BSG Watch: A Long Time Ago, In a Galaxy Far, Far Away :: Tuned In - TIME.com: "Earth is a dream. One we've been chasing for a long time. We've earned it. This is Earth."

The very end, with Angel Baltar and Angel Six walking through Times Square, which was disappointingly tell-don't-show and on-the-nose for a show as sophisticated as BSG: "The question remains—does all this have to happen again?" I half expected Angels Six and Baltar to turn to the camera and say, "Well, will you? WILL you break the cycle?"
~this is wh interests me here, the extent to wh the show did do this, "integrate into our world" (comment below), turn to us.

...
Earlier this season, I hit on something about the destroyed "Earth"--not that I was the only one to notice this--that I wish I had followed up on more: There were certain things that simply did not add up if it was our Earth, and we were the Cylons. "Now that we know the origin of the Cylon models, " I wrote, "what does this mean about the relationship of BSG's "Earth" to our Earth? Is it our Earth or, as it would now seem, a similar planet that, in this story, happens to have the same name? That is, the Earth Cylons, if I'm not mistaken, knew that they were Cylons, and knew how they came to Earth, correct? They didn't believe they had evolved from Australopithecines and later come to discover their true origins, right?"
I didn't guess, though, that the Galactica would discover Earth where 'Earth' means: the promised land. an inhabitable planet. and even: with human life already present for a second time, and find ours. So: points for surprising me.
The longstanding prophecy was that Starbuck would lead the fleet "to its end." And she did, in an unexpected way: the fleet decided to commit a sort of cultural suicide, giving up its technology and blending in with Earth humanity's hunter-gatherer forebears.
OK, intellectually, narratively, structurally that makes sense. The story ends where ours begins. Kara leads them to their end, but it's a voluntary one. The war-ravaged civilizations choose en masse to strip away everything that led them to war and start again, and hopefully start better. They become us; we never know they existed. It ties up nicely. And it syncs nicely with the opening credits of the original BSG. ("There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans, who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans...") huh: so that suggestion in the original series was in the right direction. the forefathers. not the descendants, which is what it seemed, right? that these characters were in our future, the far future, with a mythology that told them they had come long long ago from a place called Earth. and they had. but: suprise! flip: they then came to a place that they called Earth *after* the original Earth, and lived there, and 150,000 years later had become us.
...

I guess my issues with the ending amount to this: the Times Square scene, the robot montage, flying the fleet into the sun--it all put the emphasis on runaway technology getting ahead of morality. That's an ancient sci-fi theme, but it's not the BSG that I know. Lee talked about jettisoning the machines so that the newcomers could give our ancestors "the best part of us." But so much of what we've seen in BSG says that the problems of man and Cylon ultimately come down to what's inside of them. You can toss away your jump drives, but if you don't fix your soul, you've fixed nothing. Over four seasons of this fine series, the warning hasn't been: Don't lose control of your robots. It's been: don't lose control of your gods.

That part—the human part (in the broad sense)—has always been what BSG has done best. And it was what was best in this finale, so let's get back to that. Starting with Adama and, especially Roslin. Mary McDonnell has owned this series, and here you could practically feel her shaking flesh and sense the cells dying as she willed herself into a few more days of life to see her people through until the end. But for me her crowning moment was that last scene, sitting outside with Bill, minutes of breath left in her. She admires the herd of antelope. He asks her if she'd like to get a better look. There's this wonderful sly flash in her eye as she says yes. She's tired, she's dying—and yet, for a flash, she's that cougar who took her old student to bed, she's a young woman on a date, she's a girl seeing the world for the first time again.
Which, of course she is.

