Frakking Up Is Hard to Do

I’m a theorizer, and Battlestar Galactica lends itself to theories. Cool hardware (and yes, that includes Starbuck) brings the nerds in, but deepening mysteries keep them and the occasional hapless bystander coming back for more. In the lead-up to the story’s conclusion, huge questions lingered. Who are the final five Cylons? Can humans and machines maintain an uneasy peace? What does “All Along the Watchtower” have to do with any of it? I had my theories for all of them. I was always at least a little off. (I had Adama for the final Cylon, and I didn’t know what the frak “Watchtower” was all about.) But on the biggest bet of the entire series—the final fate of humanity on a planet of their own—Friday’s three-hour series finale gave me a rich, sweet, unqualified win… and then completely ruined it for me.

In case you’ve been under a rock the last few years—or outdoors, at work, or on one of those “dates” I’ve read about—BSG follows humanity’s last survivors as they flee the destruction of their home planets, the Twelve Colonies, and cross the vastness of space in search of a new home. They are pursued by the Cylons, a race of organic humanoid machines who rebelled against and warred with their human creators, nuked the Colonies and then gave chase to pick the rest off a few at a time. The beleaguered refugees have a final destination in mind, a fabled lost Colony known as Earth. The thirty-two thousand light-year questions are 1) will they ever find it? and 2) what will it be like?

My money was on 1) yes, and 2) prehistoric. I could go into detail about the evidence and clues, the instinct and deliberation, that led to my prediction. But in the interest of brevity, and in the vain hope of eventually scaring me up one or two of them date dealies, I’ll tuck my geek flag in a drawer for the time being and say simply that I called it. Like, three years ago. The rag-tag, fugitive fleet does, in fact, end its lonely quest on a shining planet they call Earth. Now, they’d actually found the Earth they’d been looking for, the ancestral Earth of their legends, earlier this season; it too had been nuked beyond repair by it’s inhabitants thousands of years before. (I knew that wasn’t really Earth. Don’t you just love me?) This new planet, it turns out, is THE Earth, our Earth—the one you and I are ruining as we speak—only our travelers have found it tens of thousands of years earlier. The continents and oceans are all where they’re supposed to be, but we’re just small, wandering tribes of preverbal humans still making our way up the food chain.

So, mission accomplished. The human race gets a chance to learn from its mistakes and start fresh. Aaaaaaaannnnnnd, scene! It is here, however, at the dawn of a new era—and in the final forty minutes of nearly one hundred hours of cultural-landscape-changing sci-fi goodness—that things, at least from a story standpoint, start taking a turn for the what now? Our spacefaring refugees, weary from a million-light year journey that tested the limits of human endurance and morality (they did some pretty awful things to one another along the way) and yearning for a really, really clean slate, decide to go native. They will abandon their technology and live peacefully and primitively among the planet’s inhabitants, and help to propagate the species that will one day become you and me and everyone we know. The decision, we’re told, is all but unanimous; preparations begin immediately. Cut to groups of colonists walking single-file into the Sub-Saharan wilderness, with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a few tools, off to populate the world.

What, now?

OK, I am not a cynic. I believe in the power of the human spirit and authoring your own destiny and all that. And these people have had a really shitty few years; they deserve as long a camping trip as they want. It is, as they say, Miller time.

But these are 40,000 members of an advanced, spacefaring culture. They had radios and toilets and shoes yesterday. They’re engineers and accountants and soldiers and teachers, with lifetimes spent working with metals and numbers and governments and languages. (It’s not clear whether the wandering prehumans even have larynxes.) And though some of them are robots, all of them are people, and, let’s face it, people are jerks. I’m supposed to believe that one of them isn’t going to stash away an automatic rifle and become king of Eurasia in a year? Or that the bands of primative hunter-gatherers aren’t going to spear to death any babbling, unarmed interlopers that come up over the hill?

I know, this is science-fiction, and it’s been four years of artificial gravity and FTL drives and leggy, blonde robots. But this is a reach, and an insult to the intelligence of engaged and committed fans and, well, anyone who saw The Gods Must Be Crazy.

There are other absurdities to ponder. The innovative and compelling dynamics of faith between the Colonials, who are secular polytheists, and the flesh-and-blood models of Cylons, who believe in One True God, was only obliquely addressed and by no means settled. And in related news… What, is Starbuck an angel? (Is that Styx I hear playing?) What ever happened to Daniel, the 13th Cylon? What’s with Baltar and Caprica’s duelling hallucinations? WHY “WATCHTOWER”?

As those ends dangled loosely, though, others were tied up in wet, treacly bows and foisted on most of the characters, regardless of how complex and compelling their personal journeys had been. Rest assured, sinners die justly and gruesomely while sickly saints expire in peace. Some couples find love and huge tracts of land; others reunite in another life. Dreams come true and life marches on. Never, I suspect, has pie-in-the-sky fallen with a duller thud.

It’s hard making television. It’s even harder making smart, challenging, science-fiction television relatable to a broad audience. And, of course, once you’ve done it, it’s nigh on impossible to maintain a degree of quality, let alone elegance, over the long run. Ronald Moore and David Eick, the show’s creators, have juggled these planetoids for years, with wavering but undeniable success. Despite stumbles and fumbles along the way, the producers and writers never ceased to amaze with their bold, often pitch-dark choices and their commitment to pushing the envelopes of sci-fi dogmas and episodic storytelling. They deserve, and will receive, enormous credit from fans and critics for keeping our attention and shaking our complacency these last years. All the more remarkable and regretable, then, the finale’s spectacular plunge into implausability and bathos. Clearly, it is as difficult and perilous to anchor a ship in harbor as it is to steer it through the roughest of seas.

By way of postscript, Edward James Olmos, the show’s onscreen commander and veteran of sci-fi ur-text Blade Runner, predicted, in a series-ending special, that Battlestar Galactica will be admired and studied long after its curtain call on a Friday night in 2009. I agree completely. It is, all told, a layered and ambitious work of art, albeit one with a big bright smiley face slapped onto its final frames. My disappointment will fade and my censure soften—in fact, it already is. (Starbuck’s an angel. Fine. Whatever.) Very soon, I’ll be left with only fond memories of a good, solid hunk of television, and the bittersweet knowledge that I was dead right about the wrongest thing in it.