Clint Hocking recently wrote a great post on the problem of didacticism in game design; I enjoyed both the post itself and a number of the subsequent responses (even got one of my own in there). One commenter brought up the issue of non-essential NPCs in Clint’s Far Cry 2, and their (the player’s) own emotional and moral hesitation at the possibility of killing those NPCs. I was rather satisfied with my response to that comment: it was something I’d been meaning to discuss for a while anyway, and so I reproduce it here (with slight modifications).

Just to play devil’s advocate: I could argue that precisely *because* many of the kill opportunities in FC2 are “not necessary to the mission or story,” they become meaningless and bereft of moralising impact.

I keep coming back to Randy Smith’s MIGS talk, primarily because it perfectly articulated so many ideas that have been nagging me for ages. He spoke of the conflict of interest between Player Goals and Character Goals: what might be a morally devastating decision for a game character is actually a completely trivial gameplay decision for the player—e.g., “Do I murder my wife or my best friend? Well, my best friend gives a perma-buff to health and mana, doubles my inventory slots, and packs a rocket launcher; my wife provides nothing and only carries a wildly inaccurate pistol. And so goodnight, my dearest, and God bless.”

I don’t think a game player is ever *not* aware that they’re playing a game, that they’re trying to *beat* a game, and that all the elements *within* the game are simply there to either hinder or advance that game. For players like that—like me, I guess—”useless” NPCs are then reduced to simple art assets somewhere on the game disc, that do nothing to advance or detract from the story, or the mission. And this is regardless of the detail of their physical 3D model, or how deep their background story/dialogue tree may be. I shot most of the useless NPCs without hesitation because I was bored and wanted to see the ragdoll engine at work. That, and—judging by a few instances—anyone I left behind had the potential to pull a gun out of nowhere and shoot me in the back. I was better safe than sorry, and so murder was a matter of no consequence.

I don’t mean to sound snippy of course, or to imply that I didn’t enjoy FC2 thoroughly. It’s just that I felt the supposed “morality” of dealing with “useless” NPCs wasn’t really reflected in the gameplay in any way.

What *did* deeply affect me was the first time I lost a partner. I did everything within my power *inside the game’s rules* to undo that loss: repeated re-tries, attempts at Rambo-style wild destruction, attempts at more defensive play, attempts at playing bodyguard. Nothing worked, and in the end the final gunshot of the mercy-kill felt like a huge “Fuck you” from the game world, and a huge failure on my part. There was serious Achilles-mourning-Patroclus rage after that one. Not because I was projecting humanity on an arbitrarily-designed art asset, but because the game itself had conspired to rob me of a highly beneficial resource in which I’d invested quite a bit of time.

Which leads me to…

THEOREM
If an art asset is useless to the player, only a select few will feel emotionally invested or morally affected by it. If it is intrinsically linked to the player’s goals, its behaviour and treatment will be more deeply affecting.¹

Obviously, the examples I gave above were somewhat extreme, and anyone justifying actions like that in real life would—rightfully so—be deemed psychopathic. But games are meant to be played, and while I’ll never say a videogame can’t be emotionally- or morally-affecting, I don’t think this has or can or will be done by having clichéd and tired old tropes being enacted on characters or objects of no consequence to the player.

The dream began in Rohan.

King Théoden dead, Éomer and I—his sister Éowyn—solemnly attending his funeral. Within a sanctum hewn from the rock (with perfectly smooth and rectilinear walls of silver), we bore his noble, potato sack-wrapped body to his tomb. Tears streamed down my face. “Bring forth his sword, that he should be clad in splendour even in death,” called the Elven guard. I wasn’t entirely sure why his sword was a Civil War cavalry saber, but we put it alongside the corpse.

“Why the fuck are there pterodactyls in Rohan?” asked Éomer, and indeed, looking up, I could see the great beast circling above, crying the sorrowful cry of the pterodactyl, mourning our common loss. It looked a lot like Mothrakk, though it wasn’t bombing us with fire.

