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.

Confounded old Nicholas Gamgee! I’d lose my own head if it wasn’t bolted firmly to my neck, and remarkably handsome.

In my excitement to conclude my series of GDC09 write-ups, I forgot to actually revisit my abortive post from Day 4 of the conference.

As previously mentioned, Day 4 was quite eventful after the day’s talks, so I missed the opportunity for a recap; however, since my previous post was overly wordy, I’ll keep this recap to a minimum. The day started with a session of “GDC Microtalks,” in which ten speakers each took precisely six minutes each to rant about a particular topic. Great range of subject matter here. Then came “Game Studies Download 4.0,” a look at video games in academia, again covering some pretty broad topics. If I’m overly brief here, just look below for my full notes.

I rounded out the day in the “Experiemental Gameplay Sessions” workshop. Again, I won’t go into detail here, suffice it to say that, if you ever attend a future GDC, do whatever it takes to see this session. Some of the designs left me absolutely floored. So, for no other reason than expedience, here are my top three most memorable games of the bunch:

• “The Unfinished Swan,” by Ian Dallas. This game literally gave me chills. The mood is perfect, and the mechanic is powerful. I’ll be talking more about this game in a post or two.
  
• “Spy Party”, by Chris Hecker. Really seems to capture the intrigue, danger, and more importantly, subtelty in some of the more realistic spy stories…you know, the kind where the spy doesn’t advertise his presence by blowing up most of a city. Really fun to watch players compete in this one.
• “Today I Die,” by Daniel Benmergui. Simple, beautiful game melding poetry with gameplay. And the soundtrack is perfect.

And with that, I’ve completed my write-ups of every day at this year’s GDC. Furthermore, I just uploaded the collection of notes I took during each lecture/session; you can find them here. Some of them may be overly vague or confusing, but feel free to send me any questions you may have.

Finally, let us now observe the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that influenced this post’s title (see 1:21).

I can’t write up the full content of today.

It is currently 2:30am, and I wake up in 4.5 hours.

After a day of decent lectures, I went out. All I can say is that I ended up at the exclusive Microsoft party, chilling in a private booth with a Frag Doll, the CEO of Harmonix, and one of the writers on Futurama/The Simpsons.

Don’t ask questions, Nick. Keep your head down and keep running.

Continuing my assault on your senses, good taste, and conception of humour, I present to you this horrible contrivance.

I saw Religulous on Friday. Great movie, hilarious and more than a little creepy, if a bit preachy towards the end.

One of the central questions that Bill Maher asks is “Why is faith good?” Often enough (I’d imagine), the answer will be that faith is key to appreciating the beauty of life and the world. Allow me to post this video response:

Rationalists do it rigourously.