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Battlestar Galactica Comes To an End
On Friday evening, Battlestar Galactica ended its four-season run as one of the most popular science fiction shows in recent history. 2.4 million people tuned in for the finale, and reactions to the ending — positive, negative, and often a mix of both — are springing up all over the internet, as are tributes and retrospectives. Producers Ron Moore and David Eick held a Q&A session after the finale to discuss certain aspects of the story and spell out the final status of several plot lines. Fans of the show will have a chance to see the Cylon side of the story this fall in a two-hour TV movie titled "The Plan," and we've previously discussed the spin-off prequel series, Caprica, the pilot for which will come out on April 21st. Be warned: these links and the following discussion will contain spoilers.
I was following the series in the beginning, but haven't for a long time.
I still have the program set in my DVR but haven't bothered to watch since starbuck ran off to find earth and ran into the cylons.
The turning point for me was when they used the term "final 5" in the show. That should have been something for the viewers, and maybe the humans to figure out, but when the cylons didn't know who the final 5 were, that just seemed stupid.
Dual Opteron < $600
I watched every episode of Battlestar Galactic so, with a mix of interest and boredom. On one hand I really life science fiction. Lets be honest, I love spaceships, space battles, people killing each other in spaces, monsters killing people, and most variations thereof. But the "spiritual" aspects of Battlestar Galactica has been a bit of a yawn for me.
They got a decent production, good actors (for the most part), decent costumes and design, and plots and episodes ranging from very entertaining, to out right silliness and cheese.
That being said; I will enjoy seeing how they try to connect it all together and I probably will check out the spin-off series if/when it hit the stream.
P.S. Bring back Firefly ffs!
The Long Now Foundation
The finale was reasonably good, but I would have preferred the last scene to have been Adama on top of the hill next to Laura's grave. What follows after that, although necessary to explain the existence of the "imaginary" Gaius/Six characters, seemed awfully cheesy to me. I'm talking "Galactica 1980" cheesy. I also didn't find the universal acceptance of the "hey, let's discard every scrap of technology and be cavemen!" idea to be realistic or practical in the least.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
The god explanation is such a cop out. It doesn't explain Kara or why it doesn't just try and influence or outright stop the genocide in the first place. I thought up to the Opera house scene, it was great and when Galen went nuts (he couldn't control his emotion when the fate of two civilization are in stake ?), there was just more questions raised than answers from that point on.
I'm praying that the end of BSG opens the door to Tricia Helfer starring in a few pornos. My god, that would rock my world! Come on Tricia, give it a try. Just one little lesbian scene. All the girls are doin' it. There's even a song about it on the radio. Puhleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeze!
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
Sometimes, yes, I want to be a spectator. Other times I want to be a creator.
Life is multi-dimensional. Try to be multi-dimensional yourself.
Yes, yes it did; except for all of the unanswered questions. 1) What the hell was Starbuck? 2) How did future Baltar and Six 'talk' to present Six and Baltar? 3) How the frak did they find new Earth? Deus Ex Machina much? Also there's the question that's raised but not answered of why would everyone vote to give up all technology more advanced than a pointy stick and live with prelingual natives which was a major wtf... In brief, it tied up some but all of the strings (mostly the emotional and not the intellectual) into a bow. P.S. May have cried a little when Roslyn died.
Snape Kills Adama
The finale was a decent episode. But I think that ever since the destruction of the HUB, the show was rudderless.
I think that this is one of the problems when the central premise of a show is a "mystery." It always ends up that the big reveal is a huge disappointment.
Also, what happened to all of the basestars that Cavil had under control? Not to mention, the "millions" of cylons on the colonies. Wouldn't they lay out to search for the final five to rebuild resurrection?
I think the finale needed a 20-30 year jump forward to show aging skinjobs scanning earth, and not detecting technology, continue searching for the final five. It would have given closure to the show's overall theme. Instead we just get a "spiritual" explanation. The reason I feel this way is back when they found the temple of jupiter, Cavil advocated nuking the planet and spending an infinite amount of time searching for earth. Even without resurrection, I think that the remaining cylons would have the same sentiment.
The other thing that had not been really discussed, and will hopefully come out in the next few entries, is what happened to the artificial intelligence that was the original cylon race? Maybe "the plan" will give us more insight to cylon society.
--WooooHoooo--
Honestly,
I thought it was weak. If you watched "BSG The Last Frakkin Special" that aired last Monday, there was a key comment in there. Ron Moore said that they were at a loss on how to end the series, and then they walked in and decided that it's about the characters.
That told me that they didn't know how to end everything, and decided to fumble through it and fill up time with these character things.
There were so many big stories that needed more elaboration, what was Starbuck, how does the one true god fit in? There was mention that he was a jealous god of the other Lords of Kobol. No mention of them? Starbuck, the one who believed in the polytheistic Lords of Kobol so much that she went back against orders for Athena's Arrow was instead an agent of the monotheistic Cylon God? That's it, head six and baltar, their story just ends so quickly? Things didn't really jive, and that disappointed me. After the whole Tigh and Caprica-6 love each other so much that they had a baby, and Ellen was jealous, that just ended? All of a sudden, we find out Baltar, the womanizer, loved Caprica-6?
It was not thought out, and by the end, they had no idea what to do. I'm really disapointed in BSG. And this ending makes me appreciate Babylon 5 even more. The value of a well thought out, planned and executed story arc where all the pieces fit together because they've been planned that way is AWESOME.
For about 4 and a half years, BSG was the best show I'd ever seen. However, ever since they came back with this last batch of 10 episodes, it's been weak. The big issues, the analysis of humanity in dire straits, the realistic depiction of events, I felt that all fell apart. BSG was still a good show, and the ending sentimental and did provide closure. It wasn't bad, but I had so much more high expectations of the ending, for it all to tie in rather than what we got. I mean that's why us SciFi fans are such continuity freaks, we want it all to fit, that's what makes it more real for us.
-"Those who fought today will die tommorow."-
Starbuck was called several times the harbinger of death.
Death of what?
Also, was she always an Angel? Or did she just become one after she died? Who was her father?
Skip ------ See the latest from http://www.anArchyFortWorth.com
All three of those questions were answered. You just didn't pay attention.
I caught the answers to 2 and 3. But what about #1? That one escaped me.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
"just"? No. Other than that yes.
1. Less talk and more subtlety. This means very little or no explicit dialog, no in-your-face pictures of dancing robots (but maybe Baltar and Six in front of an electronics store), and Jimi Hendrix's version of All Along The Watchtower playing on some radio in the background of some guy on the street. As it stands, it was too overt and tried too hard to make its point for viewers already accustomed to needing to think a bit more.
2. What probably would've happened after Lee recommended all technology go away is a split between those who still wanted it and those who didn't. The two sides would create a pact to keep separate from each other, the small minority of technology-loving people going to live on a small continent off the west coast of Africa... Said continent, of course, to have been destroyed at some future point in time by natural disaster and essentially all technology along with it. This would solve what would be an obvious dilemma and split in viewpoints of the remaining people while reasonably explaining what would've happened to their technology.
Originally posted this over on Bear McCreary's blog, but I think I'll use it here too...
I think most people who complain about the finale not meeting their expectations are the people whose expectations included a cereberal explanation for everything that happened on the show. And I'll admit, I was hoping for a little more in that arena. But in terms of emotional wrap-up and as a fitting send-off to the show, I thought it couldn't have done better.
To people who wanted every mystery tied up nice and neat, I hate to break it to you but it was never that kind of show. Moore has said from the beginning that certain supernatural aspects wouldn't be explained.
Go watch Lost or something.
1) She's god. 2) They are angels. 3) God showed them the way through the song and Kara.
Deus Ex Machina is exactly what happened. In the most literal sense possible.
As for the technology, I think I understood the choice. I'm not saying I agree with it, but I think I understood why they chose the way they did.
PS. I'm not crying, I just have something in my eye
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I liked how the end of the new BSG came back around to the opening line of the intro from the old BSG:
"There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans..."
No, Deus Ex Machina requires the resolution to drop in that moment, without story support. God suddenly appears, and fixes things.
That's not at all what BSG did. BSG pre-seeded their resolutions a year or more in advance. Sure, they were miracles, but they were miracles we'd been told a year ago would happen, all the finale did was show us exactly how they happened.
You can not like the way it was resolved, but that doesn't mean it was Deus Ex Machina.
I couldn't help but see the parallels to the "B" Ark. Heck, there was even a bathtub on the bridge!
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
God did it
The god explanation is such a cop out.
Choices to tie together a rambling, make it up as you go jumble of story bits:
1. God did it.
2. It was all a dream.
3. To be continued... in a new series!
Seemed fairly obvious to me:Jesus.
Died, resurrected, then ascended once the job was done.
My interpretation is that Kara Thrace was an angel or a guide sent by God. The foreshadowing for this was provided a few episodes back, when Kara gave Adama an angel figurine for the prow of the model ship he was building in his quarters.
Lurching from pure melodrama to plain old post-apocalyptic drudgery, I watched for a) the hot Cylons and b) the all too rare space booms. While I usually like Ronald Moore's work, there was so much self-indulgent self-pity and self-loathing for anything but "Tivo on, fast-forward engaged".
And any writer who has to turn to Deus Ex Machina to resolve a story should be spanked severely. Of course the writing was on the walls and in the context of the story from the beginning, but why must it always be God who solves the really big problems? I would have preferred to have seen the external influence turn out to be internalized somehow, even perhaps some new, third factor introduced near the end, like a "gestalt intelligence formed over the cycles between humans and Cylons" that was fighting for its own survival as well. At least that's honest and 'real', and ultimately resolved without resorting to cosmic super-powers.
In the end the message is that we can't survive without God's intervention, which is as dreary a message as I've ever seen in any medium ... and only means it's his fault anyway and we just sat through four seasons of His crappy technical support.
--
Anybody who believes in Intelligent Design should stay out of the medical profession.
2.4 million people tuned in for the finale.
And probably five times that figure downloaded the torrent outside the USA. I wish a system to pay for the chapters outside USA, at a reasonable price and with good subtitules were in place; I would use it.
We were mislead at the end of Season 3. After Starbuck reappears, we're taken on a tour of the galaxies and shown Earth, implying that this is what Starbuck found:
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Earth_(RDM).jpg
You can clearly make out the United States of America.
I don't know if we saw continents once Galactica actually made it to Earth. Haven't found a screenshot of that.
I have been lurking several discussions on the final and I have absolutely fell in love with this outrage over being unable to "believe" a supernatural force was driving things. The show was about robots who became human and flew around in spaceships at faster than light speeds. Protip: Nothing in the show was believable.
Browse at -1 to keep an eye out for abuses.
I dislike using god and a hokey religion as an explanation for anything. I couldn't stand the last few episodes with Baltar babbling on about his angels. The show has always had a religious theme but I held out for a reasonable rational explanation of the head characters (something to do with cylon projection) and Kara.
Instead pooft she magically disappears into thin air, after magically entering the coordinates of a single magic planet in all of space from a magic song that her magically disappearing dad taught her when she was young and that Hera magically happens to know as well. How? What? Why?
I disliked the get rid of all our technology and live like the natives bit. Both the god explanation and the luddite attitude seem to me to be a diservice to many science fiction fans who overwhelmingly like science and technology and reject hokey explanations for things like flying spaghetti monsters. Seriously, what happens the next time someone needs to get a tooth pulled now that all their technology is gone.
I disliked the Cavil suicide bit because it seemed out of character along with actually listening to Baltar's stupid little speech on coexistence and angels. I'd like Boomer's redemption to not have been followed with her getting shot in the gut again. I didn't need to see Adama puking.
And finally, Tyrol is an idiot for not realizing that killing Cally was the nicest thing Tory or anyone else in the entire fleet did for him.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
Serious question: what the hell for? What do you gain from subtlety? A bit of smugness that you "worked out" the oh-so-subtle meaning? The right to ignore the show's message, and still claim to enjoy the show because you "didn't see it that way"?
It's popular lately for all messages in media to be subtle, but that's just a cop-out so it can be mass-sold to everyone, and the many will buy it. It doesn't actually add value. If anything, it dilutes it.
