BSG: The Finale, having thought about it.

[beccatoria]

In my original post about the finale, I said I didn't know if I liked it or not. Well now I know. I don't like it. I was...unwilling, at the time, to make such sweeping statements when there were a lot of pretty images I liked, and an end idea I felt ought to mollify me more than it did.

It's been obvious for most of this week to anyone reading this journal that I didn't like it and am taking, um, extreme measures, to not let the distaste the finale left me with permanently affect my enjoyment of a show that was, more often than not, entirely excellent.

But I do feel, now, that I can talk a little more coherently about my issues with the thing.

Or rather, I can quote someone else's far more eloquent summation of the underlying issues with this sucker, and then comment on that.


This is Jacob from TWoP. Believe me; I'm as shocked to find myself agreeing with him again as you are. I really thought we'd gotten divorced too.

So what's the problem? Few things, but big ones. Two things particularly, which line up with the odd conclusion in a particularly gruesome way. They both have to do with imagination, unfettered imagination, creation. The things you've created, and your responsibility toward them.

The show has been sketched out a year at a time, brilliantly; it is a living breathing thing, which lends it all the power it has. The problem, for me, is when that stops being true. When the plot isn't left alone to figure itself out, because an endpoint has been decided, and nobody feels like doing the work at the end of the season to tie all the threads together.

Fanboys, sometimes they hate the fact that stories work this way. They want it all stitched up ahead of time, with a plan on the books. I don't really understand why, but I know that there's not a show on television, or a novel ever written, that works that way. Things change, stories evolve and grow up, or the people creating them change, or lose interest. But fanboys, sometimes they are loud. So the showrunner has to say, "I know what the last thing is." The last image, or the last word of dialogue, or who's left standing. Maybe it's true, maybe it's a bluff.

It would be better if it were a bluff. Because you can't have it both ways. You can't say that the story tells itself, pat your back egregiously for the "artistic" details you've chucked in for no clear artistic reason, while also reassuring the fans -- whose opinions don't really matter anyway, because all you owe them is a story, including me, which is why I feel comfortable writing about this -- that there's an endpoint, a reason for it all, a final mystery. That all will be revealed.

Trust the story, and it will be. I think what I reacted so violently to, this finale and the last one, was the exceedingly inorganic, forced nature of the revelations, at the last second. Not organically developing out of the story told over the preceding nineteen episodes, and the threads of deeper meaning and juxtaposition that they afford, but a determined weeding out of tools and images that didn't fit the finale, when it was time to write the finale. That's distinctly irreverent, toward the material, toward the story itself, and to your writers. I think what happened here was less a issue of forethought and planning, and more a loss of nutsack at a crucial moment. A dedication to reaching ideas long plotted out, working against the grain of the story itself, to arrive at treasured endpoints that no longer signify.

Not that the finale wasn't intuitively written. Which is the second issue, because while it's a fine story, it turns against the preceding flow of the narrative in some pretty stark ways that, assembled, seem pretty revealing.

Let's start with Tory, not because I love her so much or anything, because what is there to love beyond the gifted Rekha Sharma? Not a lot. She was the mystery ingredient in the Final Four, the "most exciting" open-ended character, who in the end got the least interesting, most cardboard-villainous story of all. Thinking back to the balance of the Final Five, above, let's think about her for a second. Tory Foster is not Slytherin, she's Ravenclaw -- Ellen's Slytherin -- Tory is Air, Mind, the Invisible Girl, Thinking, taunted and haunted by dark emotions she can't see directly or ever explain, shooting out dark roots into Intuition and Sensation in order to stabilize herself against these shadow emotions and fears. (Compare Buffy's Willow Rosenberg, for an easy example.) The Final Five have lost their Thinker; it's no surprise that soon after, they give up even the touchstone of transcendence, shooting Sam into the sun as an artifact of technology, and become the Final Three.

What's troubling is that these Final Three, eventually, will agree that this is okay, even appropriate. Laudable, even. The show claps Galen on the back for severing the group's ties with the infinite, breaking a peace accord through murder, and eventually damning all but three Cylon models to death. Which, whatever, that's fine.

Only at the same time, Lee is warning us about our science outstripping our souls. Just after sending Simon the doctor and Cavil the atheist genius into a black hole, and a little while before the Smartest Man in the Twelve Colonies decides to become a farmer. Because courage, not intelligence, is what earns you love, and the right to exist. And right about this time the Fleet is giving up all intellectual progress they've ever made, and lying down in the grass and praising themselves for it, because technology and intellect and progress and mental strength are not "the best part of ourselves," any more than Tory Foster deserved to live. Human progress is typified in the glorious decadence of Caprica City, where if they're not fucking they're puking on themselves: "Commercialism, decadence, technology run amok" are inscribed as natural human endpoints, and the Hybrid and Lee agree, at different points, that cities and civilization are the root cause of all evil. And even though I personally found the characters' resolutions -- yes, including Kara's, and the angels' -- completely satisfying, that can go on the list too. The story steps up to the brink spiritually on at least three fronts, and then tosses up its hands, saying those lynchpins of the series no longer signify. Not for the lack of answers, but for suggesting that the questions themselves aren't worth asking.

I submit to you that coincidental or not -- and that's a pretty long list, to be a coincidence -- this is not only offensive and misguided, but vile. You have to look in the darkest, sweatiest ugliest places to find God, and the story here tells us that you're better off just pretending those places don't exist. Wrap your hands around the shadow's throat, or your enemy's throat, or around the blow-up dolls that Cylons are after all, and submerge the holiest part of yourself in forced amnesia and bitter denial, tell yourself that development forward leads inexorably to bisexual strip clubs and casual intercourse outside the bonds of marriage, and killer robots? All the cool kids are going agrarian? That's an old man's game, afraid and lost and tired, and the show is worthy of better than that.

Human development on the individual level is self-organizing: toward strength, wholeness and transformation. That's what a soul is: the natural desire to cross the line from here to there, to move and to progress. If not for a higher purpose, then at the least from of curiosity. Everything that rises, every single thing, must converge. I haven't seen a story this... hateful, this reductive and frightened and shrinking, in a really long time.

Why on Earth should anyone, anywhere, ever retrograde? If you don't like the thesis, generate the antithesis and pull it together with your hands: don't wipe the board. I don't think I've been more grossed out by any statement of this show's characters than the order not to "underestimate the desire for a clean slate." Anyone who honestly wants a clean slate wants to die. The question is, "When Will the Work Be Done?" And the only answer is: Never. You don't get to lay down your burdens, the rough spots are all you ever had. That's called life, and it's just as sweet and just as brutal as the angels, and the Gods. You can't tear pages out of your history. That's as weak as declaring bankruptcy, and morally reprehensible. It is profane.

You can't total out a human soul, can't ask for a factory recall, can't stalk your inner Tory and choke her to death, because she's not going anywhere. That just gives her more power over you, and you become uglier for it. You learn from her, you integrate, and you grow. Anything else is a warp in the design that you cause, out of your own cowardice, and laziness.

The future is always better than the past. Even Voltaire knew that, and he invented this trite shtick. If you can't believe that -- if you fear the future you're creating, for yourself -- you're done. Because there's no point: end it today, or stop bitching and apply yourself to making it better, because essentially the implication is that nobody knows how to save the world, but you, and nobody but yours will ever figure it out. That is dead. That is death.

