In the past couple of weeks, two science fictions shows I follow have had their finales: the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. (OK, so technically, the word is still out on Sarah Connor, but many people feel it’s doomed, and although I have no inside information, the reasoning seems solid.)
Very brief report: Sarah Connor rocked and send the show off — if this is indeed the end — amazingly well, while leaving the door open to an even better third season. But Galactica … meh. I watched the finale two weeks ago and I still can’t get the taste of disappointment out of my mouth.
A review of Galactica is below the fold; Sarah Connor gets its own post. Warning: Massive spoilers for both shows follow.
The Galactica finale was simply not up to snuff. The first half opened with the almost-obligatory Big Space Battle as Admiral Adama took just about every important character on a suicide mission to rescue Hera, the half-human/half-cylon child of Athena and Helo. Hera had been set up as the important next step, the way forward, and so this was absolutely needed. Also, it was frakking fantastic. 🙂 (Although I have a hard time suspending disbelief to think that the battlestar could handle any sort of ramming-speed collision, especially since the past five episodes kept underlining how fragile Galactica had become.)
There was much opportunity for heroism and bravado in the ensuing boarding action(s). Eventually, Hera was rescued (due to the last of many Face Heel Turns and Heel Face Turns of Boomer, longtime running Cylon sleeper agent). As has actually happened before (keeping with the mantra?), Hera has trouble staying put and wanders around the combat-infested passageways of the beached Galactica.
This sets up the dramatic resolve of the first half of the two-parter, as Laura Roslin and Athena share a dream-tinged search through the corridors as well as through the (metaphorical?) halls of the Opera House which we’ve been seeing on-and-off for four seasons. As was foreseen, Hera is swept up and carried off by Gaius and Caprica Six — but aha! Gaius is finally acting selflessly and Caprica Six is more down-to-Earth than anyone and has long since abandoned the Cylon camp.
They carry Hera into the Galactica‘s CIC, which is then mocked up and faded over to resemble the Opera House, showing us how clever the writers were in matching their foreshadowing vision to this moment. (In case I’m not being clear, I’m not impressed by this “reveal”.) Then Cavil, who has somehow or another gotten his way to the CIC looking for Hera creates a standoff that Baltar of all people defuses with an admittedly great speech about how the cycle can be broken. The Cylon Final Five offer to give Cavil the technology of Resurrection if he’ll release Hera and allow the ragtag fugitive fleet to flee in peace.
Everything ends in niceness and light… until the start of the second half, when some uncomfortable truths are revealed as the Cylon Final Five perform a Vulcan mind meld with comatose Sam Anders. (Chief Tyrol finds out that aide-de-camp Tori spaced the Chief’s human wife [for no discernible reason, it seems to me] and he kills her in revenge.) And then a dying Raptor pilot sets off a nuke and blows up a ridiculously large portion of the Cylon Colony asteroid, re-igniting the war.
Cavil shoots himself for, again, no discernible reason and the Cylon raiders swoop in to destroy the Galactica. Everything is offline except the jump engines, and the navigation is shot. Starbuck has ended up at the jump engine station and is told to make a jump. She undergoes an excruciatingly long moment of indecision as she “realizes” that the mysterious song she learned from her father (and which Hera had automagically transcribed without ever hearing) can be turned into jump coordiantes. We the viewers came to this realization two episodes ago but Kara takes her sweet old time, apparently for no better reason than to jack up the supposed tension.
The Galactica jumps blindly and ends up … wait for it! … a curiously familiar blue-white globe. Yes, with an inevitabilty that would shame the Norse gods at Ragnarok, the series ends with the Colonials discovering what is in fact “our” Earth. And it’s really Earth, with Africa and everything, and not some faux Earth that’s been a nuked dead world for 2000 years. Following the drill, survey ships take off from Galactica and scout out the planet.
They find no cities or technology, just nomad hominids who barely communicate with each other. Yes, the series ends where it had to ever since they first intoned “All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again” — the Colonials are our forebears. After Baltar confirms that, somehow, the hominids are the same stock (as the humans, presumably, and not the Cylons), they get ready to lay out a city for the weary colonists.
But wait! Lee Adama says No. To break the cycle they need to give up everything they’ve known — technology, medicine, writing. It’s the ultimate back-to-Nature movement. And because so little time remains in the show, the decision to abandon Colonial civilization is accepted unanimously by every single person on the ragtag fugitive fleet. Up until now, you could spark a munity with, say, the wrong choice of soup in the canteen… but now, everyone decides to go all Thoreau.
I’ll admit, this felt like the ultimate betrayal. I would have said that the thrust of the show is, How do we stay human in the face of the unthinkable? How, tossed and battered by a cruel and uncaring Universe, do we hold onto those higher ideasl — democracy, discipline, family — that raise us up from the muck in which we find ourselves? And on the show, no one has been a more vocal or more vociferous advocate of preserving civiliization than Lee Adama. He rejected his father to preserve the principle of civilian control of the government. He argued for allowing Cylons into Colonial society. He called for the forgiveness of Baltar — Gaius Baltar! — of crimes known and unknown, in the name of preserving all that is human. And yet we are to believe that this Lee Adama, having found a refuge in which to rebuild, would shrug his shoulders and say, “Ah, to heck with it”??
And what the heck was up with Kara Thrace, anyway? She’s not a Cylon. She’s also not human. She died and was “sent back” — and was then whisked away. There is nary a word of explanation except some of Baltar’s histrionics about a divine force steering things for its own purposes. One moment she’s there, the next poof she’s gone.
About the only part of the finale that met the usual high standards of the show was the death of Laura Roslin. For something we’ve been expecting for nearly four years, it still hit with the weight of a freight train. The reticient fragile blossoming of the love between Bill Adama and Laura Roslin was consistently the high point of the show, and it is capped as it should be. Especially amidst the dross that is the rest of the finale, this shines out as diamond.
And what about Hera, the prophesied wunderkind? What is her special significance and role? Frakked if I know. Apparently she is mitochondrial Eve, the female ancestor of all humans alive today. Why that made her special, and why no other baby could have been that, is left unsaid. It’s all a set-up for a 150,000 year flash forward, where the (angelic?) beings in the form of head!Six and head!Baltar wander among our technological civilization (way to go, Lee! You couldn’t even get your abandonment right!) and speculate as to whether “all of this will happen again” or whether we’ve finally broken the cycle.
You know you’ve broken your finale when the audience is led to think of your heroes as the crew of the Golgafrinchan B-Ark.
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