{"id":14362,"date":"2009-03-30T00:08:52","date_gmt":"2009-03-30T06:08:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/?p=14362"},"modified":"2009-03-30T00:03:29","modified_gmt":"2009-03-30T06:03:29","slug":"a-finale-of-bsg-a-jug-of-wine-and-thou","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2009\/03\/30\/a-finale-of-bsg-a-jug-of-wine-and-thou.html","title":{"rendered":"A finale of BSG, a jug of wine, and thou"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"img-shadow-right\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" title=\"Battlestar Galactica\" height=\"75\" src=\"https:\/\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/galactica.jpg\" width=\"143\" \/> <\/div>\n<p>Finally, finally, by the grace of Sci-Fi, watched the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.scifi.com\/rewind\/?sid=32850\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Battlestar Galactica<\/em> finale<\/a>. My thoughts (and, duh, spoilers below) &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> Shots and drunkeness and vomit. Not a bad metaphor for the show, as so many people strive to fight against reality both in action and in drink-based reaction.<\/li>\n<li> I was first introduced to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0001521\/\" target=\"_blank\">Mary McDonnell<\/a> in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0105435\/\">Sneakers<\/a><\/em>. To think this is where she&#8217;s taken me.<\/li>\n<li> I was first introduced to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0001579\/\" target=\"_blank\">Edward James Olmos<\/a> in <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0086759\/\" target=\"_blank\">Miami Vice<\/a><\/em>. To think this is where he&#8217;s taken me.<\/li>\n<li> I will never. Ever. Ever. Eat &#8220;Hamburger Helper&#8221; again. The SciFi online version of the BSG finale had The Most Insipid Hamburger Helper Advert inserted at each commercial break. It was so wildly inappropriate that, no matter how much I appreciate Fred the Ad Exec saying, &#8220;Hey, this would be a great online show to advertise in,&#8221; the massive&nbsp;cognitive dissonance between the show and the commercial is such that HH is something I will never again willingly buy. This was not helped at all by the SciFi insertion of the commercials two seconds after the actual commercial break. (I.e., big pre-commercial climactic cliff-hanger &#8230; second-long fade to black &#8230; two seconds of next act &#8230; HH commercial &#8230; resume next act.)<\/li>\n<li> Adama and Tigh. Talk about reincarnated souls haunting each otr.<\/li>\n<li> Admiral Hoshi and President Irish-Guy. Yeah. There&#8217;s a new series for you.<\/li>\n<li> Gaius Baltar. Even when clearly, utterly self-sacrificing, you always have to wonder how altruistic he really is, and for how long.<\/li>\n<li> APOCALYPSE! RAGNAROK! WILD BUNCH! TO-YO-YO-HO!<\/li>\n<li> Gaius and Caprica 6 scene, with internal counterparts. Funniest. Scene. Ever.<\/li>\n<li> The music on this show (99% <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0566970\/\" target=\"_blank\">Bear McReary<\/a>) has been just incredible.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li> I loved the Boomer flashback. End of Line.<\/li>\n<li> LAST STAND! Desperation!<\/li>\n<li> Classic Centurions. All they were missing was &#8220;By your command.&#8221; I remember how people used to laugh at those guys. Who&#8217;s laughing now?<\/li>\n<li> Crucibles of flame and blood and flashes of light. Even if it wasn&#8217;t already known, it would be obvious that this was The Big Episode.<\/li>\n<li> Visions and reality and shattered hopes and prophecy. This series has had one foot firmly grounded in bloody gutsy realism and the other in bloody gutsy symbolism.<\/li>\n<li> The Hera Vision. Nice to see it brought to fruition, even if it turns out to be nearly incidental to the conclusion.<\/li>\n<li> The confrontation on at C&amp;C. OMG, Baltar, the goddamned weakest human in the world, is suddenly the person who brokers the final peace. Maybe.<\/li>\n<li> And, in the end, people are their word. &#8220;And the Word was God.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li> &#8220;I don&#8217;t mean to rush you, but you are keeping two civilizations waiting.&#8221; Best line in the series.<\/li>\n<li> Past sins always catch up with you. That&#8217;s one of the lessons of this particular show.<\/li>\n<li> Is it my imagination, or does the colony-ship bear a striking resemblance to a B5 Shadow Ship<\/li>\n<li> That damned Cylon music. I&#8217;m being minor-keyed to death!<\/li>\n<li> ZOMG EARTH AFRICA EARTH!<\/li>\n<li> Again, I will never eat Hamburger Helper again.