So, I Finally Finished BSG
So, the ending was stupid, obviously. I went back and read the long-ass blog post about how BSG had the worst ending ever, and it definitely raised some valid points. But more than the crappy science, weirdo metaphysics, and, well, Jungianism, of the show's finale, what really got me was its inelegance.
Inelegance 1: The Final Five
The Final Five just annoyed the crap out of me, starting with Tory. Why was Tory a Cylon? I cannot think of any clues that even remotely suggested that Tory would end up being one of the Final Five until the moment of the big reveal. From the episode when Tyrol Cyloned out on Cally and told Cavil about his dreams, it was an inescapable certainty that he was one of the Five. I had suspected Anders since the day that Starbuck ended up in the Cylon hospital and the Cylons already mysteriously knew about her relationship with him. Ellen Tigh, too, after she mysteriously joined the fleet. And if Ellen is a Cylon, you get Saul, too. But Tory?
It doesn't help that Tory's character was indifferently written and indifferently portrayed. But that sort of gets to the crux of the Final Five; the writers didn't seem to really know what to do with them. The early episodes, when they were a cabal were great. But, when Ellen came back, it turned shitty. We got tantalizing hints that the Five were different people in their previous incarnations, but we never meet these people. What were Galen and Tory like as a couple? Could their relationship have been so shitty that, even upon remembering everything about his past life, he would still strangle her to death? Or maybe Tyrol is just a woman-beating shithead at his core, but that seems at odds with other things we learned about him throughout the series. Then again, maybe it doesn't. I have an inexplicable desire to really like the Chief, but, at the end of the show, I detested him.
Anyway, I'm rambling. We should have gotten to know the Final Five, qua Cylons, better than we did.
Also, the whole opera house thing and the special room on the algae planet where you get to find out who the Five are? What the fuck? An elegant ending to the show would shed some light on these things, but BSG's actual ending did not.
Head Six is an Angel?
That's completely stupid. And if Head Six, Head Gaius, and risen-from-the-dead Kara Thrace were all angels, why didn't they hang out?
Starbuck
Besides being an annoying character from season three on, the writers left a ton of Starbuck plot threads hanging. Who was her father, who taught her the magic Bob Dylan song? That is not a minor consideration, and leaving that as "a mystery" is just lazy. What did the Cylons put in, or take away, from her body when they operated on her on Caprica? Why did the Leobens have such a thing for her, know she was an angel, etc., when nobody else on the show seemed able to pick out an angel to save their lives. And the hybrids, which were built before the Final Five intervened in the First Cylon War-how did they all know so much about her? The only explanation has to be half-assed hand waving at some kind of supernatural unconscious.
They Flew The Fucking Ships Into the Fucking Sun?
If the series writers were going to fly the Fleet into the sun, they should have come up with an inescapable reason to do so. For example: the Cylon technology on the ships would allow the surviving bad Cylons to find and threaten the fleet and that there was no way to destroy this technology without flying the ships into the sun.
Otherwise, this decision requires such a high level of consensus among the colonists as to be completely implausible. The show's last good story arc-the tragedy of Felix Gaeta-didn't suggest that dissent among the fleet was resolved, only that it was suppressed by both force and politics. There is no indication that force or politics were involved in the colonists' inexplicable decision to split up.
Also, with a few exceptions-Gaius and others from Aerelon and, presumably, the Space Amish-nobody knows how to cultivate shit. They won't last a single year without their food and technology. Of course, that might explain why the fleet arrived 100,000 years or so before the Great Leap Forward-they all died off and had no impact at all on the development of human beings.
All of the Earth Culture Shit
Like that long-ass article suggests, a much more elegant explanation for the existence of things like sushi, dogs, Bob Dylan songs, and Greek mythology begins with BSG being set in the future. Setting the show in the past involves bringing in an extra causal explanation that you don't need otherwise-practically the definition of inelegance.
There is a lot else that was wrong with this series that I'm sure I'm not even talking about. Anyway, I can't blame them, exactly, because at its best, BSG was pretty damn taut. I just wonder if making the show so "character driven" might have compromised the basic requirements of storytelling, like having a plot that isn't completely arbitrary.
Of course, this shitty ending doesn't necessarily make BSG Not Great. I mean, David Copperfield was great, and I can't, for the life of me, tell you how it ended.