Battlestar Galactica

Watched the series finale of Battlestar Galactica Friday night and it was mostly wonderful. I say mostly because there were some flaws but not serious ones. With one exception.

Why didn't Gaius Baltar, that sleazy, traitorous, slimeball get what was coming to him? Why wasn't he shattered like the rotten-to-the-core creep that he was? On the other hand, I've come to think that maybe Baltar is the personification of evil -- oily, destructive, and without a good intention in his being. And there he is at the end, ready to destroy all that humans have built, again. ANd just like evil, he's there and never leaves. Stilll, I'd like to have seen him get his.

Jennifer Godwin of E! Online says of Baltar and Caprica Six: "There was a sense that they worked in service of something else—you could say a higher power or you could say another power—that was guiding and helping, sometimes obstructing, sometimes tempting the mortal people in the show. The idea at the very end was whatever they are in service of continues and is eternal and is always around. And they too are still around, and they too are still here with us, with all of us who are the children of Hera, and in one way, shape or form they continue to walk among us and watch, and at some point they may or may not intercede at a key moment."

I have to agree that there was this sense that they are the good and evil that Baltar spoke of as coming from within us. I have always felt that evil, not necessarily good, is a human creation. The Devil is the self we fear, the self that does the unthinkable, the self we want to expunge but can never seem to get rid of entirely.

Maybe that's why they allowed the slimy Baltar to go on -- he's not him, he's just the personification of a concept. A concept that lives in each one of us and that we'd rather not think about.

But, on the whole, I enjoyed it. It was a triumphal, joyous ending -- upbeat in many ways, sad in others, philosophically complicated and simple at the same time -- as was the show during all of its run.

I liked the musical touch near the end of the echo of the theme from the original BSG as the fleet finds earth and settles in.

I didn't like the phoney hooey about Hera being the mitochondrial Eve (and didn't they find other mitochondrial ancestors -- there wasn't just one Eve. How could there be? Or, maybe that explains the monumental stupidity endemic in the human race.)

BSG ranks up there with Babylon 5 as one of the very best science fiction television shows ever. The writing, the story arc, the characters -- both BSG and B5 have all of that and all done well.