Zarek, not Varick.

After reading a few blogs that fawned over the final episode, it's nice to read a review that's much more in line with my disappointment with the finale.

I was hoping that the tying up of loose ends would provide BSG with a final opportunity to say something compelling about the human condition (maybe even like the endings of better Twilight Zone episodes, where the ending answers technical questions at the same time it asks human/philosophical questions).

Instead what we got was a refusal/inability to explain a lot of the show's key, interesting mysteries (Starbuck just disappearing is not interesting in the least in an open-ended sort of way --- it's a cop-out), and uninteresting or amateurish resolutions to the mysteries that were solved.

In a show that started off with so many atheistic characters on the one hand, and characters of faith on the other hand, who nonetheless used religion to their own ends... to have such a show end on a nubulous/Deus ex machina/"God did it" note was really, disappointingly, lame.

"Varek"?

It's Zarek.

I have no issues if the season isn't want you were looking for... I personally loved it. The final Finales rarely satisfy everyone, and I did have some issues, but overall I loved it.

But learn to spell the characters name RIGHT. Gods...

ever write about BSG without getting in a dig about Star Trek?

BSG is sometimes enjoyable, but it is by far the greatest scifi show ever. It is filled with plot holes and leaps of logic and simplistic renderings of social, economic, and political issues. Just adding a lot of bogus mysticism and sweaty sex and models doesn't make it revolutionary. That the ending was so preposterous and all-over-the-place shows just how lazy the writing could be.

And, of course, the acting was often over the top, a la Rashomon.

I like the sci in my scifi. I don't like "angels" being chucked in to make up for an incoherent narrative. And I don't think a literal deus ex machina fits into a scifi verse.

But I do think that Trek at its best surpasses this show, and has left a meaningful and lasting legacy that should not be dismissed.

... primarily because it tried to prove too much and took too long.

You need a core message a small plot.

Unfortunately, you had a zillion plots, motives and not to mention the cylons being human, etc.

I mean, who the frak is supposed to care for all this?

I had a hip-hop loving friend who thought sci-fi channel was for the geeks and nerds.

He loved BSG after watching the first episode.

Plus he forces his rapping friends to watch this show because it was so frakking good in Season 1.

It lasted one season.

"The last flash of that sensibility came when the corpse of poor Racetrack got knocked against the wrong button and wound up nuking Cavil's cylons to Kingdom Come just as everyone had decided to get along for a change."

Not sure if Racetrack got knocked against the wrong button or if she pressed the button with her last breath, but everyone had already started shooting again after Tyrol killed Tory Foster for killing Cally. Everyone was not getting along. I guess if you couldn't pay attention to that you must really not have been interested in the show.

Also, after having subjected the characters and viewers through so much heartbreak and disaster, letting most everyone have a modestly happy ending was, for me, nice, not a failure. Had the series ended with the discovery of nuked-earth, that might have been more "real" but also more "sucky".

That's the opinion of many friends of mine, who are far heavier into science fiction and fantasy than I am. All the stuff praised in this review have nothing to do with the core principle of the original series: an intergalactic version of the Jews running from the metallic minions of the Pharoah.

And if you think that's simplistic, one of the longest-lived and most inspiring American stories of the last five decades was a version of the Moses story - written by two Jewish guys, who replaced the basket in the bullrushes with a rocket from Krypton.

I never warmed to the series at all, because all the drama and political parallels were pasted on top of the original story in an attempt to make it "mature" and "relevant." Perhaps the Desperate Housewives crowd cares about who sleeps with who, which seems to be the major interest people have had with this show in Salon articles. In a genuine survival story, ladies and gentlemen, NOBODY has sex. They're too worried about staying the hell alive.

an intergalactic version of the Jews running from the metallic minions of the Pharoah

Considering it's Mormon pedigree, the BSG mythos is far more akin to Nephi's time in the wilderness.

So the re-envisioned Battlestar Galactica is bad in your opinion because:

a) It did not adhere to simplistic bronze age Hebrew myths.

b) Instead it has the auadacity to add "drama and political parallels".

c) Worse yet it focuses in large part on "who sleeps with who" also known as interpersonal relationships.

"In a genuine survival story, ladies and gentlemen, NOBODY has sex."

You appear to have some real hang-ups about complex science fiction which encompasses the entire range of human activity. Sorry not everything can be the sterile world of Star Trek the Next Generation, which despite some admittedly compelling plots, overall looks painfully one dimensional. The original Battlestar Galactica is even more painfully dated.

Good review of the BSG finale. The writers' decision to actually answer the big, existential questions they posed crapped on the whole series, and...

The answers they gave were so stupid. Painfully stupid. The ominous robot montage? Back-to-nature shit? And let's not forget the God shit. Pathetic.

Galactica was great when it was ambiguous and character-driven. By tying up all the loose ends with lowest-common-denominator knots, the writers destroyed their work. If they had balls, they would've moved the plot to some level of moderate resolution that gave some sense of closure without doint...what they did. TV shows do it all the time, and it's a shame BSG fell off the cliff. Oh well, the mediocrity of the end of season 3 probably was a good warning.

Farscape was better, overall.