Okay, you have to give me some props for that title.
Finally watched the very last episode of Battlestar Galactica, and I will admit that it was better than advertised. It was about as good a wrapup as we could have hoped for, I suppose. A few elements really bothered me, mostly centered around the religious elements of the show. Obviously, religion was something the show was interested in from the start, and allowing the existence of the supernatural as part of the denouement seems fair, since there were signs before that of some sort of supernatural power out there. However, the hokiness of interspersing the ubiquitous Opera House vision into a pointless scene on Galactica was annoying to me because it was a blatant attempt to try to show that the showrunners had a plan all along, but jamming it in like that merely served as proof that they never did. The Starbuck resolution was really, really bad--the worst kind of copout, unsatisfying and craven. You have us spend years wondering, hey, what's the deal with Starbuck and then she's just gone?! Ugh. And the notion that the Galactica humans would just start over and work the land, with no technology of any sort or any seeming opposition to the plan, seems like the very sort of convenient consequence that BSG created by the boatload during its run.
Still, it's over. I guess I'm a bit more charitable now than I was earlier, and as for the religion stuff, I guess I'm willing to cut them slack for trying to say something, even if they didn't ultimately have anything interesting to say about it. The social commentary aspect about scientific discovery was half-baked and not a significant part of the show, and trying to say that the show was about it all along is silly. Ultimately, the final episode fit the show quite nicely: it failed to deliver on what it promised (aside from some fairly captivating fight scenes), and ultimately became a catalogue of whatever banal thoughts occupied Ron Moore that day.
Still, between the false tension that the show constantly displayed, the multitude of loose threads the show dropped (remember Baltar's gang getting guns? Or the guy from Hero?) and generally ramshackle storytelling, the pretension toward intellectualism and the use of magic to explain away much of the finale when it really hadn't been invoked before, one wonders how the show managed to retain critical acclaim. These days, getting those reviews seems to be a lifeline for shows that don't make money, both to deserving shows like The Wire and Arrested Development and undeserving shows like BSG. Which is too bad for good niche shows like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Dollhouse and Kings that don't have the trappings of critically acclaimed shows, but that are provocative and interesting in their own ways. But, hey, at least one of them will survive, maybe? It's even more annoying since Heroes, another bloated carcass of a bad sci-fi show, will get another season. There truly is no justice.