I can't get around it, and I can't get past it. This is all me talking, I don't know anything about the people that brought this story to life, not really. And it's just an hour, or half an hour, out of something I will always love. It's not a dealbreaker. I'm already signed to do Caprica and The Plan for TWoP, because I do believe in this story. I love it. I love for its ambition, and its strength, and its excellence, and its hope. I love the people who have worked so hard to create something so beautiful, that has informed so much of my life for so many years. This is not a write-off. This is a personal problem with particular and personal conclusions that pushed personal buttons.

If any of the retrogressive themes in this episode were present, or even foreshadowed, in any other episode of the series, it would be lessened as a whole. But as the finale to a story, it's cool shit that doesn't mean much, other than telling us a lot about the mindset and the environment -- a given time, a given location -- in which it was produced. But no matter how hopeless it seems at this point in the story, the fact remains: We start every week in prayer: for more light, more wisdom, more strength. That will never change. Keep rising.


So, the things I don't agree with (other than Tory herself being an unsympathetic character; I find her vastly more sympathetic, loving and human than, say, the Chief these days, and the fact that he didn't like Crossroads, or the fact he doesn't think Caprica looks horrible) are confined to the final paragraphs.

When the dodgy half hour or hour is the last one; when it's the literal (awful) moral of the story, that does affect the whole in ways that no other hour would.

It doesn't have to. But preventing it from doing so requires choice and effort on my part, and the sorrow of divorcing myself from part of the canon that is responsible for a large part of my community here. It requires leaving a shared, common story behind, and in many ways, that loss is as sad to me as the fact that in the end, BSG did not tell me the story I thought it was going to.

The other point is foreshadowing. Because it was there. It has been there. My perception of Jacob's increasing willingness to make excuses for the fact that it was there, in varying degrees, throughout most of 4.5, along with my perception of an increasingly bitter attitude toward those who disagreed, was why we got divorced in the first place.

And really, we still are, but maybe now we're at the point where I can at least be friendly and proud when he done good.

So, where was the foreshadowing?

Of the religion, that's hard to say. Perhaps in Baltar's cult. Perhaps every time angels were mentioned. But I'll give it to Jacob that at the time there wasn't any way to tell that wasn't down the various literal/metaphorical/atheistic points of view that have always existed in the show.

Of the luddite message? Again, I can see why one would think that came out of leftfield with the wonderful Galactica as a hybrid subplot. But it's there too, in Nicky and in Liam. In the way biological procreation and the need to reproduce somehow is hammered home again, and again, and again all the way up to the freaking finale and at best is left completely hanging and unanswered and at worst is denied them because the only purpose of their entire race was to, once again but biologically this time, serve humanity by providing a single string of genetic code.

But the place I think it's most clear is the place that doesn't map exactly to Jacob's essay. Still, it's about putting things back in boxes. About forgetting what came before and the dark parts and the difficult parts - which are the parts of the story that make the characters grow, that give them grace, that gives the whole damn thing meaning - so that things aren't challenging. It's about putting people into places - into moments the writers want or perceive we want - and then suggesting that asking how they got there isn't something worth an answer.

I'm talking about the women.

This is...not easy for me. I know a lot of people started getting pissed about this in 4.0. I didn't. I'm still not. Not because I think it's unlikely you have a point but because...

The way I operate is this, and I admit, it's not always the best way to operate and probably lets more things slide that it should. I admit that I operate this way more about things that oppress me directly (like sexism) than things that don't (like racism) where I'm more likely to err on the side of caution because I'm not in a position to know. But I also don't think that just because I'm a woman I can't possibly spout forth sexist statements.

But, the way I operate is this -

If I make every excuse I can think of, and it still looks dodgy, then I feel I have a safe conviction.

So seasons one through three might have taken Elosha and Gina and Cain and Kat, but they also took Crashdown and Socinus and Jammer and Billy and Fisk and Garner.

Season 4.0 might have killed a lot of women, but it's not just about death and numbers and I always - I still get when thinking about it without the context of later crap - the feeling that 4.0 is just so overwhelmingly about women, while the men (Lee, Adama, even Baltar) are left behind. Chasing Laura as she slides from the quorum, or getting drunk alone because "nobody's going anywhere," or stuck, just as isolated, in a Dogsville cult of crazies while the real agents of change - Laura and Kara and Athena and Natalie - remake the world.

A lot of women died in 4.0. I kind of felt that reflected the fact there were more minor 3rd tier female characters left, and the fact that women were just doing everything.

We get to 4.5 and I'm even willing to forgive Dee and D'Anna. Because in isolation - as a story point, Dee works brilliantly. So the same way I totally see the criticisms of Cain and Gina; I can put on my earlier attitude - the one where this show was so good at women so much of the time, I didn't mind when it did things that might be construed as sexist in service to a really interesting storyline. I can do that for Dee. Even though I think there's a good chance I'm wrong.

I can remember that D'Anna left because of the actress' commitments.

And because D'Anna and Dee are balanced out by Gaeta and Zarek to an extent.

But.

Here's where it falls down and I just want to start crying.

From A Disquiet that Follows my Soul onwards. It's not just about the deaths, though it's about them too.

I know it was never Ron's intention, but fuck that. Because, "It wasn't my intention to be sexist/racist/colonialist/a mean jerk, so you're horrible for saying I was," is the worst excuse ever because it isn't one. It's okay to be upset if someone says that to you and you genuinely didn't mean it that way. It's not okay to refuse to believe it could possibly be true.

Others have already said this better than me, but Laura. Laura in 4.5 hurts my soul. For all those reasons I'm sure you're already aware of whether you agree or not. The way she quits on responsibility for TWU WUV. The way we slowly get all of her motivations and decisions retconned away. She never had a home until Bill. A shoehorned eleventh hour family tragedy, which would only be eyerolly because of its melodrama if not for the fact that it was used to further reimagine the cold, practical, political Laura as "not the real one" and, more offensively, as separate to the compassionate, loving Laura.

We knew she never wanted to get into politics. But the fact that she did and stayed there; the fact that as the show went on she came to fear losing that power because of who might take over: in Pegasus she says, "And yet..." when talking about Adar - if he came back, to take over. These were interesting things.

The scene with the younger guy was smoking hot, but I still don't quite understand the point. Another example of how she only ever chose this path because of tragedy? Because she was broken and Bill fixed her?

I do not believe in a Laura Roslin who is capable of being more fulfilled, even on her damn death bed, by relinquishing her duties to her people. And I resent the way it was framed as an either-or question. Because the show did frame it that way. It was fully able to have continued having her as an active political force while also maintaining a relationship with Adama. And if it wanted to show her giving up on that power then a) we should have seen some of that shit from her own damn perspective and b) much like colonialist shit actually inspired by Cortes without irony, consider the fucking crap you're evoking by going down this route.

What it comes down to is, Laura Roslin spends season 4.5 stepping back from every single reason she had to exist for three and a half season and after the scene where she throws her pills into the wastebasket, we basically stop seeing this from her perspective. She is one of the main theological pillars of the entire frakking show and she spend eleven episodes doing literally nothing but dying. And once yelling about her boyfriend. Apparently her huge role in the endgame was to grab Hera for two seconds and then watch some Gazelles.

I do not care if she is dying, or that is realistic, or what. It is a giant narrative fuck up that could have been rectified really, really easily. They managed to have her dying yet full of agency and terrifyingness in season two, why not now?

And it's Caprica Six.

What the hell was the point of her storyline?

I loved Caprica and Tigh in 4.0. They were so strange and broken. Her beating the shit out of him in an arguably very sexist attempt to Save A Man while doing it in such a violent, unfeminine way was amazing. So was the completely surreal yet oddly perfect match between the two of them.

