BSG Finale: Hitchhiker’s Guide Ending

Prehistoric Breeding Rights: May The Best Dressed Prevail

Well, at least they didn’t do the Scooby Doo ending…although part of me would have liked to have seen Tigh grab Cavil by the scruff and proclaim that he was really Old Man Withers who ran the amusement park downtown.  No, instead we got the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy ending, wherein Ancient Astronauts of one sort or another interfere with the delicate balance of evolution on Earth.  I particularly liked the scene where Baltar, Adama, Tigh, and a few others lay down watching the Cave People in the distance, and someone says, “We can breed with them.”  Uh, huh-huh.  Hey, baby.  I like, know those caveguys from GEICO, or something.  Us and the Vikings from Capital One hang out.  Let’s see, what’s a good pickup line…Hey, baby, can I show you how to make fire?

Arthur and Ford, of course, arrive in the company of the Golgafrincham telephone sanitizer “B” Ark crew to accidentally replace the nascent population of primative humans on Prehistoric Earth.  The Galactica crew arrives with the half-bread (half-toaster) Cylon Brat Hera, who somehow Mothers the whole human race, becoming Genetic Eve.  I guess glowing spines are genetically recessive after a few generations.   No sweat.  All of this happened before, and all of it will happen again.  The only difference is that some of us are snappier dressers…and the others really know where their towels are, you hoop froods.

BSG Finale: Cavil Orders Pizza

Well, it’s finally over. Somewhat. Still another two-hour special, and then a new prequel series about some fembots or something. I thought the big finale, “Daybreak 1 & 2” was pretty cool. It definitely tied up things on an emotional level, and the action was great. The (spoilerz here, yo) Galactica ramming the Cylon Colony/Retirement Home for Active Classic Centurions was pretty awesome. Very Star Blazers-ish. And then Cavil entering the Galactica with Centurions was so “Vader boarding the Blockade Runner-ish”, I kept expecting Gaius Baltar to be sporting one of those silver streamlined bike helmets like the Rebel troops.

Cavil making the call on the phone to end the war just cracked me up completely. I mean, how did they know how to “patch him through” to the Cylon Colony? Is the phone number listed? Does the Cylon on the other end just trust that it’s really Cavil calling on some old corded analog phone from Galactica? Just thought it was a real WTF moment.

I like how Starbuck says “There must be some kind of way out of here” before she enters the All Along the Watchtower note number coordinates into the FTL computer. Those are actually lyrics from the song… cool.

As far as all of the mystical stuff, I think it was left open enough to interpret as either God or maybe just a more highly evolved entity running the show, hanging out with Head Six and Head Baltar, temporarily resurrecting Starbuck and so on. Maybe this same entity had seeded many worlds with similar, compatible life. Still, though, a lot of holes in the final resolution there, when you really think about evolution – not just biological, but cultural/languages, etc. And, really, all of those starships into the Sun? Just using them for scrap metal and shelter in the least would have made more sense. Oh well, it was a neat image, and the original 70’s fanfare in that scene was nice.

Thought they came very close to breaking the “fourth wall” in that last scene in NYC, with the awkward cameo of producer Ron Moore and Head Six and Head Baltar wandering about on holiday.

Overall, I enjoyed the ending and glad to see that the show didn’t just continue on forever and then fade away without resolution.

So say me, y’all…

– Nigel Matrix

Cylon vs. PC

I think Cylons evolved from Macs. They seem to have the whole “cool design” theme going. Plus centralized development and implementation of software and hardware that is designed to work together seamlessly. The inside of their basestars have that minimalist, modern Apple Store look. The Cylons also have built-in iTunes so they can download their favorite versions of old Jimi Hendrix tunes directly into their minds (yeah, Jimi was a Cylon, too).

Galactica and the fleet, on the other hand, are probably running on ancient Windows machines and patched-together third-party software, downloaded for free off of some seedy Sagitaran file-sharing site. It all just barely holds together.

Now, as for Starbuck, I think she’s a Linux girl. Rebellious, open source, eager to follow her own path to the truth. No one really knows what to make of her. Plus, I think I saw a little penguin tattoo somewhere on her arm…

By the way, if you caught last week’s episode of BSG, “No Exit”, then you saw the cameo by John Hodgman (PC in the “Get a Mac” ads) as a neurosurgeon tasked with removing a bullet from Cylon Anders’ brain. Kinda distracting, actually, seeing PC there right at the moment when Anders was streaming all of this long-awaited information about everything.

– Nigel Matrix

The Final Fifth Cylon Is….

Mechanical Vegetable Extractor Revealed to Be Enemy of Humanity

There were only three old-school cylon models–centurian, IL series (the ones with the awesome disco heads) and the goat-faced, purple-afro’d Imperious Leader, who had this unexplainable obsession with sitting thirty feet high in the air under a mood light.   Purists will say, yes, a fourth humaniod model was added in Galactica 1980.  And the really obsessed will say, yes, there was a fifth “civilian” cylon model present at the Battle of Gamoray in “The Living Legend Part II”.  Fine.  But now there’s twelve cylons in the new series, and we don’t even know who they are.  They don’t even know who they are.   And after being off the air for what, 9 or 12 months, it’s hard to remember the ones that we did figure out.   But slowly it’s ramping up speed again.  Maybe it’s the fact that they keep saying “The Final Episodes” in the commercials…closure is a good thing.

Rampant speculation fueled the Internet regarding who the final fifth cylon was: Starbuck?  Apollo?  Roslin?  That smarmy lawyer dude?  Now the truth has been revealed, and it’s just somewhat of a “meh” revelation.  Meanwhile, a Cute Robot Movie From Disney swarmed out of Pixar land and took over western culture for a while.  Gee, let’s take Johnny 5 from Short Circuit, strand him on the Earth with mountains of garbage, and give him really, really sad eyes, like a puppy whose favorite chew toy just got taken away.  Oh, yeah, let him collect sporks, and maybe old lunchboxes.   And humanity is all fat and bloblike, cruising through space with all their needs taken care of.  (How did they do it without sporks and lunchboxes?!?!) Don’t get me wrong, Wall-E was beautifully animated and very, very well done, and if heavy-handed environmental moralizing is your thing, you might want to see it again.  Wall-E’s “girlfriend” is EVE, and automated vegetable extraction robot (and exemplar of the term “probe droid”) whose task is to see if the Earth can sustain life again.  EVE has a bit of a mean streak, though, and is a little too trigger-happy with her killer lasers.  Poor Wall-E, who has no weapons, is dating a ‘bot that could mop up the floor with him, despite the whole puppy-dog thing he’s got going on.  It’s the old “girlfriend with a black belt” syndrome.

When we come away from Nuevo Galatica, what lesson are we supposed to learn?  That blonde women are evil, they get inside your head, and there’s lots of them?  That your bald with a capital “B”, hard-drinking XO is really an evil robot with a thing for Dylan tunes, and that his wife is even eviller (is that a word?  is now…) cause she’s mean to the evil hard drinking friend you didn’t even know was a robot?    Or maybe it’s just that your tools shouldn’t think on their own.  Not even the ones you send to look for emerging plant life.  Or maybe…if you have a hard-driving executive officer who’s bald and also secretly an evil robot…send him to look for sporks and lunchboxes?