Did anyone actually like the ending to nBSG?

[Eternal_Freedom]

Yup, it was going well up until the "Truce in the CIC" moment.

After that, it was only the Adama/Roslin raptor scene and Adama sitting by her grave that stopped me giving up

[Junghalli]

You don't just plop down on a new planet, where you know absolutely ZERO about the fauna, with what, 2 doctors and as far as we know, no one with the skills to actually do the type of research needed, and just start to make new medicine.

I'm with you that they absolutely distributed what they had, but with what resources and personnel they did have, new medicine was not any where on the horizon.

Well the local humans and hominids might have been able to tell them how to find some medicinal plants. Although I doubt they'd have been able to get much more than a few crude painkillers, emetics etc. from that, plus some placebo effect inducing rituals, and I wouldn't be surprised if quite a bit of whatever medical traditions the locals might have had were worse than useless ("I'm gonna drill a hole in you to let the evil spirits out").

[Vympel]

I'm not going to freeze-frame the final scene and see who's packing heat, but this is a very dubious claim to make given that we only see a few dozens of people out of thousands of settlers at the end. There's not anything in the dialogue, stupid as it all is, to indicate that the Colonials, of all people, have decided to swear off bullets.

Those few thousand people are representative of the groups going to meet their end - if no one in those groups has a gun - and they don't - then there's no reason to believe anyone else does either. Not to mention even having a gun would be a waste of time given they lack the ability to make more bullets when they torched the fleet.

As for dialog, Lee refers to them giving up their weapons.

Ah, I see. Well, we see that they brought all kinds of equipment down from the surface and were powering it (presumably with portable generators). Medical equipment is easily in the cards, considering that they stripped Galactica's landing bay practically bare before they (sigh) torched it.

There's no indication of that at all. Its literally the clothes on their backs and all that going back to nature bullshit. Portable generators and actually keeping their medical equipment etc would require organised settlements and medical clinics etc that are obviously not on the cards, especially given their shortage of qualified medical personnel.

A person who wasn't a moronic delusional Luddite - like Apollo inexplicably became - would've appreciated that it was essential to have an organised settlement with a set education system so as to make sure that as much of their extremely valuable medical knowledge was codified and passed on to the next generation.

God, there are so many damn things on the fleet that should've been preserved to make life better for everyone -fuck it annoys the hell out of me. You'd think Lee would've thought the stonking big collection of his grandad's law books would be worth saving, but nooooooooo .....

[Sarevok]

Its hillarious how colonials alternate between a nation of emotinally ill teens bitching about everything to a mindless hive of borg like beings . The colonial fleet seemed full of angst ridden morons who would shout, scream and whine at every oppurtunity. They had one circlejerk fight after another on elections, courts, lawyer drama etc when they were fucking refugees in spaceships. Yet all that is conveniently forgotten when Lee orders everyone to commit collective suicide. They could not disarm petty thugs like sons ares gang running rampart INSIDE a god damn warship. Suddenly they gain +100 to faction loyalty stats ? I call it cheat codes or god damn retarded writting.

[Anguirus]

There's no indication of that at all.

You're the one making an extraordinary claim. All that we know is that they turned down the idea of making cities. I missed the line about the weapons (which is indeed crazy and if anything blown away by Helo's enthusiasm about hunting, unless he's planning to make a bow out of his cane or something), but nobody says anything about "only the clothes on our backs" and they explicitly keep Raptors and planet-spanning RADIOS around. IIRC "supplies" are mentioned.

There's not really a point to continuing this argument, I feel. You seem to think that all characters without fail went with the literal things Apollo said; while this was lightly implied, it's not obvious under SOD.

Anyway, getting back to the point, no, I didn't really like the ending to nBSG, but I thought the very general outline of it was serviceable. The quickest fix to it would have been a line that there's no tylium in the system, leaving them with the choice of abandoning their ships for Earth2 or flying back into outer space. In fact, that may be the best explanation for everyone's behavior under SOD, but it certainly doesn't begin to give RDM a pass for not writing that line into his crammed last 40 minutes, when it's the only sufficiently quick and totally plausible explanation.

Oh, and just to shut all you guys up, the Colonials should have built a city and landed their ships on a massive fault line. Atlantis!