But in 4.5...where the hell did it go? What was the point? Was it always to introduce Liam as some bizarre tease about Cylon reproduction, then kill him as if that answered anything? Was it always to get Tigh and Ellen back together? Did no one realise how insanely unsympathetic that made them as a couple? There was such heartbreaking stuff in Deadlock but looking back on it, what the hell? Because when Caprica gets wheeled out after Liam dies, that is literally, I think, the last time we ever see those two in the same frame of film.

Tigh gets episodes of grieving. Tigh gets hugs from Bill, from Ellen. Tigh gets a mini subplot where he starts to realise that all of the Cylon are his children.

Caprica? Gets completely fucking forgotten until an episode and a half later where we get one scene with Baltar. It was admittedly a completely heartbreaking scene, but it doesn't change the fact that a) it was completely from Baltar's perspective and b) Baltar doesn't know what her situation is, and, guess what, neither do we. And we never find out.

We don't know what the hell her opinion is on that entire thing, and Ellen and Tigh - a couple I used to really like - now seem like callous jackasses disinterested in helping someone they both profess to love - either as an actual lover or a child - through what is probably the saddest thing that's ever happened to her.

At best, this material was cut, but even so, apparently this material was cuttable, while the six billionth shot of Adama mourning over his women, was not. Neither was this material interesting enough to warrant mention in interviews or podcasts as RDM has frequently mentioned with other cut plotlines.

The way I wasn't against Laura having a crisis of faith and stepping away from government, or even having a relationship with Adama (well okay, I was against that, but I was prepared to accept it), I'm not against giving Caprica a storyline that's all about a baby. But I am, VEHEMENTLY, against turning her into a completely nonexistant character, and making that storyline all about Tigh. Which is basically what happened. The same way Laura's storyline became all about Bill.

And ultimately, while the Baltar/Caprica stuff was hands down the best stuff in the finale, and pretty much the only stuff I thought was poignant and nuanced in the way I expect from this show, we can talk about that too. Because she essentially gets shunted from one man to the next. I'm not sure exactly how much I can criticise this since an actual integral part of Caprica's arc was the search for love and family (which is why I didn't conceptually mind the baby storyline either), and it's actively what I wanted for her. And at least Baltar chased her a bit. But really. It's...still there.

So let's get to the finale. Where all this shit explodes.

I know Laura was going to die. I know she was always going to die.

But so does Kara.

So does Boomer.

So does Tory.

So does Racetrack.

What guys die?

Skulls?

A Cavil?

Others have already posted these lists. But the fact remains, the women left standing amount to Caprica, Athena and Ellen. I don't care that they're Cylons, that's fine. I don't even care that they've died along the way because while one could point out something about violence and women there (and I'm not sure I'd agree because in some ways the way women are extraordinarily violent in addition to having violence directed at them is something I often enjoyed about the show), but killing them and instantly resurrecting them is different to killing them flat out. It's a different narrative decision because really, they're not deciding to write them out. Arguably you could get Ellen though, since she was originally supposed to stay dead.

I think the far more interesting point is that all three of those women are massively defined by their significant others and familial relationships. I'm not against that when there's variety.

Still, who else? Seelix, maybe? Ishay, maybe? We didn't see either of them.

Of the guys, Adama, Lee, Baltar, Tigh, Tyrol, Helo, Cottle, Hoshi, Hot Dog, Romo Lampkin.

The few surviving girls go off with their menfolk to be domestic.

The guys, basically all of whom survive, are much more varied. Sure, Baltar, Tigh and Helo are also defined by their familial ties, but Romo is in a leadership position, Lee, likewise is seen forging ahead to make a new life independently. Even Adama is off somewhere building a freaking cabin for his corpse bride. Tyrol gets an ending that is at least on his terms even if one couldn't exactly call it "happy" and he certainly doesn't seem to be getting much condmenation.

I think what bugs me most - as you know - is Tory. But also Boomer. Less because her death itself was gross, more because Tory and Boomer die on the altar of personal vengeance, while Tyrol and Baltar get the endings the characters "want".

Not that I want Tyrol or Baltar to die (though I would have liked them not to destroy the Chief's character). I just...I didn't want any of them to die. Well okay, maybe Boomer. But more in an "I REGRET NOTHING, BITCHES!" kind of way and I concede that's highly personal.

However you slice it, you get five boys in the grass deciding the future of the human race while the women who assured it die and disappear in fields while no one notices.

And the thing that always mollified me - the women die, but they're so damn significant - even that's taken away.

Because what do they do in the finale? They carry Hera around for a bit so that Gaius frakking Baltar can make some nonsensical speech. So that Tigh can create a truce that Tyrol destroys.

I'll close out on Jacob again, because he manages to capture perfectly why the Opera House, while gorgeous, was a massive frakking let down, and, for the first time I can remember in a long time, agrees it was not just a letdown, but sexist too.


(Except, hold up. I can handle the fighting and whatever, because Lee's hair looks fantastic and Caprica with a gun pushes buttons I didn't know I had, but let's review. The visions that have been appearing regularly for over half the series, that have provided meaning and context for half the characters on the show, that have provided what little female-female bonding and connection the show affords us, the visions that got Natalie killed... Amount to what, exactly? A dress rehearsal of a déjà vu, in which two women walk down a hallway and a third woman picks up a child and walks, conservatively, six yards, with zero danger anywhere nearby. This is the prosaic destiny that enfolds Caprica, Athena, Laura and Hera? And Gaius? To go down a hallway. Chip's Challenge indeed, motherfucker. It takes five people, Cylon projection, two Angels, two to four Moms, and a hallucinogenic folk remedy to bring this miraculous vision to bear? That is some weak sauce. It's basic storytelling to fulfill something this large and trumped-up with something worthwhile. If that's the shit God really needs you to know, then God is pretty much retarded.

"I'm sending you a vision. Disobey it at your peril. One day years from now, you are going to go downstairs, open the mailbox, and take out an Entertainment Weekly. On the cover will be Paul Rudd. You will think, based on a caplet review, that you should probably just give in and watch one episode of The Closer, because you love Saving Grace so much, and Trust Me is growing on you. But by the time you get back upstairs to the TiVo, you will be thinking about lunch, and will die without ever seeing that show. However, a few weeks before that happens, you will look out your window and see a pretty blonde woman reaching into that mailbox, and you will go nuts and shoot her just for standing near your mailbox. This is the Shape of Mail To Come.")

Redacted.

Comments

[nicole-anell.livejournal.com]

I don't have much to add. Thank you for this post. It's... kind of heartbreaking. But I'm right there with you, with Laura and Caprica-Six. You laid out exactly the problem I have -- the whole "dead women! dead women!" honestly never bothered me the way it bothered so many other people, because for three and a half seasons WOMEN RAN THE PLOT and sometimes they died in the process. What finally breaks me in season 4.5 is how insignificant they become.

Battlestar Redactica
You have NO IDEA how excited I am about this. :D

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yeah, heartbreaking is the word. That's really how it feels.

Also, I'm totally going to steal the phrase "WOMEN RAN THE PLOT" because that's exactly what I meant but a million times more succinct.

And then, we get 4.5 and it breaks us. That's really how I feel. Broken by it and betrayed by it, which is probably a little melodramatic for "just a TV show" but hell, it was the show that played up to its role as a commentator on our times, or whatever. It's the show that does stuff like win a Peabody award and let EJO babble about bugs to the UN. And even if it wasn't... We need stories. We always do.

You have NO IDEA how excited I am about this. :D

I hope I can do the idea justice! Also pray for my editing suite; I'm currently having rendering difficulties (that I think I've solved at least for the moment *keeps fingers crossed*)

It's weird; my main goal with this thing is to make the end not suck, but I gotta be honest, I don't think I'll know until I'm finished how well I'm ever going to get over what they did in 4.5. Probably never as well as I'll want because the sheer fact I feel I need to fix it kind of illustrates how much it irks me, and the fact they messed up that bad isn't going to go away.

