Once More With Daybreak Part II
Mar. 23rd, 2009 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chaniI have been pondering the ending scene again and the Starbuck mystery and here are some musing/rant/thoughts that came to me while reading stuff on ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
battlestar_blog and commenting on an entry over there.
I have read many complaints about the ending scene, the feeling of being preached and the idea of the show cheating and changing its way through God being the ultimate explanation. For many viewers it is both too easy and not consistent with the series. Others people who loved the finale, on the contrary, say that it has always been about GOD from the beginning, that the divine intervention was on the screen for our eyes to see and that it was foolish to dismiss the religious side of the show. Head!Caprica's talk about being an angel sent by God and everything going according to some Plan decided by one divinity or higher being had to be bought from the beginning.
We have all our personal way to read the show, according to our background, beliefs and way of thinking. I guess it also depends on what we expect from a tv show and what we project, cylon-style ( ;- )) on the screen. For me BSG has definitely never been about God or any gods or any Powers that Be from the beginning, it has always been about humanity as a main theme and about these characters' journey as storylines. The beliefs, religious and fantasy elements on the show were just a way to tell things about the characters, certainly not the basis the whole tale was based on. And I still don't see God as the big explanation for what we have seen in the miniseries and over the four seasons.
However, being a viewer I have to accept the story told in front of my eyes, deal with what the finale provided and, in this case, accept the supernatural elements that occured though Starbuck's weird journey, through the fact that both Gaius and Caprica could see the two head!characters at the same time during the big battle and later on Earth II, and eventually through the head!characters' last epiphany on Time Square.
I don't have to like it though. And, to be honest, I am not really satisfied with that ending scene with the head!characters still looking like Baltar and Caprica 150,000 years later and talking about one god –he doesn't like to be called God but he's still a "he" as in male and singular. I found that it was actually a bit more disappointing and slightly harder to accept than Starbuck fulfilling her journey, and vanishing the way she did.
So it isn't the supernatural stuff per se that I reject. Yes I'm an atheist but my favourite tv series is still Buffy the frakking Vampire Slayer so I guess it shows that I am not a strict materialist who couldn't stand a bit of magic and fantastic elements. Yes BSG was first and foremost a Sci-Fi series but it doesn't mean that religions and supernatural were not to be introduced. I am not a genre purist as long as it is well written and it doesn't screw up "the soul of the show".
Kara's resurrection and disappearing act don't bother me. She clearly embraced death in "Maelstrom" but her "soul" couldn't leave the fleet because, even though she did welcome death, messed-up and self-destructive person that she had been from season 1, the one thing she feared –and that was the point of the flashbacks– was to be forgotten. That basic fear explains the reason she came to accept having a destiny. She was still struggling with the idea in season3, she tried to escape into death but her basic fear prevented her from being done. She didn't want to be forgotten so she had to make Leoben's prophecies true; she had to do something huge for the fleet; she had to come back from the dead and she had to find Earth, and she did it, twice concerning the latter. To disappear, to finally accept her death, she had to give a meaning to her time among the living. It's meaning that prevents oblivion. I see Kara as someone who's often weak and fucked-up, harmful to people around her, always running and trying to escape (like the pigeon), and also as someone with a Super Ego hence her lack of discipline, her piloting skills, her general badass attitude. So I think that the last flashbacks (the conversation with Lee, the almost-cheating-on-Zak-and-almost-destroying-thebrothers-relationship-by-doing-so and the pigeon metaphor) are right in character and allow her storyline from "Maelstrom" to "Daybreak" to be satisfying in terms of storytelling, in regard to the character's development.
