BSG Finale: Daybreak

It's done. In a hail of orchestral manoeuvres in space, a modern re-enactment of Roslin and Baltar's vision, and Adama finally touching the rains down in Africa, Battlestar Galactica rode off into the sunset. Or, in this case, into the heart of the sun.

I could write REAMS of stuff about my thoughts on BSG as a series, or "Daybreak" as a finale, but since I already spend far too much time doing that about Lost (and there are BSG experts far, far better suited to it), I'll keep this brief, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

I don't know what the general fan feeling was about this as a finale, but I thought it was beautifully done. There was so much action in the first hour I couldn't figure out how they'd sustain it for two. But the second hour was more of the denouement of the series, letting us know the fates of most of the people we've come to care about. By the end, it was a finale that felt very... final, much like the Six Feet Under finale (which I still maintain is the best finale EVER).

I thought Ron Moore did an excellent job of closing everything down, and lives were not lost without major emotional impact. In the first part of Daybreak the week before, we saw some of the lives in Caprica before the Holocaust, with Roslin losing her family, Gaius dealing with a difficult elderly parent, and Starbuck and Apollo getting to know one another while she was dating his brother. In doing so, we come to appreciate their end -- Roslin is dead, Starbuck disappears, and Gaius returns to the trade his father taught him. The finale brought back elements of previous seasons, giving the series the feeling that Moore knew exactly what he was doing right from the beginning.

Did anyone else think Moore might have beaten Lindelof and Carlton to the punch on some issues? On the surface, Anders' final statement -- "See you on the other side" -- seems to have been taken right from Desmond on Lost -- "See you in another life, bruthah." Lost has always been about fate versus free will, and BSG has explored that many times, too. In this case, Moore's world seems to have fallen on the side of fate. Starbuck had a purpose, just as Gaius and Roslin did. And in the end, he seems to chalk everything up to a higher power (not named God, apparently, but serving the same purpose). I'm sure some fans will be in a tizzy about that, but personally, I loved it. It takes guts to suggest something like that in today's world.

Highlights:
• Watching the old Centurions go head to head with the new Centurions (best part: one of the good ones blows the head off one of the old ones).
• The final answer of what the whole opera house vision and Starbuck’s purpose meant, complete with big loud music and total awesomeness.
• The fact that Caprica has been seeing little pin-striped-suit Gaius all these years, just like Gaius has been seeing sexy red-dressed Caprica. That was hilarious.
• Galen avenging Callie’s death. Oh YEAH!!
• Cavil shooting himself in the head. I didn’t see that coming... (but on the other hand, it also seemed a little convenient; it’s an easy way of disposing of the character and not having to follow through on anything)
• Ron Moore’s cameo at the end.
• Giving humanity to Boomer right after she’s shot. It would have been easy to kill her off and we’d all cheer, remembering her having sex with Helo while his wife is battered behind a door and watching, but instead, we’re reminded of who Boomer used to be, and the vulnerable, fragile person she once was, and as usual, it made her death much harder to watch.
• All of the battle scenes. That was EPIC. I’ve NEVER seen CGI like that on television, ever.

Low points:
• Adama vomiting on himself. I know you’re a method actor, man, but NO ONE wants to watch that. Ick.
• No Lucy Lawless. Come on, was she really too busy to be there at the end? I’ve never liked that she stayed behind on that other planet.

And that brings me to my question, because I don’t watch BSG the way I do Lost, so I’ll have to rely on some other fans to fill in the blanks. What was that other planet they visited? Are we to believe it wasn’t Earth? This one clearly is (you can see the continents from the sky, and from the map where they point out where people will be distributed around the world). Yet when they landed on the bleak planet, you could clearly make out the Brooklyn Bridge and other NYC landmarks. Why would Moore have put in such recognizable landmarks to convince us this was Earth if it wasn’t? Is it possible they’ve jumped in time? (Yes, I’ve been watching too much Lost.) Could they have jumped to Earth in the future in the first place, and now have jumped into the past?

