Series Finale of "Battlestar Galactica" Complaints: In the final episode of this six-year television project, the survivors of a nuclear attack against a distant star system destroy the stronghold of the evil cyborgs, thus winning the war, then fly their fleet to Earth, arriving 150,000 years ago. Finally we know when the events of the series were taking place. Landing on the African veldt at a time when Homo sapiens idaltu was learning to use tools -- we see a hunter-gatherer party in the distance -- the 38,000 remaining members of the Kobol society vote to scuttle their super-advanced starships into the sun and forsake technology. They vow to stop building factories and cities, and live as simple farmers: One character declares that science always leads to war, and they must not infect Earth with that dark impulse. The result is that the civilization Galactica represented fades from history. Long before our forebears began domesticating wheat by the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, all knowledge from the 12 worlds of Kobol had been lost.
This is the concept for a great, even moving series ending. Instead the ending was frustrating and perplexing. There's never any convincing reason why people arriving at a verdant planet aboard faster-than-light starships would decide to give up all technology and learning. Would you vote to surrender the ability to make power generators, steel plows and antibiotics? I especially didn't buy that having enduring awful suffering to reach a safe destination, the last of an old, proud civilization would agree to adopt a subsistent lifestyle and gradually die off, leaving no trace they ever existed. If they left no record of themselves, the billions who perished in the nuclear cataclysm at their home planets would be forgotten. The finale also was a letdown from a storytelling standpoint. In a two-hour, 11-minute finale of a series that set television's record for total air time devoted to exposition, at the end, precious little was explained. The show generated 74 episodes of encyclopedic detail about characters' backstories and dating histories, and how participants in a space war behaved during battle, then told almost nothing about what happened once the battle ended. I would have liked some denouement on what occurred in the characters' lives beyond the first few days when they arrived at Earth and wandered awestruck through its meadows. A lot of storyboard was left on the table -- central character William Adama's eventual death on the African plain, for instance, or whether trying to influence the development of Earth's culture by communicating with early humans would do more harm than good. The latter is the core question of all legends and scripture about contact between God or the gods and early man. For a series that devoted substantial dialogue blocks to pseudo-theology babble, a chance to take a crack at a genuine theology question was whiffed.
The reimagined "Battlestar Galactica" was well above the norm for television, outstanding in some respects. The scene in which Adama makes, alone, a final nostalgic flight from the abandoned smashed-up battlestar, while flashing back to the moment he almost quit the military for a cushy defense-contractor job -- if he'd done that, no one would have survived the nuclear attack -- is as near as sci-fi comes to art. Look closely: As Adama, piloting a fighter, circles the once-mighty starcruiser where he spent his adult life, silently regarding the ship, the serene Earth revolving in the background, on his craft's windshield a faint reflection can be seen of the fighter's battle-management display, no longer needed but still scanning nearby space for targets. And it was nice that after episode upon episode of unremitting slaughter and pessimism, the final 40 minutes showed the survivors in a peaceful setting, released from their personal demons. But that 40 minutes was the most interesting sequence in the series. I would rather have seen more of the series spent on what happened at the end, less on long-running "Battlestar Galactica" kill-timers such as visions involving ruined temples. It's as if the scriptwriters just could not function without a stereotypical good-versus-evil combat plotline to hang the action on.
And now the incredible series finale of "Battlestar Galactica" complaints:
• Early in the series the 10-foot-tall Cylon battle bots were depicted as having such strong armor it was impossible to kill one without explosives. In the final battle, small-arms fire not only kills them easily, they go flying backward when hit.
• For the climactic confrontation, Galactica discovers the location of the cyborg stronghold, a mega-enormous starship perhaps 50 miles long. The vessel is parked just above the event horizon of a black hole. If you were a malevolent life form whose continued existence hinged on protecting a mega-enormous starship, would you position the ship directly above a black hole -- where, during a battle, it might fall in? Which, needless to say, is what happens.
• Galactica and the civilian vessels she is protecting wander space for years looking for Earth, while suffering regular attacks and having no repair facility or supply depot to call at. Yet they never run out of food, fuel, ammunition or medical supplies, and Galactica's stores contain a seemingly inexhaustible quantity of whiskey.
• The recurring visions characters experienced -- such as a foretelling of five glowing people on a balcony, realized at the culmination of the last battle -- could have occurred only if some higher being already knew Galactica's future. If some higher being already knew the future, why did they have to go through all that?