Like a lot of finales, this one seemed to have a lot of ending scenes before it actually ended, and I'm fine with that. Tyrol's closure—not regretting killing Tory, but realizing that a life among other people was no longer for him—was suitable and sad. (There were fewer deaths of major characters than I expected, but in a way, and ending like his—essentially accepting his stay on Earth as a kind of prolonged suicide—was even more wrenching.) I was deeply relieved to see Helo (who I thought was going to bleed out), Sharon and Hera together and happy on Earth—even if I believe they must have a rough existence ahead of him before Hera goes on to have a million Earth babies and become great-great-grandma to all of us.
I even found myself mourning characters I didn't like that much in the series' run. Anders was always a bit of a blank space for me, but his 2001-like starchild ending was, if nothing else, beautiful. Likewise, I never cared much for Lee Adama, but his final scene moved me—probably because it was also Starbuck's. Katee Sackhoff has been the Kiefer Sutherland of this series, playing with such intensity and commitment that she completely sells a character who, with another actor, might have seemed over-the-top in her pathos. I suspect some fans may not be happy with her just vanishing while Lee's back is turned, but what matters to me is her resolution: "I'm done here. I've completed my journey. It feels good."

And then there's the old man. There are several scenes I could single out here—his last moments on Galactica, "She will not fail us if we do not fail her," that gorgeous, awful pullaway from him at Laura's grave—but I have to come back to watching the antelopes with Laura, when she asks him what this beautiful planet is called, and he says, "Earth." She laughs. He's serious. All they have lost and suffered, everyone they have lost, have brought them to this tauntingly living planet. No: it is Earth. "Earth is a dream. One we've been chasing for a long time. We've earned it. This is Earth."
That, to me, more than any part of the ending, is pure BSG, a distillation of why I love this series. What finally makes your destiny is not prophecy, not gods, not a certain set of coordinates and constellations. What tells you you have reached the place where you should be is that you journeyed there. You fought and grieved and loved, did the right thing as much as you could, did the wrong thing more often than you care to remember, and did the necessary thing as often as it took. You spent nearly every ounce of life and will and got somewhere with as many people you loved as you could bring along with you. You have expended yourself and provided for the next generation and are getting ready to die, and you are in your last place.
And that place is Earth, no matter what planets were destroyed, no matter what prophecy says otherwise. It is Earth because it is where you are. It is Earth because you have made it so. It is Earth because you say so.


nice write up.

-chriskw: If the show did integrate into our world I am assuming that the Colonials really weren't speaking English. That basically we heard them speaking that way so we could understand them, kind of like when animals talk in cartoons but then don't when around humans. when *around* us. hee. (like that far side with the cow lookout who tells the other cows when to get down on all fours and stop talking, bcs a car is coming).
to his point: when we thought the Colonials were in our far-future, our descendants, then it made sense that they would actually speak English? maybe.
and, as in our far past, as our ancestors, seems to make sense that the language of these ~40,000 people would become the language of the natives, who they explicitly said did not then have language. oh but I see the objection: in our actual history, there were no English-speakers in the early years. so yes okay it's like talking animals.

-archstanton68: given what we know about early humanity's migration and the idea of Hera being mitochondrial Eve, are we to assume that only the contingent that settled in Africa survived? tough break for the settlers on the other continents, if so.

-kemper: If you would have told me after season 2 or so that the explanation for the way Baltar and Caprica 6 saw each other in visions was that they were 'angels', and that Starbuck would ultimately die and become another type of these angels, I probably would have quit watching the show right there. But I actually liked it. The show was always about religion in one form of another. For the big reveal to be that there is a 'god', and that post-death Starbuck, and the visions Baltar & 6 had were agents of that god to lead humanity to a new beginning is a pretty epic and bold wrap-up to a show that was originally about killer robots.
Re: James P.'s note that the idea that everyone would just drop their technology and walk off into the jungle was unbelievable. I had the same thought at first. But I changed my mind after considering it for a while. If I'd had seen my entire civilization destroyed (because of runaway technology), then lived on a tin can in space for four years while in constant danger from my enemies and the odd coup or mutiny, endured a hellish occupation the first time I tried to settle down and build new cities, seen my biggest hope for a new future turn out to be irradiated ash and essentially been stuck in space with no other options and realizing that humanitity was going to wither and die out there, I very well might have chucked the laptop and cellphone to go gather berries when a new home is found via a 'miracle'.