Battlestar Galactica: Sunrise
Mar. 21st, 2009 10:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdI am gonna miss this show so much.
Over on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
filkertom's LJ, the_blue_fenix noted:
But I was also thinking about the decision in their terms. What've they seen in the last decade of their lives? 40 billion humans killed, with around 40,000 survivors, yielding a 0.001% survival rate. Somewhere on the order of 6 billion cylons, with several hundred survivors - a worse survival rate, even, than the humans. (I include Earth, where there were five survivors.)
The Colonials have discovered that two other iterations of their extended ancestral civilisation - Kobol and Earth - ended up the same way as their 12 worlds: nuclear wastelands devoid of most animal life.
14 planets. Dead. 46 billion or so people. Dead. 39,000-odd human survivors. 5 (well, in the end, 4) original cylon survivors. Several hundred modern biological cylon survivors. And I realised that if half the people die of malaria in the next 10 years, that's a huge improvement. That's a big step up.
This history is gonna make an impression. It might make the wrong impression, but it's gonna make an impression. World War I, which wasn't fractionally so bad as what they've been through, led to all kinds of these very bad ideas for the same reasons. C.f. the Khmer Rouge, which traced its philosophical roots right back to post-Great War Paris.
Never underestimate the power of catastrophe to trigger these sorts of decisions. It's also the kind of decision made by isolated island societies that face no corrective outside pressures. To my mind, they count. And in these societies certain ideas, certain technologies, become highly unfashionable, and because there's no external pressure to keep them, even if they are ultimately useful and beneficial.
I was also thinking of the arcs of civilisations and rebuilding; how the old civilisations in Europe, the old peaks, seemed to need to recede into semi-forgotten myth before the new civilisations could build themselves up again. Building new - inventing - seems to go better than trying to restore something previous and lost. This fits well with that.
And aside from everything else, Battlestar Galactica has always been a tragedy, even in its first form. It starts with the apocalypse. The fact that it ended with as much hope as it did is a kindness.
I had my own ideas about where they were going, and I might outline those later. I was right about some of them, but not about others, and the ones where I was wrong go further from the original show, in the end, than I think they wanted to wander. I respect that. And I love - love - how the character arcs resolved. President Roslyn's death, and Adama's last scene, both just had me crying. And Starbuck - I will miss you so much, my crazy, crazy TV girlfriend!
So there we are. We've all survived Battlestar Galactica. It's been a great, gruelling trip, but now, it's over. Breathe.
And be nice to the roombas, people. It's only a matter of time before they get nukes.
Over on
filkertom's LJ, the_blue_fenix noted:"Hey, let's abandon all our technology and settle down in _Equatorial Africa_!" I had been worrying about the next cancer patient to come along after Priestess Laura (it's a bitch when that stuff goes into the bone) or the first woman trying to deliver a breech birth the natural way. But I suspect the first malaria season will take their minds off all that.And I was thinking about all of that, too. I was thinking of the hell into which they were sending their descendants - nasty, brutish, and short, with tens of thousands of years of oppression, across races and in almost all cases of women; of the disease, the casual brutality, the slavery, the long climb back through feudal agricultural societies, and on, and on.
But I was also thinking about the decision in their terms. What've they seen in the last decade of their lives? 40 billion humans killed, with around 40,000 survivors, yielding a 0.001% survival rate. Somewhere on the order of 6 billion cylons, with several hundred survivors - a worse survival rate, even, than the humans. (I include Earth, where there were five survivors.)
The Colonials have discovered that two other iterations of their extended ancestral civilisation - Kobol and Earth - ended up the same way as their 12 worlds: nuclear wastelands devoid of most animal life.
14 planets. Dead. 46 billion or so people. Dead. 39,000-odd human survivors. 5 (well, in the end, 4) original cylon survivors. Several hundred modern biological cylon survivors. And I realised that if half the people die of malaria in the next 10 years, that's a huge improvement. That's a big step up.
