I think the issue for a lot of people is that the series seemed to start in one genre and end in an entirely different one. The anti-intellectuallism of the finale just isn't present at the beginning as any more than one of many plausible cultural movements.
Yes, I agree. I think the rewatch is going to drive this home for a lot of people. BSG was a totally different show back then, not just in tone or content, but in quality.
I've been saying it since I first saw the Starbuck/Dee/Lee stuff -- the problem with this show is that they don't really bother with consistency. It's OK to have the show change over time, and it's OK to do new things with the characters, but those things have to be consistent with the content and spirit of the things you've done before, and the change has to seem like a slow and natural progression. Since season 2, BSG has way too many "surprise, now character X is Y, and plot A is B!" moments. This seems to be something RDM was actually going for -- and when it's carefully planned out, as it was with Boomer as a sleeper agent, it's frakkin' great -- but when it's not planned, it just comes off as lazy and inconsistent.
After three seasons of that have piled up and piled up, and after it's become more and more accepted to just make stuff up, maybe it's no surprise that the writers can't seem to find the central themes of the series anymore.
The finale is the same way. The extent to which it contradicts the themes, character, and events in the rest of the series pretty much can't be overstated. It's amazing. It even contradicts itself, not just once, but multiple times. For example, the scene where Baltar lectures about how God doesn't take sides, less than three minutes before God entirely wipes out one of the two sides in the conflict for no discernable narrative reason -- is this a joke? Apparently not, because the podcast has even more ridiculously myopic commentary over the top of this scene. It's like they don't even see any irony in it, much less contradiction. And if we were meant to take all this God and prophecy stuff seriously, then why does the Dying Leader live to see the Promised Land? Why don't all of the Cylons join the Promised Land on the wings of an angel? Why doesn't Kara make any obvious sense as a Harbinger of Death?
This would have been an extraordinarily great show, if they'd only been rigorous about having the plot grow naturally from the characters, and the characters develop naturally from where they started at the beginning. As it is, it's a show which is retroactively about a God who can't remember his own frakkin' prophecies, angels who can't keep their mission straight from episode to episode, and characters who are nothing more than cardboard puppets for the writers. It's not even good as what RDM apparently wanted it to be, much less as the Battlestar Galactica we had in seasons 1 and 2.
I just don't understand it. If Moore really wanted to film the ending he didn't get to film for G vs. E, he should have used the cultural capital from BSG to make G vs. E II. Even the podcast (in which he's talking extensively about spirituality out of nowhere, after years in which many of the issues he's mentioning never came up!) makes it clear that the themes from Daybreak don't mesh with the themes of the rest of the show.
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Yes, I agree. I think the rewatch is going to drive this home for a lot of people. BSG was a totally different show back then, not just in tone or content, but in quality.
I've been saying it since I first saw the Starbuck/Dee/Lee stuff -- the problem with this show is that they don't really bother with consistency. It's OK to have the show change over time, and it's OK to do new things with the characters, but those things have to be consistent with the content and spirit of the things you've done before, and the change has to seem like a slow and natural progression. Since season 2, BSG has way too many "surprise, now character X is Y, and plot A is B!" moments. This seems to be something RDM was actually going for -- and when it's carefully planned out, as it was with Boomer as a sleeper agent, it's frakkin' great -- but when it's not planned, it just comes off as lazy and inconsistent.
After three seasons of that have piled up and piled up, and after it's become more and more accepted to just make stuff up, maybe it's no surprise that the writers can't seem to find the central themes of the series anymore.
The finale is the same way. The extent to which it contradicts the themes, character, and events in the rest of the series pretty much can't be overstated. It's amazing. It even contradicts itself, not just once, but multiple times. For example, the scene where Baltar lectures about how God doesn't take sides, less than three minutes before God entirely wipes out one of the two sides in the conflict for no discernable narrative reason -- is this a joke? Apparently not, because the podcast has even more ridiculously myopic commentary over the top of this scene. It's like they don't even see any irony in it, much less contradiction. And if we were meant to take all this God and prophecy stuff seriously, then why does the Dying Leader live to see the Promised Land? Why don't all of the Cylons join the Promised Land on the wings of an angel? Why doesn't Kara make any obvious sense as a Harbinger of Death?
This would have been an extraordinarily great show, if they'd only been rigorous about having the plot grow naturally from the characters, and the characters develop naturally from where they started at the beginning. As it is, it's a show which is retroactively about a God who can't remember his own frakkin' prophecies, angels who can't keep their mission straight from episode to episode, and characters who are nothing more than cardboard puppets for the writers. It's not even good as what RDM apparently wanted it to be, much less as the Battlestar Galactica we had in seasons 1 and 2.
I just don't understand it. If Moore really wanted to film the ending he didn't get to film for G vs. E, he should have used the cultural capital from BSG to make G vs. E II. Even the podcast (in which he's talking extensively about spirituality out of nowhere, after years in which many of the issues he's mentioning never came up!) makes it clear that the themes from Daybreak don't mesh with the themes of the rest of the show.