspect they left some mysteries for further movies (aka, THE PLAN coming later this year!). 

1. it was a show and an ending so much better than anything we normally get from TV
2. it's over
3. I appreciate that they tried and kept it good enough for as along as they did
4. I have very low expectations for TV, so it was fine

The Centurions got away and led happy lives until they return in 2007 looking for the allspark...

I stole that from another message board. Don't tell anyone.

Character dramas only work if the characters are consistent. Which none of them were... they were always in service to the plot, and the plot was muddled and ridiculous. The fact that it was ripped straight from Mormon mtyhology IS LAZY AS FUCK. It's fine if you use the mythology to actually examine it and see if maybe it's bullshit or if something's there, but to just horribly disguise your story as the story of Joseph fucking Smith is lazy. People complain about Deux Ex Machina endings, and this was ALL THAT. Cavil's ending was a copout. The only part of that scene that made sense was Tyrol choking Tory when he found out she killed his wife.

As for Hera's importance, great, she turned out to be Mitochondrial Eve. But why was SHE in particular important for that? No answer. Beyond the opera house hallucination (which wasn't explained at all - where did this hallucination come from and why an opera house?) and the one time they used her blood to save Roslin, why couldn't it have been any female progeny from the survivors? The best I can come up with is the storyteller needed an excuse to put people in the colony scene - meaning the character herself was unimportant.

I'm just going to look at BSG through the Matrix Filter. The series really ended after the New Caprica rescue episode, because nothing else after that was worth the effort. Unfortunately, it looks like I'll have to actually watch The Plan movie to find out the fucking answers to the shit the writer promised would be revealed.

Also this. THIS TIMES TEN. We have less than 1000 people on this board, and we can't all agree which fucking browser to use, much less make the collective decision to give up everything about our previous lives that we've ever had to live like a goddamn savage.

I imagine a large number of those people didn't really have a choice.

Because she was a human-cylon hybrid. Given that she was humanity's forbear, everyone not a hybrid ended up an evolutionary dead end. Presumably there was much interbreeding going on but she was the first and showed that it was possible.


It was a metaphorical vision (most are) which brought Baltar to the right place at the right time to save humanity/Hera from the Cylons.

I mean, I get that you don't like the metaphysical aspects which is perfectly valid, but the authors actually went to a great deal of effort to explain almost everything in the series. There's a few things that weren't spelled out, mostly involving Starbuck (Starbuck's father knowing the Watchtower theme, the nature of her visions pre-death, where her Viper came from) but pretty much everything else was. It didn't RAM IT DOWN YOUR THROAT and a lot was open to interpretation (such as who the Head-Six/Head-Baltar entities actually were) but it was there.


I agree that this was pretty badly scripted and probably unnecessary (the writers probably thought they had to explain why there wasn't the ruins of Neo-Caprica and a starship fleet somewhere in Tanzania, whereas no ruins would survive 150,000 years and several ice ages) but the underlying motivation is pretty obvious if not spelled out right then and there - humanity had been crammed as refugees on rattletrap spaceships for FOUR YEARS breathing recycled air, eating processed space algae, and leading so miserable an existence and having hope after hope crushed that when Adama says "Hey, let's just go fuck up some Cylons even though we're definitely not coming back" most of them say sure, what the hell. The last thing they want to look at is a steel-plated wall.

I think making Hera Mitochondria Eve was lame. It's not as if only one person ever has had that claim to fame. It's just as well that "magic" was the answer to most of the questions since the sciency answers fiill me with NERD RAGE.  :mob:

What does it mean to be a hybrid (in science or metaphysical terms) anyway? It's a bit ironic given the views expressed at the end, since achieving human-cylon hybrids necessitates a highly advanced society.

No way I'd give up on the advanced technology. If for nothing else, I'd keep the advances in medicine. The idea of surviving in an environment teamed with pathogens that the population has not encountered is dim (Wait, I forgot about "magic". Sorry.  :oh_i_see:)

Overall I liked the episode, even though it felt like Ron was twisting the knife a bit ("oh so you don't like Baltar's raving madness? Watch him save humanity with it, lulz.")


I even liked what they did with Kara. It sort of answered another question, apart from Starbuck. Remember that ep when Baltar pissed off Chip 6 re: monotheism? Oh, yes, I'm that OCD about this frakkin show  :why_so_serious:


Actually, I had no idea who Racetrack and Admiral Whitebread were, and my lack of knowledge kind of took away from the show. From the scene where Adama hands him the medals, I could tell it was supposed to be some sort of surprise, but all I could think was "man, that should have been Gaeta".

TLDR: God Did it!  :oh_i_see:



For proclaiming to be such a character drive show, the only 'characters' I gave a shit about in the end were the Centurions. God damn meatbags ruining everything for everyone.

Here's another thing I don't get.  I haven't seen a reason to care that Herra was half-cylon or that she's some mitochondria eve.  From the whole show, the few evolutionary features that cylons have that humans didn't have were that with proper technology they could be resurrected (which is nullified by the fact that the resurrection technology is long gone forever), could apparently read electronic signals through fluid with their hand (doesn't matter since all technology which utilized that fluid was destroyed or went away with the centurions), and some could live forever (the final 5 could, I couldn't quite tell if they made it clear that regular skinjob cyclons could as well).  The last one is further nullified that since Herra is dead that she did not get the live forever "gene".

Other then those things mentioned, humans and cylons are exactly the same in every regard (which was one of the points of the show, that I saw at least).  Hell as far as we know, the cylons literally created actual humans when they made the skinjobs, but added in genes that allowed the previously mentioned points.

First you claim to be OCD on the show, then you don't recognize two characters that appeared in 32 and 18 episodes respectively? I like the fact that they kept the bit characters in the background consistent throught the show.

I was satisfied overall. There was no possible way we were going to get the final episode of M.A.S.H. here. I think they did quite well for what was expected of it. (At least we didn't get something like the final episode of Seinfeld)

I agree with you on that - the "abandon the fleet" decision wasn't adequately explained. On the one hand they had no need for interstellar spacecraft because they had reached their goal of an Earth and with Galactica turning into a rusty tin shack there was no military escort. There was no reason for anybody to ever go back into space. But on New Caprica they landed the ships on the ground and kept using the technology.

They clung to parliaments, committees and votes the whole way, so you'd expect them to have a ballot about whether to build a city and keep the tech, or follow Lee's "go savage" idea. You'd expect at least a mention that they had a vote. But I think we were supposed to presume they had a vote like they always would, and they left out mentioning it, which didn't quite work.

Some of the things in that final interview linked above indicate that things didn't quite go according to plan in the script rewrite and final edit, and there were a few other elements he wished had been more clearly explained. This is probably part of that.

Was Adama's "one hour of work" ever explained in some past episode?  Was he wrestling with the decision to become a man-whore or a drug mule, or was it something else? 

P.S. Something I wondered early in the finale: why was it important that we saw drunk Adama vomit repeatedly onto himself?

I think it was simply that he was going to leave the military, but the Voight-Kampff test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voight-Kampff_machine) pissed him off, so he stayed in long enough to command Galactica the day the Cylons attacked. It meshes with the rest of the "how they got to this point" flashbacks.


Same reason it was important we saw Lee chase around a pigeon. (In other words, the producers got a little full of their artsy selves.)

I think in 20 years time when they remake The HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy- it ends with Aruther Dent and Ford Prefect transported to the Galactica fleet just before they find earth, via one of those ships we never got to see the inside of, because it was the ship in the fleet that had all the hair stylists and phone cleaners from Caprica on.  "The Plan" was to get the Humans and Cylons onto earth to stuff up the answer to Life the Universe and Everything.

It's easier to understand if you accept that this show was Days of our Lives in space. Soap opera fans don't give a shit if the plot or characterizaion makes sense as long as there's lots of sex and drama. Science versimilitude doesn't even get a bronze in this race.