This history is gonna make an impression. It might make the wrong impression, but it's gonna make an impression. World War I, which wasn't fractionally so bad as what they've been through, led to all kinds of these very bad ideas for the same reasons. C.f. the Khmer Rouge, which traced its philosophical roots right back to post-Great War Paris.
Never underestimate the power of catastrophe to trigger these sorts of decisions. It's also the kind of decision made by isolated island societies that face no corrective outside pressures. To my mind, they count. And in these societies certain ideas, certain technologies, become highly unfashionable, and because there's no external pressure to keep them, even if they are ultimately useful and beneficial.
I was also thinking of the arcs of civilisations and rebuilding; how the old civilisations in Europe, the old peaks, seemed to need to recede into semi-forgotten myth before the new civilisations could build themselves up again. Building new - inventing - seems to go better than trying to restore something previous and lost. This fits well with that.
And aside from everything else, Battlestar Galactica has always been a tragedy, even in its first form. It starts with the apocalypse. The fact that it ended with as much hope as it did is a kindness.
I had my own ideas about where they were going, and I might outline those later. I was right about some of them, but not about others, and the ones where I was wrong go further from the original show, in the end, than I think they wanted to wander. I respect that. And I love - love - how the character arcs resolved. President Roslyn's death, and Adama's last scene, both just had me crying. And Starbuck - I will miss you so much, my crazy, crazy TV girlfriend!
So there we are. We've all survived Battlestar Galactica. It's been a great, gruelling trip, but now, it's over. Breathe.
And be nice to the roombas, people. It's only a matter of time before they get nukes.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 05:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 06:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 04:53 am (UTC)If you know what I mean.
Starbuck
Date: 2009-03-23 01:36 am (UTC)P
Re: Starbuck
Date: 2009-03-23 01:53 am (UTC)But she played her role with gusto. If the Miss America contest had a category for "best poise when holding and firing a machine gun" she'd win it hands down.
She made the act of perforating a Cylon's chest with hundreds of bullets look downright sexy.
P
Re: Starbuck
Date: 2009-03-23 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 06:26 pm (UTC)Capsule summary: by approximately 1225 BCE, a peasants in what is now central Turkey decided that classical High Bronze Age civilization was so oppressive that it had to be destroyed no matter the cost, and managed to invent two "wonder weapons" that gave peasant rebels the new ability to defeat Bronze Age armies. The rebellion spread from there to cover everything from Gibraltar to the Gobi, and 42 of the 44 known large cities of the ancient world were burned to the ground. The rebels went specifically out of their way to make sure that all farms were destroyed, all granaries burned with their contents inside, all written records burned and the whole technology of reading and writing destroyed; they would have succeeded completely, if Ramses II hadn't prevented the main force of their army from coming ashore at The Second Battle of the Sea Peoples in 1198 BCE. The resulting starvation, especially in Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans, was so severe that in some places that were formerly highly populated, the survival rate was zero. Of the list of empires whose peasants made up the Sea Peoples on the Stele of Ramses, we've never even heard of or found archaeological remains of half of them. And people chose that, knowing what it would cost, because they considered it preferable to living under the High Bronze Age empires.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 05:33 am (UTC)Oh, and I was thinking of the Khmer Rouge as an example of this, because that's also exactly what they were trying, for many of the same reasons. Only, you know, it wasn't voluntary.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 08:11 pm (UTC)If the Galactica writers were taking history and science seriously (which they aren't) the arrival of the Colonials on our Earth 150 millennia ago ought to lead to a world very different from the one we're living in.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 11:37 pm (UTC)But also I think, like Quantum Leap, one shouldn't look too closely.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 11:47 pm (UTC)(It's funnier if you know that Quantum Leap started out as the original idea for Galactica 1980. Donald Bellisario worked on both series.)
no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 09:12 pm (UTC)Heck- with all human tech gone, a handful of surviving Cylon fighters could cause a lot of grief to Earth, and they're all jump-capable. They're not very bright, but they can hold a grudge.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 09:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 10:28 pm (UTC)- Adama has just finished building his cabin when a Base ship jumps in and starts bombarding. It turns out Anders had anticipated this and actually hid Galactica in the Oort cloud. Lee had anticipated this and hid some functional Vipers in a cave. Mayhem ensues.