[Junghalli]

Oh, and just to shut all you guys up, the Colonials should have built a city and landed their ships on a massive fault line. Atlantis!

That could actually be done quite plausibly. 150,000 years ago the Earth was in the middle of an ice age and sea levels were lower. The city was abandoned at some point for some reason and nobody's found it because the area it's in has been underwater since the end of the last ice age.

Edit: the whole thing could have been done much more plausibly just by saying the Colonials' budding civilization was wiped out by a plague when they caught some kind of bug from the native humans. The area they settled in is now underwater.

[Vympel]

You're the one making an extraordinary claim. All that we know is that they turned down the idea of making cities. I missed the line about the weapons (which is indeed crazy and if anything blown away by Helo's enthusiasm about hunting, unless he's planning to make a bow out of his cane or something), but nobody says anything about "only the clothes on our backs" and they explicitly keep Raptors and planet-spanning RADIOS around. IIRC "supplies" are mentioned.

I'd suggest you watch the ending of the finale again, but its rubbish, so don't. "Only the clothes on their backs" is in fact a line taken directly from the episode.

Also, there's no indication they kept Raptors around save for Adama using one as a taxi to show Roslyn around for a bit - but even if they did, they'd be utterly useless in a matter of days as well - complicated aircraft don't just require fuel (which they don't have, since they're idiots and tossed their tylium refinery into the sun) but also established maintenance procedures and skilled mechanics to perform those procedures - which would of course, require some sort of centralised organisation and maintenance/ supply point to be remotely effective.

I really have no idea how you got the impression that their luddism was restricted to tossing their big ships and deciding that cities alone were bad, but they quite explicitly and clearly went full luddite bonkers. They kept no technology whatsoever, in any form. They struck out onto Earth with their clothes, scattered provisions, and thats it.

[Anguirus]

I'd suggest you watch the ending of the finale again, but its rubbish, so don't. "Only the clothes on their backs" is in fact a line taken directly from the episode.

Don't have time to check it now, but I can only suggest that I've blocked out most of Apollo's speech, so sorry about that. Still, it's worth wondering how literal he is actually being (again, not to excuse terrible writing but under SOD).

[Vympel]

Its actually Admiral Adama who says it (obviously after Lee has explained his brilliant plan off screen), which makes it worse, since of course if Lee had meant something different he would've corrected him.

[Stofsk]

Oh, and just to shut all you guys up, the Colonials should have built a city and landed their ships on a massive fault line. Atlantis!

That could actually be done quite plausibly. 150,000 years ago the Earth was in the middle of an ice age and sea levels were lower. The city was abandoned at some point for some reason and nobody's found it because the area it's in has been underwater since the end of the last ice age.

Edit: the whole thing could have been done much more plausibly just by saying the Colonials' budding civilization was wiped out by a plague when they caught some kind of bug from the native humans. The area they settled in is now underwater.

Plausible, possibly, but not really satisfying. And also, who would know (ie who would be able to narrate the story to us, the audience) of the colonial's fate if they all died?

[Mayabird]

Well, you did have Head-Baltar and Head-Six dumping in the lines about Hera's fossilized skeleton at the end so they could've just changed that to a discovery of ruins of an ancient city underwater that people were calling Atlantis and have them make a quip about it. Easy change.

[Captain Piett]

Well, you did have Head-Baltar and Head-Six dumping in the lines about Hera's fossilized skeleton at the end so they could've just changed that to a discovery of ruins of an ancient city underwater that people were calling Atlantis and have them make a quip about it. Easy change.

Well, not really, since discovering the lost remains of Atlantis is kind of a bigger deal than just discovering mitochondrial Eve-- it wouldn't work for the same reasons that they decided against having them dig up a Raptor or a piece of Galactica or whatever-- it makes the "present day" portrayed in the last scene too far removed from the real world, where the discovery of a spacecraft or a lost city would substantially alter our understanding of the world in a way that the discovery of Mitochondrial Eve (a concept we already know exists, we just haven't linked it to any particular individual) wouldn't.