Then the slivery walls of the sanctum melted away and there, on the barren Arctic ice fields, began the shark chase. A single, massive, malevolent shark stalked us, sporadically breaching the ice and swallowing members of our Hawaiian tour group whole. His cold dead eyes watched us as he passed, his sickly white flank the length of a full city block. Watching the great beast, I tripped in my flight, and fell, and knew that I was doomed. But looking up, I saw an apparition: Kevin Bacon walking towards me, across the frigid waters.

“How…how are you walking on water?” I asked.

“Do you doubt the will of Kevin Bacon?” countered Kevin Bacon.

Actually, he was just walking on a shallow puddle, but the illusion was convincing. And with a wink, Kevin Bacon ran into the sunset, distracting the great shark so that I might live. I took refuge in the half-submerged ruins of an ancient civilization—had they been a sea-faring race, or were they simply victims of continental drift? Regardless, to my horror, I soon realised that my shelter was in fact the spawning grounds of the great sharks, and I was surrounded by female specimens of the species, smaller but no less aggressive than their male counterparts. Teeth gnashed, the sea boiled, the predators circled ever closer. I was frozen with hypothermia and terror. But I could end this nightmare, I knew. I had only to disconnect from this Avatar—which would subsequently be torn apart, of course; a great financial loss—and I would wake up elsewhere, away from this cursed place. I calmed myself and attempted to disconnect…

40 years later, a research expedition was gathering to investigate the disappearance of the Avatar, and of Kevin Bacon. They set out, their pack mules burdened with scientific gear, finally arriving at their first port of call: a Vulcan temple in the middle of Central Park. The expedition’s lead researcher, Neil deGrasse Tyson, pored over several recently-excavated artifacts, including a strange tomb covered in ancient Chinese writings and ideograms. He noted a particular design, three circles encompassing various writings—two circles set inside a deeply-cut rectangle, the other without. Pointing out the design to his scholars, he asked them for a translation. This is what they gave him:

“You are quiet and mathematical.”

The moral of the story is that taking Buckley’s right before bed is probably the best idea I’ve had this year.

[edit] Oh dear Sagan. **SPOILER** alert, ‘–verbose’ alert. [/edit]

I last wrote about Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2 (CoD4MW2) in regards to the controversial “No Russian” mission, and my own reaction to it (everyone is obliged to have an opinion and voice it, apparently). Allow me to continue nitpicking what is nevertheless a solid piece of game.

In the comments section of that last post, my good friend Matthew pointed out the striking absence of civilians in the “Wolverines!” mission, and the dissonant chord it struck during his playthrough (read his comment and the post he links to). Which is a valid opinion to have, even though it’s provably wrong. Or, rather, it didn’t occur to me at the time, and I am thus moderately embarrassed. But, as the neo-conservatives have taught me, when someone points out something you missed, the only reaction is to start shouting louder. Actually, his comment got me thinking about a few other confusing design decisions in the game, the most astronomical of which was astronomical.

In the “Second Sun” mission, in one of the more disorienting inter-character cuts, the player suddenly takes on the role of an astronaut on the International Space Station. I say “on” the ISS, though in fact the astronaut is apparently in the midst of an EVA and is tasked, essentially, with turning slightly to the right to catch a glimpse of a nuclear missile launch (moderate spoiler). Now, right off the bat, there’s the fact that satellite intel throughout the game seems to have millimetre resolution, but when it comes to getting images of nuclear missile launches, NORAD has to dial up Astronaut Joe and ask him to tilt his head. But hey, if Infinity Ward wants to go to the next level and throw in a space mission—however briefly—I’m all for it. It’s just that I’m slightly disappointed they would do such a piss-poor job of rendering space. Odd that a triple-A title with some of the most phenomenal graphical detail to date has trouble rendering nothing.