Yeah they did - when the camera shot pans up from the moon to Earth, you can clearly see Africa.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
The 'higher power' in Battlestar is probably not a divine entity, but a remnant of the ancient society of Kobal that wants to see humanity survive. This chessmaster knew what it was doing though, so it's origin and motives are never explicitly stated.
She was dead. But she still had a mission to carry out, so she did it.
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
I guess we're talking about three on-screen sequences.
1) End of season 3.
2) Season 4, Episode 10 (when they find what they've been calling Earth all series.)
3) End of Season 4, (when they find what we call Earth.)
I was interesting in seeing if we'd seen continents on 2.
I agree. I thought the initial made for TV movie was good enough that I'd give the show a chance. I really loved the first few episodes but I gradually lost interest. Stopped watching completely somewhere during season 2.
Lee's conclusion made no sense. The situation was already good for another try. I mean, Cylons and Humans were at peace, so rebuilding a Human-Cylon civilization was a possibility. The rebel cylons and the humans were truly allied, and even the Centurions weren't enemies anymore. They had first-hand knowledge of what happens when they don't treat artificial lifeforms as equals AND a chance at rebuilding a hybrid civilization from scratch, therefore breaking the cycle of death. (Honestly, with this shiny advanced Cylon tech and the sturdy, tough Colonial tech, that would have been one hell of a civilization.)
Instead, they threw it all away, and opted to become cavemen. This is the equivalent of running away from the problem. The final minutes demonstrated this. With all Colonial and Cylon knowledge lost, WE are now doomed to repeat these mistakes, since the problem still is unresolved. The only true way of breaking the cycle is for society to acknowledge that artificial lifeforms are not of lesser status.
This sig does not contain any SCO code.
All those alcoholics gave up liquor? I DON'T THINK SO!!!
As much as that crew drank. I seriously doubt that "let's live as caveman" would have been seen as a solution. The epic DT's, Adama alone, would have to endure could be a spinoff show.
excellent ending
No, it was a mess. Deus ex machina is the easy way out.
Such a lovely idea, integrating with the native peoples. Surely they will welcome the strange newcomers with open arms, rather than with spears through their intestines.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
Over all I thought it was probably the best ending they could have given it. The "making of" special they had really clarified it as being more "about the character" than anything else. I had been following BSG just because it was one of the few things on TV any more that was even vaguely interesting although I was disgusted how the entire conflict evolved in to some religious BS. (fiction is the appropriate place for religion since religion is all made up, but I cringe at how many people actually take that nonsense literally)
Anyway, I had actually expected something bigger, or more grand from the "Final five" plot line. But they way that ended really did "fit" this BSG - across life, death, and thousands of years, and it all ends in one big clusterfrak.
The entire thing about giving up their technology seemed kind of WTF-ish but it was obviously the only way they could make it "fit" in to the time line. I could sort of imagine the people not wanting to do the same thing of creating a city again after the mess on New Caprica, and most of those ships were probably pretty ripe and unlivable after all that time, but not salving tech from them would be crazy.
More importantly because of this, what they did was end their civilization! What is the point of biological survival if history, technology, forms of government, and other cultural things are not maintained or at least remembered?
"Repeat to yourself It's just a show, I should really just relax..." :)
The god explanation is such a cop out.
A lot of times when you see something like that, it is a cop out. But not in this case.
The story - in its entirety - was about something divine moving mankind/cylonkind like pawns. People have destinies in this show, real ones. All throughout.
So it's not like they just slapped a Deity into the ending to tie things up. Nothing else at that point would have sufficed.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
We re-watched the original miniseries recently; what a good, gripping story. At the time, I liked the show because it was more "Fi" than "Sci": Good characters, interesting plot, sophisticated issues (esp. the political issues). They took advantage of the flexibility of 'Sci' not to provide gee-whiz gizmos and superpowers that are no more meaningful than special effects, but to provide a unique setting that was not possible in real-world setting.
Re-watch the original mini-series yourself and you can't miss how far the show has come, but in a completely different (and in my mind, wrong) direction. The characters and acting have become extreme and overdramatc. The political issues hang around, but in often they are absurd (how about the politics of ditching all your technology? It was handled by one sentence: 'It's surprising there was no dissension' -- it sure is!). And the show is dominated by the Sci -- mysticism, cylon projections, the final 5, etc etc etc. Booooring. Anyone can make that stuff up as they go along; what does it mean?
And the conclusion was so poorly thought out that the writers are guilty of dereliction of duty. Returning to the decision to abandon all technology: Perhaps they should recall that our ancestors lived short, brutal lives, and they grew up with the skills to survive in that environment; our heroes have no idea how to hunt a buffalo with a spear, clean it, skin it, and preserve the meat for the winter. Just think of this little inconvenience: No salt, no pepper, no spices; no vitamins! When the first drought -- or the locusts, or neighboring tribe or a pack of baboons -- comes and they run out of food, and half of them die off, it won't seem like such a good idea. When people start dying from simple infections because there are no antibiotics, when women start dying in childbirth, when most children don't survive to adulthood, when the leading killer becomes starvation instead of obesity, they may remember the benefits of technology. Sure, we can close our eyes to all these problems, but couldn't the writers have made an effort to tell a story with some plausibility?
Like many movies and shows, it seems like the writers ran out of time or funding, and just whipped something together to fulfill their obligation to finish the story. Their audience should demand more.
Seasons one and two were great, but things rapidly started to go down hill after that. It became rapidly apparent that there was no overall plan (like Straczynski had with Babylon 5). They had set up lots of mysteries without first knowing what the resolution would be. If the mysteries were ever solved at all, they were solved in random ways, and they have pretty much admitted as much. A good example of this was the "final 5". By their own admission they picked them randomly, so what was the point of the audience trying to guess who they might be, based on possible clues?
I find it difficult to watch a show knowing that the writers have no more idea of how things will be resolved than I do. Mysteries can be very compelling, but the fun of a mystery is trying to unravel it yourself, and you clearly can't unravel it if the writers are going to use a dartboard to resolve it. What's the point of getting caught up in a mystery when you know it's a complete mystery to the writers as well?
Another problem with Galactica has been the masses of pointless filler. A good recent example of that is Baltar's religious Harem. They spent absolutely ages on that plot-line, then dumped it at the last minute. What was the point of it all? How exactly did it advance the plot? A lot of fans I know dumped the series somewhere in Season 3, complaining that it had turned into a soap opera. I know exactly what they mean.
Whereas in Season 1 and 2 you tended to have strong plots in each episode (blowing up a Cylon fuel depot, or Finding a missing pilot etc) in later seasons things started to become very drawn out. Instead there was more and more focus on relationships and peoples petty problems. That sort of thing is fine in an Alan Bennett play, but this show was fundamentally about people fleeing from killer robots in outer space. When you watch science fiction you expect some degree of excitement. It doesn't necessarily have to be low-brow "laser gun battle" excitement, but endless drawn out episodes with nothing happening are a pretty sorry excuse for science fiction (if not fiction in general).
I became sick and tired of the endless preaching, layers of hipocrisy within hipocrisy, and "we're oh so human we have so many bad sides" of all the characters. BG became so steeped in religious and political in-fighting that the sci-fi was forgotten, not to mention the third series ran too long. I would actually like to see some space battles, okay? Is America so caught up in politics that it has to make a sci-fi series a poster-child for its anti-terrorism message? All of the characters because so bloody unlikeable, and episodes about pugilism and pointless backstory reigned, making the series an uncontrollable mess.
And that cover of All Along The Watchtower? Final nail in the coffin.
A wizard did it.
Thought the first 90 minutes were fine.
And then they dropped the ball. The end was a little to "Restaurant at the End of the Universe", with populating Earth. I guess the fleet was the 'B' Ark. The supernatural bits with Starbuck and the two "observing" versions of Baltar and Caprica were a little too "Touched By an Angel". Leaving the pair as potential projections / hallucinations would have been better without us seeing them WITHOUT Baltar and Caprica. We've only ever seen them with one of the two as the POV. Seeing them without the actual characters there blows it. And WTF with Starbuck? So she was an "angel"? Or somehow wasn't real but could interact with solid objects? What? Seriously, her as a clone, or the daughter of the "Daniel" model that got resurrected on Earth the first due to some left-over equipment would have been better. Having her new Viper provided by some of the Cylons to try to force the outcome would have been better.
And who gets their faith vindicated like that? You don't really need faith once that happens. The whole point of faith is sustaining / motivating someone to believe in something they can't prove. It doesn't even have to be religion. Simply believing that the feelings you have for loved ones and friends are reciprocated is an act of faith on your part. For the story, it didn't matter if the supernatural agency existed - if the faith in it drove Baltar, Caprica, Roslin, etc. to do something important at the end, then it's THEM doing it. That really says something more profound than having some actual intervention. Even if you believe in God, belief in the absence of doubt is hardly ennobling. Nor is doing good without the knowledge of evil.
Ugh, and the very end? Besides blowing the whole POV thing, it was a subtle as a brick to the head. Argh! Horn-playing Japanese robots will come to kill you!
Ron Moore doesn't like being called that...
(Honestly, the "guiding force" being the dude reading National Geographic in the last scene explains a lot)
Given that God is all powerful and all knowing, it is ALWAYS a cop out to write him into a script.
Which is nothing more than a cop out saying that the bad script is not really a bad script. It's a good script about God.
Why would God have NEEDED or WANTED to have the characters act like that? Particularly when there must be a near infinite number of options available to an all knowing and all powerful God.
It's a cop out. That's all.
If all the bad Cylons got wiped out on the colony, I am surprised that some of the Colonials did not opt to go back to the Colonies. The indications that we have from the show is that the nuclear attack did not render the planet uninhabitable like the Cylon Earth.
There should be a good amount workable technology left and inhabitable structures. Supposedly you only need about 1000 to 5000 humans to repopulate.
The other thought I had was whether anybody went back to pick up the Number Three D'Anna Biers.
There's one thing I don't get.
The "end of the human race" was predicted many times along the way:
Head Six: I'm an angel of god sent here to protect you. To guide you, to love you.
Baltar: To what end?
Head Six: To the end of the human race.
And in the finale she tells him his role is over, when the future of the human race looks brighter than ever.
What gives?
No, it was excellent. That wasn't Deus Ex Machina. You could tell that they planned for this ending. They didn't just drop it in there because they couldn't figure out how else to end it.
1. Baltar takes down the Cylon mothership by uploading a virus using his Macbook. "Giving it a cold" indeed! Well played Dr. Baltar!
2. All the sixes move to what later becomes modern day Sweden.
Georgia Tech, the leader in Chia(tm) technology.
Snape kills Dumbledore!!!!
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I was expecting a Terminator to pop up at the end to replace the Cylons. As the angelic Number Six said (paraphrase), "If a complex system is run long enough, something different is bound to happen."
Thank god.
This made me chuckle.
Your comment (as it was probably intended) could be taken as, "I hated this show, it's finally over."
The funny thing is, your comment when taken within the context of the finale, sums things up rather nicely.
I watched this show off and on and I kind of liked it. But the ending definitely followed the well worn path of the Shaggy God(s) story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_God_story towit man and woman marooned on a primitive planet who in the last sentence of the story are named Adam and Eve. Wikipedia points out some notable stories with the same motif. ---537
The god explanation is such a cop out.
I thought the "You know it doesn't like that name." was a nice touch and opened it up quite a bit more than just "God did it".
-- i am jack's amusing sig file
The god explanation is such a cop out. It doesn't explain Kara or why it doesn't just try and influence or outright stop the genocide in the first place.
You're trying to hard to dislike the finale. Why not accept that the other participant in this cycle isn't actually all-powerful. It can influence, prod, and manipulate. It can pull of events that appear miraculous, but perhaps there's a scale concern.
Better yet, doesn't it make artistic sense that this is about free will? The other influenced the colonials and Cylons to choose differently. It didn't force them, or deny them choice. It educated them. Powerful message there.
