The ending was written so that the BS:G story could be plausible with our Earth and evolutionary history.
Playing Monday morning quarterback, I, like others, don’t see 38,000 some survivors all agreeing to give up all technology. I know it’s trite and unoriginal, but it would have been fun to have them land and set up a city on an isolated island. This island would give them protection from the rest of the then wild planet, and some people could venture out from that island to explore and settle. The island would later be destroyed thousands of years later, leaving behind the Atlantis myth.
Also, the Cortez-like abandonment of all the space ships really seemed wasteful. Land some for shelter and power like on New Caprica. Leaving some in orbit somewhere would have been a message and birthright to the later generations. A visit to a then greener Mars, showing the Face of course, could have been another tease.
What about the Centurions? 150,000 years later, are they still out there? Are they protecting the Earth or did they possibly meddle to slow down the redevelopment of Man? 150,000 is a long time.
Because it’s a re-write (a re-imagining?) of our theory about the deep evolutionary history of the human species. It puts white people into Africa at the crucial moment. It’s like…a whitewashing of our origins.
Aren’t you at all bothered by the “mate with the natives” and “spread our (superior) DNA” edict? Doesn’t that sound eerily familiar to you? Thomas Jefferson advocated basically the same thing, as the best strategy for eradicating Native Americans and completely assimilating them into the invading, colonizing culture/race, which could then “inherit” the land without feeling guilty for taking it. Remember when Tigh, Galen, Adama Sr., Lee, and Hoshi (I think it was those 5–all men, you’ll notice) are observing the early humans? Tigh actually says, “our DNA is compatible with theirs–we can interbreed with them.” As viewers, we are meant to feel good about this because it’s giving the BSG-ers a chance at rebirth, continuity. The characters we have come to love and to identify with, over 4.5 seasons, will live on. Those early humans walking by mean nothing to us. But it’s a colonizing logic. This narrative of hope and rebirth in a “new land” is the mask for a colonizing impulse. Lee Adama advocates “breaking the cycle,” but in fact they are not breaking the cycle of domination, they are simply choosing new subjects to dominate. They even describe them the same way that Columbus and other European explorers described native people in the Americas: primitive; without language; i.e. designed to be superceded by us. So yeah…I’m disturbed by that.
I was happy with the ending.
Mr. Moore’s religious applications were risky but overall I thought everything worked, including the ending.
the unanswered questions could have the fan base debating for years and there was enough to give leeway to arguments that will be similar to the unanswered concepts of 2001 which will hopeful give the series staying power for the future.
Thanks for reading
I was entirely happy. It answered all the questions that i felt need to be answered. It had all the action i wanted. It had all the explosions i wanted. And it set up the lives for everyone that i cared about. All the loose ends got nicely sniped off. I loved it. Best Series Finale i have seen thus far. (no in reality most of the shows i adore do not come with a series finale they tend to get canceled first!)
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[li]They weren’t trying to assimilate the natives (not that that’s a bad thing, necessarily.) They were trying to assimilate themselves.
[/li][li]MtDNA is different in that it is transmitted (usually) unchanged from mother to daughter. What we think of as ‘our DNA’ is blended from both parents. Making Hera MtDNA Eve just establishes our connection to the RTF. We would still have plenty of ‘human’ DNA.
[/li][li]The fleet was pretty diverse in itself. And that far back, it’s really pointless to think about ‘white,’ ‘black,’ etc. Populations change, move, and change again. (C.f., Zulus v. other S.A. tribes.) Besides, Six and Baltar’s great-great-etc kids would be pretty dark, if they stayed put.
[/li][li]Finally, they made a point of saying that fleet would disperse around the world. Presumably to avoid that kind of critique.
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Yes, it does change the story of how we understand our origins to have occurred, and does take a number of liberties with the science. But given that we’re already dealing with a story talking about humans on another planets the scientific stretches isn’t beyond the suspension of disbelief required for physics given a story about FTL space travel. I’m just glad that given the suspicion by which evolution is viewed in popular culture, they didn’t provide a strict von Daniken view of human origins.
Also the issue of ‘whitewashing’ is kind of a red herring. Yes, the story suggests that the mutliethnic* Colonials, Cylons, and Earth archaic H sapiens combined to make modern humans, but that does not imply that the Colonials replaced the ‘African’ population. In fact modern Africans, Europeans, Asians etc. would all be equally closely related to archaic humans given an Out of Africa hypothesis, one which finds general support (though still debated) in the scientific community.
