Battlestar Galactica concluded with a proceed , pyrotechnic two - hour finale last night , wrapping up its cardinal plot line in a way that offered closure – but only via a turn to spirituality and anti - scientific view . Spoilers ahead .
First of all , rent me get one affair unbowed . I cogitate Battlestar Galactica was an incredible achievement – not only did I personally consider it a fine illustration of television done right , but I believe that it has essentially changed the way speculative fable works on the small screen . As a critic , I ’ve always feel that the good part of this show is that it has always been plenteous and complicated enough to bear the weight of strong vital analysis . And so as I take the air you through such an psychoanalysis here , it ’s important that you sympathise that this is not me saying BSG sucks , but rather that this is a show whose paper make it worthy of intelligent debate .
Last Nox ’s episode , the closing of “ Daybreak , ” brought the tumultuous Fleet to a plate major planet ( our own Earth , 150,000 year ago ) where it could settle for good . But along the way we teach that the humans ’ discovery of this satellite , and their rescue of little human - cylon loan-blend Hera from the vicious cylons , has literally been part of God ’s plan . turn out the Head People that only Baltar and Caprica can see are truly angels , and that kickass resurrect buffer Starbuck is one such holy person made flesh . Moreover , the show ends with a secure trace that humans ’ devotion to science and technology will only lead to their downfall – again and again and again .
So what are we to make of such vociferous spiritualism and antiscience feeling in a show that has often been about the way humans are no more than machine ? Frankly I ’m not indisputable there ’s a means to reconcile BSG ’s two side of meat . On one hand we ’re asked to conceive that God and angel have been shaping the time to come of human ; and on the other we see that humans have forged their own destiny through scientific discipline , create entire species of sentient creatures to be their companions ( and enemy ) . Let ’s consider how “ Daybreak ” unfolded and see how such a reconciliation might work .
The first one-half of the episode was devoted to a battle episode that captured some of the very honorable persona of this serial publication in a tense , optical maser - slashed face-off between the Fleet and Cavil ’s regular army in the cylon colony . Adama has decided that the Galactica should make one last effort to save Hera , whom he realizes is probably the last promise for man ( though it ’s never amply explained why , since there are plenty of other humans and cylons who can reproduce with each other ) . So the Galactica and its crew will go on a mission that ’s likely to mean self-annihilation , assault the colony and stealing Hera back . Meanwhile , Romo is made chairperson and Hoshi takes over Adama ’s role as admiral .
All our most dear characters are staggeringly heroical during this sequence , where the Galactica parachute into the shopping mall of the colony and rams itself through one of the settlement walls . The viper pilot occupy the spoiler , Anders practice his intercrossed powers to deactivate the dependency ’s defense systems , Starbuck leads a party to Cavil ’s malign experiment chamber to retrieve Hera , and there are dandy cylon - on - cylon fight sequences . Even Baltar carry off to muster up the self-sacrifice to remain on the Galactica and defend when the Centurions room the ship . And Roslin goes to work as a triage nurse , still wearing her “ presidential ” case .
We see the squad pull out together to rescue Hera , who ultimate symbolizes a future where humans and cylons build a unexampled society together as partners and lovers . It ’s moving and well - written , and there are several good spot of battlefield banter ( “ Can we please not state her the design ? ” Starbuck grouses to Athena , who seems about to spill her guts to Boomer before shooting the punic cylon ) . Boomer number to recognize the grandness of Hera as a symbolisation , and she ultimately rescues the little girl from Simon ’s aesculapian probing .
Caprica , campaign beside the suddenly - brave Baltar , eventually precipitate in sexual love with him . And this is the first hint that the episode will a turn toward the Negro spiritual . For both of them see their Head mass at the same time , and realize the Head People are Angel Falls who have been direct them together – and head the whole Fleet to Earth . “ The design is come together , ” the Heads recount Baltar and Caprica . call on out the plan is to get the Fleet a fresh start , and the Galactica ’s forfeit is part of that plan .
At or so the same clip , we also discover what those visions of the Opera House on Kobol really meant . As the Galactica tries to fight itself from the cylons who ’ve boarded , Roslin , Caprica , Baltar , Athena , and Hera reenact the Opera House visual sense on add-in the ship . They miss cylon flak , trail down Hera , and at last the little girl winds up in Baltar and Caprica ’s hands – as they enter the CIC . So the CIC is the Opera House , and it ’s the place where the Fleet has its last confrontation with Cavil and his minion .
After a tense shot between Adama , the Final Five , and Cavil , the radical declare a cease - fire . On the condition that the last Five deal over schematics for Christ’s Resurrection technology to Cavil . ( There are some accidentally funny moments in this scene , particularly when Cavil calls off his troops by picking up a earphone and barking , “ Hello ? Hello , this is Cavil ! ” Who exactly is he talking to ? All the fans I was watching the show with could n’t help crack up at that import , and repeating the line over and over in Cavil ’s Gilbert Gottfried voice . )
Unfortunately , the Final Five have do some wit - soldering in Anders ’ muck to deliver the resurrection formula , at which pointedness Tyrol reads Tory ’s idea and finds out she killed his wife Cally . He part the mentality bail bond to murder her , and Cavil ’s crew cogitate they ’ve been double - crossed . A horrendous gunplay follows , which is concluded only by a lineal intervention from the ecclesiastic .
