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42 of 49 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Battlestar Concludes, April 19, 2009
This review is from: Battlestar Galactica: Season 4.5 (DVD)
While I would give the series as a whole (and each individual season preceding this) 5 stars, I feel compelled to drop this final chapter to 4 stars. Battlestar Galactica is a brilliant, gutsy show, and the risks it took are part of the reason we fans got so intense about it over the years. It was called the most subversive show in television history by Rolling Stone magazine, and, given the plot-lines about terrorism and insurgency at the height of the Iraq War, I think that's a fair assessment. The final season (4.0 and 4.5) become more about the internal mythology of the show, and this is where a few problems sneak in. As shows like Lost demonstrate, it's easier to set up mysteries than to resolve them. Battlestar resolves many of the plot-lines brilliantly (I love the choice of the final cylon in particular; and one character's suicide is truly haunting), but others leave me wanting. Starbuck, one of the best characters in this all-around extraordinary cast, gets muddled. I'm trying to avoid spoilers, so I'll just say that the resolution of the mystery surrounding her character is not satisfactorily handled. Ron Moore's decision to leave her conclusion ambiguous is, in my opinion, a glaring error.
The series finale is naturally the focus of this set, and I must say I've had mixed feelings about it since it aired. On the one hand, it was an intense, emotional experience, never boring for a moment, and brought nearly every character and plotline to a conclusion. However, I think it may have over-reached, beating us over the head with its "message." Battlestar Galactica was often a reflection of ourselves and our world, but never before had it been didactic, as it is in its final scene.
With another movie on its way and a prequel series for next year, Battlestar Galactica isn't over yet, but this is the end of the story as begun in the 2003 miniseries. It's been a remarkable journey and absolutely essential viewing for sci-fi and non-sci-fi fans alike.
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42 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Remember When?, September 8, 2009
This review is from: Battlestar Galactica: Season 4.5 (DVD)
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS. Don't read it if you have not watched the final season.
IT ALSO CONTAINS CYNICISM BORN OF CRUSHED EXPECTATIONS. If you don't like cynicism in general, take a pass.
IF YOU DON'T LIKE READING REVIEWS FROM PEOPLE YOU DISAGREE WITH (assuming you loved the ending) skip it entirely.
TO ALL OTHERS: READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.
TO THOSE WHO AGREE THAT THE SHOW ENDED IN DISASTER: my heart goes out to you. It really does.
Remember the first season of Battlestar? When the Cylons were truly menacing? Inhuman enough to snap a baby's neck, resolved enough to nuke countless worlds into oblivion, and coldly calculating enough to track the Galactica across vast swathes of space, showing up with robotic precision exactly every 33 minutes? Remember how compellingly frightening they were, an antagonist that was easy to hate, to fear, to even dread? I remember watching that first season and being immeasurably impressed with the quality of the show, with the compelling characters, with the sci-fi elements, with everything that was Other about the Cylons, and the promise of a show that entered the spiritual and hard science fiction realms with deft ease. I remember the promise of the show: the potential to be THE BEST science fiction tv show ever created.
4 years later, is that what those who fell in love with the show received? Did the promise of Battlestar come to fruition? Tragically the answer is no. Not just no but NOT EVEN CLOSE.
Over a few seasons the show progressed away from excellence and originality and toward a banality and insignificance epitomized by the conclusion--if you can call it that since many things were never properly concluded. Cylons became humans, humans became Cylons, and all that made them distinct and interesting as parallels of one another or opposite sides of a spectrum, or beautifully constructed antagonists was lost in the process. I'm reminded of a story of the worst trade in baseball history in which a minor league team traded all of its players to another team for all of their players. The other team was their arch rivals, and it left all of their fans unsure if they should be cheering for the players that they had come to love, or for their team which was now comprised of players they had loved to hate...
