So an open-ended show like Star Trek strikes me as way more suited to an improvisational style than a show which is larded with prophecies, visions, mysteries and a sense of narrative direction.

For example I’ve heard Moore talking about the scene with the Apollo trying to get the bird out of Starbuck’s apartment and how Moore just liked the image and when he came up with it he didn’t know who was doing it or what it meant. As a viewer that kind of stuff drives me crazy because in a show with as many themes as BSG seems to be dealing with we are taught to examine every aspect and to expect that it means something.

In some ways BSG is the anti-B5. On Babylon 5 every single thing was planned out and there were contingencies prepared for every character is the actor left the show or if the show were canceled before the story was complete. On BSG that obviously wasn’t the case. They were making it up as they went along. As fans we often see that as a negative because we are taught to look for those answers and meanings but, to use the jazz metaphor again, in other mediums and genres the ability to improvise and go with your instincts is seen as a great skill.

I don’t know what I’m saying about that but of course that is something Moore would probably encourage…

One of my friends is already cutting the last 3 eps into a new and improved fan edit of the finale.

In the aftermath of the finale, I’ve been thinking about space porn and its effects on the execution of the whole. I keep seeing the suggestion in fan discourse that the reason the penultimate episodes dragged so egregiously is because BSG had to conserve its visual-effects budget for the big fireworks display at the end. Hence a string of “bottle shows” emphasizing mutinies, character studies, and melodrama. I don’t know where I stand on this theory, but there are a few interesting things to note:

- It pretty much destroys the idea that FX and storytelling are two separate and interchangeable things

- It definitely destroys the idea that the show “was never about the space battles”

- It’s suspicious to me in the same way it’s suspicious that Joss Whedon got a pass for the lame early episodes of Dollhouse because FOX executives were “strangling his vision” — in other words, it becomes a fannish tactic of forgiveness, invoking a higher force to explain/excuse a series’ failings

The last is accurate enough, I suppose, in terms of the actual production situation. But it still seems like an unsettling mutation in reading practices, a way of weakly reinscribing the author function (and excusing poor storytelling!) in an era where the production process is much more transparent and easily tracked from moment to moment.

The best episodes of the show were about taking the premise seriously: what would a fleet of refugees trying to escape a technological apocalypse of their own making be like, and especially what would it be like once it started to dawn on them that what they’d made with their own technology was in some ways very close to themselves? This is the bleak situation that Dr. Frankenstein and his unnamed creation are in when they’re out on the ice together: the problem isn’t distance, it isn’t the alterity of the monster from the man, it’s the accursed proximity.

So when the show shined, it was often because it was thinking about what a complex, messy situation the individuals were in, and the range of complex, messy actions they’d pursue in that situation. There were characters whose contradictions worked and some who really did feel like random writer-of-the-week plot contrivances, but the overall situation felt really well realized. So we get a dramatic guns-blazing first half and then the characters come to their final destination. Ok. I wasn’t wild about aspects of the scene with Cavil and the Final Five and so on in C-and-C, but ok. We get to Earth-2, and…

the wonderfully human, contradictory situation suddenly resolves into everyone just accepting that they’ll have to go off and die as primitives on a new world. Lee Adama says we should and so we will. We get a single line from the new President about how everyone is in agreement–no dissent, no conflict, no drama–and they disperse into the mitochondrial dust. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It just doesn’t work at all.

I could tolerate the weak stuff about God and angels if they got this much right, if the moment of having to settle on Earth and accept a kind of “withering away” was full of vulnerability and contradiction and dramatic pathos. A lot of people have said, “But there wasn’t time to show that”. What, but there was time to stretch a mutiny plot over four episodes and have the awful melodrama of Ellen Tigh’s return to the Galactica and the time-wasting in general of this season? There was plenty of time, if the writers hadn’t had to invent the story they meant to tell at the last minute of the last day.

Unfortunately, the possibility annoys rather than excites me. If true, it means they sacrificed a true masterpiece on the altar of franchise exploitation.