[callmeonetrack.livejournal.com]

This is a very thoughtful post and I very much enjoyed it.

This is the heart of it for me too:
However you slice it, you get five boys in the grass deciding the future of the human race while the women who assured it die and disappear in fields while no one notices.

And the thing that always mollified me - the women die, but they're so damn significant - even that's taken away.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'm glad I sound like I'm making sense, even if I'm not glad that it's a problem a lot of people around me are also struggling with.

Clearly Kara just learned that along with the angelic power of Magical Music, she has the power to TELEPORT. She'll be back in that field wondering where the fuck Lee went any minute. Honest.

[raincitygirl.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the part where it's five WHITE boys lying in the grass. Just adding insult to injury, from the lack of women. And adds an extra level of squick at the way these five civilised white men are talking about how they're going to enrich the lives of the primitive brown indigenous people by being kind enough to civilise them, colonise them, and father babies on them.

I mean, we've just got layer upon layer upon layer of squick here. Sure would've been nice if instead of Admiral Hoshi, we'd had Admiral Dualla in there as part of the group.

And yes, I know we didn't get a close-up view at the indigenous inhabitants, but the setting was obviously supposed to be an African savannah and I think it's pretty common knowledge among the audience that early humans didn't look particularly Nordic. They may not have looked all that similar to the modern people living in Tanzania today, either, but they would've definitely been some variety of brown.

[pellucid.livejournal.com]

*clings*

The frustrating thing with Jacob is that sometimes I really do think he's dead on (and I will always sort of adore him for the way he loves Aeryn Sun), and other times he's just full of bullshit. Reined in a bit, he'd be fantastic (and I think he was a lot better before he'd acquired such a reputation--his Farscape recaps, for instance, are so much better than the BSG ones, I think, because it seemed like there was less...Jacobness going on). But anyway, the stuff you quote, yes, is mostly dead on and not so much with the bullshit. I disagree exactly where you disagree, but I do think he makes some excellent points. And perhaps none better than this one:

They both have to do with imagination, unfettered imagination, creation. The things you've created, and your responsibility toward them.

I can't decide if that particular observation makes me want to laugh or cry with the irony. Perhaps the finale is the narrative equivalent of the creation rising up and nuking the hell out of its creators? Or more likely, the creators nuking the hell out of its creation so it won't rise up, fly out of their control. Creators can be unhealthily proprietary, and I fear so much of what happened in 4.5 was RDM's unwillingness to deal with what the story had become--that it was somehow better, in his mind, to assert his control, to force his ideas onto this narrative, than to let it take its own course.

And word to everything with the women. *cries*

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

And I'll always sort of adore him for the way he used to love Laura and the paragraph he wrote about the ways they could cure her cancer and he just would not care (including, my favourite, her getting shot, but only in the cancer). But I agree. His recaps suffered as he became more well-known for them. Though I still think his early BSG stuff is pretty fantastic.

I can't decide if that particular observation makes me want to laugh or cry with the irony. Perhaps the finale is the narrative equivalent of the creation rising up and nuking the hell out of its creators? Or more likely, the creators nuking the hell out of its creation so it won't rise up, fly out of their control. Creators can be unhealthily proprietary, and I fear so much of what happened in 4.5 was RDM's unwillingness to deal with what the story had become--that it was somehow better, in his mind, to assert his control, to force his ideas onto this narrative, than to let it take its own course.

Wow. Yes.

I hadn't thought about it in those terms. Which is stupid, because what the hell have I spent all day doing but trying to wrestle this narrative back from the guy using the means provided by our incredibly tech-savvy society? And the whole time I've been working on this project, as much as I've been relieved to feel I could do something - however insignificant in the scheme of things - to help myself deal, there's also been this incredible sense of sorrow that I'll never see the "real" end. The end that fits with what went before, and that probably flies into terrifying and surreal territory.

Not that I know what it'd be.

This ending, though... It seems so small. So small not even an idea like turning us all into Cybrids is executed either epically or with integrity.

What that line made me think of - although I cannot stress how much I love your take on it - was Adama in the mini series. His seminal speech where RDM basically broke the fourth wall to address the audience and tell them the core theme of the mini and subsequently the series:

That you can't wash your hands of the things that you've created. That there is no clean slate. That you take responsibility and you learn. And if you throw your history into the sun, it will damn well serve you right when the first thing those Centurions do is go pick up D'Anna from nuked earth, return, kill the shit out of all of you, and the Opera House is really Caprica and Baltar running off with Hera as the only Colonial survivors at all and joining a pack of wandering neanderthals.

And word to everything with the women. *cries*

*drinks*

*stabs things*

[indigo419.livejournal.com]

I really love this. You've captured the complexities of disappointment in the finale - how yes, there is stuff to love, but also much that is heartbreaking in the context of how much more it could have been.

Did you know RDM is (or was) taking questions (http://forums.scifi.com/index.php?showtopic=2329378&st=580) over on Skiffy? I really hope that he knows the fans over there do not speak for all of fandom. I wish he would come over and read posts like this. I know the show's over, and the way I feel right now I'm not planning to watch more RDM productions, but otoh he does seem to be among the more receptive and (at least) communicative showrunners out there, so I am tempted to at least nudge him to think about what this show says about women, about privilege, and colonialism.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it. The way it had the seeds of awesome and failed basically every one of them is...yeah. Heartbreaking.

I did know that RDM was answering questions over there. I remember reading some of them and basically thinking it was exactly like his interviews. We can all think anything we like, which is nice, but not very helpful when his text is nowhere near as ambiguous as he seems to believe.

I think I'll take future RDM productions on a case by case basis. I think I recall being all right with how DS9 ended. But yes, I have to admit, seeing the last five episodes and discovering I was watching a completely different show to the one he was writing has been something of a harrowing experience.

[daybreak777.livejournal.com]

I agree with you about the final hour. While I'll always love this series, because that last hour is the final word, no more hope for anymore on this story, it is the conclusion to the show. I think if this was a season finale, sure I'd just ignore it and hope for better next year. But this is it. I'm glad that you and Jacob also can't get around it. For those who have problems with it I realize there is no getting around it. So I stopped trying.

At best, this material was cut, but even so, apparently this material was cuttable, while the six billionth shot of Adama mourning over his women, was not.
This is so interesting. I know there was material cut. People have seen shots of Head!Six that we never saw. Laura discussing guns and Dogville. There was a costume on Ebay for the midwife that Caprica was going to visit before she got accosted. Why were these bits cut, I wonder? The thing that gets me is, did the show runners even know what they were saying narratively about women when the cut these scenes? It bothers me more to think that maybe they didn't know. Maybe they're completely unaware. Maybe they are the boys in the grass deciding this show's future and they're clueless. That's truly what's hard to get my mind around. Hard to forgive. That I once made a video about BSG's women and every character in that video is now dead or never mentioned again, except Athena.

Re: Redactica. Yay, cupcakes! Oh noes, robots! I'll skip the dancing robots because I have not rewatched them because they scare me. But I want to see Becca's Galactica 4.5! That's a rewatch I can get behind.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly. A disatisfying season finale has the potential for redemption the next year.

I'm...in a weird place with not trying to get around it. Because on the one hand I'm not. I think it was an awful thematic end to a challenging series and I don't understand why or how it happened. So yeah, in terms of the canon, I can't and won't get around it or pretend that I think it was a good way to end the thing. Unfortunately, not having gone through my proper phases of grief yet, I'm also having trouble getting around how pissed I am at everything which is making it a little difficult to work out how I feel about the whole thing.