That image can serve as Exhibit A (there’s also this video which contains somewhat more in the way of spoilers and things blowing up). Let’s make like Dr. Phil and break it down.

Light Pollution
Okay, I’ll admit that at first, I wasn’t absolutely positive whether or not, from space, one could actually make out dense networks of city lights as shown in the image. Sure, more sensitive satellite equipment can put together fancy mosaics, but would the same patterns be visible to the human eye? A few quick videos from the actual ISS itself answered that one: seems that our cities are quite visible, and CoD4MW2 got at least that part right. False positive.

Milky Sneeze
That purplish glow to the right of the image? Either half of the Milky Way has disappeared, and the remaining half has increased in brightness about a thousand-fold; or the Solar System has been suddenly and violently flung into a distant nebula. There is a bright, purple, horribly low-res vomit stain across a full quadrant of the sky, so yes, Houston, there’s a smegging problem. I may have actually laughed when I saw it. I don’t think this was the intended reaction.

Oh, and if you look closely, you can see that this…thing…is actually illuminating the dark side of the Earth. Who exactly put that glLight() there? Yes, the Milky Way, in its full extent, is marvelous. It is not terrifying, nor is it purple.

Calvin’s Cosmos
At first, jumping into this scene, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Not because of the sudden, unexpected jump in perspective from a US Army Ranger to an orbiting astronaut, but rather because I just couldn’t believe the developers were trying to pass this off as outer space. I have never been more aware of a videogame’s skybox than here. The “space” textures, as mentioned above, are pathetically low-res. The seams are practically visible. The infinite black of space is rather a raver’s deep blue. I felt as though I was inside Calvin’s time-traveling box, flipped over and hastily painted on the inside. I like my outer space scenes to give an overwhelming sense of vastness. Being inside an obvious box does not do this. You’d think with all the graphical power at the developers’ disposal—the stuff that renders intense firefights and countless, highly-detailed moving objects—they could render a sphere (the Earth) and a static model (the ISS), and have enough CPU time left over to do something…anything…interesting with the depths of space. Celestial star positions are freely-available—believe me, I know—so why bother with a low-res skybox at all? Faugh.

EMP-athy
The existence of nuclear bomb-initiated electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) has been postulated and observed since at least 1945, though I credit GoldenEye with popularising the concept more recently. Now, I’m no expert when it comes to Earth’s magnetosphere, nuclear detonations, or electromagnetic interactions in general, so my feelings regarding the aforementioned nuclear blast and subsequent EMP are gut feelings at best, backed up by about 20 minutes of internets research. But lets walk through a few salient points.

Staggered power grid knockout. After the nuke is detonated, the player witnesses large segments of the Eastern seaboard’s power grid going dark, in a staggered procession emanating roughly circularly from ground zero (Washington, D.C.). My initial thoughts were that an EMP would travel at (or near enough to) the speed of light, so that all power grids within range would fail simultaneously, rather than with a visible delay. However, it seems there are several components to a nuclear EMP. The “E1″ component does indeed travel at relativistic speeds, and is capable of overloading electrical circuits. In addition, though, there is a slower-moving “E3″ component which bears similarities to solar-based geomagnetic storms, such as the one that disrupted the Quebec power grid in March 1989 (not the last time our lengthy transmission lines caused a few problems). Given that the E3 component can last “tens to hundreds of seconds,” and seems to be more directly associated with power grid failure, it is possible that Infinity Ward got this one right as well, and that power loss would indeed expand sequentially. But as there’s a distinct difference between the duration of a component and its actual speed, and since I really have no idea which of the E1 or E3 components would actually disrupt our electricity, I think the jury is still out on this one.

