Analyzing the Monumental Suck of the BSG Finale (SPOILERS WARNING)

(Fair warning, this post not only contains BSG spoilers, but spoilers for The Matrix and Hyperion Cantos as well). For the last several years I have been telling anyone who would listen to watch Battlestar Galactica, that it was the "best show ever on tv, SF or not." Now, I have to say "it's the best show ever on tv, right up until the stupid, horrible, retarded ending."

First off, I should caveat that the character treatment was pretty good. Yeah, I cried too when Adama and Lee said goodbye and when Roslin died. This is a testament to the acting, direction, overall fantastic execution that BSG maintained throughout the entire series, and ultimately to the ties that the series built between the audience and the characters.

I'm going to try and not repeat too much of what has already been pointed out at io9 and Brad Ideas, both by the authors and commenters - and probably many other places for that matter. Yes, it was Deus ex Machina at nearly its worst, only being eclipsed by an it-was-all-a-dream ending or an autistic kid with a snow globe. But there is extra special annoying in BSG's God-as Deus ex Machina, since for all intents and purposes, Ron Moore is the God in the BSG universe (even cameo-ing with the angels in the final sequence). That's great Ron, I'm happy for your ability to literarily autofellate at the expense of your audience.

On a minor aside, Daybreak Pt. 3 took awhile longer than Pt. 2 to show up on AppleTV and, as a result, for a good 10 minutes I actually thought Cavil agreeing to the truce was the end of the show (yes, I wasn't watching the clock or the running time). In retrospect I really wish that had been the case, although in fairness that would have pissed me off too, just less so than the whole "bah, who needs starships, let's all split up and live off the land and leave a dozen open mysteries hanging" ending.

I've thought for some time now that the Man vs. Machine, or perhaps "Man vs. Man's Creations,"(?) plot has been the preeminent fictional plot of modern times, starting chonologically with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In my view, outside of BSG, there are three major pieces of contemporary fiction telling this story: The Terminator series, The Matrix trilogy, and The Hyperion Cantos. Rather than just sit here and bash and rail BSG in of itself, I'm going to try and compare and contrast BSG with these other three works, in an effort to show why its ending fails on such a monumental level and how it could have been much, much better.

In an odd twist, The Terminator story could now actually fall quite well into the BSG universe as our version of "all of this will happen again." The original movie should probably be credited with putting the idea that our creations could get out of our control squarely into public awareness (2001 could also make this claim, although it is tricky since this was Kubrick's interest in that individual movie, and the overall story was about a whole lot more). From a purely literary standpoint, The Terminator clearly falls way behind our other two examples and BSG. The overall story is still going as a franchise with another movie forthcoming and, unless I'm missing something, has never really tried to do more than provide a nod of the head to the loftier questions surrounding the idea of humans' creations turning against us. It's essentially a more intelligent, darker version of Hollywood's Shit Blows Up genre. Interestingly, for this reason, it doesn't have the same problems as BSG. Because The Terminator never tried to get too deep into meaning or philosophy, it essentially works.

