Still too focused on my short story to put any mental energy into structuring these thoughts.

  • The decision to give up all technology and live in a state of grace with nature was completely unmotivated and nonsensical.  It is impossible to believe that 38,000 people all agreed, after years of struggling to maintain their way of life, to abandon the products and practices of civilization.  And that little scene between Lee and Bill Adama where Lee says, “It’s amazing everyone agreed to this!” and Bill says, “Never underestimate the appeal of wiping the slate clean” does nothing to address this.  That is what the Turkey City Lexicon calls “You Can’t Fire Me, I Quit” writing:  “An attempt to diffuse the reader’s incredulity with a pre-emptive strike, as if by anticipating the reader’s objections, the author had somehow answered them.”
  • If Hera is mitochondrial Eve, this has some awfully dark implications for the survivors of the 12 colonies.  Specifically, it means that every single one of them failed to have any progeny that survived and procreated.  That map of the world the Adamas said they would scatter the population of the fleet across?  All of those colonization attempts, except for one of them in Africa, utterly failed.  They all died, and if they had any children, those children died too.  Additionally, if we have any sentimental feelings for the humans already on the planet, then we should hope that one of the natives is y-chromosome Adam, because Hera being mitochondrial Eve means that the fleet arrives before the human population bottleneck.  Somewhere between Hera wandering the savanna and Ron Moore in Times Square, the entire human population drops to around 2000 individuals.  So unless one of Hera’s hardiest offspring (or, conceivably, Hera herself) got it on with one of the natives, then we must also conclude that the arrival of the fleet meant the eventual extinction of the indiginous humans.
  • Every episode for who-can-remember-how-long has started with Kara Thrace specifically reminding the audience that we should be wondering what the hell she was.  This, apparently, did not actually prefigure any intention on the part of the creators to answer that question.  So they completely failed to make good on what has been, for the last season and a half, the most strongly emphasized narrative promise.  This is highly unsatisfying.  (Although, if you actually think through the implications of Hera being mitochondrial Eve, I suppose they did make good on that whole “harbinger of death” thing.  Not that I have any faith that the writers actually realized this.)
  • In what I’m certain was intended to be a touching moment of connection, Saul Tigh tells Galen Tyrol that if Tory had done to Ellen what she did to Cally, he (Saul) would have killed her (Tory), too. What Tory did to Cally was murder her, motivated by self-preservation and race loyalty.  As opposed to what Saul did to Ellen on New Caprica, which was murder her, motivated by self-preservation and race loyalty.  Way to be self aware about your male bonding there, Saul.
  • Head Six and Head Baltar being angels, and there actually being a higher power (which may or may not be god) influencing events I personally find extremely unsatisfying.  I can’t strongly argue that the narrative didn’t earn this revelation, though.  There has been plenty to support this being the answer.  It’s just that “They really were a couple of deus ex machina all along” isn’t very interesting.
  • This show has treated in-group/out-group dynamics and dealt with issues ranging from the propriety of torture to the ethics of military occupation with such subtlety that I was tremendously disappointed by the hollow moralizing of the dancing robots ending.  As far as parallelism between the show’s story and the real world goes, they could have gone with a “will we repeat the mistakes of the past?” ending in a hundred different ways that would have been better than the slapstick literalism of “robots will turn on us if we aren’t careful.”