BSG final thoughts

[charmax]

Mine are not exactly the first footprints in the snow here so much of this will have been said already and more eloquently but I just wanted to say a few things about the BSG final.


I loved pretty much everything up to finding our Earth but I could happily have left it at that. The mission to rescue Hera felt suitably epic and exciting and it was so nice to see Baltar finally doing something not motivated by self interest. I had fully expected him to die, he probably deserved to die but I’m rather glad he didn’t nonetheless.

It was nice to get the flashbacks to Caprica. I found Gaius’s one the most enlightening and his cantankerous old dad was straight out of a million TV dramas but I enjoyed it anyway. I thought it was telling that Six was so horrified at the way Baltar treated his father. I choose to believe that she really did find Old man Baltar a nice home to live in and didn’t just take him out back and snap his neck like a twig.

Roslin’s flashback gave us a chance to see Laura being awesome and looking amazing which was something I didn’t think I’d get to see again. What made it so poignant for me wasn’t just that it highlighted how frail she had become but also that it showed how much of her own humanity she had lost in leading the fleet.

I was never the world’s biggest Lee/Kara shipper but even I thought that they were undeserved by a flashback that had them drunkenly going for it while Zak was passed out in the corner. Also why the pigeon metaphor? Is there some significance I missed because Kara as an owl would have made sense because she’s the one with the knowledge to get to Earth, Kara as raven Harbinger of death, Kara as peacock resurrection I would even accepted a dove but a PIGEON??

I always knew Boomer and Tory were doomed but Cavil’s suicide made no sense at all. I would’ve preferred for Racetrack to have actively caused the detonation rather than her dead hand flopping on the trigger. Was that meant to be divine intervention because we were specifically told God didn’t take sides.

I know there were mitigating circumstances but I really, really hated the idea of Sam as hybrid. Him piloting the ships into the sun did absolutely nothing to change my opinion that it was sad in a horrible way not a moving good storytelling way to see the character most defined by his physicality, the sportsman, the freedom fighter was reduced to spouting gibberish in a bath.

I have a number of unanswered questions. “They have a plan” really? because I never figured out what the Cylon plan was. Some of them had agendas sure but an overall plan not so much. Why did the Cylons attack after 40 years peace? I know there was that episode were Adama thought it was all down to him but surely that was just his ego talking and not actual fact. Mass genocide over a black ops mission one that failed at that, seems a bit excessive. What was the significance of all that Daniel stuff? What exactly was Kara? I’m not buying her as an angel at all. I had expected that Greek mythology would prove more relevant than it actually did. Other than the new inhabitants of Earth name the constellations after their old homes I can’t really see that it has any relevance. Was there any point at all to Caprica’s pregnancy and miscarriage? I like “All Along The Watchtower” as much as the next person but seriously wtf? The opera house payoff was visually nifty particularly with the final five all in a line like that but actually that was something I didn’t realise needed explaining. I pretty much figured it was a shared vision/dream about the importance of Hera to both Cylons and humanity. I hadn’t realised it literally foretold people chasing her down corridors.

I think everyone has mentioned this but Lampkin and Hoshi as president and Admiral!! How far down the military command structure do you have to go to get to Hoshi? And Lampkin not one of the ships captains from the new Quorum, surely there was a deputy president. isn’t it Lee? Why was he allowed to go on what seemed like a suicide mission when Doc Cottle was considered too important.

Lee says there shall be no cities and so there shall be none. Everyone agrees to ditch their technology, all of them, all of it. Nobody hangs onto some antibiotics or a knife or a spade or a lighter or that last tube of toothpaste? Leaving aside the ickiness of "we need to procreate with them and teach them our language" they’d better learn how to communicate with the native population pretty quickly because they’ll need them to show them the art of flint knapping and how to make a fire and which fauna and flora is actually edible. None of which really matters because there is probably an Earth disease to which the incomers have no immunity and they’ll all be wiped out.

I was glad to see the Centurions gain their freedom but less happy with the reasoning that they’d earned it for their recent loyalty to humans rather than because it was morally wrong to enslave them in the first place.

Laura’s death was sad but actually I was more moved when John Connor was crying into his mothers lap like a little boy. Which brings me to the one thing that last few minutes of BSG did give me. I get to continue to believe that BSG and T:SCC are part of the same universe This has all happened before and it will all happen again.

Goodbye BSG! Despite everything, I’m gonna miss you.

