Battlestar Galactica's Angels and Demons

[chipotle]

The acting and (most of the) dialogue on “Battlestar” has consistently been some of the strongest on television, and despite inconsistencies, the characterization’s also been strong. This stayed true to the end. And the plots of individual shows are usually quite good. The show’s Achilles heel has always been the plotting of the overall story arc, though. The Cylons have a plan! Wait, the Cylons have a civil war! The religious prophecies are real! No, they’re just whatever you interpret them to be! No, they’re Cylon projections! Wait, maybe they are real! The final five are among the fleet! Wait, I’ve got something better—they created the Cylons to start with, so they’re Cylons but different Cylons!

Every show needs a twist occasionally, but twist enough and the seams start showing. Ron Moore and David Eick, the show’s creators, have been fairly up front about not knowing exactly where the show was going when they started—they had a premise and what amounted to a set of end conditions. This isn’t intrinsically bad, and changing directions on the way to the end conditions isn’t intrinsically bad, either—but changing directions in a way that’s really visible, not so good. Witness the earlier sci-fi show “Andromeda,” which started out premised on rebuilding what was essentially the “Star Trek” Federation after it had fallen—and then, halfway through the second season, the producers decided that they didn’t want the show to be so complex and it abruptly became “Star Trek.” Except stupider.

As “Battlestar” hurtled toward its finale, Season 4 all but abandoned the military action to get progressively more soap-operatic. This, again, isn’t intrinsically bad, but the shift back to the Way The Show Had Been in the final two-part episode—at least the first two-thirds of it—was abrupt. I suspect that’s an inevitable consequence of not as much placing a gun over the mantelpiece as having spent two seasons methodically turning the living room into an armory. After the discovery of burned-out Earth, I had the suspicion that there would be simply no way to pull together a finale that wasn’t either unbelievable or anti-climactic. While Moore avoided the quite possible outcome of being both unbelievable and anti-climactic, he did so by going for the first choice. As Josh Tyler on Cinemablend put it,

Why the frak does Baltar have an imaginary friend? Answer: It’s God! Why isn’t Starbuck dead and what the frak is she? Answer: Oh it’s God! Why did the Cylons destroy the colonies? Oh it’s God! How are the humans going to find a home? Oh it’s God! Every remaining question was answered tonight and the answer to every question was: Oh it’s God.

I admit that, at least at first, I didn’t take it that way; while Baltar came to believe he was seeing angels, one has to keep in mind that Baltar was, well, kind of nuts. We didn’t get an explanation for why the music translated into jump coordinates for (presumably our) Earth, but I didn’t assume that was divine intervention.

Then again, what was it?

Writer Gary Farber’s proposition—echoed by IO9’s critic Annalee Newitz—is that the “angels” leading them to this resolution were essentially aliens akin to the ones from 2001, so advanced they were godlike. Farber believes this is a reflection of the angel-like beings in the original series that fans of sufficient nerdosity have been waiting for throughout the new one. (Nearly everything else in the old show made an appearance in the new one in one form or another, and it’s perhaps significant that this last episode is the only one since the first that we heard the original theme song.) And given the show’s consistent drumbeat about repeating cycles of birth and destruction and trying to break the cycle, one could make the case that if we broke that cycle, the advanced godlike beings might well be us.

You might accuse Farber and Newitz of ex post facto rationalization—Ron Moore didn’t really say any of this. It’s a structure we’re imposing on it because having godlike Spielbergian aliens is on the balance less irritating than Touched by an Angel with Tricia Helfer instead of Della Reese. Even so, changing the resolution from “divine intervention” to “godlike alien intervention” may (may) mollify the atheists, but for writers, it just takes us from literal deus ex machina back to metaphorical.

Yet one can mount a defense of the ending which works regardless of what the “angels” actually were, based not on events but themes. What’s really been the recurring question throughout most of the new “BSG,” after all? One Big Thematic Question—and only one, I’d argue—has remain consistent from the moment we learned Cylons have a monotheistic religion in contrast to the humans, and from the moment the Six In Baltar’s Head started talking about God’s plan. This question wasn’t about war, or technology versus nature, or man versus machine. It was about the nature of divinity.

