Land of the Living

Ha ha ha ho ho ho. no.

Finally I watched the second-to-last episode of Battlestar Galactia. It gets somewhere near Jump. Humanity spends much of the season finding new excuses to die. It's Hera, the human-cylon hybrid child - she's kidnapped, they have t go in to get her - SPOILER - lots of people has to die. The ships have to run with the blood of humans and cylons. Boomer gives Hera back to Athena and then Athena has to kill Boomer. The idiotic Baltar, the scientist who brought nuclear destruction to earth, is in good human-style elevated to the role of sage. The show ends with a deal between the old men. The ladies look on with the heads glowing with a heavenly light while Baltar babbles about the divine force greater than us all and dreams given to a chosen few - full on God-talk -
and Cavil, the Cylon leader (Dean Stockwell), stares at him with the contemptuous skepticism that Baltar utterly deserves. Guns Centurions guns guns guns strap on your gets. Get Your War On.


And then SPOILER Baltar the less stupid says something completely different and for once, intelligent.

What we call it doesn't matter. It's here. It exists. And our two destinies are intertwined in its force. . . . Good and evil -- we created those. You want to break the cycle. Break the cycle of death, birth, rebirth, destruction, escape, death. That's in our hands. In our hands only. It requires a leap of faith. Requires that we give in hope, not fear.

There's a trade. There's a deal.

The undead at the end:

"Everyone stand down."
"I'm as good as my word."

Cut, good. They didn't kill everybody. Hope.

Then they screwed it up with the finale.

The final five. SPOILER. The Chief gets knowledge of sin. Of course he has to kill the sinner. The Resurrection transfer is interrupted. The Cylons fall back into the pseudo-truth of the double cross. Guns blaze, people die, ship jumps. Jumps to (our) earth, and the human can start over.

Only they can't. The Prez dies. Kara makes herself disappear. The Chief vanishes to the northern isles. Everybody files into the African savanna of 150,000 years ago and the ships are flown by Sam the hybrid into the sun. The idea is supposed to be something about giving up science so we can have our souls. OK, but this is just about lying down in the green earth. Here the end of the series imagines nothing except a recurrence of the same - over 150 more millenia.

Pure death trip. Exhausted America. Taking a dive.