I just saw it and I feel kinda weird now. There must have been some other way it could have ended, not this confusion. I can't get no relief over the fact that... oh, wait, it's happening to me, too

Here's the finale on youtube while it lasts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaIgQmdbl8A&feature=channel_page

here's torrent link

Sending the fleet into the sun seems like a pretty noob move to me. Surely there must be a goldmine of salvageable material there.

6/10

Did you spot the Ronald Moore cameo?

Yeah, I'm trying to figure out that "harbinger of death" thing too. Perhaps if the circle of violence was broken like they claim they had done, then Kara's destiny changed along with everyone elses'

OR

If the mitochondrial "Eve" was Hera, then we are Cylon/Human hybrids, and Kara did take the Human race to the place of their death. The race that won out were the decendants from the hybrid race from Hera?

I was disappointed. So many noob moves in the end.

The starbuck "resolution" just pissed me off and is just a poor out.

The religious tones that it ended with was bad.

Many things were very nice, but it seemed everyone acted out of character in the end and conveniently knew/did what they were supposed to. I did not like the resolution of Cavil and the rest of the evil cylons either. The way that the bombs were "accidentally" launched.

I'm left with a strong feeling of uuuggghh.

Fuck I hope Lost ends better than this.

Also did anyone notice they paid homage to the original theme music? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHp9oZPqs8E

This kinda sums it up too: http://cinemablend.com/television/Why-The-Battlestar-Galactica-Finale-Is-A-Huge-Copout-And-It-Doesn-t-Matter-16337.html

1) WTF Starbuck was when she returned.

I think this was attempt to be faithful to original series and the Crystal Ship. I think she is either related to "God" ala Baltar/Six Angels and/or like the Crystal Six person that appears to Starbuck in that one episode with the pregnant woman/test and the Scilon that he becomes a buddy with.

2) Why was Starbuck repeatedly called the harbinger of death if she actually sent everyone to this lush green planet to repopulate humanity?

This is a much passed around mistake. I think she was only called harbinger of apocalypse. Which does not mean death, but change / rebirth.

3) Was Starbuck's father really Daniel, the last Cylon "child" created by the final five? If so, was her mother human? How did they successfully breed?

Ron Moore was clear about this in some podcast (or so I've read). Daniel was just that, killed by jealous super evil Cavil. Starbuck was not cylon ever. Also the dead/reborn Starbuck could have seen her father/piano man just like the Baltar/Six visages.

----
The only minorly interesting thing about the cop-out ending with "Eve" and crap is that Cylon DNA is literally built into the human nature and could explain how similar humans end up making the same Cylons eventually. It's like secret code waiting to be expressed. Of course the whole concept of Centurions makes zero sense then. I still don't understand why they were cludged into this TV show once skinjobs introduced.

Major plot flaw is that Cavils etc. know they have all the time in the world. Even if they felt tricked or double crossed they would not blow up ship containing Hera. That would be suicide for their race. Plus they downloaded half of the "stream" isn't that a good start? It's still not clear why the people who invented Resurrection could never recreate it. Did it really take all five of them? Also, how did they ever build the one Resurrection ship then? Could they never repair it or study it? What if it got hit by a random gamma burst or something.

I still can't understand.. How did Saul grow old? How did Cavil wipe memories and insert them five like 50 years prior to nuking planet. They clearly could make more clones of themselves even if there is no resurrection, can't they just go clone crazy and share their thoughts anyways??

Also, what would never happen is sending fleet into sun. Also, no scilons would choose to live on Earth, especially if they all have to split up. And I guarantee one captain would keep crazy weapons stash and technology to be supreme ruler of the new Earth. Besides most of these small groups of people would be killed by tribals in no time. I just can't see giving up all your medicine and stuff like that. It's lame throwback to M. Night movie.

