I loved it. Poetic. I was afraid the finale would be too “didactic”. Sure, it can’t be perfect for everyone, I would like to have one or another small detail changed, but then again that is always like that. I can hardly wait to rewatch it back to back in a few years, on a huge HD TV to make it justice (I watched the whole series in this little tube TV…)
I will miss so much this show. It has been such a wonderful journey.
After a craaaapy night’s sleep - here are some random thoughts:
There was no way to wrap up this storyline - which largely was made up as they went along - without leaving holes large enough to drive trucks through. Melville got it right in Moby Dick. Want a tight finish - kill off all save one. But so what? The resolution was well thought out and brilliantly executed. Having said that:
So, who were The Lords of Kobol? Well, RDM gave an answer - although I am not sure that it was intentional. To prehistoirc men, the survivors are going to seem pretty “godlilke”.
That jealous god issue - no answer.
So all the bad Cylons are dead right? Racetrack’s dead hand took care of them, right?
The Mitochondrial Eve skeleton was of a “young girl”. If it is Hera’s (why do we “know” that again?) - she did not live a long life and appears to have died too young to have born children. So put that one in your pipe and smoke it re the BIG story line.
The good S7s that are on Earth - do we now know that they “age” and die? Or is that just one of those truck sized holes?
Now why was there such comfort with letting the good Toasters go? They won’t try to build humanoid Cylons because they don’t have any humans to experiment with? They just are going to groove on Dylan music in some far off corner of thee galaxy - where I guess they still are.
The creatures the survivors saw on Earth are supposed to be homo sapiens - right? And we are descended from whom/what exactly?
Even if they have left all their tech behind the survivors have not left their knowledge. Like of anatomy, medicine, weather, astronomy, writing, art, music, etc. So how come we know from our own history all that appears to get erased? How can injecting 40,000 “modern” humans into a primitive society not fundamentally change “our” history - unless they mostly get wiped out? Answer - it cannot. So don’t fret about it.
I’ll always wonder about “the other side”, he/it who does not like to be called “god”, and how Head 6 and Head Baltar differ from Starbuck 2.
I could drone on, but I’m cutting myself off at 10.
And, ya know, how much else on TV would make you think this hard?
Love it or hate it, BSG made you think.
In line with that idea, here’s the stream of thoughts that kept me up to 3AM last night (new to the forums so please excuse the “wall of text” for my inaugural post :)):
Overall, I think RDM & Co. did about as fine a job as any serialized science fiction series ever has at bringing everything to a satisfying conclusion. Two things stick in my mind as substantial problems big enough to pull me out of my fuzzy glow, though.
Hera as “mitochondrial Eve” and the colonists as seeds of civilization. Someone should have brought a biologist and an archaeologist in to consult on this finale reveal becuase there is a schizophrenia here that just doesn’t work without invalidating one or the other premise, and maybe both (I am a biologist so I figure I can quip with some knowledge of at least half the problem). The mitochondrial Eve theory works because you have a point origin for Homo sapiens. At some period in our particular species’ lineage, a population bottleneck of such severity occurred that, as best we can tell, every human living today sprang from this small group of (proto) humans with a common maternal lineage. The problem here comes in if we are to accept the implication (that the show all but hits us over the head with) that this mitochondrial Eve is literally Hera. The key problem is obvious: if we accept that Hera is mitochondrial Eve, this means that within a few generations of the colonists’ arrival on ancient Earth that there isn’t one living female who can’t trace a direct line back to Hera. The tribal humans they discovered? Gone. The roughly 19,000 surviving females from the colonies and their daughters? Gone. Remember, it’s a severe population bottleneck that created mitochondrial Eve, as in something so reduced the numbers of early humans (or early ancestors of humans) that not one lineage not traceable back to a common maternal ancestor survived after this bottleneck. This creates a mutually exclusive dichotomy: either Hera is not, in spite of the show’s very strong implication, literally mitochondrial Eve, or the colonials are not, in spite of the show’s almost equally strong implication, the seeds of ancient civilizations and peoples.