I knew about some of those cut scenes but not others. A lot of stuff always gets cut, but yeah, I do wonder about some of their decisions. I don't even know if further Caprica/Tigh interaction was cut though - if it was, there's not been any evidence to suggest it as such, which makes me think they didn't even bother to write those scenes which...like you say: do they know what they said with that story arc? And how godawful it was?

And that's awful about your vid. I remember when you made it, and now it stands as a testament to the FAIL of the show in dealing with those characters.

Re: Redactica: don't worry, the robots are the very last thing, so you can just hit stop when you start hearing Hendrix! ;) And I hope I can live up to the promise of the idea!

[sabaceanbabe.livejournal.com]

Even though I did, after all is said and done, like the finale, yes, yes, and YES to what you've said about Laura and Tory and Caprica and Boomer.

I can't wait to see your version and what a brilliant idea that is.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Hey, I'm glad you liked the finale. Truthfully, I wish I did! Although I'm glad I also sound like I'm making sense.

I think the problem with the finale is that it makes not-a-lot of narrative sense and does some terrible things to certain themes and characters.

It also has some transcendentally touching moments and a sense of the epic.

Like any mythic story, it's a constant battle to balance the fact that myths are frequently built on logic sinkholes and plot-over-character, with the fact that myths tug at our hearts and speak to something deep inside and make us not care about those things.

For me...the attempt at creating a mythic epic failed and I fell into those logic sinkholes and thematic blackholes. But had they given me what I wanted with regards to a few more characters/themes/plot points and/or given you less of what you wanted from those things, even if the overall quality remained the same, our positions might well be reversed.

Anyway, whever I actually manage to finish this sucker, I hope it lives up to the local hype. ;)

[frolicndetour.livejournal.com]

When the dodgy half hour or hour is the last one; when it's the literal (awful) moral of the story, that does affect the whole in ways that no other hour would.

Yes, exactly. That's why this is so hard to reconcile. Nothing canonical can fix it so we'll just have to do it ourselves, and since I'm actually NOT okay with how all the character's stories were resolved, nothing can fix that for me either. :/ Except my mighty mighty powers of fanwanking and denial. \O/

One thing I DO agree with Jacob about is the fact that Ron Moore had a fixed idea for the ending and a fixed idea of who these characters were since the miniseries and he was unwilling or unable to deviate from that, and that explains a lot of the suck. I don't blame it on some phantom "fanboys" though; I think Ron is his own ultimate fanboy.

I LOVE him on the Opera House. LOVE. Ack, and I think I might be starting to hate Baltar-Sue. Woe!

If I make every excuse I can think of, and it still looks dodgy, then I feel I have a safe conviction.

*bites tongue hard*

I... please tell me you mean this in terms of stupid sci-fi shows, and not real life? ;)

I'm coming at this from the perspective of "fuck your 4.0, the writing has been on the wall for me since mid-season three." Not so much in terms of the body count but in the way those deaths were written and the way female sexuality has been handled from the get-go. And I don't like feeling this way and I don't think the whole show is misogynist and I still think Kara and Roslin are two of the best female characters ever, but yeah. Just like the anti-technology bias for you, the gender issues have been "foreshadowed" for me for ages. I actually called the ending with a bunch of men making the decisions in a brave new world because all the women were dead at the end of season three, though I hoped I'd be wrong. And it really does break my heart that I wasn't. At least I feel vindicated? :/

I agree that women ran the plot, at least moreso, in 4.0. I also think that's the only season where that is even close to true. And there may have been more expendable female characters, but at the point where we're left with one female character from the mini-series left and almost all of the male characters, I think we have to ask why that's true. Why did the male secondary characters take on so much more significance than the female secondary characters? Especially when I don't think any of the Sixes or Eights haved deserved to be called main characters compared to Tigh, Chief, Helo (Helo!), etc lately, even if Tricia and Grace are in the main credits. That's why I can't take that much comfort in Athena, Caprica, or Ellen's survival; they exist primarily in terms of their relationships with men, and I feel like they survived so those men could get their happy ending.

And yeah, forget not getting to react to her own pregnancy, Caprica not getting to react to her own miscarriage? Only showing up onscreen again when it was time for her to be Baltar's reward for good behavior? I think I would have preferred the baby-snatching theory to come true. 0.0

I'm not sure exactly how much I can criticise this since an actual integral part of Caprica's arc was the search for love and family (which is why I didn't conceptually mind the baby storyline either), and it's actively what I wanted for her.

I think what makes it suck was that we see none of it from her perspective. If we didn't already know about her search for love and family and her previous relationship with Baltar, we'd have no idea what any of it meant to her.

I think the far more interesting point is that all three of those women are massively defined by their significant others and familial relationships.

Or, you know, what you said, exactly.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yes, I do agree with you that RDM is his own fanboy. And I don't blame nameless hoardes of fanboys either, although I do think that fandom at large is probably less tolerant of the "make it up as you go!" approach than I am. I'm just impossibly intolerant of the "make it up as you go and ignore everything cool you accidentally make up!" approach.

As to the real life vs stupid scifi fan shows thing on sexism I... It's hard to call.

Basically I think the key here is what I consider to be a valid "excuse", which gets more stringent the more serious the situation. "But I didn't want you to see it that way; that's not what I was trying to say!" for instance isn't an excuse I have any truck with, stupid sci fi show or not. Basically I guess what I'm trying to say is that I try to look at it from all angles to see if there is a perspective from which it's not dodgy. The word "excuses" was probably ill-chosen?

And I also say this as someone who in forums other than LJ keeps ending up with a reputation as an angry feminist (yup, which is sexist in itself) so my most people's standards I'm probably not forgiving enough. :/

I think we have fundamentally different views of 4.0 which I basically loved because, as you say, it was the half season where the women were most in charge.

As to season three, I'm...torn. I think that the entire middle section of season three (from Hero to Dirty Hands) was pretty dire; even the mid-season arc which everyone else seemed to go bananas for and which had a bunch of cool religious moments like the supernova, really...did little for me. It was small and boring and the most exciting thing that was going on was a ridiculous love quadrangle I wished would just die already.

But Maelstrom through Crossroads? OMG I LOVE IT. (Well, I love Maelstrom when I refuse to consider that Kara's final scene with her mother was anything other than a heartbreaking fantasy in which she tries to shoehorn in an impossible reconciliation into the only six weeks of her mother's life in which it would still fit, rather than some justification for the way that damn woman treated her kid.)

I get that people think the whole All Along the Watchtower thing and the Final Five things were total stupid asspulls (although I'm not sure what your opinion on that is), and yeah, they were totally made up. But the good kind of insane. The kind of OMG I HAVE AN IDEA! that gave us No Exit explanations and the One Year Later at the end of season two and probably even Boomer shooting Adama.

I love the realism but I also have a very special place in my heart for TOTAL CRACK that is taken DEADLY SERIOUSLY and that, to me, is pretty much the summary of Maelstrom through Revelations (and No Exit). Which might be my favourite stretch of the show. Not the best in terms of writing (that'd probably be season one), but my favourite because I'm a sucker for sequels and context.

I think that I would call Athena a main character. At least in seasons 2 - 4 (though she was sorely under-used in 4.5), and I'd call Boomer a main character in season 1. Although I do get why you'd say otherwise, but I think she gets as much play as, say, Baltar.