<\/li>\n<li> Flying over fields. This is the point that Doyce said, &#8220;Yeah, you could end the series here and everyone would be happy.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li> Yeah. Okay. Right. And abandoning your tech base sounds like an excellent idea until the first person dies of typhus or dysentery.&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li> Okay. We&#8217;re at Earth long in the past (150K years ago, we learn anon). Okay. And, at 38K, it&#8217;s not likely we&#8217;re going to make a dent in the global population or timeline. But. Just. Doesn&#8217;t. Make. Sense.<\/li>\n<li> While it&#8217;s cool to think of <em>Galactica <\/em>genes within us all, the ker-plunk of individual tales into the millennial lost history of mankind makes it all seem nihilistic and meaningless.<\/li>\n<li> Hera as the mitochondrial Eve. Nice. Though that makes everyone else seem pretty darned insignificant, save, I suppose, for how they helped Hera survive. In some ways, then, it&#8217;s all about the story of Hera.<\/li>\n<li> Okay, big, heaping, steaming, fireworky kudos for riffing off the original <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0006225\/\" target=\"_blank\">Stu Phillips<\/a> music.<\/li>\n<li> Or, rather than Hera, is the series all about (a la <em>Star Wars <\/em>being all about Anakin \/ Vader) Saul Tigh?<\/li>\n<li> Bill and Laura. Flying off into the sunset.<\/li>\n<li> Apollo and Starbuck. And &#8230; wtf? So Apollo \/ Lee&#8217;s big dream is to kick back and relax. And instead he&#8217;s left alone on a planet where he will have to freaking <em>fight to survive every step of the rest of his life.&nbsp;<\/em> Nice.<\/li>\n<li> And Starbuck&#8217;s greatest fear is not death, but being forgotten. Another dream left unfulfilled.<\/li>\n<li> God&#8217;s plan. And we wrap back around to Gaius and Caprica 6 back on, um, Caprica. &#8220;The things we do for love.&#8221; Another theme for the series?<\/li>\n<li> 150,000 years later. &#8220;All of this has happened before.&#8221; And Gaius and Six, Chaos and Law, wander off into a rather heavy-handed and unsatisfying sunset.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So &#8230; aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?<\/p>\n<p>If the message is that, while we must stand and deliver (cf. Edward James Olmos) in our lives, over the context of eons our individual tales are on the one hand meaningless and forgotten, and on the other hand crucial to how things turn out, and on the gripping hand simply part of the endless Cycle of Things &#8230; well, I guess that&#8217;s the story.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t understand about Kara.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think the population of the colonies would simply disperse amidst the Cro-Magnons.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think the Centurions will simply vanish into the 150K-year ether.<\/p>\n<p>I &#8230; am, ultimately, disappointed. A great tale, an amazing and gripping and tremendous sound and fury, signifying nothing.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t regret having followed it. And I want to watch the mini-series again something awful. And I&#8217;m not going to be one of those folks who accuses Ron Moore of betraying me or something stupid like that. Nor do I necessarily have a better ending than all of this.<\/p>\n<p>That doesn&#8217;t mean I like it.<\/p>\n<p>End of Line.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Finally, finally, by the grace of Sci-Fi, watched the Battlestar Galactica finale. My thoughts (and, duh, spoilers below) &#8230; &nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_seopress_robots_follow":"","_seopress_robots_imageindex":"","_seopress_robots_snippet":"","_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_robots_breadcrumbs":"","_seopress_robots_freeze_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_custom_modified_date":"","_seopress_robots_canonical":"","_seopress_social_fb_title":"","_seopress_social_fb_desc":"","_seopress_social_fb_img":"","_seopress_social_fb_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_fb_img_height":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_title":"","_seopress_social_twitter_desc":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img":"","_seopress_social_twitter_img_attachment_id":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_width":0,"_seopress_social_twitter_img_height":0,"_seopress_redirections_value":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled":"","_seopress_redirections_enabled_regex":"","_seopress_redirections_logged_status":"","_seopress_redirections_param":"","_seopress_redirections_type":0,"_seopress_analysis_target_kw":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-tv"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":36632,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2013\/05\/31\/finally-watched-the-s-7-finale.html","url_meta":{"origin":14362,"position":0},"title":"Finally