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Spoilers ahoy!| | Well, the new Battlestar Galactica series has come to a close, and like most everyone else on the internet who's followed the show, I feel I must share my opinion of it. I've waited awhile to let the finale sink in, and I think my view on it has crystallized sufficiently enough to be called final.
I didn't like it. Here's why.
First, here are the parts that I sort of liked:
- The battle. Oh come on, you knew I would list this first. It was obvious they were saving their budget for the Final Battle, and it was great stuff. It's hard to mess up this aspect of the show.
- The music. Bear McCreary has, predictably, done great work. In fact, I think the music was always the best part of the series. I would highly recommend the soundtracks for the third and forth seasons.
- The acting. It's been spotty in places, especially when Tricia Helfer tries to emote concern or Michael Trucco tries to emote surprise, but here it was solid all around. Trucco, in particular, has greatly impressed me in the past few episodes with his Hybrid impression.
- They actually addressed all the characters, and led them to a resolution of some sort. We can debate whether things like Roslin's death could have been handled to be more effective, but at least it was there.
Things that were just okay:
- Cavil's suicide. It made sense, in terms of his character, for him to die by his own hand, but it was anticlimactic and extremely sudden. I actually laughed a little at it.
- The Opera House. I actually kind of like the concept of it being the Galactica itself, and it was handled well, with the dramatic reveal of the CIC. I had always thought that it would turn out to be an actual place from the past (probably on Kobol), which was important in some previous Cycle, or to the Cycle itself. It's not necessarily a let-down, but given the sheer amount of buildup they gave us for it, it could have been bigger.
And now, the rant.
- The morals that Ronald Moore tried to bring out in the end seem to come completely out of nowhere. There is a major emphasis on "Technology needs Heart to guide it." The moral of the show, so far, has frequently been shown to be "you need Faith and Love in order to survive in the long run." A dominating plot arc for the entire show has been the cylons trying to figure out how to biologically reproduce. It has been shown (and hammered home repeatedly) that only a pairing between human and cylon, where love is present between the partners, can conceive a viable offspring. The "God Plotline" has made it abundantly clear that things will work out if you have faith in the supernatural. There has been no indication at all that technology needs to be given up, and yet in the last act that's exactly the moral we're being told. It is too sudden.
- The Colonials' decision to give up said technology and mingle with the neanderthals is an astronomically illogical, poorly-thought-out idea, and flat-out contradicts the series' established tone and style. In the first season, when the survivors set out, we watched them tackle logical problems that a band of postapocalyptic survivors would face. They had to find water, food and fuel, organize themselves, establish a government and a balance of power, and so forth. But in the finale, when they head off into the wilderness, no consideration is given to any of the many, many things they will need to tackle. They need to watch out for predators, learn to forage for food, learn how to cultivate crops, build structures, even make fire. These people have lived their entire lives in a civilized environment, dependent on technology. They're a random sampling of survivors, so logically they should have as many wilderness survival skills as any random sampling off the street. Oh wait...
- ...some of them do know survival skills. Gaius does indeed come from a farming background, but that was with modern (or even futuristic) equipment. How well do you suppose that translates to farming with no equipment? And apparently Helo and Athena know how to hunt. Why haven't we heard about this before? Quite frankly, the writers pulled that one out of their asses. And Helo's got a bad leg now, so it's almost certain he will face a tough time in the wilds.
- The decision to split up was done for purely dramatic purposes, and was an out-and-out bad plan. Even if they all lack wildernesss skills, they stand a better chance of survival if they stick together. All in all, Earth is depicted here as, well, a pastoral landscape, and an unusually hospitable one at that. I know a lot of people are going to make the connection to the Garden of Eden, saying that they were led to the Promised Land in the end, and that God prepared this place for them to live, but that explanation doesn't work. Roslin died after they reached Earth, meaning that it's not the Promised Land. The Promised Land is Adama's proposed cabin. Meaning that Earth is just Earth, and subject to normal laws of nature. That includes predators, sickness, accidents, and all manner of vagaries which were all ignored in the episode. This is the kind of logic break that I just can't overlook.
- In another, somewhat less-egregious logic break, Racetrack's nukes. Her dead hand fell onto the Launch button just as her tumbling ship spun around to face the Colony. We have no indication that this was the work of God. It comes off as simply a fantastic coincidence. But wait, I hear you say, there are no coincidences when Divine Meddling is involved. Well I'm sorry, but there's nothing in the show to indicate that God caused that. Sorry.
