Battlestar Galactica

[Lum]

As for Hera's importance, great, she turned out to be Mitochondrial Eve. But why was SHE in particular important for that? No answer.

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.

(which wasn't explained at all - where did this hallucination come from and why an opera house?)

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.

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 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.

[Raguel]

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. 

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.  )

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 


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".

[Fordel]

TLDR: God Did it! 



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.

[KallDrexx]

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.

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.

[Bunk]

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 


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".

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)

[Tale]

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. 

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 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.

[Triforcer]

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? 

[Tale]

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

[Lum]

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? 

I think it was simply that he was going to leave the military, but the Voight-Kampff test 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.

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

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.)

[Comstar]

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.

[Ratman_tf]

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. 

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[NowhereMan]

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.

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

[Polysorbate80]

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.

[NowhereMan]

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

[Lum]

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.

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.

[palmer_eldritch]

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.

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.

[NowhereMan]

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.

[Mrbloodworth]

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.

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

[gryeyes]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.

[croaker69]

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.

[Jain Zar]

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.

[Ironwood]

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

[Ratman_tf]

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

But... mitochondrial eve! 

[Arthur_Parker]

Make you THINK about what you just watched.

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.

Kara, I think, is whatever you want her to be. It's easy to put that label on her: Angel, or Messenger of God, or whatever. Kara Thrace died and was resurrected and came back and took the people to their final end. That was her role, her destiny on the show... We debated back and forth in the writers' room for a while on giving it more definition, and saying, definitively, "This is what she is," and we decided that the more you try to outline it and give voice to it and put a name on it, the less interesting it became. We just decided this was the most interesting way to go out, with her disappearing without trying to name what she was.

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.

[Margalis]

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.

[Ratman_tf]

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.

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. 

[Numtini]

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?

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.

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

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

(Yes I understand indirect descendency.)

[Khaldun]

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.

[kaid]

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.

[fuser]

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).

[Yegolev]

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.

[Khaldun]

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.