As much as it makes some atheists grit their teeth, religion isn’t likely to go away until unanswerable questions do. Tremendous one-in-a-billion coincidences only happen, well, one in a billion times, but happening just once is enough to found dynasties on—or for life as we know it to evolve. Providence does happen, even in science fiction universes. No, what bothers me is using it as a catch-all: to my mind, you get a pass on leaving one and only one Big Question apparently (but never definitively) resolved with, “Oh it’s God.”

How would I have done it differently? Probably I’d have started by having Baltar’s One Supremely Good Act—convincing Cavil to stand down—to actually stand, without having Galen screw it up by choking the shit out of someone who richly deserved it. Let him take her out after that, but don’t make him stupid enough to jeopardize the entire human race over the death of his wife. Let Cavil and Kara Thrace together have the pieces to at least partially explain the music: he could plausibly have a lot of information the other characters aren’t privy to and that he had no reason to share before the truce. Get them to Earth, without requiring the Cylon colony ship to be ham-handedly blown up. Don’t make giving up technology sound like a philosophical stand: the resources to keep the fleet’s tech going are finite and probably already quite low, and starting over from scratch is a practical requirement. Have Baltar and Six’s brief conversation about the cycle possibly being broken happen in the primitive time period, not modern. The final scene in the modern day is only the news about “Mitochondrial Eve”; maybe pan out to a shot that has an Asimo in a store window, but don’t linger on it in a sort of weirdo whimsical ominousness.

And Kara Thrace? Don’t have her teleport back to heaven, for fuck’s sake, but don’t explain her, either. She remains the Big Unanswered Question that fans get to argue about for the next decade.

All right, let me catch my breath. Enough bitching and armchair scriptwriting. The series deserves to not just be toasted, but to be drunk under the table in celebration. Yes, there was an oft-recurring sense that the writers decided they were going to find some really tough whitewater rapids and ride them with inflatable pool toys. You have to wonder just what the hell they were thinking, but at the same time you have to admire the sheer chutzpah. “Battlestar Galactica” explored themes and took chances that no other science fiction show has ever taken. It was the first science fiction show that treated acting and direction and cinematography as things that matter. And it was the first science fiction show that had mainstream critics talking about it as being one of the best dramas on television. It accomplished what it really set out to do: get audiences realizing that TV sci-fi didn’t have to be like, well, nearly all the TV sci-fi that came before it. If better shows follow it—and better shows almost certainly will—they’ll have the space to succeed because this show cleared the way.

And I’m certainly interested in seeing where Ron Moore goes next. But I hope he doesn’t take his angels with him.

Comments

[bfdragon.livejournal.com]

I think that was one of the big things that bothered me, the finale really did seem like that they in fact had no idea where they were going. Rather then feeling like a natural resolution to the arc it felt like the writers sat around in the room trying to figure out how to force every thread into their new idea for an ending. Essentially, everything they did in the entire four seasons was to convenience the final battle.

Cylons and humans combining together? Sure, Hara was "Mitochondrial Eve" but there were humans already on earth anyway. Rather then taking the social strides that they had worked so hard for, the lessons that came at such a great cost, and rebuild society into one that had learned the lessons that were so hard learned, all everyone did was pass some vague mythology to some far distant generation.

Personally I'm glad Galen did what he did, the cylons shouldn't have had resurrection and it was to me it was one of the few satisfying parts of the finale. Without resurrection and after having the colony nuked (Why would the raptor have had the nukes if they hadn't been planing that, yet they put all of them onto one raptor?) The cycle would have been over as the rogue cylons and the humans move forward into the future.

[prickvixen.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't know. But I do know that if Della Reese had a prominent role in this series, I'd watch it religiously. Ha! You see what I did there?

