Monthly Archives: March 2009

So… a couple weeks ago Battlestar Galactica ended.

I really liked this show, a lot.  But like Babylon 5, years before, the writers were smart, and instead of creating an open ended storyline that would keep going until it was little more than an excuse to keep a franchise running (… can anyone say “Enterprise”?), they made a series that would have a clearly defined beginning, with interesting people who all had back-stories, and ran with it, keeping us guessing the entire five years. Then, like clockwork, it had a clearly (or not so much, depending on who you ask.) defined end.

If you are one of those people that has not seen the whole series yet, you may want to stop reading now, I plan on talking about the last show and some of the other things that I saw through the series that made me stop and go “Hmmm”, as Arsenio Hall might have said. So consider this your “Spoiler Warning.”

First…  I liked the feel of the Galactica from the onset.  It looked like a Battleship, had the feel of a battleship, and even had that appearance that you might expect from a ship that was made for battle in an airless environment.

As an example, take a moment the next time you watch BSG, and look at the layout of the ship, then watch a movie like “Hunt for Red October” or “Red Tide”, and notice that the Galactica resebles a submarine in many aspects.  This is also, more than likely, how any near-future ship that we send into space will look.

Then there is the story line.  While this BSG series used most of the same issues and plots of the original series from the 70s, it did it the way I think the original writers wanted the stories to flow.  For those of us who recall, the original series was kinda campy and hard to take too seriously.  But there was good reason for that, from my point of view, that was that it was competing against the legacy of movies like Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  There was just too much serious Sci-Fi out there at the time, so they had to “lighten it up” a bit.

This series, the new BSG, was dark.  Yes, It had it’s ups and downs, but overall, like one of the guys in the little show right before the series finale said… how happy can you make a show, when your race is in jeopardy of destruction?  There were no “cutesy” or “warm and fuzzy” moments in it, and no thought provoking epilogue from Captain/Admiral Adama at the end of the show.  If you recall the original series, you will remember what I am talking about.

The storyline that the new BSG carried with it is one that I think we will all carry with us.  Watching Rosalyn grow as a character and then watch her as the cancer ate her alive but she still fought through it all, then, once they were all safe on the new “Earth”, she finally lets go and dies with Adama by her side, his last act being that of placing his ring on her finger.  Seeing Cara Thrace seem to die, then come back… only to discover, in the last episode, that she probably was never really there to begin with.  Then to learn that the colonists may have been the seeds of what you and I are today in some form of modernized Panspermia.

BSG was one of those programs that, now that it is over, has left a hole in me.  Not just in the sense that now there is some open slot in my Television viewing schedule, but in the sense that it leaves so many questions open to interpretation.  There things that you sit and try and think out, now, that probably will never be answered.  I hope, though, that Ron Moore and his team leave it that way.

Let BSG be one of those things that all of us, the fans, will sit around for years and wonder about.  Let it fuel our conversations as we sit in Starbucks (pun intended) and drink our latte’s, and talk nerd talk about these shows.

That is what keeps the characters alive.