Both premises cannot be true. You can’t have humans going to what will become ancient Asia and Australia in addition to Africa and still wind up with Hera as the mitochondrial Eve without some harsh implications. Long distance travel would have stopped within a few years after their arrival, if even that long, once whatever fuel they had with their handful of raptors was exhausted. That means no gene flow between these regions. No gene flow means one of two things, either both the Asia and Australia colonizations were complete failures in the short term, or descendents from Hera’s lineage eventually migrated out of Africa and utterly exterminated the descendents of these other two colonial seedings (not a very constructive way of breaking the cycle). Now, since RDM is, once again, late with the podcast, perhaps he did intend the former explanation, that only the Africa colonial seeding took, but even that holds the harsh implication that out of the ten to fifteen thousand colonials who went to ancient Africa, never mind the already existing humans that were living there, that only the line of Hera survived to modern day through what can only be considered an even worse series of circumstances than what brought the colonials to our Earth in the first place. If we are to believe that Hera is the literal mitochondrial Eve, that means their plan to start over doesn’t exactly work and the majority of the colonials and their descendents, along with the humans that evolved naturally on our Earth, all get wiped out in short order after the colonials arrive. That may indeed be what RDM & Co. intended, but, if so, it’s a very, very dark scenario filled with a lot of suffering and genocide and not at all the optimistic clean slate the dialogue implies.
Admittedly, we do know our own history, and perhaps their optimism for a clean slate to break the cycle quickly dissipated by unimaginable death and despair over the next half century is exactly what the show creators intended. However, there is another set of possibilities that are suggested because the Hera as literal mitochondrial Eve mechanic has more than a few inherent weaknesses and/or loopholes. Mitochondria possess their own genome, are inherited directly from our mothers, and change very slowly relative to human genomic DNA; hence, the whole concept of being able to trace human lineages back to a mitochondrial Eve in the first place. The most obvious thing that comes to mind is that the odds are that all of the cylons possess genomically identical mitochondria. Creation of a functioning synthetic cell is not a trivial exercise, it’s certainly far outside our current technology. It is probable that all of the cylon “skinjobs”, and maybe all of the bio-organic Cylon elements, would have been derived from a common synthetic cell line. If so, then all of the remaining Six and Eight models had the potential to replicate the success of Helo and Sharon with surviving male colonials and Earth evolved tribal males (not to mention that Helo and Sharon might have provided Hera with sister “Eves”). The pairing of Baltar and Caprica, finally correct in its equation of love and respect, is an obvious example in the storyline that might have given rise to more cylon-human hybrids. In this scenario, Hera is merely the figurehead for the mitochondrial Eve since all male human-female cylon pairings would have an identical mitochondrial genotype (at the very least, all children from other Eights would). Under these circumstances, it is the hybrid vigor resulting from the combination of both naturally evolved and synthetic human genomes that could survive on ancient Earth to the exclusion of all other homonid lineages. So, while the mitochondrial lineages of the female colonials and native Earth humans may indeed have been competed out of existence in short order, it’s not quite the doom and gloom everybody dies scenario that Hera as literal mitochondrial Eve requires. This is my favored explanation since it allows us to accept both the colonials as seeds of Earth humanity and the important role, real and symbolic, of Hera for the future.
A secondary line of thought is that we should also consider what I just wrote along with the fact that we know the colonials have experienced not one, but two, severe population bottlenecks of their own, the fall of Kobol and the fall of the colonies themselves. It is conceivable that at least some colonial and cylon mitochondria are genomically identical under these circumstances. If you were going to create a synthetic cell, you would almost certainly start with parts from natural cells. With a severe population bottleneck just some short thousands of years prior to the start the BSG storyline, there might very well have already been only a few (or even just one) distinct mitochondrial genotypes during the time of the colonies. One of these mitochondrial genotypes is most likley what would have been appropriated for creation of the cylon cell lines. If true, then we could still have the modern discovery of mitochondrial Eve within the field of molecular biology but never know that she existed somewhere back on ancient Kobol. However, I am less enamored with this scenario because it removes the importance of Hera. I suspect if the show creators did think their mitochondrial Eve ramifications out, as they should have, it is my first fanwank that is what was intended.