watched the S.7 finale&#8230;","author":"***Dave","date":"Fri 31-May-13 3:10pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Finally watched the S.7 finale of #DoctorWho ... Crikey!","rel":"","context":"In &quot;~Tweets&quot;","block_context":{"text":"~Tweets","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/tweets"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":31154,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2012\/11\/06\/face-off-finale.html","url_meta":{"origin":14362,"position":1},"title":"Face Off finale","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 6-Nov-12 7:07am","format":false,"excerpt":"We finally got around to watching the season 3 finale of \"Face Off,\" which is Syfy's reality \/ competition show focused on SFX makeup. \u00a0It was a fun season on a show all three of us enjoy, with a generally likeable set of competitors. \u00a0I thought the two-episode finale was\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;~PlusPosts&quot;","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":23103,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2011\/10\/15\/tweets-from-2011-10-15.html","url_meta":{"origin":14362,"position":2},"title":"Tweets from 2011-10-15","author":"***Dave","date":"Sat 15-Oct-11 10:45pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Very pleasant, domestically romantic evening of caipirinhas, fresh pesto ravioli, Doctor Who finale, and City of Heroes. Now to snooze. # Finally watched the Doctor Who season finale last night. That was pretty damned spiffy. Now sad over dearth of Whoage for the next year. # RT @mental_floss: Herbert Hoover\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;~Tweets&quot;","block_context":{"text":"~Tweets","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/tweets"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10838,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2007\/06\/19\/battlestar_galactica_seas.html","url_meta":{"origin":14362,"position":3},"title":"Battlestar Galactica &#8211; Season 3 Wrap","author":"***Dave","date":"Tue 19-Jun-07 1:33pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Okay, probably the next to the last guy out there to have not seen the season finale of Battlestar Galactica, but finally caught it on DVR re-run. And ......","rel":"","context":"In &quot;TV&quot;","block_context":{"text":"TV","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/media\/media-tv"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/images\/galactica.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":51100,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/05\/13\/marvels-agents-of-shield-season-2-finale.html","url_meta":{"origin":14362,"position":4},"title":"&quot;Marvel&#039;s Agents of SHIELD&quot; &#8211; Season 2 Finale","author":"***Dave","date":"Wed 13-May-15 10:18pm","format":false,"excerpt":"[No specific spoilers, I think, but still ...]I've been conflicted over MAoS this season. It's definitely been a step up from the first two-thirds of Season 1, but a far cry from the post-Winter Soldier fun that wrapped up that season.Season 2 has been a bit more ... less. In\u2026","rel":"","context":"In &quot;~PlusPosts&quot;","block_context":{"text":"~PlusPosts","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/plusposts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/MAoS%2BSeason%2B2.jpgimgmax%3D660.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/MAoS%2BSeason%2B2.jpgimgmax%3D660.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/MAoS%2BSeason%2B2.jpgimgmax%3D660.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":49145,"url":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/2015\/01\/04\/third-hobbit-movie-was-great-extended-edition-finale-to-the-second-hobbit-movie.html","url_meta":{"origin":14362,"position":5},"title":"Third Hobbit movie was great extended edition finale to the Second Hobbit movie.","author":"***Dave","date":"Sun 4-Jan-15 5:57pm","format":false,"excerpt":"Third Hobbit movie was great extended edition finale to the Second Hobbit movie. View on Twitter","rel":"","context":"In &quot;~Tweets&quot;","block_context":{"text":"~Tweets","link":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/category\/blogging\/tweets"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hill-kleerup.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}