Daybreak

And now we come to the finale. I've been lazy about posting these notes, so it's about time we do it.

The first thing to notice is that there are no flashes for what's coming in the episode at the end of the title sequence. This is the first episode to do this since the brought them back in season 2. It makes sense, since they wouldn't want to spoil the finale.

The episode's structure began to remind me very much of the finale of TNG, as it goes back in time, and ultimately to the future. And just as on TNG, we start not at the beginning of the series, but before the beginning of the series. Some of these flashbacks are interesting, some are not. In fact, the whole flashback structure made the episode feel much more like Lost than BSG. I don't much like Laura's flashback, but then I don't much like Laura. Why does she have that ugly bump thing in her hair that all the girls are doing now? I just plain don't understand it. There is nothing appealing about it. It just looks stupid. Like you're a conehead or something. Why were we introduced to her sisters only to kill them off, including the pregnant one? It didn't really seem like it connected to anything, it was just an event. And then she went and sat in a fountain for no reason. Somehow all of this leads up to her joining the President's campaign... really??

Hey, Zack's back! At least that's something. I was glad to see some of that relationship which was barely there in "Act of Contrition", but even here it is sidelined to have Kara and Lee all over each other while Zack is passed out on the floor. Missed opportunity. 

Oddly enough, the character with the best flashback is Baltar. With him, we actually get to see a kind of character arc which will also inform his future. I like meeting his father. The best part of it was how Gaius was chided for changing his accent. That's a nice bit of continuity from last season and in a series that has played fast and lose with established facts, I like that they made something of that. It's great that he will eventually come full circle at the end so that he will say that he is a farmer when on Earth.

As long as we're comparing BSG to TNG, am I the only one who thinks it odd that Ron Moore destroyed the Enterprise in Star Trek Generations, and here is destroying Galactica at the end of BSG?

I don't like the Anders flashback much. I mean, I like that we actually get to see more of the triad team (I'm still not calling it pyramid), but I don't like all that business about perfection. It is a way for them to act as if he was always that way and to try to point out he was always a Cylon, but it falls flat for me. I guess though they had nothing else for him to do since he's comatose in a tub and will soon fly into the sun.

I don't get the thing with the pigeon and Lee. It doesn't signify anything. It's just there taking up screen time. They cut the Boomer/Helo flashbacks from the aired version but kept this? The only significance is that I realized that pigeon is the only animal we have ever seen on this show. Ever. Unless there were a few birds in some Caprica backgrounds, that's the only animal we've ever seen on a planet. Isn't that odd? When Roslin mentioned how Earth has far more wildlife than all of the twelve colonies, I couldn't help laughing. "Yeah, all the colonies had was one pigeon!" Of course, that raises the obvious question of how pigeons evolved on two seperate planets. But then, the original series had dogs (or daggits). 

I have in my notes "Why is Caprica doing that?" but since it's been almost two weeks, I don't remember what it refers to. But I'm sure I had a point there somewhere.

Now Romo gets to be President? How the frack does that make sense? Is there no law of succession anymore? I mean, that's how Roslin got to be President in the first place. What makes her think she can just pick the random lawyer? Never mind that the office is essentially useless once they hit Earth. It's also a shame when the sleazy lawyer seems more honest than President Roslin.

Hooray! We get to see the old-school Cylon Centurions again! 

And finally we get the reappearance of Head Baltar. It's a nice beat when both Gaius and Caprica realize they can each see them. 

When Helo was shot in the leg, I wrote "Helo's gonna die". And I totally expected it. At first, I thought it a cheat, since they brought him back from death in the miniseries only to kill him at the end of the show. But on the other hand, it seemed to make the most sense. Moore loves the body count, so I figured they'd kill Athena and Helo and then Six and Baltar would raise the baby just as was predicted way back in season one. ...Only that didn't happen. Helo disappears for awhile, but then we see him with a crutch on Earth and everything is fine. Um, what? So all of that stuff from "Kobol's Last Gleaming" onward about Gaius raising the baby NEVER HAPPENS. So he was lied to by an angel? Why then should we believe anything anyone says on this show?? That's a BIG point to never pay off!

I know it's the finale, and they were on a tight schedule. The effects for the most part are good, but in all the battle sequences on the colony ship, the Centurions never look quite right. They look rendered poorly so that the lighting on them doesn't quite match. They look like they were composited in. This is a shame, since they had really been getting good at this.

