BSG Series Finale Rant

(Spoilers? I could hardly rant without them, could I?)

Unfortunately, my single overriding thought at the conclusion of the BSG Series Finale was: I don’t frakkin’ buy it.

You know…I’ll give them the mysticism and prophecies. I’ll give them individual cases of psychosis and even suicide. I’ll even (grudgingly) give them the corporeal Deus Ex Machina that Starbuck represented and the non-corporeal versions of Six and Baltar.

But the big Shark Jump for me was at the end when Apollo declares that, seemingly by fiat and without objection, no we’re not going to build a city. Instead, we’re going to scrap our entire technological civilization and voluntarily enter a more primitive state, ie. Cultural suicide.

Huh? And his rationale that they would try to avoid the perils of technology run amok by providing the “wisdom” of their experience rings obnoxiously hollow.

First, there’s the glaringly obvious issue that returning to a primitive state would necessarily condemn them, their children and so forth to lives that were “nasty, brutish, and short.” Yes, please save us from the ravages of antibiotics and the prospect of actually surviving appendicitis.

But I’ve also got a problem with the idea that practical wisdom can be preserved without the tangible context from which it was earned/learned. Perhaps my view is far too shallow, but how exactly do you expect a pre-industrialized peasant to take to heart warnings about the dangers of technology and Artificial Intelligence (other than by irrational religious dogma)? And how are you going to afford to share this “wisdom” when you’re busy toiling in the ground, or hunting/gathering from sun-up to sun-down. Ah the restful joys of pre-industrial agrarian society!

To my mind, the great irony here is that they *had* finally broken the cycle by actually having a hybrid civilization that incorporated both artificial and natural intelligence co-existing peacefully (at last!) and then turned their backs on it – guaranteeing those lessons would need to be relearned, and thus INVITING a repetition of the cycle.

Over the course of the series there were very few instances that rang false. Alas, this was one of those and more importantly, the loudest. It is doubly unfortunate that its counterpoint now underscores (for me, at least) the entirety of the epic journey. Bah!