BSG “Daybreak, Part 2” – My Final BSG Review, The Conclusion

And now comes the last part of my review of the BSG series finale “Daybreak, Part 2″ and I can’t think of a more fitting way to complete this review than to focus on the principal characters of Bill Adama and Laura Roslyn, as well as the much discussed final scene that ended this formative series.  It’s taken me some time to sit down and finish this review, so let’s get right into it.

Bill Adama – His life fulfilled and his honour intact

In the first two parts of my review of “Daybreak, Part 2″, I noted how valuable the flashback scenes have been for allowing us to appreciate the full scope of the journey these characters have been on since before the series began and that’s certainly been the case with Adama and Roslyn.  The interchanging scenes showing what their separate lives were like back on Caprica shows us that they’ve started this journey in the same boat, of leaving behind lives where they felt trapped into accepting the choices they were being given.  In the scenes of Adama and Tigh partying in the bar, it’s clear that while Tigh has a better life waiting for him outside of serving the Colonial Fleet, Adama is being corralled into a job he clearly doesn’t want.  Watching Adama outside the bar, slumped on the ground covered in his own vomit gazing wistfully at the stars above, it’s not hard to appreciate that the stars were where he felt he belonged the most and yet, it was never as far away from him as it was at that moment.  In some ways, Adama is reminiscent of Ishmael in “Moby Dick”, being capable of handling life on land for a short while before feeling the sea, or in Adama’s case the stars, pulling him back.  This echoes what Lee says later in the episode about his childhood memories of his father, of watching him fly off to who knows where and wondering when his dad would return.  Of course, as much as Adama needs to be out there amongst the stars, he’s also defined by his sense of honour.  From those flashback scenes on Caprica, we find out that he’d rather remain at the helm of an outdated and aging ship than subject himself to having someone question his integrity.  It’s clear that Galactica had saved Adama from having to sacrifice that part of himself in order to accept the civilian job everyone expected him to take, that it gave him that way out from having to go down a road he’d regret taking for the rest of his life.

In my review of “Islanded in a Stream of Stars”, I pointed out how unlike the other characters, Adama was never consumed by the need to find a new home as Galactica was already filling that need and that with her slow demise, Adama is only now joining the others in that sense of being lost without a home.  But in these flashback scenes from Caprica, we can appreciate that Adama’s pain over Galactica’s demise is not simply a reaction to this inevitable loss of his home and with it, the last tangible vestige from his past life; it’s also a result of his inability to save Galactica much in the same way that the ship had saved him before the fall of the colonies.  It becomes clearer now why he was willing to sacrifice his ship to save Hera as this would at least grant his ship the ability to save someone else one last time.

But before Adama decides to rescue Hera, Roslyn asks him from her hospital bed to give them a chance at whatever time they have left.  They both know that ultimately Adama will lose both Galactica and Laura as both are now at a point where there is no coming back, no last minute salvation.  And yet with Laura, Adama would get that chance at a new life that the civilian job back on Caprica could never have given him, a life where he gains something without having to sacrifice who he is.  The final scene we see of Adama describing the cabin he’s going to build for Laura shows us that he’s now free from the pain of his recent losses and that he’s found that life which can replace the one he knew from serving in the Colonial Fleet, one where he basks under the light of the memories of the woman who became the love of his life.

Laura Roslyn – Softly into the dark night she goes

In the finale’s flashback scenes on Caprica, we finally get to see what the motivator was for Laura to become that driven, at times myopically focused woman we’ve known since the start of Season 1.  Taken in its whole, though, we begin to understand how all of those losses of people, whether it was someone close to her or mere numbers on her whiteboard, tore open those old wounds from the loss of her family and no doubt, it pushed her even further away from her emotional core.  And yet, what I find most striking about Laura Roslyn in this part of the story is not so much the origins of her character’s pragmatic shift, but how her life finally came to end.

Unlike any of the other characters, we expected Laura Roslyn would die before the series end, not just because of the prophecy describing a dying leader who would lead the ragtag fleet to their new home, but also because of the end stage prognosis of her cancer.  However, the manner in which her death was portrayed was so unexpected that it became one of the finale’s emotional high water marks.  Watching Laura suddenly pass away in the cockpit of the Raptor, I was reminded of the dramatic simplicity, and its subsequent effectiveness, of the death scene Shakespeare wrote for Lear in “King Lear”.  As the title character of the play, one expects there to be a dramatic speech, a solemn swan song with which to say goodbye to the character.  But Shakespeare had something else in mind, forgoing a soliloquy or one last moment between the characters to part ways, and instead wrote simply for the scene the stage direction “He dies”.  As Laura’s death was anticipated by the audience, we expected the big goodbye scene, that final farewell moment with the character.  By reducing that moment to a simple stage direction, ‘Laura dies’, we end up being surprised by her moment of death.  As a result, we’re appropriately affected by the moment as we should be, the irony here being though that the emotional impact happens because we end up being denied the very thing we took for granted we would get – the chance to say goodbye.

