BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: The Final 10 - Page 37

We never had a discussion. I gave my opinion and you came back with simplistic ideas that failed to respond to anything of substance I wrote. Your sentiments were basically, "you're wrong, the show is good" without ever backing yourself up. Then you lazily insist that the show is great simply because people disagree about it. It doesn't surprise me that you're "bored" by this, though...since thinking critically is probably very hard for you and probably burns you out quickly.

Dude, roll back a few pages. This discussion began before you got here. Anyway, I submit. You’re right, or smarter, or whatever. Everyone else please continue the debate. I’m going to begin the post-BSG chapter of my life.

So, with Head-Baltar's line at the end, the mystery of the "Temple of the One Who Must Not Be Named" gets a sort of conclusion.

And I get that it's just for audience convenience that the angels keep the form of Baltar and Six for this scene, but I kind of like pointlessly wondering if those are their true forms, and the nonangel Baltar and Six were created in their image as some kind of...divine joke.

Sorry for resurrecting the thread but I've only recently bought the 4.5 dvds and I just finished watching them.
I needed to post something to cool down a moment and let the frustration dissipate.
I won't even begin to comment on the utter disaster that was this "finale".

Just allow this post to be a "funeral pyre", to remember the brilliance of the first seasons, and to celebrate the love we all shared for some of the most powerful characters that ever appeared on television (and I mean mostly Kara and Col. Tigh, of course).
Characters that didn't deserve to be destroyed and put to shame by the inane ending of the show.
Characters that maybe owe more to the actors than to the writing, anyway.

One good thing out of this: I'll actually save time for other series, for now I KNOW I won't be watching Caprica or anything else with the name "Moore" (not even another Moore, to be on the safe side) attached to it.

I feel... conned.
There isn't really a more precise word for it, as they even spilled money out of me...

That's stupid.

I actually loved the finale (minus the super awkward robot montage and Ron Moore cameo). And for someone wanting to post on the brilliance of the previous seasons, you sure didn't take into account that season one is all Moore (and also easily bests every other season).

That final *ROBUTS!* montage pushed me over the edge from kind of hating to loving the finale.

Yeah the final robot montage was fine. Really there are much bigger flaws in Season 4 that are legitimate plot holes.

Seeing the previews for "the Plan" it looks like just the kind of FanWank I now dread in franchises:

See WHY the Cylons attacked every 33 minutes in "33" (I hope we are treated to a 20 minute scene where the Cylons debate whether it should be 32 minutes, 27 minutes etc.)

See HOW the 6 known as "Shelley" managed to get off the Galactica in Season 1

LEARN what the Plan was!

Of course I'll still watch it like the cheap whore that I am...

uhm, ok, thanx.
And I guess humans who get to earth, destroy their technology, start everything from scratch and then SOMEHOW, 150.000 years later, rebuild everything exactly as it was (houses, cars, suits, ties, songs...)
I guess THAT's intelligent, right?
(oh right, probably *God* loves just one type of clothes and He wants them redone over and over again throughout space and time)

A good part of the "perceived brilliance" came from the expectation of what was coming.
I don't deny that the first seasons were brilliant and involving. That's why I'm pissed now.
They simply ruined everything that came before with an absurd wrap up. And I'm not inclined to experience the same thing again, as I said, I felt betrayed by the way things were handled in the end.

Well I'm sure that Ron Moore will feel your absence deeply. And it will hurt.

I really don't get why in this forum people are always aggressive and sarcastic against other posters, it's an "out of frustration" kinda thing?

...point is, anyway, that MANY people felt exactly as I did, or worse (starting from the ones who were watching the serie with me).
It's a symptom, if anything.
And his new pilot was rejected, I gather...

People on this forum aren't aggressive and sarcastic against other posters.

People on this forum are aggresseive and sarcastic against other posters who say moronic fucking things.

An example would be: Hey, this thing here that I think is really super fucking brilliant for the first 76 hours of it's run? I didn't like that last fourteen minutes, therefore I AM NEVER WATCHING ANYTHING AGAIN FROM THE CREATOR EVERY AGAIN!!!!ELEVENTYONEONEONE!!!!

Then again, maybe your view is valid. I probably never should have listened to another thing Eddie Vedder did because I didn't like that last song on Vitalogy, eh?

That's right, everything that has happened will happen again... including fashion homie.

And MANY people didn't. Sucks to be you and your viewing companions, I guess.

Virtuality wasn't bad, dum-dum. It was on Fox. You know? Firefly, Brimstone, Space: Above and Beyond?

