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BSG: Thoughts on Daybreak, Part 2
Oh, BSG, why? I saw this coming from all the way back at the end of season 4.0, but I just can't help being disappointed in you, just the same.
The first part of this episode was amazing. I loved the space battles, loved the Caprica/Baltar and Cottle & Roslin scenes, loved Admiral Hoshi, loved the Centurion vs. Centurion action, loved the awesome Colony and its equally awesome guns. The first hour or so was BSG at its best.
Then Boomer grabs Hera and gets shot -- that was pretty stupid, but we all saw it coming, so what can you do -- and who cares, because now they're doing the epic Opera House thing. And Cavil is headed to the CIC surrounded by a bunch of badass Centurions! Hell yes! Wait, and now somebody almost rescues Hera... and Cavil is almost to the CIC! And cut to Hera again! Build the tension! Then we're finally there, and the epic battle for the CIC, the fiercest drop-down drag-out hand-to-hand humans vs. skinjobs fight of the whole series is...
Already over?
OMG, show, are you OK? I think you blacked out for a couple of minutes! Should I call an ambulance?
...no, you're going to walk home? Well, if you insist, but promise me you'll sit down with your head between your knees if you start to feel faint again!
Ahem.
But that's all right, I guess we can skip that scene if we have to, because Cavil turns out to be more hardcore than he looks. He's got Hera, and the Five are there, and then they're -- holy shit, they're going to end this the right way! They're actually going to resolve the conflict! I can't believe it, hurrah!
...wait a second, did the clock just strike eight?
And then, abruptly, out of nowhere, the show starts to suck. The Five prove that they're not only the worst parents in the world, they're the worst parents in three worlds. Way to go, you selfish morons. Hope the memory of your dull-eyed, cabbagey wife was worth wrecking the fates of two civilizations!
There's yet another half-baked All Along The Watchtower scene, and then
SHOW! Show, talk to me! You passed out right in the middle of the climax of the whole series! What the frak happened to the Colony?! ...um, show? Show?
Alas, this time I think you're actually dead.
To sum things up: all the "bad" Cylons magically die (offscreen, no less!), all the "good" humans magically live as super-luddites on our own Earth (extra points for their being the Secret White Ingredient Needed For Intelligence On Earth, always a classy move!), and it turns out that science is bad and God is good. And then, as if that weren't ridiculous enough, the whole thing ends with an embarrassingly indulgent modern-day self-insert.
Let's just say that Cavil's suicide made a sick kind of sense... and was about the last thing in the show which made any sense, frankly.
I'm not sure what's worse about the ending: its overwhelming anti-intellectualism, or its blatant disrespect for the overall arc of the plot. They went much farther with the former than I'd ever expected -- we got extensive lectures on how God & faith are great and reason & science are evil, with bonus points for the several different scenes of Cylons getting violently killed right after mentioning the latter. And then the human/2/6/8 race purposely sends all of its science into the Sun and wanders off to become hunter-gatherers! Wow.
As for the plot: the central conflict of the entire series, the big human vs. Cylon shebang, ends in a random deus-ex-machina explosion which they don't even bother to show. RDM had to state in an interview that all the 1/4/5s are supposed to have fallen into the singularity and died. Never mind that this makes no sense -- the Colony makes Basestars look like specks; a handful of nukes sure as frak can't push something with that much inertia out of orbit, especially when comparatively tiny Basestars and Battlestars survive multiple nuke hits all the time in this show -- nope, they're all conveniently dead, somebody cue the Ewok song.
What's that faint noise off in the distance? Why, I do believe it's the sound of the human race washing its hands of the things it has created! But that's OK -- they get to have miracles and a Promised Land and a probable end to the cycle, anyway! Galen even gets a big hearty pat on the back from Tigh for killing all of their "treasured" children, just as they were about to make peace at last!
Boy, is that stupid. And it's made even worse because the writers clearly knew how they ought to end the series, and then they deliberately didn't. It's like they head-faked themselves right into an open sewer.
The only thing I truly enjoyed about the ending sequence was seeing the Centurions get their own Basestar. Baltar's breakdown at the end was also very affecting; Starbuck's disappearance was cheap, but at least it was very much in the mind-frak spirit of BSG; Roslin and Adama's ending was decent as well, though I could have done without the ten minutes of nature photography. Everything else was painfully, depressingly bad.
For a show which is "about the characters, stupid", a lot of the character stuff they neglected the plot for was random as hell -- most of the flashbacks were meaningless and/or way too blatant, they allowed the entire cast to walk away from the oh-so-dark-and-important "one-way mission", Helo and Athena's story ends on such a forced note that even Baltar and Caprica are shocked, Starbuck just vanishes without any real closure with Lee or Leoben... and the less said about Lee in general, the better, actually. Wow, was he fourth-wall-shatteringly OOC here, or what?
