BSG Finale – What the frak?

Major spoilers for Battlestar Galactica.

Over the last four weeks I’ve watched the whole of the new series of Battlestar Galactica, and I have to admit, it was very very good. 

It was a tad darker than the original series – the episodes with The Pegasus were the most obvious example of that – and it managed to mix the action elements and political elements with fair balance. 

Even with all the mystical elements they threw in from the end of the first series, it was still a very good show – mostly because they were always equivocal about whether the spiritual stuff was real or not.

I set aside today to watch the final series – so that I could watch it all in one go, rather than having it broken up.

And again, it was very good, even if it was a tad overblown in some places. (Like the person who had been responsible for Series 1 to 4 had quit, and someone else had come in to take over running the show).

But then it came to the finale, and……

Well – it was much like the rest of the series. The first 80% of it was pretty good and fairly impressive. But then – well then it pretty much turned to crap.

The rescue of Hera was brilliant, and the firefight on Galactica was very impressive. But the moment Baltar started his speech about being friends and surviving, it seemed that the entire show had been hijacked by a bunch of sentimental, sappy, born-again halfwits.

And oddly that wasn’t the worst and most annoying part of the way it was done. 

There were far too many endings. Instead of just finding a planet and settling, we had to see each and every bit of it dragged out to mawkish extremes. 

Prime example – we could see that The President died so did we really need to see Adama and the grave? 

And the final ending was just entirely too smug and entirely too confusing. 

The clips of all the robots was just "aren’t we cool – suggesting that these AI robots are OUR version of Cylons and they’ll rise up so should we really be doing it" and while I can see why 6 might be there, what the hell was Baltar doing there? How did he survive 150,000 years exactly? Is he really one of the cylons? Or did "God" make him immortal?

So – just like I consider "Joey Potter and The Capeside Redemption" to be the REAL finale of "Dawson’s Creek", I think that I am going to pretend that BSG either ends before the episode "Day Break" or that it actually ends with Series 4, and "The Final Series" is just a figment of my imagination.

And, if you are curious, I would have ended it with the truce being agreed, and with the fleet leaving on their quest to find a planet. 

(More like the end of Quantum Leap and the end of Angel, both of which were brilliant examples of how finales should be done)

All in all – it was very disappointing, and the writers should be ashamed of themselves for such a huge betrayal.