That's not the same case, as the ending of a show gives meaning to the rest of it.
My comment may have been over the lines, but it erupted from the frustration of being abruptly delivered such a horrible finale, after 4 years of... would you say, loyalness and expectation. Heck, I even had to IMPORT the dvds from the US (I'm italian) as I didn't want to download them as everyone else did.
Certainly after the experience it looks a hell of a lot wiser to avoid future works from Mr. Moore... remove my previous tone, ok, my bad, but the substance remains.

A truly good finale wouldn't have generated so many negative reactions (because you're not denying that this one did, are you?).
A work of fiction that truly works, never does.
Read the Hyperion saga for instance... you might not like the genre, but IF you're into it, you WILL be satisfied by the ending of the 4th book.
You can't find anyone who has gone through the entire saga and has something to say about the ending: that's because it delivers on all levels, it's the perfect crowning of the story, and this is all there is to say about it (and it's not even a happy ending, mind you).

As for the rest, if you want to pay visit and check whether indeed it "sucks to be me", you're welcome, I like having guests. I live in the Tuscan countryside, if you happen to be in the whereabouts..

The miniseries and seasons that followed also received many negative reactions. It wasn't for everybody. Shocking, I know.

Conversely, are you denying the finale received many positive reactions? Because it did. Mine included. I was lucky enough to see the finale at a packed screening that received a standing ovation at the end. So it seemed at least a few hundred people surrounding me enjoyed it. Does that mean it was a great way to end the series? No. It just means that it did indeed positively resonate with a significant number of people. Do you have any more meaningless anecdotal evidence to counter my equally meaningless anecdotal evidence?

See, your need to paint your opinion as an absolute fact is what's getting you into trouble here. Some loved the finale. Some hated it. That was true of the entire series. What else is new?

And considering you live in beautiful Tuscany, I'd imagine you'd have more fulfilling things to do with your time. I know I would.

I was very hard on the show, and still have major problems with the last season, but the finale has stuck with me. Loved it when I saw it. I still have next to no complaints. It was an amazing piece of television and incredibly satisfying.

So . . . you're standing by your stance that if you don't like the last .5% of something, not only is it irrelevant how much you liked the first 99.5% but you'll actively avoid anything from the creator from there on out?

Good luck with that.

That's bullshit. There has never been a work of fiction, either the finale or in whole, that made everybody happy. That just never happens. No matter how beloved a work may be, it has detractors. If you honestly believe that every single person who read Hyperion was happy with the ending, then you're just being naive. But considering the way you've framed your arguments up to this point, that would hardly be surprising.

No, I said that it satisfied far too low a percentage of faithful followers than you would have expected from a show with its "history".
If half the people who praised it before were so irritated by the ending (I've seen "worst ending ever" threads about everywhere), I think there's a problem there. Too bad I'd already bought the dvds.
And sorry, I didn't mean to be an ass, but you did start being offensive.


There were other bits in the show that I didn't like, but they were in less relevant places and far more tolerable. Screwing the ending is the worst thing you could do to any story.

Just do a search.
You may find people who hated the work as a whole, but those who liked it, loved the ending. I repeat, there you have an example of an ending that works.

Anyway, sorry to waste your time, all. I added my opinion, I have no desire to turn it this into a fight.

I was merely responding to you being an ass. And you continue to be an ass by claiming to have any real sense of what percentage liked or disliked the finale. You really have to let that one go. And you're also being an ass for damning the majority of the show and the creator of that majority simply because YOU didn't like the way it ended.

I can't believe a concept this simple requires this much explanation. Maybe it's a language thing.

What if it is more of a 60/40 like dislike ratio.

I mean I liked alot about this show, but there is alot I disliked. Most of the start of the second season, almost every bit of the final half except the 1st episode after earth and 2 part munity.

I like characters while at the same not liking themes of the show (apparently we all be better off with a military run goverment).

And the ending feels like, so what the hell was this all about. What all the buisness about this occuring again and again if there (quite clearly based on the ending) is no way to change it.

I'd forgotten what a profoundly irritating thread this was.

I'll throw my two cents in: the only problem I had with the finale was Kara Thrace being an angel and Lee being left alone. It may be corny, but I wanted them to end up together. The way it ended for them felt like bullshit after four years of cheesy will they or won't they Sam & Diane tension.

The rest I wasn't super happy with but I did like. I believe it will much better when I eventually do a marathon of the whole series.