Blast radius. In 1962, the United States conducted a high-altitude EMP test code-named Starfish Prime. A warhead was detonated 400km over the Pacific Ocean. Immediately afterwards in Hawaii, 1445km away from ground zero, hundreds of streetlights shorted out, television sets malfunctioned, radio communications were disrupted (this can apparently mean only one thing—invasion!), and burglar alarms were set off. Let’s qualify this as “moderate” damage: not trivial, but certainly nowhere near total grid failure. In CoD4MW2, the warhead is detonated over Washington, D.C., and power outages seem to extend far enough South to affect videogame studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. A handy Google Maps Distance Calculator pegs this distance at approximately 850km. Now, the intensity and spread of an EMP’s effects depend on a number of factors, including altitude of detonation, total yield, the local topology of Earth’s magnetic field, and so on. However, if we wave our hands a lot and assume the Washington EMP was similar to the Starfish Prime event, and that total power grid failure is an order of magnitude greater than the effects experienced in Hawaii in 1962, we can very tentatively assume that “extreme” effects such as grid failure would extend a shorter distance than the full 1445km—say, the 850km or so shown in the game—and that beyond that, equipment would sustain only moderate to trivial EMP damage (e.g., fewer lights going out). So, with a lot of ifs and assumptions, we can say that the extent of the EMP damage as shown in CoD4MW2 seems plausible. Incidentally, the same distance calculator pegs Montreal at 785km from Washington, D.C., so it looks like we, too, would lose power. Again.

Literally collateral damage. Moments after witnessing the nuclear blast, the player/astronaut and the ISS are caught in the destructive shockwave of the explosion, and, well, things go bad. Now, shockwaves require a substance in which to travel—fancy the notion! The ISS, as any fool can tell you, orbits at a mean altitude of 341km, which places it smack-dab in the middle of the thermosphere. The thermosphere is so-called because, due to the absorption of solar radiation, temperatures can soar to 2500 degrees Celcius. But importantly, “[even] though the temperature is so high, one would not feel warm in the thermosphere, because it is so near vacuum that there is not enough contact with the few atoms of gas to transfer much heat” (emphasis mine). Vacuum. Nada. Zilch. There is nothing through which a shockwave could travel, however dissipated—Astronaut Joe wouldn’t feel so much as a light breeze, much less a whirlwind that could rip apart a space station. We gave up on the idea of a cosmic æther centuries ago. And while EMP tests such as Starfish Prime did knock out or otherwise impact other satellites, these were either in the immediate vicinity of the blasts, or subsequently passed through the lingering atmospheric radiation. But developing radiation sickness doesn’t play out nearly so dramatically (or so quickly) as a full-out rock ‘n rolling nuclear shockwave.

Spatial Geometry
The problem of altitude comes up again when looking at the apparent size of the Earth as seen by Astronaut Joe. I had been under the impression that, from the ISS, the Earth takes up a massive portion of the sky/viewing sphere; in the game, however, this felt much reduced. Luckily, some kooky little ancient Greek by the name of Pythagoras Triggs went and invented trigonometry for exactly this sort of situation.

Oh yes, there’s math to be done. Pregnant women and the elderly should leave the room now. Everyone else, please brace yourselves and stand away from your monitors: I’m going to try science.

Brilliant science people have previously worked out the (more exact, apparently) formula for the distance to a point on the horizon based on altitude. Referring to the drawing above, all we need to know is R (the radius of the body in question) and h (the altitude of the observer’s eye). The distance to the horizon, d, is then defined as follows:

d = sqrt(h*h + 2Rh)    (1)

I’ve used the mean value of 6371.0km for Earth’s radius (R), and the aforementioned altitude of 341km for Astronaut Joe’s viewing altitude (h), since he seems to be close enough to the ISS to make the difference negligible. Plugging these values into Equation 1 gives us a distance d of 2112.2km. This is all well and good, you say, but what does it tell us about the apparent visual size of the Earth? It tells us all we need, I respond confidently and full of aplomb. Note the angles alpha and theta in the diagram (written ‘a’ and ‘t’, respectively). Together, they make up a right angle of 90 degrees. Twice alpha gives the full angular size of the observed celestial body; or to put it another way, theta is the angle of depression between looking straight “ahead” and looking at the limb of the planet.

