Bye Bye Battlestar

How can one encapsulate in a blog post the finale that brought to an end one of the most fascinating shows on television in recent years? A show that took a show from a couple of decades earlier and reinvented it rather than simply remaking it? [That in itself should have made us think twice about the sense in which “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again”]. A show that was discussed at the United Nations recently, not least because it tackled tough issues like torture?

In many respects, the show’s finale confirmed some things I suspected quite some time ago – for instance, that the events of the show would be in our past, and that the inhabitants of our planet would turn out to be the offspring of humans and cylons. This nicely illustrates why intelligent design doesn’t get us out of the problem of regression and answer the question of origins. Even if it turned out that we inherited characteristics from beings that had been designed rather than merely having evolved, we would only succeed in pushing the problem back one step, onto another world, where we would then confront the same question: where did the original designer come from?

I was happier than some about the religious element of the finale. It didn’t try to wrap up the question of God, but left a fair bit of mystery. For fundamentalists, religion is about answering life’s questions. For other religious believers, religion is about hints of a mystery, pointers to transcendence, and a whole lot of symbolism. And the finale did some provocative things in this vein, like emphasizing that God is not on anyone’s side, calling God a “force of nature” (as opposed to a person in some anthropomorphic or cylonomorphic sense), and saying at the very end about God that “It hates to be called that”.

Anyway, goodbye Battlestar Galactica – for now. Thank you for tackling serious issues and making us think. And thank you for ending before you ran out of good ideas. The worst thing one can hear from viewers of a TV series, after all, is “All this has happened before, and all this will happen again”.