Tuesday 24 March 2009

The End Of The Beginning

Galactica finale spoilers. Look away now. Disappointment is something to be looked forward to.

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There is a certain irony in the fact that I have spent the last year discussing my love of BSG whilst simultaneously explaining my reasoning for why "God did it" is such a terrible fall-back non-explanation that only idiots would use, only for the two fucking things to end up coinciding.

Needless to say, after five years, a certain irony was exactly what I was looking for.

Let us never discuss this show again.

Well, except to say this. If I was Ronald D. Moore, I would be attempting extensive plastic surgery to render me totally unrecognisable, not taking a bow in a last-minute cameo to drive home how much everyone has just been shafted. When your appearance is less welcome than watching Apollo chase a fucking pigeon, you know something's gone wrong, although there is a perverse level of genius in managing to rip off one of the oldest ideas in science fiction and think "What we need is to add a Dick Dastardly cartoon in here". I can only presume Caprica will involve a bizarre collection of outlandish characters attempting to hold an off-road race during an invasion by Martian tripods.

Mind you, that would be better than what I just had to sit through.

4 comments:

Chemie said...

Well, I sort of enjoyed the finale. It was consistent (unfortunately) with the preceding episodes and I always suspected the whole early civilisation, will it happen again? 'twist' addition, so I wasn't disappointed. The god thing was annoying but that the 'angels' calling it 'it' was just great. Personally I started seeing an evil computer cylon god or whatnot. As story it fitted, my problem was in the execution of the story.

I felt the writers swung almost entirely over towards following characters and forgot that BSG is about more than that. What exactly were they fighting for? The epilogues and flashbacks were nice but lasted way too long. I liked that most characters got bitter-sweet, what they deserved endings (or just shot themselves with a 'frack this'). The space battle lacked the dramatic build up it deserved and was notably bloodless for the main characters. It looked awesome but felt weak, it was also confusing and deserved more screen time. The little touches were nice (yay the museum!) as was the return of some of the humour (Can we *not* tell her the plan?). I liked that the final 5 destroyed all hope for peace, by basically being *human* and faulted (*loved* Tory and her 'now, lets not get mad....' moment.) I hated that Tyrol went ape over a woman he described as 'smelling like cabbage'. It didn't work and I think it was indicative of the whole last episode(s); the ideas were big and fun but the framework it hung off and what they based them on were unrealistic and questionable. Another example; 'lets give up most of our technology and live here'. OK, I get why you might want to do that. But trotting across Africa with only a bag? No-one with a decent brain would leave those ships without tools, tents, water purifiers, survival texts and medical equipment. Once again. Nice idea, bad production execution; All you needed was a jeep or a raptor or a f*king cart with the line of people to indicate they weren't morons who are setting off to die without shelter of an unknown bacterial infection. BSG used to be about that sort of practicality. Having ranted away to poor Tom on many of our weekend walks on the subject of practicality and specialness I eventually wrote it all down (it went to 3 pages). So I can't put it here.

And even if you don't want to discuss the show again, we are soon to be trapped in a house in Cornwall together for a week. And discuss it we shall!

Anonymous said...

I agree pretty much with Kim, the ideas where fine and the suggestion of a higher power is something I'm happy to accept. (And they were always going to find Earth pre-'us' in my view) The execution of it was fluffed however. Far too many threads left untouched and the conclusion of the conflict with the Cylons was over far to 'neatly' and quickly.

And after years of arguements why does everyone suddenly decide to get along and start civilisation from scratch?

Strangely I think that given a few more episodes the series could have reached a much more satisfying conclusion. More than anything they seemed to run out of space to tell the story they wanted to

Chemie said...

Well, I made a blog and put my 3 page essay on the BSG cult of specialism on it. I wrote the bastard it deserves to go somewhere. I predict that the blog lasts all of 10 days, because its weirding me out.

http://sniffingthesnowdrops.blogspot.com/

SpaceSquid said...

I shall read it during a break from thesis-death.