It is truly astonishing how RDM completely butchered the series just so he could make Hera be "special". I think the fact that her rescue inspired the Cylons and Colonials to work together, and also led to the extermination of the "bad" Cylons, and then led them to find Earth would be "speciallness" enough.JediToren wrote:Imagine a drunk driver goes to prison for 20 years after killing a kid with his car. 20 years later he is up for parole. Having no access to alcohol or a car while in prison, his lawyer exclaims "He's learned his lesson! Why, he hasn't even had a drink in 20 years!"Gramzamber wrote:He seriously thinks abandoning all technology and culture is justified on the grounds that it'll break the cycle or at least "buy us 150,000 years."
You can't claim someone (be it an individual or a civilization) has learned its lesson until it has the means to make the same mistake but makes a conscious choice not do so.
nBSG's ending really illustrates why films and TV shows are at their best when the writer's influence stops when the cameras start rolling. Writers often fall in love with their own ideas. On the DVD commentary for the Back to the Future trilogy, Bob Gale says that writing with another person really helps keep your work in check and prevents you from over-indulging.
Most of the problems with the finale really come down to this idea of Hera being the mother of us all. In order to make it fit you had to have a bunch of things happen that don't make sense. Ellen says that they should send the centurions away in oder to "break the cycle," yet in the preceding episodes it had been established that metal and meatbags going their separate ways had been tried TWICE, and Ellen witnessed both attempts!
But the presence of a functional self-repairing interstellar warship with advanced robots aboard cannot fit into our history, so that's why they make that decision.
Even though their tech base was gone and they were going to have to accept a less advanced lifestyle eventually, reverting to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is not only a bit extreme, but doing so immediately without any kind of learning period betrays the show's realism.
But the arrival of a technologically advanced civilization 150,000 years ago would have left traces, so it is required that they act that way in order to disappear into history.
I know that some are tired of hearing this, but I think setting it in the future would have been a much stronger ending for many reasons. While many have pointed out how it makes more sense in terms of logic and evidence (and they're right on about that) it really caps the storyline of the cycle of man-machine violence and prophecies much better.
When the cycle began, their civilization stopped progressing forward and has been caught in a loop ever since. Now that they have finally learned from their mistakes, it makes sense that they return home, where it all started, to continue where they left off.
But the best part is that by setting it in the future we (the audience) have no idea how it will turn out! Up to this point they had been stuck either fulfilling grim prophecies or playing their part in a cycle of tragedy. Their future was always written one way or another. Now that they have broken the cycle, they can look forward to writing their own story, whatever that may be. There are no more plans or visions or prophecies to look to. Whatever lies ahead for them, their future will be whatever they make it, and neither they nor the audience knows that story. After the lives that they and their ancestors had been living, an uncertain future is a hopeful one.
Of course, there are other benefits of setting it in the future. You no longer have to explain why there is no evidence of an advanced civilization arriving 150,000 years ago, therefore, no need to have characters making irrational decisions or having to burn screen time on a political subplot about how to settle the planet.
The one true god's actions and plan now make sense as we understand that it's ultimate goal was to get the colonials and cylons to break the cycle and then go home to begin anew.
It still wouldn't explain why he killed off starbuck and then brought her back.
Anyway.
Kara Thrace's Special Destiny was covered when she plugged the coordinates for Earth into the Galactica's final jump.
There really was no reason to have them arrive in Earth's past, other than RDM wanting Hera to be "mitochondrial Eve". I've also seen that he wanted the final shot of the show to be him in Time's Square reading a magazine with Head Six looking over his shoulder.
Looks like George Lucas Effect to me. I agree that having them arrive on a future Earth with a remnant hunter gathering population would have made a lot more sense.
