My friend Lester pressed the DVD into my hand, and told me I had to watch this science-fiction series that was making raves in the US. I took one look at the cover, and thought it looked like a corny, cheap re-make of a corny, cheap oldie.
I told him I’d catch it when I got home. Then I stuffed it into a drawer when I got home and forgot all about it.
Lester wouldn’t give up though. He kept hounding me to see it, so one day I succumbed and popped Battlestar Galactica into my DVD player. Today, I take back everything bad I ever thought about that cover. I’d even buy Lester breakfast, lunch and dinner for introducing me to the greatest TV series I’ve watched in my entire life.
Who Gives a Frak about Battlestar Galactica?
Fast forward three years later to present day, where the last episode ever of Battlestar Galactica screened just one week ago. In the five years it’s been on air, Battlestar Galactica‘s received critical acclaim from Time magazine, the American Film Institute, the Chicago Tribune, Rolling Stone magazine, and Newsday. It’s also been nominated for a total of six Emmy Awards and won a prestigious Peabody Award.
It’s also broken my heart, raised its beat, trodden it, inspired it, frustrated it, warmed it, and blown it away in awe. I don’t think I’ve ever been so gripped and surprised by how far a story’s been pushed before.
I think human beings live for those few, transcendent moments in our lives when we see something beyond anything we’ve experienced in our lives up to that point. Something that pulls your mind wide open and have you going fuck yes. That’s art. And I can’t believe the insane amount of times Battlestar Galactica has managed to take what I thought I knew about its story, pull it wide open, twist its balls and make me go frak yes.
Some people I speak to about Battlestar get turned away because they think it’s a show about spaceships, robots and explosions. While it has lots of spaceships, robots and explosions, at its core Battlestar Galactica‘s really about the people on those ships, facing extinction at the hands of those robots and explosions and how they come to terms with it. It’s a show about humanity, and about the best and the worst of us.
God’s in His Heaven, All’s Right with the World
Warning: Major spoilers ahead! If you haven’t watched till the end of Battlestar Galactica, please click away now. If you’ve never seen Battlestar Galactica, but think you might want to one day, please click away now and save yourself future joy and suspense. Namaste.
I felt cheated after first watching the very last episode of Battlestar. After a roller-coaster 4 seasons of twists, mysteries and expecting a cathartic revelation of answers; this is what we get? The hand of God?
To be sure, the rest of the season finale was Battlestar at its best; an intense suicidal mission, Kara’s Watchtower theme paying off as the co-ordinates to Earth, the heart-breaking end to Adama and Roslin’s love story. But Kara Thrace, Baltar’s and Caprica Six’s visions as angels of God? Battlestar had always been heavy on the symbolism and religion with names like Apollo, Athena and Hera, prophecies, visions and Baltar’s religious ramblings, but…really?
My first reaction was that executive producer, writer and developer Ron Moore had pulled the worst story trick in the book on everyone; the deus ex machina. So I whipped out my copy of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting and checked.
The Writer’s Greatest Sin
Why does story guru Robert McKee call the deus ex machina ‘the writer’s greatest sin’ in his seminal screen-writing book?
Deus ex machina is a Latin phrase taken from the classical theatres of Greece and Rome, meaning “god from the machine”…
Story climaxes were as difficult twenty-five hundred years ago as now. But ancient playwrights had a way out. They would cook a story, twist Turning Points until they had the audience on the edge of their marble seats, then if the playwright’s creativity dried up and he was lost for a true Climax, convention allowed him to dodge the problem by cranking a god to the stage and letting Apollo or Athena settle everything. Who lives, who dies, who marries who, who is damned for eternity…
Deus ex machina not only erases all meaning and emotion, it’s an insult to the audience. Each of us knows we must choose and act, for better or worse, to determine the meaning of our lives. No one and nothing coincidental will come along to take that responsibility from us, regardless of the chaos around us. You could be locked up in a cell for the rest of your life for a crime you did not commit. But every morning you would still have to get up and make meaning. Do I bludgeon my brains against this wall or do I find some way to get through my days with value? Our lives are ultimately in our own hands. Deus ex machina is an insult because it’s a lie.
So, have Moore and gang cheated on us and introduced an improbable event to write away unexplainable plot twists? Is Kara Thrace ‘a god to the stage’ who dictates orders with divine wisdom? Are Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six’s visions gods who tell them how things should exactly go?
