Spoilers Ho!
Hurried home to catch the BSG finale last Friday. The first hour was vintage BSG: the old girl goes in guns blazing, with Adama squinting, Tigh scowling, and Lee and Starbuck leading infantry assaults like the good pilots they are; Boomer changes her mind one last time; Torey gets her comeuppance.
My disappointment began when the reality behind the opera house vision (I have sung on the stage of that opera house, by the way :-) turned out to be utterly irrelevant to the plot. We’re chasing Hera through the ship; Baltar and Caprica steal her, and then . . . everyone walks onto the bridge as if nothing has happened. Whoop-de-do.
But the thing that started me booing and throwing spoiled vegetables at the television was when the dead hand of the Raptor pilot brushed up against the nukular trigger. A heavy sense of doom descended, as I foresaw that the rest of the plot, such as it was, would be driven by coincidence, rabbits pulled out of hats, and ultimately as quintessential an example of the deus ex machina as you could hope for.
I was not proven wrong.
At least they didn’t go through the black hole… But it’s like the writers were sitting around in their last meeting going “I am soo tired of thinking up ideas for this stupid show… Um, let’s just say God did it and go home, mkay?”
If post-crash Starbuck was just a head Starbuck, how come everyone could see her, and she could fly real planes, and shoot real bullets and everything? If she’s an angel, and so are Head Six and Head Baltar, then how do they differ from the other Cylons’ “projections”, and if they do, what plot purpose is served by having both angels and projections in the same show? Complete cop-out, especially as it’s obvious all through the show, right from the original miniseries, that Head Six is the same thing as what they started calling “projection” later on, because she doesn’t just appear to Baltar in the space he’s in, she creates virtual spaces for them both, viz. the nice house on Howe Sound. It’s only been in the last half-season that Baltar’s suddenly been ranting on about angels, which is just the writers being completely and utterly lazy.
I like the suggestion by someone on the Tor website that we just all agree that a lion ran by and ate Starbuck while she was out of frame.
Oh, and the producers leaked a rumour months and months ago that the last shot of the show would feature Six in New York City. So obviously the only possible way to accomplish this is for the hapless body count to land on Earth and then suddenly, utterly, and completely inexplicably give up all technology! The only demonstrably bad thing about the cities on Caprica (and New Caprica, for that matter) was that the Cylons came and nuked them. So what in the world is Lee suddenly on about?
But in utter defiance of any prior foreshadowing, theme, or semblance of logic whatsoever, forty thousand people who have bled and died and struggled to survive and hang together as a civilization for four long years are to abandon the ships that have been their cradles of life for all that time, and scatter around the surface of a planet to die alone of exposure, starvation, minor infections, dental abcesses, trivial sprains, and childbirth, not to mention being eaten by the aforesaid lions? I mean it’s not like the history of the human race was one of idyllic peacefulness and happy happy joy until somebody invented evil robots that all of a sudden screwed everything up. The primary cause of death for adult male hunter-gatherers is other adult male hunter-gatherers.
And poor Anders, having just discovered the perfection of unity with the machine, somehow coerced to suicide along with the other crazies? Why couldn’t he have, you know, taken an unbroken ship off to explore the galaxy? Or if he had to stay with Galactica, why not hide out on the far side of the moon, or Mars?
The ultimate lesson we’re supposed to learn from all this? ROBOTS are EEEEVUL!
Feh.
The first hour tantalized with the promise of a bang, but the second delivered a craven and terminally lazy whimper.