What’s more, as you’ve probably already guessed/observed, we can calculate alpha easily! d is adjacent to alpha in a right-angled triangle, and R is likewise the side opposite alpha¹. In trigonometric terms:

tan(alpha) = R / d
alpha = atan(R / d)    (2)

And just like that, we can immediately calculate alpha to be 71.7 degrees. In other words, the angular width of the Earth as seen from the ISS is 143.4 degrees, only a little bit shy of your entire field of vision in one direction (180 degrees); you can also imagine staring straight ahead and tilting your head downwards (depression angle theta) by 18.3 degrees—the resulting (very large) circle would describe the horizon of the Earth as you would see it. Compare that to the images in CoD4MW2, and you can understand the confusion: the Earth as rendered in-game seems far more distant than it should.

Of course, we can do the reverse calculation: if we assume that the angle of depression theta as shown in the game is roughly 45 degrees (which I think is fair), and since the Earth’s radius R is obviously a constant¹, we can determine how high the ISS would have to be (that is, solve for h) in order to provide Astronaut Joe with the vantage point he apparently had. The derivation of the formula is left as an exercise to the reader, but to spare you the suspense, I will say that the ISS would have to be orbiting at an approximate altitude of 2639.0km. This is a far cry from achieving geostationary orbit, which requires an altitude of 35,786km, but it is nevertheless over 7.5 times higher than the ISS needs to be.

I appreciate the effort to put a memorable, distinctive space scene into a blockbuster piece of entertainment, but for a series that prides itself on gritty realism, the all-too-brief visit to outer space falls well short of the mark. Is it too much to ask for scientific accuracy in our media? Failing that, how about a little basic physical believability? Or heck, failing that, can you at least make the infinitely vast cosmic dark look less like the inside of a painted box?

Missile-aneous
Far above—too far—I mentioned a few videos taken from the ISS, which showed patterns of urban light visible on the dark side of the Earth. I want you to take 6 minutes and watch this video. It is mind-blowing, beautiful, and hypnotic. Just incredible stuff.

And one last thing. For all the controversy sparked by the “No Russian” mission; for all the acclaim heaped on the game, its production values, and its phenomenal multi-player; for all the sales records easily broken; in short, for all the hype, hyperbole, and general insanity and gossip surrounding the game, CoD4MW2 does something else very special, which no one else seems to have noticed or appreciated. When I start the game, at the first sign of anything on-screen (the Infinity Ward logo), I can press the Start button twice to get to the game itself (one more time to get to the main menu)—immediately. It has been years since I’ve been able to jump into a game as quickly as this one. No barrage of producer/developer/third-party logos (each with their own tiresome cinematic), no illegible lists of licensed APIs or incomprehensible copyright notices. Within a second of hitting “On,” I am actually able to play the game. That is huge. Just one more reason—despite my nitpicking—to take my hat off to these developers.

PS: Science!

I just finished playing through a game that I think is really neat, but you may not have heard of. It’s called Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 2, and it’s about ice climbing.

I was actually being facetious! Ha! Odds are in fact favourable that you have heard of CoD4MW2 (look, the game’s bloody acronym is CoD4MW2 and I refuse to abbreviate it and will instead write CoD4MW2 in full, every time). CoD4MW2, as you may know, expands on traditional ice climbing gameplay, adding first-person shooter elements and a mature storyline reflecting teamwork, submarines, and the ennui of the modern airport terminal.

The big hullabaloo about CoD4MW2 (aside from its being a record-breaker) was the “No Russian” mission, in which you, a CIA agent that has infiltrated into a terrorist’s inner circle, join the latter in gunning down civilians in a busy Russian airport (the preceding was a spoiler).

