Why were fans disappointed with Battlestar Galactica's finally?

[Kramodlog]

I finished it and I'm not sure I understand why fans hate the finally.

From what I gather it is because it took a mystical/religious angle it took, but that was always in the series. I do not see a break, but a continuity.

It was a very ambitious space opera, with hits and misses, but it was fun to see the how the writers didn't just let them drift in space for four seasons with just "monster of the week" style episodes. Fun to see a series end before cancellation too.

 

[MarkB]

The mystical/religious angle was always in the series as something some of the characters believed, but it wasn't until the last season, and Starbuck's return, that it became something that was presented as actually real - and even then they tried to keep the viewers guessing, and there were potentially other explanations.

In the end, it comes down to the same problem as the ending of Lost - you've presented the viewers with a mystery, a puzzle with a lot of possible answers and a scattering of clues, and positively encouraged them to keep guessing and speculating. If you then finish the series by presenting them with the answer "a god did it", then you're short-changing them, because an answer that comes from outside the established context of both the series and the real world is essentially unguessable and renders all the prior speculation meaningless.

 

[RangerWickett]

Spoilers, I assure you.

For one thing, imagine you did not get to watch the next episode right away. Imagine waiting 4 years to get all that stuff. When there's a mediocre episode that doesn't answer the questions YOU want answered, you get to go online and b**** about it. All that b****ing swirls together creating a general sense of discontent, so that at the end, people needed to see something impossibly good to stop them from complaining.

For another thing, it's kind of stupid to have everyone decide to throw away all their technology and breed with cave men.


Aside from that, I dug it. The climax was cool. The denouement seemed a little silly.

 

[Kramodlog]

Spoilers, I assure you.

For one thing, imagine you did not get to watch the next episode right away. Imagine waiting 4 years to get all that stuff. When there's a mediocre episode that doesn't answer the questions YOU want answered, you get to go online and b**** about it. All that b****ing swirls together creating a general sense of discontent, so that at the end, people needed to see something impossibly good to stop them from complaining.

For another thing, it's kind of stupid to have everyone decide to throw away all their technology and breed with cave men.


Aside from that, I dug it. The climax was cool. The denouement seemed a little silly.

I binged watch, so it makes more sense than waiting for 4 years.

Which questions do you feel aren't answered?

 

[Morrus]

For me, it wasn't an objection to a mystical ending. It's just that the ending was... anticlimactic. It was boring. I wanted something cleverer than that. A show that kept me engrossed for years just kinda went out with a whimper and a "meh".

Not that I have any idea how it should have been done better.

 

[Ahnehnois]

As a big fan of the show, I enjoyed it. Not without some mixed feelings, but I wasn't vehemently against it like some were. I think the inherent problem is that the show's style initially left so much to the imagination, that the reveals were almost guaranteed to be disappointing. The reveal of what Cylon ships look like or their culture or their Final Five were all, on some level, disappointing compared to what I imagined was going on behind the scenes when they were ransacking human civilization in the original pilot.

As to the finale, one can't say it wasn't prefaced. The characters questioning their faith and the ambiguity of whether there was any truth to it were played from the beginning. The mysterious "head" characters were played from near the beginning. The ending is a total deus ex machina, pretty much by definition, but it does make sense within the context of the show. I think it's disappointing because the show had, at times, such a naturalistic feel-their world felt so real-that it seems wrong that it should end by definitively stating that they live in a fantasy world with magic and gods and all that. It also, like any deus ex, carries a certain glibness in the way it waves off major points of plot confusion. The coda, wherein they give up technology and settle, makes a certain amount of sense, but is done in a way that seems too fast and too simple for a show that usually acknowledges that life is not simple.

However, the finale (much like Star Trek: TNG's) was moving on a character level because of the flashbacks that showed us where they came from and the many fairly definitive resolutions to their arcs. It was also an entertaining spectacle, with the requisite big space battle and action scenes. The soundtrack to the show contains an entire disc of riveting music that sums up the show's whole history, one of the better albums I own.

So, the bottom line is that it's not the finale I would have written. I would have written something that had a rational explanation for everything and didn't go the gods are real route. But there's enough to it that I can respect it.

 

[RangerWickett]

The Cylons were created by Man. They rebelled. They evolved. There are many copies.


And the have a plan.

*smashcut to black*



Well damn if that doesn't sound ominous and cool. I wonder what their plan is? Why are they trying to get Helo to have a kid with one of them? What mysterious goal do they have?

And then later on, the show creators basically cop out and say, "Um, the plan was just to, y'know, kill all the humans."

I was hoping for something a bit more complex than that. Like maybe they'd found some scientific way to talk to their God, but it required a human-Cylon hybrid. Or they knew that some outside force was about to destroy humanity, so they attacked (but didn't kill everyone) so as to force the human race to scatter and be harder to kill by the real villains. Maybe the final five models were actually planning to annihilate all biological life, and the rest of the Cylons were trying to thwart them.