Baltar talked about angels, sent by God, so many viewers see it as a reveal about Kara and the head!characters. Kara was not an angel, she wasn't God's compass, she fulfilled her destiny by becoming Aurora which was pretty unforgettable. It was a process that took several steps and looked Christ-like first. First step dying and yet coming back from the dead which raised questions about her true nature, then it was finding Earth I, being outed as a dead human being by Baltar (her prophet in a way) and therefore becoming famous for her resurrection, then finding Earth II thanks to music, and eventually vanishing like a true goddess. It was the perfect exit for her character. By the way Kara didn't say "I'm an angel, God sent me back to you, I know now that I'm God's compass", she said "I have completed my journey, I'm done here" and Lee added eventually "you won't be forgotten". The supernatural/spiritual/ element works because it fits in the character's journey and it's rather poetic. So no I don't need to see Kara as an angel sent by a higher power to deal with it, and I don't need a God-did-it explanation to read the finale.
By the way Kara's mystery and ending reminded me A LOT of what Joss Whedon did with the character of Cordelia in that lovely episode of Angel, "You Welcome", years ago. The character was dead too, but nobody knew it at the time, they thought she had come out of the coma. Cordelia had a double that walked, talked and fooled everyone because she looked alive, could touch and be touched. I remember that I posted about it on the BC&S at the time and made a connection between that solid alive-like ghost she was and one of those after-life doubles that Ancient Egyptians believed in (the famous Kha being one of them) and that could be considered as parts of what we call "a soul".
I have more problems with the ending scene of Battlestar Galactica, a scene which I don't hate but that bothered me quite a bit when I watched it on Saturday.
I'd rather have the show save the ambiguity about the head!characters and I don't like to see them disconnected from the characters of Baltar and Caprica in the end. Head!Caprica never appeared to Baltar before the attack in the miniseries, she was tied to his journey After the Fault, to his road towards redemption, through guilt, repetition, weaknesses and moments of glory, so I have a hard time buying her as an independant character now. With independant I mean, as a character who is still there 150,000 years after Baltar's journey ended.
Also the monotheism seemed to "win" eventually through the Head!characters having the last words and that talk about ONE higher power, which dismissed other spiritual elements, theologies and parts of the mythological subtext of the show. So yes it ends up looking kinda biased and preachy.
On the other hand, we could say that monotheism has won indeed 150,000 after the colonials arrived on the blue planet, and that our head!characters just reflect the spiritual situation.
At the end of the day, my choice in order to accept that ending was to see the final head!characters as a poetic licence and see the higher power "who didn't like to be called God" as a metaphor of Ron Moore himself, creator of the universe, storyteller and therefore indeed deus ex-machina because he has the final word and the final cut.
After all he was god enough to pull a Number Seven out of his divine hat, killing two birds with one plot device: fixing the previous mistake of giving Sharon the number Eight and stating there were 12 models WHILE adding to Cavill's background and character study with the Abel & Cain analogy!
But just for the pleasure of playing the devil's advocate, we could also interpret the ending in another way: the whole thing could be a projection of those who invented the concept of One God, according to Ellen, and who were set free...the Centurions. In other way, God is a Cylon, the machines turn out to be the Creator!
So yes many fans complained about the use of a deus ex-machina in the end. Deus ex-machina is an expression used about drama by reference to a simplistic technique of resolving a plot, a twist or an unexpected coming of a character. It is also the star turn of the show. In rhetorics it's an extra-special argument found in extremis. These modern meanings work for the ending scene of BSG for sure. But before it was used in the figurative it was first, in classical plays, about a true machinery, mechanical devices, that made a character appear suddenly from the sky, flung onto the stage to "save the day". The idea of making the character seem to come from the sky, thanks to the machinery, was of course an allegory of divine intervention. By the way in the tale of Roland it was an angel...The drama trick was used in Ancient Greece, in fine in tragedies, especially by Euripides. Aristophanes mocked the trick but it didn't have the comical meaning Romans gave to it, the "machina" was impressive. So when all is said and done, I'd like to think of the ending scene in a classical way. The show has always been very Greek so a final deus ex-machina suits its ways and doesn't screw up its soul. Besides deus ex-machina literally means "God out of the machine" and it could support the idea of a God thought and therefore created by the machines, theCenturions, and also the theory of the head!characters being only projections...