I thought the first part was ok, and then it went off the rails. It really did not work for me at all. To me, the whole Colony set-up was a kind of gun-on-the-mantlepiece that never got fired. I would have preferred if Adama's plan was to use the Raptor teams to get out Hera, ram the Galactica in the colony, and then fire its thrusters to drive the whole thing into the event horizon of the black hole. I would have bought all sorts of trippy quasi-spiritualities following on that--consciousnesses surviving even as bodies and matter get ripped apart, reaching out to guide the rest of the fleet to some home, key characters getting away on the Raptors, whatever.

The first thing that went wrong for me was the scene with Cavil in C-and-C. Look, I am totally willing to believe that they could reach some accommodation with the Cavil-faction Cylons, perhaps with the Final Five mediating it. But the "Give us resurrection and we'll give you peace"? All this fighting and struggle and desperation and there's anybody out there who would accept that? Believe that? The Cavil character has pretty much been revealed to be a supervillain, to be malicious on a scale that no other character in the show even approaches. (In fact, I think he's the one genuinely malevolent character in the entire history of the show, where there really isn't much about him that's redeeming or explicable.)  Here's where the deus ex machina was really needed (and not just Baltar saying there's one): something had to happen for me to believe that the characters would accept that resolution. Then Tyrol fucks up again--suddenly he's genuinely upset that his ex-wife was murdered? Really? When he's already come to the conclusion that he didn't actually love her? Plus, he's remembering everything? So he's not remembering that Tory was supposedly his lover back on ancient Earth? Whatever. This all felt very clumsy.

Then we get to Earth-2. This whole part is stupid. A deeply divided fleet, full of conflict and simmering resentments and a history of struggle, but everyone, *unanimously*, is ok with just blending into the woodwork, giving up a technological society. Right, I know, they keep their technology for a while, but how long is it going to last? Not very, most of it. So we have some little clusters of 12-Colony survivors who are going to get killed now and again by local animals, are going to die from diseases they could previously cure, live in increasingly poor conditions, suffer poor growing seasons and possible famine or malnutrition, see their children die in infancy at increased rates, and accept that in time they will fade out and disappear entirely, that nothing that they did or struggled for matters. Oh, right, Hera is the future blah blah blah blab. Well, maybe that will matter to the people who live in Hera's little group, but the rest of them? In ten years, they probably won't be able to travel to the other groups or communicate with them, so who cares about any of that. The people by themselves would die or go mad in pretty short order. Fuck, Adama would probably kill himself in a few months without any booze. If you want to get the people of the fleet to the conclusion that this is the way it HAS to be, I guess I'm ok with that, but make that hard-won, painful. Not Lee Adama saying, "No, let's just fade away and die, because it's beautiful here and there's lots of nice animals and hunter-gatherers" and everyone saying, "Oh, yeah, you're right, how loverly."

And the Head People. Lazy, like Haemish said. Ooo, how profound, maybe they really were angels. Whatever. I'd rather Ron Moore just look at the camera at the end and say, "I'm sorry, all done, I have no idea what to do with this stuff, never did think it out".

Also, like some folks said, way to misunderstand Mitochondrial Eve. Of course, so does the mass media, so I guess that's not that ridiculous.

Actually I bought that scene. Cavill is an evil fucker, he's messed up and hates humans but also is in a human body so hates himself and hates the Final Five for making him. However he's also not just evil incarnate, he's got a motivation beyond just making people miserable and without resurrection the only way for Cylons to continue is Hera. With the option of resurrection he doesn't need Hera anymore (and would probably be much happier with that method than reproducing like humans). Provided he's convinced that the humans will actually leave the Cylons alone then he really doesn't have any reason to do anything other than ignore them. He might change his mind once he's got resurrection and Galactica's no longer in a position to destroy the colony but for that scene I buy it. Everyone else knows that it's a choice between possibly being hunted and killed by him  later or definitely all dying then and there.

As for Tyrol, far as I can gather they get access to everyone else's memories and since neither of them remember being lovers they don't get that. Best they'd manage is Ellen's memories of them being together. Even if he didn't love Callie he didn't seem to hate her really and I doubt you can spend that much time with someone and get that close and then not really care when it turns out they were murdered, especially if you thought they were the mother of your child.

Overall I'm going with Lum on this, there was a lot of Deus Ex Machina but that's what this show has been about, there's a higher power and it's been directing things in various ways. Starbuck was handled in, frankly, the best way they could have done that. You can say it's lazy for not giving us any substantial explanation but there really is no satisfactory way you can explain her coming back, any actual explanation would either be far lamer or have plot holes in it the size of a base star. Also Hera turns out to be a slut with a thing for primitives :why_so_serious:

IMO there's no way in hell Cavil would have ultimately let the humans live, but he's certainly capable of pretending it to get the resurrection technology.  My personal guess is he'd have had nukes planted on board the Galactica, so dead-Racetrack blasting the colony is just a case of "do unto others before they do unto you"

Either Tyrol's rage was "God's" way to wreck the transfer so there are no immortal cylons mucking things up, or the chief really did love Cally despite trying to convince himself he didn't.

Actually it raised a question for me since I don't have an encyclopeadic memory. Has Cavil ever actually lied or broken promises? I know he's a psycho but there was something about the way he said that they had his word that struck me as either being sarcastic or sincere and it could be that was meant to be a genuine resolution that got fucked up by Tyrol going into rage mode. And like I said I don't think it's necessary that he was in love with Cally for him to snap and want to kill Tory. She spaced the woman he thought of as the mother of his child and lived with for quite a while in a fucking cold hearted manner and I get the feeling she never actually felt too bad about doing it.

Two more things that pissed me off:

Cavil - his whole motivation this time is to get resurrection tech? If so, why did he bother fighting the humans before the resurrection ship got blown up? Why bother attacking the humans at all? He seems to have been the most human-hating, but really, once the original Cylons got their freedom from human servitude, why bother trying to exterminate them? And as for his hating a human body, why keep it in the first place? Once he'd gotten rid of the final 5, the resurrection tech has to merely by a method of storing memories for transference. So why not build himself a great big tough ass shiny robot body and transfer into that? Because only the final 5 knew how to make resurrection tech? Ok, but that means the other skin jobs are complete fucking idiots with no idea how to alter their tech, meaning they would be an evolutionary dead end anyway once the resurrection ship bought it. The skin jobs aren't capable of learning how to use their own tech? My fucking head hurts with that shit.

As for the primitive purity shit, one thing would have improved it and it would have taken about 2 lines of dialogue and a few minutes of CGI. Just tell me that like 10-20,000 decided they didn't want to give up their tech, took some of the ships and fucked off to another planet. It just goes beyond belief that THAT MANY PEOPLE, who have previously been shown to be bitchy and rebellious even in situations where it's obvious going against Galactica and the government was going to get motherfuckers killed, it stretches my bullshit factor to the breaking point to think they'd all just say "Yeah, let's go Robison Crusoe on this bitch."

And I'm assuming that in this timeline Ron Moore postulates, Joseph Smith discovered some old Galactica writings to make up the book of the Mormons. Wanker.

I'm not sure if you were following along with the show, but until they found our-Earth, humanity was fresh out of planets.

But yes, I would have preferred if Lampkin looked down his glasses at Lee, and said something to the effect of "Yeeeeeah. Go play with the natives, big people talking" and continued laying out the city plans. Hell, if Moore wanted to get all religious with it he could have named it Nod!

I think the whole rationale behind that was that the authors thought a civilization 150,000 years ago would have left remnants, when most likely whatever the Colonials built wouldn't have survived the next ice age.

Cavil knew about the final five all along and either outright lied to the other cylons about it or feigned ignorance. I'm not sure it was really explained how he knew the truth and no other humanoid-cylons did.

