On tonight’s BSG finale (which I’m still watching), what Simon says to Boomer is a direct quote from Tarkin on the Death Star.
"Austro" as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, "Athenian" as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.
About Roderick T. Long
The Empirical Me
I’m Roderick T. Long, Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. I’m an Aristotelean/Wittgensteinian in philosophy and a left-libertarian market anarchist in social theory. (More about me here.) This blog, Austro-Athenian Empire, is a continuation of my earlier blog, archived here.
I have to say the finale confirmed all my misgivings about the series. Important plot points weren’t resolved (e.g. the explanation for Virtual Six is a cop-out, the space probe with the virus was never explored, etc). Instead most of it was flashbacks. It felt almost like a “clipshow”, despite not having seen the actual flashbacks mainly because the flashbacks were just kind of random.
I don’t think the flashbacks were random. Adama’s and Roslin’s flashbacks showed choices that explained why they ended up on Galactica rather than somewhere else. Lee’s and Kara’s flashback gave the whole arc of their relationship in miniature, including her eventual ascension.
And the explanation for Virtual Six is the same one I’ve been predicting on this blog for the last two seasons.
It didn’t seem to be very fleshed out though, compared to your explanation. I mean, it was basically just some vague talk about God doing this and that, like putting humans on a distant planet, sending Kara Thrace’s doppelganger to them, etc. I mean, at least in the Old Testament it explains what God does and why he does it sometimes. If Ron Moore was writing the Old Testament then Moses would speculate endlessly about what the burning bush “really meant” and nobody would be able to figure out the purpose of wandering in the desert until the last chapter.
Well, God’s motives can be pretty cryptic in the Bible too. For example, at Exodus 4: 19-26, God tells Moses to return to Egypt and negotiate with the Pharaoh for the liberation of the Jews (though God also warns Moses that he, God, will harden the Pharaoh’s heart so that he’ll say no), so Moses heads back in obedience to this directive, but while he’s on the road to Egypt, God suddenly “attempts to kill” Moses. (Attempts?) So (so?) Moses’ wife quickly circumcises their son (something God hasn’t explicitly requested) and splatters Moses with the blood, so then God stops trying to kill Moses. Whee! Happy ending! What?
To clarify: when I say that God “hasn’t explicitly requested” circumcision, I mean in the context of his dealings with Moses. Of course there’s the standing requirement in Genesis that all Jewish males be circumcised, so the usual interpretation is that God is threatening Moses with death for having neglected this requirement of law. But it’s odd that it didn’t come up in their immediately previous conversation.
Plus alt-Starbuck and Virtual Six don’t really act like any angels I’ve ever seen. Alt-Starbuck agonizes over what she “really is” a lot, and Virtual Six goads Baltar into causing a passenger liner to explode and then later tells him to arm his fruity little cult. Usually angels are more knowledgeable and benevolent than this.
Plus alt-Starbuck and Virtual Six don’t really act like any angels I’ve ever seen.
How many angels have you seen?
On the original BSG, there were two kinds of “angel” — the good ones and the evil ones. (They weren’t necessarily angels in the traditional sense; they were “more advanced beings.” Though given Larson’s Mormon background the difference is fuzzy.) On the new BSG, the angels are (if Baltar’s speech is right) neither precisely good nor precisely evil, but they have some sort of interest in our survival.
On the original BSG (or more precisely on G1980, including the unproduced episode “Wheel of Fire”), Starbuck was a normal human who was raised to angelhood by the good angels. More or less the same deal on the new series, I reckon.
I had really high hopes for this series. It started out very well, and even to the end some elements of it – most of the acting, the direction, set design, etc. – were as good as TV gets. But I still don’t think they ever really knew where they were going with this. They ended with a lot of loose ends, realized they were never going to tie them up, tried to explain some of them by saying “God” and just forgot about the rests, hoping we would too.
Actually it feels like a lot of book series/tv series I’ve followed in the last year or so have let the audience down. Maybe the Writer’s Strike was only the beginning of problems for storywriters.
On a bit of a fun note, here’s a picture I made last week of some funny lightsaber action:
http://img9.imageshack.us/img9/1125/blocksaber.jpg
You could really stick a second lightsabre in his other hand too. Like Anakin fighting Dooku at the end of AotC.
I don’t think that until the Final 5 made mention of being visited by ‘angels’ that the idea of Virtual-6 & Virtual-Baltar might be that as well seemed possible (I always figured they were some internal dilusion).
Starbuck, IMO, was never an angel. She had no powers/abilities. Just that “God” had brought her back from the dead to fulfil her destiny, and when that task was complete, she disappeared to ‘got to heaven’.
While we may not like it, religion has always played a part in BSG, both current and pass. It just differed how it was handled (Count Iblis and the angels in the original; Lord of Kobol, angels, and the like in the new one).
I don’t think that until the Final 5 made mention of being visited by ‘angels’ that the idea of Virtual-6 & Virtual-Baltar might be that as well seemed possible (I always figured they were some internal dilusion).
As soon as Baltar found out he had no chip back in season 1, I assumed that in-head Six was real and was the new show’s equivalent of the old show’s angels. And once Caprica Six turned out to have an in-head Baltar I thought it was definitely confirmed.
Starbuck, IMO, was never an angel. She had no powers/abilities.
I think she was an angel-in-training — again, as per the original show.
I don’t have a problem with “God” being in the story, but saying “God” a lot by itself isn’t enough say religion “played a part”. I mean, there’s a lot more to religious thought than having mysterious stuff happen and then saying “God” a lot. God never really redeemed anybody, punished anybody, fought with other Gods, etc in this story.
That’s a good idea Roderick, I’ll see what I can do. I thought about using the pen hand but it looked like it was at a funny angle or something.
Well, you have the elements of the two forces (humans and cylons) having different belief systems: polytheistic humans and monotheisitic cylons, with cylons seeming to be driven in part by their religious belief.
During the first season or so, prophesy played a big part as well, which for me means religion as well. At least after they left New Caprica, those elements seems to take somewhat of a backseat, to be replaced later by Starbuck resurrected.
It seemed clear to me toward the end that while “God” existed in the BSG universe, he/it was more a force then the God of Bible/Koran, etc that we go for.
Here’s the updated shot with 2 lightsabers:
http://img240.imageshack.us/img240/9955/blocktwosabers.jpg
And here’s a red one:
http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/2277/benbernankesaber.jpg
The main problem with the lightsaber trick that I learned is that if the saber has both dark and light backgrounds behind it then the glow appears to be faded on the lighter backgrounds (like the blue one in the first picture).
Here’s another one. These are actually pretty fun to make:
http://img257.imageshack.us/img257/7713/lenin.jpg
This is physics-based Gnostic mythology for sci-fi fanboi skeptics that couldn’t indulge in such silliness otherwise. Or something like that.