The BSG finale! Spoiler City...

I must admit I tried it a bit and didn't really like it... I'm generally a Sci-Fi guy but something didn't feel right, maybe a bit too 'soapy' (See the Frakmap, in only 4 seasons! :o) Knowing there are only about 80 episodes, maybe I'll try it again

EPIC!  Truely epic show. The finale was absolutely some of the most thought provoking science fiction since perhaps Babylon 5.  As far as exploring the questions of 'what is it to be human', 'where did we come from', 'good and evil', and the 'origins' of myth and religion the show is completely without equal. It is definately a 'thinking mans' show and requires a good bit of reading between the lines to understand the subtleties and parallels of many of the characters.  I have no doubt I will be continuing to contemplate the concepts, questions and insights of the show for days, weeks, and years. Just teasing apart the nuances of any one character has lead to many eye opening thoughts. 

I truely hope this show wins some awards for writing and acting. In a sea of mostly mindless television drivel this has been one of the rare gems that pushes to think and feel about concepts both internal and external, to reevaluate attitudes about ourselves, our society, and our place in the universe. If we had more shows like this we might even have a better world.

I liked the 1st hour. The 2nd, not so much. Big deus ex machina. Almost literally. I was expecting that though, as there was no other way to explain many of the mysteries. I'm still not sure how Baltar survived the nuke in the series pilot. I'm guessing God saved him. I'm happy the way it ended though. Throwing away the tech breaks the cycle. Well, maybe.

I liked the finale. As far as battle sequences go, I would rate it in between Resurrection Ship (season 2)/New Caprica (season 3) and the Nebula battle (season 4). Resurrection Ship and New Caprica battles just stand out a bit more. Though, Galactica ramming a hole in the Colony was not what I expected!

They tied up the Hera plot line in the last 2 minutes, which was sort of amusing in a way and half made sense - okay, we knew she had the key to Cylon resurrection, but why was she that important to Humanity as well? They referenced her when talking about the "oldest known bones found" magazine, but why her? I mean, there were plenty of other children around there?

Other than that, I thought some of the characters wrapped up their stuff a bit too quick. Nobody expected Roslyn to survive, but if Apollo didn't see Adama carrying her to the Raptor, Adama would've just taken off without saying goodbye to his son, Kara, or well anyone.

Kara's I guess makes sense in a way, that Cylon has always been trying to tell her she's an angel, and the "Kara Thrace is the harbinger of death, she will lead humanity to its destruction" line the hybrid kept spitting out in Razor finally made sense: she would jump them to "Earth" (whichever Earth that is), they would re-build the civilization and end up starting the cycle. And since she was an angel she would keep getting brought back to try it again (hence seeing her body on the 'real' Earth). But I still expected a little more than "I'm done here, Lee" *poof*.

The one I got the best was Tyrrol.. cause after finding out a cylon killed his wife, he didn't really belong with either side.

All in all, I thought it was a pretty powerful finale, and other than tying the individual character arcs at the very end, it didn't feel very rushed at all, which is sort of a rare thing these days.

Yeah I think it's really just those loose ends (character wise) I would've liked to see them take more time over.  I can think of a good 3 or so episodes in the latter half of season 4 that either could've been merged into one so-so episode, or put to better to use; i.e. to start unravelling the mystery behind Kara Thrace, and some of the back story of Roslin, Adama, Tigh, etc.  But instead they got themselves in a situation where, as has already been pointed out, Adama flies away to die alone without so much as a word to Saul.  You can't build up relationships like that and then axe them so quickly and easily.  But I guess it's left to us to imagine that something lead up to this.  I mean the transition from the fleet, to the ground, takes place over about ten minutes but presumably it would take several days.  I like to think that during this time Adama said goodbye properly.  Maybe this is something we'll see in webisodes or a one of special or something.

Overall though it was epic viewing.  It's kind of a no-win situation really because BSG really set the standard so high with a large number of quality episodes, that we came to expect it 100% of the time.  And unfortunately the writers aren't guided by God's plan They just write from episode to episode...season to season...and try and deliver the best they can.