I'm one of those who felt simply having Kara be an angel or whatever she was, was a cop-out. Explaining things by saying it was a higher power who moves in mysterious ways is up there with saying a wizard did it. As others have said, it feels different if the angels are head-people. Head-people offered advice and challenged people's thinking, but Baltar and Caprica ultimately had to make their own decisions. Kara flew a viper and shot things, and of course led the fleet to earth by typing the co-ordinates into a computer.

Frankly I'm still confused as to why the first earth they found was populated by cylons (tests showed the skeletons they found were humanoid-cylon skeletons) when it seems it actually was the 13th colony, but it may well be that I just got confused by the end.

You and the writers methinks.

Actually it may be that Cylons on the old Earth were advanced to skin job style but possibly still in slave conditions, hence the final five having the cylon bodies to beam themselves into and the 13th Tribe Cylons wiping everyone out in some massive suicide nuking rather than bombing from orbit. That's the only thing I can think of that explains those Cylons not being around anywhere, the 13th Tribe being normal humans and there being Cylon skeletons on the planet.

Also some people keep referring to the Final five as if they've spent the last 2,000 years preparing for their arrival at Kobol. While it's taken them that long to get there because of the speed they were travelling at it has in fact only been a few years for them. They're not as age old and experienced as all the talk about them being thousands of years old leads you to believe so it's no surprise that they make the same kind of mistakes as everyone else seems to do.

They did, cavil removed it from the others memories in order to push his personal hate and agenda.

The forsaking of technology and the manner in which the choice was portrayed really grated on me. We have all sorts of mythology about super advanced civilizations that existed at one point in pre-history. Easily could have had Atlantis or Lemuria or some other mythical civilization be attributed them.

I can accept the shoddy mystical aspects of the storyline. But the destruction of all technology was a bit much.

Julian May's four-novel series of dissident humans going through a time gate and discovering that there are gene-compatible telepathic aliens in Earth's Pliocene got this whole plotline right. 1. Go ahead and build a technological society...if there aren't enough of you, big fucking deal, because eventually it's going to die out and leave no real remnants at all. 2. Your adventures and conflicts will be the basis of human mythology later on, because enough of you will survive in smaller and smaller numbers that you'll interact with evolving humanity and tell increasingly corrupted and re-envisioned versions of what actually happened.

So the way BSG could play this out? That the very reason we're haunted by the Frankenstein concept (which is way older than the novel) is because we have in our racial memory dimly distorted versions of the stories told by the 12 Colony survivors. Ok. This does not require the improbably stupid, show-violating belief that all 39,000 people would agree to go primitive. What the hell, let one group build a city, let them even be at odds, who cares, it doesn't matter. That would be the human complexity the show otherwise did an OK job of showing.

Cavil is just another in a long line of characters who they made up as they went along. "And they have a plan". Sure, whatever, bullshit. No they don't. But it was never more clear than in this episode than the character was basically just a cipher who could be as evil or not as the story required him to be. If he really had mommy and daddy issues at the level of "I'll brainwash you all, dump you among the humans to live or not, and then launch a genocidal war after fucking up all your dearest hopes", is he really going to say, "Oh, hai guys, good to see you Final Five-y people. Can we haz rez tech?" We've been told that the character is *irrational*, obsessed, and not just with the survival of his people or with escaping his humaniform body: he hates his creators enough that he did his best to make them feel horrible while not quite daring to just kill them flat out. That is, if we buy that one episode where they tried to flesh him out, as opposed to other episodes that just made him out to be another Cylon, or one of several with a different opinion than the others.

Not to mention the utterly cipher-like Cavil-faction Cylons. Or the Leoben models, who just curl up and suck a little cock at the end of this after being religious fanatics for most of the history of the show. What do they think? Feel?

Mostly I think this show adds up to an ambitious, sporadically excellent near-miss with periods of spectacular pratfalling failure. I guess that's better than the safe complacent but frequently kind of American-cheese satisfaction of something like Stargate. Maybe.

Well Stargate had Richard Dean Anderson and BSG had Edward James Olmos.  Pretty significant difference I'd say.

The scene that stuck with me was Adama puking all over himself, camera goes  tight on his face and you see this desperate fear (I've been there when too drunk) that transitions to a child-like beatific smile as he manages to get the stars he is staring at into focus.  Transition to the fleet in space.  It's moments like that I will miss in spite of the odd pacing choices, etc.  that everyone is complaining about.

The thing is, if they had properly explained every last little bit to make everyone so totally happy we probably would have needed another half a season of episodes to do it, and that's without going into the trio of angels!

We can assume they kept SOME low end tech, that they scavenged SOME stuff from their ships.

But as the show has shown us (hurr) they barely had any fucking toothpaste left, much less the supplies to build a decent city.  Hell, New Caprica was left in the lurch, and it was a fucking SHITHOLE.  And that was extra ships, supplies, and people ago!

I'm sure they took books, and tools, and guns, and had some Raptors and Vipers stashed away for a rainy day.

I'm sure there were arguments on going down planet and not trying to land a bunch of ships who were falling apart and most weren't atmosphere capable.  Hell, NOT bringing the ships means the various groups of meanie hate Cylons who are now doomed to a slow extinction all over the galactic region will have a shitload of trouble finding them if they ever do.  Their jump signatures are gonna be hard to find, and if they do happen to come upon Earth its a bunch of scattered people who are gonna be tough to spot, and probably not even worth the effort.  And all split up over most of the WARM PARTS OF THE PLANET (excepting folks like Tyrol up in ur Scotland) what few nukes they have left will be a waste.  They basically just took the survivors into super stealth mode.

And the odds of all those wandering basestars getting to Earth is probably nil, but now its nil to a factor of 10.

The colonists aren't all gonna be caveman.  Hell, they will probably maintain an Amish level of existence for quite some time!  Heck, maybe they even reach Victorian eras of technology.  There is only about 40K of them, and not all have useful skills for a hunter/gatherer/farmer existence.  Many will spend their remaining days learning these skills from the people who know them.  I'm sure Cottle is teaching medicine and learning what plants do what.  Baltar knows how to farm.  They have stronger, faster, and more durable Cylon skinjobs to defend them from the crankier subhumans.

150K years is a LONG FUCKING TIME.  All evidence of the colonials could easily be lost in 10K, much less 15 times that.  Maybe the Centurions came back and picked up most of them in a few years.  Maybe they got into a scrap against the cranky Cylons, and they lost, but the data of where Earth was lead the bad Cylons to Earth who then dropped a nuke on Atlantis, the big city they founded.  Hell, maybe Atlantis flew into space to meet the Basestars and kicked some ass, but flew out of control, flying into Mars and mostly burned up on entry!

Heck, maybe the good Centurions ended up becoming the fucking Transformers, or the Anti Spirals, or the Protodevlin.

I mean, there WERE some survivor groups on Caprica and New Caprica.  There are 11 other colonies with a few scattered survivors.  Maybe they make peace or take out some Cyclons and sneak aboard a basestar and are putzing about the galaxy?  Maybe they might have even hit a wierd snag with FTL and jumped forward a few millenia and end up forming the colonies from original BSG?

Hell, who says BSG Earth has to be EXACTLY like our Earth?  Maybe its the Earth of Doctor Who or Marvel comics or something!

That's what is so fucking rad about the ending.  It leaves so much open to personal thought and interpretation that its practically a storytelling engine for entire generations of fanfic fiends, and fodder for endless forum discussions.

I can understand why some folks may have issues with it, but it did what more endings should do. 

Make you THINK about what you just watched.

Um, you know it's no real, right ?

But... mitochondrial eve!  :sad_panda:

Only three people mattered, Hera, her Cylon mother and her Human daddy, everyone else was erased from history.  As a tv series it worked well, but as a story it left too much unexplained.  Everyone could have died in "33" and Gods plan of getting a Cylon/Human to earth II would still have been a trivial feat using any human survivor.