I thought up to the Opera house scene, it was great and when Galen went nuts (he couldn't control his emotion when the fate of two civilization are in stake ?), there was just more questions raised than answers from that point on.
One of the strongest themes of the BSG series has been that "people are people". The writers have never shied away from an opportunity to show characters behaving in very human ways. Vengeful, spiteful, angry Tyrol being overwhelmed by the moment? Very much in character. This is the guy who (while half-awake) beat Cally's face in because of a few bad dreams. This is the guy who killed an Eight to help Boomer escape. This is the guy who lost his rank and the respect of Adama because he couldn't keep it together after Cally's murder. Tori's action has repercussions for that man, and he's never been one with lots of self control.
Again, you're trying to dislike the ending.
"Oh no... he found the
First, the writers did a terrible job in that the last story arc directly contradicted a story from last season. (or was it the season before) It was mentioned that the Cylons had the resurrection hub because it was "too far" for transmission from where the battles took place to the Cylon home world. This was revealed by one of the number six's, so even if the hub was destroyed they supposedly still had the technology on the home world and really all they needed was to build a new hub. Making the story about the need for the final five having the secret total garbage.
Also as someone else mentioned when a series is based on a secret and the reveal either isn't satisfying or the explanation makes no sense and some things aren't explained properly it sucks and this sucked. Who was the "replacement" Starbuck? Where did the music come from that "turned" the final five on and how was it that her father had it? Also any number of other questions were left to our imagination.
You want dysentery don't you? All the cool kids have dysentery. Dump all your existing technology and get yourself a nice case of dysentery.
No, that makes no sense whatsoever. The only people who would think it does have never had to deal with the wilderness on an extended basis.
Who cares about rebuilding civilization? This is about surviving the winter.
My wife is a huge fan of the show (probably more than me), and decided to honor the finale by making up a batch of mandala-inspired cupcakes. We were both happy to see the mandala make a short cameo toward the end.
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
It was great how the Opera House was tied into the story, but this ending has a lot of annoying gaps.
How Gaius and 6 were 150,000 years in the future?
What is Kara?
Why did they smash their fleet?
Why didn't the cylon base get damage from galactica practically jumping partially from inside of it?
In any case, this finale was rather good in the sense that it raised interesting questions, and tied some things together, despite the gaps in the plot (they ran out of airing time??) i highly enjoyed this finale!
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
I hated practically every inch of it from the get-go
I hate to post the obvious, but I'll do it anyways.
Why watch it in the first place then?
Holy crap, man. Do you eat at restaurants you hate? "Man. Every time I come here I hate it. Disgusting food. See you next Thursday."
If anyone should be embarrassed, it's you. Four seasons worth of hour long shows and you watched them all, hating almost every single moment. Imagine what else you could have done with that time.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Why wouldn't Adama live with his son (family) in the new civilization? To me this was more ridiculous than Kara disappearing.
No no no, it wasn't that God did it, but God led them to the New Earth by using Kara and reincarnating her and bringing her back to life after each time she died.
God created the 12 colonies, the 13th colony was Cylons, but they killed themselves 2000 years ago as their on creations turned on them. Just like the Cylons on Caprica turned on the humans there.
What BSG showed was that while God was not all powerful and could not stop the genocide, he was able to lead a part of the Cylons to be good and lead Caprica Six and Baltar with "Angels" that only they could see, and sent Kara to lead them all to Earth.
That when Humans or Cylons tried to play God and create new life, that life turned on them just as Humans and Cylons turned on God in the first place.
After they reached "New Earth" which I guess was our Earth 150,000 years ago, their lives were less eventful and they mated with the natives on New Earth to create what we have now.
This ends racism, as it creates one race, the Human race, the best of Humans and Cylons merged into one, and speaks out against violence and trying to play God and creating new life, which might turn on us and try to kill us all.
That everything has happened before and will happen again, unless we are careful.
It is a story on morality, really. We shouldn't abuse technology and create Cylons.
Caprica is going to show how they first created the Cylons. It is going to be a Frankenstein type story where a scientist's daughter died in a terrorist suicide bombing attack but he had backed up her mind on computer and created the first Cylon in an attempt to play God and bring his daughter back to life. But his partner wants nothing to do with it and leaves. But then a greedy corporation steals the technology to create Cylons as servants for the Twelve colonies.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
I've been thinking about this and haven't come up with a satisfactory answer. The Battlestar Galactia crew believes in evolution since Lee says the human critters they encounter are at the "pre-verbal" stage of evolution and Saul finds it amazing that humans evolved independently on another planet, but the repeated destruction of civilization and the distribution of Galactia humans around the planet is a lot like Cuvier's catastrophism and the distribution of species, i.e. God periodically wipes a species out and then plops down pre-formed critters on different continents and, voila, that's what people and animals have looked like since the day they appeared on Earth. This coupled with the explanation that a higher power is directing all of this....well, I wonder if this was intentional or an accident of trying to wrap up the story as fast as possible.
It's not *just* the "God did it" explanation for several major recurring plot points that disappointed me, its that it was done so poorly. To be fair I thought *a lot* of this series was poor, like the demands of the remaining humans to have their civil rights restored *while* still having to jump a head of the cylons every 12 minutes (or whatever the time frame was), and the "civil wars starts on the drop of a dime" coup stuff that kept coming around every season or so. A picture of this series should be in the dictionary next to the definition for "potboiler." (And as an atheist I do sometimes thing the "God did it thing" is a-ok. Dune Messiah (and the books after that, but before his son started writing them) have wonderful, and *understandable* prophecies, gods, half-human/half-san worm characters. Hell, the Honored Matres could be seen as Cyclons in some sense. And the robots-are-soon-to-be-skynet-cylons ending felt very,very tacked on.
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So in other words they killed a total of 65535 Humans?
The god explanation is such a cop out.
I thought the "You know it doesn't like that name." was a nice touch and opened it up quite a bit more than just "God did it".
Or a fellow writer suggested that to avoid being completely panned by critics.
Ok, I suck at writing, but you get my drift.
That's alright, so do the BSG writers.
After some of the major plotholes left and advertising that 'everything will be answered' they didn't live up to the promise. I didn't want everything gift wrapped and handed to me. I'm alright with Starbuck being an angel / ascended being/ whichever. While overall I think BSG was probably the best sci fi show I've seen there were enough plotlines hanging that I wasn't satisfied. Here's some of them, major and minor.
Then again I'm also the type to wonder why the idiots stranded on the island in Lost didn't put up a wooden palisade around their camp the first time a boar ran through it or someone was abducted. Advancing the plot is one thing, being stupid is another.
"Instead, they threw it all away, and opted to become cavemen."
I keep reading that from people, and I really can't understand why that is what people project on the future of the Colonials. Why cavemen? I mean, I may be training as a historian, and I do have an interest in ancient history and anthropology, but the idea that they became cavemen seems rather obviously wrong to me.
What I think would have happened is this: you would have gotten a number of small, scattered farming communities. These communities would see rapid growth in the first few generations, although they'd remain subsistence farmers. Eventually, they'd gain enough critical mass for towns, and in a few generations, those towns might become cities.
Realistically speaking, that's the only logical way they could have had the civilization survive anyway. It's true that they're starting with a great deal of technology at their finger-tips, but they don't have the technological resources to reproduce it. At best, they can keep it running as long as possible, but you're talking about that technology breaking down within a couple of generations anyway.
Think of it this way. They've survived with computers, but it takes a lot to build a computer. You have to be able to get the silicon for parts, you need the machinery to make the circuit-boards, etc. That's stuff they'd have to rebuild, and with their small population, they don't have time for that.
So, you would see cities again within a few generations. You'd see civilizations rising, expanding, and eventually dying. There's nothing to say this isn't the way it happens - keep in mind, we're talking about landfall on Earth being 150 THOUSAND years ago. The entire city of Toronto could have been there that long ago, and we wouldn't have any signs of it today.
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
No, Deus Ex Machina requires the resolution to drop in that moment, without story support. God suddenly appears, and fixes things.
That's not at all what BSG did. BSG pre-seeded their resolutions a year or more in advance. Sure, they were miracles, but they were miracles we'd been told a year ago would happen, all the finale did was show us exactly how they happened.
You can not like the way it was resolved, but that doesn't mean it was Deus Ex Machina.
Just read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deus_ex_machina
Even It has evolved in interpretation, but it's clear that Ron loves Deus ex machina.
... Too bad Ron Moore didn't. And it shows!
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
I Agree. I dvr'ed it (my wife will have to see it tomorrow night because she had to work this weekend. I think, like the conclusion to Quantum Leap, It answers as much as it lets the cycle carry on.But, most importantly, i think the creators of the show (R&D) want you to interperate your own ending. Here's SOME of my interperatations/dillusions. 1. Were Baltar/#6's at the end angels or gods or just immortals? I assume that they were the ones that appeared to each other. I interperate that, by any other name, they were immortals. And that's how i will refer to them. 2. Kara was either one of them or projected by the immortals for their needs. 3. I assume that the immortals judge us. When man/cylon/whatever, gets too greedy and destructive, that's when they lower the boom: they use us (and our insecurities) to destroy ourselves. Then they can try again. 4. I think that the immortals are trying to raise the race to the point that they grow past their own baggage and can live like the immortals. Maybe even become them. 5. Sometimes what you want and what you need are two totally different things. 6. Some of the shows answers are to be found in the Caprica series. Some found through re-watching the series. Some, like Daniel, are your own choices. Was Daniel (or copy) actually Kara's father. One could intyerperate that, especially since they were both in the same episode. I like that they answerd some questions with questions. I don't think that some 'fans' like the fact that that R&D did not litterally answer the questions with the answers they wanted. "I just want it to be totally my show. If not, I hate it" is a bad attitude and you miss the greater drama. Like the great prophet Lenny Kravitz preaches "Let Love Rule." So ends my sermon. Now I have the courage to move out of my parent's basement with pride! Now i realize it's just a show! Moving on now...
Wikipedia agrees with me: "sudden invocation of extraordinary circumstance."
Note the sudden. Hinting at it for over a year makes it not sudden. :)
Like you, I thought the ending sucked. But I think I'm starting to get it. Starbuck IS the harbinger of death. She leads everyone to New Earth, where they somehow lose all sense of rationality (we'll chalk that up to God) and toss everything in the fire. As a result of their idiocy, all the colonists die within a year or two. EXCEPT Hera. Hera's immune system helps her survive diseases better so that when she is captured in a barbarian raid, she survives long enough to be forced into a relationship with the tribal Big Dog as soon as she hits puberty. Thus, Hera becomes M. Eve.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
If it's implied that she took us there in the middle of season four, but she really didn't, then we were mislead (exactly as I said.)
Yes, I think you're right. I would have been happier about this had she been shown at the end in New York, though.
I thought the "You know it doesn't like that name." was a nice touch and opened it up quite a bit more than just "God did it".
But that didn't make sense for them since those two mentioned God's plan more than anyone else in the show
That ending racism stuff there is pretty wacky.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
As a child, I grew up on the 2 original BSGs .. and loved them. Fort he first 2 seasons, I refused to watch the new BSG. I was appalled they changed Starbuck to a female.. Then one day I happened to see it accidentally not realizing it was the new BSG.. and yes, I was hooked. I had to go back and see all the first 2 seasons.
I fell in love and carried the storylines all the way through. I am glad I did too.. I loved it and it always kept me wanting more.
The ending I loved. Everything that happened the past few weeks I never thought would. Adama give the lady up?? I was captured till the end when Starbuck jumped the ship and they found earth. Ok, for me, I was happy they did.. but to me, the last half just was not in accord with the other seasons. I did like how they explained Hera though.. but I was still left hanging with so many questions.
It wasn't an angel figurine. It was a figurine of the Aurora, Goddess of the Dawn. It was also more than a few episodes back. It was Maelstrom - the episode in season 3 where she dies.
I agree that the show is fairly explicit that she's an Angel. But perhaps they weren't explicit, hitting us over the head enough. That's why at the end of Season 3, when Starbuck reappears, they zoom in on Earth, with North America front and center. The staff of the show were worried that if they didn't, audiences wouldn't get that it was Earth.