Essentially this is what Batlestar delivered, a blurring of the lines to the point of causing this viewer to ask, "who cares?" Honestly, who cares if the humans/Cylons/humans/hybrids survive? Haven't they all just become the same thing anyway? Who cares about Cavel and his petty obsessional sadism? Who cares about Adama and all his rage over Saul or Kara, or anyone else for that matter? There is nothing left to care about except individual characters 'tempest in a tea cup' emotional outbursts and petty infighting. The show lost its way in Season III and never recovered--you can only care about your protagonists in the light of their antagonists, and when those two things stop being distinct, the wheels fall off. This is a concept known to storytellers of all generations, and it amazes this viewer that the writers could get this so painfully, ineptly wrong.
And to add insult to injury, all that was built into most of the characters that we DID care deeply about, all that made Kara Thrace who she is and was, all the questions about what it meant that she returned, that she came back from the dead, the implications of that were all swept away in probably the single most unfulfilling moment in the show. Why did she paint the future as a child and as an adult? Why did she return from death? How does she find the real location of earth using a song that her father taught her and that Anders is able to help decode? What does it all mean? We never get to know because... Kara vanishes. Poof. End of line.
The fleet finds Earth, and what do they decide to do? Destroy all their ships and technology? Please. I hope they all realized they now get to be subsistence dirt farmers without the aid of modern tools (or even ancient tools since I doubt that useful things like animal husbandry, crop cultivation and specialization, basic meteorology, navigation, and a whole host of other essentials to even ancient civilizations are skill sets of a space faring race that has just spent a few years scurrying across the galaxy). I hope the massive number of thugs that resided on some of the ships were all good boys and girls and turned in their fire arms or we all know how this will end. Honestly the idea that you can get 30,000+ people to 100% to agree on ANYTHING is just stupid and especially something that catastrophically life changing. Did anyone bother to keep a still or two, because it not there are going to be some VERY unhappy residents. Like Saul. Or his godawful wife.
The 30,000+ survivors of humanity's near total destruction also decide that separating into small groups and each taking a continent is a good plan? I guess being isolated from larger society in the confines of a ship convinced them that what they really wanted once the war was over was to stay separated? Adama so much so that he decides to live the life of a hermit, ignoring the first chance he's had to spend quality time with his son Lee?
Is this really what these guys were fighting so hard to survive for? Giving up all they knew and spending several hundred thousand years living lives that Hobbes might describe as "nasty, brutish, and short"? All their culture, society, inventions, science, history, all swept away in a reactionary decision that was never even explained in the show? The engineers and scientist and teachers and historians and even the priests/priestesses told to drop everything and pursue survival (a full time job absent any real technology)?
New Earth turns out to be our Earth. We get a preachy message about robots and climate change. We learn that Hera is the mitochondrial mother of all the humans (in fact hybrids) that presently live on Earth. She was so important, so essential, so... disappointing? Does this cheap cop-out please anyone? Because if it does, I want to hear what your theories were when you were watching the show for the first time. Why was Hera so important? What about the prophecies about her, the shared vision of Kara, The President, Athena, etc... Were any of your theories that she would prove to be the mitochondrial mother of all humanity? I would be willing to bet that ANY of the things you thought up would have been a better resolution that what we were offered. Because it JUST DIDN'T MAKE SENSE. We were led to believe over 4 seasons that she was ESSENTIAL and VERY IMPORTANT and in-fact a lynch-pin around which anchored the show. Instead she became a silly foot note strapped on as the show breathed its last shuddering breaths and collapsed in on itself.
BSG is over. All our time and energy spent watching it, talking about it, thinking about it.
We feel, what exactly? Elated at the brilliance of the answers to the show's myriad questions? Fired up because against all odds the fleet made it to Earth? Introspective as we consider the profoundness of show's deeper subtexts?
Or are we wishing for that gun Cavel used to off himself so we can end the painful headache we've developed from asking the same question over and over and over again?
Why. Why did it have to end like this?
Remember when?
