tous et rien

During its run, BSG offered much that TV SF has never given us:

* Artificial minds in humanoid bodies who were emotional, sexual and religious.
* Getting a general audience to undertand the “humanity” of these machines.
* Stirring space battles with much better concepts of space than typically found on TV. Bullets and missiles, not force-rays.
* No bumpy-head aliens, no planet of the week, no cute time travel or alternate-reality-where-everybody-is-evil episodes.
* Dark stories of interesting characters.
* Multiple copies of the same being, beings programmed to think they were human, beings able to transfer their mind to a new body at the moment of death.
* A mystery about the origins of the society and its legends, and a mystery about a lost planet named Earth.
* A mystery about the origin of the Cylons and their reasons for their genocide.
* Daring use of concepts like suicide bombing and terrorism by the protagonists.
* Kick-ass leadership characters in Adama and Roslin who were complex, but neither over the top nor understated.
* Starbuck as a woman. Before she became a toy of god, at least.
* Baltar: One of the best TV villains ever, a self-centered slightly mad scientist who does evil without wishing to, manipulated by a strange vision in his head.
* Other superb characters, notably Tigh, Tyrol, Gaeta and Zarek.

But it all came to a far lesser end due to the following failures I will outline in too much detail:

* The confirmation/revelation of an intervening god as the driving force behind events
* The use of that god to resolve large numbers of major plot points
* A number of significant scientific mistakes on major plot points, including:
o Twisting the whole story to fit a completely wrong idea of what Mitochondrial Eve is
o To support that concept, an impossible-to-credit political shift among the characters
o The use of concepts from Intelligent Design to resolve plot issues.
o The introduction of the nonsense idea of “collective unconscious” to explain cultural similarities.
* The use of “big secrets” to dominate what was supposed to be a character-driven story
* Removing all connection to our reality by trying to build a poorly constructed one
* Mistakes, one of them major and never corrected, which misled the audience

And then I’ll explain the reason why the fall was so great — how, until the last moments, a few minor differences could have fixed most of the problems.

Dies ist nur ein klitzekleiner Vorgeschmack auf Brad Templetons Essay Battlestar’s „Daybreak:“ The worst ending in the history of on-screen science fiction. [via Framing Science]