Mostly though, this show has done much better than typical TV spoon feeding you info and spelling everything out ad nauseum.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
BSG was by far the best thing on television, but did anyone else notice the undercurrent of violence particularly towards women? That, and the tendency for strong male figures to break down into emotional Jello? By the end of the series, NONE of the remaining principal characters were human females. Laura Roslin, Starbuck, Dualla and Callie were all dead.
I'm not talking about the Starbuck character's sex change. That, taken by itself was a great decision. Women in action/sf movies are almost exclusively portrayed as tough-as-nails, drink the guys under the table, A-type overachievers, and in that regard BSG was no different. But what disturbed me was the repetitive and gruesome nature of the violence that seemed to be more focused on women.
Sharon/Athena's frequent facial beatings, complete with long-lasting bandages and bloody scars. Many instances of Sixes being beaten, tortured and raped, usually with lurid shots of bloody wounds and scars to the body and face. Countless beatings taken and given by Starbuck, usually accompanied with much blood. Callie gets tossed out of an airlock, but not before she gets beaten to a pulp by Tory, who in the end gets strangled to death with Ty's bare hands. Pilots killed in space battles seem to be disproportionately women, and they die not so much in a ball of flame as usual, but in a way where we can view the lifeless corpse. There's Dualla's pointless suicide, ironically just after the character drops the "killer chick" facade. For years we witnessed the slow and painful deterioration of Laura Roslyn, with plenty of humiliating shots in a hospital bed, and years of moaning and grunting in pain. It was such a relief just to see her die peacefully. Ellen Tigh gets poisoned by her husband, and then barely escapes being dissected alive. A similar fate awaited the innocent child Hera, who only had to face days of terror, starvation and isolation. D'Anna dares to speak out against authority and in return she and her clone sisters are "boxed" and ultimately all destroyed save her. Sure, Baltar got his ass kicked a lot, but he deserved it. The only gruesome and painful injury to a male that I recall is to Felix, with his nagging amputation. Of course, the ancillary BSG episodes show him to be gay...
So in typical BSG ambiguity, it leaves us with a question. In the eyes of the producers, are these women truly "liberated", or do they have to pay a price for living in a man's world? Similarly (even congruently), are men weakened when surrounded by strong women?
I predicted the ending... and I was totally wrong. But mine was better. They totally set it up, they went another direction.
First of all, Baltar has to be a Cylon. The fact that he is not can be nothing other than the writers making a mistake. That would explain how he:
- Shared visions with a Cylon
- Survived the nuclear blast on Caprica
- Why Caprica 6 told him something like "How can you pretend so well?"
- Knew intricacies of Cylon technology (Ex: Recognizing Cylon structures in the attack on the cylon base on the Asteroid - season 1 or 2 I think)
- Was inherently monotheistic
My ending would have involved time travel. They should have jumped into Earth, of the past, before the 12 colonies separated. I know, time travel is sorely overused, but it would totally have fit:
- Explains why this has happened before and will happen again
- How the 12 colonies were able to leave a marker about a Sun going supernova.
- The "earth" in the end is the same Earth they found, only in the past. That is why Kara's body was found while she was still alive: She time traveled back to Earth of the past
- The last episode involved a singularity and some magical coordinates - total time travel setup. She should have jumped them straight into the singularity and thus back in time.
That's how I'll try to remember the series. It ties things up quite well.
No, Deus Ex Machina requires the resolution to drop in that moment, without story support. God suddenly appears, and fixes things.
Foreshadowing doesn't automatically qualify as sufficient story support.
Establishing that such things are not just possible but commonplace in the universe, foreshadowing to the audience and visions to the characters, and having characters tell you all along what's going to happen does.
The god explanation is such a cop out.
Like a "Deus Ex Machina"?
*ducks*
"Given that God is all powerful and all knowing, it is ALWAYS a cop out to write him into a script."
I'm sorry but is that the judo christian God, or the god that BSG actually used?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
I was thinking just the opposite.
Instead of all mankind deriving from some African tribe somewhere around the Olduvai and all men being derived from a common black eve, I though the series reconfirmed a more eurocentric view point that inferior backwards Africans were lifted up through the combination of a superior more advanced people.
...what about the two basestars that jumped away that the recce raptor filmed in Daybreak Pt 1?
They just might be a tad pissed off. Not to mention fully armed.
Other than that I thought it was a great tale, and the ending tied up most loose ends at least for me.
Oh yeah, I *STILL* want to know who it was that Carprica Six was meeting at the beginning the the miniseries.
I am such a huge fan of the series - and almost totally at peace with it coming to an end.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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Apparently you missed the hints suggesting that religion might have nothing to do with it:
Angel Caprica Six: "That too is in God's plan"
Angel Baltar: "You know it doesn't like that name"
The discussions between the "angels" about the Law of Averages rather than prophecy or revelation.
It looks more like advanced beings overseeing the development of new species in the galaxy than "God". Which would be semi-consistent with the original BSG, as well.
And if you follow that explanatio
Inconceivable!
So are we not to create robots?
Or are we not to create intelligent robots to use as slaves?
Or are we to only create robots that are to dumb to know they are slaves?
vi +
YES, finally something that makes sense! Also, the angels were hallucinations caused by alcohol withdrawal, and Kara actually dies of spontaneous combustion while Lee is off in dreamworld.
Throughout the show they only ever conversed with real-Six and real-Baltar. The concept of 'God' was something that the real counterparts they were influencing could easily understand and latch onto; portraying themselves as guardian angels in a way. It made them more malleable.
Hunt your preferred prey at Aliens vs Predator MUD. Join the war at avpmud.com port 4000
But that didn't make sense for them since those two mentioned God's plan more than anyone else in the show
True. But those two characters, especially the Angel 6, have said a lot of things that weren't true but which the characters needed to hear. In terms of a person's willingness to believe, there's a big difference between attributing something to a guiding force and attributing it to the classical christian God.
Man, you make it sound like such a shitty unoriginal show.
I'm an agnostic and that didn't prevent me from understanding the religious/spiritual theme in the show, which I enjoyed immensely.
Just because I don't believe in God doesn't mean I don't understand why religious people do or that I think they're wrong to do so.
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
"Shit, I was sort of pissed that they had a bunch of steel lying around to repair Galactica -- reminded me of Voyager where every episode a new shuttlecraft would appear."
It's not so outlandish when you consider just how resource rich space can be.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
You're right, there has been religion in the show for a long time. Since day one even. But it's always been presented in a deliberately ambiguous way so that it could be interpreted either scientifically and rationally or spiritually by the audience or the characters.
But this time, there is absolutely no rational or scientific explanation for the events of the show other than a supernatural god or gods and angels. The show crossed a line here it's never crossed before.
The aesthetic of the narrative up until this point promised us we'd have rational explanations for Kara and Baltar's head people, but we didn't get it because the writers wrote themselves into a corner and literally had no other explanation.
So the suddenness component you require is the unexpected lack of an explanation alternative to god, something the show has never done before. There's always been an alternative possible explanation since the day Roslin gave the order to destroy the Olympic Carrier.
You can choose to like the way it was resolved, but let's be honest here. It absolutely was deus ex machina.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
The wife and I just started watching BSG based on all the positive talk we've been hearing about it. We're on season 1, episode 7 or something.
I have to say so far, it's a metric shitload better than Stargate. However, we have a couple of concerns. It seems the writers are being overly obtuse about things. I have no problem pondering plot twists and various character motives, but they're way too obvious about the fact that they're holding back 90% of the information about what's going on. For instance, they haven't yet told us what life was like before the cylons arrived, how they encountered humans in the first place, or what the fuck is going on with that Caprica place. I know that some of the history should remain hidden so as to exploit it in future episodes, but c'mon.
Also, it seems like its taking an extremely long time to get to know the characters, even the "good guys". It's the first sci-fi show I've ever seen that instead of trying to immerse you in the story, deliberately keeps you at bay while spoon-feeding you tiny scraps of information at a time. Watching BSG is like overhearing an argument where you can only discern the occasional word clearly enough to get the faintest grasp of what the debate is about. When it's over, you're left unsure of what exactly transpired while wondering if you'll ever find out.
No. I have to disagree in this case. What you claim was established was not. Sure it was clear that there was somewhere a helpful force, but that it was capable of making a copy of Earth complete with humans or that there were genuine "angels" (whatever those were supposed to be) running about, was not established.
I agree. Excellent ending. And the people who seem to be railing against it can't seem to come up with anything more than "I don't like God" or "I can't deal with not having 100% concrete answers."
Kara - angel who didn't know it until the end, or human resurrected and ascended after serving out the purpose of their resurrection.
The "Head Baltar" and "Head Six" - angels, that's how the "future" Baltar and Six are able to talk to the "past" Baltar and Six. They're not Baltar and Six, they just look that way for purpose of influencing Baltar and Six. When it happened 2000 years earlier, on the original Earth, Anders and Tory say they were approached by their own version of those two beings (only they could see them)... yet, if they had appeared as Baltar and Six back then, they would have recognized Six when they created her, and would have recognized Baltar when Anders got his memory back. Clearly they're not "future Baltar and Six", they're just beings that are presented to Baltar and Six in a particular guise (and we see them in that same guise in the epilogue so that we have continuity of their identities). Probably when they appeared to Anders and Tory, they looked like Tory and Anders.
I sort of like the "they blended in with the natives" story. For one, it's 150,000 years ago ... not just around the time at which Mitochondrial Eve lived, but about the point when _modern_ homo sapiens appears on the scene (130k - 150k years ago). The "150,000 years later" wasn't some random number, and it's not just about Hera/Eve, it's about Modern Homo Sapiens vs Archaic Homo Sapiens.
God ... maybe, or maybe just an advanced being. The fact that the two "angels" explain it as being "God" doesn't make it so. They're not themselves the absolute being, so we directly don't know what that absolute being is. Their influence on Anders and Tory is probably why the fleshy Cylons (except Caval) believe in a single god. We know it's a being with a complex understanding of time and systems, more complex that our own linear understanding of time and systems (because it's able to sense or cause complex actions to happen far in the future, and seed into things solutions to those problems). Aside from that, we don't really know much about it ... and that's almost certainly a good thing (stories that try to "explain god" are typically rather hollow, and/or self-serving).
Which then also carries over to "angels" -- they're advanced beings with a different sense/understanding of time/space/etc. than ours. Divine? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe "God" and the two angels are more like Clarke's view of "Magic" and such. Advanced to the point that we can't distinguish them from being God and Angels, but maybe they're something else. Or maybe, like the heavy influence of Mormon-ism on the original series, they're a Mormon-ish type of advanced being ("As we are now, God once was; as God is now, we may become").
It's also something more palatable to me than the original series invocation of divine beings (the crystal ship beings). But it does so in a way that is open to both the original series being very Mormon, or being much less Mormon about it. By not being heavy handed "this is who God really is", they leave it to individual interpretations or musings. And that's a VERY good thing.
Remember... "it' doesn't like to be called God.
I only kept watching the show because I'd already invested two years following it. When they made that final push away from science fiction and toward religious soap opera, it was a real struggle to watch.
When they were tackling issues like torture, ethics, and the "us or them" mentality the show remained interesting. And then they ruined it by introducing God as an off-set character.
Not quite. Caprica Six (the one who ended up boinking Tigh) and Baltar did. The illusory/virtual/"angel" Six/Baltar, not so much.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
You can have robots, but you've got to let them choose their own fate - as the centurions were allowed to at the end. In a way, they had already broken the cycle when the humans, rebel humanoid cylons, and free centurions fought side by side in the colony.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Didn't like the look of it at all. Seemed really boring. The original BattleStar from the early 80's was great.
I thought after Kara's disappearance she can back as an "angel" kinda like the imaginary Baltar and 6. She just didn't know it....thats why she vanished in the field with Lee at the end. Kara was the resurrected Jesus like character who brought humanity and the cylons to their promise land.
People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
Think about it-- if you watched all the movies in the order of Vader's lifetime why is it he NEVER takes a second look at c-3po?
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Did I miss something?
Property is theft.
