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Battlestar Galactica AND Caprica *SPOILERS* - It's Over! YEAAAAHHHHH
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Yes, it fucking is a hellish prospect. And it isn't a life with lots of food or without fear of imminent death. It's a life where food might be plentiful one year and then you starve the next year. It's a life where, if you're a woman, you have even odds of dying from child birth. It's a life where the average life span is 35 and pushing 45 if you make it to 15 years of age. It's a life that the colonials are utterly unprepared for and, in all reality, would have all died out within a couple of years.
If I was in the fleet, my response would have been, "Okay. You guys stay on the planet and I'll just take the ships. I'll keep my nice fucking life of science and technology. And in a 150,000 years, after you've all forgotten every lesson we learned in this whole journey and start to repeat your god damned mistakes, my descendents will be living in a hyper-advanced culture, perhaps chillin' with the Cylon Centurions, and we'll have figured out the way to break the cycle through the thing that humanity and Cylons alike do best: reason."
I think they wrote themselves into a corner when they arrived on pre-civilization Earth. We don't have any history of humans arriving from space and setting up colonies, so obviously the Colonials couldn't do that. That's how it kind of feels to me. Some people have made good points as to why they would cast away everything and become cavemen, but realistically I can't see everyone agreeing to do away with all they've known and accomplished and split up into groups across the planet. Why couldn't they have civilization but record their tragical history and give a warning to future generations? Because the writers had them arrive in pre-civilization Earth?
To be honest, that was one of the parts of the ending that I found extremely clumsy.
The fact that they said the exact same thing at the exact same time struck me as something that would be done for "humour" in Friends or some other shit like that.
They should have said a different phrase if they were talking at the same time, I would have liked that more; I think it would have been less jarring and obvious.
It was just more of a warning or a heads-up.
Being able to live with the centurions is what they really had to do to break the cycle. I mean they could live with the skinjobs, but they're essentially human. Breaking the cycle means accepting that the centurions are people too, even though they're scary looking metal men.
I thought the flashbacks where showing where all their "destinies" started
Lee's started when he met Kara
Adama's started when he was puking on himself in a gutter (haha no, when he walked out of the polygraph for the civi job.)
Laura Roslin deciding to join Adar's campaign
when col saul tigh met ellYEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
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I think relying on Centurions for labour would be a mistake, since that is sort of what led them to rebel in the first place. If a new Centurion/Human civlisation were started, it would need to start out with the two people being equals from the get-go and with no expectations of how each species should contribute to society. There should be no division of labour, no division of living, no division of duties, etc. The Centurions, if they want, should be free to become musicians or whatever without fear of being looked down upon for not using their nearly limitless robot strength to perform manual labour.
Plus, Centurions would probably make some kick-ass, funky techno beats.
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It's probably just me, in that case.
I do remember wincing a bit when I saw it. It just seemed so obvious, like something I'd write.
And that's not a good thing!
Yeah, I guess if writing and speech and information didn't exist you might have a point.
O_o Did you miss the part where the captains were squabbling for bits and pieces of the Galactica before she was even retired? The entire fleet was falling apart. And combat-induced structural damage aside, Galactica would have been the one in the best shape, given that it was the only one actually designed for long-term deep-space missions. All the other ships were only meant to travel between planets inside a single star system. You've seen how bad the Galactica was in the end - the other ship would have been even worse off.
They said each group of settlers knew the location of all others, so presumably they have some way to contact each other. So the brain drain won't happen. Splitting up makes sense: large settlements require a lot more resources, infrastructures and sanitation than small ones. It also gives humanity a better shot: a natural disaster can wipe out a settlement, but not all of them at once.
No it's not.
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1) Kara being an angel who doesn't know she's an angel, who gets visions from other angels who are normally invisible to everyone but she's a special angel who's the harbinger of death, whatever that means. That was bullshit contrived crap that made no sense.
2) The nice thing about the series was that the supernatural angle was always subtly hinted at, but never blatantly shown, and always explainable through sufficiently advanced technology or luck. Just coming out and having head six/baltar/piano guy be agents of either god or some godlike being contradicts the entire tone of the series.
It should have just faded to black with Adama sitting on the hill.
As for her disappearing... I'll just assume she has mad stealth skillz. I mean, she's already cross-trained as a pilot, marksman, and commando leader. She might as well have had ninja training too.
They also still had brains when they left Kobol for Earth and Caprica. How did that work out? Maybe all the colonials should have drilled out their brains. They also had lungs. How did that work out? Maybe they should get a pneumatic lung extractor and pop those puppies out since they clearly caused the conflicts.
No. You know what they had that likely did cause the conflicts? Baser human emotions and reactions. Things like "vengeance" and "oppression" aren't the result of knowledge, they're the result of humans giving in to their baser side. Knowledge is the only hope that humanity ever has of escaping those tendencies.
