By Joshua Tyler
| Published
When Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica reboot delivered its finale episode in 2009, it was met with mild disappointment. Fans walked away feeling as if they needed something more, a more clearly happy or sad wrap-up with more questions answered. Instead, they got an ending in which the show’s surviving characters shrugged their shoulders and walked off into the wilderness.
What those watching didn’t realize back then is that the ending wasn’t the problem. It was the way they’d been forced to watch the show. Watched now, in one continuous binge, the way it’s meant to be seen, Battlestar Galactica’s ending is perfect. It’s the only ending the show could have had.
Battlestar Galactica Was The First Show Made For Streaming, Even Though Streaming Did Not Exist
Ronald D. Moore’s 2004 Battlestar Galactica reboot began and ended its run before the era of streaming. People’s reactions to it were as much a product of how they were forced to schedule their viewing as they were a reflection of the show itself.
Battlestar Galactica is brilliant at many things, but one of the things it’s best at is letting the audience feel the fatigue of its characters. That’s most clearly embodied by episode “33,” in which the Colonials are forced to function for days without sleep as they fight off endless Cylon attacks.
It’s also a long-term strength of the show. The journey our characters are on is hard. It takes a toll, and episode by episode the Colonials start wearing down, falling apart, giving up. Battlestar doesn’t just show us that, it lets us experience it.
Watching it now on streaming, you’re hit with the full weight of that wear and tear by binging it. On old-school television, though, with viewers limited to watching one episode a week, one season a year, it was easier to forget how much your favorite characters suffered in previous episodes and how much that suffering must be weighing on them.
Without sharing those feelings with the characters on the show, it’s easy to become bogged down in wanting something else for them. We want them to land and build a great civilization or defeat the Cylons or somehow take back Caprica, or something equally grandiose. But that’s not what these people would want, in this place. And it’s something the audience can only fully experience, when they’re watching episodes back to back to back.
Unless you bought the Battlestar Galactica DVD box sets (and a lot of people did), it’s not something you could have understood, viewing the show in its carefully scheduled out broadcast television format.
Battlestar Galactica’s Ending Is About The Need To Forget
By the end of Battlestar Galactica, every character, whether hero or villain, has endured years of continual hell. The show began with every person in the Colonial fleet having everyone and everything they know and love. And then things get worse from there. It never gets better.
There are occasional bright spots in the series, enough to keep the light of life alive, but by the time the Galactica reaches its last episode, both the ship and everyone on her is done. The Galactica’s back is literally broken. Many of her characters are on the verge of death. Those who aren’t are done with all of it. Done with fighting, done with running, done with fancy flights of hope.
So they find a place they decide is Earth. They decide it’s Earth because it’s habitable, it is there, and they are tired.
Earth is empty. It seems nice, but that doesn’t matter. Because they’re done, they’re all done. With everything. With each other. Too much has happened, too much has been lost. There’s no way to recover.
So the Colonials land and wander off into the wilderness, some to die, others to try and live out a life. Cylons and humans together, to live and breed and die and forget. Whatever happens, hope, ambition, it’s all been traumatized out of them. Forgetting is what our characters need more than anything else.
Watching it now on streaming, where the time between episodes is compressed, makes sense because you feel their fatigue, their trauma, and their acceptance.
After all their struggle and suffering, the people of the Colonial fleet have nothing left to give. There are questions they haven’t answered, but those questions no longer feel like they matter to them. They reach Earth in one final, exhausted gasp, then lie down to rest.
We Are All Part Of Battlestar Galactica’s Struggle
It’s time for the audience to rest, too, because the most satisfying final reveal of the show is that these people are us. All those endless questions about who or what the Cylons are have a simple answer: It’s us. We, the viewers. We are all Cylons, and we are all humans, too. We have been all along.
The final scene of the show is one of warning and hope, one that now seems almost prescient in light of recent developments in artificial intelligence. Battlestar Galactica flashes forward to modern Earth and asks if things will be different this time. Will we repeat the AI mistakes of our Colonial/Cylon ancestors, or will we do something different this time?
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. But it doesn’t have to. It’s not just the right ending, it’s the only ending Battlestar Galactica could have ever had. So say we all.
