Holy mother of frak, it’s over. It’s really over. No more staying in Friday nights, eager anticipation for season and mid-season premieres, plot speculation, Cylon speculation, mind-blowingly frustrating season finales, sincere human drama with believeable characters…
…you know what? I could go on and on about what everything that ends with the finale of Battlestar Galactica, but the fact of the matter is that my favorite show–one that I have watched from the beginning–is over. The only consolation is that when it ended, it ended perfectly, and I mean that in every sense of the word.
There are so many highlights from the finale that I don’t know where to begin. Since the miniseries, some of the things that have made BSG such an amazing show is the ingenious and unpredictable plot and premise, the dynamic characters, the amazing space battles and action sequences, and the movie-quality special effects. The finale was great because it gave us everything that made us fall in love with the show in the first place. It was as action-packed as the heart stopping “Exodus Pt. 2″ from season 3, dramatic as episodes like “Lay Down Your Burdens” from season 2, and surprising as basically every twist and turn we’ve seen in the show’s tenure, especially the season and mid-season finales. They took the best parts from all the past episodes and made it into one epic masterpiece, easily deserving of the name Battlestar Galactica.
Going into Friday night’s BSG-a-thon, my expectations were tremendously high. I took to mind some of the other T.V. series that have aired their season finales in the past few years, namely The Sopranos and The Shield. Knowing the dark tone of BSG, I was expecting a somewhat bittersweet ending where important characters die heroically, all but eliminating the possibility of some kind of half-baked spinoff movie or T.V. show.
SPOILERS–LOOK AWAY IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE FINALES OF THE SHIELD, THE SOPRANOS, or BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
Take The Sopranos, for example. In the series’ final episodes, New York mob boss puts out hits on Tony Soprano, his brother-in-law Bobby, and his number two man, Sil, played by Steven Van Zandt. Bobby and Sil both get riddled with bullets, while Tony’s fate is a little more ambigous. At first, fans across the country were livid by the ambiguous and infamous cut-to-black ending. But as time went on, the ending made more and more sense. I think it ended perfectly. The irregular amount of focus placed on the man wearing the Members Only Jacket sitting at the counter, who is in turn paying a bit too much attention to Tony and his family, all but spells he causes the cut-to-black ending. Watch it on YouTube. You see him get up from his seat, avoid eye contact with Tony, walk into the bathroom (perhaps as an homage to The Godfather), then BAM. Nothing. When you get a mortal gunshot would do the head, the bullet is so fast that it reaches your brain before the sound does. So if you get shot in the back of the head, you’re just going to die. You won’t even hear it coming. The show ends when Tony does. Without Tony, there isn’t a show.
Then there’s The Shield. Whereas The Sopranos initially left scores of fans across the country incredibly frustrated and distraught, The Shield gave their fans a clearly unambiguous and satisfying ending that kept them talking for months. The main story arc in the final season was a mounting conflict between corrupt cop Detective Vic Mackey and Detective Shane Vandrell–a cop who spent his career following Mackey’s game plan, paying dearly for it in the end. In its seven-year run, viewers watched Mackey and his gang, the Strike Team, lie, cheat, steal, torture, and bribe their way out of any situation, without any of them, save for fellow Strike Team member Curtis Lemansky, paying for their crimes. That is, until the final episode. The conflict spirals out of control, and Vandrell, in an effort to save himself and his family from a life of hell in prison, takes his own life as well as the lives of his 2-year-old son, wife, and unborn child.
To cleanse himself of his past sins, Mackey agrees to come clean with all of his transgressions in the form of a plea bargain to the Feds. In return, the Feds give him immunity and a job where his expertise can be utilized. This is done, of course, without them knowing exactly what his past sins are, giving them a very rude awakening once he spills his guts to the federal agent. But since an agreement was made, nothing can be done. He’s essentially a free man with a clean slate. Technically speaking, anyway. His punishment is that he’s taken off the streets as a cop and forced to work an 8-5 office job, ostracized by his former peers who see him as he really is. I thought that the ending was truly Shakesperean.
I was expecting a similar ending with BSG. You know, the crew of the Galactica sacrificing itself for the sake of Hera, Helo, and Athena, making it a fairly bittersweet ending. When that didn’t happen, i.e., when they landed on Earth (our Earth) and showed signs of a happy ending, I was initially disappointed. I mean, the show was so dark from the beginning that it only made sense to me that it’d have a dark, tear-jerking ending. But the more I thought about how they ended things, the more I liked it. We’ve come to know and love the characters from BSG over the past five years, and they’ve been, more often than not, clear-cut protagonists. They didn’t deserve the same fate as Tony Soprano and Vic Mackey. Whereas those two characters spent their lives cheating, stealing, and shitting on everyone but themselves in order for their own personal gain, the characters from BSG were the ones getting shit on. They deserved at least some kind of reward or happy ending after their years of running across the galaxy from their enemies, and by George, they got it. Again, I’ll reiterate that it was the perfect ending for one of the best shows ever made.
And the way Ron Moore tied it into our own times was quite interesting and extremely clever. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again. After seeing that end scene, I’ll never be mean to robots again.
So did I like the ending? You’re damn right I did. I can’t wait to watch it again.
What did you think, fellow BSG junkies?