Despite their visions, our characters don’t act with the wisdom of gods, they stumble through the dark trying to make their way out of it, sometimes falling in the process. The more I thought about it, the more I felt that the writers of Battlestar hadn’t just pulled ‘the writers’ greatest sin’, but they did it in the service of saying that God exists. Boldly, in-your-face and without apologies – so Battlestar.
It’s an ending you either love or hate; you either accept it as something they’ve been building to from the start to make an unapologetic spiritual statement about man and machine, or a complete cop-out so they could pull every crazy stunt they’ve pulled without consequence.
(Unless the upcoming 2-hour TV movie The Plan shows us that Kara, Baltar and Six were all pawns in an even larger Cylon plan – are we going meta-Cylon?)
Why Battlestar Galactica Ends Perfectly
Maybe the greatest clue to the what-the-frak, answer-less ending of Battlestar Galactica comes from a blog post Moore wrote about the conclusion of another hit TV series, The Sopranos, titled The Sopranos Ends Perfectly:
For weeks, the speculation has centered around a simplistic black and white question for a show that revelled in never providing monochromatic answers: would Tony live or die? The prosaic nature of the question and its anticipated answer was itself was the most disappointing thing about the lead-up to the finale. Either Tony was going to get whacked, or he wouldn’t. “The Sopranos” would end with either the bitter little pill of the “bad” guy finally getting what he’s got coming or with the vaguely false relief of family affirmed and life goes on.
Instead, Chase managed to do the unthinkable, the unbelievable and the unprecedented: he yanked us out of their lives without any resolution whatsoever…
Oh, I’m sure there are those who will bemoan the lack of resolution to the story or that Chase has somehow “robbed the fans” but I’m a fan and I’m ecstatic. I’m glad he thumbed his nose at the tyranny of the narrative drive to bring things to a tidy conclusion so we can all clap and walk away without another thought about that mob family in Jersey, satisfied that all’s well that ends well. Screw that…
It’s poetic. It’s exciting. It’s perfect.
And most of all, I wish I’d thought of it first.
And the ending of Battlestar is poetic. Our beloved characters win the war and peaceful new lives on a lovely planet. Kara Thrace finds her peace. Caprica Six reassures Gaius Baltar as he completes the most revolutionary character change in the entire series. Poor Boomer makes her stand. Saul Tigh and Ellen Tigh, 2000-year old soul-mates, reunite. William Adama recites the lines of the book he and Laura Roslin shared as he sits besides her cairn, looking out at a vast landscape (oh, my heavy heart). And mysteries remain mysteries, as life’s mysteries do, and enrich our lives with wonder as they keep their secrets.
William Goldman, novelist, playwright and two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter, says the key to all story endings is to give the audience what it wants, but not the way it expects. Battlestar Galactica has always been giving us what we wanted but not in the way we expected, and its end isn’t any different.
But You and I, We’ve Been Through That
It’s hard to let go of people, even fictional ones. After watching Battlestar Galactica for nearly three years, it’s hard to say goodbye to the characters I’ve come to know and love. Battlestar‘s happy ending may be a bit too trite for some people, but honestly, isn’t hope and a happy ending something all of us want for ourselves? And for all the frakked up craziness they’ve been through, the people and crew of the fleet sure deserve it.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Erm, Al, I don’t really trust someone who likes Star Trek =p. I like the word frak though.
yeah, i also find BSG a very interesting movie that has lot’s of twisted story inside, give us what we wanted but not the way we expected ^^
for me, the ending is kinda disappointing though.. i expect more twist, and unexpected things, like a greater cylons maybe :p
nevertheless i love the movie very much!
btw, u should youtube this: admiral adama give his speech on UN, yea, United Nation ^^
I completely agree with your write up about the ending of Battlestar Galactica. So few shows have touched me as much as this show has. My prevailing feeling afterwards was complete and utter happiness for our humanity and perfection, but also of sorry. Even though it is just a show, it makes me feel disgusted with the world that we live in. While there is a lot of hope for our humanity, I feel that the hope is quickly diminishing with our wastefulness and disrespect for mother nature. Trying to remain positive, though! I wish I could meet more people that felt humanity’s sorrow.
Incredible show. So say we all.
While BSG made for a very good story, very gripping and moving, it is not really good science fiction. Good science fiction focuses on the the science, not the people. That is what makes Stargate far closer to the ideal of the science fiction genre.