- For a Modern-Day restart: Anders went to the Oort and no Cylons came. Cut to the New Horizons probe, which finds a 150000-year-old Galactia after passing Pluto. X-Files ensues.
Both of these would be terrible ideas; Ron Moore wouldn't touch either with a ten-foot pole.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 07:45 pm (UTC)Galactica
Date: 2009-03-21 09:34 pm (UTC)P
Re: Galactica
Date: 2009-03-23 02:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 10:55 pm (UTC)- with the possible exception of spear points and fire, evidently none of the knowledge they were planning to pass on stuck. If it had it wouldn't have taken 150,000 years to come back (N.B. even agriculture is only about 10-20K years old, so whatever the BSG folks left behind there was clearly lost). So basically they vanish without a trace except for the genetic material.
- Starbuck's biggest fear is begin forgotten, and guess what? She's forgotten. Totally (*)
- pretty much all of the final scenes except for the ones with Helo&Athena&Hera are basically the main characters all deciding how they're going to commit suicide. Adam Sr. is going to sit on a hillside next to Roslin's grave, watch the sunrise and freeze to death. Tyrol is going to fly to an island in the North Atlantic and freeze to death. Lee is going to go rock climbing, probably take a bad fall somewhere and freeze to death. Starbuck is already dead, so no problem there...
- and the human race was already present on this planet and being a million light-years away from everything else (think different galaxy here) and so were going to survive anyway (*), so even if the BSG people had all gotten killed in that last battle it wouldn't have made the slightest bit of difference. All of that struggle was for absolutely nothing
I mean you really couldn't have picked a worse ending if you tried, no matter the postive spin they were able to put on it.(*) well okay, there is the issue of what the angels are going to do (e.g., lead the Cavells et al to the new planet so they can blow that one up too -- figure if the angels and g*d's plan here are Part of the Problem, we're just fucked anyway) and who they might remember over the years (irrelevant if they don't actually talk to anyone about it).
no subject
Date: 2009-03-21 11:43 pm (UTC)...called Britain, I think, but again, it's one of those things where you don't look too closely. Particularly not with ice ages coming.
I think you're going to have a hard time freezing to death in equatorial Africa.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 12:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 01:44 am (UTC)Yeah, I wouldn't take camera shots too seriously for location. Most of Caprica is SFU campus up on Burnaby Mountain.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 07:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 03:23 pm (UTC)Not that tragic
Date: 2009-03-22 12:56 am (UTC)First, they don't vanish without a trace. They make it clear that they intend to pass along language and presumably agricultural science to the humans already existing on Earth. It can be argued that after existing for millions of years, humans on Earth didn't really create a civilization until the Galactica arrived.
Regarding Starbuck, I think her hopes for remembrance were considerably shorter than 150,000 years.
Adama's comments to Roslin at her gravesite strongly indicated that he had plans for a cabin and long term survival.
The fourth point really illuminates the utter confusion of the ending. They evolved independently? What about the previous ruins of civilization they found there? How could they say that they had no connection to the humans walking around in the African Savannah? And the comment about a million light years is really annoying because (yes, I'm a stickler to details), there are no galaxies a million light-years away. You'd have to go at least two million light years away.
I thought the birth (rebirth?) or human civilization on Earth courtesy of the Galactica wasn't so bad.
What puzzled me was why John Cavil gave up so quickly and put a gun to his mouth. He was so keen on getting resurrection technology and then he just offs himself? It doesn't make sense.
P
Re: Not that tragic
Date: 2009-03-22 01:50 am (UTC)um... do you mean from the Cylon colony Earth? The previous Earth was the original Earth (the "real" Earth, as referenced later) which is specifically set up to be not our Earth.
