So I’ve just finished watch the series finale to Battlestar Galactica. Now I am a hardcore Star Trek fan through and through but the story arc and character development might very well make this the absolute best SciFi series of all time. If you are not familiar with the subject matter of the show or if you have not watched it through to the end then you’ll probably not want to read this.
Now I have read some reviews that complain about the “too happy” ending, complaints over the religious overtones, the “lack of resolution” and most of all the preachy nature of how the robots will all rise up and kill us Matrix and/or Terminator style. I just disagree.
I am however quick to point out that nobody should ever laugh off the possibility of creating A.I. that could someday surpass our own intelligence. I love science but science tends to have a problem with thinking before doing. Jurassic Park had a great line about scientists being so concerned with weather or not they could instead of thinking about weather or not they should. That sort of thinking exists and as proof I give you the Tsar Bomba. Granted we have never come close to making something like a Cylon or a Terminator but that does not mean that scientists won’t try. Science may not be flawed by scientists are human and they are flawed. That not withstanding; my viewing of the last episode had me thinking a lot more than “ohh so the message is don’t create Cylons”. I think one of the messages was, yes, to stop and think if we should before we do something that could have repercussions as big as that (no matter what it is be it a Cylon/Terminator thingy or a bomb that can wipe a country and its people off the face of the Earth).
But I also got the message that Human society on its own failed (Kobol, The 12 Colonies) Cylon society failed on its own (The Colony, Original Earth) it was only when the two waring enemies found common ground and joined together that a resolution was found (for them). That brings me to the religious aspect.
One of the revelations at the end was that God did exist in some form. Many people are taking this to mean quite literally that the makers of this show are telling us to go and join a Christian church somewhere because it is all true. Maybe that was the writers intentions (I do not know) but what I took out of it was this. All of the signs pointed out in this series told me that there is something out there responsible for the creation of existence and it does have some kind of plan laid out for our species but never did it specify anything (other than Easter eggs here and there) that said anything about our religions here today. If anything it was left incredibly vague as to what it was that the Cylons and humans called God. There was no other mention of any other kind of “Christian message” that I got other then “something God like exists”. I am not a person tied to any one faith and yeah I do believe that something had to start all of this. The Big Bang started the universe as we know it? Great! What caused the Big Bang? And until people can tell me where existence started the floor is open to all possibilities in my humble opinion. I am not arrogant enough to assume I know the answer to the unanswerable.
The great part of this show is that it ends where our known history begins. So a Human/Cylon hybrid lead to our evolution and existence. The show itself ended on kind of a happy note but the real mind bender here that the story technically continues to include the history of life on this planet. They wanted to instill their best qualities in the early life that lived here on our Earth. The ironic thing is that they failed. You can look through our history and see that things they “originated” eventually came to the surface. A people who believed in many Gods and a people who believed in one true God and things splintered even more from there when people started to have ideas about what the one true God really was. These kind of em-battlements don’t just exist between nations today they exist in our own towns. The overall message I got from this show is that the Humans and the Cylons had the same issues but failed to create a decent society on their own the only way they found true peace was to find common ground in spite of their differences.
To me that is the biggest moral of this incredible story. Human civilization has destroyed almost everything its touched in the pursuit of bettering ourselves and that includes our own race (Human Beings) the only way to start to find a way to avoid annihilation is to find a common ground with those who we hate…..to try and find commonalities and look past our imperfections and our differences…..to find a way to unite…..if not we are doomed to repeat the cycle started back on Kobol. To me that is the story of BSG that is what I took from it.
One thing is for sure I am never going to forget this show. Forget the story for a minute. The fact that this is a SciFi/SyFy channel show is astounding as that channel produces a lot of crap but the effects, the characters, and the acting are beyond reproach.
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