Don't read this thread if you have not seen the series through to the finale and don't want it ruined for you.

I really want to know what the other BSG fans here thought of the finale, the final season, and the show as a whole.

I'll go in reverse order:

The show as a whole: overall I loved it. Its highs were as high as any show I've ever seen (I still get chills when I remember how Adama saved the people on New Caprica). But there were quite a few filler episodes, and places where it dragged a bit. Still, there's enough here for me to recommend to anyone, even non-Sci-Fi fans.

The last season: well, the last half-season. I loved it. I mean, it frustrated the hell out of me, particularly the mutiny segment, but the episodes were packed with plot and character development, and I was never once bored. Even characters who usually get on my nerves (I'm sorry, but Starbuck annoys me at least half of the time) weren't as grating to me.

The finale: I'm still working out how I feel about the finale. They didn't answer every last thing, which I'm fine with, but what did get answered felt a little odd. Regardless, I was happy to see that the conclusion I was leaning to (that the survivors existed in a time before us) was the right one.

Okay, can someone explain to me the history of these people? I'm talking pre-colonies. I'm having a difficult time figuring out how the 13th tribe was all cylons. I thought the other 12 colonies created the cylons, didn't they? Or were the Centurians just the AI that the 12 created, and the cylons existed from the beginning? If so, who created them? I'm very confused.

Anyway, I thought it was a good finale. There was a bit of a harsh juxtaposition in the last two hours, with the first hour being such non-stop, massive, intense, action, and the last hour consisting of people walking around in fields, but I can't really think how else they could have done it.

On a side note, my mom works at National Geographic, and there was even a little bit of buzz there this week, because of the magazine's prominence in the finale. Apparently that is an actual story from the magazine, but published about three years ago. That makes me wonder if the idea for Hera's final role was in the creators' heads the whole time, or if it's something they thought up when reading that article.

I loved the story. I enjoyed the finale. But if you dig into all the sundry details, it's just a whole sad mess.

What the hell was up with Starbuck and Baltar? They were reincarnated by the God(s) to advance the plot? The whole Hera thing, never mind the prophesies and such, also seems staggeringly forced. These Cylons couldn't look at their own damn selves and teach themselves how their resurrection mechanism worked? The final five Cylons: what are the odds that they'd all end up on Battlestar Galactica?

All of these plot points were essential for the overall story arc to go anywhere. Who are these God(s) who made it all happen? The show writers? It's not like similar shows haven't used characters who can see the future or other such machinery to advance the plot, but here it was pretty extreme.

For contrast, all the "coincidences" in the first few episodes of season 1 of Heroes, where these people kept bumping into each other, didn't feel nearly as forced, yet it still required the heavy hand of the writer to make it happen.

Definitely arguable, as I think everything in the entire series of Heroes is forced, but you have a point about BSG being the same way.

And you're right, what is the likelihood that out of all 12 planets, the final five were on the ships to make it out (can't remember which ship Tori was on, if not Galactica).

I have a feeling that all these questions would be explained by the show runners as "divine will." That's where it seemed nearly every resolution in the final hour came from.

The divine hand of the writer, in both Heroes Season 1 and BSG is pretty heavy. This is one of the places where Babylon 5 did a much better job. Sure there were big chunks of prophesy, but even those were (for the most part) explained.

The contrast is pretty stark. Londo literally forsaw his future, with the Shadow ships arriving on Centauri, and that's precisely how it came to be, albeit with some interesting twists. Conversely, in BSG we had the whole opera house foreshadowing business, which was nothing more than a metaphor.

At least it's at least somewhat clear that the BSG people knew where they were going and managed to get there -- something the Heroes people, or the Star Trek people, or god help us, the X-Files people, never really got right.

Yes, you ended up sort-of believing that a side-effect of the superpower mutation was to have the people subconsciously attracted to the same situations and locations, so their paths would cross disproportionately often. (And that this was a bit like the "the human species as one single organism subconsciously realises that it needs to renew itself and strike out in new directions" thing from Dune.) But that explanation for the coincidences did count against one of the authors' reveals, as

Peter

In general, I really liked the whole series of BSG. However, the place where it fell down for me is where the religion stuff turned out to be true. Okay, that's a little harsh, but I really liked the way the religious stuff was ambiguous in the earlier part of the series. The whole final episode relied on the fact that the religious aspects of the show were true. And that bothered me.

The first hour of the finale was certainly exciting, but, even then, it was largely based on the idea that they had to rescue Hera, and that was based on nothing more than the notion that she was the salvation of both the Cylon and Human races.

The coda of the series, where it's "revealed" that the story was an anti-technology metaphor -- well, that's just irritating, especially since the exact opposite theme had been advanced throughout the last couple of seasons.

Largely, though, this stuff didn't bother me during the actual viewing of the finale. What did bother me was the schmaltziness of the last hour. I felt like they were all going to have a group hug and sing "It's a Long Way To Tipperary". And the idea of thirty thousand people all universally being okay with throwing away all their technology was just stupid. As was the notion of spreading them out all over the world.

Of course, the one thing that bothered me the most is that there was no way that "All Along the Watchtower" could already have been written. That's the single most anti-suspension-of-disbelief thing I've ever experienced in a TV show ever, and there was apparently no point to it other than someone on the production staff liked the song.

All that said, the finale would have been much better if they had miraculously found New Earth and decided to settle and just completely left out the denouement and coda.

Leaving all sorts of ambiguous threads hanging, and avoiding all the stuff that annoyed both of us. I completely agree.

Well, I think the plot point was that they were trying to use Hera to figure out how to reproduce, which they had never done successfully, not how to regain resurrection technology. Cavil was apparently happy with either solution, though.

I think it really helped that Babylon 5 had the major points of the story all worked out prior to any filming ever occurring. The impression I get from the BSG behind the scenes articles is that the show wasn't ever fully fleshed out, and they just wrote it a chunk at a time. Probably explains the major plots left dangling at the end, and direction changes the show had during it's run.

Overall I liked BSG, but I don't see it having as much rewatchability as B5 has for me. It's still a series I plan on buying at some point though for my collection.

Yeah, in particular, I like how they had to retcon that Hotdog was the real father of Tyrol and Callie's kid so that there would be only one human/Cylon child. It felt to me like that, in particular, exposed that they didn't know Tyrol was going to be a Cylon and they didn't know that the human/Cylon offspring were going to be important.

(As an aside, it sure would be nice if they hadn't inexplicably used the term "hybrid" to refer to the Basestar controller Cylons, so that I could intelligibly and correctly refer to Hera as a hybrid.)

I view that as proof that Jimi Hendrix is god incarnate.

Except that he was covering Dylan.

Ok, I knew that (forgot). I used to have a Dylan and the Dead cassette that had a version of the song, too.

So Dylan, Jimi and Jerry are all gods.

Let's see. If Dylan is the Father, and Jimi is the Son, then that would make the Holy Ghost...

I really can't bring myself to put Jerry in that slot. John Lennon, perhaps?

Gods work in mysterious ways.