Battlestar Galactica

[Fordel]

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

[Lum]

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.

[Tale]

their former life on Caprica, which was shiny, modern, and very, very bright.

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.

[Soln]

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

[Velorath]

This is not a proper penultimate episode.

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.

[Tannhauser]

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.

[Kirth]

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...

[KallDrexx]

...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 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.

[NowhereMan]

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...

[Tale]

black hole ... time jump

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

[Lum]

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..."

[Surlyboi]

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

[NiX]

Damn you Lum! DAMN YOU!

[Lum]

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.)

[Venkman]

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

[Surlyboi]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

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.

[Polysorbate80]

* The battle is finally won win Galactica rams the hell out of the Colony, with only Adama and Roslin on the bridge.

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.

[rattran]

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.

[Lum]

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.

[tazelbain]

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

[Arthur_Parker]

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.

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.

[HaemishM]

Daniel was a throwaway? WTF? 

[Raguel]

Daniel was a throwaway? WTF? 

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? )

[Venkman]

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.

[Tale]

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.

[Kirth]

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)?

[NowhereMan]

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.

[Yegolev]

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

[Venkman]

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

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.

[Rishathra]

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.

[tazelbain]

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

[Tale]

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.

[sidereal]

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.

[Soln]

head people are from teh Future.  Bet on it.