Comments on: After We All Got To Earth

By: On the Pleasures of Watching Battlestar Galactica Again | Koreanish

On the Pleasures of Watching Battlestar Galactica Again | Koreanish — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 00:17:05 +0000

[...] The original drama was about humanity suffering from a genocide, at the hands of a machine-made humanity, a silica-based life-form made to resemble humans, but with abilities that surpass them physically and mentally, the limits of being human–what are they, and at what point are you human, at what point, not? Can you come at being human from the other side, in other words—can you start out somewhere inhuman and make yourself human? This is more centrally the topic of the show once you know who the Cylons are, and what emerges is a different cadence to the dramatic irony. Boomer’s relationship with Chief, for example, Tigh and his wife Ellen’s reunion, these become more poignant rather than less, for how these are relationships between Cylons who both do and do not know who each other is, in ways conscious and unconscious, and the show’s original need to be conventionally suspenseful vanishes, replaced by another story, animated by the new dramatic irony of knowing what the rest of the crew does not. We are then watching the Cylons as characters variously lost within this human world they sought to enter, and finding each other again at the edge of catastrophe. A new plot emerges—will these new creatures, who sought to be human and then more than human, survive themselves? Can they find what it is they sought, or have they simply recreated the worst of what they hated about humanity inside themselves? The Cylon civil war, the idea that there are elders who are so lost in their dream of humanity that they’ve forgotten themselves, the robot who drinks to forget himself—if anything, the literary qualities of the show’s story increase on a second watching. I can’t wait to see how it changes the end. [...]

By: koreanish

koreanish — Wed, 13 May 2009 06:49:06 +0000

But yes. Sad.

By: koreanish

koreanish — Wed, 13 May 2009 06:48:30 +0000

I don’t think it was malicious, though. I think they thought it was a really great idea. I just don’t think they realized, we wanted to see our hero live or die. And not just fade away.

By: heather

heather — Mon, 11 May 2009 01:24:04 +0000

Alex-

I haven’t seen a single episode of BG, but I know its fans are hardcore devotees.

Your comment about the disappointing fate of Starbuck reminds me of a rant I saw on public access cable about 20 years ago.

The topic was the film “Field of Dreams.” A black man was outraged by the racism in the film. His argument went something like this:

The only black character is James Earl Jones, the least threatening black man ever. How convenient that the only black character just disappears. This is white people’s solution to the problem of black people. Just stick them in some corn field where they disappear. They aren’t dead. They are happily going away. They are just getting sucked into a corn field. They will be happy in some corn field and we will never see them again. Good riddance.

At first, I dismissed this as crazy. I didn’t recall any racism in the film. Then I couldn’t stop thinking about his arguments. Finally, I watched Field of Dreams again (I got it for free with a McDonalds meal). After hearing this man’s views, a film that had appeared dumb but innocuous seemed positively sinister.

So, the only mortal female sci fi hero in recent memory just vanishes at the end of the show. Maybe this reflects some de-evolutionary ideas on the part of the writers. If so, it’s just sad.

By: koreanish

koreanish — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:27:32 +0000

That is actually really interesting to do—because of what is revealed in season late season 3/early season 4, watching the whole show over again is like watching a new show. There’s much more drama in Chief’s discovery of the Eye of Jupiter, for example. Or when he and Boomer are first together.

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:08:31 +0000

I do agree with your assessment of Starbuck’s end-her final role as a quasi-Jesus parallel ran too strongly towards a Christian metaphor (in what I thought was/should have been an exploration of spirituality as an ideal, not a concrete parallel to one or another specific religion), and Ron Moore’s explanation of “she’s whatever you want her to be/believe in” was lame. On a final note, I’ve enjoyed everyone’s discussion on the last episode here, and I’m going to watch the series again on DVD, and glory in what for the most part was a frakkin’ great show. Like Buffy, it had its wonderful highs and stumbly lows. And we all differ on what those exactly were.

By: koreanish

koreanish — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 01:18:29 +0000

Also Chris: It was nice to see them happy, but it would have been nicer to see them with a happiness they’d earned.

By: koreanish

koreanish — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 01:14:46 +0000

Lindsay: Dramatically, the ending was disappointing and even insulting to faithful viewers—after all this time, for Starbuck, a woman who fought, bled and killed—a hero—to end with her vanishing into thin air, that’s beyond foul. She was the only woman character in scifi in recent memory with no superhero powers and no bionics, just plain gut, smarts and fury, to be a hero, and she deserved a better ending. Captain Tigh, who was set to betray his people for his friend Admiral Adama, for him to not even say goodbye to Adama is incredible, and yet that’s what the ending suggests. Their friendship was central to so many story lines–why let it drop at the end? I’m not interested in either a happy or ambiguous ending for the sake of itself and I don’t say that, either. What I am talking about is that I want an ending that delivers on what has come before and that makes a narrative sense. And what I’m arguing here is that this ending ended up mirroring our times, even as it also failed dramatically as a story.

Also, at the level of a fanboy, I don’t believe that a people who fought so hard against the very idea of letting the Cylons board the ship much less repair it would then just give up all technology and wander the planet beatifically committed to starting over without it. Especially given that Adama then …flies off? With a ship? I’m not asking for tragedy over happiness or any of this other silliness. There’s a more complicated and interesting story that went missing. I would have believed it if Adama had set fire to his ship to be sure that all technology was gone. And had then wandered off with the President to see those birds. I would have believed it if Tigh and Adama had said goodbye, or if Starbuck had managed to find out what she was and to tell Lee even a little of it. Those things I would have or could have believed. But I don’t believe this. This ending might have been ‘nicely ambiguous’ but it was false and thus had the qualities of a lie. And I hate it above all else when people lie to me and stories especially. So I’ll keep ragging on it, thanks.

Chris: See the above for the ending I would have preferred. Also, yes, it would have been nice to see them happy, at the ending of a story that made sense.

By: Chris

Chris — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 21:39:34 +0000

My friends and I have talked back and forth about the finale, one of them feeling much of the same sense of an awkward break of the shows’ realism and character complexity. Which I get. On the other hand, I was somewhat happy to see the characters happy- naively simplistic on my part I admit, but after everything they had been through, I liked seeing a sense of peace. Structurally, I always thought after Hera was introduced that they (the creators of the show) would go for a ‘we all-human and Cylon-need to get along to move forward in the world. The end was a deviation of BSG’s moral ambiguity and complexity but I found it intriguing that a hard science fiction show would dive into a very humanistic ideal of faith as a source of forgiveness and renewal, when it’s primarily used as such a blunt weapon in our own reality today. Maybe it was an example of themes dominating over characters too much. And I wonder, what would the finale have been like if it did follow the full previous moral ambiguity/darkness to the end? Abandon Galactica with anyone still alive going off into the unknown in the Raptors with only the blind determination to exist? Would we have liked that scenario or one like it, in its execution more?

By: Cosmic Emptiness « Kenyanthropus

Cosmic Emptiness « Kenyanthropus — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 00:25:29 +0000

[...] had my say a couple days back. Over at Koreanish, Alex Chee puts it this way: To celebrate the Battlestar Galactica finale, my friends make a [...]