Anyway, I quite liked the finale. It wasn't perfect, but it nicely brought together all of the themes of the show-- that cylons are human in all the ways that count, that their old society was irrevocably lost (When they tried to rebuild their technological society on New Caprica it failed ages before the Cylons bothered to show up-- it's forty thousand people in a bunch of rusty ships that smell like feet, not twelve worlds-- a civilization, not a gang), love your enemies, etc. There's something very beautiful about how, at the beginning of the show, we are very sure that the Colonials are "us" and the Cylons are "them", but over the next four seasons it blurs it until the final revelation that we, the modern inhabitants of Earth, are as Cylon as we are Colonial. It also brought most of the cast's arcs to emotionally satisfying conclusions, except for poor Tory, who just got murdered as a plot macguffin to shuffle the Ones, Fours, and Fives off-stage.

[Eternal_Freedom]

Thats true
I think I might have to revise my opinion, rare as that is

Given what the finale had to wrap up, it did it reasonably well. Of course that doesnt mean it was satisfying or anything, but it DID wrap everything up (well, most things) which is the point of a series finale

[Krisnack]

Humans needed to spend a bit more time evolving, learning to think out the long term consequences of things.

How does evolution play into that? How could anyone expect humanity to "learn to think out long term consequences" when people no longer have the means to share and accumulate the experiences and conclusions they've arrived at? How do you even have the gall to claim that present-day humanity has somehow received those lessons when our own history - hell, our own current events - shows an appalling lack of foresight and appreciation for long-term consequences? Are you high on drugs?

Given the the fact that they built sentient robots without any sort of three laws of robotics, or restraining bolt, or ethical subroutine, it's pretty obvious that Colonials were much more reckless then us (I imagine that when they exploded their first atomic bomb, their reactions was not "Now we are all sons of bitches", or a verse from the Bhagavad-Gita, but just a celebratory cheer). In Carl Sagan's Cosmos he writes "when our weapons were comparatively paltry, even and enraged warrior could only kill a few. As our technology improved, the means of war also improved... But our weapons can now kill billions." (Cosmos, page 326).

The new, low tech environment was a place people did not have the resources for massive, ill thought out schemes that would kill billions, they had to make do with small scale, ill thought out schemes that would only kill dozens (and the person who thought said scheme was a good idea, assuming they weren't lynched by the survivors). In this Darwinistic fashion, the 'fools who would rush in' were weeded out.

Of course, if the Colonials were vastly outnumbered, then such genetic adaptation would have been diluted, and thus rendered irrelevant.

[Academia Nut]

I think it is the annihilation aspect that gets to me most, and here is why. If we take that the Colonials landed on 'our' Earth then we would have to accept all we know about human paleontology and archaeology as part of the evidence of what happened (less of course the whole extraterrestrial humans being added into the gene pool thing), then there is one very damning piece of evidence that the writer's obviously didn't look up.

Humans were not behaviourally modern 150,000 years ago.

Art? The earliest point at which that is undisputed is 40,000 years ago.

Agriculture? 10,000 years ago, maybe a bit earlier than that, but still off by an order of magnitude. That's particularly damning because agriculture is hard to start up but also hard to kill off because it is so damn useful.

The bow and arrow? 60,000 years, at best. 15-20,000 is a more likely estimate though.

Advanced language structure? Maybe, maybe not, but it is iffy at that point. The humans around at that time might not have been Homo sapiens sapiens but Homo sapiens idaltu, a different and less sophisticated subspecies.

See a pattern? We're looking at a gulf of at least a hundred thousand years where things we would consider fundamental and basic, even in a Luddite society, do not exist. That means that every last scrap of culture, of music, of thought, of learning, of everything was utterly erased, and fast too, before anything could spread. And if they had been successful things would have spread, but they didn't and had to wait tens of thousands of years to be reinvented. Things like the lack of bows and arrows are most damning because in hunter-gatherer terms, the advantage bows give over other forms of hunting like spears are huge, and you don't need a large advantage to become dominant. The Neanderthals were believed to have been driven to extinction by a 3% difference in reproductive success in comparison to the Cro-Magnons that would have been their contemporaries, and the Cro-Mags probably did not have bows, as mentioned above. Even with just the shirts on their backs, the Colonials would have carried with them knowledge they would have considered primitive and basic that would have been revolutionary 150,000 years ago.