A final problem is in the time period of the colonials’ arrival. The arrival at 150,000 years ago becomes necessary if the cylon-human hybrids as the progenitors of modern humanity is true. Hera, either as literal or figurative mitochodrial Eve, requires this particular date as it is around the time we can calculate the existence of the so-called mitochondrial Eve via subsequent changes in mitochondrial genotypes around the globe. However, there’s a bit of a problem in that this pre-dates agriculture and written language by well over 100,000 years. So, although the colonials talk about bringing language to native Earthers, and Baltar and Caprica have a touching moment over his farming expertise, we’re given a bit of a conundrum to swallow. Much as in the probably very ugly truth about what happened to all those tens of thousands of colonials and native Earthers if only human-cylon hybrid lineages survived to modern day, we have to ask what happened to these seeds of human civilization. Is modern archaeology simply wrong and the line of Hera maintained written language and agriculture throughout this 100,000 plus year discrepancy, or did the seeds of civilization die out within a few generations, if that long, and plunge the descendents of Hera into complete paleolithic barbarism until these technologies were rediscovered after an eon of total ignorance? The sunnier scenario isn’t entirely impossible since we were given the very explicit prohibition of building a new city from the colonials. Perhaps we are to accept that it wasn’t that agriculture and written language didn’t begin until roughly 10,000 years ago, but rather that no records due to no concentrated human settlements before this time exist. After an eon of living as seasonal farmers and hunter-gathers, the descendents of Hera have forgot their proscription against cities and began to gather once again and we have merely misinterpreted this evidence. I’m no expert on archaeology, so I don’t know if that fanwank is as plausible as my figurehead Hera as mitochondrial Eve fanwank, but I hope it is (otherwise I have once again analyzed myself out of totally enjoying a good story ;)).
- The Mitochondrial Eve skeleton was of a “young girl”. If it is Hera’s (why do we “know” that again?) - she did not live a long life and appears to have died too young to have born children. So put that one in your pipe and smoke it re the BIG story line.
There could have been other human/Cylon hybrids born on Earth, since there were quite a few Cylons and humans.
- The good S7s that are on Earth - do we now know that they “age” and die? Or is that just one of those truck sized holes?
Yes and no. Statistically speaking, even if you don’t ever die of natural cases some horrible accident will do you in sooner or later. After 150,000 years there might not be any left. Or, maybe there are some still alive in our time!
We don’t know much about the aging of the S7 cylons, so its possible they do age normally, or at a slightly slower rate then humans.
- The creatures the survivors saw on Earth are supposed to be homo sapiens - right? And we are descended from whom/what exactly?
Them, the Rag Tag Fleet survivors, and the Cylons.
Oh, I just wrote in a separate thread about the same exact thing. Yeah. I loved it, and I hated it. I am angry, yet also satisfied. How weird is that?
But reading your list there, I guess you had the most problems with the aftermath of them settling down on Earth 2.0? For me, other than the really cheesy cliched end scene that I wished never happened, I’m actually ok with them not really explaining how they did settle down on Earth 2.0.
ETA: kind of unrelated, but what were Anders’ last words (to Starbuck)? I couldn’t hear it.
I have a few comments on your points:
Yeah, there were going to be holes no matter what. And the characters got appropriate ends, so I guess that’s good enough.
Most of those colonists headed to areas that won’t have humans (homo sapiens) for 100,000 years. Failure to thrive, I think. Maybe in previous cycles they set up their cities and became lords.
No clue. Athena claimed on Kobol that the Cylons knew more about the Colonial religion than the Colonials did. I think that claim was largely forgotten.
At the beginning of the series, Cylon resources seemed inexhaustable. But it seems like the intent was that the bad Cylons were down to what they had at the colony.
Hera was important as bait. Other than that, not so much. And I think the writers thought “Mitochodrial Eve” sounded cool, but have no idea what it means. When Hera ran off by herself at the end, I thought, “She’s leopard chow.”
I always had the impression that their immortality was solely because they had fresh bodies in the fridge.
