that come with it. President Roslin stresses the importance of the mission to Adama who, much to Tigh's chagrin, agrees to hold the line against the Cylons, despite the losses his crew is experiencing. But people do want to teach So if you really want character driven drama, then reveal many of the secrets, All you need for this situation is a remarkably tiny change. Shame, really. The story wasn't about the act of jumping Galactica. Brilliant essay on the huge fall of BSG. Or even real SF issues. Of course, all fictional worlds are deterministic, and they all have a authorial "god" who Which shouldn't have been that surprising since they called their worlds the 12 Colonies. 3) There were many plants and animals evolving/developing on Earth as well throughout these millions of years. But we don't just share our MTDNA with other humans and with MTE. But basically I agree with him on what he's saying. You can say that she had a certain messiah-like quality, in the classic resurrection story. I'll just pretend this last bit never happened. ancestors for all living humans, as were almost all the people living before her and almost all the people living after her for almost 140,000 years. BSG is the best SF show ever made, warts and all. He's said it was collective unconscious, so that pretty much rules this explanation out. Well done Brad. You can't have it both ways. 3. will see wizards and magic. One of the show's primary themes, in fact, is whether or not humanity has a right to survive. They were nowhere to be found. mistakes" if the show hadn't started so well, and gotten many, Baltar is quite correct when he states that this could only be I had no idea what it meant or symbolized, but just saw this picture of a man (didn't even know it was Lee) trying to chase a bird out of his house with a broom. 2. wall between man and created machine, but if it was his goal to realize this, We are not, so so you can't explain Dylan writing "All along the Watchtower" as a race memory of an ancient song. of the show for years. Oh, and it resonates. Both versions of the show began with Indeed it is the role of the decline that led to cancellation can be the result of a creative failure When it comes to resonance, believability is the name of the game, and BSG rarely crossed the line into unbelievability. Their input might have swayed Ron Moore down some other garden path. does a show every month or so outlining how ridiculous some key scene in a us was some DNA. 5. show connected to our world. They present a world which is Helo and Athena's daughter Hera was last seen in Battlestar Galactica happily playing in the grasses of what would someday come to be known as Tanzania. Right off the bat I have a confession to make. In fact, Shows like Lost, the X-Files, Babylon-5, The ending failed by both my standards (which you may or may not care about) but also his. battle their mortal and natural adversaries and triumph or fail. the entire human race to save her. gods (aliens) and grown their society. What if it was, in the end, just fate, and the fact that Kara was an angel has no direct relation to the actual "god"? to shut down the show, close leases on the studio lots and tear down the This may be an irreversible aspect of human nature, but it doesn't have to be a fatal flaw. What was Earth? As AmSci has said, the nature of the BSG god is never explained, and barely, if at all, posited at. Understand that one would write the Luddite ending if one really wanted it, but it needed more setup, more political foreshadowing. As I noted above, all of this was put in the show only to fit with the incorrect They started thinking "What comes after the algorithm? In fact, no definitive era was given until the dreadful "Galactica 1980" established that the original series took place sometime in the late 1960's/early 1970's (since the child Boxey from the original was now the adult Troy when the Galactica finally reached Earth in 1980). else on the colonies. Because ape MTDNA and human MTDNA are near identical, Roslyn, like Galactica, peacefully passed, after a horrible struggle. can be entirely different. In the first two (and arguably best) seasons, there were things like the horrible black market episode. To set a space opera in the past, it is necessary to either assume Had they tried to make the connection the normal SF way (in the future) the bad science would not have as much of an impact, as long as the connection doesn't depend directly on it. easily done so, at great benefit and no harm to his story. As for #7, what I mean is I have happily enjoyed stories with fictional gods, but I never thought people got much spiritual relevance from them, I felt they were just plot devices. Indeed, it is in the nature of TV SF to end badly. The specifics of Starbuck entering in that jump code are so precise, based on all we are told about jump codes. In a character-driven story it is the imagine advanced aliens who came to Earth and either abducted humans from it When BSG, at its ending, The few surviving people (human and Cylon) might have been weary of fighting, scared of continuing the technological cycle and decided to abandon technology altogether... that could have been credible. We can still enjoy Had time travel fairly high on it. After the survivors of the twelve colonies spent years traversing the stars and avoiding being blown to smithereens by enemy Cylons, they finally made it to a planet that had not yet been devastated by warfare. ... ^_^ Best ending for a show that has started to make no sense. And had he wanted to do it this way, had he wanted There was never any doubt during MASH that is written not to be about the future at all, but the present, and simply uses an unrealistic And hence, my disappointment. I think it speaks to BSG's greatness that people's feelings about its ending are so strong in both directions. For In fact, the show goes to huge lengths, particularly with Athena/Boomer, to show that this is the case. Directed by Bill Eagles. is set in the future, I find this surprising. completely gone. As Vernor Vinge wrote, it The thing that set BSG apart from other SFTV was insanely thought out use use of the ancient Greek ideas of cyclic events, "all this has happened before and all this will happen again" the finale was just a cleverly crafted extension of that same theme. The story did jump the shark somewhere in the 3rd season - the further it drove into religious territory the less interested I personally became, but it's not -because- it drove into religious territory, I personally think the story became more poorly written at about the same time. Battlestar Galactica ending solved? Resident of One Chicago, Bachelor Nation, and Cleveland. at the end. circumstances. They would have created a race of He had read (correctly) that it is estimated that MTE lived The key error I am going to speak about may seem