The final scene with Head Six and Head Baltar – the hit and miss moment

Much has been said about the final scene with the Baltar and Caprica Six angels on present-day Earth and the following montage showing the current developments in the field of robotics.  As expected, reaction to this series ending has been a mixed bag.  Personally, I remain somewhat ambivalent about this ending, in part because I understand what message Moore wanted to impart at the end.  At the same time, though, I disagree with his assumption of why such a scene would be needed to convey it.

In one of several post-finale interviews, Ron Moore stated that he wanted to end the series on present-day Earth to help the audience relate to what the characters have gone through, to take it as being an extension of our own reality and not merely feel as though we’ve been watching events through the looking glass.  In Moore’s eyes, making the series characters our ancestors allows the audience to appreciate that what has happened to them can repeat itself with us, all these thousands of years later.  But I don’t think storytelling needs to be so directed or literal for its audience to take hold of the message inside, especially if the message refers to our collective humanity.  That is after all the nature of allegorical storytelling, one where the deeper message about issues facing our society are there to be found without resorting to making direct linkages to contemporary society.  Certainly, it’s a technique that BSG had already successfully employed numerous times throughout its run, so I fail to see why Moore would feel that a more obvious, if not blunt, approach was necessary for us to understand the message he wanted to convey to the audience.

The other problem I have with this scene is that the series shouldn’t have ended on a note about our future since that was never the focus of the series.  What the series was about was the characters that populated the canvas on which the story was told and how they dealt with the political/social/moral dilemmas they faced.  Our relationship to that arises not from being descendants of these people, but because of how in many ways, their action or inaction reflected either what is going on in our society or what we’re at risk of committing if we don’t stop to think about the decisions that are being made.  Personally, I would’ve preferred that the series end on that final shot of Adama sitting next to Laura’s grave because that moment more than anything that follows it completed both the series and the journey the characters took within it.

This brings forth the other issue I had with this final scene on modern day Earth.  While Head Six has been present since the beginning, the fact is we’ve always seen her existence as being an extension of Baltar.  Although in “Daybreak, Part 2″, we are presented with the revelation that Head Six and Head Baltar are in fact angels, the fact is that without Baltar and Caprica Six, these two characters lack any real context or direct relationship with the audience to truly impress the point Moore wishes us to take at the end.  The simple truth is that we haven’t invested anything into either of these constructs for us to be able to really take hold of what they are trying to tell us.

Of course, none of this is to say that I disagree with Moore’s message regarding technology or that it doesn’t belong in the story.  On the contrary, I think Moore provided a much more effective moment that addresses this point in the earlier scene featuring Lee and Adama walking together in the fields outside their camp.  In this scene, Lee states that technology has always grown faster than the ability of humanity to fully understand or appreciate its consequences to their existence, which essentially is the message Moore wanted to leave the audience with at the episode’s end.  Granted, there are several plot issues that arise after this scene which can cause this point that Moore wants to make to get lost in the shuffle.  But this scene offers the means to bring back this issue once more, in a manner that would be a better fit as an ending for the series.

The way I see it, as the camera slowly receded away from that last view of Adama on top of that hill, Moore could have provided a voice-over speech from Adama where he gives us his final message, of what he and everyone else has learned from their journey.  In this parting message, Adama could echo what his son said about what they hoped to share with the indigenous population, of sharing not their technology but what they’ve learned from the pursuit of the development of it.  This way, it would be Adama, and not the Head Six angel, who leaves us with that impression of a cautionary hope that the cycle of technological progress exceeding humanity’s understanding of its consequences won’t be repeated in the societies created by their descendants.  Personally, such an ending would maintain the focus of the story on the characters, in particular the series lead Adama.  This way, our last impressions are of appreciating that sense of peace Adama clearly has thanks to his love for Laura, and yet it’s couched by his apprehension about what legacy humanity will inherit from their arrival, that while he hopes the cycle has been broken, he realizes that it will up to their descendants who will go on to develop technological advancements to ultimately decide what their relationship will be with their own creations.

And with that, I complete my final thoughts on Battlestar Galactica.  I have to admit that as was the case with watching the series finale, it is a bittersweet moment knowing that there won’t be any more regular opportunities to share my thoughts on this series.  While I’m sure the upcoming BSG film “The Plan” will be a welcome reunion with some beloved characters, and something I shall enjoy writing a review about, time will tell if that same intensity and pull toward the characters will happen with the prequel series “Caprica”.  Of course, with BSG now over, all we can do is hope that Ron Moore and David Eick will be able to capture that lightning in a bottle once more.

So say we all.

Some other posts you may enjoy:

1. BSG “Daybreak, Part 1” – The End Is Found In Where We Began
2. BSG “Daybreak, Part 2” – My Final BSG Review, Part 2
3. BSG “Daybreak, Part 2” – My Final BSG Review, Part 1
4. BSG “Sometimes A Great Notion” – Honey, I’m Home
5. BSG “The Oath” – It’s Payback Time
6. BSG “Revelations” – We’re Off To See The Wizard

posted on April 19th, 2009 | 2 Comments » | Tags: allegory, Bill Adama, BSG, Entertainment, Head Baltar, Head Six, Ishmael, King Lear, Laura Roslyn, Lee Adama, Moby Dick, Ron Moore |