In the end, it turns out, we’re all part Cylon. And while I thought that’s where they might be going, I didn’t realize they’d do it like this. I loved that ending.

So what did you think? Did it work for you?

All This Has Happened Before...

...and we should be so lucky that a show like this will ever happen again.

Tonight is the series finale of Battlestar Galactica, one of the best television shows of all time. A remake, no less, that didn't just update the sets, but completely reimagined a pre-existing series, and made it so much better the first series should be forced to change its name. (If you're a massive fan of the 1970s version, please don't hate me for saying that.) The last handful of episodes have been stunning examples of what television can, and should, be. One crew member who has been on the show from the beginning (I won't spoil in case you're waiting to watch this on DVD) is tried and charged with treason, and as he sits in the airlock about to be executed, he suddenly looks down, then looks up and delivers a line so mundane, so beautiful, and so heartbreaking it literally made me catch my breath. And then the screen instantly went black. That scene will always haunt me.

We've seen friends become enemies, we've watched the characters lose loved ones and mourn their deaths, and in one case -- something I've never seen before on TV or in movies -- mourn their own death.

This show has always had a lot to say about life, death, procreation, why we're all here, religion, not having religion, desire, following that desire, knowing when to call it quits or when to keep going. What began as a show that acted as a subtle metaphor for terrorism and 9/11 has become a show that's about all of us.

Tonight, in a 2-hour finale, it comes to an end. I hope you'll be watching. I know I will. So say we all...

Dirk Benedict Has Lost His Frakkin' Mind

So... last week I was having dinner with a dear, dear friend of mine whom I hadn't seen in ages, and asked her if she was going to be watching BSG on Friday. "Oh, I don't watch it," she said. "I can't fathom a female Starbuck." As I pleaded with her to watch this show, insisting that regardless of whether Starbuck was a man, woman, or unicorn, this show was LEAGUES above the original, she emphatically shook her head and said her heart lay with the 1970s version of the show.

Her comments immediately brought to mind a quote in the book I worked on once, called Frak You (a companion guide to BSG) where the author quoted Dirk Benedict as saying there was something seriously wrong with a female Starbuck, and it would never work. Despite looking happy in this picture here -- with Katee Sackhoff, at a *cough* Starbucks... ba dum bum bum -- he's very very VERY bitter about the reimagined BSG (probably because he wasn't offered a part in it) and isn't afraid of saying so.

My friend Chris just sent me a link to Dirk's latest rant about "Stardoe," as he calls her, explaining that in HIS day, men were men and women were women and everyone knew his/her place. Apparently women belong on TV shows to be the conquests of the womanizing male characters, and this new version of BSG — which forces us to look at the world today and see the various shades of grey in it — is depressing and stupid. Black is black and white is white and there is good and there is evil and THE END, in Dirk's world. Starbuck was a cigar-chomping womanizing sex machine and he had a LOT of ladies sending him underwear and the Suits (his capital, not mine) hated him, and cancelled the show because of him, he implies.

But enough of me talking, let's listen to Dirk:

In the bleak and miserable “re-imagined” world of “Battlestar Galactica,” things are never that simple. Maybe the Cylons are not evil and alien but in fact enlightened and evolved? Let us not judge them so harshly. Maybe it is they who deserve to live and Adama and his human ilk who deserve to die? And what a way to go! For the re-imagined terrorists (Cylons) are not mechanical robots void of soul, of sexuality, but rather humanoid six foot tall former lingerie models who f**k you to death. (Poor old Starbuck, you were imagined too early. Think of the fun you could have had ‘fighting’ with these thong-clad aliens!) In the spirit of such soft-core, sci-fi porn I think a more re-imaginative title would have been “F**cked by A Cylon.” (Apologies to “Touched by an Angel.”)

