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dianora2I don't even know if this post makes any sense at this point. It vomited out of my fingers like Adama vomitng all over himself in an alley and I can't bear to re-read it right now. In any case:
Why I Thought the BSG Finale Sucked, or, Why I Hate Ron Moore Even More than Chris Carter, or, Why I've Been Describing How I Feel as Ron Moore Taking a Shit on My Head, by Dia.
I spent a huge chunk of the day reading other people's reactions to the finale, and I do feel a bit of a catharsis for having done so. But I don't think I'll feel complete until I put down some of my own thoughts, even though they will largely echo and seem lame in comparison to some of the magnificent rants and meta that has gone on these past few days. ;) I'm even quoting some people where I know they said it much better than I could.
Part of me feels that in order to understand why I did not like the finale, all you have to do is read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rawles's recap, here. The beauty of this recap is that she is not embellishing anything, and yet when you see it all written down in black and white you really see what an LOLtastic piece of crap the finale was. (At least, I do. I'm not trying to convince anyone who loved it that they're "wrong" and it sucked. I'm just venting my personal spleen, as it were.)
I thought I would start out by listing the things I liked, but I'm realizing that even the things I liked are tied in to arguments about things I hated, which is sad. LOL.
I would have been much better with this finale -- would have merely found it lackluster -- if they had stopped right when the fleet reached Earth. But that is of course when things took a real crazycakes turn. Now, I DID like the shot of the men lying in the grass, especially Tigh and Cottle side by side, because hello that shit is hilarious. But as soon as Gaius started nattering about interacting and reproducing with the "tribal natives," they lost me. I cracked at Em's party that this was when they built an obelisk and started playing the 2001 theme. Then, Lee, Mr. Civilization himself, the show's living representation of progressive ideals whether RDM realized it or not, seeing as how he never gave more than two seconds' thought to Lee anyway, says they should just give up all technology and trappings of civilization and live off the land or whatever. Let's hope they saved some antibiotics or tampons or, like, GARDENING TOOLS or something first? I guess everything that's happened before will happen again, since they're going to be as doomed as the fucking Pilgrims were unless the natives teach them how to hunt in return for, I don't know, THE WHEEL or something.
The fast forward to the future, again, was embarrasing, it was so bad. Just so mockable and ludicrous and painful to watch, particularly when the MSNBC robots footage started, just in case YOU DIDN'T GET IT EVEN AFTER BEING HIT REPEATEDLY WITH A SLEDGEHAMMER. So apparently all along the moral of the story has been that TECHNOLOGY IS EVIL? Um, OKAY. Oh wait, technology is evil, yet, it is all PREORDAINED BY GOD anyway so why bother doing anything. I knew Calvinism had been having a resurgence, but this is ridiculous.
Apparently RDM didn't realize you don't have to take the term deus ex machina QUITE SO LITERALLY.
And, so, Head!Six and Head!Gaius are angels, but so is Kara, only she's a completely different kind of angel because she's corporeal and visible to everyone and doesn't know what she is (and doesn't dress nearly as snazzily) and, well, let's introduce angels but not try to make it a consistent mythos or anything. RDM has since admitted it was essentially to head-hurty to figure out and explain what Kara was, so they just left it open-ended instead of having to think about it. WOW. I AM GLAD YOU BECAME A "WRITER" INSTEAD OF A BRAIN SURGEON, MR. MOORE.
Will add a quote fromdionusia here: "Kara's like Jesus, the classic resurrection story! Except for the fact that Jesus knew who he was and what he had to say to people and what he needed to do. Right. If you make the Divine Plan an important driver of the plot...then you should treat it as if it is important. As it is their angel needed another head-angel to explain things, which is getting really, really crazy. I now imagine that when HeadSix and HeadBaltar are confused, they get headpeople of their own to sort things out. Maybe the headpeople-headpeople know the truth...!"
Also, how was Kara the "harbinger of death?" Because.....who died other than a few random people? I'm thinking Cavil was more a harbinger of death than Kara ever was. But, oh right, explaining that would make RDM's unstylishly-coiffed head hurt, so never mind.
(Also, finding out that Head!Six and Head!Gaius were messengers from God all along? OY. Thanks for making those "characters" a whole lot less interesting, psychologically speaking.)
What else. Oh, the whole epic vision about the Opera House was reduced to....chasing a little girl around a spaceship. And the stage is the CIC. Wow, most anticlimactic reveal EVER. Why weren't one of the glowy Final Five sitting in a bathtub then, LOL.
They made the president the guy WHO WALKED AROUND WITH HIS DEAD CAT IN A BAG. Chew on that for a while.
RDM must have been slathering at the bit for years trying to work a STRIP CLUB into his show, and is no doubt thrilled that he finally did. In an episode where the female characters were punished exponentially more than the male characters, it was quite the objectifying icing on the cake.