*Although admittedly those that we actually saw on screen seemed more to reflected the extra-pool of Vancouver, BC than a truly balanced multiethnic society.
Without the requirements of an extended education needed to make it in a modern society (and thus delaying the reproduction), a young woman can still have a number of offspring. A 24-28 year old skeleton could still look like a ‘young woman’ and easily have given birth to more than 3 daughters…
The survivors are going to be “needles in the DNA haystacks” (ouch) - all over the planet (although, if they have arrived at the dawn of homo sapiens I don’t know where they are going to find compatible beings other than in Africa). (Now whether the role of Hera throws a wrench into this - well I don’t know enough about the true meaning of MtcE to be able to address.)
This idea of the survivors becoming a small part of the larger whole of the population is true especially if they break up into smaller groups, as they are.
I don’t believe that their DNA is any better, worse or whatever than that of the indigenous population. Being more advanced technologically has nothing to do with the “quality” of one’s DNA. (The real science issue here is that the survivors and the natives are truly compatible for procreation purposes - but I’ll make that leap of faith.)
Really what RDM did with this is pretty ingenous - whether he intended it to be or not. The concern of survivor domination of the indigenous population would be more of a concern had they remained together and kept as much as their technology as they could. And built a “city” (and formed and “army”).
That would have set up a possible master/subject society - The Lords of Kobol scenario addressed elsewhere. So, Lee’s (truly questionable) “decision” to abandon the tech and divide the population does have the advantage of reducing survivor dominance of the native population and slowing the Cycle, if not breaking it (about the 10th time I’ve written that, sorry).
Finally a question, do “we” know much about the “complexion” of humans in the area where it is believed man first “arose” - 150,000 years ago? Would they fit into any of the racial categories that we have identified today?
Yeah, I know how mDNA is transmitted. That’s why I started a new paragraph before I talked about the edict to “breed with the natives.”
My point isn’t about complexion, or about whether or not the “race” of people depicted in Africa would be recognizable to us as a modern-day race. It’s that the logic they’re employing is a colonizing logic, and very recognizable as such.
My objections to this are primarily literary, i.e. regarding the narrative, not the science. Literarily and narratively speaking, it is a whitewashing–they put white people there at the dawn of humanity, thereby making “them” part of the explanation of “us.” It’s the one thing in the finale I didn’t like, but I didn’t like it for a pretty big reason. If you don’t see it that way…I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
I’m not getting the ‘colonizing logic’ part. Unless you mean it in the sense of ‘showing up in a new place where there are people’ sense, which seems a stretch. The problems of colonization are solved by assimilation (of the newcomers.) Lee seems to have grasped that.
Personally, I think you’re reading more into it than what is there. The goal of the colonists is, was & always has been to perptuate the human race, to make sure it does not die out. In the mini-series, one of the first things Roslin declared was that they needed to start having babies. With this edict paramount, being able to intermingle & create progeny with the native population is an absolute consideration. The fact that they did not concentrate their numbers & instead spread them out so as not to overhwlem the local populations is anathema to the concept you are proposing.
The lines of humans we see getting off the ships were multi-racial, not just white. As has been stated before, they were limited by the local Vancouver population for ethnicity considerations.
Not necessarily needles in a hay stack. My expertise is not in paleodemography, but at 150kya the total population of Earthing humans could probably be on the order of 10s or 100s of thousands of people and not millions. So the Colonials would make up a sizable chunk of the new gene pool…
I loved it, though if I were in charge I would have ended it with Adama on the hillside. Not because I didn’t enjoy the fun tie-in to contemporary US society, but it just jibes with my artistic tastes more.
I see. That is a big reason, but just a few comments:
To the extent that our “European” concepts of colonization equate with subjugation - that’s not what I took from the story. Splitting the population and abandoning technology to me seemed to smack more of assimilation.
The rub with the whole white folks there at the dawn of humanity is an issue inherent to the plot and the casting. To put that into English, I always thought the show would end up being about how the “survivors” somehow figured into our distant past. (That goes right back to the TOS and, also, from a dramatic stance gave “us” a vested interest in the outcome of the story.) And in a way that this “incursion” would be essentially unknowable to us, although somehow we would be descendants of “them”. So that would have to take the event WAY back (although the Mito Eve issue never occurred to me). That the cast appears to be predominantly “white” - well we’re stuck with that, because that was the casting - although in reality from the standpoint of current American TV it was a fairly heterogenous group.