A lot more than a year..."Head Six" was talking about "God's Plan" from the very beginning and Baltar had a "pick randomly and it turns out to work perfectly" miracles in the first season.
The cake is a pie
Because the droids all look the same. Even in A New Hope there were a tonne of silver versions of C-3PO that were otherwise identical.
Not that C-3PO's presence in the new trilogy didn't bother me (R2-D2 was fine because he was supposed to already be aware of Obi-Wan and where he lives, etc.).
Holy Moses! So, it's like 1,500 years before Jesus was born, he was pre-incarnated as Moses to lead "his" people to the promised land ... you trying to start YAC (Yet Another Cult) or something?
(The worst part is, you'd probably get a following. People will believe anything if you wrap it up in religious mumbo-jumbo. Look at how many are arguing in favour of the ending, and how it was foreshadowed throught the series, even though the writers admit they were winging it :-)
Did you all forget what site you're on?? This is about FOSS and documenting your code!
They create an AI but they don't give their creations the ability to *view their own source*. They should have provided them with a properly licensed, well-documented, and easy-to-maintain hardware architecture, at least one kernal, and least one compiler (they would need some abstraction, the language would have to be "human-readable", after all). Also porn. With these *bare* necessities, the AI would have no reason to bug the humans anymore. Why would the AI choose to wage war if the humans provided them all of what they needed to keep developing themselves?
At that point, you get to either Terminator or the Matrix, both of which show you how bright the future can be if only you let your self-aware programs keep developing themselves.
The End.
(sorry for double-posting, but this brilliant piece of punditry is mine and mine alone. And I was stupid enough to click the "Post Anonymously" box as I Alt-ed through the form. I realize that this says a lot about my mental health.)
Entomologically speaking, the spider is not a bug, it's a feature.
In the final episode the fleet settle on Earth, without their technology. The early humans had just evolved, and they possibly interbred with with the native humans. This sounds an awful lot like in "The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe", where a fleet of hair dressers and phone cleaners fall to Earth at a similar stage of human evolution and make a life there. That fleet, however, decided to use leaves as currency, and the native population seemed to die out. But who knows?
Well, it's probably not an easter egg, but it is a little funny.
The truth may be out there, but lies are inside your head
It was Bob Cylon that did it all. Even though BSG is gone now, at least we still have Bob to explain things.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
It was a nightmare of Starbuck (the original one). He had ate too much.
It looked great. It's just that it was crap. Yes the original was great, but you just cannot argue that the new, crappy, preachy, god heavy, mamby-pamby new one didn't look good. It looked great. It's just that it was a complete waste of time.
The Cylons in the old series looked like teamsters, which they probably were, complete with metallic pot-belly. The lumbered around and couldn't shoot straight and fell over comically when they exploded. It was silly how low-tech it was. It looks horribly unmodern compared to the annoying, preachy, ultimately vapid new one.
The characters in the old one were simple, the dialog trivial, the ideas tidy. Who can possibly argue that the new version, with its complex dialog and story, deep characters, no clear good guy or bad, was not much more modern and splashy? Who cared if it made for a pointless series that left us feeling unsatisfied at every turn?
In the old one, Starbuck wound up stranded on a planet with a Cylon and they came to depend on each other. How naive of them to think that that was one simple show which could have a beginning and an end, some conflict and some resolution. The new series showed us that that little episode was really the whole series!
Incompetent old Galactic makers. They didn't realize that it's not good enough to make an episodic badguy vs. goodguy show. There are no good guys, after all. Thank goodness the new BSG showed us that.
The contrast between the theme music kinda summarized the whole difference. The original BSG got you roused up for some adventure. The new one prepped you for a long, LONG nap. At least it's now over.
You know, they did it just specifically to piss you off. If I were you, I'd write them a strongly worded letter.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
I couldn't agree more! the original was FUN. This new BSG takes itself too seriously!
This was my favorite show until the end of the second season where they went through the looking glass (New Caprica) and never returned. I was stunned by the flash forward episode where none of the characters made any sense (and pretty much haven't since). It was like a bad parody of evil opposite universe from Star Trek - Adama with a mustache, Apollo in the fat suit, Starbuck grew a lot of hair (or extensions) and they all seemed completely out character, the show has felt like a surreal mess since, when the hard boiled realism of the first two seasons are what drew me to it.
From then on I think the initial success went to their heads and they went more grandiose/artsy with each episode, with terrible results. Here is where I see Parallel with M Knight Shamalan, letting success then attempting to produce self aggrandizing artsy drek as favorable press goes to your head. Fitting that he gave himself a cameo in the end.
We then had two seasons of pushing characters in completely unbelievable directions, Captain one day, mutineer the next, president the next, spin and repeat. The fleet goes into bloody civil war just from the thought of allying with the Cylons, then they volunteer to go on a suicide mission to rescue one half cyclon kid. All the other plot elements all made up as they went that could never have a satisfying end.
Then we got the cop out "God/super being did it all" explanation for anything. Yes during the last two seasons they laid it on thick but unfortunately I was still hoping against hope for a return of the show that was the first two seasons, hoping for some redemption. Back in Season 1&2 when it was still good and my friends used to discuss it. Baltars Head-6 was insanity or implanted technology, there was ZERO discussion of angles and god pulling all the strings. Basically because such an explanation is completely lacking in imagination and satisfaction.
Once you go down that road, you can do practically anything you want with no need for anything to have any logical reason behind it. Music activating the Final 5; God did it. Visions in peoples heads; God did it. Starbuck back from the dead; God did it. Empty Raptor launching missiles and destroying the whole giant Cylon Colony; God did it. etc... Once you go down this road, logic is out the window. God becomes the ultimate non explanation for everything. Blah.
The utterly ridiculous final act of jettisoning all technology into the sun is in keeping with the mess that has been season 3 and 4. Whatever the plot element is we want this week, the characters will nonsensically jump through any hoop to make it happen. Since they wanted this to be our past, so all that pesky technology had to go. Simple toss it into the sun. So what if it make no sense at all. It serves our cutesy ending.
Summary: Two great initial season driven by hard edged realism, sane plots, believably characters. Then two season of grandiose wacky plots, mysteries that weren't and unbelievable characters. The finale was just more of the same final two seasons that fed into it. Too bad it didn't end two years ago when it still could have had a satisfying end.
Exactly. That's why it's so perfect. ;-)
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Now let's let Caprica die a quiet death and we'll finally be able to put this whole thing behind us.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Since you are very small, utmostly microscopically small, your opinion is of too little value for me to care.
I agree. I'm sure you noticed how the only atheist was Gaius Baltar, and how all the logical, scientific cylons were, of course, THE BAD GUYS.
Not to mention "It was all God and he loves you!" was just plain bad deus ex machina-type storytelling. "We were... Angels the entire time!" What a satisfying explanation that is on a sci-fi show!
Oh come on, that quip was obviously to create ambiguity so they wouldn't isolate all the fans, particularly the more secular ones.
Did you ever watch the original series? Did you think the visitors that made the colonials clothes turn white were just aliens?
all those ships- none could be a phillip morris/seagrams cargo ship?
a vehicle with the capacity to deliever cancer sticks in a quantity sufficient to supply a planet can certainly supply that limited population for 4 years... (they'd get kinda stale though)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
As has been said, it was an emotional ending.
Its plot may have been weak and some promised answers never came but I feel good that it's over now and I got to see my favorite characters reach a place to call home.
I know I'm not the only one that feels this way but an ending that wraps up a voyage as long as Galactica's with humanity surviving is quite nice.
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
have you ever utterly restored a car?
from junk to cherry?
something like a VW ghia?
then sold it?
for the rest of your life, if you catch the sign of that model vehicle you'll be checking it out and wondering
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Yup.
You're trying to hard to dislike the finale. Why not accept that the other participant in this cycle isn't actually all-powerful. It can influence, prod, and manipulate. It can pull of events that appear miraculous, but perhaps there's a scale concern.
If this entity can teleport a fully functional Kara Thrace and a fully functional like-new Viper into space, there is no consequcnce to anything the characters do. Everything is pointless because the magical being behind the curtain can fiat anything it wants to happen. This makes following the story and the drama pointless.
Also, as mentioned many times, Ron Moore admited that he was just making shit up as he went along. Which is basically how religion came about, so I guess I can see why religious people liked it.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
This ends racism, as it creates one race, the Human race, the best of Humans and Cylons merged into one, and speaks out against violence and trying to play God and creating new life, which might turn on us and try to kill us all.
We can all see how well that turned out. What a bunch of crap. Stop trying to justify ex-post-facto a bunch of random shit Ron Moore made up because he didn't know what to do.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
are we to assume other cycles were similarly spaced?
Really, they jumped the shark a few too many times and did a SF board fan end instead of a sci fi fanatic end
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Seemed fairly obvious to me:Jesus.
Died, resurrected, then ascended once the job was done.
Wow, I totally want to get in a three way with my girlfriend and Jesus now. Jesus is fuckin hot.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
If you've read this thread you've been spoiled already, but out of politeness I'll just say that there's spoilers following)
I've read a lot of posts and articles in which people are debating the validity of the choice to explain everything as being god's work. I never thought that way myself, but because you could make a halfway decent argument for that point of view I've done some thinking into the best way to explain why it's not a copout and I think I've come up with a pretty good one.
Through prophecy and the guidance of the show's God they're led to a ruined earth. Whether or not God intended it to be ruined when they found it or not can be debated right up until the point in the last episode at which point they find Earth2. When it becomes apparent that God intended the whole time for them to end their journey at Earth2 (because Kara's song is what led them there) it makes the discovery of a devastated Earth2 part of the process of getting there. More specifically, it turns Earth1 into a lesson. It makes it a meaningful example on the way to understanding what produced the destruction of their entire civilization this means God has a purpose in leading them on this convoluted path through genocide and oppression and heartache. Even at its most passive the purpose for God's journey must be to teach humanity that lesson.
This purpose gives the God real substance and character and it's this character that takes God from some convenient force that can be used to explain anything and everything and incorporates it into the plot in a legitimate way. This makes the lack of an explanation for what specifically Kara is or what the Head 6 and Head Gaius are ok. It's unimportant to the plot. All the story needs is enough explanation of what they are to show that they really were tools of the character which is God, and that was accomplished. This also legitimizes the spirituality of the story, because that is the story. It's a story of what God put mankind through in order to give them a chance to be better.
Just my two cents, and it reaches just a little bit, but there it is.
All the camera did was pan to Earth after Starbuck said she'd take them there. In the end, that's exactly what she did. (Ok, it's kind of a stretch because she took them to the old Earth first, but whatever.)
The show ended too soon. I was waiting for the episode where Kara Thrace gets taken off duty and sent to a ship where a retired captain lives with his twelve children, only he still acts like a captain and hard-heartedly marches his children about like they're officers, but then, Kara teaches them all to sing.
"You know it doesn't like that name"
One of the themes of the show is that there is an invisible hand at work, and it's up to the viewer to decide whether it be God, the Gods, space monsters, or something else.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Remember... "it' doesn't like to be called God.
Yeah, the singularity running our simulation prefers to be called "Bob".
This is a technique called Lampshade Hanging. Here is a recent Dinosaur Comics about it.
I really wanted to like the finale, but this ruined it. I could no longer identify with the characters.
Abandon all technology? Frak. That. Felgercarb.
Don't put advice in your sig.
I didn't notice anything past those first few episodes, and that was how long ago? Unlike the other BG whiners, who complain about "all the spiritual crap" but kept watching anyway, I actually put my foot down and walked away. Sure, I feel like I missed out on something, but what I feel I missed is precisely what wasn't offered: real science fiction.
To use lawyer-speak, asked and answered already:
Remember the lives they lived aboard the ships. Almost half of the original survivors were dead. Civilians lived in castes tied to their ship and essentially powerless about their destiny. They lived as prisoners of technology. After a few years of that existence, many average people would like to return to a simpler life. To be truly free and farm, fish, feel the grass on their feet and warmth of the sun.
Such rejection of technology is not unprecedented.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Congratulations, you've just managed to support Intelligent Design.
