Battlestar Galactica: Ultimately Pointless

If you're even half of a science fiction fan, you know by now that the "re-imagined" version of Battlestar Galactica aired its series finale last Friday. In it, the fugitive Colonials finally defeated the mean Cylons (with the help of some friendly Cylons) and settled on Earth. Our Earth, mind you; not the one they were looking for, which was a different Earth populated entirely by Cylons who apparently wiped each other out.

A twist, however, reveals that the Colonials arrived at our Earth 150,000 years ago, and that a Cylon-Human hybrid child, Hera (a centerpiece of the series, for those of you who don't watch) is the "mitochondrial Eve."

Silly, I know, and the end result of the show is that, ultimately, it was all for naught.

What? What did I just write? Yeah, you read it... the entire series was an exercise in futility. I'll get to that in a bit, but first some background is in order.

Battlestar Galactica is about a space-faring human civilization that made its home light-years from Earth (the real Earth... ours). There, they colonized 12 planets and enjoyed existence among the stars. Eventually, they created a race of robots (the Cylons) who gained self-awareness and promptly waged war on their human former-masters. The war ended in an armistice, and the Cylons disappeared.

40 years later they return, and just as promptly whoop some serious ass. Now, I'm not going to go into all of the contradictory and completely illogical plot progressions of the series, but basically what happens is that the survivors of humanity (40 or 50k of them) take off in search of Earth, a supposedly mythical place that is the home to a 13th long-forgotten colony.

Their reasons for going there are simple: they need a new home, and they need that colony's help for protection against the Cylons.

Fast-forward to the finale: the Colonials take on the Cylons one last time and, despite the fact that we never see it happen on-screen, all of the bad-guy Cylons are destroyed. The Colonials win. They whooped some ass. And then, for some mysterious reason, they decide to populate the primitive Earth and fly all of their ships into the sun.

Basically, they have a new home, but no protection against the Cylons. And, let's face it, space is huge... there are undoubtedly more Cylons out there still looking for the Colonials. But, whatever.

So why is all this ultimately pointless? Well, think about it. The Colonials won. The illogical writers of the series want us to believe that all the bad Cylons are gone, leaving the Colonials to do whatever the Hell they want.

Put it this way: they could've went home. They could've went back to Kobol, which is supposedly their ancestral home. They could've gone anywhere in the galaxy and settled anywhere they wanted to.

Sure, they're a bit low on population, but they could've bred with the local Earthlings (the product of an extremely unlikely perfect parallel evolution), rebuilt their military strength, and gone back to the 12 Colonies later.

But, they can't. They're stuck. They went all that way to disappear into history. AND THEY COULD'VE WENT HOME. The Cylons were defeated. There was nothing left to fear. They no longer needed to find a new home... they had the choice of five different star systems (the 12 Colonies, Kobol, New Caprica, Earth 1, and Earth 2). They no longer needed protection against the Cylons. The journey was done, over, kaput.

And the messed up part is: they never even had to leave their home system in order to wind up with the same result.

Conclusion: ultimately pointless.