BSG: Thoughts on Daybreak, Part 2

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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 RacetrackThe Hand Of God presses a button, and... the Colony! Is it blowing up? Is it falling into the black hole? Wait, it's...

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.

Comments

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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.

Yeah. Before I read that RDM interview, I had some hope that The Plan might end with some sort of resolution for them, but I sure as frak won't bet on it now. The show never really cared about the Cylons -- they were just an excuse to drive the plot. "They all die or disappear in five-minute scenes at the end" is incredibly lame. Guess they needed airtime for those very-important vomit and pigeon shots.

I seriously hated Galen in this episode. Seriously.

Yeah, me too. Also Ellen "omg we couldn't possibly give you Resurrection! That would involve all five of us, and it's not like I don't know exactly where they are and what they're all doing tonight!" Tigh. Seriously, I had assumed that there was some reason why it would be hard to get the Resurrection info from the Five, but no: it seems that she was actually willing to kill half of her "treasured" children because the alternative was to stick her hand in a frakkin' datafont? Right up to the end, she was like "Saul! What are you doing!? Don't encourage Cavil to let go of his petty desire for revenge -- he's peacefully trying to become a better machine, rather than murdering humans! Don't help him!" Then Galen kills every single one of her "millions of beloved children", whether by violence or by slow extinction, and she and Tigh are like "good for you, man! Petty human emotions like hatred and revenge are awesome, as is murder!"

Sigh. Way to bring the "deep" themes of No Exit full-circle there, guys. Were the Five supposed to be the villains of the entire series? Because if not, it sure looks that way from here!

The centurions' ending was perfect

Yeah, it was. They are so great! I hope they build a wonderful world. In fact, I hope they become the best machines the universe has ever seen. *sigh*

I'm just going to pretend the freaking awful nonsense about "real earth" never happened and just re-watch the centurion parts about 50 times. Perhaps I'll also construct an imaginary alternate ending in which Galen wasn't a total selfish frak-up, and everyone was happy and peaceful and frolicking. Yes, frolicking.

Yeah. At least they didn't actually show all the 1/4/5s dying -- I figure there are still some out there, whether on the Colony (which didn't fall into the singularity what are you talking about) or on their individual Basestars. Maybe now, with the humans gone, they can finally concentrate on living for themselves.