Comments

[par-avion.livejournal.com]

I saw one person say that the pigeon in BSG (and elsewhere, the pigeon in TSCC) is because it's a reference to Blade Runner -- which I watched last week for the first time, and okay there is a pigeon at the end, but I don't know if I buy the connection to BSG. Although I do think that Cameron's bird is a pigeon because of Blade Runner.

[charmax.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen Blade Runner so if it's a nod to that it's no wonder I missed it and just saw a rat with wings.

[laura47.livejournal.com]

and EJO was in blade runner, and has said he was drawn to bsg because it went for themes he found important in blade runner...

i don't get the pigeon either.

[charmax.livejournal.com]

Like I said to par_avion I haven't seen Blade Runner and so am not really aware of any similarities. The pigeon just doesn't seem very impressive an animal for someone like Kara.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Dove, not pigeon. White dove. People seem to say that all the time, though.

[charmax.livejournal.com]

Definitely a big fat pigeon in BSG. I've checked out the end scene of Blade Runner and that's a white dove no mistakin'.

[gwyn-r.livejournal.com]

Sorry! I should have specified I meant Blade Runner.

[deathisyourart.livejournal.com]

Homing pigeon? Actually, I have no idea; I am more than a full season behind on BSG and I am less and less inclined to finish the show.

[charmax.livejournal.com]

Homing pigeon sounds like a good guess, I'll go with that. I hate giving up on shows even when they begin to fail and even at its worst BSG was better than most.

[sol-se.livejournal.com]

Homing pigeon?
Oh!!! I like that, I'm going with that one.

[laura47.livejournal.com]

I always knew Boomer and Tory were doomed but Cavil’s suicide made no sense at all

RDM said original script had tigh throwing him to his death, and the actor said "no, come on, i think he'd realize the gig was up, this was it, and just end it."

we actually paused and rewound we were so surprised by the suicide.

[charmax.livejournal.com]

The suicide came out of the blue. I would've expected him to go out fighting. Also I thought Cylons couldn't commit suicide. There was an early scene with Boomer when she can't pull the trigger. Athena has to get Helo to shoot her so she can download and rescue Hera. D'Anna had to have a centurion kill her so she could continue her spiritual quest.

[katsaris.livejournal.com]

Kara as an owl would have made sense because she’s the one with the knowledge to get to Earth,

Mythology geek here. The owl was a symbol of Athena, and Athena was a goddess of knowledge and craftsmanship as derived from human reasoning and intellect. (And geez, how much Athena would loathe their giving up technology)

But Kara received her knowledge as divine inspiration, combined with music. Those are most definitely NOT Athena's province -- both of them are much more the province of Apollo. It's Apollo who had seers and oracles, Athena never did.

And if I had to choose a goddess to correspond to Kara, I'd definitely choose Artemis, the sister of Apollo. Kara and Lee, despite their misguided attempts at romance, worked better as sister and brother than as lovers.

[charmax.livejournal.com]

That's certainly more Greek geek than I was going for. I just meant that the owl is traditionally regarded as wise. I'm definitely with you on Kara and Lee as siblings though. Isn't Artemis associated with hunting, in which case, that definitely suits Kara.

[katsaris.livejournal.com]

Artemis is associated to hunting, and through it associated with both youthful strength, non-sexual physicality, and killing.

She's also considered the protector of young children (especially young girls), though she's never mothered a child herself. This reminds me a bit of the beginning of the 3rd season, where she does end up the protector of a young girl she hasn't birthed.

Associated with the moon as well, perhaps we can connect this to her death-and-reappearance.

Not everything matches out exactly ofcourse. But it's a pretty good fit overall.

The closest fit for Head-Six I've been able to find is the Egyptian Hathor/Sekhmet, the goddess of beauty and sexual attraction that can become the goddess of vicious slaughter and genocide.

[charmax.livejournal.com]

I guess the Greek mythology in the show was more than just window dressing after all. I hadn't realised there was a significant correlation between the BSG characters and classical gods. Thanks for pointing that out for me.

[katsaris.livejournal.com]

Uh, they *could* have made it more than just window dressing, but it's not as if they ever associated Starbuck to Artemis themselves. I like this connection I'm imagining, but it's not canonical and I doubt the writers realized how well it worked.

[laura47.livejournal.com]

“They have a plan” really? because I never figured out what the Cylon plan was.

well, they have this tv movie coming out called "The Plan" which will be cavil-centric and, I should hope, explain what the hell the plan was.

[charmax.livejournal.com]

How bizarre. That makes it more of an anti-climax. At least I'll get to see what Cavil was up to.