And their best is pretty frackin good.  One thing's for sure though; BSG fans will be talking about it for a long while!

Going into the finale I didn't like the flashbacks to pre-genocide caprica of the previous episode, there was too much in the present that needed some resoulution and direction to end the show. All in all having seen the finale its those flashbacks that very neatly close the circle for nearly all the major characters.

I also rather enjoyed the point that baltar made, God didn't care: he never was on anyone's side, humanity and cylon alike created the religious baggage. In the end humanity is responsible for saving itself by making better choices or endlessly repeating the bad ones. 

The one beef I have is the fate of the cylons. The mystical solution of proto humans on final earth seemed to marginalize the theme that humanity and cylons needed eachother to survive. Those left on the colony were nuked and left for dead, and those who weren't in direct human relation ships (everyone but the final 5, Athena, and Caprica 6) decided to stay in orbit to grease the wheels of the new colony. I feel like Cavil's (#1) need to be a machine could have been resolved better than his suicide in the Conrol Room when shit hit the fan. Perhaps the movie "the plan" will address it but most of the first 7 cylons had really become characters in their own rights and the finale didn't tie their stories together like they did for the human characters and the final 5. 

My favorite part was when Cavel commited suicide. Doesn't really make sense though.

"FRAK!"

~Famous last words

Nor does it make sense that Earth was 1 jump away from that black hole/base ship and they didn't notice. Well the "new" earth, not the old one

Hehe I really liked Cavil's death.  Dry and darkly comical right up to the end.

I have to agree with the opinions that a few of the arcs seeming rushed or somewhat abbreviated; though overall this series did a WAY better job than many series as far as completeing the story and wrapping various arcs.  My 'guess' is that the seasons 4 and 5 were planned/written as full seasons and the fact they wound up condensed into two half-seasons there is a great deal we missed out on both content and quality-wise. While somewhat compressed; I still have to give an enormous amount of kudos to Moore and the rest of the staff for getting the whole story in AND managing to throw in a HUGE twist in the last hour. I know I cant be the only one that totally did NOT see that coming at all.

I was pleasently suprised. The way the last part of the season had been going I thought we would see 30 minutes of prep for the batlle, 60 minutes of battle, then 30 minutes to wrap up all the story lines. But instead they jupmed away with Hera, found Earth and still had 60 minutes to go.

* Tory died. Finally got what was coming to her.

* Starbuck disapeaered. Hey is that what we're like in our dreams? We're angels and then when we wake up, poof, we're gone. 

* Ron Moore's cameo. Nice

* The opera house dream coming true on Galactica.

* Old Centurians fighting the new ones. And they won a baseship as reward. Leaves room for a Earth meets evolved Cylon story if they every want to go that route.

What is interesting about the finale minutes is that the "angel" baltar and 6 talk about Hera and the way the human / cyclon hybrid race (us) was going on.  The interesting part is the fact that baltar says after six says god, "it doesn't like being called that."  So it leaves it up in the air if it is a religous god or a very high advanced entity that is controlled the destiny of the human and cylon races.

But yes the sequence of Galactica ramming the colony ship to board it was amazing, I was watching it with a buddy and when it happened we were like, "WTF"

The importance of the whole hera thing is that even today we are still trying to figure out our ancestry, a missing link, and at the end of the show they point to hera as the missing link.

Yeah, that reference to "Those who don't learn from history are condemned to repeat it" is about the one thing I really liked about the finale. AND Cavil's End of course.

The rest was... well, probably the best they could come up with...

But Starbucket being an returning angel... BLEH!

Yeah, it was deliciously awesome. It was the actor's idea too.

Here's a link to the QA/interview with Ronald Moore about the finale, he answers a lot of interesting questions and why it was the way it was:

http://www.nj.com/entertainment/tv/index.ssf/2009/03/battlestar_galactica_ronald_d.html

Good read!

The whole thing felt rushed to me, they did tie stuff up which was good I couldn't help thinking of Hitch Hikerguide to the Galaxy towards the end.

One of the more interesting story plots to me was always going to be, what was going to happen when they discovered Earth. There were a number of plausible options and it has to be said the production team choose the cheap to produce option.