Tricia Helfer, on the other hand, has been getting royally screwed since the start of season three. Head Six was a main character, but was always necessarily limited in her appearances. And when Caprica came back she got totally sidelined by D'Anna (much as I enjoy D'Anna) and then forgotten in the brig. By season four, Helfer had a collection of C-list characters. Because while I want to believe that Caprica Six is at least B-list, and should, by rights, be A-list, she actually has dialogue in...only half the season four episodes. And of those 10 episodes, there are only 4 where she has more than one scene. And one of those only counts if you include flashbacks.

I just...

I'll admit it, one of the reasons I started loving her so much was her distance and intrigue. But for real, the treatment of her character is extremely telling and disappointing.

*cries*

Part 1

[asta77.livejournal.com]

Something I’ve been thinking about (as apparently has Jacob) is that Ron was trying to have it both ways. I truly believe he had an ending in mind for a long time. But, along the way, the story evolved as new ideas came to Ron and the other writers. It’s something that happens to all series with any sort of longevity. While the Final Five was an idea that came late in the game, I found it an interesting one to explore. What happens to people when they are no longer who they thought they were. What happens when your friend turns out to be your enemy, thought not really since thousands of years ago your races coexisted?

But as the story changed, Ron’s plans for the end didn’t. I do feel he wrote the back half of the season to accommodate the conclusion he always envisioned and didn’t stop to consider how that would affect the characters and certain subplots. For me, Caprica’s pregnancy was the biggest WTF? Having another Cylon become pregnant was HUGE, yet it ultimately became pointless when she miscarried. And, as you pointed out, we never had the opportunity to see her deal with her loss or the loss of Tigh. I never believed the two really loved each other. It became a relationship of companionship and convenience after they learned of the pregnancy, which is fine, but then why try to push that Tigh did love her? Then have her lose the baby because he didn’t love her enough and have him go right back to Ellen.

When the dodgy half hour or hour is the last one; when it's the literal (awful) moral of the story, that does affect the whole in ways that no other hour would.

The finale, even if I hated it, wouldn’t have ruined the series for me, but I do agree having a disappointing finale is more disappointing than having a disappointing episode. It’s easier to dismiss ‘Black Market’ or ‘The Woman King’ because they are standalone episodes and ‘filler’. ‘Daybreak’ was to be and is the culmination of four seasons of work and was promised to answer all our questions. Ron had years, not weeks, to plan for this episode. While I didn’t hate it, that it wasn’t what it could have been is a frustrating.

In the way biological procreation and the need to reproduce somehow is hammered home again…..and at worst is denied them because the only purpose of their entire race was to, once again but biologically this time, serve humanity by providing a single string of genetic code.’

I didn’t feel that way, but it could be because I always believed the endgame would involve the human and Cylon races coming together in order to survive. The first time things began to fall apart seems to be when the Thirteenth Tribe and the other tribes parted ways. And since monotheism, in one form or another, has become the dominant religion, that belief can be traced back to the Cylons. I do find it fascinating that the machines got it right and the humans wrong, if judged by popular belief.

We’ve talked at length about the female characters dying and it’s the context of the death that is important. Kat didn’t die because she was female, she died of her own agency, trying to prove something to herself, and saving lives in the process. And, yes, prior to the last run of episodes so many of the stories focused on women (and it could be argued that the stories focusing on the men – Lee, Adama, Baltar, Helo – were often badly handled) so that if they died it was about *them* and not about the men surrounding them.

I can remember that D'Anna left because of the actress' commitments.

Yeah, especially when the inexplicable lack of Leoben in the final episodes has to be for the same reason.

Re: Part 1

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yes, I really do think you're right about the unchanging endgame. I mean obviously the final five are added as a unit into whatever endgame he planned, but...well I actually think that Caprica's WTFPregnancy (I agree with everything you said about it!) plays into this. RDM's always said that from very early on he had a very clear idea of the role Hera would play in the show's mythology which, you know, is really great. But I think he really glommed onto the idea that she was unique and special which started undercutting the unity of the races rather than heralding it?

So they throw in all these cool ideas, cus that's how they roll, and I love that. But at the end, instead of letting those ideas run around and turn into something else, they put all the ideas that didn't fit back in the box.

I'm still happy for you that you didn't hate it, but I am glad you can at least understand why it's frustrating. In some ways, it's because it came so close to being satisfying that it's so awful. If the payoff to the Opera House had been a larger role for those women; if we'd gotten answers about Kara; if we'd gotten a definitive answer on Cylon reproduction and where it was going en masse and that whole love ridiculousness and stuff.

As an aside about Tigh and Caprica and love I have an...odd take on it. I think that they did love each other, but not in that epic True Love Starcrossed kind of way. Their relationship was one of convenience in many ways, and what I loved about it was that they were not each others' Great Loves. The reason I think they did love each other in some fashion is because I honestly believe that Tigh and Caprica (at least the Tigh I loved before they wrecked him for me) are the two characters on the show most capable of unconditional love and most likely to lavish it on someone completely undeserving.

So I think they loved each other because their default mode is to love people, all people, any people, ridiculous people, not because it was some great romance for the ages.

I didn’t feel that way, but it could be because I always believed the endgame would involve the human and Cylon races coming together in order to survive. The first time things began to fall apart seems to be when the Thirteenth Tribe and the other tribes parted ways. And since monotheism, in one form or another, has become the dominant religion, that belief can be traced back to the Cylons. I do find it fascinating that the machines got it right and the humans wrong, if judged by popular belief.

Well I also agree that they did come together to survive and that the message was that pure cylon/pure human doesn't work. I think what I'm really reacting against here is the wishy-washy non-answers we get regarding how the Cylon are contributing to society. That once again, the show doesn't follow that suggestion through to its logical conclusion and we're left with vague half-answers.

so that if they died it was about *them* and not about the men surrounding them.

If only it were still true! *cries* *stabs Laura's Corpse-Marriage*

And Part 2

[asta77.livejournal.com]

Others have already said this better than me, but Laura. Laura in 4.5 hurts my soul. For all those reasons I'm sure you're already aware of whether you agree or not. The way she quits on responsibility for TWU WUV. The way we slowly get all of her motivations and decisions retconned away. She never had a home until Bill. A shoehorned eleventh hour family tragedy, which would only be eyerolly because of its melodrama if not for the fact that it was used to further reimagine the cold, practical, political Laura as "not the real one" and, more offensively, as separate to the compassionate, loving Laura.

I know it was never addressed on the show until the finale, but the death of Laura’s family, as referenced in the show’s ‘bible’, was always in the back of my mind and, because of it, it influenced my reading of her choices throughout the series. So, to explicitly state the tragedy was a turning point for her I couldn’t take issue with. I do think it’s a reasonable argument to make that, having what she cared most about in the world, her family, taken from her, would motivate her to find something to fill the void in her life and politics was as good a place as any to channel her energy.

When forced to confront the fact that she was ‘the lady in charge’, she set aside her fear and grief, as before, and went about the monumental task of saving humanity. Actually, there is a nice parallel to be made. She couldn’t save her family, it was outside her power, but, here and now, she could save these people. Saving humanity was a duty and the presidency a position she never could have conceived being in nor wanted. But just as when she learned of her family’s death or her terminal cancer or the attacks on the Colonies, she found the strength to go on.

