Submitted by Now that Battlestar Galactica is really, really over, and people are discussing whether or not the finale was super awesome or lame (the former, obviously), we can start to look for lessons we can learn from the series that redefined science fiction. “You think your business has it rough? The people of Battlestar Galactica have lived through a recession you wouldn’t believe. With dwindling resources, a skeleton crew, enemies constantly lurking out of view, and a pervasive threat of annihilation, Admiral Adama navigates the vast unknown. Like any leader, he makes his share of mistakes – sometimes with devastating consequences. But regardless of the fate of that ragtag fleet, the tale of Galactica is rife with lessons that can benefit any business leader.”
Like not screwing the fans with such a crappy ending. Or how to make half your fan base hate you in one season or less.
Maybe what this should really be about is how to make a story before making a show… I guess thinking out a whole plot line is to much for these people, because for the life of them they forgot to finish the show without FSM.
I thought the ending was pretty good. If you feel you got screwed, perhaps they should have bought you a drink first.
Yeah a lot of the Fundies didn’t think they got screwed over… I guess thats why I said half.
Fundies? Are you calling me a fundie? I’m an athiest, and I still enjoyed the show and the ending. I don’t think that characterizing people as fundamentally religious because they like a tv show is not very openminded, or even close to correct.
I know religion exists, and has been an important part of human culture. I don’t let things like that ruin a good show for me. I also liked DS9, and that had a strong religious component as well.
No matter what way you look at it, the ending was somewhat of a disappointment. Not whether one personally liked the ending or not, but the fact that the finale has drawn so much anger is certainly not a good sign. It wasn’t that people did not get the ending they wanted, but they got the ending they should never have expected…in a Science Fiction show. Fine for Supernatural, but not BSG.
Yes, because if science fiction does not come with aliens that are all humans with a different forehad ridge, tractor beams, and an irrational hate towards anything related to religion, than scifi fans curl up in foetal position and cry.
BSG wasn’t just a scifi show. It pushed the envelope, and made scifi something beautiful, new, and refreshing, instead of yet another crappy thirteen-a-dozen Star Trek ripoff.
There were lots of crap episodes in BSG, the episodes that had religion in them were not that bad(mostly because they tied in well),infact quite a few were really good, but they had quite a few that were easily classified as fillers and were mostly bad. Season 4.5 was just a bunch of filler episodes thrown together and then 2.5 episodes to try and tie everything together, having “Angels” just made me angry that they couldn’t find a way to end it without becoming overly stupid.
I remember right after the final episode I was kinda disappointed that they really didn’t explain that much and they seemed to just throw in lots of crap that didn’t make sense. For example, Lee proposed: lets just get rid of all our technology and spread out so we can all die in the next 2 years(yeah he didn’t say die, but thats what would have happened). After looking online to see if others were disappointed a lot of people also pointed out things they forgot to do or just didn’t address. One of them was why Kara just vanished(I kinda missed it while on the computer)? Another good point brought up was about how it was always possible to interpret anything as religious experience, or just dumb luck. They threw a lot of that out of the window in this final episode.
People aren’t angry because it had religion, people are angry because just saying “God did it!” is such a completely lame answer. I was a fan from the start, to the end, still am, the religion part never bothered me.
It amuses me when elitists say stuff like “sorry it’s above your level of understanding” considering the people most likely to use “God did it!” IRL are creationists and the like — people totally renown for their intellectual prowess.
Sorry, “God did it!” isn’t above anyones level of understanding.
Edited 2009-03-24 17:30 UTC
What is the difference between:
“A higher being did it” (he was not called god).
or:
“Aliens did it?” (the general way scifi works)
Both are equally ridiculous, you see, but that’s science fiction for you. I find it endlessly amusing that scifi fans have NO qualms whatsoever about accepting nonsense like time travel, teleportation, aliens that all look like humans, and so on – but have quarrels with accepting “a” supreme being (NOT god, as they specifically said he did not want to be called that) that toys with out lives. Did you complain when Q (essentially gods) came onto Star Trek?
The fact of the matter is that I personally do not find if far-fetched at all to imagine that there are beings far beyond our comprehension, that see us as mere insects to pull legs out of, much like the neighbour kid who uses an magnifying glass to burn ants.