Personally, I love the TWO asterisks he's added to his bad word at the end. How exactly does he think that word is spelled?

This was my personal favourite part:

Women are from Venus. Men are from Mars. Hamlet does not scan as Hamletta. Nor does Hans Solo as Hans Sally. Faceman is not the same as Facewoman. Nor does a Stardoe a Starbuck make. Men hand out cigars. Women “hand out” babies. And thus the world for thousands of years has gone’ round.

Seriously, does it get more awesome than that? If he were writing Lost, Kate would simply be repopulating the island while Sawyer marked off his female conquests with notches on a coconut tree. And Jack and Locke would be handing out cigars.

You can read the entire thing here. And scroll down for the comments. Some of them are what you'd expect, "Oh my god, STARBUCK! You are THE MAN, and you are totally right and the new BSG sucks!" But there are some really good ones in there pointing him out for what he really is. Like these two:

Randy - January 19th, 2009 at 10:22 amWow, a washed up actor bitter that his brief shine in the spotlight has been totally eclipsed by a far superior version of that 70s joke. Whereas Dirk glorifies and even sanctifies the cheap Star Wars ripoff that he so beloves, Ron Moore’s version takes the genre to a whole new level of intrigue and sophistication.

It’s not the Big Suit’s fault that they’re better than you, Dirk. Grow up.

Stav - January 19th, 2009 at 10:29 amDude, Katee Sackhoff’s Starbuck has a much bigger pair than your femme, hairbrushing, mirror-loving pipsqueek ever did. When I was 14 or so your old show was a great Sunday night diversion. The new BSG is like a great novel, with three-dimensional characters, a taut storyline and complex thought-provoking writing.

Don’t be an old has-been grump. Lesser storytellers provided the seeds that gave us Shakespeare. Your little romp is the seed that gave us an extraordinary five years of drama.

Holy Frakkin' Hell: Battlestar Galactica

Tonight begins the return of stellar television to our world -- five new shows return between tonight and Monday (tune in to my blog throughout the day today for writeups on three of them, with the other two on the weekend). And, of course, the sixth, and most important, starts next Wednesday! Battlestar Galactica airs the first of the final ten episodes of the series tonight at 10pm (on Space in Canada, Sci-Fi Channel in the US) and WHOA, these last eps are going to be doozies. As I've said in a few of the comments sections recently, I discovered about a month ago that I had missed the end of the season. I thought I'd missed one episode (my PVR is allergic to Space, for some reason, and will tape a single minute of a program and then shut off. This is the only channel where this weirdness occurs). I couldn't find it anywhere, and was stuck. I recently discovered I'd missed THREE episodes, and had a lot of catching up to do. So, last weekend, my husband and I rented the final disk of the DVD and caught up. And... well... WOW.

First of all, Deanna is back, and I cannot be happier. Lucy Lawless pulled a classic Xena move (how I miss Xena) when she was first reborn, grabbed one of the Cylons and knocked him out, all with that jaw-jut she did so well on Xena. I was in heaven.

Then, while the Hybrid was jumping the ship continuously, Deanna confronted Roslin, who was sitting over Gaius's dying body, and Roslin told her she needed to know the final five, who would lead them all back to Earth. Deanna said, "You mean you don't know you're one of them?" and the music swelled, the camera did that BSG patented quick-zoom, Roslin's eyes widened... and then the music abruptly stopped and Deanna sat in her chair cackling. It was AWESOME. Best fake revelation of the year. It's definitely one of my favourite moments of the series.

After four of the five were outed (William Adama's reaction to Tigh being a Cylon was brilliant) and Tigh was almost sent out the airlock, Anders and Tyrrol realized Starbuck's ship was offering the coordinates to Earth. Deanna made a pact to work together with the humans and all go back to Earth (she was kinda in the same boat as the humans anyway, since the Resurrection ship had gone kablammo and there would be no more risings in the Cylon world).