BTW.. I thought the "white ship" couldn't be a more dead giveaway to Starbuck being time traveled/ messed with. I posted some bits of 1980 for reference. I think there is a lot of parallels to Galactica 1980 last episode (test of humanity, disappearing people when they are ready to go, make friends with Cylon, etc.). It used to be on Hulu, but seems to now be missing. (Also, the episode was called "The Return of Starbuck")

http://www.videosift.com/video/Galactica-1980-was-the-best-show-ever

It's kind of sad to see that there was no overarching plot outline, or any genuine meaning behind all the mystical mumbo jumbo. I could probably fill a page or two with criticism, but what's the point? I got a lot of enjoyment out of this show and its characters over the past few years, and it's one of the few TV programs I've seen in its entirety. Yes, this last episode was preposterous and an absolute cop out, but after seeing this show devolve into a meandering mess over the past season and a half, I really didn't expect anything better. Let's just try to remember the good times.

RIP BSG

^ I'm on the same wavelength as you. I could spend a couple pages flaying it to pieces, but I've enjoyed the show so much, I'll forgive the total deus ex machina ending that didn't answer hardly any questions.

Two nits I do want to pick. First is the issue of Greek mythology and Zodiac. Did the greeks find the Scrolls of Pithia, some 147,000 years after the Colonials landed? If not, why did they end up with their own version of the exact same frakkin pantheon as the Colonials, long, long, long, long after they must have died out?

Second, is agriculture. As much as the colonials seemed to want to give up technology, they all seemed to be talking about building subsistence farms and shacks. 150,000 years ago, that was a technological revolution larger than the printing press in terms of how it shaped human society. No, it's not the same as laying down a futuristic city in Tanzania 150,000 years ago, but our contemporary society would be some 140,000 years more advanced than it is today.

However, I think they're doing a similar thing to what Babylon 5 did when it ended -- wrapping up character plot, and giving us new major revelations that raise more questions than they answered. They both think they have a new series to slowly work out the rest of their plots (Crusade for B5, Caprica for BSG).

Based on the trailer for Caprica, it looks like the theme of God & Resurrection will be front and center, and since the elevator pitch for that series is that it's also about the genesis of the 50-years-ago branch of cylons, it has an opportunity to answer questions about the final 5, and why they kept saying "this has all happened before..."

All in all it was a good ending on the character front, though I was deeply saddened by their choice to have Roselyn die, and Starbuck vanish. I think they deserved happier endings.

I'm only growing more agitated with this ending. Bad and lazy.

Kara (after she died), Head Baltar, and Head Six were all angels, doing the will of the superior being (not necessarily god).

Head six at some stages in the series actually caused physical harm to real baltar, not limited to lifting him off the ground in some cases. Her ability to manipulate him, even physically like that, is just the same as Angel-Starbuck, only kara was visible to everyone, and was oblivious to her nature until the very end.

Daniel was just a story plot used to fill in the missing cylon model number, and plays no role in the entire series other than that.

Hera is the mitochondrial eve. Her mixed blood gives the best of the cylons and the humans of the colonies, to man kind on new-earth.

The cylons of Earth 1.0 were the cylons that the original humans before them created. There has been a cycle of man evolving, man creating technology, man mastering technology, technology rebelling against man, and both of them wiping each other out. These cylons were no different.

I too was disappointed with the ending, but theres no real mystery after its all over, just....really lazy writing.

I wanted more.. I have to admit, I don't remember all the details from the whole series. And lots of the time I watched, I was very tired and a bit drunk, so I might have forgotten a lot.

Though wyhen I heard that there was going to be a Galactica remake, and Starbuck would be famela, I was not happy. I had a majot crush on Starbuck when I watched the original series, and a female Starbuck, wtf??

But I nreally grew fond of Kara! I love Aeryn Sun in Farscape, and Kara was like her.. kick-ass hero, who was soft inside. I really would have wanted to know more about her.

I really did not care much about Baltar.. He was way to weird and cryptic and crazy the whole series long. This Adama was way more human.,, and in the end, I wish he could have lived happily ever after with Roslin..