But the show never actually had a plan. Like, they had a general idea where they wanted to end it, but they didn't script their reveals along the way, so stuff seems half-assed. Just like LOST, and The X-Files before it.

If you're going to do a serial mystery, you'd better actually have a plan. Especially if you claim that you do at the start of each episode.

 

[wingsandsword]

I loved, positively loved, the first two seasons of Galactica. Third season was mostly okay, but it started to go downhill, I kept watching until the finale. . .and had a huge "WTF" on my face at the end.

1. It's a ridiculously huge strain on disbelief that tens of thousands of people, from a spacefaring (and according to Caprica, post-cyberpunk) society would all willingly give up technology and revert to a stone age population. They didn't have people who said "heck no" and wanted to stay on their ships or land them? Just because Apollo said he didn't want a city everyone went along with it?

They could have at least set up a city on some island, called it "Atlantis" and salvaged a tiny shred of credibility there, saying that some went to live with the natives, others built a city of Colonial technology on a lush island.

2. The entire Tomb of Athena plotline on Kobol made no connection. The entire cliffhanger between the first and second seasons was based on the fact there's a star map on Kobol leading to Earth, our Earth (as in the stars in the sky are the same). The only way that works is if the original residents had been to, or come from Earth. The "Earth" they find that's a nuked wasteland and wasn't our Earth threw that out of the water, and the idea that our Earth was apparently uncontacted? Huge continuity problem with the map from Kobol.

3. The religion stuff was always subtle the entire time, a sort of "is it/isn't it". It was always ambiguous up until the end if Baltar was just having delusions based on his guilt, or if there was some piece of Cylon biotech in his brain producing the image, or if Head Six really was an angel. Everything religious could have been a coincidence.

Then the resurrection of Starbuck dumped on that one, and if that wasn't enough, the end with the angels walking in modern day Earth talking about everything that happened just fell flat.

4. It's a little of what TV Tropes called "The Chris Carter Effect", for X-Files having the same thing happen to it. They imply early on that there's masterful plotting and a huge overarching plotline, but they haven't really given it any thought, then when the show actually becomes a long-running hit they realize they have to start to show that plot and are winging it and it really shows. The longer the show went, the more clear it was that they really didn't have a long term plan. The Final Five, the "Earth" that wasn't Earth, the Cylon prophecy about not following Starbuck, all felt the were pulled out of nowhere and shoehorned in or dropped. They even admitted the whole reason for the lost "Daniel" Cylon was they made a mistake in numbering the models and had to account for why one was missing. Big part of the Cylon origin story was a patch for a writing mistake when they realized the fans would notice that sort of thing.

5. Too grimdark. Yeah, this was a darker and more realistic retelling of Galactica than the campy 70's version, but the earlier seasons always had moments of hope. Somewhere around the 4th season they just started to pile on more and more bad things, make things darker, more grim, more bleak, without respite. They were practically losing more characters to suicide than enemy action at one point.

6. "No aliens" An original key conceit of the show from the writers was that there were no alien life, that intelligent life arising would be so incredibly unlikely that they would never see another sentient race, ever. Edward James Olmos even said he'd walk off the set if they ever encountered aliens. So, having them encounter humans that were genetically identical to them that apparently evolved separately was countless times even more unlikely than some random alien race. There was a brief hand wave about divine providence, but for a show that had previously couched divine actions in plausible coincidences, this was just way, way too far.

 

[Ahnehnois]

If you're going to do a serial mystery, you'd better actually have a plan.

I guess then, it really depends whether one looks at the show as a mystery or not. I see all that stuff, and I suppose I was disappointed on some level that the plan didn't pay off, but that wasn't really why I was watching anyway.

If I had to choose between, say "Deus ex machina ending that makes a lot of the mythology seem pointless or incoherent" and "cheap gag that was never set up" or "cliffhanger ending that never gets resolved after show gets canceled" or "ending where all the characters give up and pull a Cavill", I'm definitely taking the first one. Shows often end really badly.

 

[wingsandsword]

I guess then, it really depends whether one looks at the show as a mystery or not. I see all that stuff, and I suppose I was disappointed on some level that the plan didn't pay off, but that wasn't really why I was watching anyway.

If I had to choose between, say "Deus ex machina ending that makes a lot of the mythology seem pointless or incoherent" and "cheap gag that was never set up" or "cliffhanger ending that never gets resolved after show gets canceled" or "ending where all the characters give up and pull a Cavill", I'm definitely taking the first one. Shows often end really badly.

This is the heart of a lot of the discontent. A lot of fans saw the series as essentially a large mystery: What/where is Earth and what is the Cylons plan? If you don't have really good answers to those questions that fit the clues that came before, fans feel cheated.