Okay, Let’s Talk Galactica Finale (Part 4)

 In this post we’ll look at the third and last hour of the Galactica finale, Daybreak (summary here: Act 6 to Act 10).

The first act of this hour–Act 6–is the climax of the entire series. These ten minutes are where it all comes to a head. After this, it’s a comfortable downhill ride (so we’re going to have more to say about it than anything else).

When we last saw our heroes, a tentative truce had just been worked out and everybody stood down from active combat.

The basis of the truce was the Final Five’s offer to Cavil resurrection technology if he would release Hera, who he was holding hostage.

Cavil agreed.

Rather too conveniently (weak writing alert), each of the Final Five holds a piece of the design for resurrection tech, so they all have to cooperate or they can’t fulfill their bargain with Cavil.

Specifically: They have to merge their memories (of everything they’ve ever done, apparently, not just uploading the part of the design they have in them) through the cylon hand/water data interface system (which is kinda cool, admittedly).

Think of it as a total-penetration Facebook with no privacy controls–something we’re currently working toward in the real world. Should be ready in a couple years.

And, again by coincidence, they apparently have to do it all at once through the water interface. They can’t just download their pieces one at a time from their memories. It’s all at once or nothing. (Is that plausible for the people who designed the process in the first place? Why can’t Tigh give the part he designed, then Ellen give the part she did, etc? Why do they have to do it all together?)

If you’re sensing an unusual number of implausibilities setting us up for something Ron Moore needs to happen, your literary spidey sense is functioning properly.

Tory starts hemming and hawing, urging everyone to preemptively forgive each other for whatever they may have done, clearly dreading the fact that Galen and the others are about to find out that she spaced Galen’s wife Cally in her first flush of cylon-evilness.

Favorite line during this: CAVIL: “Hey! I don’t mean to rush you, but you are keeping two civilizations waiting!”

Eventually, they plunge their hands into Anders’ bathtub, and the design for resurrection tech starts downloading to the Colony.

Then Tigh, Ellen, and Galen get images of then-smug Tory spacing Cally.

Galen becomes homicidally enraged, yanks his hand from the bathtub, and kills Tory.

Cavil’s group interprets this as a betrayal of the deal, and hostilities in the CIC renew.

Cavil’s allies are quickly shot, and Cavil himself eats his pistol and blows his brains out in an act of nihilistic despair.

Conflict Over.

Let’s talk about a couple of things. First, the less-complicated question of Cavil’s exit.

I don’t mind it.

He’s a nasty, petty nihilistic villain, and he suffers a nasty, petty, nihilistic, self-imposed fate. When he realizes all is lost, he takes the Hitler way out, and it works dramatically. He stays true to his selfish little worldview, which closes him in and ultimately destroys him. It fits his character. He chose to live by the sword, and he dies by his own sword.

Good riddance.

For Cavil to die by his own hand is more dramatically satisfying than someone else shooting him, or him being put in a cell, or being spaced (as happened to two other versions of him, which was fine in context).

So I didn’t mind this. I didn’t need to see someone else righteously–or desperately–slaying him. Having his own nihilism do him in was fine.

Now for the more complex–and irritating–issue: Galen killing Tory.

Uhhhhh . . . I want something better.

I understand that Moore wants the truce with Cavil to fall apart, but . . . why?

We’ve already had a boatload of drama with the fight that’s been going on for much of the last hour. Why do we need a few extra seconds of action so Cavil and his colleagues can die? 

Why not let them have resurrection?

To prevent them from overrunning humanity in the future? Maybe . . . but that’s a danger the centurions pose, too, and the show doesn’t have a problem letting them go off on their own, with the hope that recent events have mended the fence enough to make this an acceptable risk. Why not do the same with Cavil now that he’s taken a step in faith, released his hostage, called off his troops, and agreed to the Final Five’s offer?

All of the characters seemed to think this was an acceptable bargain. Why didn’t the show’s creators?

It would end things on a nice note of hope and redemption growing from the midst of conflict and despair–major themes in the show–and it would symbolize the difficult-but-real coming-to-terms of humanity and its cylon offspring.

It would have been a good ending.

We also don’t need Cavil’s death to serve as a springboard to the other series goal: Finding Earth. Because, as we’re about to see, that is motivated by something entirely unrelated to Cavil’s death.

(And the “Racetrack Solution” that we’re about to see would also end future threats of Cavil hurting humans if the writers wanted. The Hand of Fate can just come down on the nuke button and send the Colony spiraling into the black hole.)

So what about Galen strangling Tory?

We already noted some of the coincidences that are involved to set this up: They all have to participate; they have to do it at the same time; they can’t hold back memories that aren’t related to the tech. These are really implausible to begin with, but then we have this: Galen didn’t really like his wife. After he semi-consciously slapped her around before they were married, he only married her because she lied to him and told him she was pregnant with his baby–a lie he later discovered. They had a rocky, unpleasant marriage, and he repudiated their child the moment he found out it wasn’t his. In the end, he wanted nothing to do with Cally and her memory.