It could be argued she wasn’t happy. Who among them truly was? Was she fulfilled? As much as I think one could be giving the situation. She definitely had a purpose. And I certainly understand her questioning her purpose after the discovery of earth. I’ll even cut her some slack for running away from her life and the responsibilities that went with it because she had had three plus years of NEVER putting herself first and if everything she believed turned out to be lies then why not indulge in a little selfishness? Where they lost me is that she allowed Lee to fail where she could have (maybe) succeeded. She allowed the fleet to tear itself apart. And I perhaps could have even forgiven all that if she wasn’t turning a blind eye while playing house with Adama, as if he became more important than everything and everyone else. If she had locked herself away on Colonial One, I still might have been OK with it. But once she seemingly moved onto Galactica in became All About Bill.

Then there was the crap about never having a home until those last few months with Bill. The flashbacks made it clear she once had a very happy home with a family she loved. When she escaped New Caprica she would only leave on Colonial One, her home. For better, for worse, her job became her life and, yes, she seemed fulfilled if not always happy. I actually don’t feel the show negated in anyway the person she was before shacking up with Bill, but I do hate that Ron seemed to be saying that in order for Laura Roslin or any woman to be truly happy she also has to have a man in her life. And it’s hard not to have that reading when Lee’s source of joy was being able to go off, by himself, and climb a mountain.

However you slice it, you get five boys in the grass deciding the future of the human race while the women who assured it die and disappear in fields while no one notices.

Laura was too weak, but would it have killed them to include Kara in the scouting party?

Re: And Part 2

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

I think the thing for me is that I never knew that part of Laura's history from the show bible. I actually agree that on its own, it's a fine addition to her history (although I think I would have preferred it as written in the Bible that it happened to her much earlier in her life, but it's not really that great a difference).

I would even have been okay with revealing it very late in the game, although I do feel the actual finale is a little late.

I think my issue with a lot of the flashback revelations is less that there's anything wrong with them inherently and more that by inserting them into the last ever episode there's a feeling of suddenly rewriting. Like, if this was important, why didn't we see it before? Some, like Boomer's, or even Kara's sudden fear of being forgotten, came across as very forced in order to "tie into" the finale. Although to be fair, Laura's did not.

The reason I'm a little uneasy at its placement here has more to do with how it plays in context with the wider story of Laura giving up power and becomig All About Bill. So while I can appreciate it as another example of her inner strength and refusal to give up, or as a reason she got into politics, when combined with the All About Bill storyline, it has the irritating side-effect of making it look like Bill saved her from the awful life of politics she only got into because her life was so tragic. And like, if it weren't for the generally awful handling of that storyline, I'd be willing to make myself read it another way. But I ran out of patience with that tack sometime after that wonderful scene in No Exit that I made myself read as purely about her politicses go absolutely no payoff.

I completely agree with you that if she'd relinquished politics and holed up on Colonial One it would have been totally different.

I'm actually in favour of breaking down Laura and having her question her own role in things and pushing her to the edge of what she can take. But if Adama hadn't been in the equation it would have been about her and her abandoning the Fleet would have seemed like nothing but tragedy. Instead, it seems like some sort of romantic notion that we're a) supposed to cheer and b) supposed to believe fixed all her worries about her role without actually dealing with any of them.

Apologies for such a long reply - just...venting and working through it, I guess?

[chaila.livejournal.com]

Still, it's about putting things back in boxes. About forgetting what came before and the dark parts and the difficult parts - which are the parts of the story that make the characters grow, that give them grace, that gives the whole damn thing meaning - so that things aren't challenging. It's about putting people into places - into moments the writers want or perceive we want - and then suggesting that asking how they got there isn't something worth an answer.

YES. I know that I’m ridiculously Laura-centric with this shown and I get stuck there, so I am really glad that you are around to brilliantly explain why so much of the Laura and women-in-general fail is emblematic of the many ways that 4.5 and the finale failed. So much of the show was challenging, intellectually, narratively, in so many ways. Its whole point was unpacking assumptions and ideals and stereotypes and asking really hard questions. And then the end tried to pack it all back up and make it manageable, and WHY? How DEPRESSING. Why would you ever want to unpack an assumption and then just, like, try to shove the answers away and forget you ever asked the question?

FWIW I do think there’s a bit of reclaiming to do with Laura in the finale. I am meh about the flashbacks generally, but when I step back from my inclination to ascribe squick to all ambiguous 4.5 questions—an inclination they FULLY earned—I do see a little “and yet” Laura in that final flashback. It’s not nearly fucking enough, and I never thought the finale had so much Laura fail as much as it utterly failed to Fix any of what came before about her, so it's really not much at all. But *clings to Laura*

Re: the women generally, I won’t list all my agreement, because I’m sure at some point that just gets hivemind-y and self-reinforcing. But while I was aware of lots of potential for squick in 4.0, I was kind of trying to reserve judgment because I was giving them the benefit of the doubt. Which at the time I thought they deserved. But bah, even though I’ve been annoyed at them for awhile, it’s still really, really painful to grasp the overwhelming fail of 4.5 in this area. I hate, hate the narrative fail and the mytharc fail, but what they did to the women hurts my feelings like, really deeply. It's like once you really can't allow yourself to excuse the show anymore--wherever that point is for each person--all the fail comes crashing down and it's really fucking depressing.

*wanders off grumbling about COTTLE and FUCKING PRESIDENT ROMO being part of the decisionmakers* Who’s Lee at this point? A Quorum member? Maybe? What about Sonja? She has as much right to be there as Lee, or frakking Cottle (I mean, I love Cottle, but).

The whole point of the female-centric Opera House being that Gauis Frakking BALTAR gets to make a speech about GOD while Cavil LISTENS offends me on so many levels that I can’t even count them. Now that I think about it, I think that very scene represents the many, many, many kinds of FAIL this show reduced itself to.

You make such an excellent point though about the show also taking Tigh from you. Because I know you hated him and I know why, but the flip side of the Laura Twu Luv fail is that it took Bill from me too. Because apart from the horrible acting which would have been problematic, Bill completely falling apart is exactly what I was expecting. But instead of me being able to see the character I loved and, like, being able to FEEL for him, 1) in the end, I was expected to find this somehow heroic or something, probably because he’s the main male character and thus must be the hero, and 2) they shoved this making Laura happy down my throat. Neither fit organically with MY Bill and I feel both kinda rest on bad assumptions about his role in the show and his role vis-a-vis Laura. Gender fail is fail for both genders.

Bah, this finale. It’s like the worst kind of prism, the more you turn it around and look at every angle, the more fail there is to see.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

There are too many things I agree with here to even list.

But the key point is the prism point. Like how the other day I realised (and I'm offended by my brain that I didn't realise sooner), that shipping Anders into the sun isn't just another rejection of the merging of human and technology, it's THROWING DISABLED PEOPLE INTO THE SUN. So we can now add able-bodied/disabled FAIL to the catalogue along with colonialist, sexist and racial FAIL. Can we work in classism there? Anything else, just for a nice full house?

You know, putting Sonja in that scouting party and having her make some acerbic comment about breeding with the natives would have helped a HUGE amount. But no. It's better for the boys to make smutty jokes about sleeping with the preverbal civilisation they're about to irrevocably change with no permission.

And also yes. While there is fail to go around everywhere, it's the gender fail that feels like a personal betrayal. Because I trusted them so much. And just... Fail.

Fail.

*cries*

*drinks*

*stabs things*

(Oh and FWIW, I also agree about the Laura flashbacks. It's not the concept of her having lost her family, which I know was in the show bible from the beginning, or how those scenes were executed. It was the particular unfortunate combination of choosing to reveal this at this time and juxtaposed against her "current" failgate of choices. The flashbacks themselves were fine and I loved the one where she slept with her student! Maybe I was just blinded by the HOTT though...)

[emmiere.livejournal.com]

So. Thank you for this. It'd kind of cathartic to read actually.