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246 of 315 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An absolutely brilliant ending to a glorious series, March 23, 2009
This review is from: Battlestar Galactica: Season 4.5 (DVD)
Warning! Spoiler alert! The following review contains very signficant spoilers, including several regarding the final episode of the series. If you wish to remain spoiler free, do NOT read the following review.
In the words of the immortal Butthead, forewarned is . . . uh . . . something.
I am astonished that the finale of BSG is proving to be controversial. I watched the final episode with a sense of excitement, delight, and deep gratitude. I found it moving and appropriate to the series as a whole. I would rank it with the best series finales that I have ever seen, alongside BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER and SIX FEET UNDER. In particular I found the final 20 or so minutes to be especially gratifying, as we see the final 38,000 some odd survivors of the long journey from the 12 Colonies to New Earth finally find their new home. Did everything end precisely as I wanted? Of course not. But what is important is that it ended the way that Ron Moore clearly intended it to end. I had long suspected that one of the first things that had been conceived was the role of Hera (or someone like Hera) in the overall scheme of things. That she would indeed prove to be "The Shape of Things to Come" was something of which I was confident, and I found the role ascribed to her -- essentially the DNA mother of our own humanity -- as both powerful and fulfilling of the great importance assigned to her. [And Ron Moore's brief cameo as the gent reading the magazine about what is obviously Hera's remains was similar to J. Michael Straczynski's cameo at the end of BABYLON 5.]
The 2008-2009 television season has seen the ending of a string of truly great series. BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, THE SHIELD, and THE WIRE managed to end on their own terms, with their overall arcs ended on their own schedule. Other equally great series like PUSHING DAISIES were stopped in mid-stride. That a show as great as PUSHING DAISIES could be cancelled makes me all the more grateful that some shows like BSG manage to make it all the way to the end. My own television viewing will now be greatly diminished by the end of BSG. No show of the past five years has so consistently obsessed me. It wasn't always as consistent as I would have liked. FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS is a far steadier, more consistently brilliant show, but while it has never had anywhere near as many as weak episodes as BSG, neither has it ever reached BSG's best moments. Never, ever have I had a series (with the exception of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER) at its best so completely shock and amaze me. No other show (except BUFFY) has managed to astonish me so frequently. And it did this by almost never recycling stories seen on other series. BSG not only never recycled stories from other shows, but never recycled its own stories. Any stunning plot twist, once used, was never used again.
Rarely do series redefine their genre, but BSG has done more to alter what one can do on a television Sci-fi series than any since STAR TREK first debuted in the late sixties. No future serious series in the genre can ignore the achievements of BSG. They might decide not to take up the challenge that BSG has laid down, but even that is a way of acknowledging the new standards it has laid down. Series like STARGATE SG-1 now seem oddly simplistic in comparison. Ron Moore stated in his initial mission statement that his goal was to completely redefine TV Sci-fi and in this he was supremely successful. It is impossible to overstate the importance of BSG in taking TV Sci-fi to the next level. Many have noted that it was the first important Sci-fi series that was made for adults rather than teens, but it is also the first that was directed to thinking adults instead of only Sci-fi geeks. BSG expanded the audience of those interested in Sci-fi, with thousands of people who had previously been determined not to watch any show in the genre obsessed with the fate of those on Galactica. And it has also been a huge hit with academics and intellectuals. The only television series that has received as much attention from academics has been BUFFY, and the only show to attract as much attention from nonacademic intellectuals has been BUFFY and THE SOPRANOS. Who would have thought a show based on the passionately maligned 1978 series (a show that has a small but dedicated cadre of fans, but which is otherwise attacked by TV critics and serious Sci-fi fans and writers as one of the worst series in TV history) could have ascended to such heights?