I'm sorry I'm being totally stupid here. I've only ever seen part of one episode of the new BSG, and it was this kind of sweaty man-porn locker room scene. And despite that I never watched it again!

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I think he could have had a nice evocotive climatic ending, if he'd just *stopped* writing when they landed on earth. In fact, I highly recomend people stop watching the finale just around then. It's a much better ending point.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I didn't care much for the ending at all. They could have done SO MUCH with this, and dropped the ball. All the flashbacks broke the action and did nothing - nothing at all - to move the story along. We have the ship smashing into the basestar! Awesome! Suddenly we have a flashback to Lee wanting into Starbucks pants before his brother died. WTF? Then we cut back to the assault on the Colony. It left me thinking it was padded for time and nothing else.

Everything being done by divine guidance struck me as a Deus ex machina bit. So Starbuck is an angel. Baltar is an angel too, as is six. bleah. I liked it better when Baltar was just nuts.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

I personally feel the series as a whole would be better if all the episodes (including the series finale) after the midseason finale were simply dropped. Everyone reaching Earth (well... Urth) and finding it a dead world seriously moved me. The new alliance standing around thinking "Okay, what the frak now?"

Indeed, what the frak now?

[ben-mouse.livejournal.com]

All I can say, if your spoilers are a true reflection of the series and the finale are true reflections of the nature of the "Battlestar Galactica remake, is that I'm glad I didn't spend time on it.

It's a dangerous thing, I think, when even our science fiction starts telling us that the only way out of desperate situations is through "providence" and mysticism.

Anyway... I'll just put this down to evidence that saying something is the "best show on the SciFi Channel" isn't saying much...

(grump)

[elusivetiger.livejournal.com]

I guess I have a somewhat different take: I just don't think BSG's writing, overall, was ever very good; the quality it had was all front-loaded. Certainly it had tremendous character development and, critically, spectacular acting. There was great production. But the vast bulk of the actual writing once the characters and setting were forged seemed to consist of summoning profound themes to hook us and then ignoring them to spend 99% of the time torturing the characters for angst voyeurs.

Perpetually generating grief and attempting to see how characters endure it is one limited approach, but torturing characters arbitrarily and mercilessly quickly becomes tedious; a successful appeal to sadism does not equal good writing. Watching the BSG writers handle real themes was like watching a bunch of kids play with the sextants and plows of their parents, then deciding the best thing to do with them was to see how well they'd work at squishing bugs. At some point one figures out that the children wielding the sextants are not actually interested in sailing anywhere, and for haikujaguar and I that point was reached somewhere near the end of S2.

I was very excited for the future of the show's early themes when we began watching, and hoped to the end it would pull off something of lasting quality. In particular, I believed the arc would attempt to yield some useful study or revelation on the notions of tribalism, entitlement, destiny, science vs faith... to actually add to the collective literature tapping into these veins. Yet in the end it fell and fell hard, because if one is going to evoke weighty themes one better be able to treat them with respect; the gap between expectation and delivery is otherwise liable to be especially embarrassing when it can be clearly seen that the emperor never had any clothes and was trotting around, if not naked, in a very fine paper pattern from the tailor that he couldn't be bothered to actually sew.

So while it started great, it never managed to crawl out of the bling/angst gutter and live up to its early aspirations. I do give it credit for an engaging and respectful depiction of military culture, some interesting political sub-plots, a great setting, and superb acting. I will also give it credit for actually ending, and doing a fairly good job of it to boot, especially given the horror of the past two years of "writing", the interminable hokeyness of the Dylan Music from Beyond, and the like.

That's OK because in the end the actors carried the water and made it somewhat entertaining, though I don't think it rose much beyond entertainment, if often of an unusually tawdry sort I felt I might be rewarded for enduring with thematic development which ultimately never materialized. I feel pretty dirty for having sat through every teenaged episode of the past two seasons but, as haikujaguar commented at the end, "At least it's over and we can stop watching it".