Right there in black and white, Starbuck was just a plot device to move the story forward, turns out the best way to keep ratings up with riddles is to make unsolvable ones.  Effective, but sucks if you actually wanted a resolution.

I think the lesson here is that it's easier to build up awesome mysteries than to resolve them.

I thought the show started to go off rails when it become focused on the final five and their identity. At that point it switched from a character-driven military show to a whodunnit. And in the end if the answer is "it's magic" then the mystery is totally invalidated.

Building up an exciting, involving mystery then resolving it in a way that makes sense is hard, and the more involving and outrageous the mystery is the harder it is. The Matrix movies are a good example of this, as is Lost and a lot of Stephen King stuff.

For me the series peaked in season two and since then I've watched only sporadically.

I agree with you there. But I did get some enjoyment of watching them writing themselves into a corner, because i knew they couldn't pull off an ending that would satisfy all the buildup.  :awesome_for_real:

A few things here. First, he expected the final five to come back on their knees so even if the res ship was gone, he wasn't concerned. He sent them into the colonies as humans to teach them a lesson and fully expected they'd learn it. But mostly, he wanted the best for his people. He wanted safety from future human attacks and vengeance. Once resurrection was gone, he wanted his people to continue.

Though really, as with letting the red stripes go, they seemed to be doing pretty ok before the Five arrived. They managed to cobble together hybrids and build a military machine all while the slaves of humanity. Presumably without humans picking them off or making them clean the sewers of Caprica City they have the potential to find a way to reproduce, even if it's cloning or something like that.


But but... So I shouldn't go to the courthouse today to have my last name changed to Agathon?

(Yes I understand indirect descendency.)

You know, they could easily have compressed the mutiny episodes, dropped the absolutely horrifically bad melodrama episode where Helen gets back and finds out Tigh is screwing a Caprica, had a compression of the episodes leading up to the attack, and then had time for a much more moving finale of how the fleet comes to accept, in fits and starts and with a lot of unease, fading and disappearing into the genetic woodwork of another species. Show us a few little scenes of how the survivors actually fare--maybe Tyrol dead in Scotland somewhere, a haunting ambiguity about whether he died naturally or by his own hand; maybe Adama comes back out of his life as a hermit and we see him as an old sad man drinking rotgut in a shabby village, etc: something that gives us a feeling for how different characters gave in or struggled against the inevitable.

One thing that kinda had me curious other than the what the hell was starbuck part was 150k into the future when baltar talks about gods plan, head caprica says something like you know he dosn't like it when you call him that. Which implies some specific entity and not a nebulous force of nature.

They present Cavil as basically a supervillian (experimenting, altering the memories of the final five, do anything for his goals, no moral compass) but they expect us to accept that he couldn't already have the plans for resurrection technology and/or not take it before? Then that's his whole motivation for peace? I really expected him to shoot Hara in the head not himself, that's just a cop out.

The whole going caveman on earth was just silliness "I cannot believe everyone agreed to it", neither do I. Roam the earth as a caveman or on the centurion express base star will full living accommodations, I'm sure you'd have a few people wanting to take a trip with them.

The whole over the top of miracles was just silly(it's been covered a lot), lets just mash numbers till the FTL takes us somewhere. Yes I know she was working out the math formula for the notes but without seeing the original sheets again and no pen/paper its a far stretch (imho), and there was no direct links provided for numbers mashed(see goonies).

I liked it.

I'm glad it's over.

Explained mysteries suck and are not mysteries.

I'm glad a show existed that did not stick to a tired formula.

Eric Stoltz is the new Ted McGinley.

Right on the "roaming around with Centurions". You mean *nobody* in the 39,000 says, "Say, you know what, give a few of us a ship of our own that has some supplies and fuel, we'd like to keep poking around the galaxy looking for stuff, we're not ready to settle down and be cavemen. Yeah, we get that we'll eventually die out, but it seems more interesting to die out exploring aboard a technologically sophisticated ship than it does playing at primitivism". There are plenty of cultures in human history where small bands of dissidents or explorers kept going when the rest of their social group decided to settle down during a long migration, just to see what was over the next hill, even knowing that they'd eventually end up dead that way.

For that matter, you mean no one said, "Hey, there's still Cylons out there...we did this once already with New Caprica, what's the point of settling if they're still around out there to kill us or for that matter, still thinking that Hera is the key to their own survival?"  Or that no one said, "Say, Helen, about this resurrection business, now that we're away from Cavil and the Colony, why not try to build a small resurrection machine before you send Anders into the sun? Then we can live our lives as primitives on this planet but our culture will survive  because we will survive to live forever. Maybe Tory's knowledge of resurrection wasn't particularly crucial".  Everything that was human and interesting about the 12 Colony survivors just fucking flash-evaporated in the second hour of the finale, leaving only Adama and Baltar with vaguely compelling character development.

I'm going to go with: It's very likely the Cylons could have reverse engineered resurrection technology but to do so they'd have had to offline and probably take apart the resurrection ship, something they were unwilling to do.  Once the resurrection ship was destroyed, it was too late.

You know that entire season and half of shows they've had since they left New Caprica? You remember those sterling arc episodes like "Useless Boxing Tournament" and "Overwrought Fifteenth Mutiny" and "Look, Baltar's Group of Concubines is Starving, Let's Give them Guns!" episodes? That's where you explain some of this shit that's left unexplained. Moore had plenty of fucking time to write and explain the shit he left to our imaginations, he just chose to piss it away with useless soap opera love triangles and idiotic visions.

And fanfic? The world does not need more fanfic.

I've noticed there is a strange obsession in BSG fan commentary with the Boxing Episode and how it TOOK MY PRECIOUS TIME AWAY.  Every show has occasional throwaway episodes, like when a puppy teaches Worf to love or something like that.  I actually liked that episode a lot. 

For God's sake Triforcer. The Worf puppy love episode was absolute crap! It simply reconfirmed the well known fact that Trek has been dead since the Wrath of Khan.

To me, it seems obvious that there's absolutely nothing wrong with BSG that couldn't have been fixed by putting Joss Whedon in charge.

The blame lies solely on the retarted way ratings are measured in the US. Arc episodes are ususally scheduled for sweeps months because they draw a lot of audience and they usually have a bigger budget than regular episodes.

Since BSG doesn't have a very huge budget to start with, they end up with a few killer episodes and a fair amount of filler to compensate for that. The boxing episode and similar ones are basically BSGs clip show equivalent. Not enough budget to show something cool and shall not move the plot forward.

You can notice something similar in other shows as well.

I liked the boxing episode too.

I think maybe a reason I liked this show so much is that I don't tend to obsess over the details of a work.  I'm not the guy who has the Star Trek Technical manual memorized and can tell you each episode, time and way in which continuity was violated.  If the high level works, I can keep my suspension of disbelief.

For example, I can think of a lot of ways to tell the story of why they "all" decided to go native, but it would take another series, or miniseries at least, to go into it.  I'll take a clean end over elaborating everything to the detriment of the main point of the series.

BTW it's not Helen Tigh, it's Ellen, dammit.

I don't get the Boxing Episode hate.  Did everyone forget about Fatsuit Lee?  FUCKING LEE IN A FAT SUIT?!  HOW IS THAT NOT THE STUPIDEST THING IN THE WHOLE SERIES?!  If you all just blotted it out or something, congrats.

BAM!


I thought it was fine.  Exceeded expectations, which admittedly had been lowered slightly over the course of the last couple of seasons. 