Yet nothing survived, not a single, solitary idea, and it could be said that the human species did not even notice them in the grand scheme of things since that point was not a great turning point in evolution, biological or cultural. That's what irritates me, is that everything the Colonials ever did was for absolutely nothing.

[Captain Piett]

I think it is the annihilation aspect that gets to me most, and here is why. If we take that the Colonials landed on 'our' Earth then we would have to accept all we know about human paleontology and archaeology as part of the evidence of what happened (less of course the whole extraterrestrial humans being added into the gene pool thing), then there is one very damning piece of evidence that the writer's obviously didn't look up.

Humans were not behaviourally modern 150,000 years ago.

Art? The earliest point at which that is undisputed is 40,000 years ago.

Agriculture? 10,000 years ago, maybe a bit earlier than that, but still off by an order of magnitude. That's particularly damning because agriculture is hard to start up but also hard to kill off because it is so damn useful.

The bow and arrow? 60,000 years, at best. 15-20,000 is a more likely estimate though.

Advanced language structure? Maybe, maybe not, but it is iffy at that point. The humans around at that time might not have been Homo sapiens sapiens but Homo sapiens idaltu, a different and less sophisticated subspecies.

See a pattern? We're looking at a gulf of at least a hundred thousand years where things we would consider fundamental and basic, even in a Luddite society, do not exist. That means that every last scrap of culture, of music, of thought, of learning, of everything was utterly erased, and fast too, before anything could spread. And if they had been successful things would have spread, but they didn't and had to wait tens of thousands of years to be reinvented. Things like the lack of bows and arrows are most damning because in hunter-gatherer terms, the advantage bows give over other forms of hunting like spears are huge, and you don't need a large advantage to become dominant. The Neanderthals were believed to have been driven to extinction by a 3% difference in reproductive success in comparison to the Cro-Magnons that would have been their contemporaries, and the Cro-Mags probably did not have bows, as mentioned above. Even with just the shirts on their backs, the Colonials would have carried with them knowledge they would have considered primitive and basic that would have been revolutionary 150,000 years ago.

Yet nothing survived, not a single, solitary idea, and it could be said that the human species did not even notice them in the grand scheme of things since that point was not a great turning point in evolution, biological or cultural. That's what irritates me, is that everything the Colonials ever did was for absolutely nothing.

Well, try fixing that without breaking the entirety of Earth's history as known to the Cylon-Human hybrids running around Earth in 2009.

[Stofsk]

You can't fix it, that's why it's a fucking awful finale. The whole story was rendered utterly pointless by setting the end 150,000 years into our past, and leaving not a single trace of Colonial civilisation behind.

[Captain Piett]

You can't fix it, that's why it's a fucking awful finale. The whole story was rendered utterly pointless by setting the end 150,000 years into our past, and leaving not a single trace of Colonial civilisation behind.

No, since the point of the story is the humanization of the Cylons, from how scary they were back in 33 to the Iraq War allegory of New Caprica where it was the Cylons represented America to Adama saying, "I gave them access. And you know what? I didn't give them aid and comfort. They gave it to me" about the rebel Cylons, to how in the end we find out that the Cylons are as much a part of the history of the human race as the Colonials. The point wasn't the preservation for future generations of the Colonial's proud cultural heritage of octagonal sheets of paper a broken civilization which blew itself up every few thousand years in vicious cycles of slavery and war.

[Sarevok]

They blew themselves up because they were genetically programmed to do so, Ancient aliens programmed teh humans in colonies like this. Without instructions to the contrary they will do it again.

[Stofsk]

You can't fix it, that's why it's a fucking awful finale. The whole story was rendered utterly pointless by setting the end 150,000 years into our past, and leaving not a single trace of Colonial civilisation behind.

No, since the point of the story is the humanization of the Cylons

Oh really? I guess how for the first three seasons the whole 'the survivors looking for a new home, a place called earth' was retconned and nobody told me? What a load of bullshit.

And PS, the 'humanisation' of the Cylons is also total rubbish considering scientifically, Hera could not possibly be mitochondrial eve.

[Captain Piett]

You can't fix it, that's why it's a fucking awful finale. The whole story was rendered utterly pointless by setting the end 150,000 years into our past, and leaving not a single trace of Colonial civilisation behind.