It doesn't matter how the characters acted. That's a whole different thread.
In that story, human beings as we know them today are NOT a product of millions of years of evolution. They're the result of some "god" who directly influences events. And who is, apparently, still involved today.
Which is even worse than the age old cliche "and we will call this new planet 'Earth'".
"Eddie kept pitching me that they come to Earth in contemporary times, and everyone's cheering and happy, and cut to the White House and the President goes, "Nuke 'em!" And they destroy Galactica -- cut to credits." -- Ron Moore at http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/03/battlestar_galactica_ronald_d.html
haha. hahahaha.
A good computer engineer would come up with something like an abacus, simple enough to make with his tech and useful for the types of problems they would face.
The more I think about what the colonials would have brought in their heads, the more I think early civilization would have made the perfect landing time.
They would have brought the ideas of Farming, writing, math, building houses, organization, etc. all of which occur around the same time period.
It also would have been easier for them to approach and interbreed with earthlings who were at nearly the same stage of technological development.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
No, Deus Ex Machina requires the resolution to drop in that moment, without story support. God suddenly appears, and fixes things.
That's not at all what BSG did. BSG pre-seeded their resolutions a year or more in advance. Sure, they were miracles, but they were miracles we'd been told a year ago would happen, all the finale did was show us exactly how they happened.
You can not like the way it was resolved, but that doesn't mean it was Deus Ex Machina.
It was deus ex machina, with a long epilogue.
How many "machine" and "god" references do you need to be next to each other before you say it in latin?
You can't take the sky from me...
If that's the case, atheists must be very easy to offend. Considering that atheists still make up a minority of the population, they should be very used to religious symbology used in the culture, even if they don't agree with it.
Should a Christian be "insulted" by fairy tales that involve pixies and trolls, but leave out God? Maybe some would, but the sensible majority can separate fantasy entertainment from religious philosophy.
And if it's any consolation to anti-christian atheists, the "god" in BSG wouldn't have made a very good substitute for the Judeo-Christian God. As stated in the finale, the BSG god is neither good nor evil - it's the people that are good or evil. That puts the BSG god a couple of notches below the "good God" most people recognize, and even lower than The Force...
Exactly.
They killed Cally intentionally so that it would end the way it did.
That's a looooong lead time.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
On the verge of being wiped out after a terribly harsh winter, our ancestors came across thirty thousand tasty colonists that tried to make friends with them.
"They can take my FTL starship from my cold dead hands."
Founding member 148,000BC
Stupid Fraking Ending.
In GOD we trust, all others we monitor.
Robots need love and attention too. But seriously, the only thing I had issues with was making it with a cave person to ensure the survival of humanity. I mean come on... how gross is that? *shudder*
-=VampiressX=-
Random Deus ex Machina?
Oh he's gonna hate me for that one.
Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many.
Except, you know, for the fact that all that stuff was in there from season 1.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Better yet, doesn't it make artistic sense that this is about free will? The other influenced the colonials and Cylons to choose differently. It didn't force them, or deny them choice. It educated them. Powerful message there.
I thought it was almost a message to humans about how to behave towards their creations. God created us, and lets us do as we please, but tries to direct us when we've gotten lost. He's willing to let us nearly self-destruct, theoretically in the hopes that we get it right.
On the other hand, we create and we wish to dominate, enslave and use. We made something that pleased us and wish to give nothing back to it. The cylons, when you get down to it, had no "culture". They needed to be more than machines, but could not be, and all we offered was war. And they learned that lesson well.
They didn't put a name on her, because they probably can't without offending some religion or another. She is a supernatural character, like Head Six and Head Baltar. But she's also not at all like them, and acts very differently.
I think the best way to understand Starbuck is to compare her with Head Six and Baltar, and the explanation about the nature of the BSG God. Head Six and Head Baltar view humanity as a science experiment, they do not embrace us for what we are. They know of the BSG God and their place in the world. They're detached from humanity and maybe from the experience but they have a role to play in our story. There were other head characters too, I remember Elosha and maybe one other. They had different personalities and roles but they shared these characteristics.
Starbuck, on the other hand, very much revels in humanity. While she has no idea who or what she is at any point in the show, she seems driven and her behavior suggests she enjoys her existence, even while she's doing things that would make us cringe. She has her role to play, but she never actually interferes with how things play out, always involved but never committed. She seems to be the incarnation of the BSG god gone on a joyride in human flesh.
I think leaving it a bit of a mystery isn't a bad thing. Disappearing at the end said what it needed to say: she's not human and her job was complete she can't stay any longer. What more do we need to feel satisfied?
I don't think Kara belongs with Head Six/Baltar. I would think they are of opposite polarities.
So you think that perhaps a depressed Centurian teleported from Galactica after a black light on a black (and very grubby) console lit up in black with the message against a black background that you'd just pressed it. Or are you implying that Sam was spending a year dead for "tax reasons"? Man, I'd like to have been 300 feet below that concert in a reinforced concrete bunker!
No, the poster just forgot a hyphen. Try reading it as ". . .resurrected Jesus-like character. . ." and it makes sense.
Torben
Don't see a fleet anymore, now do you?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh right, so a deus ex machina is ok if you mention it earlier on in the plot. Gotcha.
The plot was confused from quite early on, the scripting was good initially and then deteriorated gradually as things lost coherence. The characterisation and dram was better, and at times gripping, but the cod-religion, silly plot-twists and lack of coherence really put me off the show around the end of season 2, so I'm glad to hear that the ending was just as messy as I imagined, basically '$Diety did it'.
I'm amazed to be honest that they managed to stretch it out for so long, and that people are still defending it.
You can give someone food, or you can teach them to grow it. Probably the idea at play here. Sure, you can do whatever you want to them, but they'll never /understand/ if they're simply forced.
BytesTemplar.com
In the writers' room:
"OK, so Starbuck is a ghost. And so is the Viper she flew back, except people can touch it. Oh, and the 'red dress' Caprica Six who appears to Baltar? Yeah, she's not his subconscious or a figment of his imagination or anything like that. She's an angel. So is the Baltar who appears to the real Caprica Six. Also Jesus did it. And because Jesus did it, we don't have to explain the aboriginal humans on some backwater planet even slightly."
"Ron, are you fucking high?"
"Yes. Yes I am."
Who tought of that name anyway? Yeah, we have a planet, let's call it "dust", or "dirt". Yuck. We can call it Vulcan (because it has a lot of vulcans, you know, and it had even more so times before) or "The Blue Jewel", or "Water drop", but no, we called it "Dirt".
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I wish I had mod points today. Die, jerky-cam, die!
BSG was a total bust and the end was unbelievably bad. For the effort invested in it, BSG might even be the most epic fail in the history of TV.
BSG wasn't sci-fi... it was a soap opera against a little-used space background. Anytime I tuned in it was just like a daytime soap.
I think they got way too full of themselves and lost all perspective. I saw a documentary about the show and couldn't believe the extent to which they patted themselves on their backs while an objective look at the production revealed it to be a mess of a dreary soap opera -- all talk and little action.
And any series that has to resort to promos like "All will be revealed" or "All will be explained" has clearly overcomplicated itself to the point where it can't be understood.
Look at the bright side: there's always seppuku.
The god explanation is such a cop out.
I thought the "You know it doesn't like that name." was a nice touch
He goes by "Allah" nowadays?
You can't take the sky from me...
Battle House on the Prairie, the next chapter in BSG.
You are making the mistake in thinking that Kara Thrace is the same as everyone else. I don't think she is.
In some mythologies, there are multiple classes of beings besides just god and people. You have angels, demons, spirits, and any other number of creatures that have special treatment. For example, in Judeo-Christian mythology, Angels are special creatures that can do all kinds of things and yet they don't really have free will - that's reserved for humans.
So, in Galactica, I thought they did a pretty good idea of making it clear that Kara Thrace isn't like "people" - she's something else. God can manipulate her in any number of ways that it might not be able to manipulate "real" people. Kara was a tool to accomplish something - it just happens that she didn't know what she was, and happened to have a more complex inner life than other tools. At least, that's what makes sense to me - it lets miraculous things like Kara's return happen, but doesn't invalidate the other characters.
And I agree - Moore making shit up kinda wrecks it, but I think it's actually pretty entertaining to try and figure out how to account for the inconsistencies. I'm not remotely religious, but I enjoyed it as entertainment.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
While it may be an unpopular opinion on this thread I think that the writers were not entirely wrong in their decision to have the remaining humans abandon the technology that had kept them alive throughout the series and ultimately delivered them to the Sol system. Recall, that throughout the series the Galactica and the surviving fleet were always attempting to scavange and repair their degrading technologies, usually just a few steps ahead of a catastrophic failure or two. The running down of the previous civilization and the technologies that made the Galactica and the fleet possible was a constant running theme, even though it wasn't always addressed explicitly. The 30,000 or so surving humans of the Galactica fleet did not have the necessary skills, knowledge, or materials to continue operating indefinitely. In fact, when the Galactica did reach Earth it was heavily damaged from its latest encounter with the Cavil and with the fold drive completely shot the Galactica, or what was left of it anyway, wasn't going to leave the Sol system for a long time if indeed it ever would again.
It was practically inevitable, even if all 30,000 had agreed to settle together and carefully husband, maintain, and pass down all of their collected technical knowledge and the remaining equipment that much of that knowledge and equipment would be lost in the following centuries as the remaining Galactica technology ran down to broken and the comforts of the previous civilization began to fade into a more primitive and agrarian society of descendents on Earth.
The truth of the matter is that without an advanced civilization and population in the millions to support it on at least one fully developed colony planet, the Galactica and the technology that made everything work was impossible to maintain indefinitely. There were perhaps some minor details that the writers could have done a bit better, but the decision to abandon the Galactica and the remaining fleet was not an entirely illogical one given the state of the Galactica and the remaining equipment (and its penchant for attracting the Cylons from far and wide). It is also important to remember that as the series continued it became more and more apparent that technology was not "the answer" to the problems of humanity (i.e. something to be pursued as an end unto itself). Recall that it was technology that brought them the Cylons and put them on the path into their present circumstances; so is the decision to "start again" so completely illogical in the context of all that they had been through and the state of their remaining technology when they finally arived at Earth? Maybe not.
> blah blah blah
Have you read the title versus that of the original? "Battlestar Galactica Re-Imagined". This is not your Mommy and Daddy's BSG.
The natives were also her contemporaries.
So, it is possible that all the Colonists except Hera die off quickly, but it's not necessary.
Hera's hybrid biology must have represented an evolutionary advantage in order for her mitochondrial DNA to be successfully passed down over 150,000 years to modern humans.
It is possible that that advantage would not be realized until many generations later - for example if a hundred generations later, her descendants are the only people who have resistance to some new disease they encounter, and everyone else who does not posses her mitochondrial DNA dies from the plague.
It does seem likely that most of the Colonists die off quickly or have little impact on the native peoples in terms of culture.
Think about it - if 150,000 years ago farming and things like that had been introduced and it had actually taken, isn't it likely that mankind would be a lot more advanced now? We might have had an industrial revolution 100,000 years ago instead of 150 years ago.
Certainly, the introduction of language in addition to farming would have been a huge cultural leap over the existing hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
Putting moderation advice in your
First, I also didn't like the way they glossed over the fleet's unanimous decision to forgo all technology. And I wished for a better ending for Starbuck. How about, now that her destiny is complete, she is free to be the human she should have been all along?
But when they showed up in the past, I started flashing back ("Lost" style) to the old series, and the introductory narration:
"There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. That they may have been the architects of the great pyramids, or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens..." --(thanks, Wikipedia!)
So in a way they tied the new show back to that idea (sort of). Plus, remember the big white crystal ships, and the cool white uniformed Starbuck and Apollo? There was an advanced race that was sort of looking out for the fleet.
When Kara found her dead body on Old Earth, the writers had so many options open to them. We knew the old occupants had resurrection technology. Maybe they didn't all die out, and there was an advanced colony hidden somewhere nearby. And their resurrection tech is so advanced, it even works on humans (and vipers!). I mean, someone built her factory fresh spaceship!
