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Did Battlestar Galactica Have The Worst Ending In Science Fiction History?
San Francisco, 5:54 AM
Mon Dec 21
12 posts in the last 24 hours
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Did Battlestar Galactica Have The Worst Ending In Science Fiction History? |
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07/15/09
Quantum Leap would be the worst in my book. QL's ending destroys it's own continuity, makes you question if the series as a whole ever really happened, and pins everything on God when God was rarely a topic of the series.
God and The Gods, in BSG are like off screen characters who are always there fighting for dominance. I dont think the people who claim "a God ending comes out of no where", were really paying attention..
07/15/09
07/15/09
07/14/09
07/14/09
"Yes" Gaeta replied "that would make a lot of sense and probably ensure our victory, but I feel strangely compelled by an unexplainable supernatural force to just let Starbuck run free and interfere with our plans, eventually saving the day and resulting in my own execution."
07/14/09
I'm just worried that Lost is gonna do the same thing, because it certainly looks like it's headed in that direction.
07/14/09
07/14/09
Then what happened? No, apparently the show wasn't "about the characters" when RDM & Co started focusing the show on "big mysteries" which in fact never got answered except for "god did it". That isn't REALISTIC at all.
As the guy says, even "Lord of the Rings" is "realistic" because it plays by its own story-rules that there are wizards and magic; even Deep Space Nine, with its Bajoran Prophets, established *from the first seasno* that the Prophets are a race of god-like aliens, although they are not actual gods, but live outside of linear-time so that's how they often know the future. It made logical sense.
They got wrapped up in their own myth, resting on their laurels, everyone telling them how great BSG was that they tried to do anything.
How is the show "about the characters" when Starbuck was completely re-written over the seasons?
Did they just do....mental gymnastics to convince themselves that "that's what I always though Starbuck was like"
I'll always remember BSG for "Naturalistic Science fiction" which actually stopped in season 3; it's not about the technobabble science, it's about following your own story rules and character development
And saying "oops" is basically admitting that they aren't going to be the greatest scifi TV show anymore.
I still believe it was great to make a VERY realistic, uncliche series: "bringing realism into what has previously been a very unrealistic genre"...and they did that for Space Opera.
So what I think the future holds is to take another classic scifi genre and put a self-aware twist on it, of intense plot-realism. As if someone were to read a list on TVtropes.com and point by point re-invent a genre as painfully realistic
Maybe something with Giant Robots?
07/14/09
07/14/09
It all made sense until then....
07/14/09
Speaking of V, the first fanfic I ever read was something published on a photocopier and sold at a convention called "Survive the Alliance." In it, it was revealed that the "lizard" aliens who created the 70s BSG were in fact the V lizards, and Galactica arrived at Earth just after the 2nd miniseries with the robotic cylons in hot pursuit. Suddenly it became Earth + V + Galactica vs the Cyclons. WILD. They even tossed in cameos by other TV shows like Remington Steele and the A Team. (And Starbuck met Face, hah!)
07/14/09
And fail.
07/14/09
If you honestly think it was the worst ending in all of science fiction television, you must not watch a lot of television.
07/14/09
Then name a worse one for a series that was as "important" as this one.
And I watch PLENTY of television.
07/14/09
07/14/09
07/15/09
Shush. I've repressed that whole final session. It. Never. Happened.
07/13/09
It also struck me as having the message that God and science are not mutually exclusive, which isn't something you hear whole lot of these days.
07/14/09
07/13/09
A year from the landing, when most of the colonials were dead from exposure, starvation, or the nasty megafauna that inhabited the Earth back then, I wonder what the few survivors thought of their decision to walk into the wilderness with whatever was on their backs.
I won't even get into the deus ex machina that the whole God angle was.
07/13/09
Answer: Fuck you audience!
Instead of trying to hash out something that maybe might have partially worked, he just decided to disregard the viewers he knew were going to be angry at him anyway.
07/13/09
It even had considerable logic to it if you're the slightest bit spiritual and perhaps a little dubious about the wisdom of a society such as our own, so immersed in its technology that it tries to play god on a regular basis--even changing the climate and perhaps one day reinventing life itself (AI or otherwise). (NOTE: I'm not saying technology is evil, but cleverness is not the same thing as wisdom, and you need both to make it in this world).
Anyway, BSG was never about being Hard SF--it was always a work of political & religious fantasy. I'm not sure why a living universe (something that might be called God[s]) is really that much harder to believe in than, say, Artificial Intelligence or Faster Than Light Travel. It's all just playing with possibilities. That's all science fiction really is.
It's not RDM's fault if you don't want to suspend your disbelief that far.
So, no, it was a good ending. To each his or her own, but it wrapped up the personal stories nicely, even if it wasn't scientifically rigorous.
/rant