Brad Templeton, he say:
"The worst ending in the history of on-screen SF." (
David Thompson)
Some chick at Suicide Girls
was even more blunt.
See, here's the thing. Up to a point, I'm willing to cut people some slack on a bad ending, if the show preceding had huge hits of awesome (Deep Space 9, Moonlighting) but when you get a gigantic turd like the BSG ending, no. I'm really glad at this point I didn't watch any of the show except for the ep that probably should have been the real ending, because if I'd followed this show for five years and gotten an ending like this, I probably would have smashed my TV. Also, like the reviewers previously cited, I want God to stay out of the plot. Yes, I'm a practicing Catholic, but all the same - there's SF, there's religious fiction, and while the two can certainly mix, it's not a good idea to have YHWH or Allah or, you know, God as a character. It's hard enough trying to write stories about people who are smarter than oneself, as Charles Stross avers.
This may be a tad harsh of me, given that I didn't actually see the final episode, but let's face it, people, there's plenty of stuff in this world you don't have to experience first-hand to know that it sucks. When I was told "Oh, yeah, they just pitched all their high-tech stuff into the sun," I knew all I had to know. While you can certainly write entertaining novels about societies that for one reason or another do the Luddite thing (Joe Haldeman and David Weber both have done it) it didn't ring true to me and I hadn't even experienced all the factionalism and stuff in the previous five years.
tl;dr, Ron Moore screwed the pooch and I saved myself a lot of time not watching a good series that ended really really badly.