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I'd still stand by the assertion that despite its flaws it was the best science fiction show that's been on television. Not "the Sci-Fi Channel"; television. There's some terrific writing in it at many points and some terrific acting--leagues ahead of anything else I've seen in the genre, bluntly--pretty consistently. That there's less than terrific writing in it also is unfortunate, but what else in the genre are we holding up as an example of how to do it better? There's not a lot outside the genre which was consistently better--even recent critically-acclaimed series like "The Wire" and "The Sopranos" had their critics (particularly in their last seasons, and "The Sopranos" finale got far more tomatoes thrown at it than BSG's), and when you go back farther in TV history, memory tends to paper over how many great shows ended their runs as shadows of their former selves, if not outright parodies. And when it comes to science fiction shows on TV--goodness.

I don't honestly think BSG's biggest failure was having "mystic" elements in it; 2001: A Space Odyssey had an extremely mystical ending and was entirely premised on a higher power guiding human evolution through specific stages -- Stanley Kubrick was simply better than Ron Moore at pulling it off in a way that didn't make people go "ew, angels." But "Don't you think Kubrick would have done this better?" is a pretty challenging bar to set.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

There was another review which I remember making essentially the same case--although they pinpointed the Good Stopping Place for it being Galactica's first sight of "real" Earth as it was revealed past the moon. That would have been fantastic from a cinematography standpoint, although I could imagine a lot of fans ripping their hair out if it faded to the credits right then. (Not that that's an argument against doing it...)

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

While I don't grade the latter two seasons as harshly as you do, obviously, I'm not in complete disagreement, either -- the ending of the "New Caprica" plotline struck me as the point where the writers started flailing around for an actual direction, and kept falling back on "pick a character to beat up this week" as a stopgap. That they seemed to transparently shift the direction of the overall arc more than once after that didn't help matters.

...the interminable hokeyness of the Dylan Music from Beyond, ...

No no. See, his fans were right: Dylan really is God!

[mauser.livejournal.com]

"As “Battlestar” hurtled toward its finale, Season 4 all but abandoned the military action to get progressively more soap-operatic"

I sense Bonnie Hammer's influence. She's the president of programming who has been trying to make Sci-Fi more attractive to women by making it, well, less science fictiony. One article I found about her pointed out how none of the BSG advertising had spaceships in it, and placed more emphasis on the characters/drama/relationships.

I get the feeling that "syfy" is going to end up too girly for the geeks and too geeky for the girls, leaving them with nothing. Way to screw over your core audience.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Well, I think Moore always had a deliberate focus on the characters, too -- he wanted to consciously set the show at odds with most of what TV science fiction had focused on before, which tended to be pretty much be effects-driven action, simplistic morality plays and an occasional whizbang "it's the future!" idea. Sure, I'm overstating that for effect; it's easy to pick out individual episodes of shows that rose above those traps, but for the most part TV science fiction lagged pretty far behind written science fiction in terms of complexity and characterization. Despite BSG's various faults, being the first SF show on television that had so many people talking about the superlative acting without feeling compelled to append "...for science fiction" counts for a whole lot.

As for "Syfy": oy. I suspect John Scalzi is correct and the real reason behind the name change has less to do with some peculiar attempt to broaden the audience than it does with having a channel name that can be easily trademarked. Of course, Scalzi also brought to light that "syfy" in Polish means "venereal disease." As he wrote, "You would have thought NBC Universal's brand people might have caught this (heh) ahead of time."

It may be worth noting that the name change actually only happened after Bonnie Hammer got bumped upstairs, as it were: she runs the whole NBC Universal cable division now, and Dave Howe is president of the Sci Fi, er, VD, er, Syfy channel these days. I don't know what that means, but after the name change, do watch for rashes.

[silasmouse.livejournal.com]

I saw one episode at some point during the series. Maybe two. But despite the praise, the criticisms I'm hearing make me think the same things. And the religious bend, which I was unaware of, has completely turned me off now.