I thought the series would end with the discovery of Earth. But then again, I thought Lost would end with a rescue. Looks like today's television is all about thwarting expectations. Survivors are rescued on Lost two seasons from the end, and at the end of the 2008 BSG finale, they all arrived on Earth. It was a beautiful moment as they jumped into Earth's range, and we saw that globe for the first time on the series. And then... they arrived and all had their awful Charlton Heston moment:



Yup. It's New York City, and apparently Hiro didn't save the world. The big question about BSG has always been, does this show happen in the future, or in the distant past, before recorded history? Since they're all on spaceships, one would tend to believe that they were in the future, but there was always that fascinating potential that they might actually be our ancestors, not our descendents. Well, now that has been answered: you can see a remnant of the Brooklyn Bridge in one of the scenes, and there also appeared to be a giant cross lying on the ground. Earth has been obliterated, and the humans apparently left in spaceships to escape. So now the question is, will Wall-E come rolling out to greet them?

Tune in tonight and find out!

Calling All BSG Fans...

Just a quick note for the Canadian BSG fans out there... tonight on Space, there will be a fan forum at 10pm about the first half of the fourth season. Among the participants will be author Jo Storm, who wrote the companion guide to BSG, Frak You, a book I worked on. Jo is brilliant and very funny, so I'm very much looking forward to watching this. And, as I was disclosing to a reader who emailed me a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that despite what I'd thought, I'd actually missed the final episode of BSG. He's been bugging me since to watch it, and now I have to say I'd actually missed THREE episodes. Two down, one to go tonight, and I am ADORING it.

For those who, like me, need some refreshers on where we're at before the second half of the final season begins next week, tune in to Space all day next Friday for a marathon of season 4, plus the webisodes, an hour of interviews with Moore and Eick, and a repeat of tonight's fan forum. The first of the final 10 episodes premieres next Friday at 10pm. Squeeeee!!

Stuff for a Wednesday

I keep meaning to post on this, but then I forget again... I assume I have a gist of what new music is out there. My husband and brother are complete musos, so of course I can't compete with them (as my brother constantly reminds me) but I do typically know what's out there, especially on my home turf. My husband is a music writer for a large music publication, so our house is constantly bombarded with truckloads of CDs and DVDs. One day I saw sitting in his pile this DVD for a band called Moneen. I'd never heard of them, but after some googling, I discovered they've been around for a couple of years and have a fairly devoted following. I felt out of the loop.

But then I turned over the DVD and began looking at song titles, and imagine my shock when one of them was called, "Don't Tell Locke What He Can't Do." I madly opened the packaging and popped it in... and the song doesn't seem to have anything to do with Lost or Locke beyond the title. Which might actually be even cooler... I just haven't decided yet. The band sounds a bit like the UK's Muse, and when I googled "Moneen and Lost" I found this great discussion where people were trying to find hidden Lost meaning in the lyrics. Go here for more info on the band.


So, are you one of the ones who hasn't bought a single season of The Sopranos, because you'd rather save some money to buy the entire box set? Think again. HBO just announced the box set will come out with a price tag of $400. Unbelievable. Go to Costco and grab some of them up; they're usually about $40 each there. (While you're at it, grab The Wire AND WATCH IT... it's currently $25 a season!) Also, keep an eye on it... it'll be offered for less elsewhere.


I have a confession. I am totally, completely, head over heels in love with So You Think You Can Dance. My pals CC and SD encouraged me to watch it last season, and I actually started to like it, even though I only saw the last 6 episodes. (I wanted the guy to win, but c'est la vie.) I really disliked Mary on the judging panel, and thought she came off as a screechy Marie Osmond... I'd actually fastforward it every time she spoke. But now that I've seen it from the beginning, I have a new respect for her, and I think she's great. And the dancing is fantastic. I showed part of last week's episode to my 4-year-old daughter, and now she wants to take up dancing. I'm going to see if I can get her signed up. I've never had a dancing lesson in my life (seriously, Elaine in Seinfeld looks like Baryshnikov compared to me), so I usually stayed away from shows like this out of a complete lack of interest, but I'm hooked. My husband is very ashamed of me. But he thinks Road Trip is a funny movie.

