I watched the final two hour episode of Battlestar Galactica last night. In general I thought it was very good. I've not been a big fan of the series, as every time I would watch an episode it seemed to be more like a soap-opera than anything else, but I thought I would see the end.
Things I liked: the battle was done very well, except for the fact I often couldn't tell whether the guns were from the Cylon colony or on Galactica, and the viper battles got very little attention except for wide angle shots with too much going on to get more than a general impression. The escape from the battle in particular was done quite brilliantly. Poor old Galactica groaned and her whole frame moved in ways obviously not designed for, much like you'd expect a car to come apart after landing badly after doing some kind of massive jump.
The main reason I wanted to post something is that I've been going over and over the final conclusion, and I really like part of it, but intensely hate part of the way they did it. This is most especially because they could have kept the good bit and dumped the stupid bit without it causing any harm to the story. It just made the writers look like idiots.
So ... (here's the spoiler if you haven't seen it) ... the find Earth (again). Galactica arrives at a destination typed in by Starbuck, and you see a sweeping shot past a cratered moon and onto a beautiful blue planet with Africa clearly outlined. So it turns out that the Earth they discovered nuked in earlier episodes wasn't our Earth at all. They land, and see that there are humanoids living there, but they are extremely primitive to the point of not even having developed proper language skills yet. It also turns out, due to some kind of miracle, that through parallel evolution they're even genetically compatible with the new arrivals from space. The last part is incredibly implausible, but even the characters themselves are amazed and regard it as the work of the gods, so I'm prepared to take that for what it's worth. So far, so good. In fact, it's a pretty interesting twist. At one point Adama even says, "we've found our Earth", or words to that effect, showing that he knows it wasn't really the Earth they were looking for, but it will do!
Now we get to the dumb part. Apollo listens as someone outlines plans for a new city, and he says "no, we need a clean slate!" and so all the colonists decide they're not going to live in cities, but they're going to live a "natural" existence without urban living, technology, guns etc. They crash all their spaceships into the sun, and distribute themselves around the globe with nothing but what they can carry in a few sacks on their shoulders. There are nice shots of herds of antelope, and flamingos and things. That was just incredibly dumb. I kept waiting for a lion to leap out of the grass and eat the cute little cylon-human girl while everyone else looked on in terror (seeing as they just dumped all their guns into the sun). It would have been just fine if they had said that they wanted to maintain a more simple existence, living in villages, sustaining themselves with farming etc., but they would first have used the available technology to build themselves some homes etc., and at least kept some guns for hunting and self defense. As it was, most of the colonists would be dead within the year, of starvation, being eaten by predators, and clubbed by the primitive natives. It was a moment of horrible PC Gaia-loving fragging BS. It was nothing short of collective suicide for the majority of the survivors. OK, maybe that explains why no evidence of them survives ... all but a tiny few ended up dead very rapidly. Perhaps their genetic heritage came from the few females who were kidnapped by the locals? Wife stealing is pretty endemic to that level of human society. I don't think the writers intended to offer this solution!
Now I know that the writers thought they had to do all this stuff, because otherwise how could they explain that 150,000 years later the current population of this planet has no evidence of the arrival of aliens from another planet. After all, we'd see ruins of cities, spaceships in orbit etc. That just shows their general ignorance of what exactly has gone on during this period. 150,000 years ago was a very good point to choose, since it was about this point that humans suddenly start demonstrating evidence of abstract thought through cave paintings, chiseled patterns on stone, etc., when previously we have evidence of creatures that physically resemble us, but who apparently did not think/act quite like us. Battlestar Galactica solves the mystery of why this happened. So far so good. The way to explain all the possible problems: lack of fuel and inability to land the bigger ships on a planet meant most stuff had to be left in orbit, with only the ability to land the people and stuff that could be fitted on the small transport ships and vipers. They created towns and villages for themselves, in areas that were quite temperate then, but which would be covered by glaciation during the ice age that would intervene for a large portion of the time between then and now. The guns etc would stop working within a few decades at most, and they'd lack the equipment and know-how to make new ones, especially after a few generations had passed. The massive temperature variability (far far worse than anything seen in the last 10,000 years) would make farming incredibly difficult, and the communities would rapidly be reduced to simply trying to get enough food to survive, and when the ice age arrived, it is easy to see how the descendants of the colonists would ultimately revert to abandoning their towns and going off to hunt woolly mammoths etc. All evidence of their settlements would be erased by time, changing sea-levels, and especially glaciers. Maybe one day someone might dig up a fossilized machine gun or something, but it is so rare for things to get preserved, that there's really no reason why any would survive in recognizable form. The last great problem, that of the spaceships in orbit, really isn't a problem at all, or at least it shouldn't be for a science-fiction writer. They leave the spaceships in relatively stable orbits. One of the characters asks "won't the orbits eventually decay?" and another replies, "No, well, not for at least 100,000 years anyway, so don't worry about it." So, the spaceships stayed in orbit, people rapidly lost the ability to return to them, and after staying in the sky for millennia they eventually burn up on re-entry. If the writers really wanted to stretch themselves they could have even had one of the last ones being responsible for certain human myths concerning anger of the gods, or Icarus, or Sodom and Gomorrah being wiped out, etc.
Another problem arises, which is connected to the "what are they going to eat?" issue. Boltar briefly mentions that he's decided that a certain patch might be a good place to have a farm. What exactly was he going to grow on this farm? 150,000 years ago, none of the major cereals, fruits or vegetables existed in their current forms. Divergence of these plant species started when humans started naturally selecting for certain traits, and place these events within the last ten to twenty thousand years. They may have landed in an apparent Garden of Eden, but the closest to an apple tree would be some sort of horribly sour miniature crab apple. The more I think about it, the more I think that they'd have no choice other than to survive on a meat diet. Perhaps, if we get very creative, we can use this to explain why certain species were relatively easy to domesticate when human civilization began to re-emerge ten thousand years ago ... those species had already been partly domesticated by the Galactica humans before they eventually reverted to primitive hunter gatherer existence under the pressures of the ice age.
In short, I thought the end was very thought provoking, and it's kept me thinking about ways in which their arrival can be fitted into the real human story as we know it, but the whole nonsense of a return to an idyllic existence without technology was just so stupid that it almost spoiled it. In fact, at the time it did spoil it, and it's only in retrospect that I really rather like the conclusion to the story.
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