makeshiftmind

Last night marked the end of what many consider to be the finest science fiction series to ever grace television. Battlestar Galactica brought science fiction into the mainstream by focusing on plot, character, and issues instead of the traditional techno babble, campy aliens, and painfully silly stories that give the SciFi channel its current reputation. As a rabid follower of Galactica, I feel compelled to say a few closing comments, particularly since I’ve evangelized it to pretty much everyone I’ve ever talked to (people at work are, yes, in a queue to borrow my DVDs). I’m not going to recap the entire series, but I want to spill my opinions about the final episode, since much of the tension in the series was supposed to be resolved in Battlestar’s final hours. If you haven’t watched the series, or have merely seen a spattering of episodes here and there, I encourage you to skip this post, watch all four seasons on DVD, then come back and read my opinions (if you even remember that I have any by that point!).

William Adama is probably my favorite character in the show, simply because he resonates with my masculinity in so many ways. And because it sounds like his vocal chords were victims of a power sander. In the last two episodes, we are given a glimpse into his life right before the Cylon attack on earth, where he is offered a fat salary and laudable title to park his ass behind a desk and wilt away into bureaucracy. That’s not how the Old Man rolls however, and he rejects his promotion to spend the last hours of his career onboard his outdated ship called Galactica that is being decommissioned. The irony of course is that the Cylon attack happens during the decommissioning ceremony and Adama spends the next several years commanding the lone Battlestar and a fleet of civilian ships running for their lives. During that time, Adama falls in love with Roslin, who we learn very early on has terminal cancer. Adama is forced to endure as the two “ladies” he loves (Galactica and Roslin) are slowly taken from him by combat and disease.

If anyone deserved to find a happy ending, it was Adama. He wasn’t perfect, but without his leadership skills and guts of iron, the fleet would have perished quite early in the series. If there’s one thing that Battlestar is good at serving up, however, its tragedy, and Adama’s last days are certainly no departure. Galactica’s last emergency jump cripples the ship in a sickening sequence in which her “spine” is broken by the stress of combat and age. The crew is forced to abandon ship, but luckily a habitable planet has been found, so they aren’t without salvation. Roslin, meanwhile, continues to pump herself full of drugs to give herself a last forty-eight hours of life. Adama, knowing her time is short, says a tearful goodbye to Lee and Starbuck, then takes a Raptor and flies low over the planet so they can look for the spot on which they will build the dream home they’ve talked about for so many years. During the flight, Roslin finally dies, and Adama lands the Raptor to bury her. Adama’s final words to Lee indicate that he never intended to return from his final flight. Adama’s losses were certainly tragic, and I think for the sake of the finale the drama of his “last flight” was pretty powerful. The more I thought about it though, the more I realized that there was still a great deal that Adama had to live for. His best friend Saul was still alive, as was his son Lee, and many of the officers and pilots to which he had grown close. The fleet had found a lush planet on which to live out their final days, and more than 30,000 humans survived the long trek to get there. Adama is nothing but the archetype of strength, so I question whether the loss of Galactica and Roslin would have finally broken him or not.

If the finale’s treatment of Adama was tragic, it was at least understandable. Starbuck, on the other hand, was a profound disappointment (to me at least). Ever since Kara’s miraculous return in season 3, viewers have been madly speculating about what exactly happened to her on her recon mission to find Earth. When season four began and Kara finds her own skeletal corpse in a viper wreck planetside, things *really* began to get mental with the Starbuck plotline. Even the cryptic Leoban gets a bad case of the willies when Kara yells at him, “What am I!?” But all creepiness and mystique aside, this is really where Starbuck’s story begins to teeter. In season 3, Lee clearly saw her Viper explode, which seems to contradict her Viper’s presence on Earth I. When she miraculously re-appeared with a shiny new Viper, everyone suspected her of being a Cylon (because they could resurrect), but the Final Five were revealed and Kara wasn’t one of them, so that simply made her an enigma. She gives Baltar the dogtags she found on her own corpse, which were spattered with blood, and “asks” him to run DNA tests to determine if it was really her blood. Baltar confirms her suspicion, and his explanation is that she is an angel from god, which is not surprising since Baltar basically leads his own cult on board Galactica. No one takes him seriously, but he concludes that Kara is essentially the same kind of entity as the Six that he keeps seeing in his own head. Except everyone can see Kara. Which makes no sense at all. After Galactica is abandoned, the crew is safely planet side, and Adama has departed for his last flight, Starbuck asks Lee what he intends to do with his new life. Lee, the eternal optimist, takes in the scenery and says he wants to go exploring. When he turns around, Kara has vanished, and Lee realizes that whatever the hell she was, she’s gone for good. The implication is that she really was some kind of angel, which I found to be anticlimactic all things considered. As a character, Starbuck played a pivotal role in so many plotlines, that to reduce her to a mere mystical phenomenon seems to be a kind of bad deus ex machina. Even so, the implication was that at one point she was mortal (she did find her own body, after all), so her buried foreknowledge (her painting, the song her father taught her, etc.) has still not really been explained. Also, every Hybrid that Starbuck encountered, including her own Cylon husband Sam, told her ominously that she was the harbinger of death, and would lead the human race to its end. Which I’m happy to say did not actually happen, but it’s yet another Kara plotline that was conveniently forgotten at the eleventh hour.

