Battlestar Galactica Finale

This will be brief for the moment. I've just seen it and there's that kind of relief that a lot came together with some disappointments (the end essentially remakes The Matrix Revolutions with more character and less wonderful weirdness). So its a odd one. Its sort of like the conclusion for Homicide and The Wire for me. Lots of wonderful moments and character beats finally coming together but with a little overt sentimentality and some missed elements which felt important in the run of the shows.

There were lost moments. There's one nasty moment that I feel went too far because it hadn't been built up enough and lacked proper dramatic resolution (Tyrol kills Tory for the murder of his wife while saving his son, a situation on which he was partially responsible for, as well as being very responsible for the mess they found themselves in the finale, which also destroys a fragile truce, causing more deaths). Now the act was shocking and nasty, powerful, and hopefully a longer released cut will fill in some blanks, but there's so little afterthought, so little balance that its resolved as the bitch is dead. As the situation was more complicated, you wanted more, especially as they had built up Tyrol's disenchantment with everyone and Tory's falling into the background, trying to hide from the past, throughout the second half of the season. You kind of feel that you got all the build-up, then horrible violence and no dramatic pay-off. It also means that the image of a man killing a woman and then walking away is distasteful and leaves a lingering bad taste after the finale. The Adama-Roslin finale has the opposite problem, feeling too long and self-indulgent, getting and repeating points so often that it grates by the time you're meant to feel emotion.

There's a lot of good stuff. Baltar finally comes together, shows some guts and loyalty, creating a truce by showing his madness and talking common sense. He faces his worst fear (basically its settling down with someone who knows him), the character arc really working, a more traditional ending likely seeing him dead. Lee also worked well, someone who saw the mess around himself and realised that everything had moved too fast, that everyone was damaged, out of control, to have realistic expectations (over-coming his main flaw in his own life). The Kara reveal was good, nicely unforced and mysterious, a figure disappearing, not really revealing much. Its nice not to be told too much.

The finale, the jump 150,000 years later worked okay but was a little forced. Am still not quite sure what to think of it but will probably blog on it again after a few days.