The End Of An Era

 

Tonight, the greatest show on Television (as far as I'm concerned) comes to an end.  After four amazing seasons, Battlestar Galactica will be airing its series finale this evening.  The build up to the end has been wild.  All season long there has been wild speculation amongst fans as to how things will wind up.  And then there's been the never ending set of questions we've been forced to deal with.  What exactly is Kara Thrace?  What's up with that opera house thing?  Will Baltar ever stop being a douche?  Will the human race ever find a happy home?  What the hell is going on with Anders?  Why won't Rosalin die already?

 

Ok, so that last one is only something that's been bugging me.  But still, there's a lot of unanswered questions that the writers of BSG still need to resolve and there's only tonight's two hour series finale episode to answer it all in.  That's a lot of resolution that needs to get fit into one double sized episode.  Will we get all of our answers?  Will we get to see a happy ending, or will the series end as it has spent the last four years and make us all thoroughly depressed as we watch everyone die?

 

I wouldn't put it past the writers of BSG to have everyone go out in a wild blaze of glory.  It would be sad, but it would also be a fitting end to a show that has been about constant struggle and fighting to survive and running for humanity's collective lives.  I don't think that's where they're going though, but I'm just saying I wouldn't be suprised.

 

Personally, I'm both really excited and really sad by the prospects of tonights finale.  I'm excited because hopefully "All will be revealed" as we've been promised for the longest time.  We'll finally get to see how things end for the last surviving bits of humanity, and that closure will be good to see.  I'm really sad though because this marks the end of an era of amazing television.  BSG pushed every conventional boundary of what a televised sci-fi series could do.  They reinvented serialized sci-fi storytelling and created a show that was both pure science fiction and fantasy sci/fi.

 

The show was a reflection of the culture in which it was made.  Many analogies can be made to the post September 11th world in which we live. The occupation of Caprica as an analogy of the Iraq war is the easiest example to point to.  Occupation forces being attacked by a small rebel/terrorist force (depending on your point of view) which employed dirty tactics such as suicide bombers was something we were reading about every day in the newspapers, but we were also seeing played out on TV which made us look at the situation very differently.  The fact that the heroes of the show (the human resistence) were the rebel/terrorist force and that the evil robots were the the occupation forces turned the Iraq war on its head for western viewers.

 

This is what great science fiction does.  It takes a giant mirror and holds it up to society and makes us take a long, hard look at ourselves.  This is what BSG has done again and again so beautifully.  The series has covered many topics over its run including things like politics, religion, human nature, fate and destiny, women's rights and racism.

 

Hell, this week the writers of BSG as well as some of the cast were even invited to speak in front of the United Nations to discuss how they handled some of these topics on their show.  If that isn't a show having a profound effect on the world, I don't know what is.

 

I will admit though, I do miss the days when BSG was all about the viper pilots.  The fighter jockeys, much like a sort of Top Gun in space, were the heart of the series during its first two seasons and those shows are still my favorites.  I recognize the show needed to grow beyond that or it would have gotten stale, and I am glad that it did grow beyond showing dogfight after dogfight.  At the same time though, I really do miss seeing Apollo and Starbuck whooping some Cylon ass every other episode.

 

What makes me the most sad though is that there's nothing, and I mean nothing, currently on TV that I can watch which will fill the hole that the departure of BSG will leave.  There's nothing else like Battlestar out there.  Sure, there's tons of other sci-fi shows, and while many of them are good, none of them come close to the excitement or complexity that episodes of BSG delivered week after week.

 

So long Battlestar Galactica.  You will be missed.  But you will never be forgotten.  You gave us so many things over the last few years, including the word Frak, which I will probably use in my regular vernacular from now until the day I die.  We can only hope that the spinoff show Caprica will be anywhere near as good, although I doubt it ever will be.

 

Personally, I want to see a spinoff show about the first Cylon war.  But that's just me.