Oh, and what is the life span of a cylon like Tigh? Obviosly he eventually dies without resurrection. And what about Heras?

And what do Cylon Centurions do for fun anyway? Cruise the galaxy and.. ?

Like I said, I probably have forgotten more than I remember right now. I just wanted to know aboiot Starbuck!

I hope 'Lost' gets some better closure and explanation.

Lost doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell of a satisfying ending for a viewer with even modest intelligence and decent memory. I'm watching it for one reason only. Sawyer :::drool:::

The trouble with television writers is that they are inspired to come up w/ a great idea, but they do not fully create a story from start to finish. They're only good at developing characters and keep a show going.

I'm sorry I only have the time to downvote a couple of pretentious tossers' comments, and sorry that I don't have the time to delve into the revelations at the moment, but rest assured I will take the time in the next 24 hours or so to express how I felt/feel about the finale.

And gwiz, what the frak is that, equating Lost and BSG?... You are dead to me.

Oh, and I'll just say this - the very central motif of BSG was - from the very beginning till the very end - the morality of co-existence with AI. In brief, I was satisfied with their conclusion - for one, it was way better, if somewhat alike, than that of the Matrix movies.

Jesus I just watched it in HD. Did they really have to make Roselyn so fucking scary looking? BTW the camera operator really needs to start a 12 step program and wane off the booze. Jesus that was dizzying, I guess 45 mins never hurt as much as an hour and 45 of that.

Poor lazy cop out ending, but I don't blame them it was always going to be hard to end this show, especially after the Starbuck shit they pulled, I always felt they killed her just for the LULZ and season shocker shit.

Over the last season they sucked everything I ever loved about the show, so by the end I was fairly apathetic. Gone was the exploration of leadership and military justice. I would have liked the battle to have been A BIT MORE TACTICALLY SOUND. Just for some kind of action kick.

And the "Look Earth! So green! Fuck Technology!" WTF Man? That was so stupid.

Still better then any ending Lost can conjure up for you losers still watchin', I expect that to end with a cut to a fat man lying on a couch suddenly waking up "Woa WTF was that?"

Ultimately... I think the writers just wrote themselves into multiple corners, plain and simple. It's a pretty big fuck-up when you take such an amazing television series and just write stuff because it seems cool, without any plan or vision as to where it will lead, or how you're going to tie it up and explain it.

Kara being an angel? Bullshit. They painted themselves into a corner after they decided to "resurrect" her (or perhaps when they had her drawing the Eye of Jupiter throughout her childhood). Even so, couldn't they have done better? I saw someone suggest the idea that the resurrected Kara could actually be a clone, created from Kara's ovaries (from when Kara was in the Cylon hospital on Caprica). I don't like that idea just for the fact that it wouldn't truly be Kara, but it strikes me as a more interesting, more reasonable explanation. But perhaps it would've been best to not kill her in the first place.

Head Six and Baltar being angels? They painted themselves into that corner way back in season 1, when Shelly Godfrey showed up. I remember thinking, after watching that episode, "there's no way they're going to be able to adequately explain this." No surprise: I was right.

Kara being the harbinger of death? They'd been repeating that over and over again, but I didn't see it. Same with Hera being essential to the story. I didn't see either of those things. I've heard it theorized that the vast majority of the colonists would've died on Earth 2, and in that sense, Kara was a harbinger of death. And perhaps Hera being a hybrid made her and her descendants strong enough to survive in those conditions. Which I might actually accept, except that I didn't see any hints of either of those in the finale.

Those are the main ones, I guess. I'm sure I'll think of more.