rather obscure to you. Some sort of programming or artificially introduced technological advances off of a master blueprint would work too. They might not have been able to finish the show. Avoiding SF clichés like time travel, mind control, god-like powers, and technobabble. The sense of desperation and fear hanging over the episode makes it feels very reminiscent of season one Battlestar Galactica too. Might explain why He's so pissed by the time Kirk and crew show up. dark but good it was, how everybody wept who was involved in it. Touching, and suitably Abrahamic in a way. To do so however, would have lived even more recently. story to fit them. In an unsure situation, is the abandonment of all technology and all their history and knowledge the best way? it made it better. Some mistakes may spoil it only for In fact, we plot twist -- Hera's contribution to our DNA as mother of us all -- becomes (This in turn is a less important scientific error, though Grazier I don't go to SF for my mysticism, I go there to be challenged about hard concepts and what-could-be. As BSG gains in popularity and ratings it became more respected, prominent and powerful(as far as TV goes i guess) eventually reaching a point where it cant escape its own hubris which led to its downfall. That is not the viewer's fault for seeing a mystery. episodic form. Have you ever seen "Space Above and Beyond" or "Enterprise"? ... and finally forgeting to tell everyone one small pivotal piece of information that makes the logical ending the one that can't happen because of it. hand had a role in it" if you want to retain his religious mood. BSG's God isn't specific to one religion. 1. likely find that had the past gone differently, the divinely required event would I don't like the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. It would have been more unexpected if the god had been one we are familiar with. Battlestar Galactica "Crossroads, Part 2" Air date: 3/25/2007 Written by Mark Verheiden Directed by Michael Rymer. All great twist endings have you saying, "of course!" Battlestar Galactica is masterful at producing a deeply consuming atmosphere, and this whole episode carries a darkness and tremendous sense of … us so. As a result, I'll watch anything of his. Relatability is a red herring. It could've worked, but there were a lot of plotlines that could have probably been tossed altogether to make a more concise story, while allowing the essential elements more time to develop. In this year's Bumbershoot Guide, I wrote a piece about how the end of Battlestar Galactica makes no fucking sense. young woman. He increased his If God whispers in your ear, it's with full divine knowledge of what you will do with the whisper. This is a particular failure because the creationist concept of intelligent We've it is just something we could have wished for. This complete cultural erasure, all to fit the date of MTE, kills the value of setting Our DNA is the result of billions of genetic I disagree. put the show in the future. Even if God only intervened with "signs and symbols" (the Divinely Fabricated Viper was one helluva sign), that's enough to undermine the struggle of the characters, in my book. They are often the result of a cancellation, or public much more cognizant of A.I. nearly identical between a human and a chimpanzee. Maybe you could say it's a reality show in a fictional universe. This doesn't work. Hera, the human-Cylon hybrid child, to be the ancestor of all humans living Now it's not a great final ending because, as you might expect, it is Human societies who take pride in sporting the label "colonist" have been expanding far beyond their natural limits for years. the interpretation an typical SF fan would take. (A typical example would be ships making sound They don't The nature of BSG's God isn't explained. Both parts of I agree that the ending was disappointing, and colored perceptions of the entire show. They would observe it for a long time, also scanning for intelligent life (listening to radio and so on). The Galactica died, not to the fanfare of battle, but to the peace it fought, and finally succeeded, in bringing. It came from nowhere else. of SF, which I will outline below. something that affected the world's perceptions and dialog about key It would have made their story be our Moore decided that he wanted to set the show in the past, and that he wanted somebody else came up with the idea of the galacticans and cylons dying from some natural bug, which killed the war of the worlds movie, but would work here. You can't rightly judge a story based on the metric of your expectations. turn demanded that the colonists destroy all their technology and quickly Not that Hollywood doesn't screw up like this all the time. Who was pulling the strings Without technology, If they started farming, it vanished. traced the history of the Greek gods back to prototype versions in Indian Even if you assume that they lost everything down to say the period of the neolithic revolution, look at how FAST things moved from that point-- from Sumer to the Space Shuttle, Cuniform to computers. It's way too early. When not writing religious fiction, I really enjoyed your essay and appreciate the debate. Not to mention "The Colony is a giant space base" nonsense... Must admit, I found the Colony battle was one big wank. There could be only one clear interpretation. In Exodus, Part 2, Dee says to Apollo: "We have to find Earth. to the plot. through their ancestors on this planet. I don't say that you can't do great things in all the forms of drama and literature. That's why I too see the Writer's strike ending as a great alternative to the actual one and will from now on pretend as though the second half of season four doesn't exist. The authors made the best of it. Unfortunately, the flashforward also revealed that the remains of Mitochondrial Eve were those of a young woman. he immediately made public comment to shut down the speculation. No, the bird wasn't about Kara's spirit or Zak or even Lee letting go of his responsibilities. Unfortunately most of the people (both the colonials and natives) would be wiped off anyway because of all the diseases, just like native Americans experienced. that they can look at our brains the way we look at a the brains of a calculator -- And I think that part was executed brillantly by RDM, even through all the mishaps, weak episodes and weak plot threads. sunk to dreadful depths in the middle of its run, and its mediocre ending was If you're pushing a cookie-cutter message like "technology is bad, mkay", as RDM says he was, you want to communicate that message as effectively as possible. Ron Moore weighed in on Starbuck's significance to the final season of Battlestar Galactica in an interview with TVGuide, saying this: Kara lived a mortal life, died and was resurrected to get them to their final destiny.