A number of people seem to have Very Important Opinions about the level, holding it up as final, incontrovertible proof that videogames have reached the imbecilic, blood-thirsty lows of maenadic carnage¹; or instead that they have reached the ultimate peak of cultural sophistication, being this medium’s Moby-Dick and Gilgamesh and Star Wars, all rolled into one very long tube. I myself probably have opinions as well, though I tend to find the current discussion horribly melodramatic and prepossessed of an overabundance of verbiage (“Slowly, so slowly, I turned to see the pained visage of my fellow Russian airport resident—a face strained with horror reflective of my own—as I explored the game’s mechanic of not letting me run (No Rushin’, indeed), and knew that the peak of interactivity had come as I woefully, so woefully pulled the trigger.”)

So, moving along, I think much of the fuss over the level is somewhat silly (though imagine the furor if they’d included a Hot Coffee mod—outrageous!), and as I am something of a positivist, let me instead just comment on the level’s effect. In a word which has never before been used in the “No Russian” discussion, it is disturbing. But then, it was meant to be. Everything is designed to draw a very visceral reaction from the player: actors were mo-capped crawling away on their hands and knees, and are rendered trailing blood; the music (which I loved) is minimal and unsettling; the pace is deadly and deliberate. The words “designed” and “deliberate” both start with the letter D, and the duo describe why I don’t deem “No Russian” to be the most disturbing level of the game. The intent of the developers is clear: this terrorist guy is a Bad Dude, and he does Bad Things That Shock You. Hey, it works. The level is memorable. Makarov is no good. Point taken.

For me, however—because I’m interesting like that—”No Russian” isn’t the most affecting level of CoD4MW2. That honour goes to “Wolverines!”, two missions after “No Russian.” In “Wolverines!”, Russian forces retaliate for the previous terrorist attack, and begin an invasion on the United States’ eastern seaboard (that’s another spoiler). The level begins in the midst of a full-blown Russian attack in typical American suburbia. And therein lies the fun. I believe I once heard Stephen Spielberg describe the best settings for horror as being set amongst the familiar, and that was the first thing to come to mind while playing this mission. Fighting off waves of invaders against a backdrop of smoke, fire, and anti-aircraft guns can feel claustrophobic all on its own, but it’s all the more terrifying when it’s in “our” backyard; when you’re running past the family patio or someone’s barbecue. “Wolverines!” is one of the great examples of “Situation Normal All F***ed Up,” and it works because it takes all the subtle cues of “home” and “safety,” and then shoots them right to hell.

While volunteering at MIGS ‘09, I attended a talk by Randy Smith about making games that aren’t necessarily “light-hearted” or “fun” to play. At one point, he paraphrased a movie critic² who claimed that writers using a character’s death to provoke a reaction were betraying the audience’s trust—that it was “too easy” to do so, given that audiences are guaranteed to take death emotionally. I feel rather the same way about “No Russian”—it was designed from start to finish to make the player uncomfortable, and is therefore entirely lacking in subtlety (though I admit subtlety may not have been exactly what they were going for). On the other hand, “Wolverines!” goes the opposite direction, taking the standard adrenaline-pumping shooter formula and giving it a deeply insidious turn by setting it in our backyards. “No Russian” will stand as the memorable mission from CoD4MW2, but to my mind, “Wolverines!” takes a much less overt approach (perhaps even subconscious), and the terror induced is therefore many times greater.

Hm? Oh, right. CoD4MW2 is an excellent game in single-player, full of exciting set-pieces, novel gameplay, and impressive polish. Now to find some time to play through the multiplayer, which has apparently done a few things right. Luckily, I’m already a frakking marksman online.

I finally watched the series finale of Battlestar Galactica last night. I was only about nine months late—fitting, I guess, since I joined the series late too, thinking that it would be a short-lived cash-grab riding the wave of a nostalgic trip back to the late 70’s, as TV and movie execs are wont to do. But it turned out alright, and so, having just wrapped it up, I figured I’m entitled to rant.

Spoilers below, evidently.

