REVISITING A TERRIBLE ENDING

Now that several weeks have passed since the disastrous Ron Moore-scripted ending to Battlestar Galactica, it has had time to sink in and I've realized it was even worse than I initially thought. Any fan who has taken the time since the show ended to go back and watch the mini or episodes from Seasons 1 and 2 knows just how far afield Moore took the show in Season 4 and especially 4.5 and then simply led it over a cliff in the finale. It is a quintessential example of creative hubris dooming a show. Instead of having so little sleep due to his commitments to several other projects he should have spent the time watching every episode of his Battlestar Galactica creation prior to plotting out the finale eps and writing his finale. What he came up with was nothing short of an abortion.

What made the show interesting and set it apart was Sci-Fi Channel executive Michael Jackson's suggestion that Moore play up the religious conflict and thus we had a human-made robot race that was monotheistic and a human race that was polytheistic. For once a mainstream Western science fiction show didn't have a conventional point-of-view from its characters. The names and traditions and legends of the polytheists had a direct line to our Earth of the Classical Age and a bit earlier in the Bronze Age. The whole point of the show was a people, crushed by war, were on an exodus of survival to a mythic place known as Earth.

And what happened in Moore's finale? God did it. Angels walk among us. Give up your technology (and soap and antibiotics) and live among the dirty early hominids and breed with them.

The Opera House vision - a key thematic throughline of visual interest and surreal religiosity was reduced to the ridiculous - a these-pieces-belong-on-these-squares moment. Hera? Suddenly she's Mitochondreal Eve - a minor character elevated to the fulcrum of the finale - bah! And Kara, our reborn rabble-rouser who hears the "unstruck music?" - oh, she's and angel that goes *poof*

One has to wonder, in hindsight, if Moore and the gang got lucky early on in creating such a compelling and at times profound show only to desecrate it with their terrible ending, or if they simply didn't care - position in the industry and other jobs beckoned. The characters and we the fans deserved much better.