By Request: Battlestar Galactica
A few days ago, I was asked to write about the final season of BSG, which continues tonight with the fourth of the final ten episodes, so here are a few thoughts on the season and where I think it may be going. Numerous spoilers follow. Don’t keep reading if you haven’t seen any of the new episodes.
Based on what I have seen so far this season and what I have heard and read in various interviews with cast and crew, the remaining episodes are going to be progressively bleak, violent and unpleasant. If the last three episodes have been unusually grim and depressing even by Ron Moore’s standards, the coming episodes are going to make these seem dull and peaceful by comparison. Those who have watched “The Oath” know that there is a full-scale mutiny going on. There is good reason to think that many more well-known characters are going to be killed off in fairly short order. Racetrack and Seelix are not long for this world. Assuming that Adama et al. eventually prevail, as I think they will, the mutineers are going to be executed in large numbers. Gaeta and Zarek will have to die, which will probably lead to an insurgency against Adama and Roslin by many of the ships that sympathized with the coup.
My guess is that at least one of the final Cylons is killed during the mutiny (bye, Anders!), which will provoke the rebel Cylons either to seek revenge and/or to abandon the fleet, and the death of one of the Five will provide the writers another excuse to create some hokey addition to their Cylon mythology. Maybe the Five survive through some process of metempsychosis, which might help to make sense of how they ended up being born on the colonies, so even if they kill off one or more of them they may not be gone from the show. Shortly after the mutiny, Cavil and the other models that did not rebel will reappear to harrass the divided, self-destructing fleet, perhaps with Ellen Tigh in tow. It seems to me that Moore will have no trouble coming up with a scenario in which the entire fleet and most, if not all, of the Cylons are annihilated in a final battle. I don’t see how he will settle for a pat happy ending at this point.
10 Responses to “By Request: Battlestar Galactica”
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I don’t see how he settles for the “everyone dies” ending and not suffer the DVD sales long-term poor opinion the series will get. If it ends on a ridiculously bleak note, all anyone will remember is how the final 2.5 seasons meandered and lost the excellent feel that the first season established.
BSG has, instead, become the perfect example of why episodic drama is only good when a beginning, middle and end are in mind. Making it up as things went along worked OK for the (largely) episodic seasons of ST:DS9 because there were too many persons that had to be pleased. BSG, ultimately, did not have that sort of check.
Er, “not suffer poor DVD sales and long-term poor opinion…”
I have no guesses, but I will say the thing that saves Battlestar is the same thing that saves much of Shakespeare’s plots. No I’m not saying that Shakespeare’s language needed some crutch but many of his plots would not work without a secret ingredient. Power. Even Romeo and Juliet held the possibility that the union of the two families would end what seemed like an open civil war between two powerful families. There is something very visceral about watching a drama about people who’s actions carry more weight.
That is what Battlestar Galactica provides. A drama where even the smallest decisions can have much broader effects. Adama and Roslin’s relationship would mean very little in dramatic terms if they weren’t both co leaders of the fleet.
While a number of the plot points you predicted have come to pass, they are not really surprises. The writers of BSG seem to believe that there is a core of characters, such as Roslin and Adama, that may be put through difficult circumstances, but cannot be killed off. That leaves this viewer a bit unsatisfied. Not that I want to see leads killed off just for the sake of it, but it makes for less interesting drama when you know a main character will absolutely make it. That is what made the previous season’s finale so compelling – to spend all that time searching for Earth, only to find a smoldering rock. I was a bit surprised they did not spend more time on Earth to find out what happened.
Also, the Cylons (with the exception of Tigh) have not been getting much air-time this season. I wonder what Brother Cavill is up to.
What are your thoughts on the coup attempt? Seemed to be pretty well justified to me. Cylon technology on the Galactica? The only reason the Galactica survived the holocaust is because it was one of the few ships didn’t have (Baltar/Caprica Six) technology on it. As far as the most recent ep goes, it seemed only to confirm in my mind that Adama doesn’t have much support amongst humans. If not for Tigh (cylon), Tyrol (cylon), and Adama’s son, he would have been toast.
I think Lee summed it up well in the last episode. He acknowledged that the coup leaders were basically in the right and had legitimate reason to do what they were doing to resist an alliance with the Cylons. There’s not much reason, aside from extreme pragmatism that pretends that the Cylons did not try to annihilate humanity, to go along with what the leadership was proposing to do.
Isn’t it Adama’s extreme pragmatism that’s kept them all alive, though? Seems to me that’s something to weight when considering mutiny. And any time you’re turning to Tom Zarick as your partner in a coup, you really should take a moment to reconsider. Gaeta’s tragedy is that he’s an absolutely terrible judge of character.
Even if we put aside the killing off humanity thing, say it was just bad programming, they were also just recently holding a bunch of military personnel hostage and dumped one into space. And you want to ally with these folks? Even on the grounds of pragmatism, trusting the Cylons is just plain stupid. You can’t trust their conscious thought (remember Athena capping Natalie because….well, because!), and the gods only know what sort of unconscious subroutines they still have running.
I want to know if Baltar will survive to the end…
Richard Hatch, the actor who played Tom Zarek, actually got involved in a blog over at The Chicago Tribune, to defend his character.
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2009/02/battlestar-galactica-gaeta-blood-scales-angeli/comments/page/2/#comments