This is not our fate.

I never posted about the end of BSG because I didn't want to think about it. It was bad. Really bad. And I was just willing to forget about it and remember the earlier parts of the show that had been so great. But for some reason, with Lost starting back soon, I'm feeling compelled to post about why I hate Lost so much and it's weirdly tied up in my mind with the end of BSG, so I'm going to try to get this out first.

I know that I absolutely do not need to go into all the reasons that the finale sucked. TWoP breaks it down pretty well, as does io9. And for a more detailed breakdown of the suckage, the TWoP recap by Jacob is pretty brilliant. The parenthetical on page 17 is probably the best part.

So I'm not going to talk about the suck. I'm going to talk about the two parts that I actually liked.

One is the Kara and Lee flashback where they get drunk and almost have sex on the table at Kara and Zach's apartment paired with the flashback of the morning after where Lee tries to shoo a bird out of his apartment. It made me think about their relationship in a newish way. A way in which, for better or worse, I actually had to accept some of the divine plan/destiny stuff the last season was peddling. If you can accept the idea that whatever deity or deities might exist were specifically crafting a situation in which the humans and Cylons made it to a colonizable planet, then the fact that Kara and Lee's relationship was nothing but a long series of "near misses" actually seems purposeful rather than just superfluous relationship drama. Kara was created to lead the humans and Cylons to "Earth". Her crazy combination of parents and her horrible upbringing crafted that personality that made her a soldier who wanted direction but also a dreamer who was always searching for something, which basically combined to make her a pilot. And she had to be both parts because if she was just a soldier she wouldn't be searching, and if she was just searching, she would take off and never come back. She needed something that would keep her tied to humanity such that she would always come back and something that didn't satisfy her enough that she would stop moving forward. Hence Lee Adama. She ricocheted off of him in a way that made her fly off and find new paths and new answers, but she always brought the new stuff back to the fleet to keep leading them in the right direction. There are so many points where she could have left for good or stopped moving for good that would have prevented the fleet from ever getting to "Earth", but Lee was always around to inadvertently push her in the right direction. Even the love triangle between Lee, Kara, and Sam furthered their path towards Earth. If Kara had been able to settle with Lee she never would have found Sam. If Lee hadn't been around to screw up her marriage to Sam she probably wouldn't have flown off to her "death", where she found Earth. Anyway, maybe I just like the idea that their entire relationship wasn't pointless and was actually crucial in the salvation of human and Cylon-kind.

The other part I actually liked:



This one moment completely redeemed Gaius Baltar in my eyes. Throughout the entire series there were points where the show tried to convince us that the Baltar we were seeing was the actual, genuine Gaius. I hated those moments because I never thought they were earned. I never felt like I had any reason to believe that those moments were real, that Baltar wasn't just putting on another mask, playing whatever part was necessary to get him through the given situation. Particularly his sudden devout religiosity in the last season. It never seemed genuine to me. And this scene proved to me that I was right. After his years and years of piling bullshit upon bullshit to hide his emotions, it all fell away in that moment and there was the remnants of a real person under there.

So that's it. The two things I actually liked about the end of Battlestar Galactica. But the real reason I wanted to write this post was to say that the crappy ending doesn't matter. In the end, whether or not the conclusion was satisfying, or even made any sense, wasn't important. At least not to me. Because I cared about the world and I cared about the characters in it and that's why I enjoyed watching the series. All of the characters could've sprouted wings and flown away or decided on ritual group suicide in the end and it wouldn't have changed the fact that for several years I loved those people and I just wanted to see what they were doing, to know how they were feeling, to watch them be.

And that is how this post is actually about Lost.