• Numerous studly males wander the corridors of Galactica, but the attractive women have little interest in them. The space babes have the hots for a nerdy scientist and a 60-ish balding colonel. TMQ has long contended that because many Hollywood scripts are written by guys who always flunk out with girls, cinema often depicts a reality in which good-looking young women crave sex with geeky, overweight or aging men. Talk about science fiction!
• In the very last scene, set in the present day, two never-explained supernatural manifestations reflect that a girl brought to Earth aboard Galactica became Mitochondrial Eve. Clever touch -- we all carry a bit of DNA that evolved on a distant planet. But this plot twist means a gentle child of a futuristic space-faring culture, or at least her immediate matrilineal offspring, grew up to have sex with cavemen. Doesn't sound likely. The final subplot "arc" involved a succession of bloody battles over the girl, who had a human father and machine mother, and was kidnapped by the Cylons' sinister leader. Several times it was declared that without the hybrid child, the human race would fall extinct. Why? There were 38,000 survivors when Earth was reached -- ample men and women to begin populating a world. That any one child was crucial to reproduction was illogical, to put it mildly.
• Setting foot on Earth, Adama marvels it is "1 million light-years" from home. The Milky Way is 100,000 light-years across, while the next closest galaxy, Andromeda, is 1.5 million light-years distant. If you traveled 1 million light-years in any direction from Earth, you'd end up in the intergalactic void: the worlds of Kobol either were much closer to Earth than a million light-years, or much farther away. Considering dozens of people worked on the Battlestar series for six years, couldn't someone have fact-checked basic astronomy references? (This recalls the first "Star Wars" movie, which drew groans by referring to a parsec as a measure of time rather than of astronomical length.) Plus, previously viewers were told that Galactica had outdated engines capable of traversing only short hyperspace distances, and that structural fatigue from repeated passage through hyperspace restricted the ship to moving no more than a few light-years at a time. A few episodes before the finale, Galactica arrived at a planet described as 2,000 light-years from its home star system. So how, in its final leap, did Galactica travel 998,000 light-years?
• Throughout the series, the Baltar character conversed with a spirit-image of the Caprica character, and vice versa. In the finale, the Baltar and Caprica avatars appeared together to the flesh-and-blood Baltar and Caprica. Then in the very last scene, Baltar and Caprica were seen conversing in present-day New York City -- actually, present-day Vancouver, British Columbia. Anyway who were these beings? There were references to crew members believing angels were aboard Galactica. If angels intervene in the mortal world, why didn't they prevent numerous human tragedies? And were the spirits walking the Vancouver streets at the conclusion the same ones who appeared in the far past during the show, or angels of the flesh-and-blood Baltar and Caprica, by then long since dead? The beings simply were never identified. To have a central running plot element never explained is a cop-out. But quite a handy deus ex machina gimmick for scriptwriters who have dug themselves into a ditch.
• Then there's Starbuck. Ace pilot Kara Thrace is taught a mysterious melody as a child; as an adult, endlessly draws a mysterious mandala; is the subject of mysterious prophecies by sundry clairvoyants; halfway through the series is visited by a spirit who tells her she must die to fulfill her destiny and commits suicide by flying her space fighter into a mysterious energy vortex that looks exactly like the mysterious mandala. Her fighter explodes and her corpse is found. Two months later she returns, resurrected, and even has a brand-new ship in factory-fresh condition. The guidance device on her mysterious new fighter leads the fleet to Old Earth, a cyborg planet obliterated by nuclear war. A spirit-image of her dead father reveals that the notes in her childhood song can be converted into numerals. In the finale, as Galactica is about to fall into the black hole, she realizes the numbers are hyperspace coordinates; she punches them into the stardrive and Galactica materializes above our world, saving the day. Standing on the lush pastures of ancient Africa, Kara declares her purpose is complete, and vanishes into thin air.
None of this is ever explained. "What am I!" the resurrected Starbuck shouts in torment at several points. Viewers never find out; we don't even find out where her brand-new spaceship came from. Even if, as the Greeks believed, the gods toy with mortals for amusement, Kara Thrace was the cheapest cop-out in the history of screenwriting. Here, series producer Ronald Moore admits to Newark Star-Ledger reporter Alan Sepinwall that Starbuck and the angel characters made no sense. Never explaining them kept the show interesting right up to the end, Moore contends. It's a lot easier to be a television producer if you can create mysterious paranormal characters that keep viewers watching for six years awaiting the explanation, then not be bothered producing the explanation.