So why is he motivated to fly into a murderous rage when he knows the gravity of the moment, involving the fate of two civilizations?

The emotional groundwork for this reaction has not been properly laid.

Given the layering of coincidence here, the question, “Couldn’t you have waited 30 seconds?” is entirely justified.

If you want to juice the drama, you could have Galen remove his hand, see the result, and put it back in long enough for the download to complete, and then kill Tory.

Or you could have the download of resurrection tech complete before the memories of Cally’s murder come up–the Galen kills her.

Or you could have had her tried and executed after the download. Maybe Adama lets Galen push the button to space her and she flies out the tube the way Cally did. It’s not like we don’t have options for how to pay off the Tory-killed-Cally thread.

Even if these possibilities are less than fully satiating, there’s still something unsatisfying about Galen picking This Precise Moment–loaded with Coincidence–to kill Tory.

A fact that RoMo realizes, because later in the hour he hangs a lantern on it by having Tigh tell Galen, “For what it’s worth, if the same thing that happened to Cally had happened to Ellen, I’d’ve done the same fraking thing.”

Yeah, right. 

It still rings hollow.

But I can live with it. (Sorta.)

On with the show!

Meanwhile, out in the accretion disk that surrounds the Colony, Racetrack and Skulls are still dead.

As their ship spins out of control, an accretion disk rock hit it and causes Racetrack’s dead hand to slamdown on the “Fire” button controlling the Raptor’s nukes, which all launch and hit the Colony.

This creates the Final Crisis requiring Galactica to make a Desperate Jump, and so under orders by Adama, Starbuck uses a numerical version of the musical notes given to her by her angel father, Starbuck programs the jump system, and we get . . .

. . . a flashback to Caprica before the Fall in which Kara tells Lee that she’s not afraid of dying, but she is afraid of being forgotten.

Galactica comes out of the jump–visibly suffering major structural damage and unable to jump again–but it’s okay, because . . . 

. . . it’s moving into orbit around EARTH! (Our Earth.)

WOO-HOO!!!

The most important series goal has just been achieved!

 

END OF ACT 6

ACT 7

It’s a big relief to get to Earth, and we’ve got some nice scenes and goodbyes coming up.

These are needed.

If the drama of the last four-plus years has succeeded at all, we have invested in these characters, and we need to see them saying goodbye and starting their new lives (as appropriate). We need to see them adjusting to “the new normal,” now that the “normal” of the series is over.

There is a balance to be found here. Sometimes there is too much material in the post-climax (I’m thinking of you, Peter Jackson!), and sometimes there is too little (Jerry Pournelle! This is the case in the otherwise-stellar[!] book Starswarm!). Here . . . I think they got it just about right. Maybe a little too much, but not by much. 

It’s quickly clear that Galactica has arrived on Earth in our past, and it soon becomes clear that the Colonials are among our ancestors and that Hera is mitochondrial Eve.

A lot of people didn’t like this, citing it as a recycling of the cliched “Adam and Eve story” that pops up every so often in sci-fi.

I don’t buy that.

You can call anything a cliche if you look at it from the right angle. There are no totally new stories. The question is how you tell them.

In this case we don’t have a literal retelling of Adam and Eve. Bill Adama is not Adam, and Laura Roslin is not Eve (if any biblical figure, she’s more like Moses).

Having Hera turn out to be mitochondrial Eve is not the same thing as having her turn out to be the biblical Eve. It’s just a way of paying off her importance, which they had promised us ever since season 2. They had to do something, and this was reasonable as a storytelling choice.

I also don’t mind the fact that they had Galactica show up in our past. In fact, this seems to me to be the smart storytelling choice. There are only three options, after all: 1) Galactica shows up in our past, 2) Galactica shows up in our present, 3) Galactica shows up in our future.

If the last option is exercised, what does that do to the drama? Well, depends on how they play it.

If they show up to a low-tech, post-apocalyptic Earth then that’s a real downer to end the series on–and they already did that one on us anyway, which was good storytelling.

If they show up at a technologically advanced Earth that can defend the fleet from cylons then it comes as an unsatisfying deus ex machina ending–assuming the cylons haven’t already been beaten.

If the cylons have already been beaten and they show up at a high-tech Earth then . . . so what? We get to watch them marvel at the marvels of the future for a few minutes? (Ssssssssssssssssnore!)

What if Galactica shows up in the present? Earth can’t defend them from the cylons, and they’ve only made things worse by leading evil cylons to the final, undefendable pocket of humanity–assuming the evil cylons haven’t already been defeated. If they have been defeated and Galactica shows up at present-day Earth then . . .  ssssssnore!