The 'God did it' uber-explanation unfortunately craps out the same way it always does: you're left wondering why 'God' didn't 'do' something else.  Like just tell them what to do.  'Take Hera and go here and make Earth.  See ya!'  Usually that shit's explained with 'God' having to be mysterious and have a light touch, except this time he crapped out a fake Starbuck and spaceship from nothing, and made her run around the ship and half-remember Jimi Hendrix songs with her memory-dad.  That's not a light touch.  It's a lot of fucking work when you just made her from scratch in the first place.  Just give her a Raptor with full knowledge of what she's supposed to do.

So I mostly just ignored that.

Giving up the tech was a little weak, too.  I think they could have explained it away with Atlantis.  Oh we had a city, but it sank! QQ

Ok... so I might be remembering wrong, and the finale isn't up on Hulu or anything yet to double check.

Didn't the newspapers at the very end refer to finding a child skeleton who might be mitochondrial eve? Angel Gaius and Angel Six then referred to her "human dad and cylon mom" buried next to her. So that means Hera died a young child.... which means she couldn't have had offspring.... which means she wasn't important anyways? Is my memory mistaken, because I swear that's how it happened. I mean, it's not a big deal, the ending overall was more than just that one throwaway line... but it stuck with me as strange and implausible... like the writer's logic just utterly failed them at the very last second.

They said "young woman", not "child," I'm pretty sure.

That's the thing.  I actually LIKED the slow moving plot not going forward episodes.  Apparently most of you didn't which is why I have kept having to listen to whining about anything character driven in this show since like 06-07 or so.  (Lots of rolleyes.  Its why I barely comment on BSG.)

Sure they could have explained away every little bit of them getting to an agreement on going retro on Earth and why all the ships were more properly sent into the sun and what every group of Cylon and Colonial resistance group did afterwards, but really?  Who gives a shit.  Use your fucking imaginations and rational thought for once.

I can understand how some folks might not like this, but its just what BSG did so close your eyes, spread your legs, and think of England. 

Its certainly not the ending I would have written or anything, but I am happy enough with the bittersweet ending we got.

Or would you rather we have the fucking ending of something like Evangelion?

But hey forget all that, also forget Moore flat out saying about Starbuck "We debated back and forth in the writers' room for a while on giving it more definition...the more you try to outline it and give voice to it and put a name on it, the less interesting it became."

Because Hera (Hera in the context of the TV show BSG, not Hera the God from Greek mythology) being mitochondrial Eve is so much more interesting.  Years spent crossing the galaxy and ultimately they get totally erased from history because someone got pissed that Stargate got there first with the Pyramids and Atlantis.  I hope Larson's movie is good just to piss Moore off, because even though he created a great series, make no mistake, he really bottled it at the end.

I laughed.


Back on topic, is there any series that everyone agrees ended well, wrapped everything up, didn't lose continuity, nothing was sorta hokey, and left you with that happy afterglow?  I'm not asking rhetorically here (unless there is no such series) but as some have pointed out, ending a series is a hell of a lot harder than keeping the mystery going (cf Lost) so I wonder how often and if ever it's been pulled off better than BSG did.

I'm not sure about wrapping everything up and happy afterglow, but two of the best finales ever were M*A*S*H and Twin Peaks, both of which were depressing as hell.

Babylon 5. The only criticism that I have to the ending of that series was most of season 5 was paced badly. But the finale just puts ME in tears every time. This wasn't even a good Star Trek ending.

As for those character episodes that I've dogged - I love character episodes, but only when the characters are consistent. Moore likes to talk big shit that BSG is a character drama, but the characters were CIPHERS for where he wanted to move the plot. They acted in complete contradiction to established positions they had before several times during the series. Lee Adama was the worst of the lot. I'm the best pilot, no I want to be a Battlestar Captain, no I want to screw Kara, no I want to marry Duella, no, I want to be a lawyer (which is where it really went off the rails), no I want to be a politician, no I want to be a ground pounder, no I want to be Robinson Crusoe. I mean, shit, 4 episodes ago we have Tigh professing his undying love for Caprica 6 (and vice versa) and one episode after they lose the baby, he's back with Ellen and Caprica ignores the whole goddamn thing.

And since the characters were ciphers to the plot, it meant he wanted to get us to the point he got us to. And that point SUCKED ASS, and it had inconsistent, flip-floppy characters to do it.

Actually, I think Babylon 5 is somewhat similar in the end, except that the finale of B5 was better than this one. I think that's another case where the author had one idea at the start about what the ultimate resolution of his big mysteries was, started to realize it was kind of cheesy or didn't fit all the facts, started to improvise, then also had to adapt to actors leaving the show when there was uncertainty about renewal, and ended up with an explanation of the major "arc" that was totally stupid. (Vorlons = Order, Shadows = Chaos; younger races say 'leave us alone' and what ho! they do.) Then he had to stall out some of the last part of his fourth season and most of his fifth. Plus, I think JMS chickened out on some of the harsher dramatic arcs he had planned for characters early on, particularly with the Sheridan-Delenn romance. But at least he tried pretty hard to make a big save and get things back to where they were early on.

But yeah, I don't know a show that was built on a "mystery plot" that's really done exceedingly well in tying everything up satisfyingly. But considering that a lot of novel series manage to do that, it's not impossible. It just takes writing the whole thing out in some measure right from the beginning, rather than having an open-ended serial drama in mind. There are a lot of great shows that would have been even greater if the creators had said, "This is a 48-episode story, no more and no less. That's what you're buying."

Head-Six:
"Let a complex system repeat itself long enough eventually something surprising might occur.  That too is in god's plan."

Head-Baltar(suddenly in a Bale's Batman-esqe gravely voice):
"You know it doesn't like that name."


God did it!  But it's not really god so... that makes it better... or something.

Ron Moore just doesn't have that big an ego :awesome_for_real:

That would be... a pretty impractical way of going about things.

Not at all. It's how a lot of shows get made in the UK, for example: there's a set number of episodes that are being bought that tell a complete story. Maybe there will be another complete story with some of the same characters sold later, maybe not--but aren't required to sell a serial on the premise that you'll go as long as the network still wants it, and keep the narrative hamster wheels spinning as long as possible.

That doesn't sound at all like Greek mythology to me. Greek mythology has a very linear progression that shows the ascent of normal man. First you have the Titans, and they are overthrown by the Gods who are not as powerful but are crafty. Then you have an earth populated with various half-Gods and such but by the end of the Trojan war most of the half-gods are dead or forgotten and the real Gods are fading into the background while humanity comes to the forefront based on good old fashioned ingenuity and hard work.

Greek Mythology and Tragedy (http://learning.berkeley.edu/cipolat/PDF/Student%20Papers%20ISF116/Greek%20Mythology%20and%20Tragedy.pdf)


The First Philosophers of Ancient Greece (http://www.gmu.edu/courses/phil/ancient/intrps.htm)


*shrug*

Arthur's cites are basically right. Broadly speaking, the Greeks had a cyclical view of time and history. Inasmuch as they saw things in linear terms, they saw them in terms of anti-progress, e.g., that things had a tendency to get worse over time.

And they're generally a lot shorter than the 48 episodes you suggested in your example (a season is often as short as six episodes, and even something like Doctor Who is only 13 episodes a seaon).  It's impractical to write an outline a 48 part story (which would come out to around 35+ hours of story for an hour long show minus commericals) without a network commited to picking the show up, and it's impractical for a network to commit to a story of that magnitude before even airing a single episode to see if it will catch on.  Especially if it's a show that will requires a decent sized budget.

Beyond that, even if you plan out a story of that size from beginning to end, there's still a good chance that somewhere during the writing and filming of those episodes, shit is going to change along the way for various reasons.

I'm going to say Newhart, but that might be subjective.

M*A*S*H

As someone already said, you cannot say it was 'happy' ?

I laughed, I cried and I felt happy to have watched the final episode.

Someone asked a while back what the "one hour" was that was such a big deal. Looking it over for a third time (yeah I liked it sue me), it's pretty clear that the hour is the lie detector test which Adama views as an affront to his honor.

