Thoughts on Battlestar Galactica: the finale, and what it says about the series as a whole. Since this will be mega-spoilery for people who haven’t seen it yet, I’m hiding it in the extended entry.
The little things first: man, that battle between the Galactica and the Cylon colony was sci-fi porn at its very best. I’ve wondered, on and off, all season – not just this half-season, but all the way back to 2008 – why there was so little in the way of space action. I think we have the answer: to save money and man-hours on the fan-damn-tasticalest battle sequence the show has had in ages. Not since the four-part season three premiere, with the extraordinary moment where Galactica fell into the atmosphere and jumped out, have I been so entirely bowled over by the exorbitant coolness of the show, in that adolescent way that all science fiction fans sometimes find themselves. To see a massive spaceship fucking ram into an even more massive station; that is the stuff of a twelve-year-old boy’s dreams.
The construction of the first hour in general was quite impeccable. Written, directed and edited to show exactly what was going on in tiny ways, but only revealing the whole scale of the battle by inches; that was tremendous. The show has always been one of the best-directed on television, and Michael Rymer was always their best director, though I’m often quite partial to Edward James Olmos’s work, and I’m hugely excited that he’s helming The Plan, the TV movie to come out later this year.
I think that does it for the little things, but only because the big things are so tied up with a whole bunch of tiny moments.
Here, in a nutshell, is both the triumph and the abysmal failure of Battlestar Galactica‘s final episode. For 72 episodes, a miniseries, and a movie, spread across five-and-a-quarter years, I though that Ron Moore was telling one story. It has now been proven that Ron Moore was telling a different story, in fact, and has seemingly been doing so all along.
We now know, thanks to interviews and podcasts and the like, that when confronted with the final question of resolving all of the show’s mythological loose ends in an interesting and compelling way, or resolving the characters’ arcs, Moore chose the latter path. This is disappointing to many of us fans, but not at all surprising. At every point in the series’ run, when there was a distinction to be made between hard sci-fi (questions of how the universe works, speculative answers to technological questions) and soft sci-fi (watching how people live in an alternate society, unanswered philosophical issues), the writers always broke in favor of soft sci-fi. A lot of people, myself included, put up with this a lot, I think, in the expectation that Moore was saving everything up for the big reveals at the end.
Was that fair? The show never pretended to be anything other than what it was, and after much thought I’ve concluded that we who pout and complain that the show ended “wrong” perhaps didn’t really pay attention for all those years. This is EXACTLY the finale that Battlestar Galactica has always promised: big issues are put aside in favor of characters just managing to survive each individual moment. Lo and behold, that is precisely what the finale was: huge metaphysical questions were raised, and the characters responded with a collective “let’s just settle down, because we’ll never have a better chance to be happy”. Weirdly enough, I feel unfulfilled because the show gave an honest conclusion to almost every character’s arc; I wanted death and space opera, and I got people.
Want. Now there’s a hell of a word. The trick of the finale is that it doesn’t actually leave any questions unanswered. It’s just that the answer is one I don’t really like. “God did it” covers literally every lingering question every fan had about the show, with the caveat that “God” in this case is a superintelligence beyond morality who craves balance in the universe, rather than a moral arbiter or a creator. Science fiction is supposed to come up with better answers than “God”, but that just brings us right back to that sticky question that’s been part of BSG for years: is it sci-fi, or is sci-fi just the delivery system? We definitively know that it was the latter, and that’s unsettling and annoying to a lot of us, but not therefore unfair.
Fact is, the finale was surpassingly fair. Not one single moment was out of sync, logically, with anything we’ve previously seen, and not one character acted in a way that was inexplicable. There are some weird leaps of faith; I don’t suppose for a minute that every last member of the fleet would have willingly stayed on New Earth, given that every ship but Galactica had a functioning FTL drive. But television is about the main characters, and I believed every one of them did what they would have done, even Baltar, whose completed arc reveals him to be, I suspect, the central character of the series.
Ah, but what of that final scene? This is where I find it hard to defend the episode. First things first, the idea that the fleet would turn out to be humanity’s forebears is hardly shocking – I called it as a likely possibility all the way back in season 2. Any halfway-seasoned SF fan has already seen this idea, at least a couple of times.
And the implications of the final montage are simply idiotic. The moral of the story, it seems, is that Moore is cautioning us that “all this will happen again”: we, in 2009, are creating the same environment that led to so much bloodshed to earlier generations. If it’s not immediately obvious why this is an argument in bad faith, let me point out that those earlier generations aren’t real. We didn’t evolve from a raise of human/robot hybrids who had only learned after decades to put aside their differences, and there is no “this” to be happening again (and no, I can’t KNOW that, any more than I can prove the non-existence of a teapot orbiting midway between Mars and Jupiter). So Moore’s argument is ultimately a gigantic strawman.
I could have loved the finale if it had but ended with that shot of Adama remembering Roslin, as he sat on the hill.
Because deep down, the glut of essentially unanswered questions doesn’t bother me. Two of my favorite long-form narratives ever – not the best, just my favorites – are Gaiman’s The Sandman (75 issue comic book series) and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (for a novel, it’s really long). Both of those works, Tolkien’s especially, are famous and brilliant for their creation of an illusory depth: a world beyond the story we are told. In Tolkien’s case, this was because he had several millennia worth of history rattling around in his head, and used allusions to that history to deepen his setting. The same is not true of Gaiman’s work, but the effect is the same: by the end of the stories, there are many, many questions about his characters that have no hint of resolution, many things don’t make sense, and many events have been referenced that we never learn anything about, save the name. In neither case have I ever seen this as a flaw; it’s always been one of the things I’ve loved most about these stories, in fact, that feeling that I only saw a tiny portion of a rich, sprawling universe. Once the tale is over, there’s still a palpable sense that there’s so much else out there to know, that nothing has actually ended, and that’s ultimately much more satisfying than thinking that an entire world is so compact that it can be compressed into one narrative.
So it is, I guess, with Battlestar Galactica. It wasn’t, as it turned out, the story of a universe and a mythological system. It was the story of a couple dozen marvelouslly drawn characters who underwent a very certain crisis. And taken on that level, it’s still one of the finest television series ever produced, and its resolution is close to perfect: the characters are done with their crisis, and ready to settle into anonymity. That’s not what I wanted, and not what I expected. But since it’s what I got, I’m prepared to be satisfied. There aren’t many shows that have managed to successfully pull off that trick, when all is said and done.