Mind Meld

For some unfathomable reason, the folks over at SF Signal asked me to participate in their Mind Meld feature again. It's almost like they didn't learn their lesson last time. This week's subject matter is the series finale to Battlestar Galactica. What did yours truly think about it?

Magic happened. And not the good kind that flows from the pen of a writer on a roll. The sloppy kind that leads to Ships of Light and Robbie Rist in Lennon specs shepherding the survivors of humanity into a soft white future filled with hi-key lighting. Only we didn't get Ships of Light in Daybreak part 1, 2 or 3. Heck, we didn't even get Robbie Rist (and seriously, how much could he have cost?).

And there's more where that came from. Oh, and be sure to read Chris Roberson's evisceration of the series. It's what I'd have written were I more capable of good word-using.

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Battlestar Galactica: The final curtain

So, the finale of the reinvented Battlestar Galactica series aired last night. Because of scheduling conflicts, I had to watch the 11 p.m. airing, and didn't get to bed until late. After all the seemingly bizarre and make-it-up-as-you-go plot twists that have permeated the last couple of seasons, I really had to wonder if they could pull off a decent wrap-up. The first half of this final season did not give me hope. The episodes devolved into melodramatic soap opera territory, and the epic seemed to persistently grow smaller rather than more grand. After a hiatus lasting the better part of a year, the final episodes kicked in and gave me reason for optimism. The two-parter dealing with the Gaeta-led mutiny aboard the Galactica was the best in a long, long time. They were dealing once again with concrete moral issues, rather than woo-woo mysticism or Apollo being a wuss or whatever. Gaeta's motivation was muddled, however, since his pathological hatred of the Cylons which ostensibly drove him to mutiny against Adama came off as tenuous, at best. Yes, he suffered under the Cylons, but no more than anyone else. The loss of his leg, which remained an obvious anger issue for him, wasn't caused by by the Cylons but rather by Colonials who attempted mutiny on a mission led by Starbuck. Participating in Baltar's Cylon-collaborating algae planet government--albeit as an informer to the resistance--almost got him killed. So yeah, Gaeta had issues and motivation take drastic action, but the justification for turning against Adama, rather than extracting vengeance against those who legitimately wronged him seems thin. I was also disappointed with the final appearance of Tom Zarek. After playing the former terrorist for the entire series as a ruthless yet almost idealistic agitator for justice, in his last act he turned into a simple thug, violent and brutish in his greedy quest for power. Murdering the Colonial Quorum? That was too far. Zarek always worked best when his despicable methods were morally justified to some degree. Abandoning that ambiguity at the very end in favor of a cheap, two-dimensional villain to hiss at was beneath the dignity of the show. I'm not arguing to change the fate of either Zarek or Gaeta, but the writing definitely fell short. Which is too bad, because otherwise the mutiny two-parter harkened back to the greatness of the series' first two seasons.

The string of episodes that followed were average at best. They served mostly to fill out random plot points, bring back Ellen Tigh, lay out that the Galactica is too structurally deficient to continue much longer before breaking up, stuff like that. Treading water, essentially, setting up the pieces for the final endgame in the series finale.

So, how about that finale? In my opinion, "Daybreak" was far better than it had any right to be. Certainly more satisfying than Galactica 1980. Better than the entirety of The X-Files' final season. I did expect them to find our "Earth" at the end, an Earth that was not the same as the nuke-blasted 13th colony populated by Cylons. I did not expect it to happen 150,000 years ago, although in hindsight this does appear to be their only real "out" and--unlike the majority of the plot twists introduced these last couple of seasons, strikes me as one that was in place at the time the miniseries aired all those years ago. I even remember seeing some media feature that made mention of the fact the fleet isn't going to seek Earth, because it had been blasted in a nuclear war centuries before--a hint that someone on the production team let slip a plot point by accident during initial promotion efforts. Finding indigenous humanoid life extant on the planet with fully compatible DNA was just a tad too convenient, however, particularly since if Hera is going to be a mitochondrial Eve figure the timing's off. Because 150,000 years ago, Homo sapiens had already evolved. They claim the homo species has no language, but does have tribal society and buries their dead, but even Neandertals had these traits. The hominids discovered would have to be Homo erectus, but the Galactica would've needed to arrive almost 100,000 years earlier to interbreed with that species and give rise to Homo sapiens.

Of course, all would be forgiven if two colonial refugees named Arthur and Ford were overheard bemoaning the fact that most of the colonials were unemployed telephone earpiece cleaners.

There was an egregious over-use of flashbacks, as well as a pretentiousness and a hubristic display of "we're making an important show" syndrome throughout the final three hours. Flashbacks worked well for Ron Moore in the Star Trek: The Next Generation finale "All Good Things..." but those flashbacks (and flash forwards) were fluid and integral to the plot. Here, the flashbacks are just that, serving as elements of character development that should've happened throughout the series run, rather than being shoehorned in at the last minute.