I read this on EW.com, and it does a good job of explaining why I disliked Kara's exit so vehemently:

"For all of its religious overtones and prophetical trappings, Battlestar Galactica has been a show rooted in the real. It was defined by a very real holocaust and the harsh realities of a world lost, of shattered hope, that gave the show its shape. For characters to die, and come back from the dead, and vanish into thin air...feels like a betrayal of that fundamental premise. Is she an angel, as Baltar would claim? A collective figment of everyone's imagination? I know that Ron Moore has said that Kara is whatever we want her to be. I want her to make sense. (And who, exactly, was Kara the Harbinger of Death for? The Cylons? Not for the humans, clearly.)"

Could have been better, could have been worse. Could have done without all the flashback sequences.

When I saw that Daybreak, part 1 began as a flashback on Caprica, that really excited me... it felt like it was going someplace interesting. But I came to find that the flashbacks were not in the original script, and it shows... they weren't particularly interesting or necessary. I had hoped they would tie into a revelation of some sort, that would have come together to mean something important towards the end of the episode. No dice.

"And gwiz, what the frak is that, equating Lost and BSG?... You are dead to me"

How is hoping an ending of one show isn't as crap as this one equating it??

Fuck off EDD Lost will surely surpass this bullshit! Fuck off alllll you haters! I hate you!




Lost better have a great finale

Lost is superior in every way. BSG was good up until, well, basically everything with Hera was for naught. "Angels" or whatever they were. Kara Thrace ended up just being crap. I like things that make sense and as weird and fucked up Lost is, it makes much, much more sense than BSG. Rest in Piece, BSG, you died a horrible death. Hopefully no one is going to resurrect your stinking corpse in a spin-off.

(oops..)

>> ^EDD:
I'm sorry I only have the time to downvote a couple of pretentious tossers' comments, and sorry that I don't have the time to delve into the revelations at the moment, but rest assured I will take the time in the next 24 hours or so to express how I felt/feel about the finale.
And gwiz, what the frak is that, equating Lost and BSG?... You are dead to me.

As empty and hollow as the Matrix ending felt, it too was also far superior to BSG's ending. Ron Moore should bow his head in shame.

>> ^EDD:
Oh, and I'll just say this - the very central motif of BSG was - from the very beginning till the very end - the morality of co-existence with AI. In brief, I was satisfied with their conclusion - for one, it was way better, if somewhat alike, than that of the Matrix movies.

That made me LOL. HATERS heheh...I love raw venting

>> ^alien_concept:
"And gwiz, what the frak is that, equating Lost and BSG?... You are dead to me"
How is hoping an ending of one show isn't as crap as this one equating it??
Fuck off EDD Lost will surely surpass this bullshit! Fuck off alllll you haters! I hate you!


Lost better have a great finale

^ Don't worry, my inherent apathy is still intact. TV in general can kiss my backside

BsG had a slim chance of a satisfactory closure, Lost has even less or none.

But they both had fantastic runs. Better than probably most series.

I think I've never bonded to tv characters as I did in the first couple of BsG series. I felt like I was a cat lady watching a soap.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I'm deliberately not reading this post, as I'm still working through season 3, but I'd just like to say that BSG is cheesy schmaltz most of the time. If I have to see Adama and Apollo hug once more to swelling music, I think I'm going to barf.

The Terminator series is much better, at least I'm only dealing with teen angst.

BSG > Terminator? When hell freezes over! They're on opposite ends of the spectrum (with Terminator on the bottom), as far as the acting, story, casting... everything really, is concerned.

BSG's more "sensitive" moments didn't come off as cheesy to me, for the most part. Aside from that damned "so say we all" bullshit, and Adama's "inspirational" speeches he likes to make every now and then.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Well, I'm still in the middle of season 3 of BSG - but I'm enjoying the storyline in Terminator much more. The last episode on the submarine was very good and I'm enjoying how they are starting to tie-in to the storyline of the upcoming movie. ... And also Summer Glau.

As one who got to watch the finale with the cast and crew of BSG, I loved it.

Begin flaming in five, four, three...

No flaming here, just jealousy. I so badly wanted to love the finale, and I know many did, but I was one of the unlucky ones. You got to see it with the cast and crew? That's pretty damn cool.