Other random thoughts:
Why wouldn't Adm Adama come back after burying Laura? Why wouldn't he want to be near his family after suffering a loss like that? And how would Lee "know" that his father was going to go all hermit on everyone?
What was the Cylons "Plan?" Yes, I know there's another movie coming out to explain that, but we spent the first 2 or 3 seasons being told "And they have a plan," only to have said plan kind of fizzle out. At first it seemed they wanted there to be survivors, so they could experiment with making hybrid babies, or learning about emotions, or teaching the humans to say "Oh my god" instead of "Oh my gods." But by the end, they were just as lost as the humans. "And they have a plan" was brilliant as a way of making the Cylons into a truly terrifying enemy who is always going to be one step ahead of you, and making you second-guess every decision. But it turned out to be just a cool line.
The world has changed a lot since the miniseries. The events of 9/11/2001 (quick aside, do people in other countries refer to it as 11/9?) no longer haunt us the way they did back then. The reign of King Dubya is over, and we will be dealing with the fallout for years/decades to come. It would have been nice to see that reflected in the finale more, with more emphasis on humans and Cylons putting aside their differences and working together to dig themselves out of the hole they have created. (But I know the show finished production long before last year's election.)
On the whole, it was a fun ride, and the ending fell a little flat. I'm grateful the ending wasn't so bad that it will sour my memory of the show's earlier glories. (Remember Galactica jumping into the atmosphere of New Caprica? Remember Pegasus ramming the Base Stars? Remember Boomer showing up with the Cylons at the end of the miniseries? Remember Starbuck always ending up in the brig? Remember Lee and Kara's attraction even though--or because--they were totally wrong for each other? Remember Starbuck waggling the Raider's wings? Good times!)
Who says creating what was apparently a temporary Kara Thrace "construct" requires that something be "all-powerful"? We don't know what exactly she was, only that she was instantiated for an apparently intentionally short period of time. I'm not saying that I think this kind of thing is necessarily possible, but if you'd written a story in the 1600's that featured people looking into glass windows and seeing events that happen thousands of miles away, some critic would call it impossible and silly. We call it television.
Why is it that: ....and yet liking Battlestar Galactica and allowing for the idea that some "higher power" can be in the story somehow means I'm religious? By the way, who says that this "higher power" is even supernatural? It could be anything, since it's never completely defined and they actually mention that "it" doesn't like being called God. For all we know, BSG's reality is a copy of "The Sims" that some kid bought at WalMart and is running a "god-mode" patch on, or anything else you can imagine.....
I can like Star Wars, but nobody thinks I must therefore believe in The Force.
I can like Lord of the Rings, but nobody thinks that I must therefore believe in magic, hobbits and dragons.
I can like Heroes, but nobody thinks that I must therefore believe in superheroes.
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
You act like the conditions onboard the ships were caused by technology. They were not. They were caused by living on a frakking ship.
It's like saying that living in a submarine is hell compared to living on land because nuclear power exists. It's Faustian-level ignorance.
But then again, the village mob always went after Frankenstein's monster, not the good Doctor.
I disliked the conclusion so much that I had to reimagine it in a different context, with a different ending, in order to accept it.
http://manifestomultilinko.blogspot.com/2009/03/bsg-finale-answer-to-question-we-didnt.html
The god explanation is such a cop out.
Choices to tie together a rambling, make it up as you go jumble of story bits: 1. God did it. 2. It was all a dream. 3. To be continued... in a new series!
Unless your Doctor Who then you can always say "I'll explain later" and ignore the subject indefinately.
Ancient Greeks believed in powerful gods with human emotions that frequently visited them in various disguises and influenced and guided them. But I don't believe the Greeks thought their lives were meaningless because of that.
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
Yeah but if you can create a full human from vaccum, along with attendant viper and the like, then you can definitely create them with whatever knowledge, skills, predispositions, biases, and beliefs that you want. If you create them in such a way that they naturally trend away from what you want them to do, and then punish them for not doing what you want them to, all it means is that you're a sick motherfucker and should probably be put down.
Or you're bored with your Sims and decided to turn the door to the bathroom into a wall.
Either way, the problem is that it doesn't make for an interesting story for anyone other than the player. Thats why you don't see a tv channel dedicated entirely to watching other people play "The Sims" and thats why having a supernatural fiat in your science fiction show (as opposed to events that characters interpret with supernaturalism, which I can accept far more readily) is an epic fail on the story front.
That, ultimately, is the distinction that so many people have failed to make in the discussion of "the God solution" to the BSG mysteries.
On the one hand, you have characters who interpret things that are happening to them with supernatural explanations. Things like the visions that characters experienced, the "coincidences" that were essentially miracles (sun going nova, the fleet losing power, etc), and the various prophecies. You can have this and still have a good story, as long as you explain later that what appeared to be miracles from the perspective of the characters were actually explainable, rational phenomena. This would actually make for a good story.
On the other hand, you have a story filled with drama and tension, except in your story world there is an all powerful (capable of creating people and advanced technology without effort from vaccum, capable of exploding stars on cue, capable of transmitting information instantly across spacetime, etc) and all knowing and who can change events at a whim, but only chooses to do so when dramatically appropriate, but with no sense of internal logic or consistancy. In that case your built in magical dues ex can swoop in at any moment and rescue anyone from anything, or not, and the only real question when the characters are in danger is, "Will God save them or not?"
That, added to the fact that humans existed on Earth2 the whole time, means that the entire "escape" of the ragtag fleet was meaningless. Humanity as a whole was never threatened, and if the crew of the Galactica had never lifted a finger, God would have done all the heavy lifting to allow their "destiny" to come to pass. Either that, or God wouldn't have done anything. Except, there isn't really a God, just the writers, and so what the show boils down to is, "What do the writers feel like randomly fiating this week?" Not very interesting, and it robs the show of all of its tension and mystery.
If I want a 'Wizards did it' plot, I'll just read the old testament. Its like Battlestar, but with less guns and more incest (but not much more *cough*TighandCaprica*cough*).
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Angels are special creatures that can do all kinds of things and yet they don't really have free will - that's reserved for humans.
Citation Needed!
No free will?
How did Satan Rebel?
Okay, I have to vent. SPOILER ALERT!
The writers should be sent home in shame. They should not be allowed to ever write again. These people have taken one of the best shows on television and thoroughly and completely destroyed it.
This episode was the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Where to start?? History. After 2 excellent seasons, the show began its nose dive. They killed Starbuck. Why? No reason! Just for the fuck of it! And then they had to deal with that dumb-ass move the rest of the season. And for episode after episode leading up to the finale, they taunt us with "what happened? is she alive? is she dead? find out in the finale!" and guess what? They had no idea what to do! So they just pretended it didnt happen and had her disappear! She turned into a fucking angel or some dumb shit and disappeared into thin air!
What is this entire plot, too? For no reason, everybody starts believing that Hera is the only hope of both cyclons and humankind. FOR NO REASON! Nobody has any explanation as to why they all suddenly believe this. They just do. For plot! And the entire plot of the last 4 hours of the show revolve around this nonsensical assertation. In the end, they rescue her, and does she do anything special at all? NO! Nothing! Then she's called Eve? What, did everybody else become sterile and did she mate with a thousand aborigines?!?! What the hell sense does that make?
Then they decided that the robotic military cylons had "earned their freedom" and they set them free with their own base ship! Everybody agreed! Nobody could see the possibility at all that cylons could come back to do them any harm. I mean, why would they? Cylons only destroyed 12 worlds and almost every last living human. But these? They're not going to hurt us. MY GOD. So they shoo their great enemy away and destroy all their own technology so that they can only defend themselves with sticks. Writing this bad should be considered a crime. Seriously.
Why did they have to bring back the loserest character ever written - that smarmy douche with sunglasses who somehow has the power to sway the minds of everyone on the ship. That absolute loser star of the episode when Lee decides he needs to become a LAWYER for fuck's sake and defend this great traitor AT ANY COST. Yeah, that made sense. And then they bring this asshole sunglasses douche back and suddenly, HE'S THE FUCKING PRESIDENT! After seasons full of the entire fleet fighting over who gets to lead, Lee just says "Congrats, you're the president for no fucking reason." Right then, I turned off the show and turned off the TV. Could it get any dumber?
YES! Probably the stupidest moment of all is when Lee goes "hey, I have an idea! Let's just throw all our technology away and live in dirt huts!" and the douche president later says "I was surprised everyone agreed to it." YEAH, ME TOO. So nobody at all had a brain. None of the 35,000 people thought that maybe throwing away all their resources to live on a completely unknown planet was a bad idea. No, apparently not. The first virus would have wiped them out. They didn't know if ANYTHING there was edible. They didn't have tools or seeds or anything! They had a stick. They had one stick and they were going to build a civilization with it. But not working together - oh no. They're going to spread out all over, one person per 100,000 miles, and each one is going to find a stick and cultivate crops and build a house and town with it. EVERYONE AGREED!
And what of this stupid song and the stupid notes that imaginary Kara was obsessing over. Never explained! What, somehow her dad knew that someday she'd be on a Battlestar and need the coordinates to a planet? Is that what we're supposed to believe? Not to mention, how could an interstellar location be converted into a single 10 digit number? What in the hell???
And what was the purpose of this big long opera house garbage? Nothing! All these dumb visions and years later it sort of reminds them of this scene that plays out? What the hell? Why did they bother us with all that?
My god, I'm just so amazed that this got past anyone in production. I'd have tore this script up and fired the lot of them.
"Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
That line exists becasue his name is Larry.
Oh right, so a deus ex machina is ok if you mention it earlier on in the plot. Gotcha.
YES it does make it ok!
I swear if you picked up a copy of Paradise Lost you'd complain about the ending for the same reason.
Who says Satan had a choice in the matter? That's what I mean about tools playing parts without realizing that's what they're doing and it seeming to be their choosing. Basically, what I'm saying is that just because Satan (or Kara Thrace) seemed to behave like he (or she) could make choices and do things of his (or her) own free-will, that may not have been true.
It's a basic philosophical riddle that we all face - it sure *feels* like I have free will, it sure *feels* like I can make choices in what I do, but who's to say that the choices I make are actually choices and not simply pre-programmed actions? Who's to say my angst over making choice a over choice b isn't completely worthless because I don't actually have a choice? I'm simply stipulating that it is possible, in the context of Galactica, that there may be at least 2 categories of beings: those who really don't have any choices and those who really do, and that Kara Thrace may have been one of the ones who had no choice and thus was subject to special rules that don't apply to those who actually have free will.
I can't give you a specific citation on the lack of free-will thing except to say that in virtually every popular culture portrayal of angels I've run across, angels are different from humans in that they have no choice in what they do in the larger scheme of things - they have a destiny and while they might be able to vary a bit in how they fulfill it, they don't have a choice about fulfilling it. For the purposes of a discussion of Galactica, I'd say "popular culture" is a good enough citation. I'm no biblical scholar - and if it not being the case in Judeo-Christian texts that angels have no free will, there certainly are instances of special beings who are pre-programmed to do all kinds of tasks in other cultures - they're under a compulsion, geas, etc. The idea of special rules for special beings is not without precedent.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
After reading almost 3/4 of the leve 4 & 5 comments, I am going to jump in here.
I think that while the writers (may have) dropped the ball with plot holes, there is an opportunity to (if everyone was not totally truthful about moving on) have yet a few more episodes or a series revival. Well, that is, if Galactica is not cannibalized, and assuming another battlestar appeared after 5 years of being lost (a la Voyager returning to Federation space). This idea also assumes the surviving characters look fit enough to lead a new fight against the stray, fight-seeking Cylons still out in deep space.
If there is another BSG that is ancillary to "Caprica", hopefully they're physically fit, and not, say, geriatrics, as in ST's movies. The only reason to go see most of the Trek movies was to constantly see K/S/M and virtually not one major Scotty, Uhura, Chekov, et al sub plot of significance.