.
battlestar_blog and commenting on an entry over there.I have read many complaints about the ending scene, the feeling of being preached and the idea of the show cheating and changing its way through God being the ultimate explanation. For many viewers it is both too easy and not consistent with the series. Others people who loved the finale, on the contrary, say that it has always been about GOD from the beginning, that the divine intervention was on the screen for our eyes to see and that it was foolish to dismiss the religious side of the show. Head!Caprica's talk about being an angel sent by God and everything going according to some Plan decided by one divinity or higher being had to be bought from the beginning.
We have all our personal way to read the show, according to our background, beliefs and way of thinking. I guess it also depends on what we expect from a tv show and what we project, cylon-style ( ;- )) on the screen. For me BSG has definitely never been about God or any gods or any Powers that Be from the beginning, it has always been about humanity as a main theme and about these characters' journey as storylines. The beliefs, religious and fantasy elements on the show were just a way to tell things about the characters, certainly not the basis the whole tale was based on. And I still don't see God as the big explanation for what we have seen in the miniseries and over the four seasons.
However, being a viewer I have to accept the story told in front of my eyes, deal with what the finale provided and, in this case, accept the supernatural elements that occured though Starbuck's weird journey, through the fact that both Gaius and Caprica could see the two head!characters at the same time during the big battle and later on Earth II, and eventually through the head!characters' last epiphany on Time Square.
I don't have to like it though. And, to be honest, I am not really satisfied with that ending scene with the head!characters still looking like Baltar and Caprica 150,000 years later and talking about one god –he doesn't like to be called God but he's still a "he" as in male and singular. I found that it was actually a bit more disappointing and slightly harder to accept than Starbuck fulfilling her journey, and vanishing the way she did.
So it isn't the supernatural stuff per se that I reject. Yes I'm an atheist but my favourite tv series is still Buffy the frakking Vampire Slayer so I guess it shows that I am not a strict materialist who couldn't stand a bit of magic and fantastic elements. Yes BSG was first and foremost a Sci-Fi series but it doesn't mean that religions and supernatural were not to be introduced. I am not a genre purist as long as it is well written and it doesn't screw up "the soul of the show".
Kara's resurrection and disappearing act don't bother me. She clearly embraced death in "Maelstrom" but her "soul" couldn't leave the fleet because, even though she did welcome death, messed-up and self-destructive person that she had been from season 1, the one thing she feared –and that was the point of the flashbacks– was to be forgotten. That basic fear explains the reason she came to accept having a destiny. She was still struggling with the idea in season3, she tried to escape into death but her basic fear prevented her from being done. She didn't want to be forgotten so she had to make Leoben's prophecies true; she had to do something huge for the fleet; she had to come back from the dead and she had to find Earth, and she did it, twice concerning the latter. To disappear, to finally accept her death, she had to give a meaning to her time among the living. It's meaning that prevents oblivion. I see Kara as someone who's often weak and fucked-up, harmful to people around her, always running and trying to escape (like the pigeon), and also as someone with a Super Ego hence her lack of discipline, her piloting skills, her general badass attitude. So I think that the last flashbacks (the conversation with Lee, the almost-cheating-on-Zak-and-almost-destroying-thebrothers-relationship-by-doing-so and the pigeon metaphor) are right in character and allow her storyline from "Maelstrom" to "Daybreak" to be satisfying in terms of storytelling, in regard to the character's development.