I don't mind any of the decisions made in the final episode, but the editing really was rushed and they should have taken that 11 minutes and gone to the half hour.

It was alright until the flash forward, which was really horrible.

Sure, I don't think anyone's going to deny that. You've got your big, can't help it, things like actors moving on, and you've got your writing things, like a storyline that's just flopping like a dead fish when it got thrown up on the TV screen. Shit happens.

But nBSG went far afield. I'm not sure if it's what really happened, but goddamn it seems like they threw in a lot of soap drama to appeal to their growing 30-40 yr old housewife soap fanbase. That, and they'd go in circles with a lot of the characters (Roslyn is dying, she's recovering! sh'es dying again... Kara's dead, she's back, she's crazy, she's a cylon? she's an angel? she's gone again...) it just felt like for a long time there the story didn't even have a vague idea of what it was about or what it wanted to accomplish.

The finale was filmed at the end of season 4. Season 5 was added at the last minute when the series was renewed, which is why it stunk in comparison.

True, along with the tinkering and meddling TNT insisted on doing to Season 5, it contributd to a very uneven season. And Claudia Christian being banished from the show didn't help either. Oh and Marcus being killed in Season 4. But the finale was indeed incredible.

Neon Genesis Evangelion.  :awesome_for_real:

As one of the few people who will get that, I ought to choke you.

Well, avoiding this topic like a disease because I'm still in the middle of Season Two, when  

but I must say I underestimated the second season at the beginning, now I really  :heart: it.

Grace Park and Kandyse McClure (Dualla) are just gorgeous  :awesome_for_real:

Consdiering the last several pages of discussion it's kind of cute that you spoilered

Cute like a baby retard.

Second season is wrought of pure awesome.

Third and forth... isn't.

Eva caused enough choking to anyone unfortunate enough to watch the last few episodes/movies on its own.  It does not need our help.

I swear to god some of you fuckers defy belief.

For the entire run of this series there has been a quasi-supernatural aspect to things. And you bitch about the metaphysical copouts? WERE YOU EVEN FUCKING WATCHING THE SHOW?

Baltar, oddly enough, was the character I found the most satisfying in the end. He's also the one who grew the most as a character.

Oh, and every character I wished death on? They died.

I was quite happy overall with the finale.

Everything except the primitive purity bullshit worked for me.  As someone said earlier, it won't seem so awesome when in ten years you die horribly from a preventible disease on your mud farm. 

You wished death on Racetrack and Skulls?  That's terrible.

I did after the mutiny.

The primitive purity stuff was kind of unexpected but it worked for me. Maybe I'm just getting old and sentimental but I could see never wanting to see technology again after it nearly destroyed them.

I totally forgot they sided with the mutineers in that one.  Never mind.  I'm glad they're dead now too.

Good point. If it had been explained that way instead of "Lee has an idea and suddenly everyone does it" and we'd seen some die-hard technologists saying "yes, for the sake of breaking the cycle", it would have resolved better. I agree with you overall, that the finale was really good, but the low-tech decision was my only complaint.

Re Racetrack - I thought she was a throwaway character and I'm surprised anyone paid any attention to her existence.

(SPOILERS on the second season...Yeah, well, you never know :P)


I Just finished watching the second season  :heart: :heart: :heart: :heart:

I really loved the flashbacks on Caprica, as well as the personality of the two "corrupted" Cylons back there :).

I must say that, given the budget and whatnot, they managed to create some gorgeous scenes, especially the attack against the Resurrection (but Christopher Blair, Hobbes and Maniac would have done a much quicker job :P) and the ambush of the rescue team on Caprica by the Cylon.

And how fucked up was the scene when Tyrol punches poor Kelly???  :ye_gods: :ye_gods: :ye_gods:. I really felt sorry for her :(

Not sure about the last turn of events...I just hope Gaius dies of a horrible death :P
---

Ok, enough babbling, on April 6th the DVD box set of the third season comes out here in Italy  :drill: :drill:

I did too at that stage but he does finally redeem himself. As others have said, his moments in the finale are the most touching as he seems to finally become humble and a believer.

Yeah, we were. We figured not even a douchebag like Ron Moore would just toss away 4 years of mystery in a 30-second dissertation that boiled down to "God did it."

(http://www.primeraplana.cl/jl105/images/Fotos_pp/Actualidad/nelson_muntz.jpg)

"Too easy."

One of the mysteries from early on that they explained and made part of the show was the identity of the Final Five. Do you really think what they did with that was better than what they did with Starbuck? I'm not going to defend the writing decision to make this show all about mystery but frankly I think they ended it in the spirit of the show and I think explaining all that shit would have been so much worse than leaving us with another set of questions.

Clearly you weren't paying attention. From Season 1 this has been all about the God(s) and their plan for humanity.

Except, he really didn't even have the balls to say "GOD" did it. He just said "Well, it was some divine force that the Cylons call God and we called the Gods and it doesn't really matter so long as you just have faith."

He could have saved me the trouble 4 years ago.

Ahhh...so the finale was supposed to not only wrap up plotlines but tell you exactly who/what the God(s) were? Got it. I guess I wasn't expecting the final episode to be a philosophy/religious studies course so I was happy with what I got.

You seem to be able to increase your density at will.  That's an interesting superpower.

(http://www.rayeye.nl/homepage%20plaatjes/shinobishaw-k.jpg)

4 years of build up followed by 30 seconds of "none of it fucking matters. GOTCHA!!!!!"

It's like being told your first time is going to be the greatest sex ever with Salma Hayek, only to find out you get 30 seconds of rumpy pumpy with Rosie O'Donnell's poodle.

I just want to say that, I've avoided watching this series during its entire run.  All of my roommates loved it, and I saw the original mini-series.  I thought it was great.  However, all shit that happened after that immediately turned me off (like Cylons being human, and a bunch of humans being Cylon, and all that shit.  I really just wanted good human on robot warfare action).  Listening to my roommates, and seeing random bits of episodes, I kind of got the jist of the story through its rises and falls.  I've read the basic synopsis of the ending, and agree it's completely retarded, Mormon's go mainstream, crap.

I've also now just completed downloading a torrent of the entire series plus mini-series/movie, and will be watching it all now fresh from start to finish.  I don't know why, but I feel obligated to watch this, if for nothing more than the fact that I can come back and bitch about it.  I know I'm going to hate it all.  Yet, the series is also important.  It's the only fucking Sci-fi series anybody has dared to try recently, and I really enjoyed the setting and the feel.  The story already pissed me off from the beginning, which is why I haven't watched it till now, yet I'm going to try to get it all now.  I still can't explain why.  Thus is it's weird power.

I look forward to resurrecting this thread a month, or even a year from now, when I've finally made myself watch every episode of it, and bitching about the retarded writing.  Huzzah.

Why in the world would you force yourself to watch something you have already decided to hate just so you can complain about it?  Seems like there's better things to do with one's life.

Still, I'd suggest watching at least season one, which was a lot of fun, moved fast, and was only 12-13 episodes.

Season two wasn't as good.   The end of two, beginning of three, and end of three had some great stuff.  Middle of three was a bunch of crappy episodic bits (the network thought the long story arcs were losing them viewers -- turned out the viewers liked the episodic bits even less).

Season four was all over the place, had some great moments but really didn't pull together coherently and a lot of people really really hated the ending (it worked for me, but I was not exactly expecting the most amazing finale ever).

A complaint I have is that for a character-driven show, they were really inconsistent about characters' motivations and behaviors, especially in the later seasons, which was frustrating. 

Overall, I'm not sure if it ever lived up to its potential, but I enjoyed the whole thing except for some really awful episodes in the middle of season three. 

Moore says it about characters.  But he is lying to himself.  It's about the stories they wanted to tell.  When a character does something out of character it always to move them into position to tell a particular story.