Our dear editors on this site use far more colorful and disrespectful tones versus movies or directors they don't like, and everyone is fine with it... being a forum where such things are debated, it's part of the game.
And I merely stated that I hated the finale, and that I'll avoid future Moore's works like the plague (which is what will happen).

Attacking another poster lies on another level IMHO (since we're "equals" and out of the movie business, in general), maybe it has something to do with proving one's worth, I don't know. Anyway, it seems to be standard practice on this forum, too.

Truth.

I actually liked that they didn't really have a clean ending for the Lee-Kara-Anders love triangle. The angel thing, really bugged me. It seemed like they had everything else wrapped up tight, but had this one big dangling plot thread left, so they just through some MAGIC at it. But if it worked for others, rock on.

But you make it sound as if they decided she was an angel at the last minute just to get rid of her. It's pretty clear in retrospect that she wasn't human from the moment she returned after the wreck. I have no trouble believing that the writers planned for her to vanish once they made it to Earth.

You keep repeating this verbatim as if that's clarifying your position. It isn't. It's just repeating. And also, still fucking stupid.

I'm just disappointed, overall. Caught up on seasons 1 and 2 on Netflix, and then all through season 3 I told myself I'd hold off on buying any of the series so I could buy the whole thing when the story was finished. In the meantime, I recommended the show to everyone I knew as one of the best TV shows ever made.

Then the finale happened. And while I still think the first 2.5 seasons were amazing and there were plenty of highlights after that, it definitely taints my overall opinion of the show. The whole time I was watching the series, I was thinking about what it was building towards, and how it was all part of the writers' plan. Now I can't watch those episodes without knowing that the writers had no plan whatsoever. They've admitted as much in interviews. The final five and all the retconning leading up to "Starbuck was an angel" just kind of ruins the whole experience for me, to the point where I don't know if I'll ever revisit the series (whereas up until 4.5, it was probably my favorite TV show of all time, even with small lapses here and there).

This is just my opinion, of course (and I also thought maybe 70% of the finale actually worked). But think about how The Matrix lost its luster after the sequels. Or, if in Lost's final season, we find out it's all just a dream.

I just feel like BSG fucked the landing so hard that I've lost interest, although maybe I should give the full series another shot. Still, it'll hurt knowing the whole time they were just making it up as they go along, instead of telling a contained story from start to finish.

It absolutely felt like they decided it at the last minute to get rid of her, imo. It's not so much the vanishing itself, but the fact that her nature is so baldly, ham-fistedly supernatural. They built up this big mystery around what had happened to Starbuck, and the answer they settled on is about the easiest, least interesting one I can imagine.

It's also related to a reason I'm not really chomping at the bit to rewatch the series, particularly the later seasons. Now, I'll fully cop to being an essentially non-spiritual person with a prejudice for my own species, but at the end of the show, you're left with the two Adamas and Helo (whose presence dwindles as the show goes on) as fully human characters who are not being directly manipulated by the Almighty. And that's the kind of character I'm interested in. I'm much more interested in seeing people struggle with their humanity in desperate situations than in seeing people struggle with what it means to be a secret robot with repressed memories or a resurrected angel who doesn't know they're an angel.

Basically, the show started to lose me when it shifted the focus from the humans to the cylons, and I'm worried that the earlier stuff I loved so much will be marred by knowing that half the cast are actually robots, that Baltar is unequivocally being driven by ghosts and not his own damaged psyche, that Roslin's religious visions are 100% genuine, etc.

As a whole, the show is still a remarkable achievement, but I do think it drowned in its own mythology at the end.

What it basically boils down to for people who were unsatisfied with the latter part of the series is that they weren't watching the show they thought they were. The series tilted a bit more to the metaphysical side of things and many didn't appreciate it. I can understand that, I don't agree philosophically with some of the show's messages but on its own terms Galactica came to the best conclusion it could have. A lot of the themes it dealed in were too large to be answered... they made the absolute right decision not to have Adama meet the Cylon God or whatever B.S. they could've doled out to tie everything up.

I also don't think people understand the show's creative philosophy. When it's said that the writers "didn't know where they were going," that's something that worked in Galactica's favor. It allowed them to create more fluid and natural storylines by reacting to how things played out on the show. For instance, in one of the commentaries Moore noted that they had planned to have Lee and Lara have some kind of romance but dropped the idea because the actors just didn't have that type of chemistry. Creative paid attention to how the actors drove the story and wrote around that. No matter how thoroughly you plan things, you never know how it's gonna come across on screen. They made the wise decision to watch and react.

