Battlestar Galactica: Season Four

[Solver]

That is by their own choice. Humans survived genetically and as a species, obviously, but leaving their culture and technology is what they chose.

Mind you, it actually seems to me like the worst way to break that cycle. It should have been obvious that, if they become an agrarian society and all that like they chose to, they would still eventually evolve, start anew, build machines and thus probably repeat the cycle. Seems to me like the best way to break the cycle was to settle while keeping their technology as much as possible and, most importantly, making sure that the history remains known. That's the only way future people might know not to create their own enslaved machines...

[Imran Siddiqui]

Of course, you could say that's the only way to interpret God and all that - a divine plan is just that, a divine plan, not something that people can reasonably understand. So you wouldn't know why he leads them to new Earth by resurrecting Starbuck and playing that music instead of just making the FTL drives "misfire" so they arrive at those coordinates. That's divine plan for you.

And the hybrids / Starbuck thing still doesn't make sense to me. The Razor hybrid:

Kara Thrace will lead the human race to its end. She is the herald of the apocalypse, the harbinger of death. They must not follow her.

Starbuck didn't even lead the human race to its end. They didn't "end", they actually live on, having found a new home. No apocalypse, no death - no reason why the Hybrids would treat her like that.

Remember the genetic "eve" was Hera, a Cylon/human child. I'm guessing the human race "ends" because Cylons and humans intermarry and have children, thus making the descendants to be less than 100% human.

[Dinner]

That last point was only made clear a dozen times in the series.

Still, some of the humans on the 12 colonies had to live in remote areas and 3 months wouldn't have been enough time to hunt them all down and kill them. There simply must be some humans left alive on the 12 colonies just like if you have an advanced space traveling civilization there must be some settlements on more then just the 12 colonies. Some mining colonies or military bases on remote inhospitable planets or even just religious separatists some where. Just like global thermal nuclear war wouldn't have killed everyone on Kobal or the first Earth.

[Dr Strangelove]

They first landed on Africa, as witnessed by the wildlife. That's where they saw the people with spears. I don't think that Neanderthal man made it to Africa, so they must have been observing Homo sapiens.
Also I think it's generally believed now that Neanderthal man probably did have language, they had fire and tools after all. They wouldn't have had the vocal range of Homo sapiens.

I must admit the whole idea of "it will be better if we throw away our technology" was a little hard to swallow.

They could have found an uninhabited island somewhere and founded a city, pledging themselves to not interfere with the locals. Then 145,000 years later some Cylon remnant finds them and sinks their little isle.

[Nikolai]

I must admit the whole idea of "it will be better if we throw away our technology" was a little hard to swallow.

They could have found an uninhabited island somewhere and founded a city, pledging themselves to not interfere with the locals. Then 145,000 years later some Cylon remnant finds them and sinks their little isle.

Some did, according to Platon. You know, that Atlantis place. Mu too btw. And various religious text describing human looking gods. Some, placed in a hilly part of Europe, even adopted a few of the names used.

[Dinner]

They first landed on Africa, as witnessed by the wildlife. That's where they saw the people with spears. I don't think that Neanderthal man made it to Africa, so they must have been observing Homo sapiens.

While true I find it hard to believe that 30,000 humans and cylons so dominated the world as hunter gatherers that they became the near sole procreators of modern humans. They did say everyone alive on Earth was descended from human cylons so apparently the locals didn't make it into the gene pool or they were very, very small in numbers.

[Riesstiu IV]

This is how it should have ended:

The fleet arrives at earth and instead of giving up their technology, they decide to share it with the native humans. Then we begin a new spin off series!

Fast forward 20 years. A new civilization emerges with the combine strength of the colonials and the native humans. The two main characters will be the GEICO cavemen as viper pilots.

[Solver]

I think I'm starting to realize why the ending wasn't satisfying. It was always clear enough that not all questions would be answered. Which is fine in itself. But I guess it's the "No Exit" episode that sort of spoiled the ending. In that ep, answers were given - a lot of answers. Origin of skinjobs, the story of Earth, of Ellen, etc. And it created the sense that the major remaining questions would also be answered, but we got nothing there. And poor Starbuck, never even found out what she was - after struggling with the confusion for so long.