The fate of the Erf toasters is also unknown, isn’t it? Maybe there’s a civilization based on centurions out there some where. “Welcome to the Greater Cylon Republic. If you’ve just destroyed your masters, tune to 1405 MHZ. If you’ve just been set free by your masters, tune to 1407 MHZ. If neither of these applies to you, transmit a sequence of prime numbers on 1409 MHZ and a representative will contact you as soon as possible.”
150k is right for archaic homo sapiens. Physically like us, but behaviorally like other hominids. I’m going to guess that the tribesmen on the show were supposed to be whatever came right before H. sapiens, with the Colonials providing the final push.
One hundred and fifty thousand years of the telephone game will tear up just about any knowledge.
You have a special destiny, Kara Thrace. A convoluted poorly explained destiny that will cause you and everyone you love large amounts of unneeded pain and drama.
Kind Simian, first off, nice post. It’s long and I’m still going over it, but I wanted to point something out. Mitochodrial Eve doesn’t mean there was a population bottleneck. She, in the real world, was one of many women alive at the time. What gave her the title is that she is the oldest individual who had a daughter in every generation of decendants since. All of the other women eventually either had decendants who either didn’t pass on their genes or passed on their genes only through males. Talk Origins has a page on the concept http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/mitoeve.html that explains quite a bit and Wikipedia has a page that lays it out in a slightly different fashion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve
So all of the women in the colonies can have kids, but eventually all of the lines that issue forth from them would have a son-only generation or terminate.
Of course, the ones outside of Africa would have to die out anyway, as we know from genetic studies that all living humans can be traced to a group that lived in East Africa about 50,000 years ago.
I usually don’t like to get into this nitpicking frenzy (this is not Star Trek/Lord of the Rings, and thank goodness for that) but a Mithocondrial Eve dugg out somewhere (not that this ever happened AFAIK) does not have to be exactly the same person that is the common female ancestor of everyone. For instance, if Athena and Helo got more kids afterwards, all of them would have the same mithocondrial DNA and could be the true “mithocondrial Eve”, they just happened to have found Hera who could have died young. In any case that is just a statistical label.
But hey, what about remembering this is art, television, and let some air for poetical licenses etc? 
This is not a NatGeo documentary! 
All true. However, it seems pretty clear that RDM’s story is that Hera is the mother of us all. So on further reflection, I’m just breezing through any suggestion that the skeleton was of a “young girl”, conclude that “she” lived long enough to have a child or two and did. For me that’s the plot and that’s that.
And it’s also important to remember that the mtDNA is a completely sepparate genome from nuclear DNA (vast majority of our genetic material). As paternal and maternal DNA recombine with each generation its still possible to have a mix of Cylon, Colonial and Earthing DNA represented in population 150ky later.
There is a theory out there (that I don’t subscribe to) that there was this great transition in cognative capabilities of anatomically modern humans approximately 100-50 kya. That theory would fit with the current ending of BSG.
On the other had, I tend to favor that view that the increase cultural and technological capabilities has generally been exponential, so its quite understandable that humans had a stone hand axe based technology for 800ky before they started leaving other remnants indicative of advanced cognative behavior such as bone carvings, cave paintings etc. Anyway, I figure the humans on Earth 150ka were just as smart as the Colonials. You just mix the cultures of both populations (a little advanced engineering, complex language and art combinded with intimate knowledge of the seasons, flora and fauna) and you would get a new population that would begin to dramatically expland into the other continents. Thus the mtEve could come from Athena’s line…
See you on the other side.
Which, if I remember correctly, has been said between characters before but I don’t remember which ones.
Kara said it before dying in Maelstrom, to Lee. But apparently not. 
Hopefully Sam had better foresight, being hybrid and all.
Technically true, but a population bottleneck is still the most likely explanation. In this case bottleneck could be anything from one individual to thousands of individuals with common ancestry. The probability that you wind up with six billion human individuals with a common female ancestor without a population bottleneck is slim. With no known survival advantage to different mitochondrial genotypes (except the now revealed human-cylon hybrid vigor hypothesis ;)), the only way you get there in the relatively recent past that the mitochondrial Eve hypothesis proposes is a small enough population for this dead end and/or male only descendent tree to completely weed out any other ancestral mt lineages.
