One Will Be Revealed

It’s List of Giant Things Day!

Today, one of my favorite shows of recent memory, and one that unlike all the previous shows I’ve done on List of Giant Things, I watched as it was originally airing. I did stumble on Battlestar Galactica after the fact of its first premiere and then inhaled the first season on DVD, but after that initial discovery, I was stuck with waiting months and years to find out the end of that story.

I think it’s appropriate and important to talk about endings when thinking about Battlestar Galactica, because its relationship with finality is quite different than a lot of other long shows. This isn’t the case for all genre fiction, but when a show is oriented around a plot that deals with mystery and discovery, the imagined end point forms a crucial and often difficult horizon line from the very beginning. Unlike fiction that uses multiple generations as its device for creating length, it would have been impossible for Battlestar Galactica to continue indefinitely. There are certain questions that the show built into its premise – What do all of the Cylon models look like? Is there such a thing as Earth, and if so, how do we find it? Will humanity survive? Will Cylons survive? – which required an ending in a markedly different sense than a romance plotline. Shows built on generations can continue forever by simply adding new characters, and in the sense of generations, I don’t just mean a family that has children, but any renewable cast of characters: a new senior class at high school, a new administration in the White House, a new bunch of interns in the hospital. Unlike those open, changeable settings, the world of Battlestar is a closed set. These are the humans who survived the apocalypse. These are the thirteen models of humanoid Cylons. Sure, you can discover another ship that managed to survive, or you can learn that there are more models of Cylon than you thought, and the show uses both of those strategies. But you can’t go on like that forever, and at some point, the show has to answer its central questions rather than continue the drama by forever stumbling across an implausible new set of characters. As soon as those questions are resolved, the show is over.

Oscar Moralde recently wrote a nice piece on the problem of television endings for Slant Magazine, in which he describes the difficulty of ending a long-running television show, especially when it’s not necessarily on the creator’s terms. As he points out, few writers have the opportunity to plan for how long the show will need to run, and the process of endlessly extending a show over an indefinite period of time is one Moralde describes as finding a path somewhere in between alienation and stagnation – on the one hand, you can’t change a show so dramatically that its audience no longer recognizes it (“jumping the shark”), on the other hand, you cannot endlessly repeat the same familiar pattern (or, you can do that, but we call those shows Law and Order, Two and a Half Men, or more simply: boring). On Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore and David Eick actually had an opportunity that doesn’t come around that often in television. They were able to set their own end point. The show was popular enough and was garnering enough high-culture respect that SciFi (now the dreaded SyFy) would probably have embraced another season of Battlestar, but its creators negotiated a renewal for a fourth season and then announced that season would be the show’s last. It’s an unusual move for a popular show, and one that was certainly the best thing that could have happened for Battlestar. Only by building in a defined ending point was the show able to move purposefully toward satisfying answers to its central questions.

One year later

All the way through its run, Battlestar is nothing if not completely ballsy in its endings. There are several moments of outright cliffhangers, but it’s even more astonishing in how often the last ten or twenty minutes of an episode will completely shift everything you thought you knew. The best of these is the end of season two, where several plotlines converge around the discovery of a habitable planet and the decision to settle there, abandoning the search for Earth. The last fifteen minutes of that season take place a full year later, which means that the show skips over a gap greater than the entire previous period of time covered in the first two seasons. In the last fifteen minutes, we learn that characters have gotten married, entire political systems and labor unions have been established, a city exists where none was before… Lee Adama got fat! It’s a remarkable shift that telegraphs the writers’ supreme confidence in the long term plan for the show (because how could you do something like that if you didn’t know where you were going?), and jolts the audience outside its comfortable patterns. A faster, if no less impressive shift happens in the middle of season four, at the end of an episode that wasn’t a season finale, but constituted the last episode before a very long hiatus. The easy assumption is that the show will end with finding Earth. Instead, in the final moments of episode twelve (of twenty-two), Cylons and humans land on Earth together and find an irradiated, post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s a blow-your-mind level of awesomeness, and a playful, bravura gesture of surprise and control that’s much more complex and fictionally risky than the typical soap opera cliffhanger (“She’s pregnant! Who’s the father?!”).

You can always tell post-apolcalyptic landscapes by their insistence on grayscale

Nevertheless, the end of Battlestar Galactica was subject to some intense skepticism from the audience, and it was more to do with the thematic and allegorical concerns of the show than from a standpoint of narrative structure. Lost is an important text to bring in here, because it too is a genre show that has been given a set end point far in advance, and seems to be loaded with concrete questions which require answers but whose answers will necessarily conclude the show. My problems with Lost now have little do with the actual answers to those questions (“it’s a genie!”), and are mostly about the way we’re getting around to them (“why should we care about the flash-sideways?”). In contrast, Battlestar’s last season was a pretty masterful sequence of events that doled out information in meaningful, careful, but not unfairly suspenseful ways, while the conclusion it actually reached was considered by some of its audience to be incongruously utopian, or disappointingly spiritual.

After living with it for a while now, I’ve decided that I like the ending. There’s only so much bleakness one can take before turning in relief toward an optimistic ending, even if that ending looks inconsistently cheerful. Its final lines speak to the problem of ending something so complicated, when Caprica Six tells Chip Baltar that she has hope for this incarnation of earth: “let a complicated system repeat itself long enough, eventually something surprising will occur.” But even if the end of Battlestar was unsatisfying for some viewers on a thematic level, it’s hard to deny that its conclusion was thoughtful, well-balanced, and most importantly – planned. We can only hope that we’ll feel the same way about Lost when we look at it a year from now.