I think, if I can sum up a response to the title of this posting clearly and concisely, the answer is "No, it did not" and in all fairness this show went a lot farther into explaining things then many shows of a similar nature ever have in the past.
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..
I have only one thing to say... God being a part of the ending actually is a good thing, not because God explains everything really, but because it is Deus Ex Machina in its purest form, as the God who descends onto the stage to end the play -- a wholly Greek concept, on which the entire show is based. In that, sort of "meta" way, is it actually the most ingenious (if not best) way to end the series?
If I ever run into Katee Sackhoff or Mary McDonnell, I'm buying them a drink and toasting them as heroes for keeping that line out of the finale. I suppose it goes to show that while bad, it still could have been worse.
"Hey Gaeta, while we're arresting all the other Cylon lovers and friends of Adama, do you want us to take Starbuck out too? I mean, we all know how much you hate that bitch, and she's a pretty dangerous fighter too!!"
"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."
@Aethyr: I have much more faith in Lost than I ever had in BSG. Re-watching early BSG episodes reveals tons of plot holes, re-watching old Lost episodes in light of recent ones makes everything much more clear.
I agree with every word of this man's essay. I in particular was a giant BSG fan in seasons 1 and 2, declaring it "the anti-Star Trek" (being hurt from the Berman and Braga days) and "best scifi show ever". Indeed, season 2's "Cain Trilogy" was the peak of scifi for the past decade.
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
@CodenameV: I also agree with the analysis. When they jumped out of the mess that was their last battle and appeared over Earth 2.0, my thought was, "they've jumped through time, this is Earth after the radiation has died down, they can re-colonize it." Then everything went off the rails. I felt like I had been spat on. And I also had the EXACT thought he outlined about the possibility Head Six was telling the truth that she was an angel: "well, that could be a real god, but it won’t be, because that would really suck as an ending, and Moore is better than that."
@Fedaykin: Since the stakes weren't so high, I didn't feel that was the worst ending. As an alien hybrid, she was a new evolution along with the psi powers that implies. Cheesy yes, but it didn't violate internal consistency.
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!)
Eh. I liked the ending. I took the ending as a way of saying that having faith in something despite how ridiculous it might sound is sometimes better than sitting around groveling like a number of the characters did for a while.
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.
@VergessenHeld: I'm with you on this one. I had issues with some of the stuff presented in the ending (I'd have liked to have seen a few people take the 'Actually, we quite like living in these ships now no one else is' approach for example) but by and large I liked it. I especially liked the grim undercurrent that the chances of any of them living past a couple of decades were very, very slim.
That ending ruined the show for me. Far from being uplifting, the nihilism of it shocked me. In the end, Cavil won. The colonies, their history and culture - all destroyed.
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.
I've said this before: Ron Moore is a terrific writer but when he gets stuck he becomes very passive aggressive. In other words: Ron is stuck? Ron doesn't know where to go?
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.
Ah, come on. The answer to your question is "No." Sure, the ending was all handwavy, it was still entertaining.
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.
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