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The whole thing was there to question the possibility of machines that are essentially human, and to question whether AI can be indistinguishable from natural life. I think the answer they tried to give was "yes." Which definition of science fiction are people using that doesn't include "fiction speculating on current or future technology & science?"
I'm honestly confused as to why people didn't like the ending. It seemed like the perfectly natural conclusion to the series and didn't feel "poorly constructed" at all. It drew on threads that have been cropping up since the pilot episode and tied them all together pretty nicely.
edit: and NaC I think you missed the point is the problem, not that there wasn't a point.
This is me reading responses in this thread.
pffhahaha
Yeah I don't see it either. I was fine with the ending, it could have gone a lot worse, and I don't have any feelings of regret of unanswered questions. I think that the only part I didn't like, is when they two Angels said "something something god"
"You know he hates being called that"
It seemed like a pointless exchange and it reminded me of watching Dogma. But that was about it, pretty insignificant, just seemed... out of place.
well the guy was a total dick, to be honest
lots of people though the whole gods plan thing wasn't literal. Pony was partly right in saying some people have issues with religion and that's causing them to dislike the ending, but the point is you can go "but the hints were there throughout the story!" all you want, but some people felt it was a red-herring. Until the final, either group probably could have made a good case for either side being right. Then you have the people who feel the second half of the final was just poorly written/designed/whatever.
Resident 8bitdo expert.
Resident hybrid/flap cover expert.
Edit: right now they're arguing over the shelf life of Laura's medications, and rather than simply saying "hey, dumb little technical details like that are not the point of the show" they're spinning ridiculously complex in-universe explanations for how Laura has a steady supply of cancer meds.
Not very smart, Tory.
In other words, I think the point was to say Cylons have experiences equal to humans; they have souls too.
What..wha? Gods plan is to get you all this way and watch you off yourselves within 6 months?
You're going to take everyone, divide them up, and let them go live in nature?
Are you fucking insane?!? They'll be dead in a week! Its an ALIEN planet! You don't even know the fucking flora or fauna! What is safe to eat? What is going to eat YOU? How the fuck are you going to treat Malaria?!?
Yeah...great idea. Hope the first group that got to Africa enjoyed the learning experience of why you don't poke the fat ugly grey things in the water (see: Hippo).
Or the Australia team that decided there had to be water SOMEWHERE inland....right? Maybe over that NEXT dune?
Basically the driving thrust of the first half of the first season was how they were out of supplies and out of water and out of food and dammit they are fucked if they don't find a place to settle down soon.
I'm not demanding that every show nitpick down to the fine details of everything, and no show is going to catch everything. I'd just like good shows to follow their own established rules.
Presumably a planet supporting organisms genetically close enough to humans to breed with them can support humans. They no longer had much in terms of tools and power generators and such to try creating a functioning city like on New Caprica, so they gave up on their old ways and spread out. Of course some of them would fail. It's called "hedging your bets."
It was out of the ordinary, but sure as hell not alien.
By this logic - What is "success" defined as?
We are not going to start that shit in here too.
Feel free to skip this, I won't think less of you.
Because they had this mysterious thing of God's true plan for all of us, we have a destiny and all that. That's what characters in the show were telling us the whole time.
At the same time, the narration and titling and other hints were suggesting that everything was cyclical and we were doomed or destined to repeat the same thing over and over again, which is not only boring and depressing, but seems to contradict the "God's plan" alleyway.
At the finale they say "Oh, yeah, all of that was true. God's plan PLUS doomed to repeat yourself".
Then there is a whole character development plotline about Kara returning and what happened to her ship and there's a new one and she's having breakdowns and doing shit and sleeping with people and all of that, a human with human issues and is even having visions of what we could assume are spiritual creatures.
But no, she wasn't actually human there, she was an angel, although perfectly indistinguishable from the humans.
And they told us that the one true God that the cylons believed in was a fabrication of the final five, but no, wait, it's actually true.