Don't get me wrong. I LIKE Trek, and watched it for the first time around 1970 (around age 5), then picked it up again around 1972, then continued watching over and over from 74 to 84, and resumed (after the USN) from 88-2002. I felt that TNG's ending was just unfulfilling. I felt sad at the end of DS 9. Voyager was OK, but i was disappointed that Harry Kim's promotion was really (to me) an alternate time line, and it nullified Kim's promotion/rank in the "real" Voyager timeline, and i begrudged the staff for allowing that. Enterprise was OK, tho I only saw maybe 1/2 of the episodes, and absolutely DESPISED that theme song (the only time i was spared of it was the Tholian episode, IIRC, or whichever one started in another timeline and thus, gratefully happy i was, obviated that song being sang... it sounded way too damned manifest destinest to me...). But, overall, while I was a core fan, bought ship blueprints, star charts/maps, more than 30 novels, numerous tech manuals, a script book, Trek compendiums/encyclopedias, once i started watching BSG, Trek went from 150 (on a scale of 0-100) to maybe 70 or 80. BSG (at least the miniseries, seasons 1 & 2, and some of 3) was suddenly **200**, on that same scale, mainly because it didn't pussyfoot around or get too cerebral, techno-babbly, or moralistic in the Trek way. It did so in it's own, deeper-character-exposition way. Trek thus was second, with Voyager, DS9, TNG, then Ent, then TOS...
Finally, the blessing of BSG is that it did NOT allow for some Homer/Kirk/Spock/McCoy triad to hijack the beauty in pursuing understanding supporting characters. Too many hollywood actions pin budgets on a handful of principal characters/actors, and big-ass ego trips undercut the others (Nichols, and IIRC, Takei, and Koenig wrote memoires about how shatner took the shooting scripts and redacted or stole lines from other characters, to give himself more screen time. Nimoy essentially supposedly did the same, but not as egomanically as shatner...), and it is egregious when so much money is put into a production and the others end up as foils or backdrop.
A lesson Moore and company should learn, however, is that when a show like BSG arrives and is lambasted as rudderless, they may need to fire the lawyers (or gag/strap them a few weeks) and "pseudo crowd-source" with disclaimers (wait, they already HAVE that power, in law) and just borrow from the audience to keep it happy. The mini-series and seasons 1 & 2 are highly regarded by most followers, but 3 & 4 went on the drift, so it would have been humbling and rewarding if 3rd and 4th rails were set up to keep the writers in line AND the audiences happy. But, even i, (if i ever create something) would not want to lose total property control (hence, i'd likely NEVER sell to a studio, and will crowdsource if i have to), and would distribute via the Internet(s) and use talent not afraid of nor controllable by hwood, and no egomaniacal or candy-ass pretty boy/girl talent capable of walking off the set and destroying the production.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I honestly thought the finale was pretty fitting. I didn't really have too many problems with it. I was more worried they were going to kill every one off or just leave them lost in space. I thought it was interesting that they ended up being what present day Earth believed to be the beginning of civilization. This whole time I was thinking they were going to find Earth already in present day or the furture. I was expecting it to 150,000 years in the past. I found it to be interesting and did just what it should do which was to make people think about what was happening. The whole point of leaving technology behind is to leave behind the very thing that brought on their war in the first place. It was about starting OVER with a clean slate and a new life. The only part I really didn't feel was explained well enough was how Hera was the key to their survival, because it seemed more like Kara was the key. Even with Hera being the mitochondrial Eve, you're telling me the some 38+K survivors left and all the cylons that stayed on Earth didn't procreate and help re-populize the planet. That really made no sense to me. Otherwise, I was generally please with the ending.
The show has crossed the line plenty of times, with scripture causing them to find things by what appears to be out of pure chance, and Roslin's visions. Just because the explanation it supernatural doesn't make it irrational. They've been saying it was supernatural the entire time- very rational explanation given it's really been the only one.
Just because the Greeks didn't believe that didn't mean it wasn't true. In a universe with an omnipotent omniscient power, any descision you make is meaningless because that power can fiat you into not only doing something different, but believing you did something different of your own "free will." You'd never be able to know the difference. If these powerful beings exist, our lives and choices are meaningless.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
The ending made it look like living in Africa was going to be one big camping trip. These people don't stand a chance against carnivores, disease, or spear-wielding natives. I seriously doubt this was a realistic voluntary choice.
That's not exactly what we're saying. What we're saying is dues ex machina requires the miracle (for lack of a better term) to be just hacked on to the end. If you establish before the end, it's by definition not dues ex machina.
That doesn't mean it's a good ending. You're absolutely welcome to hate it. I can totally respect someone not liking that ending. But claiming it's dues ex machina makes you look like an ignorant fool to anyone who knows what the term actually means.
I require it to meet the actual definition of deus ex machina, which has a specific meaning.
The god explanation is such a cop out. It doesn't explain Kara or why it doesn't just try and influence or outright stop the genocide in the first place.
Clearly it's the Christian God :)
I stole this Sig
You're using the fallacy of necessity. I'm not buying.
I was saying a year only because some of the elements were only thrown in at the very end of season 3: Kara having the coordinates to a new world. But you're right that other elements have existed a lot longer than a single year.
We were mislead at the end of Season 3. After Starbuck reappears, we're taken on a tour of the galaxies and shown Earth, implying that this is what Starbuck found:
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:Earth_(RDM).jpg
You can clearly make out the United States of America.
I don't know if we saw continents once Galactica actually made it to Earth. Haven't found a screenshot of that.
The planets independently evolved genetically compatible humans.
That the planets also looked the same chances the odds from infinity:1 to infinity:1.
I stole this Sig
Christ! What new cult? That idea has been around for a while.
:-)
(The worst part is that Slashdotters believe they are experts in the history and sociology of religion if you wrap up a claim in sarcastic mumbo-jumbo. Look how many make authoritative assertions about the history of ideas when it's clear from their errors that they are just winging it.
Leben Sie jetzt die Fragen.
That makes little sense. The New Caprica storyline showed that Colonials were exceedingly bad at long-term thinking. That was the point of the vote to colonize New Caprica. Sure, it was a lousy, inhospitable place suitable only for subsistence farming, but at least they could have land under their feet and sky overhead, even if they all starved to death later.
That also makes little sense. They spent the last several episodes Basestarizing the Galactica, going as far as to give the Anders hybrid control over its systems to use technology to raid the Cylon colony, and they almost gave Cavil resurrection technology. Immediately after this, a unanimous hanging lampshade vote decides that even indoor plumbing is too dangerous? I don't believe it.
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But this time, there is absolutely no rational or scientific explanation for the events of the show other than a supernatural god or gods and angels. The show crossed a line here it's never crossed before.
Didn't Baltar's Head Six (ie, the one only he could see) say she was an angel of God at some point? And here you thought she was lying.
And you would have ended it.... how?
But claiming it's dues ex machina makes you look like an ignorant fool to anyone who knows what the term actually means.
heh. Really? Perhaps if you think wikipedia is actually a reliable source of definitions. The original usage from Horace says nothing about 'sudden', indeed, it refers to the use of a previously known god to wrap up a story by solving everything by fiat. Which is exactly what this series did. If you 'establish' it before the end by giving vague hints that Gods may intervene, it's still a cop-out.
It's intellectually lazy and disappointing. If you prefer not to use the term deus ex machina, fine, but really you're playing with semantics, the original point stands about the ending.
In a sense you can have the godlike being intervening randomly and have it fit in, if you equate it to a completely unfathomable intelligence. Of course, this makes everything everyone does in relation to the god irrelevant, as you never know if it cares or not, or why.
Yeah, I heard that SO many times in Sunday School ... but when you consider that the bible itself is so full of contradictions that it can (and has) been used to justify anything, and that when a "deadline" passes (like the 2nd coming which was expected by the original followers of Jesus within their own lifetimes ...) - Christianity's just another cult.
Exactly. A "god" of that nature would just be a random force of nature, some sort of tendency to chaos. The one in the BSG universe, however, is distinctly interventionist and takes an active interest in playing games with its creations.
Considering one of these games it likes to play is "Now you commit genocide on each other," the entity that is running human affairs by fiat in the BSG universe is a particularly unpleasant fucker.
The world you experience is only a close approximation of reality.
Shelly Godfrey.
Do you know why the Cylons had religion? Because of a single throwaway line from the mini-series, when Six tells Baltar that "God is love". Moore says as much in the Season 4.0 DVD extras.
If I give Moore credit for something, it's that he's been completely honest about how they've pretty much made everything up as they went.
The final five? Invented on the spot in season 3 to explain why Baltar wasn't seeing them on the baseship. The opera house? Meaningless. Starbuck as the "harbinger of death"? Meaningless.
I will remember BSG for many things. For tackling difficult modern day issues like suicide bombing and torture. For some great characters and good show-to-show writing. For slick production values and stellar special effects. But in terms of the big picture, story is king, and they really shat the bed on that one. After all the buildup, all the "all shall be revealed" bullshit, we deserved better than "Oh, god did it" for all their hanging plot holes.
Time to dust off my Babylon 5 DVDs, for a cohesive epic storyline that actually pays off in the long run, and benefits from multiple viewings. (Which, I might add, has religion and prophecy aplenty, but didn't use it to fill in the gaps of lazy writing)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Hunter gatherers don't have language already?
The natives featured in the series finale of BSG were "pre-lingual", without language. One of the main characters said so as they were observing them.
Think about it, you do don't need much more than a few gestures and grunts to organize a hunt or point out the location of some particularly delectable berries.
I have to say, the finale left me a little disappointed. There was a lot of action, but once that finished they had some minor impact on humanity and all went off and died some time later. I loved the whole show from miniseries to series finale, but it did leave me wanting something more. An explanation of who "it", "god" is, and what it's playing at. Presumably angels Six and Baltar weren't just observing modern Earth for exposition.
Putting moderation advice in your
Some interesting comments over on The Register:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/23/battlestar_galactica_finale/comments/
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The religion was just a minor branch among all the other stories in the first two seasons.
After that they just kind of discarded any semblance of parallel narrative and bet the farm on religion. And the show suffered for it.
KITT will save us!
You're using the fallacy of necessity. I'm not buying.
No, but you're using the fallacy of naming random entries from a list of fallacies.
You can't take the sky from me...
I require it to meet the actual definition of deus ex machina, which has a specific meaning.
A deus ex machina (IPA: [ËdeÉÊOEs Éks ËmakÊÉna], literally "god from the machine") is a plot device in which a surprising or unexpected event occurs in a story's plot, often to resolve flaws or tie up loose ends in the narrative.
Such as Kara Thrace coming back to life, her body not being on the planet where her ship disindegrated, and then her third body just vanishing without explanation. Oh wait, there is an 'explanation': The god of the machines.
You can't take the sky from me...
The only one of those examples that came close was her vanishing at the end of the finale. But it resolved no loose ends, instead adding one of its own. There's a long standing tradition of allowing just this kind of twist to an ending in modern story telling, and if anything it seems to becoming more acceptable.
The first one that springs to mind is Phone Booth, where the caller inexplicably escapes and gets close to the main character, but I'm sure you can think of a thousand more.
There's a long standing tradition of allowing just this kind of twist to an ending in modern story telling
Yup, in fact that tradition has been going on for so long that the name for it is in Latin.
You can't take the sky from me...
No, you're still misusing that term. It's used for resolution, not additional complication.
No, you're still misusing that term. It's used for resolution, not additional complication.
I'm not misusing anything, the people at the SyFyLys station are misusing the concept: it's a botched deus ex machina. Anyway, ask the jeebus crowd, they loved the resolution: God did it; pretty SFX. No questions raised for the, they have that all sorted out.
You can't take the sky from me...
The term has a specific meaning. You're not using it correctly. You can argue whatever you like about whether it was a good ending or not, I don't really care: you're using the term wrong.
The term has a specific meaning. You're not using it correctly.
I am, you are the one mistaken.
You can't take the sky from me...
I don't know if he/it exists or not. If I had to bet, i'd probably bet on 'no'; but frankly, the main reason I'm an agnostic is that I don't really care either way :)
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
This argument is pretty juvenile. I think our space program sucks. I don't know how the hell to fix it, I just am stating what I feel. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean you know how to do it better than them.