Re: Not that tragic
Date: 2009-03-22 05:05 am (UTC)I will say, the soundtrack for the season finale was markedly better than the rest of the episodes. The offbeat bass guitar music during the jump drive sequence, the orchestral themes after they find the "real"(?) Earth. It was a welcome change.
P
Re: Not that tragic
Date: 2009-03-22 05:17 am (UTC)No, it was specifically called out as different multiple times on screen.
Adama said it didn't matter and for her to just start the jump drive. They jump, to another Earth?
She was entering the numbers she'd translated the notes from the song into. The notes in the song turned out to be the jump coordinates for the new Earth.
How did the rest of the fleet find them then?
Also stated on screen; once they figured out Galactica wasn't going to explode but couldn't take another jump, they sent a jump-capable raptor to the previously-agreed-upon fleet rendezvous point. The fleet then jumped to Galactica's coordinates.
And when the Cylons destroyed humanity at fake Earth, what happened to those Cylons?
..."fake" earth meaning the first earth they found? There were no humans on that planet until Galactica and the Colonial fleet found it 2000 years after destruction. The 13th tribe was a cylon tribe. Their nuclear war was an inter-cylon war. The final five were the only survivors of that war, and only survived because they'd invented the reincarnation technology.
when the Cylons destroyed humanity at fake Earth, what happened to those Cylons? That wasn't clear either.
These were all huge plot points vital to the entire season. Multiple episodes were focused on these questions; what happened on 13th Colony Earth (what you're calling "fake earth"), who the final five were, how they survived the war and came to the area around the 12 Colonies and intervened in the first Cylon war to end it in exchange for technologies they had (resurrection, biological cylon creation) - all of this were the main plot points of year four.
The offbeat bass guitar music during the jump drive sequence
...has been a major musical theme since year three.
You weren't really watching this show, were you?
Re: Not that tragic
Date: 2009-03-22 03:37 pm (UTC)I was under the impression it was the same, or poorly differentiated.
Yes, yes, I know all about the song and the coordinates. In fact, they needlessly hammered it over our heads.
Also stated on screen; once they figured out Galactica wasn't going to explode but couldn't take another jump, they sent a jump-capable raptor to the previously-agreed-upon fleet rendezvous point. The fleet then jumped to Galactica's coordinates.
The raptor reference could have been stated a little more plainly, especially after they dickered around with the reference to the previous Earth and it still wasn't clear yet. It would have been far better if they edited an "aha" moment into the series that the other "Earth" wasn't Earth. It was poor editing, which was endemic through the series.
The final five were the only survivors of that war, and only survived because they'd invented the reincarnation technology.
Yes, I know. I saw those episodes and it just didn't seem credible at all. The final five get caught by surprise during an all out war and they're the only survivors? It's absurd.
...all of this were the main plot points of year four.
Yes, and it was extremely boring and I just didn't care.
The offbeat bass guitar music during the jump drive sequence
Not the syncopated beat.
Honestly, throughout the series, I was totally bored by the Cylons. Watching them sit around and gripe was watching an extended group therapy session.
The only portions I found riveting were the fratricidal fights among the human survivors. Razor, Blood on the Scales, etcetera. Those were the fleeting times Galactica was at its finest. Michelle Forbes should have been leading this fleet. Not Adama.
P
Re: Not that tragic
Date: 2009-03-22 03:39 pm (UTC)Re: Not that tragic
Date: 2009-03-22 05:45 pm (UTC)They said they expected it was coming and had built a resurrection platform in space. They didn't know when or even entirely if - it was a contingency platform. (Work + survivalism!)
>...all of this were the main plot points of year four.
Yes, and it was extremely boring and I just didn't care.
Oh, okay, so this is all just your surliness at being dragged into watching it.
I also did <3 Admiral Cain and her crazy crazy crazy. I was disappointed that the extended cut of Razor wasn't really that extended.
Re: Not that tragic
Date: 2009-03-23 01:34 am (UTC)And then what does he tell us in the last episode? "Whoops, sorry, heh heh, the 13th tribe isn't Earth. It's this other random planet that has nothing to do with the 13th tribe."
