(Everything that pops up after the jump is laden with spoilers, so if you haven’t seen last night’s BSG finale, consider yourself warned…)
For the last few weeks TV critics fortunate enough to obtain screeners of last night’s Battlestar Galactica season finale, “Crossroads Part II,” have been promising that the last 10 minutes of the episode would more than make up for the relatively spotty season. Those kind enough not to spoil, but too cruel to leave well enough alone, teased that the final words uttered before the credits rolled, in particular, would blow our frakking minds. And that they did. But right now, with so many new questions raised, I’m more concerned with the five words said after the show ended: “Battlestar Galactica returns in 2008.”
2008?! With four of the final five Cylons revealed, the President inching towards death yet again, the location of earth about to be revealed and Kara Thrace’s supposed fulfillment of her special destiny, how can anyone possibly think that my poor heart can stand a full year’s hiatus. Silly Sci-Fi, it’s not HBO, it’s TV! But I digress and resign to dissecting the minutia of what I have been given.
“The Crossroads” kept with the running flaw of the third season and spent far too much time focusing on Baltar. We get it. He’s wily, he’s an anti-hero and who doesn’t love the way British people say “butterfingers”? I just can’t understand their insistence that the outcome of his trial had to be this season’s watershed. It’s just not that compelling. With hardly anywhere to take his character, his abduction by his cult following offers hope that he might soon drink the Kool-Aid.
Last week’s suspicions were kinda confirmed that the four hearing music wafting through the walls of Galactica are in fact Cylons who only needed to hear a particularly metal rendition of Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” to achieve self-realization. As for their identities, none are super-surprising, aside from Anders who just seems too boring to come into his own subplot.
So if those four are actually Cylons, and one still remains, why weren’t they drawn by Dylan into the strange hexagonal room to meet with their pseudo-robotic brethren? Could it be because they were too busy defying death, zooming around the galaxy, and showing up in the last two minutes (looking particularly ethereal) like our not-so departed Kara Thrace? I had no idea how they were going to bring her back, and since it wasn’t explained at all, I still don’t. But I couldn’t imagine that the season would have ended without the reappearance of Starbuck. Her death was too silly and quick to justify, so it’s nice to see she’s still around in some capacity. Her mysterious return and ensuing announcement that she’s actually been to earth is more of a cliffhanger than anyone could have anticipated.
Naysayers will say nay, and adoring zealots will worship blindly, but the way they ended the show by expanding the frame to show the looming battle between humans and Cylons, the whole galaxy, and then super-zoom to earth, showing us for the first time that it actually exists… was one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen. So while we still don’t know much, we do know that when Battlestar Galactica is wearing its game face, it isn’t just best show on television, it’s the most entertaining thing you could dream of watching. Wake me up in 2008.
Ya – 2008. Fucking nuts. I gotta tell you though, I found the closing sequence to be a little off. While I appreciated the zooming and the earth shot, I thought the soundtrack was particularly un-bsg-esque. Not that they didn’t need a shake-up, I just wasn’t a big fan of the way things wound up for the season. While I expected Starbuck to come back at some point, I thought the way they did it seemed thrown in just to make sure it happened as one of a dozen cliffhangers to end the season with. Apollo jumping into uniform and hijacking a viper just so he could fly off into a cloud of nothing, chasing a phantom signal when an three ships are about to come in on a dead-in-the-water fleet seemed whimsical at best. There was just no reason him to chase one ship into an open field…and if Kara wants anyone to join her maybe she could have come back with something more helpful than “I know where Earth is,” unless she was really just hoping Lee could die happy.
At any rate, i didn’t necessarily think the season was as bad as the critics are making it out to be, although I’m 100% on board with your assessment of the Baltar trial. I found the finale to be abrupt and lackluster and I’m getting pretty tired of the over dramatic roller-coaster relationship between the Adamas. I also think the show will be greatly served by avoiding story-telling by flashback in the future. And to be honest, I was almost happy with the few episodes sans Thrase – her personality disorders were getting tiresome toward the end, there. Still, it remains one of the better series on TV if based on nothing other than my eager anticipation for it’s next airing. As for the far-too-long hiatus, it seems to be a new feature of sci-fi, which i’m ashamed to admit I know only because Battlestar isn’t the only show of theirs I watch. Luckily, the last time I checked my watch it was Christmas, so with any hope, 2008 is just around the corner.
[...] Had last season’s allusions to the American occupation of Iraq and that “duh” moment of realization that the cylons are, in fact, no worse than the old US of A actually fallen in ‘07… Battlestar Galactica would have most certainly nabbed the number one spot. The beginning of last season was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen on TV. 2007 was a little different though. The year brought a few too many of their cringeworthy filler episodes followed by a hefty hiatus – BSG was off my radar for the majority of the TV-watching year! But looking back, 2007 was also the year of “Rapture,” of “Maelstrom, “of “Crossroads Part II” and of last month’s rockin’ “Razor!” Sure, Battlestar Galactica occasionally falls short. It’s also capable of a deeply involved allegoric intelligence the likes of which you almost never get. Seeing a fitting end to this awesome series in its final season is my number one reason for wishing this damned writers’ strike would end already. [...]