TV Review: Battlestar Galactica Series Finale

Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009)

I promised a review of the series finale of Battlestar Galactica and here it is. I felt inclined to do this for everyone who has been held captive by one of televisions all time greatest shows for the last five years. There are many people out there who give us fans a hard time for watching the show. I should know: I was one of them. Eventually, these people will end up watching the show and feeling like complete assholes. Yes the show is science fiction and yes it involves a whole lot of robots. But there are no lasers. There are no beams of light that transport people down to planet surfaces. There are no aliens, or phasers, or people with wrinkly prosthetic foreheads. There is just humanity, what’s left of it after a nearly-complete holocaust, in a struggle to survive when all hope has been taken away. What’s left of humanity travels the cosmos in a small fleet of military and civilian survivors. Only one of these ships is a military one and it is the only one that possesses the power to defend the survivors. When the series opens, the Galactica is about to be decommissioned and renovated as a museum. The tourist gift shop has already been installed. So when the old beast must summon everything it has left in her to protect humanity’s survivors, you can’t help but wonder how long she could possibly hold out. In the series finale, she finally breaks. But it’s a good thing she lasted as long as she did, otherwise the world would have been without four seasons of the best television has to offer. Battlestar Galactica will go down as one of the greatest shows of all time: the writing, the characters, and the stories are consistently of the highest quality, and the show-runners made a smart decision to stop while they were ahead. From day one, the survivors, and the show itself, had one goal: to find a home. Now in the show’s final hours, that dream is realized and the end of these characters’ journey could not have been more satisfying.

SPOILER WARNING – This review assumes that the reader has watched the show and is familiar with its many plot twists and surprises.

Admiral Adama, the commander of Battlestar Galactica, has had a really tough run lately. He has had to deal with numerous mutinies and civilian uprisings that have threatened the safety of the entire fleet. His adopted daughter, Kara Thrace, died and then mysteriously reappeared. The one woman he has fallen in love with, during humanity’s darkest hours, is slowly dying of cancer. He has learned that his best friend and second-in-command is a cylon: an artificially-created organic robot (just think of the replicants from Blade Runner) who was implanted in the human colonies as a spy decades earlier. In fact, many of the ships key personnel turned out to by cylons. Over the course of the last few years, Adama has been shot, imprisoned, and had to make impossibly difficult decisions. An early episode forced Adama to order the destruction of a civilian vessel suspected to have been infiltrated by the enemy cylons after disappearing for a long period of time and then failing to respond to numerous radio hails upon its return. Thousands of innocent lives were assumed to be aboard the ship. These choices are all in a day’s work for Adama, who literally holds the fate of his species in his hands. That’s got to be a tough job. Finally, he gets a break in the show’s finale when the fleet finds a home.

Before they find a home, however, one more obstacle awaits the crew of the Galactica. Adama has learned that his ship is on its last legs. It can only manage a handful of faster-than-light jumps before it will crumple. With the odds of finding a planet hospitable for human settlement almost non-existent, Adama sends the fleet off to find a home as he takes Galactica on its final journey to rescue Hera. Hera is important, we are told. She is the first human-cylon hybrid baby of natural birth, and some believe she holds the key to humanity’s survival. The only problem is that the cylons believe that she also holds the key to their survival, so they have captured her and are holding her at the cylon home colony. It’s time for the show to spend whatever remains of its special effects budget.

The special effects in the episode’s bravura sequence are nothing short of spectacular. Adama rams the front end of Galactica into the side of the cylon colony and a daring rescue mission ensues. The show really had to end with a climax this big and this stunning. Once the audience’s action bone is satisfied, the show can move onto its even more impressive emotional climax.

Many questions are answered here, more than I was expecting. The opera house, Kara’s purpose, the number six cyclon Baltar thinks may be in his head, are all answered for. One scene that I found particularly evocative and shocking was Tyrol’s discovery that it was Tory, a fellow final five cylon, who had murdered his wife: a death once attributed to suicide. This causes an enraged Tyrol to grab Tory by the neck and kill her, destroying the one small chance of peace that had emerged in discussions with the antagonizing cylons and signaling the end of a cease-fire. The human survivors were so close to finding an end to their conflict, but all that was destroyed in seconds due to the basic human desire for revenge. It’s a theme that was introduced at the beginning of the series, when Adama decides to plan an all-out revenge on the cylons who have just destroyed the human home-worlds. The attack would have been suicidal, but the desire for revenge outweighed plain common sense. Roslin eventually talks Adama out of it, reminding him that the survivors need him and their safety is much more important to the survival of the human race than ill-advised revenge. The cylon attack on the colonies itself was an act of revenge. This highlights the show’s theme of the cyclical nature of human civilization: all that has happened has happened before and will happen again.

Just when it looks like the crew of Galactica is done for, Kara, with some guidance from Hera, saves the crew. Hera’s job was to write out the notes to a song that Kara, and some of the cylons, keep hearing in their heads. Kara translates the notes into numerical co-ordinates and jumps Galactica just in time. The ship's backbone is broken in the process and she will never jump again. Galactica, however, arrives at the most beautiful planet anyone could have imagined. In fact, it looks a lot like the Earth we know and love, but without all the lights and cities and pollution.

The survivors make an intriguing decision upon arriving at the new Earth: they decide to start again. They decide to bring everything that is good about humanity and leave all the bad. All the space ships are sent on an automated suicide run into the sun. This suggests that the survivors are at least trying to break free from the cycle that has brought them where they are.

One of the most touching scenes of the series comes to us in a final scene with Baltar, the narcissistic genius scientist who is ashamed of his agricultural heritage. He, and the rest of his family, were born into a culture of farming and manual labor. Baltar sees this work as beneath him, destined for those of lesser intellect. But having arrived at this new Earth, Baltar realizes that his skills as an intellectual are no longer as valuable as his upbringing as a farmer. “I know about farming,” he admits to a Caprica Six.

Of all the positive things that can be said about the show, none can be more pivitol than the performances of Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell as Bill Adama and Laura Roslin, respectively. They validate the show. The show is never more engaging than when Adama erupts in growling anger and never more touching than when Roslin brings him back to reality. This is their show.

The episode, and the series, ends with a hauntingly beautiful goodbye from Adama, now relinquished from military duty, who has fled what remains of his people to live by himself, away from everything, with his dying love, Roslin. It seems fitting that after dedicating so many years to protecting his species’ survival that this old man would want to simply be left alone, away from any form of human responsibility. Roslin passes away in the final moments and is buried atop a green hill, surrounded by a spectacularly gorgeous panorama. Adama sits and gazes out at the bright sunshine he has surely not seen in a long time.

“I laid out the cabin today. It’s going to have an Easterly view. You should see the light that we get here when the sun comes from behind those mountains. It’s almost heavenly. It reminds me of you.”

In a show that is predicated upon the interrelationship of faith and science, and the search for the nature of true humanity; in a show that asks us, in the real world, to question the difficult moral decisions that we and our leaders make, the final message is one of complete peace and calm. And of all the emotions that humanity, as depicted in the show, has displayed over the last five years, the series ends with the most essential one: love.

Professor P