I'm going to read the Ron Moore interview now (thanks for the link btw), see what his take is.

Overall BSG is one of the best scifi series when taken as a whole.

Absolutely loved the finale.  It was quite heavy going emotionally through a lot of it and after it had finished I actually felt upset about a few things and the fact that I will never see another new episode of the show

I am a great believer in poetic license, they are telling a story and people want to question every little thing.  Thankfully it was a bloody good story and I could enjoy it for what it was.

There is only one thing I really have a bone of contention about, the whole Admiral Adama flying off to live alone thing, that's not poetic license, it's ridiculous.  He's spent almost his entire adult life with his close friend Tigh(sp?), he has formed a very strong relationship with his last remaining son and he is going to abandon this why?  There's no amount of debating after the show is done that can justify that, the writers were having a brain melt down when they added that one in, just trying to add more weepy moments imo.

I hope that many of the team come together to create something else that is as wonderful in the future.

Well, if you caught a short ad, there's going to be another BSG "movie" in the fall, centering around the Cylons and their "Plan" (which, I imagine, did not include their own extinction originally..).

It's even called "The Plan". Should be interesting!

Caprica also sounded good at first, but now I'm not so sure. It may be good, going to the origins of their technology, resurrection, etc.. but it's still going to be a modern-ish drama.

Yeah I heard some time ago that they planned 2 TV movies based on BSG, these days I only hear talk of the 1 movie but let's hope we will see more.

I'm totally not sold on the Caprica thing either, just seems like a soap opera with a touch of thriller on some other planet.  I want to see an intelligently written space series again.  By intelligent I don't mean pseudo science, what other space series has characters as deep and believeable while also being morally grey, not black and white.

I don't think it is necessarily that they chose to not use their knowledge. With no tools etc, and a very small population it will be hard to just survive, in a few generations only will almost all tech knowlege be lost for good. Knowing that certain things can exist dioesn't mean they could reproduce them. Look at what the Plage did in Europe, how much knowledge was lost and how long it took to get back on track. With so many people dead most people had to concentrate on just staying alive, and communication was rare. Besides, even if they had knowledge of Raptors and how to fly them, how many of them would know about metalurgy etc.?

Anyway I liked the ending and I like that they are our ancestors; better than if they got here now or in the furure. I always wondered how that was going top be, In 1980 the had them get here in our present and it was a pretty dumb ,movie. It was cool that Starbuck was an angel. I liked the religiousness of it. Too many sci-fi shows try to erase this because it makes it harder to write for, i think.

Did anyone notice that the old style cylons were tougher than the newer ones? In the fire fight the new one went down with a shot but the old ones seemed to take quite a few hits.

I noticed how Cylons have slowly become a lot easier to kill as the series went on

Remember when they got boarded that time?  They were like trying to take out Terminators.  The finale had them going down like Storm Troopers

Well it's been a few years between those two, I'll attribute it to "they learned to make better bullets"

Just one other thing about this show...  for anyone out there that smokes or used to smoke, How many frakkin' packs did the doctors have with him????  I mean the guy chain smokes and four years later hes still got some to light.

They were down to their last tube of toothpaste (few episodes before the finale) but they still have cigarettes and alcohol.  I'd really like to talk to the quatermaster. lol

I thought it was pretty good, but like others said, it kind of felt rushed. To me, it felt like even an hour into it the writers still had no idea how to end it or tie up the lose ends. And why did Adama never come back to live with Apollo? I mean, they're father and son, why would he want to live alone for years on end?

How do we know that that is "our" Earth? Our Earth could have been the one that was an apocolyptic wasteland.

The last minute or two when they show the 'angel' Baltar and Six walking through Times Square, perhaps

I suspect he might have been making a joke about his penis.  I need to watch that scene again, but I think "Six" is looking down when she says "god" causing "Baltar" to make a joke alluding to her thinking his male anaotomy is a god.

Appearantly the anglefied versions of Baltar and Six are pretty much like thier corporeal counterparts.

Except the ruined Earth had the Brooklyn Bridge on it.