No, since the point of the story is the humanization of the Cylons

Oh really? I guess how for the first three seasons the whole 'the survivors looking for a new home, a place called earth' was retconned and nobody told me? What a load of bullshit.

And PS, the 'humanisation' of the Cylons is also total rubbish considering scientifically, Hera could not possibly be mitochondrial eve.

By "humanization" I didn't mean a literal transformation into humans, but rather in the sense of humanizing what at first seemed like a totally alien and incomprehensible enemy. As we learn that the Cylons love, and feel, and suffer, and strive in ways that make them human in all the ways that count.

That said, I'm not really sure what you mean by how Hera could not possibly "scientifically" be mitochondrial Eve. I mean, obviously it's impossible since Battlestar Galactica is a television show that does not exist, and therefore a bunch of people mysteriously genetically compatible with the native humans of Earth did not arrive on this planet 150,000 years ago by FTL. But within the world of the show, at no point did the show ever go into the genetics of Cylons, Colonial humans, and Earth humans, or how they might differ-- although I imagine that Cylons had genes that were basically like those of their Colonial counterparts given that Baltar's Cylon detector couldn't just sort everything out with DNA analysis, that Athena could be impregnated by Helo, etc.

"The survivors looking for a new home, a place called Earth" remains a central part of the plot of the show until the end, when they find a new home which is a place called Earth. But that's not the point the show is trying to make. The theme of the show is all about war, and the terrible things it makes people do, and how in the end you should love your enemy. All of this goes back to Season One, too, so it's not like this was just tacked on at the end. Remember Cylon Boomer full of fear and terror and guilt about the things she was doing for her nation? Remember Caprica Six saving Baltar from a nuclear blast because she loved him? Remember Sharon grabbing Helo by the hand and leading him away from her brothers and sisters? Remember Adama ad-libbing a speech asking whether or not humans were even worthy to survive? The show had been poking and prodding at the questions of just what it is that separates the humans from Cylons since the very beginning.

This wasn't a show about evil killer robots chasing "us" to Earth since everyone talked about yahrens and Starbuck was a dude.

[Sarevok]

Cylon humanization was what killed the series other than injecting overdose of religon into it.

[Captain Piett]

Cylon humanization was what killed the series other than injecting overdose of religon into it.

I guess you hated every episode from Water on, then.

[Sarevok]

Fuck no. I enjoyed it thoroughly upto season 2. Remember back then BSG was "military scifi". People who slammed Voyager were wanktastic about a series written as we would have written a fanfic about a lost warship. Here was a tv series with competent military, effective weapons designs and proper tactics. Or so I thought at the time. Of course the fascination started to wane gradually. Season 3 was a big box of wtf and boring boring nonsense. Season 4 showed flashes of brilliance and angel free episodes at a time. The mutiny arc, batshit insane Starbuck arc, Natalie rebellion were good. To sum up here is the good and bad about nBSG as a whole.

Good

- Space combat scenes
- Centurions - most badass looking war robots in visual media other than Terminators.
- Adama and Tigh making hard decisions, winning battles and living to fight another day.

The Bad
- Angst. Apollo/Dee/Starbuck/Anders love rectangles were extremely annoying. They frequently interrupted cool stories in every episode they were in with boring drama.

- Starbuck. She was annoying, irritating, arrogant pompous asshole. Yet she was so important to writters even after dying she came back.

- Religon. In Stargate the Oriii and Gould pretended to be gods with abilities rivaling mythology. Yet 20th century Earth did not believe them. In nBSG a few Jedi mind tricks is all it takes to make your religon "true" to a fucking multi planetary civilization.

[Samuel]

That said, I'm not really sure what you mean by how Hera could not possibly "scientifically" be mitochondrial Eve.

For starters, we share our mitochondria in common with all other life on Earth. It makes her existance pointless.

The theme of the show is all about war, and the terrible things it makes people do, and how in the end you should love your enemy.

The cylons exterminated a couple billion people. I don't think "loving your enemy" really works here.

Remember Adama ad-libbing a speech asking whether or not humans were even worthy to survive?

I blame it on the depression of watching your entire civilization turned into a charnal house.