I *am* glad that Helo, Athena, and Hera all survived, and while the “mitochondrial Eve” tie-in was somewhat expected, at least it fit well within the story. Even though Hera represents the marriage of human and Cylon DNA, we still don’t know why she was able to produce the pattern of dots that:

1. turned out to be the song that Kara’s dad taught her;
2. that turned out to be the song that the final five played on Earth I;
3. that triggered the memories of the final five;
4. that turned out to be the coordinates to Earth II, which none of them had been to before;
5. that is really a Bob Dylan song

Another thing I was a little disappointed about in the Hera plotline was the resolution of the Opera House dream. The implication of the dream from previous seasons was that Six and Baltar would actually take the child instead of merely protecting her for a grand total of about 30 seconds. Even Baltar was surprised when his phantom-angel-self confirmed that the protection of Hera was really his only purpose with Caprica. We are also never told why Roslin, Athena, Caprica and Baltar began having the dream in the first place. The dream offered no insight into *how* they were supposed to act to protect Hera, it was simply a veiled view of *what* would actually take place.

Finally, I have to say a few words about the “moral message” of the series finale. One thing Battlestar has always been very good at is dealing with moral issues through plotlines instead of monologues, but I found the last few minutes of the finale to be a real departure from this pattern. When I heard about the U.N.’s invitation to select members of the Battlestar cast to come speak about world issues, I had an inkling that the show might suffer from self-importance, and I think the finale demonstrated that. A recurring theme spoken from the mouths of bathtub-ridden Hybrids was that the history of humanity tended to move in cyclical patterns — “This has all happened before, this will all happen again.” The revelation of the Final Five and the fate of Earth I certainly illustrated the Hybrid observation. At the end of the finale, the show jumps 150,000 years into the future — to present-day New York — and we find angels Baltar and Caprica perusing the magazines of a news stand next to bystander Ronald Moore (the show’s producer) who is reading a current paper. The show then departs from its “show, don’t tell” policy and we are given an earful about how decadent and unstable humanity has become. Baltar asks Caprica if she thinks the pattern will repeat, and she indicates that even in ordered systems there is a chance of random departure from the norm. The camera then swoops down to an old woman begging on the street, then sweeps up to electronic billboards that are advertising the latest robotic advancements (which are really lame compared to Centurions, so it was almost like, “Really? You’re going there?”).

At first I didn’t quite make the connection between poverty and robotics. The show has always (ironically) had a slight bent against technology (no networked computers on Galactica, the use of old, corded phones, etc.), but the justification was always that precautions were necessary so that the Cylon war wouldn’t repeat itself. Then I found myself wondering whether the show was going one step further and blaming all of mankind’s problems on technology. (This is a silly position of course. If people think that we are worse off now than the pre-industrial middle ages, I think a history lesson is in order.) But then it occured to me that perhaps the show was simply making the point that it is ironic how much we are focused on artificial life, when so much real life around us needs attention. Procreation, whether biological or articial, is not enough. The survival of a species is not enough. As Adama observed early on, a species (whether Human or Cylon), must be *worthy* of survival. And that, perhaps more than anything, is the true message of Battlestar Galactica.

Although I was somewhat disappointed by the series finale, I realize that it had enormous expectations to meet, and I think it was adequate for the task. I will still whole-heartedly recommend the series to anyone who has not seen it. Hell, I may just go back and watch it all again.