[xandra-ptv.livejournal.com]

Over all i enjoyed it too, but on the rest i got nitpicky.

oh bsg and tscc are totally the same universe... even the regular terminator universe, i mean have you seen the t4's trailer?

and no cylons didn't have a plan and neither did the show runner, which really pisses me off, cause the Daniel name drop was a red haring... but you can't do that when you leave one characters' story line up in the air like they did starbuck... Cause it seemed to me that Daniel was Starbucks daddy or the actually "the thing" Cottle did to Daniel. Okay grumpy now.

I supposed they probably kept the little things... but yeah. But we learned one thing the secret behind BSG was at its heart the retelling of Noah's ark, minus the animals. its the ultimate wiping out of the old corrupt world to make a new one.

But at the end, i got confused with the god joke at the very end: was it that headBaltar refered to god as a he, or where they implying it was bob dylan?

[charmax.livejournal.com]

T4 trailer is very like BSG.

I think it's painfully clear that things were being made up on the fly to dig themselves out of plot holes. Almost everything after them finding destroyed Earth made no real sense. You have to have watched the webisodes to really understand Gaeta's motives and I hadn't bothered and had to go back and google it when I realised I'd missed something important.

There was absolutely no point to the Daniel thing at all. The whole thing about there being a super secret thirteenth Cylon seemed like a last minute attempt to explain the gap between models number 6 and 8.

It's kind of a weird mix of Noah's Ark and the Exodus story. Actually, I got more and more confused by all the religious references. Perhaps Bob Dylan is the missing Cylon model Dylan could be a corruption of Daniel I guess.

[xandra-ptv.livejournal.com]

lol. Yep, Daniel 'mention' just to fill the number gap. And Ellen was a cop out too. lol. Though at least she was more fun when we knew she was a cylon.

I know, I always felt like they were missing something or going to slow in other places. But frankly there was so much about the show i couldn't remember anymore. Way back when, i thought Gaeta-and if you remember him, the president's aide, Billy- were the cylons. I just remember hoping Gaeta would finally make the right move and kill- fuck whats his name- the original series' Apollo.

sorry, i just find it amusing that they chose an actual song to be their "end of the world song"

[charmax.livejournal.com]

That's interesting because I always thought Billy was going to turn out to be a Cylon. I think it would have been a better story to see how Roslin reacted to someone so close to her being a Cylon especially as he was the nice guy of the fleet. I also thought Adama would turn out to be a Cylon based on what Leoben told Roslin before she airlocked him but I guess he was just messing with her head afterall.

As end of the world songs go, it's a pretty good one. Still seems like a weird thing to do though.

[xandra-ptv.livejournal.com]

Well Adama couldn't be a cylon without fucking with the entire family tree. Making Lee and the deceased Zak half cylons, cylons or not actually his kids. Though reading through some stuff about the Capirca show their planning, Bill Adama's sister might be one, well born human but... think about Cameron and Alison in TSCC, wow they are the same universe. If i cared enough I'd write a fic connecting them.

I think we hoped Billy was a cylon is because thats when the show got weird, breaking him up with Dualla, having Dualla and Lee have all this never before UST, and Billy was a nobody type person who was all important. And your right it would have been a huge shock to everyone. You could tell they were thinking it, cause it wasn't just a coincidence that Lori was next in line to be a cylon.

The worst part is its an addictive song. i listen to it a lot.

[charmax.livejournal.com]

I haven't heard much about the Caprica series other than that it was a prequel to BSG. I'm not at all sure I'll be watching it I've kinda lost faith in the folk behind BSG.

Dualla and Lee getting together out of nowhere was definitely one of the points at which it dawned on me that maybe nobody knew what they were doing with the characters. I hate it when shows make me feel like that. It's the main reason I've walked away from Heroes.

[balistik94.livejournal.com]

I agree with you about Lee and Kara's flashback it wasn't very fitting. And yeah the pigeon metaphor might not seem to be very flattering but I think what matters is that it's a bird taking flight like she's beginning a new life she's flying towards her destiny (at least that's my interpretation). I was disappointed by how quickly Racetrack and my man Skulls died but at least their raptor was useful. Cavil's death was almost comical it didn't make no sense at all. But yeah like you said despite everything I enjoyed this show and I'm gonna miss it some of the characters were really well written.

[charmax.livejournal.com]

I suppose I'm reading too much into the fact it was a pigeon. Pigeons seem to be getting all symbolic everywhere at the moment. BSG, T:SCC and now Kings. Pigeons are the new doves!

I've always admired how fleshed out minor characters were on BSG. On other shows we probably wouldn't even know their names but on this show they actually mattered which is why I wanted something a bit more for them.

I'm definitely going to miss the show.