Sure, I'm not saying I know better than the creators what the show was really about. But I liked the show I thought I was watching a lot better than the one it turned out to be at the end.

I absolutely agree that these questions were too large to be answered. And they chose to answer them definitively at the end, which had the effect of making the whole thing feel trite and smaller than life, imo.

A show doesn't need an infallible bible from the outset that it can never deviate from. Making it up as you go along has inherent assets and liabilities. The benefits are in the character interactions and being able to adjust them according to performance and reaction and so forth. The drawback comes when you have an overarching mythology driving things, which this show had to a degree that few other shows ever glanced at. And as they focused more and more on the mythology as the show wound down, the cracks showed wider and wider.

I'm all for improvisation, but if you have supernatural/mythological elements featuring prominently in your story, you need to have that framework figured out from the beginning and consistent throughout, even if you're going to keep the audience in the dark about the specifics for a while. Otherwise it winds up feeling arbitrary, which is what I took away from the finale.

Sure, I'm not saying I know better than the creators what the show was really about. But I liked the show I thought I was watching a lot better than the one it turned out to be at the end.

I absolutely agree that these questions were too large to be answered. And they chose to answer them definitively at the end, which had the effect of making the whole thing feel trite and smaller than life, imo.

A show doesn't need an infallible bible from the outset that it can never deviate from. Making it up as you go along has inherent assets and liabilities. The benefits are in the character interactions and being able to adjust them according to performance and reaction and so forth. The drawback comes when you have an overarching mythology driving things, which this show had to a degree that few other shows ever glanced at. And as they focused more and more on the mythology as the show wound down, the cracks showed wider and wider.

I'm all for improvisation, but if you have supernatural/mythological elements featuring prominently in your story, you need to have that framework figured out from the beginning and consistent throughout, even if you're going to keep the audience in the dark about the specifics for a while. Otherwise it winds up feeling arbitrary, which is what I took away from the finale.

I think it's useful to compare BSG with Babylon 5 in terms of improvised vs planned story arcs.

Babylon 5 had a very defined, nay rigid plot over a 5 season arc. But the network demanded that the show lead be replaced after Season 1, which necessitated a whole bunch of script changes. And when it looked like Season 4 would be the last, the show runners crammed all of the plot threads into Season 4. Then they got season 5 approved with not much at all to write about. So we got a season of filler episodes and attempts to extend the show's mythology (failed attempts in my opinion).

BSG seems to have a very clear storyline up through the end of season 2, then seems to fall apart until the last few episodes. There is the fate of Helo on Caprica, the attempts of the Fleet to get their act together, the finding of Kobol, and of course the Cylon plotlines (Sharon and Six mostly)

LOTS of filler episodes in Season 3 and 4.0, the writers do admit they really had no plan on where to go or how to end the series.

But I give Moore a lot of credit for going back to the basic implications of the series (and the original 70's version) and actually following through with them. For me the finale actually saves the show's final season from a lot of improbabilities and tap dancing by the writers (mostly the Final Five buildup and let down)

So I guess where I'm going with this is to say whether the show runners have a rock solid plotline for the show's entire run or not, story arcs change, actors change, and there has to be some adaptivity to make the show work overall.

Again, I'm not against improvising or responding to what is and isn't working as a show goes on. But I do think that you shouldn't introduce a plotline if you don't have a pretty good idea of where it's going. Particularly if you are going to stretch them out over multiple seasons. Which you don't have to do. The Sopranos, for example, had very self-contained seasons, story-wise, and it's one of the greatest shows ever. Definitely not the most tightly plotted, but because the storylines didn't carry over in the same way (and the show made a thematic point of life being full of loose ends) it was not such a big issue. Deadwood is another show that made discursive plotting a textural strength, but again it gets away with this because it promises very little, plotwise, in the early going.

With Galactica, they threw out a lot of big story points early on, which creates the responsibility to follow through on them. When you open every show with the proclamation that your villains have a master plan, you need to know what said plan is so their actions are consistent with it when it is revealed. When a mystery like who final cylon models are drives multiple storylines over several years, you need to know who they're going to be so it doesn't feel arbitrary when we find out.

Not saying every show needs to be planned out like this. But the type of story they chose to tell (heavy with mystery and mythology), and the length at which they chose to tell it (with expectations steadily rising the longer the explanations are put off), require more planning and forethought to execute satisfactorily, imo.