(Unless you want to use Eddie Olmos’s suggested ending–having Galactica show up in modern skies, cut to President Bush being told about it, and he says “Nuke ’em!” Everybody dies and . . . Uh, too dark for a good ending.)

Also, having them show up present day would create howls of protests from the fans due to comparisons to the Totally Evil Series Galactica 1980.

So having the Galactica show up in the past is actually the smart storytelling choice. This way, Earth can’t be the solution to the cylon problem. The characters are forced to deal with that on their own, to stand on their own two feet (so to speak) and come to terms with what humanity created. 

I also don’t mind the characters proclaiming the new planet “Earth” even though they’d been to the post-apocalyptic cylon Earth. That’s fine. They’ve been through so much they deserve to call the new planet Earth, even if it wasn’t the original one.

But while I think having them arrive in the past was the smart choice, this act also contains the stupidest thing of the whole finale: Lee’s luddite proposal.

No matter how much lantern hanging and justification Moore did for this, it still came off really, really lame.

I don’t mind Lee making the proposal. After all, they need some way to explain why they didn’t set up a technological civilization, in which case our history would be very different.

What they should have had happen is something like this:

LEE: Hey, dad! I just got another one of my brilliant ideas! Let’s all abandon technology!

ADAMA: Heh. Yeah, right, son. Look: We got here with not much more than the shirts on our backs. We have no manufacturing base. Our supplies are low. And we are totally unprepared for the kind of life we’re about to lead. We’ll be lucky if we don’t fall back into the stone age within a couple of generations.

Of course, that doesn’t get us to the dramatic moment of flying Galactica into the sun (a fitting end), but this does . . . 

LEE: Dad! What are we going to do about the fleet in orbit?

ADAMA: Except for the Vipers, Raptors, and a few other ships, the rest aren’t built for atmosphere, so we can’t bring them down. We’ll use the atmosphere-worthy ships to strip the others of everything that can be brought down. Then we’ll drive the rest into the sun so that they won’t stay up there in decaying orbits and eventually come down and spray radioactive Tylium isotopes from their reactors all over our lovely new environment.

See? Just a few dialog-level fixes and you get to the same place–low-tech Earth and fleet going into Sun–without the stupid luddite business. (Obviously, I’m only gesturing with the above dialog–not suggesting those precise words.)

ACT 8

This act has a bunch of goodbyes, as well as flashback resolutions for Adama and Tigh. The goodbyes are good. The flashbacks okay.

ACT 9

More goodbyes, plus flashback resolutions for Kara, Lee, and Roslin. Though the dialog in this act needs touching up (especially Kara’s lines, “He’s not coming back this time, Lee” and “Today’s the first day of the rest of your life, Lee”–both of which need to be struck), the goodbyes are basically good; the flashbacks less so–especially the Lee/pigeon flashback in which it seems to be implied that the pigeon may be Kara Thrace in another form. The whole Lee/pigeon series did not work.

On the other hand, having Lee turn around and discover Kara gone was good.

Finally, this act has Laura’s death scene. Apparently, this wasn’t originally in here. The script first called for Adama and Roslin to fly into space, but the actress insisted that she get the death scene we’d been building up to from the beginning, and she got it.

That was the right decision, and the death scene was beautifully played–and played off against the bountiful life that surrounded the characters during it.

Truly moving.

ACT 10

Some more character moments, which are nice, and then we zoom 150,000 years into the future, to today’s Time Square, where Head Six and Head Baltar are walking around, wondering if the human/cylon cycle will repeat itself on New Earth the way it did on Kobol, the Twelve Colonies, Old Earth, and no doubt other oscillations of “All of this has happened before; all of this will happen again.”

Head Six bets no, citing the law of averages, which she says is part of God’s plan.

At which point Head Baltar get’s the final lines of the series, which happen to be stupid.

HEAD BALTAR: (referring to God) You know it doesn’t like that name.

HEAD SIX glares at him.

HEAD BALTAR: (self-deprecatingly) Silly. . . . Silly me.

The line that God doesn’t like to be called “God” makes no sense whatsoever. So . . . Head Six was right to glare at him and he was right to confess his own silliness, I guess.

In reality, this is another case of Ron Moore trying to be spiritually profound and politically correct at the same time and succeeding only at the latter.

Dude, you’ve already established that in this story God exists and that Head Six, Head Baltar, and Kara Thrace (at least post-death) are his angels (even if they’re not like our angels). Just go with it.

And so we come to the final montage of Head Six and and Head Baltar walking off amid the sounds of All along the Watchtower and the sights of robotics technology being displayed amid modern decadence, leading us to wonder if the cycle of destruction will repeat or not. 

A nice ending.

I liked it.

And I liked the finale overall, though only barely, given the amount of stupid stuff that was present. I gave it * * * 1/2 of five stars.

Thus ends our epic and long-awaited review of the Battlestar Galactica finale.

What are your thoughts on the finale?