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Right! So, the end fo Battlestar Galactica (spoilers)
03-21-2009, 05:07 AM
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Yeah, uh...
One hour of awesome followed by...
Yeah.
Okay, fuck you science fiction writers: Science and technology is not evil.
The "noble savage", really? That's the best you could come up with?
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Epsilon
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I didn't see it that way. The decision was to break the cycle. Consider that every single other time a ragtag group of refugees fled to a distant world and kept their technology - the Thirteenth Tribe from Kobol to Original Earth, the Twelve from Kobol to the Colonies - within 2000 years they'd reinvented the wheel and killed themselves. By rebuilding completely from scratch, humanity (hybridity?) has outlasted the original cycle by two orders of magnitude. I'd call that a victory. Now if we can invent artificial sapience and not immediately put it to work as slave labor, we've done it, the cycle's broken.
(I was actually kinda hoping that would be part of the newsbite in the coda. Mitochondrial Hera was nice, but I was hoping for a "new Cylon" announcement showing that while all this has happened before, it didn't happen again. Oh well.)
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So, in other words: to break the cycle of violence they... had to give up technology and live as noble savages.
Thus Technology = evil.
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Epsilon
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... Well, looks like giving up on this shitburger in season two was the right plan.
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No.
They just had to put it behind them. Like they said, "Everyone feels good about starting with a blank slate."
What they had to do was leave behind their society's ingrained fear of the Cylons. We've seen it this season, with the mutiny: they were just too used to hating and fearing each other. Technology didn't cause that, the war, the destruction of the colonies, and the relentless pursuit, betrayal, and terror of the last four years caused it.
The only way to break out of that cycle is to forget that it happened, and any attempt to immediately rebuild a high-tech society would make that impossible. By doing this, they're allowing time to wear it down. Let it become half-remembered stories told by your grandparents, and finally nothing more than myth, if even that.
The end is not a "Oh, look, the humans are about to start the cycle again", it's "Oh, look. The humans are where they were when the cycle started. But they've got a damn good chance of not going the same way this time."
Like Lee said. "All of this has happened before. But it doesn't have to happen again."
Personally, I hate the 'noble savage' concept, vehemently and totally. But I'm not going to condemn them for choosing it here.
And, besides. What's the one element of the original show that they've consciously avoided addressing all along? The 'ancient astronauts' bit. Could you possibly see any way they could have fit that in, with a Colonial society as thoroughly human as what arrived at Earth, without going that route?
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I thought their decision was understandable, if not rational. By that time the survivors were so traumatized that a decision to commit mass suicide in slow
motion seems more like an unsurprising case of insanity. I was more disappointed by the way the writers addressed the question of who exactly had been leading
the survivors around by the nose for the past couple of seasons. It's been the elephant in the room ever since they found the ruined Cylon world, and
dismissing it with "it's magic" seems like a cop-out.
I was pleased with how it ended.... my only question is this - What exactly WAS Kara in the end? Was she something similar to the Baltar/#6 "angels"?
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Apparently.
This makes the early "I'm no angel" comments by her in season 1 or 2 rather ironic, but I have a hard time assuming that was actually planned.
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Quote:This makes the early "I'm no angel" comments by her in season 1 or 2 rather ironic, but I have a hard time assuming that was actually planned.
Mmm. It gets more ironic if you assume that the Starbuck who died at the Eye of Jupiter, and whose body was found on Earth, wasn't the same person as Angelbuck.
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Spotted on the SJGames Forums (specifically, http://forums.sjgames.com/showpost.php? ... ostcount=4]here):
Quote:As the group of colonials were on the hill watching the natives, one thing popped into my mind and I will never be able to get it out. The thought was "telephone sanitizers."
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<snort>
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.
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*Snorts* Thank you, Douglas Adams.
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Here's an amusing thought. You could take it as RDM's way of telling us that choosing the 'noble savage' path, if you hate it as much as I
do...
... is directly responsible for all the shit we have to put up with today. I mean, if we could've been a space-faring civilization 140-some millennia ago?
Yeah. We'd be Up There With The Vorlons by now...
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Nah, I figure that's a little too optimistic. You'd have some that manage to go that path, and then you got some that keep on repeating the cycle. :p
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I like the idea that by the modern age, due to the Mitochondrial Eve thing, every human on earth in this here and now is a small bit Cylon. It's the one angle the previous societies didn't have. But I don't really see what they did as a cycle per se. I mean, the Kobol humans create artificial life, and eventually create it so well they create organic AI's. They have a war, their AI's go off in some other direction to a place they call "Earth". They wipe themselves out. A handful of the surviving Kobol AI's find the Cylons and stupidly recreate their own society with them, further damaging the Cylons in the process, and reducing them to soldier-bots all over again.
Basically, the entire modern war was between the Kobol-era AI's and humanity. The Cylons were the whipping-boys of both cultures for the series. I think their answer when they were finally let go was to start jumping for another galaxy, and never look back...
As for the angel angle, the original series was far more blatant with the angel thing, with the cities of light and the white-dressed people. But the thing of them was that no one else could see them, and the two viper pilots couldn't remember what they did there afterward. So I always assumed the Kara-as-angel thing was what it would look like if you coudln't see the episode that explains it all. You see the show from the viewpoint of the average person. There may be a Force out there moving them around, but you can't see them. Kara may well have been given instructions, but we never heard them. All we have to work with is the results.
The Viper thing was a little odd though. I mean, her viper exploded in a gas giant many thousands of Lightyears away from Cylon Earth. So how did it get there?
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