Now that Battlestar is coming to an end (in 2009... FRAK!) Tricia Helfer has already landed herself a pilot on Fox. Considering the show is by Shaun Cassidy, who did Invasion, I'm intrigued already.

Well, this was going to be longer, but I have to go out and buy my daughter a bathing suit.

Battlestar Galactica: HOLY FRAK!!
My PVR somehow pooped out on me last week, and when I sat down to watch BSG on Sunday morning, it read "Battlestar Galactica -- 0:00." Awesome. Luckily, I know someone who was able to get me the episode (BSG eps are next to impossible to download), and now I can watch the rest of the season.

But nothing prepared me for these two episodes. WHOA. (Please stop reading now if you haven't yet seen episodes 3 and 4.)

Last week's episode, "The Ties That Bind," is one that will haunt me for a long time. Cally has noticed a change in her husband, and she's starting to go bonkers. Their constantly crying baby is, well, constantly crying, and Tyrol is on call 24/7... when he's not having private meetings with Tigh and Tory. She mistakenly interprets Tyrol's emotional distance and physical absence as him having an affair with Tory, and follows him one night, only to overhear a conversation he's having with his fellow two Cylons where they admit that's what they are. She races back to their quarters, where Tyrol soon returns, and she clocks him with a wrench in a very brutal scene, grabs the baby, and heads to an airlock. At this point I was holding my breath. Cally has a hatred of Cylons unmatched in anyone except maybe Tigh, and the thought of sleeping with one, and giving birth to a half-Cylon child is too much for her. Just as she's about to commit her murder/suicide, Tory catches her, and kindly convinces her she'll be okay. She tells Cally to hand over the baby so the two of them can return to the quarters and talk about it, and when Cally falls for it, Tory knocks her back so hard her head hits one of the rails, and Tory leaves with the baby, closes the airlock, and -- horrors -- shoots Cally off the ship. In a pseudo-2001 moment, we see a close-up of Cally's face, frozen and dead. It was horrifying.

The last thing Tyrol remembers is her trying to kill him with a wrench, so on this week's episode, he goes on a rampage about what a horrible person she was, and how he'd settled for Cally anyway, preferring Boomer, whom he wasn't allowed to have. Tory's stepped up the evil, Tyrol is making "mistakes" and isn't sure if he's subconsciously doing it on purpose, and Tigh is visiting with Six and hallucinating that she's his wife.

So here's my question: Do you think something has been triggered in the new four Cylons that is suddenly making them evil? Or did they have it in them all along and now they're giving in to it? Or, have they spent their lives believing that Cylons are evil, and now that they are Cylons, they are simply acting out, subconsciously assuming this is how they're supposed to act? I'm thinking the third... after all, isn't the series about how we perceive a race of beings to be evil, when in fact we're no different? The scene where Six holds out her arms to show Tigh that she has blood and veins just like anyone else was particularly poignant.

Meanwhile, Baltar has his own cult of worshipers, and Roslin is attempting to have their gatherings suppressed. Apollo, smarting after a bit of verbal abruptness on the part of the president (when he praises her in front of the others, she tells him she doesn't need his approval), has decided to side with Zarek and challenge her at every turn. Who is right? Should Roslin be trying to suppress Baltar's cult? After all, she's saying it's just this one-time-deal, but isn't that how these things get started, and the next thing you know, freedom of speech is out the window? I love when the show presents these moral conundrums.

The funniest thing so far this season was in this week's episode, when Six is trying to get Baltar to challenge the guards to prove his point and become a martyr to his cause, and he's begging her out loud to let him stay on the ground. When she picks him up, so his shoulders are raised and his feet are barely touching the ground, all anyone sees is him, not Six actually doing the lifting, the result was hilarious.