Every episode of Scooby-Do gave more hints about the end than Ron Moore. I'm surprised so few of the viewers feel like they were jacked around.
P
Re: Not that tragic
Date: 2009-03-22 06:19 am (UTC)(I suppose this could have been a writer screwup and that they meant to have the BSG crew altering the course of civilization in which case the epilogue should have been "15K years later" rather than "150K years later", and I suppose I should be thankful they were only off by an order of magnitude.)well, if we're going to be sticklers about details, then once you go back more than a million years, you start running into serious questions about what one considers "human", a million years ago being the era of homo erectus (i.e. not homo sapiens; I'm not clear on how far the genetic drift is, but I imagine they try not to change the species name until there's no chance of being able to interbreed)
As it happens, stars and solar systems can in fact be anywhere. Granted, you need some concentration of mass available in order for them to form and evolve in the usual way, but even if one wants to stipulate they only get formed "within" galaxies, figure the gravitational interactions of hundreds of billion of stars can toss things into arbitrarily strange orbits. While I don't particularly like the idea of the entire series prior to the last episode being set out in genuinely intergalactic space, it's not impossible ... or at least not as compared with the other way-more-impossible things that the series wants us to swallow as routine, e.g.,
Never mind that time also gets severely messed up (hello, relativity anyone?) -- for all we know, they could now be in a reference frame where all of the Kobol/original-Earth/Caprica stuff is a million years in the future -- but let's not go there.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 06:58 am (UTC)Not totally. Many millennia later, Herman Melville writes a novel dimly based on a racial memory of the events of the episode "Scar", and even names one of the characters after her. Later, a chain of coffee shops is named after the character.
Don't forget
Date: 2009-03-22 07:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 02:54 pm (UTC)I don't see them as totally giving up technology. I think Lee's suggestion was that they give up _cities_ and the sort of high-concentration, high-stress lives those bring. There are many people today suggesting something similar. The colonists did take technology with them. You see binoculars, modern clothing, backpacks... It wouldn't last 150k years, but just how durable is their tech?
If they - or their descendants - did build up a new civilization, and it happened during an ice age, all traces could have been removed by glaciers or be a hundred meters under the ocean, on the old shore line.
Keep in mind that in terms of human culture and civilization, 150k years is a _long_ time. There could have been several rises and falls, with all but a few traces lost.
I was irritated at Baltar's claim that Homo _heidelbergensis_ didn't have language, until I realized that everyone he knows _speaks the same language_ (well, except for the centurions, who presumably are digital). Would he even have the concept of another language?
no subject
Date: 2009-03-22 05:52 pm (UTC)From what I gather happened after that, it seems like they shouldn't have added the extra time. I think it was better with Helo apparently dead and without looping around to current day. Still, I'm TiVoing the replay of the episode so we can see what we missed.
As for what we did see, I think everything until they landed on Earth was perfect. I'm annoyed about godditit but I appreciate that given a choice between exposition to explain angels that wouldn't have worked anyway and a focus on the characters they chose the latter.
It's clear that their technology won't persist and couldn't have persisted even if they'd kept the fleet around. I never bought that 30,000 people could rebuild a lasting modern technological society even if they wanted to, and given what they had lost it actually makes sense for them to consciously seek a new path. Scattering people around the planet was silly, and I'm sure everyone outside of Africa died without leaving descendants past a few generations. But they'll likely live out their lives at the least and some will have children, which compared to a few brief years on the run from genocidal robots is a happy ending.
The 150K timeframe is perfect for Hera as Mitochondrial Eve. Even with abandoning most of their tech the colonists of the fleet possess knowledge that might not persist but probably helps both them and the existing human population survive. So it can be seen that the landing of humans from the fleet saved the total human population.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 08:11 pm (UTC)Rebuilding often takes more effort than bulldozing from scratch.
No one wants to bulldoze the remnants of their civilization even when it's the right answer.