Battlestar Galactica (My comments from last year.)

After having a week to mull it over, I find that I must comment on the series finale of Battlestar Galactica.   Five years my friends and I have watched this show faithfully.   Five years I have been saying that this is the best thing to ever come out of a TV set.   Five years my friends and I have speculated on where the show will ultimately go and how it will end.   Five years I have hung on every word and prophecy to come out of the show.   How did it end?   With a whimper and not a bang.   The ending was not Star Wars but a rip off of The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.

Also I am only mildly impressed with the battle leading up to the end.   We have seen battles before on this show.   During the battle sequence I was thinking, "Get this over with so I can see how this ends."   This is one series where destination was just as important as the journey.

There were a couple of illogical plot devices that I don't really want to comment on.   I just tried to ignore them.

It is not that I didn't enjoy the ending.   I did.   The ending was beautiful in its own way.   It was very well executed.   I thought that the acting was really exceptional.   I expected, however, some sort of grand science fiction ending and instead the show delivered religious symbolism (note that the first Battlestar Galactica series had Mormon symbolism) and a recycled plot about how the human race started on earth, i.e. Probe 7, Over and Out.   I just thought that it could have been more original.   For a long time we expected this series to lead to something grand, but what we got was only about half way there.

There were some characters in the show that we were unsure about who or what they were.   In the end we find out that they are angels.   O.K.   I can dig this.   It is not everyday that you have angels in a science fiction show.   I should have paid more attention to the random ramblings of one Gaius Baltar.   (He seems to be the equivalent of John Locke on Lost, who occasionally makes crazy claims that years later turn out to be true.)

The 6 episodes leading up to the ending did not give me confidence that this was going to end well.   You could have taken the plots of these six episodes and compressed them down to 2 hours.   It appeared like not much was happening and that they were dragging out the story.   I started speculating that they had run out of ideas.

I can only hope that Lost does better when it ends next year.