- Also, why the happy ending? The only major character to die was really Anders. Roslin's death was inevitable and we had been frequently reminded that it was coming, and Racetrack and Skulls were, let's face it, side characters. Tory died, which was a bit of a (welcome) surprise since I thought that Tyrol already knew or suspected that the others set up Cally's death. But Everybody else went their separate ways into the aforementioned pastorale. Quite frankly, I would have been perfectly satisfied if everybody died (except Hera for plot reasons.) There's a physics for this stuff, guys.
- Starbuck just disappeared. They never addressed her nature or her resurrection. This particular mystery had been touted almost incessantly throughout season 4, which characters all around, including Starbuck herself, wondering just what she was and how she came back. Then, a few episodes ago, she came to grips with the fact that nobody could explain it, and she made peace with thte fact that she was an enigma. I thought that that worked fine as an ending to the plot arc, though I hoped that it would be revisited and properly answered later on. But they kept dangling that particular carrot before us, bringing the issue up again in Someone to Watch Over Me and often using clips of it in pre-episode recaps. It was clear they really wanted us to wonder about it. It had been suggested in several instances that she was an angel somehow, or possibly (and less plausibly) a cylon. But in the end they don't address this. It never even comes up. To me, this is inexcusable. You don't hook the audience with a mystery, offer some guesses and theories to keep it in our minds, and then completely drop it in the end.
I feel I should say a few words about the use of mysteries as plot hooks, and about Black Boxes as plot devices. It is perfectly acceptable to leave something open to speculation or interpretation, a Black Box in the plot which the audience is meant to open for themselves. It is quite another to leave a plot thread hanging without resolution. "Resolution" here does not mean "explanation," but rather fulfillment. It is clear that we were meant to speculate as to the nature of God in the series, his plan, the nature of the cycle, and Starbuck's true nature. But it's very difficult to pull off a Black Box, since the task is to fulfill the mystery in question, rather than answering and explaining it away. You have to give the audience just enough to go on, while still leaving some crucial things unexplained. What constitutes fulfillment is different for every viewer: for some, only a little bit of informatiton may be sufficient to keep them wondering and speculating; for others, more detail or attention might be needed to call their attention to it. I did not feel that they sufficiently addressed the issue of Starbuck's nature, and consequently it came off as just something they dropped out of laziness.
Now wait, I hear you say, laziness? Well, yeah, laziness. You could argue that there wasn't enough time to address it, but I would contest that. I felt that the last three episodes before the finale (Someone to Watch Over me, Islanded in a Stream of Stars, and Daybreak, Part I) were all paced far too slowly, and that both parts of the finale spent too much time on flashbacks which only amounted to fanservice. Come to think of it, that's all that the finale was: fanservice.
All in all, I felt that the finale was poorly-written but well-executed, if that makes sense. By going out with such a happy ending, I feel that they forced to ignore a lot of the harsh realism that's been the hallmark of the show...and, indeed, any semblance of realism at all. I will watch the extended cut on DVD, but I doubt it will change anything. It will probably only include padding scenes.
As I believe I've commented about before on this blog, I like it when the end of a story reveals a unified structure, giving new significance to everything that's come before and making me go back and reevaluate it all anew. That did not happen here. But it's not just that it doesn't fit my own tastes: so many of the important events of the show have now turned out to have little-to-no purpose in the grand scheme of things. Major plot arcs like Pegasus, New Caprica, the events of Razor, the freeing of the Centurions and, perhaps most seriously, Baltar's messiah status and ensuing religion, ended up being just stops or detours along the way, links in the chain of causal events which otherwise served no purpose in the unified scheme of the story, and sometimes not even that.
The show's writers have freely admitted that although they knew the ultimate end, they've been making this stuff up as they go. I was willing to go along with it during the series because, hey, we writers all make the story up as we go, to some greater or lesser degree. I was giving them the benefit of the doubt, withholding judgement until the end, to see if their plan worked. I began to doubt right around the New Caprica arc, when the cylons were revealed to be considerably less competent and imposing than we had been led to believe, then again in season 3 when we got to see the somewhat-underwhelming and slightly-silly interior of the basestars, then over and over as the entire nature of the cylons was essentially retconned beyond all reason. (REBAR? I should trademark that...) Now, in the end, as they've delved into fanservice for its own sake, tossing prior mysteries and logic out the window, I am forced to conclude that, although some aspects of the series have been great, most notably the acting, directing (usually) and music, the writing was not all that great. On a small scale, on the level of dialogue and character actions, it looks good. But there's more to it than that. There's large-scale plot construction too, what Eric Walker calls "deliberate artifice." The writers behind BSG were just that: writers. They could not be authors, though they tried.
| | | Posted 3/22/2009 10:02 PM - 21 Views - 0 eProps - 0 comments
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