I have started rewatching the series from the very beginning in light of the series finale and I am amazed at how good it all feels knowing how it will end. The series finale of BSG fit the rest of the series so perfectly that it managed retroactively to make the rest even better. I frankly have long suspected that Ron Moore is a big, fat liar. He has often stated things that were not true or at least were only partially true. I think he had a great deal of the overall story planned from near the beginning. I believe he had many of the main arc details in mind from the beginning. I do think that he left a lot of room for alternation and development, but I believe he knew from the time of the miniseries that he intended to have the remnants of the human race align with the Cylons to become the genetic ancestors of our own human race. One of the first moments in BSG of note was when Caprica Six looked at an infant with amazement, shortly before she broke its neck (an act that is one of the most effective mission statements I've ever seen -- after that, you knew the show was capable of anything). And the crucial moment came when President Laura Roslin stressed to Commander Adama that it was crucial that they leave that part of the galaxy to find a new home where the survivors could "start having babies." Early in the first episode of Season One Head Six asks Gaius Baltar if he would like to have a child. We then soon learn of the mission of the other Sharon on Caprica to try and make Helo fall in love with her and get her pregnant. In retrospect, we see that "The Plan" was to perpetuate the Cylon race by biological reproduction.
Similarly, from early on the show was concerned with ever deepening religious themes, as God (though Head Baltar in the finale tells Head Six that he doesn't care for that name) directed the fate of both Cylons and humans to their eventual fate. Even Starbuck is shown to be an instrument of God, as she is sent back to the fleet after her death in order to help them find their way to their new home. Until the finale we had no idea precisely how deep this idea that God had a plan for them truly was, but as the series comes to an end we realize that Head Six's words to Baltar in the first regular season episode were absolutely true: this all was God's plan. To what degree this God coincides with a Christian or Muslim or Jewish god is very much open to debate, but that it unceasingly is at the core of BSG cannot now be questioned.
BSG begins with the question -- put forward by Bill Adama as he participates in Galactica's decommissioning ceremony -- whether humanity had a right to survive. The answer to this is delayed for the length of the series, as we see the fleet undergo a series of trials. The parallels with the account in Exodus of the Children of Israel departing from Egypt to the Promised Land increase as the series nears its end. Just as the Children of Israel undergo a series of temptations, so do the members of the fate. Likewise, the fleet's Moses, Laura Roslin, is allowed to see the promised land but not enter (she dies as Adama finds the spot upon which to build the cabin she longed for). That humanity has earned the right to survive comes as the crew of Galactica undertakes the ship's final mission, the rescue of the Human-Cylon hybrid child Hera, whose DNA becomes the foundation of a new humanity.
So, the show's many rich and deep themes are successfully and beautifully resolved at the end. Those who found the ending unsatisfying seem not to recognize this. But I'm baffled. What more can one ask of a series than to resolve successfully all its major themes?
While I loved the end of the series, I can understand some of the uneasiness some felt. In order to break the cycle ("All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again") of death and destruction, Lee Adama persuades the survivors to embrace a nontechnological culture. I understand this on a poetic level even as I question it on a psychological level. And like many I found the departure of Starbuck, one of the great iconic characters in the history of TV (it is funny now to remember how upset some were that Starbuck was going to be played by a girl), both too sudden and less than satisfying. But this is nitpicking and should be recognized as such. To carp on something that wasn't quite done to one's satisfaction while ignoring the massive number of things that were done so exceptionally well is petty.
Sadly the end of BSG signals the disbanding of one of the most wonderful and largest casts in the history of television. Only LOST can match BSG in the size and richness of its cast of characters. I'm going to miss Adama, Laura Roslin, Lee, Kara, Sharon (in whatever form), Helo, Hera, Tigh, Tyrol, Baltar, all of the Sixes, Dee, Ellen, Duck, Kat, Billy, Tory, Anders, Racetrack, Cally, Doc Cottle, Jake, Elosha, Sgt. Mathis, Captain Kelly, Zarek, Gaeta, Seelix, Hotdog, Romo Lampkin and all the others (all the way down to the tattooed Asian guy who never had a line of dialogue and whose main function seemed to be to keep Galactica's card games going) -- not to mention the Cavils, Dorals, D'Annas, Simons, and Leobens. And I'm going to miss Galactica itself. For five years this show has been one of the great...
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