I had originally been a bit more OK with Daybreak, because I'd thought the fate of the Colony had been deliberately left to the audience to decide, thus allowing a tiny ray of omg-what-if to shine through all the heavy-handed polemics. Nope: it turns out the last remaining scrap of moral ambiguity in Battlestar Galactica was actually just the result of yet another editing failure.
That single sentence, right there, says everything there is to say about season 4.5. What a joke.
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It's ironic that Cavil, with his superior forces, didn't even bother to destroy the human fleet when he knew where they were (given Boomer locating them with ease) even after he acquired Hera. Maybe it's just me, but why doesn't he wipe humanity out? BSG is crippled, the rebel Basestar is broken, couldn't Cavil effortlessly wipe them out without breaking a sweat?
Yet I can't help but wonder why he'd nab Hera in the first place. Human/Cylon hybrid. Can't procreate without humans even if he found out what made her survive without joining humanity and their rag tag fleet. Wouldn't Cavil now be able to persuade his allies to download their consciousness into immortal metal bodies if their corporeal forms were mortal? (Something that seems unlikely given that we never see any "aged" Cylons at all).
And poor Boomer...
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Basically... I'm agreeing so hard with most of this. I was actually really down with everything happening until Starbuck's ~magical destiny~ made her jump the fleet right by "real" earth. Alarm bells went off in my head at that point: how are they going to un-cheesify this one?
They didn't. O-kay.
I was willing to give it a chance until the exact moment you mentioned: "Oh look! The pretty white space people can give their magical superior learnings to the quaint brown natives!" My eyes rolled so hard I think I'm still seeing sideways. Like, really? Did they really just go there?
we got extensive lectures on how God & faith are great and reason & science are evil
This is totally a false dichotomy in the first place, so I always get sort of irritated when it's used as a source of conflict in stories. For a long time, I really loved that BSG didn't cop out into that dichotomy; after all, hello, the robots made their own religion and are the most devout and woo-woo mystical of the lot. But that all fell apart and then it totally went there too! Damn. Not only did it just dip its foot in to test the waters, it dove right in with anvils falling left and right. Lee's dialog in this episode was horrid. There is a valid point in there about ethics in relation to technology (see what happens when you are mean to your robot soldiers with gun hands?), but the point sort of floated away when the cylons were pretty much never mentioned again.
I seriously hated Galen in this episode. Seriously. After beating the shit out of Cally, trash talking her to no end, and barely caring that she died, he goes and kills Tory over it? What? How is avenging his dead wife whom he never at any point seemed to like more important than the welfare of two species, both at the brink of extinction? Bad, bad, bad. The fact that no one really seemed to care that he did this was even more odd. But maybe I'm being irrationally bitter because they were literally moments from my idyllic happy ending of everyone all getting along, and he had to go and ruin it.
The whole "150,000 years later" thing was just, well, dumb. I don't know how else to put it. At that point all suspension of disbelief was shot to hell. The attempts to tie the show to reality were just way too forced and poorly done. The "mitochondrial eve" is really Hera? Uhhh... And the cheesy shots of uncanny valley Japanese trade show robots that are really just remote control mannequins? Let's not. By that point, my face was definitely in my palm. I might have groaned, too.
But, there was a lot of stuff I did like. Like the entire first half, pretty much. The centurion fight was amazing and completely swoon-worthy (the red stripes! Eee!). I loved Six and Gaius in this entire episode: the moment where the both realize they see the head!people, the part where Gaius talks about being a farmer, everything. I admit that I cried over the Adama/Roslin ending. And at Sam's ending, too. The centurions' ending was perfect; I was so happy that they finally, for reals, got the freedom they've always wanted. I can't believe any of characters thought they'd actually come back at some point: like, after being enslaved and mistreated by the humans, having to go to war to end that only to be enslaved and mistreated again by their own people, why would they want to do anything except throw a huge middle finger to all the humans and skinjobs, never be seen or heard from again, and live happily ever after? And I'm happy that at least some cylons lived on as their own species, too. Even if all the skinjobs were wiped out, their species isn't extinct.
Part II
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Ugh, so well put! And not only will we go and teach the natives how to be smart, instead of leaving them alone or, I don't know, learning survival skills from them or something, we will do so all over the frakking planet. Because that makes so much more sense then colonizing in one area for our survival.
Also agreed that the characters were so often just butchered for the sake of tying up their epic plot.
The God stuff bugged me out to no end. And despite the fun polytheism vs. monotheism themes in the series, we still get to end with the One Judeo-Christian God with actual, physical angels and everything. It was all quite literally deus ex machina.
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Completely concur
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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.
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