MASSIVE spoliers follow.
The last episode of BSG came with trepidation. I hate to see it go. BSG has been and will always be one of the great television shows. We live in the golden age of television - the best writing in the English language occurs on TV right now - and BSG is one of the crown jewels of this era. Great writing, great drama, demands an ending and in so many cases TV denies that. Pushing Daisies is a recent example of promise denied. BSG deserved an ending and though I'm sad to see it go, I don't begrudge it at all. The great thing about BSG is that for all its drama and moral and philosophical complexity, you have these geek moments where you're shouting "Yeah!" at the screen. My all time favorite was when Galactica jumped into the atmosphere of New Caprica; I was out of my seat. The finale provided a couple of those same moments - the Galactica ramming into the colony, and the hair-raising discovery of Earth. Our earth. More on that in a sec. The effects on BSG have been cinema worthy since the start and tonight cemented that. The raid on the colony was outstanding, groundbreaking work for TV. It had to have cost a fortune.
The ending has perfect moments. Perfect endings, for some. Baltar has a perfect ending. I almost lost it when he did, as he said, "I know something about being a farmer." Perfect. To that end, Six has a good ending as well. Laura's end has been forecast for so long that it was slightly anti-climactic, but the last moment with her and Adama was beauftiul. The going off into the sunset end of Galactica, and the entire fleet was beautiful - and the call back to the original series music was a nice touch - but a part of me did want to see the Galactica go down fighting. A lot of times through out the show we got to moments that seemed like the end of the line, and then the ship and crew survived. This really did seem like the end, and but for the need to have the ship ferry the crew at last to Earth, itself a poetic ending, I wouldn't have minded to see her go down with the colony.
Earth.
I suspected something along these lines with Earth a couple episodes after the discovery of 'Earth' at the beginning of this season. We never saw the continents, after all, and never went back. Tonight, we saw Earth in all her familiar glory, Africa in full view at the outset. I loved the idea of the song that the Final Five and Kara heard being cooridinates. I thought maybe that was the case after last week's episode, when she began assigning them numbers, but to be honest as Friday got closer, I started to fear Ron Moore would not go back to Earth at all. Is Lucy Lawless still sitting there, waiting for Cavil? Does anyone care?
Ok. Now for the 'but.'
150,000 years later - COMPLETELY demystifies the entire series. I'm sorry. The entire series was of gods and men; the ending brings it down to street level, literally. The ominous shots of robots here in the present day was so blatant (as was the Ron Moore cameo) it was unbecoming of a show that has prided itself on subtlety and complexity of thought. It threw me. Did we need to see this? We know - now - that we, us, are the children of Hera. The question of whether or not the cycle is being repeated would have immediately come to mind anyhow and would have been some mind candy to chew on as we settle in with our DVD's and memories.
Kara is a ghost. A ghost that has DNA and blood to establish she wasn't a Cylon at least. An angel? An avenging angel certainly. It seems the writers simply didn't know what to do with her. That's borne out, I think, by this honest answer from Ron Moore himself:
We debated back and forth in the writers room for a while about giving more definition, giving her more clarity and saying “This is definitively what she is.” And we started to say, the more you try to sort of outline and give voice to and put a name on it, the less interesting it became, and we just decided this was the most interesting way to go out, with her just disappearing and [you’re] wondering just exactly what she was.
It's not that I needed to know what she was - the suggestion that she is other than Cylon or human is mystical and poetic and almost enough, but Kara represents an agency even beyond the music and the Head Six or Head Baltar. She and the Viper she came back in are - were - physical, tangential representations of living things now dead. Kara's resurrection mirrors, obviously, Christ's, and I like Maureen Ryan's thoughts about her being the Holy Ghost of the Trinity. It makes sense, if this were a show steeped in Catholic mythology. It's not, and there should have been more - not more explanation, but a more definitive representation of her otherness. Rather than just simply vanish, I think it would have been more interesting to see Kara either evolve, or revert back - perhaps to the moment she perished - ala 2001.
All in all, it was an excellent ending to an excellent series and I am sure I will be wrapping my head around it for a long time to come.
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