I have to say, all of the intercutting with the opera house stuff was done in such a way that it almost worked. It's probably the highlight of the episode, and really gives the feeling that it was all connected. Of course, given a minute's thought it makes no sense at all. Why the connection to an opera house on Kobol anyway? why do the final five have glowing hoods? None of that ever actually goes anywhere, but I'll call it a valiant attempt at making connections. At least then some of those events play out. Sadly, the whole Kobol element pretty much drops out of the show, which makes so many of these things confused.

I really don't like or understand Baltar's little speech about God at the end. His ecumenical theosophy that "God is a force of nature beyond good and evil" is silly, at least to this universe. "Good and evil, we created those." Really? So what got them banished from Kobol in the first place? I can sort of see how God would be beyond what humans might define as good and evil, but there must still be things that are good and things that are not, right? Isn't mankind creating his own destruction an evil thing? And frankly, there has to be some kind of "god" entity on this show. HAS to be. Not just because he sent angels, either. The basic mythology of the show is that humans were banished from Kobol by the gods, the Lords of Kobol. Who were they? Were they really the Greek deities? We don't know, but we are led to believe no. Fine, but they have to be SOMEONE, right? Moore's basic mythology, which he laid out on podcast after podcast was that man created Cylons, essentially playing god, and for that they were banished by god or the gods or whoever. So there is SOME deity that set it all in motion. We've also been told that the Cylons believe this power to be the one true God, and that the other gods are false. So were the "Lords of Kobol" real angelic beings who acted as gods on Kobol? Or was there one God there who became twisted in the stories into many gods later on? The most curious thing about it is that angel Six was so adamant that there is only one God and that Baltar would be his instrument. So if she is really an angel, you'd think she really would speak for this God. But then, for the first two seasons, she was still very Cylon in nature, so maybe none of it makes sense. In any case, I really expected as the show went on for there to be a God who wasn't the Lords of Kobol and wasn't quite the Cylon God either, but was an expression of some ultimate truth that both cultures knew about. Instead we are told that god is an indefinable force. Great Gaius. How very "Star Wars" of you.

I like that Tyrol finally learns about Callie and what a jerk Tory was. Did he need to kill her right then? Maybe not. But I'm glad she got what she deserved.

I hated the fact that "All Along the Watchtower" ended up being coordinates, primarily because I expected that. I had that figured out three episodes ago. But she's sitting there trying to plug it into algebra? Though I also have to ask why the song happens to contain the coordinates to Earth. Is this some expression of "god", or is it just a really lucky coincidence? I also hate that Kara has to do the obvious thing of quoting "There must be some kind of way out of here," when she punches it in. What's most offensive about that to me is that it quotes the Hendrix version, not the original. Dylan never sang "kind of", and that phrase weakens the punch of the line. 

What do you know, there's another Earth. Just like I predicted, it really is all like the original series. Only in the old show, the "real Earth" was the second one. Here, the "real Earth" was the ruined one, and this just happens to be our Earth which is not the Earth the prophecies spoke of. Confused yet? It's very lame to me that they just decide to call it Earth. 

I guess there was some mention about it, but I'm a little vague on how the rest of the fleet got to Earth. There was one line about it, but it was still not clear to me.

We soon come to learn that this is Earth in our distant past. Which means the entire series took place literally "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." This also is a great departure from Larson's series, which featured brothers of man "even now" beyond the heavens. 

It's a curious thing, this connection to the original show. Essentially, this episode pays homage to it while simultaneously betraying it. Just as in the original series, mankind reaches Earth and essentially builds its early civilization. But this plays out so much differently. I think the whole attitude can be best expressed by that last shot of the fleet. We get a fly-by that is meant to replicate the shot of the fleet we saw at the end of every old episode, complete with elements of the old theme music under it... and then they all fly into the sun and are destroyed. It's almost as if they are flying the old series into the sun.

I guess the whole "dying leader" thing goes nowhere. I wonder how the Geminons feel about their prophecies not coming true. That's an angle that really should have been played but never was. I'm glad Roslin finally died though. Still, why does Adama just decide then to live off by himself? That seems pretty dumb to me.