I've been struggling with this for awhile because I almost just don't want to admit that the show fell down so hard. Parts of it I still like, but I have to remove them from most of the context to do so. The problem with this finale was never really the plot for me, though I nit pick that, but how we came to this end and whose stories were told.

And I agree that having an end image set forced the story to move in inorganic ways that dead-ended the stranger, more intuitive writing choices. It's very strange to be agreeing with Jacob on so many things again. Except for, as you said, that none of this was telegraphed throughout the season. Which is one of the things that's hardest for me to get by, that I'd glossed over a lot of things that I actually hated, hoping irrationally for some magic fix in the finale. It was probably always a bad bet. I hate the feeling that a lot of the show I love was made accidentally.

I try and remember what actually happened in 4.5 now and I come up with....well, the parts that will eventually be Battlestar Redactica, I suppose. So I can't chuck it entirely. ;) But in between we have Adama and Tigh plots and subplots almost exclusively, building to climaxes that go nowhere. The little I've heard of the original plans suggests that this is actually the better version. O_o Though Tory and Ellen had more to do, both plots still seemed to be viewed through the perspective of Baltar and Tigh respectively.

I had been holding out of jumping on the genderfail bandwagon for awhile now, but I can't really excuse being this blind. Nor will I try in any way to do so. It always had the potential to be this bad, I suppose, but I'm stunned that they actually went this far and didn't notice. And I feel ridiculous for giving them the benefit of the doubt. Just everything you said, quoted, whatever. All of it. Yes. *cries*

This is the Shape of Mail To Come.
I need a word now for being stuck between laughter and wanting to cry. It's a pretty common feeling right now.

[run-atreyu.livejournal.com]

Just a quick comment, but I adore your icon, particularly in the context of this gender-centric thread and comments.

[run-atreyu.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for this post. I'm more critical than you, but I agree with so much here.

What it comes down to is, Laura Roslin spends season 4.5 stepping back from every single reason she had to exist for three and a half season and after the scene where she throws her pills into the wastebasket, we basically stop seeing this from her perspective. She is one of the main theological pillars of the entire frakking show and she spend eleven episodes doing literally nothing but dying. And once yelling about her boyfriend. Apparently her huge role in the endgame was to grab Hera for two seconds and then watch some Gazelles.

Yes! I hate what the Adama/Roslin relationship did to Laura. Even aside from her taking a back seat, she became All About Her Relationship. It also, and this is where I personally felt robbed, took her away from all the characters with whom she had interesting and complex interactions, particularly Kara and Lee. Even Baltar. And Athena.

Roslin/McDonnell had great chemistry with so many of the characters/actors and all we got for the last seasons was Adama/Roslin, ad infinitum. I confess to not liking Adama at all, which didn't help, but I wasn't anti them being together and was pleased for their shippers but bloody hell, I didn't expect her to spend every single scene with him. I was relieved we at least got her scene with Cottle in the finale.

However you slice it, you get five boys in the grass deciding the future of the human race while the women who assured it die and disappear in fields while no one notices.

And THIS. This makes me so, so sad.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Thinking about the tiny circles in which Laura was forced to act in the final season makes me want to STAB THINGS. To be honest, I always found her scenes with Olmos kind of boring but that's probably because throughout the series I came to hate Adama with a fiery passion that was, apparently, totally justified. *sigh*

Her scene with Cottle was nice though. Too bad EVERYTHING ELSE WAS LAME.

[samstareagle.livejournal.com]

It did end rather like The Stepford Wives, didn't it??? I could be really mad about this as many people are, but here's why I'm not...because Ron's explanation left out nearly half the plot and thus I'm allowed to bulldoze it and create my own version of what REALLY happened in my head, and just laugh at the "God/Not-God's Dancing Robot Show" ending...:P

The irony for me is Racetrack was one of the only characters that actually SURVIVED. How so? She had lost her family, her world, and had devoted her entire life to avenging them. Throughout S4, the writers decided to spit on those feelings like the idiots that mock 9-11 victims for their grief, but she never backed down, and in the end, avenged her family, her world, and saved all of Humanity. (In my fandom, the hybrids all over the galaxy started to jump in panic when they learned the Colony had been destroyed, taking all the EvilCylons with them as they jumped into whatever stars they were closest to...heeheehee...) She went out THE HERO of the entire show. And after all the mystical stuff with the River that we ACTUALLY SAW FOR REAL on the show (there's NO TAKE BACKS, Ron...you show an afterlife, there's an afterlife.), I say she went off and became a LOK or whatever those people are...while the "survivors" on Earth got eaten by Giant Sloths and predatory Kangaroos. LOL. But Lee and Chief and the other guys that made it to Earth? They didn't survive at all. Who they were and wanted to be in the end was MEANINGLESS. Stealing a line from the awful Mutiny arc...

Maggie- I died taking out millions of Cylons and saving all of your asses, thank you very much. You? You'll get eaten by a house cat's great, great grandmother and then chocked up as a hairball.

LOL... I think my brief point is made...heehee... Either way, what they did with everybody else (and I mean Kara) was just...just dumb. And I mean EPIC dumb. The kind of dumb you can yell down into and never hear an echo.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Well the thing that pisses me off is that I have to imagine some breaking off point and what "really" happened and I miss the sense of community of a shared canon I can...stand.

Honestly, we disagree on the mutiny arc, which I really enjoyed because I felt it did a good job of contrasting the very real and sympathetic anger the Colonials like Racetrack and Narcho felt with the very real necessity of allying with the Cylon and how...impossible that situation is.

But I certainly think that the likeliest scenario for the Earth Camping is that everyone gets eaten or dies of simple infections within the first few years and Hera exercises her great skill in wandering off and gets adopted by a local tribe of pre-verbal humans.

*sigh*

[nightxade.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the reason for their death and then their retrograde is to allow for a matriarchal society where these women become worshipped as gods and Hera becomes Queen of the Universe and makes all the men where dresses?

But seriously. What you said. I tend to think about prejudices in terms of race, not in terms of sex. All the points you make about the women in question I knew, but never truly connected in this manner until now.

No, I don't think it was RDM's intention, but I hope it's something he's far more aware of now and will consider in his future works. Perhaps he can become an official card-carrying feminist like Joss.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the reason for their death and then their retrograde is to allow for a matriarchal society where these women become worshipped as gods and Hera becomes Queen of the Universe and makes all the men where dresses?

HEE! That would go a long way toward helping, yes! :p

The thing about the women, though, is even though I do tend to be much more keyed into gender than racial issues, I didn't even see any of this for the longest time. It's like...the last half of the last half of the season (um, i.e. from Deadlock to the end), and really just...the finale exploded with weird sexism and my brain can't really understand where the frak it came from. *sigh*

No, I don't think it was RDM's intention, but I hope it's something he's far more aware of now and will consider in his future works.

Me too, but sadly I think he doesn't even see it. The way when asked about the technophobic ending he was all, "Oh I didn't mean it to be taken that way," and I'm like, dude, you literally wrote someone a monologue about how we can't handle technology because our SOULS and our HEARTS lag behind our BRAINS. Like, the very origin of anti-intellectual and anti-technological rhetoric. And then you LITERALLY threw all your technology into the SUN along with the very sentient disabled guy because apparently requiring technology to live is NO LIFE AT ALL.

If we weren't supposed to read that as anti-technological, how the frak were we supposed to read it?!

Ahem. Apologies. ;)

Perhaps he can become an official card-carrying feminist like Joss.

*laughs forever*

Didn't you get the memo? He totally already is one. It's why it's okay for him to kill off all the women in violent ways or reduce them to gendered stereotypes. :p