Roslin and Adama are growing ever-closer, as he's reading to her while she's taking her chemotherapy treatments. And Starbuck seems to be on the edge, simply raising everyone's suspicions that she's a Cylon. But because Sam is already one, who is he to judge? Therefore, he fraks instead.

I love this show.

Battlestar Galactica 4.01: He That Believeth In Me
I'm late on blogging on BSG, but that's because I just saw this week's episode last night. Just watching the "previously on" segment at the beginning got me excited, and man, did I miss these characters.


Balthar is as much of a loopy horndog as ever, and now that his trial is over and he's been taken in by a cult that worships him, he can go back to being the funny portion of the show. James Callis can pull the best faces, and his eyes were bugging out of his head as he saw his own face pasted to a holy shrine, and realized these people expected him to be Gaius Christ. But when he finally fell to his knees in an actual genuine moment of compassion, it added a poignancy to his story that lifted it above the mere comic. As he asked the grieving man to just slit his throat, it was the first time we saw something in his eyes in this episode other than "Wow, how much booty will I be getting now??" I love him; he was the major thing missing from that Razor episode that didn't do much for me.

Starbuck has returned, but she doesn't think it's from the dead; as far as she knows, she entered a wormhole, arrived in our solar system, and took photos of Earth and a "gaseous planet with rings around it." Then she came back, and it all took place within 6 hours. No one can believe her -- Apollo watched her die, Adama went through his grief and buried her, and now that Tigh and Anders know they're Cylons, they suspect she could be, too. But you can tell they WANT to believe her. Is she telling the truth? Her plane is brand new, and clearly isn't the fighter that Starbuck used even before she went kaboom. In a touching scene, Apollo asks Adama, if it were his brother who'd come back from the dead and stepped off that plane, Cylon or no Cylon, would he have been immediately put in the brig? Adama can't really answer.

Roslin doesn't trust Starbuck at all, and she's the one who has put the strict rules on her. She goes to Number Six because she wants to know the final five, and if she could just tell her, she'd know the answer. But Six isn't about to help out.

Is Starbuck the fifth Cylon? I don't think so. She's not helping her cause (she's holding a gun to Roslin's head and knocked out the men watching her), but an innocent person who had just found the path to Earth and expected a hero's welcome is probably allowed to go a little crazy upon her return a few hours later, when she discovers a colony that has been mourning her for months and now they think she's a traitor.

I can't wait to see what next week brings. What did you think? Who out there is watching BSG?

Battlestar Galactica Returns!
Hey all you BSG fans... this weekend marks the return of BSG to our screens (yay!) though it's not the cast we're used to. Battlestar Galactica: Razor will air on Saturday night on Space in Canada, and at some point on the Sci-Fi Channel in the U.S. It's a 2-hour prequel to the series. The actual show will begin in April (APRIL!)

Ron Moore had an interesting blog where he talked about the impact of the writer's strike, and how he's halted production, which could mean the ending of BSG would be shelved forever, but this strike means too much to him. Go Ron Moore! (Can I just use this moment to not downplay Ron Moore, but to say that I ADORE Ellen Degeneres from the bottom of my heart and that's why I'm so disappointed that she's crossing the picket line to continue her show? Sad... I know she's the producer and she stands to lose a lot from it, but as a comic, and therefore someone who has to write a lot of her own material, her support in the strike would be really crucial. But anyway...) Back to Ron Moore: Kudos to you for having the conviction and the strength to fight for your rights.

And while I've got the attention of BSG fans, I wanted to mention that my good friend Jo Storm has a new book out called Frak You: The Ultimate Unofficial Guide to Battlestar Galactica. It's awesome, and has the complete episode guide to the first three seasons, photos, bios, etc. Definitely check out this book if you love the show.