BSG built itself on tension and paranoia—anyone could be a cylon, anyone could drop at any moment. Season one played that up perfectly. Actually, pretty much every one of the cliffhangers throughout the series had me on the edge of my seat for that exact reason: the humans were playing for all the cards, anything could happen, and when it did, it tended to be spectacular.

Then they went and revealed seven cylons before the series was half over.

Suddenly, the tight cat-and-mouse game the two fleets were playing (where your mouse buddy could very well be a gods-damn frakking toaster mouse) became more of an interminable bumble about the galaxy with the humans and cylons occasionally thumbing their noses at each other, but generally sticking to their own and playing pointless political games and sleeping with just about anyone not yet airlocked.

Hey, I like political intrigue, but there’s only so many times I can watch the Quorum get in an uproar over grain taxes, be ignored, to general outcries and rhubarbing within the fleet, to be finally brought to order by Lee’s wide chin refusing to do anything but the right (democratic) thing, which means pretty much rolling the credits and ignoring the issue the following week. I see this every time Quebec threatens a tuition hike.

And there’s only so many love triangles/heptagons I can keep track of. Woody Allen is a master of handling infidelity (erm, well, in his movies); his characters go through believable and consistent arcs as they become involved in numerous relationships. Complexity comes as a result of every character’s nuanced behaviour, and the webs of misunderstanding and dishonesty that they produce. In BSG, relationships are complex because everyone has sex with everyone else all of the time, apparently (survivor tally in Daybreak, Pt. I is 39,516; 39,516 choose 2 = 780,737,370 possible pairings, if we allow for Gaeda to be Gayda &c). At a certain point I just started accepting these things. Tigh and Caprica 6 were having a baby before I knew they were romantically involved. Wait, what?

I often impersonate Old Man Bill Adama. I slowly take off my glasses, work some phlegm into my throat, and grumble that “somewhere along the line, we lost our way,” a quote that I’m fairly certain he uses at least three times during the show. And how very à propos it is. Somewhere near the beginning or middle of season two, perhaps, with the lion’s share of cylons revealed, a very positive critical reception, and nothing to do but delay the final dash for Earth until the show became unprofitable, the writers lost their way. Partial, inconsequential storylines confused the narrative, characters spent their time boxing or drinking or reminiscing about flashbacks introduced for the sake of a single episode, and in terms of tension and compelling drama, the series was bleeding out.

Not to say it didn’t have its fair share of mind-blowing episodes. The confrontation with Pegasus, and the rescue on New Caprica were fully and truly epic—the latter stands as the best episode of the series, without question. But the killer was outmuched by filler, as the writers dilly-dallied their way through the endless stream of positive reviews before getting (I assume) blindsided with a termination date.

In short, I felt the denouement of the series reeked of writers trying to grapple with a tangled mess of narrative thread that they’d inadvertently spun themselves over the course of three years of unattended screenwriter binging. What was once a show being hailed for “gritty realism”—yes, it had FTL and humanoid robots but we’re talking “believability” here—suddenly became overwhelmed by angels and God’s Will and cycles and “flashbacks” presented to retroactively explain away everyone’s abrupt stepping out of character.

The opera house vision is my favourite example. Here’s something that directly tied together four main characters: Roslyn, Athena, Caprica 6, and Baltar. The way it had been built up over several episodes (an entire season, even?), I assumed that these four would together have a direct impact on a key, decisive event in the final push to Earth. Instead, Roslyn and Athena are effectively useless (“Oops, Hera went behind a door, where is she now? Derp derp.”) and the climactic scene in the operahouse/CIC is just a delaying tactic so that a number of completely unrelated accidents can conveniently wipe out about a half dozen dangling storylines. Honestly, once again: You go through such great lengths to make the audience believe in angels and God’s Plan and the supernatural, and then the seemingly most important symbolic element affecting four major characters suddenly has nothing to do with two of the latter, and brings together a handful of characters for a cascade of happenstance “oops!” moments. The chain of events seems flimsy at best. God’s Plan is to have a corpsified Racetrack touch off the (apparently quite sensitive) nuke trigger because of a fluke asteroid collision?

