nigeltde | BSG done a tummy shame (Reply)

I don't know if I could say I enjoyed the finale. I cried a bunch of times, mostly over Roslin. I liked the performances, mostly Sackhoff in her flashback. I loved the ending for Baltar. I loved that Boomer got a grace note to her story. I kind of liked the resolution of the Opera House visions, except it felt a bit too fanwanked. There were a lot of little moments I loved: the wedding ring, Sam's final words, the meaning of All Along the Watchtower, Athena smiling at Helo during his briefing, Hoshi and Romo becoming top dogs, Galactica's back breaking, Saul Tigh being so fucking awesome, & c & c.

I really, really, really liked that Kara was something divinely sent. I was so sure I knew what she was (the first Human/Cylon hybrid, thanks to Daniel) so I appreciated that genuine twist there, and it just felt right.

I got pretty frustrated for some admittedly subjective reasons: the Itchy and Scratchie portion of the evening was entertaining enough but felt like any other episode; I think I wrote that RotK epilogue when I was ten, including all the speechifying (except Moore shifted the so-convincing-it's-reaching-Mary-Sue-proportions God-exists-can't-we-all-get-along speech to a bit earlier); after everything they've been through no-one is together except two couples and a family; what the hell was up with Lee's hair?; I didn't get any closure on Leoben which especially niggles cause CKR was the reason I tuned in for the miniseries in the first place; I thought Cavil's end was stupid; no resolution on Adama's get-drunk-and-fall-over sessions which in retrospect look like ham-fisted writerly attempts at characterisation instead of letting Olmos do his thing; I got shitty that they killed Tory, who deserved it but was never really given a chance to be a character, instead of any one of the thousand other characters who deserved it and who would have had more of an emotional impact, and given the end a more bittersweet flavour to match the rest of the series -- it's stupid to be shitty about not getting enough loss but because Roslin's death has been so long coming and Kara's was prefigured by that awful conversation, the whole thing felt falsely upbeat.

Mostly the whole the whole second half left a sour taste in my mouth because it seems to reduce the entire series to some retarded return to primitivism. What? The? Fuck? The preceding four seasons have been about the tension between organics and technology, evolution/devolution, progress/danger, imagination-choice/programming, and suddenly it's all let's frolic with the gazelles and fuck Neanderthals and leave your nasty technology in the sun pls and whatever the hell that meaningless speech Lee gave Adama was. It felt like a really cheap sci-fi ending that was extremely impressed with its own cleverness and I have grown to expect more from this show over the years.

It ties in to one of the biggest mistakes the series has ever made, which was to include that business in modern-day NY with the robot montage, because it dates the shit out of the episode and turns the series into a simplistic morality play just for the awful cutesy fleeting pleasure of oooooh! Just think about what's going on right now? Aren't we soooooo thought provoking?! Aren't we sooooooo relevant?! Because one of the series' biggest strengths is its retro feel, which avoids the whole dating thing and makes it feel like it could exist at any time: any series that does the future will always look retarded in ten years and be locked into its production date. Same goes for anything set in the future that visits the present, because all it is is gimmick. If the critical wank about this show is that it is relevant for all the big post 9/11 debates, despite being shock-horror science fiction, that all the themes and moral quandries play out and are startling and real in this fictional universe, doing what they did is just a sledgehammer's worth of pretentiousness and masturbation.

However, I must say that even despite that, I am tickled pink at the thought of Head Six and Baltar wandering around for 150 000 years and more all meddling and hot like a particularly well-dressed Crowley and Aziraphale. That kicks quite a lot of ass.

Wow, I didn't mean to go on so much. I just really loved this show for four seasons.