Edited 2009-03-24 18:13 UTC
Dude dude dude… you completely missed his point I think. God’s motivations were never explained. Imagine if at the end of Return of the King, while Frodo and Sam are fighting with Golum, the scene cuts away to everyone partying with Neo and Bambi listening to White Zombie at a club with a banner at the top saying “God did it!” as the ending.
What motivation does the neighbour kid have to pull out the legs of spiders? To burn ants?
So you would not be disappointed by my ending to Return of the King?
I don’t disagree for the most part, I’d argue your characterization isn’t representative of the entire genre, though certainly the most visible part of it. I actually hate Star Trek, for all the reasons you listed. On top of weak story writing (there are exceptions) it’s just completely ridiculous.
DS9 is a shining exception, the Treknobabble stuff is still completely ridiculous but I loved the story. It easily involved more religion and spiritual mumbo-jumbo than BSG, yet it’s still in my top 5. (#2)
FWIW though, I’m generally a fan of hard science fiction, I start to take issue after it crosses the implausibly plausible, it has to have redeeming factors.
Edited 2009-03-24 20:37 UTC
Star Wars was cool when The Force was a quasi-mystical power, and some families happened to be “strong with the force”. George Lucas completely ruined it by prividing a scientific explanation as what causes The Force and why some were strong with The Gorce: the frikkin’ midocloreans (or whatever). Totally stupid, and toally ruined the concept of The Force.
It sounds like you wanted some rational explanation for the events of BSG, like Lucas came up with a rational explanation for The Force. Lucas was wrong (terribly so), and you are, not necessarily wrong, but not necessarily right either.
Edited 2009-03-24 19:37 UTC
No matter how YOU look at it, you mean. No matter how I look at it, It worked out pretty good. It kept with the major themes of the show, had a huge ass battle, most loose ends were tied up, and it even had strippers.
I thought it was one of the better sci-fi show endings in recent history.
Final episode(s) are on Sky One tonight in the UK. Should be “teh awesum!”
I had been a rabid fan since the beginning. I always loved how we were led to believe “They Have a Plan”. So what was it? It was never finished. Honestly I felt as though the last half have season 4 just didn’t live up to the first 3 seasons.
Head Six/Balter? Angels
Starbuck? Angel
Opera House? Just the CIC.
The list goes on.
It just felt like such a buid up for a lukearm ending. I really thought that this show would surpass Babylon 5, but in the end, it was only too apparent they were making the stuff up as they went along. Moore said as much.
As an IT admin (among other things) I took a different lesson home here.
“Over time, the technology you create and deploy will eventually make your life a living hell. weather it is paging your blackberry constantly telling you its crashed or it is following you around the universe trying to kill or enslave you, eventually it will wear you down to the point of wishing you had never deployed the damn thing in the first place.”
also see here: http://xkcd.com/534/
Edited 2009-03-24 17:17 UTC
I thought Kara Thrace was supposed to be the “harbinger of death.” Instead she just disappears. Who knows if she’s an angel. Maybe Scotty beamed her up. Was her dad an angel, or do harbingers of death, that don’t bring death, hallucinate Hendrix that robots hear because… uhhh…. yeah because. If the answer is angels did it. Why bother with all the sci fi plot crap? They can obviously teleport (kara back from ‘earth’), bring into existance new raptors, attack people via their mind (caprica v.s. baltar) or directly (ala kara & guns) So they should have just directly killed all the people who died, then teleported chief to Finland and the rest to Africa. Perhaps the moral of the story is that angels are circuitous at best.
The best part was where Cavil was like “Wow, this episode sux, I think I’ll shoot myself for some reason.” Actually the first 30 min of the episode wasn’t too bad.
Can you spoilt it for me? I didn’t see it, nor I plan to.
So, Battlestar Galactica fans are complaining about the final episode not making very much sense and having huge holes in the plot and massive leaps of logic. Hello? That’s what’s been happening during the entire rest of the show!
I don’t see why Ron Moore shouldn’t have introduced religious/supernatural elements to his BSG. He ripped everything else worthwhile from the original Battlestar series, so why not the religion?
The rationale (if you can call it that) for many of the unanswered questions, boiled down to “just because” – that’s anti-sci-fi. I watch these shows looking for creative sci-fi. The “because god says so” arch endings were absolutely devastatingly disappointing, and actually made the more touching human scale emotional resolutions hard to parse – and those moments have always been Galactica’s greatest assets.
That said the show was still great, and except for the angel bits of the last 1 hour, I’d still recommend the show to people (with that caveat).