All joking aside, this is pretty much why I'm going to watch it.  Enough of my friends loved the show at various points in its life that I know there are a lot of good episodes to see.  So even if I think the overall story sucks ass, I know I'm going to actually enjoy many episodes of the show.  Plus, I'd have to turn in my Nerd creds if I just totally skipped this  :awesome_for_real:

He might not be aware of it but he hates the characters, he wiped them from history, making every choice, every sacrifice, meaningless, playthings of the Gods.  He doomed their children to short life spans reverting to stone age levels of technology without even the comfort of remembering their ancestors.  I'm not all up in arms about it, because it's only a tv series but I can't think of any other show where the cast got shafted so badly, Blackadder goes forth had a positively upbeat ending in comparison.

Keep in mind that I hated the final episode, and I think it's absolutely true that Moore didn't understand or wasn't interested in his own characters, which is why so many of them shifted in fundamental ways whenever a story needed them to shift.

But: let's just say there had never been Cylons and the 12 Colonies had gone about their business without much of a problem: Adama had refused his lie detector test, Roslin gone into politics, Lee had eventually boned his brother's GF with bad consequences, what have you. 150,000 years later, I think the choices and sacrifices of those characters wouldn't matter much, either. I don't know much of anything about Og the Caveman's difficult personal choices in life. Hell, we barely know anything specific about societies that existed a mere 10,000 years ago except that they did exist and made tools of certain kinds, etc. 

But you could do this to any kind of speculative drama: leap ahead suddenly 150,000 years at the very end, and say, "Welp, didn't matter none". Which unless that's been an important point to the drama all along, unless you've been telling stories that have that kind of cosmic perspective, it's just a stupid and useless gesture.

My game group is having this discussion right now in one friend's desire to run Star Wars Saga edition.  (Meaning I get fucked with a fifth Star Wars core rulesbook.  AAAARRRRRSSSSEEEE.)
I mentioned I would do it only if it were KOTOR timeframe.  Its less familiar taking place 4,000 years before Episode 4, and we can generally do what we want without covering existing ground much. 
My friend agreed and also made a good point that we can do what we want and there is room for it.

Also (and here is where it connects to the above) its so far behind that we can pretty much change the entire setting milieu of Star Wars and not affect the movie canon whatsoever.
4000 years is a LONG FUCKING TIME for things to happen.  Our actions will affect our characters and those around us.  4K years later its ancient fucking history with limited affect. 
But our tale IS important.  To us.

BSG is the same way, except its 150 THOUSAND years.  Its so damned wide open what happened and all you can pretty much rationalize it any dang way you want.  Hell, for all we know their actions cause Earth to morph into Middle Earth and Adama becomes motherfuckin Gandalf and Tyrol becomes Morgoth.  (Apparently LOTR is pre history Earth.  If so, does the War of the Ring not matter since nobody in the modern era knows or is affected by it?  In LOTR's Earth it fucking happened.  Just nobody remembers it NOW.)

You can do this with real history too.  How much do we really know about humanity pre 1000 BC?  Not much.  Technology degrades, stuff gets destroyed.

For all we know the colonists created Atlantis, and the Centurions went off to create Cybertron and Gobotron.

All their sacrifices and struggles weren't for naught, though.  They served to get Hera to Earth and start the Human race.   It's that they were important in that 'God has a bigger picture than you mere mortals with your individual struggles" kind of way.   

Update from the incredibly late comer!   :awesome_for_real:

Because I've apparently been starved for entertainment lately, and this show is really damn good, I've spent the last few days cat-ass'ing my way from the Mini-series straight on through to the end of season 2.  Couldn't stop watching.  Show really is as good as everybody said it was, up to this point, heh.  I don't think I really liked the ending of the second season however.  Going to ruin the feel of things I think.  I'm particularly mad that Sharon/Helo didn't get the baby back, as that seems to have fucked their relationship (though it didn't show them in the year later, so maybe not..).  Sad to think the Sharon character suffered that long not knowing. 

I was surprised to find that I actually really enjoyed the caprica-sharon/Helo relationship storyline from the start.  I thought it was going to be the thing I least liked about the show, enjoying pew pew more, but the whole dynamic of her turning on the others and them trying to come to terms with loving each other was actually pretty neat.  I really hope they don't fuck that up, as the last half of the second season seemed to be trying to do.  However I seem to be about the start of where everybody tells me the series goes horrible, so I guess we'll see how I feel in another week.   :why_so_serious:

Having said all that, I think I'm actually going walk away from this whole series with a better enjoyment of it than most people here, by 1.)  Watching the entire thing in one go all together, and 2.)  By knowing how the show ends (read the basic synopsis, nothing to detail oriented).  While I think its retarded, knowing what the basic explanation for all the wierd crap I'm seeing helps me enjoy it!  I'm not left filling in the blanks with my imagination of the many (better) explanations.  With that in mind, I can watch the story go along and not be let down.  Guess we'll see how I feel after watching the next season, but thats my feeling so far.

I know this is all late, but figured some long time viewers might find the views of me, somebody who completely ignored the show till it was done, interesting/sad/funny/retarded.  I look forward to going back and reading old threads from earlier seasons to see the original reactions.

Fake edit:  I think my actual only real stupid complaint so far is how perfectly intact and green Caprica is after having gone through a nuclear holocaust.  I mean, not a single damn building is destroyed.  They could have just said they bombarded the planet with Neutron bombs or something to get the same effect. 

Edit 2:  Well fuck, that was fast.  Only 2 episodes into season 3 and I want to burn the writers alive  :why_so_serious:.  Seriously, the whole cylon occupation makes no sense.  They have to know that what they are doing isn't being "friends" with the humans, or helping them.  And that it would cause discord.  ESPECIALLY since original boomer is one of the leaders.  They seemed to imply previously she still has her same mind she did as a human, and would definitely know better than to do all this shit.  She (and many others) are waaaaaaay the fuck out of character now.  Fuck.

Don't worry, while season three suxors,  the series gets better after season six.  :awesome_for_real:

Out of character will take on whole new meanings :) Also most posters felt that season redeemed itself with its ending (I wasn't too sure). Remember you've also got the telemovie BSG: Razor to watch between seasons 3 and 4.

I watched The Wire seaons 1-4 like you're watching BSG. It's an awesome experience, but none too healthy. Tear yourself away sometimes. And if you've never seen The Wire, that's worth an epic catchup too.

IMO BSG season 1-2 is the same as the original Matrix. Watch it and imagine the rest, watching it play out only dissapoints.

At the start of the show the religious mumbo-jumbo seemed like some crazy shit that only a schoolteacher high on drugs believed. And as they built up the mysteries more and more they built up the expectation that the mysteries would be explained.

I think the exact moment the show jumped the shark for me was when they were trying to get the cyclon hybrid baby and her surrogate mother off of Caprica. They built it up as a super important mission but then they put a couple of redshirts on it and their failure played out offscreen and was explained with a single "she didn't make it" throwaway line. To me that was the first really glaring example of the plot being shoehorned in at the expense of all logic.

Keep watching until the Cylon occupation ends. Then just forget the entire rest of the series never existed, because it will NEVER GET ANY BETTER. Unfortunately, it will get a SHITLOAD worse.

As for out-of-character, forget it. Season 3 is where character gets thrown right out the fucking airlock in service of the mess of an overarching plot.

Heh, your right, its not healthy at all (I've really put off a ton of shit I should be doing as well), but luckily easter weekend has forced a respite.  I've never seen a single episode of The Wire, and everybody raves about it, so I'm probably going to have to do the same thing with it as well now.  Ah well.