The Matrix was wildly more intellectually ambitious than The Terminator. The Matrix made allusions to everything from The Bible to modern philosophy, all of which have been documented and analyzed ad nauseum. The trilogy had a few very fundamental problems (for example, the "humans as a battery" makes no scientific sense) that most fans were willing to roll with as a conceit. The second and third movies got fairly derailed from a quality standpoint by being too impressed with themselves and having some major "huh?" moments (why use Sentinels to destroy Zion? Why not just drop a bomb or a virus or something?) and some spectacularly campy lines ("she's got a fat ass") that seemed to cheapen the depth and gravitas that the first movie had established. Despite these flaws, the story as a whole essentially held together and followed its own rules. The prophecies were placed by pro-peace machines/programs and the Neo character was essentially engineered to break cycle and establish the ultimate victory of freewill and choice over predestination and mathematical predictability. The final film did not answer all of the open questions, but it answered everything required to make the story work and left plenty of things for fans to interpret as they saw fit (e.g. was The Merovingian and earlier version of The Architect? And was Seraph a parallel early Neo?). This final point is where BSG falls flat on its face in comparison to The Matrix. Rather than tying up all of the mysteries and string pulling, BSG just goes "hey, God is real and can't control everything, but there are angels and miraculous events to nudge the outcome." And Hera is our Earth's Mitochondrial Eve. And watch out for robots!!! And... that's it. On one level, I give BSG some credit for the sheer scope of trying to tie together the two universes and spanning 150,000 years. But just saying "God is real and look! Angels!" is horrifically messy. The Matrix had religious elements, such as prophecies, miraculous powers, and "the Chosen One." These elements worked within the confines of the rules of the story. BSG's religious mechanisms are all over the place. Are God and the angels aliens? Older versions of a resolved "all this has happened before and will happen again" cycle? Are the miraculous events in BSG part of some superscience that is indistinguishable from magic or are they... miracles? Is God really just... God? It certainly appears that way. The show made no attempt to be mysterious and by all accounts one has to take it at face value that they are angels, the miracles are miracles, and God is God, even he hates that name (huh?). In which case, BSG, in every sense of the definition of the term, ceased to be "science fiction." The moment you remove the possibility of scientific explanation from your story's events, you've taken the "science" out and you're left with "fiction."

Up until BSG I considered The Hyperion Cantos the single best piece of science fiction in existence. Once it became obvious just how good BSG was, I placed it into a category where it could eclipse Hyperion, depending on how BSG played out. I obviously feel it has fallen very disappointingly short. What the resolution of the Hyperion story pulled off was to brilliantly weave together the characters' destinies with the plot points. All of the emotional punch was partnered with extremely important plot outcomes. At many levels, I thought BSG was borrowing heavily from the Hyperion story, to the point that I thought that Hera was most likely going to serve the same mechanical role as Aenea. In the Hyperion Universe, the character Aenea is the offspring of a human and an AI character (sound familiar?), and carries a virus which holds the key to breaking the Catholic Church's and the TechnoCore's (the Hyperion universe's machine organization) power over humanity, essentially through love. The outcome manages to be beautiful, sad, horrifying, and hopeful all at once - and it holds together and provides resolution and closure to the entire story. BSG gives us essentially decent character resolution (I still think Kara's individual outcome was phenomenally stupid) and then proceeds to throw the entire rest of itself into a little "watch our for excess and abuse" parable told through the eyes of angels in the context of a semi-omnipotent God. We need to watch out for what we create? Really? The entire series doesn't serve as enough of a warning or connection to our own world that I need to be shown some shots of contemporary robots? Really?

One last note on Dan Simmons comparisons. His Ilium/Olympos books don't really fall into this general plot category, but they do possess a device that is worth noting: The Greek Gods are real in these books. They are super advanced future humans playing around with very advanced quantum and nano technologies to actually play out the Iliad. They really appear to the characters and, for example, Achilles is so hard to kill because they have interfered with his quantum probability field. This sort of device would have much more acceptable for the "one true God" and the Baltar/Caprica Head Angels. It would have stretched the established themes of the show, but it would have worked much better than the goofy ending that Moore decided on.

In truth, I think I sensed this coming. My excitement about new episodes has been diminishing episode by episode since the second half of season four started. In the back of my mind I could sense that they were running out of airtime to properly clean up all of the plot threads and that it was heading towards some sort of awful cop-out. It's a testament to the quality of the first 3 1/2 seasons that I held out hope that there would be some sort of brilliant end that would make it all work.

Overall, I still have to BSG a phenomenal amount of credit for legitimizing and popularizing science fiction to a much broader popular audience (it won a Peabody for crying out loud!). The fact that Emily was completely hooked on the show speaks volumes to its quality as a body of work. This is probably what ultimately upsets me so much about an ending which pulls so much of the "science" out of what was up until the last few minutes, easily the best "science fiction" ever put on TV. Hell, even without resolving all the mysteries they could have just left it with the "angel" Baltar/Caprica just telling the real Balter and Caprica "you aren't ready for the knowledge of what we are yet" instead of literally inserting the supernatural.

How would I have ended it? I will work on that in a forthcoming post, if for no other reason than this one is epically long. Brad has a good list, which it is worth noting that he wrote before the finale.