Baltar talked about angels, sent by God, so many viewers see it as a reveal about Kara and the head!characters. Kara was not an angel, she wasn't God's compass, she fulfilled her destiny by becoming Aurora which was pretty unforgettable. It was a process that took several steps and looked Christ-like first. First step dying and yet coming back from the dead which raised questions about her true nature, then it was finding Earth I, being outed as a dead human being by Baltar (her prophet in a way) and therefore becoming famous for her resurrection, then finding Earth II thanks to music, and eventually vanishing like a true goddess. It was the perfect exit for her character. By the way Kara didn't say "I'm an angel, God sent me back to you, I know now that I'm God's compass", she said "I have completed my journey, I'm done here" and Lee added eventually "you won't be forgotten". The supernatural/spiritual/ element works because it fits in the character's journey and it's rather poetic. So no I don't need to see Kara as an angel sent by a higher power to deal with it, and I don't need a God-did-it explanation to read the finale.
By the way Kara's mystery and ending reminded me A LOT of what Joss Whedon did with the character of Cordelia in that lovely episode of Angel, "You Welcome", years ago. The character was dead too, but nobody knew it at the time, they thought she had come out of the coma. Cordelia had a double that walked, talked and fooled everyone because she looked alive, could touch and be touched. I remember that I posted about it on the BC&S at the time and made a connection between that solid alive-like ghost she was and one of those after-life doubles that Ancient Egyptians believed in (the famous Kha being one of them) and that could be considered as parts of what we call "a soul".
I have more problems with the ending scene of Battlestar Galactica, a scene which I don't hate but that bothered me quite a bit when I watched it on Saturday.
I'd rather have the show save the ambiguity about the head!characters and I don't like to see them disconnected from the characters of Baltar and Caprica in the end. Head!Caprica never appeared to Baltar before the attack in the miniseries, she was tied to his journey After the Fault, to his road towards redemption, through guilt, repetition, weaknesses and moments of glory, so I have a hard time buying her as an independant character now. With independant I mean, as a character who is still there 150,000 years after Baltar's journey ended.
Also the monotheism seemed to "win" eventually through the Head!characters having the last words and that talk about ONE higher power, which dismissed other spiritual elements, theologies and parts of the mythological subtext of the show. So yes it ends up looking kinda biased and preachy.
On the other hand, we could say that monotheism has won indeed 150,000 after the colonials arrived on the blue planet, and that our head!characters just reflect the spiritual situation.
At the end of the day, my choice in order to accept that ending was to see the final head!characters as a poetic licence and see the higher power "who didn't like to be called God" as a metaphor of Ron Moore himself, creator of the universe, storyteller and therefore indeed deus ex-machina because he has the final word and the final cut.
After all he was god enough to pull a Number Seven out of his divine hat, killing two birds with one plot device: fixing the previous mistake of giving Sharon the number Eight and stating there were 12 models WHILE adding to Cavill's background and character study with the Abel & Cain analogy!
But just for the pleasure of playing the devil's advocate, we could also interpret the ending in another way: the whole thing could be a projection of those who invented the concept of One God, according to Ellen, and who were set free...the Centurions. In other way, God is a Cylon, the machines turn out to be the Creator!
So yes many fans complained about the use of a deus ex-machina in the end. Deus ex-machina is an expression used about drama by reference to a simplistic technique of resolving a plot, a twist or an unexpected coming of a character. It is also the star turn of the show. In rhetorics it's an extra-special argument found in extremis. These modern meanings work for the ending scene of BSG for sure. But before it was used in the figurative it was first, in classical plays, about a true machinery, mechanical devices, that made a character appear suddenly from the sky, flung onto the stage to "save the day". The idea of making the character seem to come from the sky, thanks to the machinery, was of course an allegory of divine intervention. By the way in the tale of Roland it was an angel...The drama trick was used in Ancient Greece, in fine in tragedies, especially by Euripides. Aristophanes mocked the trick but it didn't have the comical meaning Romans gave to it, the "machina" was impressive. So when all is said and done, I'd like to think of the ending scene in a classical way. The show has always been very Greek so a final deus ex-machina suits its ways and doesn't screw up its soul. Besides deus ex-machina literally means "God out of the machine" and it could support the idea of a God thought and therefore created by the machines, theCenturions, and also the theory of the head!characters being only projections...
.