So say we all…

This post is about the TV series Battlestar Galactica and contains SPOILERS. Don’t read it if you haven’t seen the final episode and plan to watch it at some point in the future. Despite the complaints I have about the very ending, it was an enjoyable and thought provoking show and I encourage you to watch it if you haven’t already done so.

To say I was disappointed by the ending of Battlestar Galactica would be an understatement. Although the final battle was exciting, the last half hour subjected us to some very odd theological and evolutionary lessons. I’ve been meaning to write something about it for some time, but never found the words. Fortunately, I don’t have to.  Sarah Yahm has said pretty much everything I wanted to about the weirdly colonial ending:

It’s the perfect Jeffersonian fantasy. The colonials (aptly named) get to be purified by the landscape and the simple primitive noble savages, and they get to uplift and improve them at the same time.

The most chilling moment in the finale is when five white men, hiding behind a hillock, look at a group of black “natives” and express surprise and delight at their shared humanity. “Hard to believe it,” Papa Adama tells us.

But what I really liked was her insight into the way the ending restored normative gender roles which had been challenged throughout the series:

Once again Frederick Jameson rears his ugly head. Throughout the series we got to flirt with these unprescribed, complicated, unscripted forms of relationship, but once the story ends we’re right back to mom and dad and the half-cylon child.

So say we all…

(Thanks to my brother for the link!)

2 thoughts on “So say we all…

  1. Lee Adama can’t be the new Thomas Jefferson because the show’s writers had long since jettisoned any pretense of character continuity in the service of plot. That that plot doesn’t sit well with your or my political philosophies might deserve a secondary critique, but it kind of lets the writers off the hook for the fact that they lead viewers to believe that they were watching hard science fiction for 74 episodes and then suddenly hit us with an episode of _Stargate: SG1_. And the showrunner had the nerve to claim that he was inspired by the _Sopranos_ finale! But as with the end of all relationships that were not what they seemed to be, I should just let it go…

    To anyone who hasn’t seen an episode of _BSG_ but is interested, in my opinion it is one of the best TV shows ever made through episode four of season three, but in retrospect looses its way quickly thereafter.

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