It probably seems like I'm being incessantly negative about the show, but really, as an amateur writer, I just find this to be an interesting topic. As this thread will attest. My basic conclusion there was that for a long-form story to end well, it has to be aware of and informed by its internal history as it ends. And to me, BSG felt like it was rewriting and generally working against its history during the home stretch.

I loved the finale. The only thing it was missing was showing us the discussion with the rest of the fleet about abandoning technology.

At least Adama could have had one last rousing speech to the entire fleet. But I suppose he had one of his best before they rescued Hera. "This is likely to be... a one way trip !!!"
But did anyone else think the rescue went a little too smoothly?

I think people would have less problems with the series if they didn't know every single detail about the writing process. If you didn't know they made some of it up as they went along - EG the final five - you wouldn't be so bothered.

Huh? I have seen all the episodes. I don´t need extra knowledge about the writing process to see storylines going nowhere.

Yeah, I thought the Final Five storyline was sloppy and twist-fueled before I heard Moore admit as much on a podcast. Imo, Five was just way too many. It tipped the balance of the show way too far from the humans to the cylons, and since we'd been through much of this stuff with Boomer in earlier seasons, I was a bit numb to the ZOMGIMAROBUT angle. Then there's all the convulsions and retconning of prior plot points* they got bogged down in trying to make sense of it. It would've taken a lot to convince me that this wasn't hastily thrown together to justify the twist.

*They're cylons, but different than the cylons we've known up to that point, so really they're something entirely new to the show that they are conflating with the other skinjobs so we can hit familiar story points. The Chief's son isn't his son. The wife Tigh murdered is still alive. Anders has always been a secret geometry wonk. And since its everyone's favorite story device, repressed memories for everyone!

Do not get me wrong, I loved this show. I think it is some of the best syfy I have ever seen, but I do feel it did not quite live up to the hopes I had for it when all was said and done. Some of it seemed like they were making it up on the fly, and the way it ended left alot to be desired.

With that said, some moments and episodes of this program rank among the best moments of television I've ever seen.

But... Tigh as a cylon? Come on.....

^ Yeah it's tough for me to defend most of the Final Five garbage. I'd say the Gaeta Mutiny story Arc and the series wrap up were the saving graces of Season 4, and the Baltar Trial in Season 3 redeem that season.

I do think Moore took some glee in subverting the expectations set by the network's advertising as well as the show itself. Very often in his commentaries he notes that the series sets up something only to knock it down or re-write it. Boomer's arcs is an example. So I do think a lot of this was deliberate if perhaps not as well executed as we'd have liked.

BEHOLD What might have been

The Richard Hatch BSG Sequel trailer from 1999 has finally surfaced!

Behold!

That trailer is incredible. His speech about the salvation of the human race is just like Bill Adama's from the new mini-series. If Bill Adama's speech was awful.

Personally, I felt that about half or so of Season 3 and a good chunk of Season 4 felt like rough drafts. The Final 5 should have had another run through to make it matter more. There were parts that I thought were great, like the mutiny arc, and even the intermixing of the fleets, but they didn't have all the bugs worked out before we got the episodes.

So reaction to the final seasons of Battlestar was mixed? Hmph. I just marathoned through the show -- all four seasons, first time through, in a month -- and I was floored by just about everything. Including the finale, which may be my favorite series ender ever next to Six Feet Under.

I have a theory that the finale would be better with a marathon viewing like you did than over four years.

Just finished a first-time viewing marathon myself, so the above is quoted (and thread resurrected) for truth. It was like watching an 80 hour movie; there were slow parts, and there were bad parts, but they all fell away in the grand sweep of one amazing story that culminated in just about the most emotionally satisfying finale of a work of fiction I've ever experienced.

I think maybe the aniticipation of having to wait between episodes and seasons might put some people in a postion to impose their own expectations on the story. Watching the series straight through, I was caught up in the flow of the narrative, and never found myself trying to predict where it was taking me. The richly rewarding experience of watching BSG (and before that The Wire) in this way may have forever put me off watching television drama in serialized weekly installments.

Having read through most of the last few pages of this thread, I am resisting the urge to dredge up some of the arguments about the finale. Suffice it to say, the finale was flawed, but absolutely brilliant, and anyone who disagrees is a stupid fucking faggot.

To be fair, right the start the show kept hammering that the Cylons (and thus by extension the show's writers) "have a plan". This is why season 3.5 and 4.0 making it as we go along-everybody's a Cylon felt fake for those who had been watching for a long time.

BTW, you would've had more credibility without your last line.