Warning: this article contains details about the final season and series finale of Battlestar Galactica. If you have not seen these episodes and are planning on watching, please do not read further.
Friday night, the final episode of Battlestar Galactica aired on the SciFi Channel. Providing a closing to what has been one of the most successful and complex television science fiction series must have seemed a large burden for the writers. While behind the scenes information will eventually leak about how far in advance the ending was planned, if it was part of the original plan or something that came out along the way, the final episode will leave its own statement of the theme for the entire series.
The ultimate theme of Battlestar Galactica, a science fiction series set mostly in space, is that we should all hate technology and science. From the moment the twelve colonies’ defense network was compromised, leaving all of humanity under the protection of the least advanced battleship in the fleet, to the last episode of the series, where the remaining humans (along with human-cylons) decide to send their ships packing into the sun to settle down for the agrarian life on Earth 2 (really, our Earth), the moral of the series is the end result of human technology will be self-destructive and bad for us. Our planets will be wiped out by psychotic killer robots we created, and we will be left to fend for ourselves all over again. In the last moments of the final episode, they skip ahead 150,000 years to modern Earth, and play a little video montage of robots we have today, as if warning us that we are creating cylons that will destroy us even now.
The writers and producers of Battlestar Galactica would have us believe there is no point to science, mathematics, physics, or any of the thousands of disciplines that have advanced humanity. They would have us believe that a prior society would become so frustrated, tired, and perhaps angry of such advancements, that they would unanimously decide to eschew all technological innovation and leave themselves stranded on a planet to forget all they know. They would have us believe this society would leave behind the things that any scientist, doctor, nurse, technician, artist, or practitioner of almost any trade had worked to learn and start all over again as farmers, hunters, and gatherers. They would have us believe there would be no sense of curiosity, exploration, and innovation, that they would be a people completely without hope within themselves and anything they had done in their lives.
As much as I still believe the show is one of the highest quality science fiction shows ever created, and I believe the writing has consistently been excellent, I am disappointed in the final ending to the story; that the surviving humans and cylons have turned out to be our ancestors. I think they had to take the show somewhere, and they had to leave it on a note that would give it closure, but pulling a “find Earth and they all lived happily ever after” and a “now you know the rest of the story” lacked creativity and failed to deliver upon the promise of an otherwise great show. The show needed hope for an ending, and to place that hope in modern society by making us the heirs of the cycle of violence that led to Battlestar's tragedy, and making the entire show a warning on the dangers of technology is just a bit too hokey.