Also, thank god he finally got in the transcendent vision of ADAMA VOMITING that he's been holding on to all these years. I'm so glad we go to see ADAMA PUKE instead of more character interaction. \O/
Chief killing Tory was good for a laugh, but the more I think about it the more disgusted I am with myself for laughing at it. Also, I must quotequeenofthorns here: "Secondly, do we not have ANY PROBLEM with Tyrol being the voice of murderous rage yet again, and being COMMISERATED WITH because of this? You know how Tigh says something about how he would have done the same thing to someone who'd killed HIS wife? Um, TIGH, YOU DID KILL YOUR WIFE."
SERIOUSLY. I await Tigh strangling himself any time now.
But, this is an episode, after all, in which committing genocide is not nearly as bad a crime as almost cheating on your boyfriend/brother. (RDM, please page your sex therapist, stat.) Gaius and Six, Ellen and Tigh, Sharon who just shot Boomer in cold blood and Helo, even, sort of, murderer Chief, all get their happy endings....but not those dirty whores who got drunk and kissed near Zak! To quotealethialia, "Then I contrast their ending with that of Baltar/Caprica and I just can't even be coherent. The guy that betrays all of humanity gets to reunite with his accomplice and play happy family, but the two who never stopped fighting for humanity, they get dicked over? Fuck that." And I say that as someone who LOVED the resolution of Caprica/Gaius. That was probably the only part of the finale that I really loved. Every moment between the two of them was pitch perfect and Gaius saying he knows something about farming was possibly the best line in the entire two-plus hours. That was the only time I teared up at all because I felt genuine emotion instead of authorial hand-waving. I *adored* them in this episode. BUT. The point still remains.
To quote RDM himself, "Yeah, I kind of felt that Kara and Lee had never really left a moment in time on the table. They were kind of trapped in that moment perpetually of wanting, longing, feeling but never being able to fully enjoy it or fully embrace it. They just really never left that place as characters."
So, let me get this straight, Ronnie: you're essentially admitting that over the course of four seasons, two of your main characters NEVER EVOLVED OR GREW AS PEOPLE? Because wow, that's a different take than what those characters' fans had, I'll tell you that. I mean, thanks for admitting you're a shitty writer, I guess, but: shouldn't your job have been to MOVE THEM PAST THAT? A lot of us were suckers and really thought that most of this past season was about free will, and making your own choices, and subverting destiny, and Lee and Kara's relationship with each other has seemed to echo that. There was so much talk about "breaking the cycle" that we stupidly thought the whole point with Lee/Kara was that they, too, were going to BREAK THE CYCLE and finally be together without guilt and without rancor but just with love. Ron, I hate to break it to you, but that's where you had been leading those characters. And then you did a 180 (according to some interviews because of Michael Trucco's accident) and decided to just completely fuck over the characters, and the characters' fans, instead. KUDOS, SIR.
And, just to be clear, I did not need Lee and Kara to go off and be blissful and make babies or whatever. I'd kind of always assumed that wouldn't happen -- except, this is supposed to be a dark show and it got this supposedly sunny happy ending, so for a minute there I did wonder -- but, I did expect some kind of true acknowledgment between the characters of their feelings for each other, rather than spending their last scene together like friendly acquaintances asking each other how their day went. Kara just had this intensely emotional scene where she says goodbye to Sam and tells him she loves him, and then....acts like Lee is just some random dude? WHAT THE FUCK? I think I speak for a LOT of Lee/Kara fans when I say that we would have been okay with Kara just disappearing (even though that's still fucking stupid, but whatever), if they had been allowed to share just ONE moment of happiness, or for her to say "I love you, Lee Adama," before disappearing, or SOMETHING. But instead, RDM purposely shit all over Lee/Kara fans because he's never had any respect for them (because we're GIRLS), even though it would have been SO EASY to give them a happy ending just like he gave Ellen and Saul, Gaius and Caprica, and Helo and Sharon. And even, IMO, Bill and Laura, as since Laura had to die, I thought that was one of the nicer ways they could have done it.
To quotesarmoti, with capslock intact: "THIS IS MAYBE THE ONLY WAY THAT LEE/KARA COULD EVER BE TOGETHER AND YET THEY STILL ARE NOT TOGETHER."
It would have been SO EASY to just throw us a bone -- SO EASY to give something to the fans who helped comprise that TEENY TINY VIEWING AUDIENCE YOU WERE STILL HOLDING ON TO -- but purposely didn't, because you're a dick. Charming.
It also now means Lee is ALL ALONE. "Smell ya later, son, I'm gonna go be the Unabomber in a cabin in the woods!" "Smell ya later, Lee, I know I'm the love of your life, but, eh, whatever." Way to leave the supposed "hero" of your show with nothing. I know you don't give two shits about Lee Adama or his fans, but way to really rub it in our faces.