There is not a storyline in there that I have a problem with, I just wish they had picked one and used it, instead of being inconsistent. That, however, is a relatively small nitpick.
The big thing though, the dealbreaker, as it were, after that entire voyage, they land on this planet, presumably destroy all evidence of their advanced space-faring civilization, convince 30,000 people to give up everything they have to revert to primitive pre-modern humans at the dawn of homo-sapiens 150,000 years ago and eventually become us.
Now, here's the problem I have with that, which has very little to do with my enjoyment of the series. Making Hera the Mitochondrial Eve is an interesting touch to suggest, hey, all of us are part toaster and don't even know it. Given the fact that it's only a common maternal line and we could still have other lines through sons of other people, it's plausible.
But what about language and tool usage? Depending on which theory of evolutionary linguistics you subscribe to, the Great Leap Forward that lead to modernity would have occurred around 50,000 years ago, or was a slow progression over a hundred thousand years. But since we do know that tool use and simple speech (although not language, and definitely not elements of higher culture) was present around that time, and suggested in the show, wouldn't we have evidence of a rapid advancement in humans? Wouldn't we see evidence of these spread out small villages and agricultural development 150k years ago? What I mean to say, wouldn't we see the start of civilization around the time the people from the fleet arrived? The only other thoughts would be that they really did give up everything and "went native" or most of the fleet I spent years cheering on died off before they could make their mark on the planet, except for one small line from which we all derive a common heritage.
So what the show is asking me to believe is that the group of untrusted military leaders who had integrated their rag-tag fleet of survivors with the robots who had nuked 12 planets and had just allowed a coup that killed all but one of their elected representatives, this group of people somehow convinced 30,000 people to accept a plan thought up on a whim where they would give up all protection, advanced language, art, music, culture, religion, technology, government, law and heritage, and I am supposed to believe that everyone went along with it. Even though a vast majority of the survivors probably had no clue about survival. Even though the chances were good that most of them wouldn't make it, but everyone was ok with it, because someone said it was time to "break the cycle." And then they suggest that the cycle wasn't really broken at all, it was just delayed?
I don't give a shit about the God did it angle. If they want to say that there was a divine plan, I'll buy that. I'm even ok if they don't want to explain the divine plan.
But they took a huge steaming shit on plausibility. There's just no way to apply logic to the ending and get anywhere close to something reasonable or acceptable.
but then I was 'hey alternate realities' and 'crown is excellent' and 'mori let's get on this army of two bro'
I remember thinking it was original when Douglas Adams wrote it.
That's leaving a mark.
The 150,000 years later bit was ... alright as an epilogue, but it didn't really fit the show. It really felt unnecessary.
form babby?
I guess its one of those things that don't matter all that much, but I don't believe that there are not still tons and tons of Cylons out there.
Just wanted to put that out there.
Would have been nice if he'd been making that perfection speech earlier in the season/series.
(open the spoiler)
Green means I think you interpreted the events correctly, but drew a weird conclusion from it. I thought those were all tied together nicely. Using the word "angel" for Kara is just Baltar grasping for words that make sense to describe the apparently supernatural phenomena they're experiencing. I thought the whole point was them coming to terms with how all these things are related any why certain people seem to have certain destinies.
Blue: I don't think that was the intention at all. Hera was supposed to be a symbol that Cylons and humans are compatible and spiritually equal. Her legacy got talked up a lot but it's a largely symbolic one.
Red: this is you descending into nerdrage because they gave us a fictional alternate reality which indicates an Earth that doesn't conform to current rigorous anthropological analysis. I thought the point of it being Earth Earth was to show how the cycle might actually occur: we can conceive of people inventing the Cylons in the foreseeable future, and thus the cycle happens again, with different planets.
The... purply colored stuff I kind of agree with, though I figure it was just them all thinking, well, we really don't have much opportunity to keep searching and this is the best we're going to find, so... I'm tired and I want to hunt buffalo for the rest of my life.
did you just grade my post?