[Solver]

On the issue of humans abandoning their technology, I found this blog post very satisfying. It's well-written and made me look at the issue from a different perspective.

I have to confess how surprised I am that people aren't willing to accept what General Boy called "the choice of primitivism." It may be because of my own familiarity with the subject as a historian - perhaps those who can't accept it just aren't aware that human beings have often expressed a desire to, or actually have chosen to, do exactly this.

And I don't blame people for not having that awareness - we live in an age in which our technological society is considered superior to the absence of it, where criticism of technology is dismissed as "Luddite" and where people living off the land are derided as "primitives".

The desire of human beings to blame their problems on their present surroundings - whether ideological, technological, or cultural - and move somewhere new and unspoiled to start over again in a kind of New Eden is VERY VERY STRONG in our history. Hell, it's one of the founding myths of the United States.

From the Amish Country to Walden Pond, from the hippie communes of the 1960s to the hardy pioneers of the 1800s who forsake Eastern civilization to "light out for the territories" in Mark Twain's phrase (and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has a very similar ending to BSG), plenty of people have desired a tabula rasa - to get back in touch with their souls, as Lee put it, and start again with a more authentic lifestyle free from the corrupting influences that brought so much suffering.

And that's a point which all those people saying "I could never do that" are missing. If you asked any of those humans before the fall of the colonies where they could make the same choice, nobody would have said yes.

But they have been through a harrowing journey over the last four years in which they learned, repeatedly, that their technology not only won't save them, but that it has frequently destroyed them. Finding Old Earth as a nuclear ruin would have put a profound exclamation point on it.

And so when the find an Edenic place to live - where they don't have to be afraid, where they really can just spread out and explore, you can bet that the desire to give up the past ways and start anew will take over. If I were down there I'd have been in complete agreement with Lee.

One of my concerns with online discussion of TV shows is that too often people criticize the direction of a show because "I would never do that" or "it does not make sense to me." If everyone thought as you did, there would be no diversity of thought at all in the human race. Human beings see things differently. People make what I believe to be stupid and crazy decisions all the time, decisions I would never make.

But the point, especially in art and literature, isn't that they made a bad choice - rather it's to understand why the choice was made. And I think BSG has done that very well here.

Ultimately, good art is NOT about pleasing everyone. It's about making a profound artistic statement that leaves people feeling moved, even if people passionately disagree about what those feelings should be.

[Dinner]

The idea of a new primitive garden of Edan is great and probably does have an emotional pull... until your child is dying of an easily curable disease which you can't cure because there are no doctors and no medicine. At that point people would likely start thinking technology has so major pluses to it.

[chequita guevara]

I can see that some people would fall prey to the disease of primitivism, but not all 40,000. Especially because, very likely, a number of them have conditions that require technological solutions . . . like asthma. How long do you think Saul and Ellen are going to be able to go without alcohol? Just not gonna happen.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Dunno about Ellen, but Tigh gave up alcohol for the most part when Caprica was pregnant with his child. Remember, he had to go searching for a bottle in the quarters after the miscarriage.

Oh, and, of course, the entire leadership was for it. The only guy that would have spoken up and/or riled up the people, Tom Zarek, is dead. And since we've suspended our disbelief for the rest of the fleet just doing whatever the Hell Adama and Co. said, well, I think we can do it again.

[Whoha]

And now, Lee Vs Pigeon:

[Q Classic]

Actually, the reason why the ending was unsatisfying to me can be boiled down to two things:
1. the somewhat anti-technology feel to it (that's been answered here already), and
2. it seemed too hopeful. Restarted on a new Earth? I liked how horrifying it was for the original Earth to be a radioactive cinder. To give the humans and Cylons a second chance, when no compelling case was made for the simple justification of their survival...

[Lord Avalon]

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No Thanks, Mister Roboto