So all of the women in the colonies can have kids, but eventually all of the lines that issue forth from them would have a son-only generation or terminate.
Admittedly, which is why I throw out the idea that in line with the show’s mythology “mitochondrial Eve” is any male human-female cylon pairing’s female offspring. We would have little evidence today to distinguish that scenario from our hypothesised east Africa mtEve (and the Asian and Australian colonial seedings don’t necessarily have to be extinct - probably, yes, but not certainly).
Although Melville got it right, the British publisher accidentally printed the book without the epilogue. Moby Dick was slammed as a book written by a dead man, and since the American papers printed the British reviews without actually reading the book, it was initially a flop.
One good thing about technology: This would never happen in the age of the internet.
More mulling:
Not only did RDM lay the groundwork for “lords” by bringing an advanced civilization to the home of a prehistoric one, but by dividing his troops, he did likewise for the creation of “tribes”.
Speaking of which, and this is just “me”, but while it makes for good story telling, I keep coming back to how incredibly STUPID the decision to abandon technology and split up was. Good luck with a harsh enviroment. Good luck with hungry, BIG, animals. Good luck with illness. Good luck with childbirth.
How about this for a sequel - 5 years later? How many of the 39,000 are alive (half)? What are they wearing - animal hides? Have their teeth rotted out? Anybody had a haircut? How’s social order holding up? Enjoying romance with a species that is about 4 and half feet tall, filthy and (probably) dangerous. Never mind having an average life span of 30 years, maybe.
I find myself subject to violent “mood swings” since the finale. C’mon OT it is just an extremely well done show. Show. SHOW.
Well acted, great battle (I was on the edge of my seat!). And when it was all over I felt that I had just seen a good movie in the theater. But I apparently bought the wrong ticket because it wasn’t the movie I had thought I was going to see.
So, I’m reading all these posts about how people are satisfied with the ending, how it was so great that they were welling up, can’t wait for Caprica, etc.
Am I really the only one who feels dumped?? For four seasons I was strung along with mysteries and puzzles, only to be told: “IT DOESN’T MATTER, sweetheart - get over it.” I swear the last few minute of the finale it was screaming at me: “Everything you wondered about, all the mysteries you were curious about, the plot lines you faithfully followed - IT DOESN’T MATTER.”
Lords of Kobol? Doesn’t matter.
Timeline of exodus from Kobol, and how many exoduses, and who was Pythia? Doesn’t matter.
Kara? Doesn’t matter. (Though implied that she was some kind of “head” character that everybody could see. Maybe a real angel.)
And those flashbacks??? OMG do not even get me started… Too late! Laura’s flashbacks were pointless, a waste of time, I cannot believe they spent so much screen time on that.
That last flashback with Lee and Starbuck was, to me, the way the show ended: “Thank you for coming, nice to have met you. [shake hands]” Rather anticlimatic and disappointing, considering what could have happened on the table.
I don’t want to sound like I’m nitpicking, but check out that Talk Origins page I linked earlier. It goes through why probability isn’t slim, it’s 100%. It’s honestly pretty cool once you see it. If a human population has a common ancestor, it has to have an ME and that person will change as people in the current population die.
I’m sorry for getting so off track. I don’t believe that the writers had any idea what the term Mitochondrial Eve actually meant, they just thought it sounded cool and fit in with the quasi-religious tone they wanted to establish. Like a lot of the rest of the quibbles I have, it’s just something to help them tell a better story.
Hence my mood violent mood swings. I keep trying to answer some of those questions by rationalizing that RDM (inadvertently?) answered them.
At 150 kya in Africa they’d be modern human indistinguishable from us. There’s still debate out there whether you could tell European Neandertals from modern humans or not once all the skin was on them.
Yes, every biological population has a ME; it’s just a question how long in the past it was. Also the term bottle neck is kind of vague. If the combination of Colonials, Cylons and actual Earth humans combined into a slightly more successful populations than the other Earth human populations alone, then the odds are the ME would come from the more reproductively fit group at a relatively recent date.