Here ’s how it goes down . Racetrack ’s Viper , all power up with thermonuclear warhead , has been taken out by a rock-and-roll to the windshield . But Racetrack ’s stagnant hand slips , hits the “ clangor into the settlement ” button , and the whole cylon colony starts to go mushroom . So the Galactica needs to start out of the burn fast , and Starbuck has to guess at which coordinates the fail ship should skip over to . Luckily , she has a visual modality from God , connected to the Bob Dylan music , and she ’s guided into choosing the coordinates for the major planet that you and I screw as Earth .
As the Earth rises over the moon , and the Fleet lay eyes on the depressed planet for the first time , we know thing are extend to be alright . The Cavil cylons have been nuke out of existence , and the Earth is completely pristine – inhabit by a clustering of pretty raspberry , elk , and a bunch of nonthreatening homo erectus types with spears but no language . Baltar helpfully points out that the homo erectuses have desoxyribonucleic acid that ’s compatible with the homo ’ ( and presumably the cylons ’ ) , so let the breeding programs begin .
This is when thing set off to go seriously antiscience . President Romo is take the Fleet towards creating a city on the savanna where they ’ve landed , but Lee says the expert affair they can do to pull through is to spread out across the planet in midget groups of subsistence Farmer . For some reason the Fleet votes to sign this programme . They ’ll shoot their ship into the sun , and give up all their advance engineering too . In practice session , this seems to intend that masses are actually going to experience in radical of one or two , which would seem to be a formula for dissolute extinction on an alien existence . But I reckon the idea is that they ’ll slowly ingest into the homo erectus federation of tribes , convey language to the natives and hopefully leaving behind their robot - slave - building ways .
Things get even eldritch when Lee is talking to Kara about what they ’ll do next , and she says “ I ’ve completed my journey , ” and then just disappears . So she was in spades an saint , albeit one who could transport a gun and pour down people . There is no noetic account for her at all .
In a coda , the story stick out forward 150,000 years . We ’re on Earth today , and enamor a glance of Ron Moore doing a piddling cameo as a cat on the street in a giant city , reading an clause about the find of “ Mitochondrial Eve , ” the oldest common ascendant of all humans . Our angels Head Six and Head Baltar are strolling the street , checking everything out , and commenting on how Mitochondrial Eve had a “ cylon female parent . ” The two also gaze in discouragement at what they call the “ decadence and commercialism ” of contemporary Earth life , and marvel if we ’re on the way to a repetition of the human - cylon conflict . They confab in brief about “ God , ” and Head Six jokes that “ you be intimate it hates to be forebode that . ”
As they debate this query , tardily disappearing into the crowd , the camera pan to a television set in a shop windowpane play a vid of Sony ’s latest line of humanoid robots . As the bots dance , merging into a montage of present - day robots , “ All Along the Watchtower ” part play and we fade to melanise .
So where does this provide us ? First of all , it would seem that our Mitochondrial Eve is Hera or a hybrid like her . Humans are all hybrids of biology and machine . And we owe our beingness to a tool sleep together only as “ God ” ( though apparently it does n’t like that name ) , as well as a bunch of ( on the face of it ) immortal saint . In addition , it ’s strongly suggest that manhood has run wrong again due to our mellow - tech commercialism . After all , it was to break away that wrong act that the Fleet chose to go back to nature in such an uttermost way 150,000 years ago . They believed that they could get a clean slating only by trashing their ships and joining up with hominid so naive that they have not yet developed speech communication .
Looked at from that perspective , the show seems to be taking the position that our destiny as a people is in the hands of a spiritual military group which constantly tries to rescue us from our baser nature . This is n’t a Christian imaginativeness specifically – notably , there is no “ devil ” here , except perhaps for our technofetishism ; and there is n’t much promise of heaven either . Nevertheless , there ’s a strong suggestion that scientific rationalism is a problem . And that we should make up attention to the words of angels .
But I desire to evoke that there is a return - tale here , too , which relies on the idea that any applied science sufficiently advanced looks like magic . Though our “ angels ” and “ God ” come dressed in the trappings of spiritualism , they could just as plausibly be benevolent but meddlesome aliens who take a kindly sake in primitive like ourselves .
While these aliens help steer us , they do not control our fate . In fact , BSG makes a moderately passionate pillowcase for human ego - determination . The humans of the 12 colonies have all used science to produce life , in the mannequin of cylons . And although those cylons are humans ’ precipitation in the short terminal figure , they deform out to be humanity ’s redemption in the prospicient term . They ’re the creatures human race must conflate with in order of magnitude to take civilisation in a new direction . calculate at from that perspective , human race on Earth today are the genetically - engineered ( or only engineered ) creation of an early species . They leaven that our species is not the resolution of some kind of divine intervention , but is quite emphatically the result of scientific intervention mixed with a lilliputian random evolution .
Can these two accounts of humanity be hybridized , or are they simply self-contradictory ? That we can demand that form of head after view Battlestar Galactica ’s final episode is ultimately is lure of this series . It offers no pat solution . We must decide .
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