Daybreak, Deus Ex Machina, and Deconstructing Your Entire Narrative In One Fell Swoop

[useyourlove]

More and more I find that people are just militantly pro-Daybreak on Tumblr and insisting that I explain why I find "Daybreak" so repulsive, insulting, and just all around bad. I'm not sure where the hell this sudden flood of militant love is coming from (as opposed to the apparently now cliched old flood of Daybreak-hate.) But I just want to

Comments

[tegdoh]

Over the course of the series, the writers had no idea where they were going with any of the mysteries and so they piled them on top of each other with no answers. If it came to a twist in the plot they went for the most shock value possible whether it made narrative sense or not. By the time they got around to the finale, they were too lazy to think of a narratively plausible legitimate ending that fit with the course of the show or in any way resolved the mysteries.

... Just a sec, I'm channeling Lost.... Okay, where were we? Oh yeah, BSG.

So we got "Daybreak."

Yes. This. THANK YOU.

I came to BSG a bit late, not having access to cable TV. I was intrigued and then a bit put off by all the hype, but when it showed up on Netflix I decided to give it a go. Meh. Okay dark!SF for the first three seasons, if a bit uneven. I didn't really get what all the fuss had been about. But then came New Caprica. I loathed almost everything that happened after New Caprica, and "Daybreak" cinched it for me. What a waste of time, effort and

[useyourlove]

I agree completely. If you're going to have an arc-driven show you need to know the arc or it's not going to work. I really love BSG but it has so many problems that I hate it almost as much as I love it. It started out really wonderfully because it was doing what scifi does best: making a direct commentary on current events. And the commentary was often such that it was like "take this real world event and recontextualize it and see how people feel about it" which would frequently result in "dear god I have no IDEA how I feel about it." So it removed a lot of the black and white of media spin (which is ironic, given that it was a media product itself). The other driving factor in why it had so much hype was that it was a character drama. It's character driven. It's all about the interpersonal relationships. But they screwed around with those too, so it lost a lot of that drive in the back half of Season 2. If it had all actually gone somewhere? Sure, that's fine. Uneven storytelling is common in TV. But it didn't go anywhere. They

[pennyante]

So I wrote a whole manifesto about Daybreak's terribleness, before I started writing "In the Whole World"--it became my manifesto for why I was writing and what needed to be fixed. In short

[useyourlove]

<3<3<3<3<3<3<3 OMG I love you right now. ANY TIME YOU WANT TO RANT ABOUT DAYBREAK I AM TOTALLY THE PERSON TO COME TO! Cuz I will hop on board the rant-y train right with you.

I seriously have a giant fix-it in my brain for what I see as the various failings of the entire series starting with the string of terrible stand-alones in season 2.5, but most of it is honestly how to make a better Daybreak, and how to not make all the female characters dead in ways that make it seem like they deserved it, or couldn't handle the pressure, or were being rewarded with life by being traditionally domestic (I have SOOOO many problems with Helo and Athena over the course of the whole SERIES, so that in the end they were like "oh by the way, they're your only happy ending! HAHAHA!" Also, the fact that Gaius was actually from Aerilon and "denying his roots" and that his happy ending was "sorry, you should never have tried to be an intellectual you damn farmer!" just... reeeeally really irks me as well.) But I do honestly see the people on the