If I ever recommend this series to someone who hasn't watched it before, I would tell them to stop watching at the ep where the final 4 are revealed.

Agreed, this final season was dissapointing. So much filler and character development. I wanted more PLOT development!

I enjoyed BSG overall, but the idea of everyone in the fleet suddenly saying screw technology, lets destroy the fleet and get back to a short back breaking life of prehistoric subsistence agriculture in isolated homesteads dotted around a wilderness planet, struck me as laughable, only I wasnt laughing.

I can see about 10 percent say they wanted to do that, but everyone? No way. Most would NOT want to lose ALL the technology they would need to establish a comfortable life on a rough planet. I'm all for living off the land but puhleeese.... I have to have some weapons...seriously..

Wouldn't you want to make sure you can kill some food until you get that spear and bow and arrow workin for ya???

(I'm drinking...shhhh)

"So we put the city here?"
"No, were going back to the stone age"
"Okey dokey"

No, see you must have missed the part where the abrasive lawyer president guy brought up that exact point and the provided response, which was brilliant as if sent down from the heavens, was: don't underestimate how much people want a clean slate. Yes, all the creature comforts that everyone was fighting and killing and mutinying over was truly just insignificant fodder in the end, especially when you can replace it all with the glorious life of mud huts and spear chucking.

I just finished the torrents in the early hours and I loved it and respected the way the show ended.
I'm not one for technical detail and consistency - it doesn't really matter when what's always impressed about BSG is solid acting, great characters and top drama. Even in this respect it wasn't always brilliant but it's been so ballsy and ambitious in tackling serious issues that you could forgive any roughness around the edges. The mutiny for example felt slightly compressed at around one and a half episodes but the emotional payoff was worth it.

I suppose the confirmation of god and angels might irk us atheists but it means we don't have to live with some whacked out explanation of what was happening to Gaius.

In fact from my sleep-addled perspective events seemed to link nicely back into the various themes and prophesies. Was absolutely everything tied off in a nice bow? No, as an intelligent show it doesn't need to, this isn't Star Trek. And happy endings all round should not have been expected either.

Yet it managed to be quite touching. Out of nowhere Gaius' words about being good at farming caused me to tear up as the memory of his father came flooding back.

I started the series by watching the finale. I'll definitely be watching the rest, now.

It sort of reminded me of the end episode of babylon 5 somehow. I was expecting JMS to trot out and shut off all the lights on the galactica.

Hilarious article concerning the BSG finale from the Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news/obama_depressed_distant_since?utm_source=a-section

"I'm a little concerned," first lady Michelle Obama was overheard saying at a fundraising event Tuesday. "When Firefly was canceled, he walked around like a zombie for a week, and Serenity was the only thing that snapped him out of it. Last night he said he felt like he had just discovered David Axelrod was one of the Final Five, whatever that means."

"When we spoke last month, he said season three was his least favorite because some of the episodes with Helo and the Sagittarons—and pretty much anything that involved Cally—were boring and didn't advance the plot," Afghan president Hamid Karzai said. "But I told him that when you watch it all on DVD, and you don't have to wait a whole week for a new show, those peripheral episodes actually add new color to the already established world."

>> ^Deano:
I'm not one for technical detail and consistency - it doesn't really matter when what's always impressed about BSG is solid acting, great characters and top drama.

I loved the acting, characters, and drama also. But since when did plot not matter? The story of BSG was really damned good for the most part. Is it asking too much for the story to make sense? For beginnings to have endings? In my opinion, they promised so much, and failed to deliver when it came time.

I agree with that.

In the beginning one of the most fascinating things was that all this intricate plot was tied to an ending they had fully mapped out. But after watching that "final special" where the producers, etc. discuss how they were just trying to come up with who should be the final 5 literally right before they were to reveal them left me certain all they'd been doing up to the ending was trying to create what seemed like cool plot points, but they never had a full story developed.