Hero Moment of the Week — Lots of Heroes that Missed the Ship. Battlestar Galatica failed on many levels.

I guess I’m venting a bit this week.  Because I don’t watch television, I tend to be almost a year behind everyone else when it comes to catching up with TV series.

So I’ve only recently got to watch the debacle that was the series finale of Battlestar Galactica.

I was going to be a bit kinder in my description but I’ve cruised around on-line to see what everyone else thought of it, and discovered that it’s not just me being a princess about what was one of my all-time favourite science fiction series ever being totally screwed over at the end.

So for today, let me enumerate how they missed the boat when it came to the many romances they were hinting at or outright stating.  I feel the romances deserve a critique of their own.  Battlestar Galactica spent plenty of airtime developing meaty romantic storylines for five years.  If the writers were going to step into the romance ring, and play with the big kiddies then they get to take their licks like we romance writers all do:

First, Admiral Adama and President Roslyn:  It was refreshing to see an older couple get a romance, but they wimped out at the end.  The lack of commitment until after she died felt spineless on Adama’s behalf.  He’s an Admiral.  A commander of men.  Once they’d figured out their feelings for each other, then the commitment should have been total.  So I was shocked when he slipped his wedding ring onto her hand when she died.  If he really felt that way, why didn’t he do that when she was alive?  It’s a small thing, I know.  But it was one more thing about the ending that really bothered me.

Galen/Sharon Valerii/Cally: I ended up really liking Galen, even though he’s the least romantic hero of all the heroes in the series.  He went through hell, emotionally, and just kept persevering, and stuck to his guns and his principles.  And his loyalty to the Admiral.  So the fact that he ended up alone at the end of the series and walking off into the sunset just sucked.  He rejected everyone.  It was so out of character it stank.  And it was such a stupid story idea, too.  Thirty seconds of survival instinct would tell you that living on your own decreases your chance of survival by several hundreds of percent points.  But Galen heads north into the colder parts of the world by himself.  Ugh.  After fighting so hard for two different races, he just gives up?  Give me a break.   He just killed the woman who murdered his wife.   He’s passionate, full of fire.  As they killed off the two women he loved, he should have got even the beginnings of a new romance, the hint of a relationship.  He should have been surrounded by people and love, not turned into a hermit.  They really blew this romance, big time.

Caprica Six and Gaius Baltar: I hated this romance.  Period.   Baltar was obsessed about Caprica to the point where he betrayed his race willingly and knowingly, and at the end of the series, he was rewarded by getting her back.  He learned a lot of things in between, sure, but by getting her back at the end, all it tells him is that it was okay to do the worst thing you can possibly do as a human being in order to impress a woman you’re obsessed with, because it’ll win the girl in the end.  Viewers won’t notice his single small act of nervous bravery at the end.  They’ll just see five years of selfishness and self-interest, lying, cheating, and magnificent self-absorption.  And he still got the girl.  And that’s what the series showed thousands of gullible guys out there, too:  Do anything you have to do to get the hot chick.  It’s worth it.

The best/worst for last.  Lee Adama/Starbuck (Kira)/Sam Anders. I had high hopes throughout the first part of the series that Lee and Kira would get together and the writers were dangling this deliberately.  There were plenty of very broad hints, tension, looks, and romantic I am, I wanted to see it happen.  Then in the middle of the series, Lee and Kira actually do get together for a night and confess they love each other…and Kira bails, afraid of her own feelings, and rushes off and marries Sam instead.

Okay, I can see how the writers would feel that they’d backed themselves into a corner and resolved the Lee/Kira thing too soon and needed to throw a spanner into the works, in the form of Sam.   But they never got back online.  The storyline spluttered and died after that.  Sam turned into a Cylon baseship supercomputer, Lee married Dee, who killed herself, and Kira, at the end of the series, turned into some sort of resurrected Angel/Black Death Messenger who decided she’d done her duty and simply disappeared when Lee turned around to look at some mountains.

Say what?

This was absolutely the most disappointing and farsical of all the romance storylines in the series.  The Lee/Kira romance had the potential of having us all chewing our fingernails every week for the entire series, as they figured their feelings out.  There was plenty of raw material there, and the writers didn’t even need to drop into clichés to do it.  These two characters were fresh, original — hell, Kira sucker-punched her CO over a friendly game of poker in the first week of the series and ended up in the brig — that’s how original they were.  And the series itself was constantly pushing the envelope, so the situations themselves were unique, so just playing the romance out against that unique background would make the romance itself original.

Instead, they killed what could have been one of the primary story backbones.  The Sam/Kira thing didn’t do much for me at all.  I kept waiting for the marriage to fail so she could get back to Lee, frankly.

Instead, all the potential story lines evaporated into nothing at all.  In the finale, Lee Adama didn’t even look particularly upset when Kira disappeared.  Just wistful.  She was supposed to be the secret love of his life, for god’s sake!

_____________

Like I said, the ending of the series failed on so many levels, but when it came to the romance storylines, Battlestar Galactica really, really blew it.  You can hold up your finger and point out that it was a science fiction series.  Yes, it was.  But they chose to write romances into the series, and if they elected to put romances into the series in the first place, then they should have dealt with them properly, and not half-assed them. It’s as if they’re too embarrassed by the deeper human emotions, like love, to deal with them properly.    Blowing up cylons and mountains of technical shit is just fine, but when it comes to feelings…ugh.

I think the way they fumbled it made them look stupid.

_______________________

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