Of course the whole notion that all of the fleet would just decide to forsake technology and live like savages, hoping that the neanderthals wouldn't kill them is silly too. I also don't like that it places these events in sub-saharan Africa. Despite where fossilized "human ancestors" are found, I don't buy the African genesis stuff. All early civilization is in the Middle East. I can't jump on the idea that a few simian bones means we evolved in Africa. How do we know these are even ancestral hominids? How do we know mankind evolved at all? How do we know these aren't just extinct species of ape? They call them ancestors because they want to believe it. Still, it just doesn't make logical sense to me for man to evolve in Africa, and then develop writing and iron and wheels and calendars and architecture in Sumeria. Especially if I'm to believe the Galacticans had all of this!

The one thing I will say about the whole ancient Earth thing though is that I'm glad that there was no pangaea. We saw the continenatal masses from space, and they looked pretty much as they do now. I don't really buy the whole pangaea thing since when you really think about it it doesn't make sense. I can believe there are tectonic plates and fault lines and that there's a slight continental drift. But to believe that all of the continents were one big one based solely on the idea that South America's east coast looks a lot like Africa's west coast is silly. There is LAND between them under the ocean! The continents are not just floating islands on the sea! Furthermore, if we are to believe that "native Americans" came over on a land bridge between Russia and Alaska, that would mean that THOSE continents were connected over on that side. If the pangaea argument is correct, not only would Russia and Alaska not be connected at that time, but they would be FURTHER apart! But I digress.

Kara Thrace being the angel of death was a total red herring, and essentially a lie. She never brought about the destruction of humanity (not even close), nor did she really bring death. And then we are to believe she was, what, an angel? That her mission was to bring them to Earth? NO! Her mission was to bring death! Who sent her? Where did she come from? She was corporeal! We saw her and felt her! We watched her pee for crying out loud! So where did she go? Is this just to make her like Jesus or something? And even Jesus physically rose in the same body he died in; Kara did not! Her story makes absolutely no sense at all.

And then suddenly we flash forward 150,000 years. I'm no scientist; is that time frame supposed to be accurate? Anyway, we are led to believe that Hera is the "mitochondrial Eve" from which we all sprung. ...What? So Hera is so important because she was us? That's it? And that means that we are all part Cylon! So I was right; this whole show IS about the Cylons. Why have scientists not found any evidence of any of the other 40,000 humans there; only this one girl? And what about the modern clothing that they were wearing? Why haven't they found zippers in their archaeological digs? And again, how exactly are the skin-job Cylons machines?? They seem just biological. Did Hera only inherit the Cylon biology, but not the mechanisms? And more interestingly, who did she mate with? Was it a human, thus diluting the Cylon blood, or was it a neanderthal? Is the gradual dilution of Hera's Cylon blood over time the reason that we no longer have magic blood that cures cancer?

I knew Ron Moore would give himself a cameo. I don't like that angel Six and Baltar appear at the end. They seem to be there for no reason at all, other than to give this didactic message to us. Nobody sees them except us; so why do WE see them as Six and Gaius? I really hate the ending. It's just obvious and preachy. "Watch out humans, or you could destroy yourselves again..." As if we didn't get that that was the point of the series from the very beginning anyway. And note, they fled from the colonies to escape war and all, then they become us. So isn't this all really inevitable? All this has happened before, and it will all happen again, so do we really have any control over it anyway? And to top it all off, AGAIN I have to sit through "All Along the Watchtower", this time the actual Hendrix recording, as we look at the evolution of robots. I like the driving percussive element, but honestly I don't get why the Hendrix version gets so much devotion. He doesn't even know the words! Can anyone tell me what he sings after "plowmen dig my earth"? Because it sure isn't Dylan's lyric!

Ultimately, the end is a letdown as it was always going to be. The abandoned most of the mythology a long time ago, and then had to find a way to make things seem like they connected. Well, it doesn't all connect. The Kara Thrace story doesn't resolve. The show gets back to it's preachy nihilistic origins. Ultimately, Gaius comes off the best; he even essentially gets away with the destruction of mankind from the miniseries! So this guy who was supposed to be a villain, ends up buddy-buddy with angels who watch over mankind! And I hate that it all comes down to that song; I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to hear that song again.

I'm glad it's over anyway. End of line.

Favorite line: "A perfect face, perfect lace, find the perfect world for the end of Kara Thrace." Why is Anders rhyming? I find this very funny.