As it is, I just finished season 3, and watched the Razor movie (which seems highly pointless.  Not a bad story, was sort of neat to see the Pegasus story, but, uh, didn't advance the plot.  Kind of odd how I keep seeing it stressed that your suppose to watch it between season 3 and 4).  Season 3 actually just as quickly redeemed itself from my burning hate by episode 4, with an awesome space fight/rescue, and reset back to the norm for everybody.  They also killed off some characters I hated, including Adama's mustache.  Season 3 is a good example of why I can walk away from it all with less hate by watching the whole series the way I am now.  Most of season 3 was completely god damn pointless, mainly just character episodes/filler.  Which is fine, because my main fear was that they were going to fuck the whole plot up (I was mainly afraid a ton of the season would be spent on New Caprica, of which I completely hated).  Instead, just a whole lot of nothing happened, which is fine for me.  I can quickly bring on more episodes.  If I had waited the year for this season, then waited a week between episodes for months, only to get zero plot advancement, I'm sure I would have hated it as well.  As it is, I only hated a few of the episodes, and thought some of the other character episodes were fine, and the overall plot arc wasn't effected in any stupid way, so win win for me.

As for the ending of season 3, at first I thought it made up for any flaws the season had as well.  But then I realized this could be the beginning of real retardedry, as wtf are the chances that 2 of the final 5 were stationed on the only god damn Battlestar in the fleet to survive, and the other 2 (and obviously 3, really) being in the get away fleet.  Also, dead character coming back out of the blue.  So, it was a cool ending, but its setting off my bullshit alarms, as they are actually going to need to give well thought you explanations for all this, and most peoples reactions to the whole ending leads me to believe that's not going to happen  :awesome_for_real:.

On to season 4!

That's just in line with when it was made and aired. Filled in some Pegasus blanks, didn't suck, and gave us all a BSG fix.

So I actually finished watching the series a week ago.  I agree with much of what was said here as far as complaints go, and that the quality of the second half definably went down.  However, amazingly, I still walked away from it all pretty satisfied. 

The biggest problem was that the writing got very sloppy in the second half.  You can tell that they were writing the whole thing as they went, because there were so many plot lines that started and abruptly stopped (like the Tigh/#6 relationship/baby thing.  That made no fucking sense, and was pointless), and they had shitty excuses for it.  That sort of thing usually piss's me off a lot, and certainly irked me here.  But many of the episodes were actually still fun for me to watch throughout season 3 and 4.  If if they were doing wonky things with the characters and plot through season 4, almost all the episodes in season 4 were still very entertaining for me to watch, so I can't really be that mad at it.

I really wish they had done more with Helo/Athena.  Once they got the kid back, they didn't do much with them the rest of the series, which I think is a let down.  They spent a lot of time rehashing the relationships of several of the main characters over and over and over again.  It would have helped the series to have been more inclusive of the other characters, which I felt they did better in the first two seasons as well.  I think Helo was actually my favorite character, in part because he was apparently the only non-freakishly paranoid ignorant asshole left in the ENTIRE human race.

The ending was stupid for many of the reasons people listed, but after actually seeing it, I actually think the CONCEPT was actually one of the better ways to end it.  There's not many ways I can actually think of where they found modern earth, that wouldn't be cheesy/stupid.  All they had to do was change a few things and it would be fine.  First, they didn't give up all their technology, they just vanished over the course 150,000 years, like it would have (and the main city they founded was Atlantis  :awesome_for_real:).  There already more believable.  Second, emphasize that the fleet was out of all supplies and fuel, and that the ships would barely even be able to run even more (they were sort of hinting at this already).  Again more realistic in why the people of the fleet would go for it.  Hell, basically, the entire civilian government was wiped out in a coup not to long before this, I'm pretty sure all unity was gone and everybody hated each other, so even more reason for all the different bands to say fuck it and settle across the globe without trying to keep a unifying government.

So I just imagine that's how it ended, and suddenly the whole series becomes much better, and I have 1 less thing to hate  :awesome_for_real:

Only way I can see an ending with them finding modern earth that would be good is if they followed what Edward James Olmos was apparently pushing for:

That would have been depressing as fuck.
While as stated I can understand why folks wouldn't like the ending, I did like it, if just because it made my sorry little mind do an endless what if dance.

But probably the best ending overall would have just been to have the fleet get in orbit, and fade out with them heading to Earth.  Leave everything else up to the imagination.   
Admitted, they pretty much did anyhow, but they gave just enough details to piss some folks off.

This was partially beyond their control.  Helo was very scarce in season 4 because he was busy filming Dollhouse.

---

The Caprica DVD goes on sale today.

Oh yeah, wanted to ask about that.  Anybody see Caprica yet?  I downloaded the pilot last week and watched it.  It was pretty good, and very high production value.  It was also surprisingly graphic (topless girls everywhere...).

Seems like it has a lot of potential, but in either very good or very bad direction.  My biggest fear is that they are going to shit all over the existing lore and plot even more, horribly contradicting themselves.  Also, hopefully they keep down teen angst stuff.  But we'll see.

The opening scene made no sense to me and it went downhill from there.

BSG BluRay with new stuffs (http://www.thrfeed.com/2009/04/battlestar-heading-to-blu-ray.html)

"The final season, "4.5" -- essentially the last run of episodes from earlier this year -- includes 13 hours of extras such as three extended episodes that never aired on television, behind-the-scenes featurettes and audio commentaries by producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick."

Extended episodes that never aired could be interesting.

Yeah, I didn't get into it at all at first.  Stopped and started it several times.  But after the train bombing and introduction of maphia, it picked up.  I do think its going to be somewhat hard for them to string together more than a season of plot though.

Yeah, I liked the Cylon origin for purely humorous reason. The rest of Caprica I found rather crappy and too soapish.

Everything made sense to me except that goddamn stupid ending/cliffhanger.

How many seasons of this show were there? I just finished Season 4. Seems like a logical place to stop. Is there another season?

:awesome_for_real:  I mean, really?

Yes.  That's it.  Though there is also the movie they released afterwards called "The Plan" if you haven't seen that yet.

 :uhrr:

How did you see the last parts of the 4th season and think there could possibly be more?  Are you sure you saw what we all saw?  I don't want to spoiler it for you, but that shit was pretty conclusive.

Maybe he saw the episode before the mid-season break and assumed it was the end?  It did have a touch of finality to it, after all.

Well what happened to the Cylons that are still out there? Were I them, I'd still search for Earth and then nuke it.

They're making a living in pron  :grin:

I submit that Cylons never had a plan and neither did Ronald Moore.

EDIT:fuck!

Well, his plan to play Bond for several movies seems to have paid off.  :grin:

Resurrection!

Anyone catch Blood and Chrome? Made-for-Bluray thing for next February, kinda like Razor, except Machinima Prime is releasing all parts on YouTube.

Trailer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMcLF9V0_6o)
Episode 1 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT79x4qM4FE)
Episode 2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdisGiivP9c)

Premise: Young Adama in the earlier Cylon War. Lots of referential nerd porn all over the place.

It's very watchable. Not as tight as season 1 nor Razor, but definitely enjoyable if you liked the series.

Love the CGI and atmosphere but everything else felt rather cliché. It's twice ten minutes, so it's not like they have a lot of room for character development but still.

The first two were fun, but good lord the lense flare. I did like the clever diegetic bleeping.

I have no complaints because I'm more a fan of traditional hard(er) sci-fi than space opera.  B&C is definitely not quite space opera, so far.  It's taking more of a Wing Commander approach and me likey.

I looked that up and still don't quite get it? Isn't that just beeps that come from stuff you see on screen?

For instance, when someone is about to cuss ( Other than frack ), instead of beep, a wrench falls.

Oh, bleeping, as in censoring. For some reason I read that as diegetic beeping (no L). Makes much more sense now :-)

B&C is kind of fun and I agree with the Wing Commander comment. Some of the acting is a bit painful but it is still a good show. It seems much more about the action and adventure than the drama/soap opera that BSG was and I like that to be honest.