Final Thoughts on the Battlestar Galactica Finale

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Last night was the end of an era of television. Battlestar Galactica, the most well-written, identifiable sci-fi show ever made went off the air, as one website put it “with a bang, and with a whimper.”There was much to cram into the final two hours, and many didn’t think the show could do it, but in my opinion, the finale was nearly pitch perfect, with leaving only a few lingering questions in its wake.

The final space battle between Galactica and the Colony was something you would expect to see on an IMAX screen. I’m not sure how much it cost, but I’m guessing they probably could have ran another season with the money they spent on it.During the final assault is when we finally began to get some answers.

Caprica Six and Baltar saw each other’s head people, and the opera house dream was finally explained as a prophetic vision of this final battle. Anyone expecting it to be something more than that (what, did you think there would be a literal opera house on the Colony?) may have been disappointed, but I thought that the scene was executed extremely well.

Tyrol throttling Tory after he found out she killed Cally was one of the high points of the episode for me, it broke the just-made truce and led to the complete annihilation of all the evil Cylons.I was a little confused about Starbuck inputting the jump coordinates based on the music notes. I thought she had used them already to find the Colony, but I think that Sam told them where it was instead.

Still, they could have made that more clear.The revelation of “real Earth” was incredibly well done, despite the fact that I swear I heard Ron Moore say that nuked Earth WAS the real Earth, but looking back, we never did see our continents on that Earth. Adama’s simple line about naming the planet Earth, (Rosalin: “This isn’t Earth” Adama: “Earth is a dream.”) was a perfect way to segue the two worlds.

More often than not, the explanation for most lingering questions last night was God and God’s plan. That shouldn’t be a surprise since Head Six has been babbling about that since season one, but I guess we never really listened. Her and Head Baltar were in fact angels, and some now say that Starbuck was as well.For me, the Starbuck question is the one that remains most puzzling to me.

If she was an angel as most people are saying, why did she act human and why was she a physical being? Head Six and Head Baltar were clearly all-knowing in-head only creatures, but not Starbuck.I believe is that God gave her a new body after she died (and a new Viper) and sent her back so she could fulfill her ultimate purpose of leading them to real Earth.

And once her mission was over, she was gone, leaving Lee to climb mountains and swim oceans by himself.Hera as the mother of our current world is fine with me as an explanation to give her relevance. Google Mitochondrial Eve if you don’t think it makes any sense.

I like to think that Baltar and Six had another half Cylon child who was Mitochondrial Adam, and Helo, Athena, Six and Baltar are the grandparents of us all.The finale was touching from Roslin’s death with Adama to Lee and Starbuck’s last goodbye and it was a near pitch perfect conclusion to one of the best series on television. I’ll miss you Battlestar Galactica, I really will.So say we all.

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6 Comments

  1. I was quite disappointed with the final two hours.

    The space battle was a short little one-peice with little or no real tension to it. In my opinion I would have liked to see Galactica absolutely POUND the Cylon Colony for a bit until 4 or 5 Basestars jumped in and turned the tables; leaving the ram as the final contingency in case the Raptor missions failed.
    By drawing it out and having Galactica really flex her true muscles, we’d have been pumping the air going ‘frakking hell yeah’.
    I watched BSG for the space battles, and Season 4 was sorely lacking.

    The Opera House vision/CIC was fantastic, but the prehistoric Earth concept was a bit ‘meh’ and optimistic. I would have preferred they come across Earth in the future; we’re building our own Battlestars. We have Cylons. And they’re just starting to rebel….

  2. FYI – no such thing as Mitochondrial Adam. Mitochondrial DNA comes from the mother only. Men get their mitochondrial DNA from their mother, but they cannot pass it on. Y Chromosome Adam would be more appropriate, but he lived some 70,000 years later than Mitochondrial Eve. So although I like the idea of Caprica and Baltar having a half human, half cylon family of their own…they don’t seem to have played any further role in the DNA lineage of Earth v 2.0. lol

    There were some things I didn’t care much for, but overall I think it was a wonderful, bittersweet ending. I like space battles and all, but it was always the characters that drew me to BSG. I’m glad they took a somewhat uplifting route. I had almost dreaded the finale, because I honestly thought the ending would be much darker. It was a relief to be proven incorrect.

    I’ll miss the show. Thank you BSG for four years of fantastic TV. I was definitely entertained.

  3. Check out the wikipedia entry, looks like someone had some fun:

    “According to probabilistic studies[2], Mitochondrial Eve is thought to have been a cylon who lived around 140,000 years ago. “

  4. When I heard that the colony was parked on top of a “naked singularity” (which first – are not allowed because unphysical and second – are not black holes; Adama must have been sleeping in astrophysics classes) I was foreseeing some time travel resolution artifice to save Earth or explain Kara II.

    So … Is there a resolution to the “Harbinger of Death” mystery somewhere?

    Also, jumping a Raptor next to Galactica rips out a good chunk of the armour but Galactica plopping into the Colony’s embrace with a heroic feat of navigation doesn’t blow the structures of both vessels? Unlikely.

    Here’s hoping God laid good groundwork for a break in the everlasting cycle. (What would Nietzsche say – God of all things breaking the “Ewige Wiederkunft”?)

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