The problem for me, I suppose, is that I lost track of the mythology right around the time that Daniel was introduced; he never really registered on me as a player in the drama, so the show’s ultimate neglect of him in favor of a blunt but conclusive ending came as a relief. As for the god/faith stuff, I’m telling myself it was less about some actual deity and more about “higher powers” constituted through advanced technology — as in the old Arthur C. Clarke aphorism that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishable from magic. RDM pretty much ruled out that we’d ever meet aliens in the BSG universe, but that’s not to say that a higher level of being (some kind of advanced human/cylon hybrid, engaged in its own act of species creation?) wasn’t involved.

I guess such matters are what we have left to debate, now that the show is finished …

On Facebook I mentioned that I have a long list of grievances about the show’s finale–I really hated it. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

I think your zeitgeist analysis is spot on. I agree that the finale captured the right tone: a fresh start brimming with optimism. And I loved the idea of the musical refrain pointing the way to our own ancient earth. If it had been done right, it could have been as mind-blowing as the last frames of Planet of the Apes. But I thought that the conclusion utterly failed at reconciling the show’s many competing elements. Or at least, that it did so in the laziest and most unsatisfying way possible.

There are several failures to reconcile (or weak reconciliations) that bothered me, but the one that bothered me the most was the decision to tell the viewers: “You know all that God and angels and destiny stuff? We meant that literally. Here, you want a surprise ending? You weren’t watching science fiction, you were watching faith fiction. Surprise!” Wait, what? Kara was *literally* a corporeal angel sent by God on a God-ship? God just raptured her away when her work was done? And Lee didn’t even blink?!? Asking characters to take a leap of faith is all well and good, but asking the audience to do so is a big fat cop-out, IMHO. I’m all for suspension of disbelief in science fiction–plausible-sounding mechanisms that are currently (and perhaps forever) impossible are a huge part of sci-fi’s stock-in-trade–but “God did it” does not count as a plausible-sounding mechanism. What made this all the more disappointing for me is that I thought I knew where they were headed, at least the general compass-bearing, with the Kara/musical refrain thread of the story, which I thought was the heart of the story. So here’s a sketch of my alternate ending (I haven’t gone back to see if it conflicts with the rest of the series as written, but I think the general outline works):

In place of the time-wasting flashbacks that did exactly nothing to advance the plot or close any loops, the finale has some expository reveals.

Not necessarily in this order, and not necessarily explicitly in each case:
Reveal 1: Kara’s dad is Daniel (the sensitive, artistic Cylon that Cavil snuffed out); Kara is a half-breed
Reveal 2: The Final Five created Daniel as a hedge against Cavil when they realized that he was unpredictable and sociopathic; they entrusted him with a lot of knowledge and made him very smart
Reveal 3: Daniel survived Cavil’s genocide in some non-corporeal form on 13th-Colony-Earth
Reveal 4: Daniel discovered, or, depending on how skillfully it was written, the Final Five entrusted him with knowledge of, Our-Ancient-Earth
Reveal 5: Daniel had prepared a way to resurrect half-breed Kara, his daughter, after luring her to 13th-Colony-Earth
Reveal 6: Daniel used the musical refrain, the visions, Kara’s paintings, etc., to orchestrate the reconciliation of the races, Cavil’s defeat, and the fleet’s arrival at Our-Ancient-Earth
Reveal 7: Daniel is “God”

I also would have waited until the last five minutes to reveal that this planet they found to call home is Our-Ancient-Earth. Have them settle on the planet, wrap up all the relationship stuff, explain why they’re ditching their technology, etc., then at the last minute have someone come across Homo Erectus or something. OMG, is that what I think it is? Zoom out to show the clear outline of Africa. NO FRAKKIN WAY! Do the little Mitochondrial Eve coda thingie. THIS IS THE BEST FRAKKIN SCI FI SERIES EVARRRR!!!