However, Lee's brilliant fucking solution was to cast away the only hope humanity had and GIVE IN TO THE BASER SIDE OF THEIR HUMANITY! Fucking retarded.
And then fifteen minutes after landing on the planet he decides to leave everyone forever.
During the assault on the colony, there's the scene where Racetrack and Skulls are flying, and Skulls get killed by the asteroid. Immediately following that scene is the one where Boomer breaks Simon's neck.
"RDM just killed all the black characters in like three minutes."
Besides, at worst, the ships would've held a lot of usable metal. It's just so bloody wasteful to dump them into the sun.
1. I'm wasn't suggesting using the ships for travel (but it's not like that wouldn't be incredibly useful). Hence the cannibalization comment. They're useful for, if nothing else, shelter on earth. There was no good reason to destroy them (that wouldn't have been soundly defeated by all the reasons to not destroy them). If nothing else, keeping one around to fuck up any errant giant asteroids would have been handy.
2. From the end of the episode, we can conclude that this episode is supposed to slide in with general human pre-history and eventual history. That means that information didn't do so well, there was massive brain drain, medical technology and knowledge was lost, superstition ran wild, tribalism, racism, witch burnings, Nazis, Carlos Mencia and the final shit episode of Battlestar Galactica ensued.
I didn't say information caused the cycle. I said it did not prevent it. That was in response to Loren saying that keeping technology-based information would allow the people of New-Earth to break out of the cycle. That had already been tried twice after Kobol, and failed twice to prevent the cycle from repeating.
Well, yeah. Back half of every season the fleet goes crazy just for not being attacked and living with themselves. At least microtribes can periodically attack one another just to keep the other tribe sane
But I'm not sure how anyone in the production team could ever have watched the "150,000 years later" bit and thought that it worked. It felt like a snide, smug joke that neither worked if taken as a joke nor if taken seriously. Take out the explicit commentary, and it might kind of work, but with the head angels' dialogue it pretty much hurt. It's a shame that this is the very last impression we have of BSG.
On a different topic: I hope that the S4.5 episodes will be extended on DVD, because I imagine that a number of quibbles can (and, I hope, will) be resolved by having deleted scenes, e.g. about what happened to the mutineers, what happened to Tyrol after he freed Boomer etc. We find out in later episodes, but having scenes filling in those blanks when it's needed should improve the flow of the final eps.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
2. Yeah, I don't think brain drain means what you think it does. It's when scientists move en masse from one place to another; their knowledge isn't lost from humanity, it just lost locally here and gained there. That's the one you named first, and the one I argued wouldn't happen. But you're right; clearly, somewhere along the generations, everything the Colonials and Cylon knew was lost.
I really think we just have to take their word for it and assume they can survive, because the said they could. Not saying it was easy, but assuming that they all froze to death a day later is taking something out of the text and putting it in. But that doesn't mean in the intervening 150,000 years their descendants don't lose what they built. 150,000 years is a damn long time. Our modern civilization will not exist in 150,000 years, but that's not really a test we have to pass.
I feel like the best way to describe the epilogue is 'tasteless.' In the future, I'm going to just switch it off when it fades away from Adama.
Oh, it's even better than that; they land in Africa, and see early man.
BSG people: Primitives, LOL. Don't worry though, our hardy band of basically white settlers will teach these poor African cavemen language and other civilised skills as we interbreed with them! Thus, we shall mock the idea that man emerged from Africa (ie black people) and show how it took a bunch of space crackers and cyborg Asians (they're good at math, right?) to turn them into the advanced species we see today!
I keed, I keed.
Sort of.
I'm still going with Starbuck being the daughter of God and hence can technomagically appear and disappear but only realises this when she remembers the period of time when she was "dead" but in fact having long chats to her dad and stuff.
@Richy: Yeah the robots were cutesy, but there was that other humanoid looking one as well which I recognised from a couple of news articles before and they showed a variety of different robots. I don't know, it just seemed like a "this is what we're doing, we're taking to first steps to creating perhaps creating sentient machines - don't fuck this up."
Honestly, the fact that such an interpretation is even possible is very, very dissapointing.
I'm basically pulling your leg mate - it was a response to Plutonium's post, but I do remember giggling to myself when it was implied that the "mitochondrial eve" was so because "she" had space whitey DNA as opposed to native African.
That's the thing, though - I don't think that BSG was ever a show about the evils of robotics, except on the most banal, literal level. Its themes/motifs were much more revenge vs. forgiveness, atonement, maintaining ethics (or redefining/compromising/losing them) during times of crisis, intentions vs. actions etc. Critique of technology? I honestly think that this was a teensy little part of BSG only. Wasn't one of the main questions that the series raised over and over again that the Cylons (excluding the toasters) were practically human and that the difference was largely in our heads?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods