A friend of mine finally finished watching Battlestar Galactica, thanks to his Netflix membership and wrote me to tell me how much he and his wife loved the ending – and asking me a couple of questions about the finale.
I think about the finale often, I’ll admit, and I haven’t erased it off my DVR yet, though I haven’t watched it more than twice. I’ve gone back and forth from loving it to being disappointed in the last few minutes of it.
But as I wrote back to my friend, whom I’ll call S., I realized it really was the perfect ending. It is what the show was about all along. Fate. Destiny. Faith. Whatever the personal belief of the viewers, this is what the show was about.
The belief in the one true god was a dividing line between human and cylon from the miniseries itself. Not the only thing that separated them, but it wouldn’t be the first time religion exacerbated a rift between two cultures.
As I wrote, I realized I was putting an awful lot of thought into my answers, so I thought I’d share his questions and my answers here, too. I’d love to hear what others think.
• First, S. wondered why Cavil killed himself. His wife thought it was because he believed he’d be resurrected on the base ship, but he disagreed. “I thought there was no further opportunity for resurrection. That’s why he agreed to let Hera go, after he was promised that the Cylons would re-create resurrection.”
He’s right, in fact. There was no further opportunity for resurrection, at least not until the Cylons figured it out again, and that seemed highly unlikely.
Cavil killed himself, I believe, because he saw that his time was at an end. I think he killed himself almost BECAUSE there was no resurrection, rather than it spite of there being no resurrection.