God has shitty plans.

Bizarre coincidence works when Henry Jones wrestles a Nazi, a gun goes off, and it ricochets and kills a tank driver, who turns the tank, which saves Indiana Jones, dangling from the side of said tank. It works, but even then just barely.

It does not work when God’s Plan is to wait for four seasons for Racetrack to get iced by a space rock and float about until the nukes go off so that Starbuck can piece together a puzzle that was introduced for no reason in the last two episodes by her Angel dad. Yes, “God works in mysterious ways,” but only cylons and religious colonial nuts believe that. To me, it stinks of a hurried salvage job.

Babylon 5 was written with a specific beginning, middle, and end in mind. The arc was written before the show even began. BSG, however, promised a great cylon plan from day one, then threw it out the window and scrambled to pick up the pieces in the last half-season, or scatter them and hope no one noticed.

So the cylons “have a plan” from Day One: that plan, apparently, is to become mortal (resurrection died with Tory), bitterly divided by civil war, and scattered, so that a handful of humans can land on Earth and try to integrate with pre-language homonids, hopefully without teaching them about robots and ray-guns. That sounds more like a human plan, or at least something for them. But no actually, forget about the cylon plan, it’s really God’s Plan, and if it’s not a bloody improvised piece of guesswork and happenstance, you could have fooled me.

Ugh.

Now, the gold standard (not my gold standard; the gold standard) for series finales is clearly Star Trek: The Next Generation. It stayed true to the spirit of the series, tied all seven seasons together, balanced thrilling action with honest characters and even philosophical reflection, and offered a beautiful sendoff. And at the same time, they managed to make an anomaly consisting of “anti-time” traveling backwards through history to the dawn of man seem more plausible than BSG’s magical Angels in the Outfield. Both, of course, were written (or co-written) by Ron Moore. What was the difference? I postulate that the writers of ST:TNG had a much clearer sense of purpose in their show and in their characters. Maybe the rigourousness of the Star Trek fanboys kept them more conscious of the rules of the universe they were populating. Design documents (even informal ones) do spell out a clear vision to be followed over the course of a project, from sculpture to software engineering to urban planning to advertising, and even to TV shows. Losing sight of that vision almost inevitably sends a project out of control, to be patched up mostly haphazardly, and always at the detriment of the original beauty of the thing.

Somewhere along the line, the BSG writers lost their way, and the finale suffered for it.

So, now to assign arbitrary numerical rankings. Let us posit a magical line from Zero to Ten indicative of Goodness of Series Finale. Zero on this scale corresponds to Seinfeld; Ten corresponds to Star Trek: The Next Generation. By the power vested in me by the internet, I rank the series finale of Battlestar Galactica a 6 on 10. I enjoyed it more than I disliked it—and obviously much more than the huge rant above would lead one to believe. I am relatively happy with the ending of (almost) every character, and to be fair, the writers and cast and crew did a good job in concluding the show. But unfortunately, a huge part of the drama was hamstrung by a lack of direction through the bulk of the series, and the very flimsy attempts to patch it up.

Oh, and I still don’t understand why the Old Man drowned a baby in Season One.

Ah, hell. This rant is more vitriolic than originally intended, and you can chalk that up to two-and-a-half to three seasons of some confusion coming out all at once (and past midnight, at that). I sniff my nose at writers getting out of hand, but they still put together some damn fine television. Maybe I’m just upset that the one show I was following fairly regularly didn’t maintain the awesomeness of season one through three more years. That may have been a lot to ask. Despite the wavering, it was enjoyable. It may have been bumpy, but it was a helluva ride.

TIGH: She was a grand old lady.
ADAMA: The grandest.