Then again, I think I completely avoided the series in the first place just on the basis that Cylons could remote-hack everything. Had nobody ever heard of a firewall? I don't think I could ever forgive it for that. For some reason every sci-fi writer assumes that every chip in every electronic device is somehow Turing-complete. I can forgive a script for that, sure, but it doesn't work for me when it's the crux of the whole series.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Had nobody ever heard of a firewall?

I'm trying to avoid bristling too much here, since you're only indirectly implying that I'm too stupid to have noticed such an obvious plot hole when I'm saying this was the best science fiction series that's been on television despite its problems, but for God's sake, the "crux of the whole series" wasn't that the Cylons "hacked a firewall," it was that a human very high up let the Cylons in. And the ramifications of that act of betrayal made for some of the most electrifying moments in the whole series. Whatever things they may have gotten wrong, that was something that from a writing standpoint they got really fucking right.

[elusivetiger.livejournal.com]

It's interesting that you mention that, as another thing haikujaguar and I often commented on was the overall weakness of the male characters vs. the strength of the females. The males were often the sentimental fools, and the women the ones to get 'er done. Yet the females were largely strong due to their adoption of traditionally masculine behaviors and patterns of thought (Rosyln being a notable exception).

There was something weird going on there and it might indeed fall into the "Women fantasizing about being men" thing (yet often without the context or responsibility); by the end it had become pretty consistent.

[mauser.livejournal.com]

Did you catch the flamewar over Bonnie Hammer's feminism in my Journal?

[elusivetiger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I can agree on the New Caprica plotline being the "Oh crap, what do we do now?" point.

"No no. See, his fans were right: Dylan really is God!"

That would certainly explain the wide variety of religious interpretation: "Could you please repeat that, oh Lord?"

[mauser.livejournal.com]

But the effort to soften SciFi dates back to her administration.

As for getting kicked upstairs... The Peter Principle comes to mind.

[elusivetiger.livejournal.com]

No?

[mauser.livejournal.com]

Why Television (usually) sucks. (http://mauser.livejournal.com/364666.html)

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

*laugh* Well, it could well be the Peter Principle -- but remember, what Peter was getting at wasn't that incompetence gets one promoted, but rather that competent people get promoted up to the level where they can no longer do their job competently and thus stop getting promotions. Love it or hate it, she's arguably responsible for both Sci-Fi and USA shifting to rely on original programming rather than on reruns of cancelled major network shows. It's easy to imagine someone else doing a better job... but it's just as easy to imagine someone else doing a worse one, also. If the name change is the first solid indication of changes under Dave Howe's regime, I'm not convinced it's in for improvement. :)

[mauser.livejournal.com]

I would take reruns of ST:TOS over Ghost Hunters or ECW any day of the week.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Okay, point. :)

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

Suddenly we have a flashback to Lee wanting into Starbucks pants before his brother died. WTF? Then we cut back to the assault on the Colony. It left me thinking it was padded for time and nothing else.

Actually, I thought that the flashbacks to the Lee/Kara subplot back on Caprica were pretty crucial to providing some insight into what minimal closure Starbuck did get.

What it served to illustrate is that the one person that Kara has always wanted to be with is Lee. Even when Kara was with Zak, and even when she was with Anders, Lee is the guy that she wanted--and yet, as we're shown, he's the guy she can't be with, and she knows it, deep down. I actually thought that was a fairly nice bit of storytelling, myself.

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

the Good Stopping Place for it being Galactica's first sight of "real" Earth as it was revealed past the moon...

...only to discover that the planet was walled off by Delenn and the Minbari fleet!



But nah, seriously: I dug the finale, myself, and I've just been too busy to post my own recap and review. Did it have its flaws? Certainly. But it wasn't some deplorable suckfest like some people seem to want to make it out to be.

[toob.livejournal.com]

I definitely agree that the flashbacks were quite solid -- especially the final ones that contrasted with the characters' last moments. Amazing writing there.