The Big Battle with the Cylon colony was okay, but too easy. There was none of the awesomeness of the Galactica-Pegasus tag-team match against the Cylons over New Caprica. That no-holds-barred imagination was missing this time out. And The whole business with the Dean Stockwell-led Cylons felt very unfinished. Yes, there were comments made that they faced extinction with resurrection technology and/or dissecting Hera, but having all the evil Cylons die off safely off camera was a cheat. Sending the sentient Centurions off in their own basestar was better. That, at least, leaves the door open for future, different follow-up projects.

Starbuck's fate sucked. Just awful. Starbuck didn't know what she was, and neither did the writers. So they make her disappear. WTF?

Ditto for the Baltar and Caprica Six "angels." These hallucinogenic figures most assuredly did not start out as such, and their elevation to benevolent supernatural status felt very much like an 11th-hour workaround to a problem nobody had a solution for.

There were a lot of 11th-hour workarounds on display here. That's a consequence of making things up as you go along with no real concern for existing continuity or how everything will resolve in the end. I have to give Ron Moore and writing staff for pulling... well, maybe not a rabbit out of the hat, but certainly not a stinking turd. The plot holes and gaps in logic have been papered over, and as long as you don't look too closely the thing is pretty and entertaining.

I'm glad I saw it, and I don't feel ripped off or betrayed (certainly not like all those LOST fans are going to in another year) but I've no real desire to see "Daybreak" again. If I've got an urge to take in three hours' worth of a SF series finale, I'll pop in my DVD of Farscape's "The Peacekeeper Wars."

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About that Galactica episode...

Friday's new episode of Battlestar Galactica, "Sometimes a Great Notion," did little to allay my concerns regarding the coherence of these final episodes of the series. That's not to say there weren't great moments here to dazzle the masses--Starbuck finding her own corpse (which wasn't that unexpected) or Dee's abrupt and graphic suicide attempt (which was pretty much unexpected) really drove home the emotion of this episode.

But there are other things that leave me unsatisfied. If Earth (if indeed this is Earth--Starbuck's vision of Earth earlier in the series clearly showed the continents, yet this world was just a sort of generic world as seen from space, no identifying marks, so to speak. And I don't recall seeing the Moon or Jupiter...) was nuked 2,000 years ago, then the background levels of radiation should surely be in tolerable limits for human life--there's plant life enough to sustain an oxygen atmosphere, after all. Unless they used cobalt bombs, and this Earth had its very own On the Beach scenario. But the Cylons being the 13th Tribe? Smells like another something Moore bent over and pulled out his ass, not for logical reasons, but purely for "shock the audience" reasons. Because the entire population was supposedly Cylons (and just how big a sample did they take? From how many sites?) it doesn't was that this is Earth. We're not Cylons, no matter how much hand-waving Moore does, since evolution is a pretty clearly established refutation of that point. Unless (and this, admittedly, is a huge stretch) Earth was the mother world and subsequently abandoned (pollution? War?) and Kobol colonized. When they screwed up Kobol, that's when the 12 colonies were settled, making Kobol more of an intermediary home rather than the cradle. The 13th Cylon tribe, presumably being Cylon and more tolerant of radiation and other crap, decided to give Earth another go. Not sure how that works out in the series' timeline, since IIRC Kobol's climatological catastrophe happened about the same time or somewhat after the Cylons' Earthly Armageddon. But honestly, Moore's played so fast and loose with continuity that this may be as valid an explanation as anything else.

I'm not clear why the fleet is leaving the Cylon Earth. I'm assuming it's too radioactive to live on, but that wasn't strongly conveyed. On Caprica, the guerrillas at least had to take little anti-radiation tablets to survive. We're not seeing that here. And I'm not clear how wandering off among the stars will make them any better off, unless there's still the issue of other Cylons chasing them (which hasn't been referenced in a while) and the whole Cylon civil war (a nuked Cylon homeworld becomes a poignant irony when viewed in that light).

As for Ellen Tigh being the final skinjob Cylon, I'm somewhat ambivalent about it. Ellen was a great character, and her death on New Caprica was a high point of the series for me. Great writing there. Of course, that's about the point where the series lost its bearings, so maybe her death, and not the destruction of the Pegasus, marks the point where shark-jumping begins. Bringing her back feels like a cheat, although of all the sudden knee-jerk plot twists introduced to the series, this one at least has enough backstory elements to make it almost seem plausible. But that begs the question, if there are only one model of the Final Five operating, it stretched credulity that each of them not only survive the initial Cylon sneak attacks, but also happen to end up on the Galactica and survive time and again when facing certain death. Magical woo-woo stuff comes into play, which I suppose ties in with the religion and prophecy they've been spouting throughout the series' run, but for once I'd like to see hoary old prophecies be exposed as so much nonsensical fortune cookie babbling. And wouldn't Starbuck's pretty damn obvious resurrection imply pretty damn strongly that she's a Cylon? A 13th model, for the 13th Tribe? There's a certain symmetry there, but not a whole lot of narrative sense.

I did like Apollo changing the number on the dry erase board. That was a nice touch. The series needs more of those.

All in all, lots of powerful individual moments. Lots of "eyeball kicks" if I'm allowed to invoke the Turkey City Lexicon. But ultimately, it's a bunch of hand-waving, the sum equalling far less than the sum of its parts. But I confess at this point I have no idea what's going to happen next, so that's something, right?

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