I loved the finale to Battlestar Galactica (and I cried like a bitch twice during it).

By no means was the ending perfect, but I still loved it, and I don't really understand all the hate towards it, either. I mean, when a show spends four years telling you, "Some higher power is at work here," it seems kind of unfair to yell "cop-out!" when, hey, it turns out a higher power was at work.

As I mentioned the other day, my friends and I are rewatching the series from the beginning. The very first line of the first episode of the main series (not the miniseries) is Head Six, saying to Baltar, "God has a plan for you, Gaius. He has a plan for everything and everyone."

I find that nicely poetic. Did the writers necessarily know what they were writing towards when they wrote that first episode? Probably not, but at least they stuck to do the vision and the spirit of things instead of trying to explain everything away with purely non-mystical science, and I have to give them credit for that.

Spoilers for those who haven't watched the last episodes, be warned



I actually went back and read your episode summary for the last episode so I could see what you thought of it, and I think we had pretty similar feelings about the whole deal (including some frustration with Kara's resolution or lack thereof). I'll say the last few minutes of it were a little too THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU about it (though it did give another nice chance to listen to the amazing version of All Along the Watchtower), but I had no problem with the deus ex machina because, as you said, they've been saying "O HAI, GOD IS WORKING HERE" from the beginning, so the fact that, gasp, God was involved is kind of a giant duh. I personally wish it had been just some other inhabitable planet and they hadn't gone for the Planet of the Apes/it was Earth all along ending, but I can see how they thought that was the only reasonable ending worth doing. I just felt it was a little heavy-handed and would've been better if it had just been maybe implied rather than outright bash-the-audience-over-the-head with it (Hera=Mitochondrial Eve? Really?).

And, yeah, OH GOD ROSLIN. ;________; So much crying.



Going back a few episodes: ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER PIANO DUET IS THE MOST AMAZING THING EVER.

Yeah, exactly. People who rail against the ending being a deus ex machina are mistaking what a "deus ex machina" is. By definition, a deus ex meachina involves problems being tied up at the end by something that had been totally unheralded, and in the case of BSG, we had literal heralds the entire course of the show. :)

Moreover, it's not like everyone was fucked and then, "Oh, look, God fixed it!" Everyone, both human and Cylon, had to get to that point, and their own actions could very well have ruined everything. Multiple times.

And yeah, some parts of the ending are a little heavy-handed, but it's not, "Oh my god, you retroactively ruined four years of awesome show" heavy-handed, so I'm grateful for that.

One of the other things I like about the ending is that they leave things open to interpretation as to who/what "God" is (in the BSG context). That takes a little bit of the edge off of the anvil, in a way.

Yes, overall I think it was well-handled with a couple of flaws. But, like you said, it didn't detract from the awesome of the rest of the series, which is pretty much all I needed from it, so I'm satisfied.

Other than that, I think we discussed this at length today over chat, so there's not a lot more to say XD