And that's it for Kara, really? Bad enough to give us this insane retcon that the thing that scares her the most is not being remembered, when that is not supported by the past four seasons of text AT ALL, but, apparently in the podcast RDM has said that the main reason she tried to have sex with Lee on the table is because she's a big old slut -- oh Ron, you've been TRYING SO HARD for years to tell us Kara is a big old slut, and I guess you've finally done it! Somewhere, Dirk Benedict is smiling -- and, that because Kara always leaves, it was fitting for their relationship to end that way. Again, if that was the case, WHAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF MAELSTROM AND STWOM? Are you just admitting that as far as you're concerned Kara NEVER CHANGED? REALLY? More the fools we, then, who have been following a character evolution for years, and part of that evolution was learning to let people love her.
Here I'm going to quote the brilliantrawles at length: "And if he wanted to have a coherent theme, the whole BLANK SLATE thing going extra for Kara who literally WAS RESURRECTED and rarely happy and NEVER AT PEACE in her first life would have worked well. It is just so utterly counterintuitive to have your theme be about making the choice to break a cycle and then have these two people who have been in this endless cycle (which you have just played up in flashbacks) of almost-there-but-not-quite and bad timing and hurting each other and other people and strip them of their choice. Neither Lee or Kara had any agency whatsoever in their endings. They don't get to take the blank slate and make a choice to be together or not be together, to be better people or not be better people, to make the same mistakes or make new ones. Kara goes because apparently the only reason she ever existed was her ~*~destiny~*~ and Lee is left without her because it is also his destiny to always be watching her FLY AWAY just out of reach or whatever the fuck. And I guess we're supposed to think that's fine for Kara because Lee will remember her and, you know, they just made up that being her life's desire ten minutes ago. And I've also seen people talking about how Lee's ending was affirming because he is finally free from blah blah and can be his own man. Uh. No. It is not self-affirming to make no choice to be alone, but rather have literally every person in the universe you love just leave you. It is also especially stupid because the episodes leading up to this one were about Kara letting go of her original life and getting affirmation from Lee (and less meaningfully from Adama) that they didn't care what she was and, in Lee's case, all that was important was that THEY WERE BOTH STILL THERE. Which of course makes the one most self-contradictory and unsatisfying and random thing that could ever happen to be for her to just NOT BE THERE ANYMORE. LITERALLY."
At least Katee has had the balls to admit she was less than thrilled with Kara's fate because...how could she be? That ending felt to me like RDM had nothing, ultimately, but contempt, for both Kara and for Lee. Just...contempt. Ugh.
It just makes me wonder why they bothered having the Lee/Kara scenes in "Six of One" or "Islanded..." AT ALL. Or showing them being awesome together in "The Oath" and "Blood on the Scales." WHY EVEN BOTHER DOING THAT? WHAT WAS THE POINT?
Also, let's LOL for a while that the only reason that stupid pigeon scene was in the finale was because RDM thought having someone chase a pigeon would BE COOL. NO REALLY. And then he did eenie meenie minie moe to see if it would be Lee, Bill, or Gaius. I would rather have seen Bill chase a pigeon than puke all over himself, just sayin'.
In conclusion, I feel insulted, and violated, and duped, and crushed, and I hate myself for feeling that way, because god knows Ronald D. Moore couldn't give two fucking shits. Maybe when Caprica gets canceled after two episodes, he'll give a little bit of a shit. Happy Failures, Ron!
Anyway, if you haven't readshipperfey's lovely ficlet in which she makes things right with Kara, please do. She put a lot more thought into it than RDM did into the finale. Also, cosetteferaud does her best to make us feel better about the whole thing here. And workerbee73 has a post on The Art of Episode Divorce here.
Oh, and I didn't get to why I hate Ron Moore even more than Chris Carter: because at least Mulder and Scully eventually got together, even if it was too little too late. At least he gave us that. CHRIS CARTER IS MORE GENEROUS THAN RON MOORE WTF. My world is tilting on its axis.
Short version: most of my anger is about Lee and Lee/Kara, but not all of it. I thought a lot of the rest of it sucked, too. Also, the fact that most of my anger IS about Lee and Lee/Kara? I make no apologies for it. It's not like the rest of the show had been so great lately that I had PLOT to cling to. ;P And if you did like it, more power to you. I really, really, really wish I had, as I'd be in a much better emotional state of mind right now.
HOWEVER, that does not change the fact that I have had SO MUCH FUN on LJ and IRL over the past couple of years with my fellow fans. From getting to share new bonding experiences withem_meredith and nnaylime, to meeting people like nicole_anell and everyone at Em's finale party, to introducing the show to oeilade and girlunravelled, to nattering on at length about Lee with dionusia, queenofthorns, and bop_radar, to laughing extremely hard at every post of sarmoti's, to making recent discoveries of awesome people I can't believe I didn't have friended for years, like airings and taragel, I don't regret a minute of it. And especially to all the folks at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sasa_hq, the greatest Lee/Kara forum on the internets. A million thanks to canadiangirl_86 for being our fearless leader. I love you all.
P.S. I watched a couple of Arrested Development episodes that featured Franklin. That really did help. "I'm not kissing that old bitch!" "That's my wife you're talking about!"
Why I Thought the BSG Finale Sucked, or, Why I Hate Ron Moore Even More than Chris Carter, or, Why I've Been Describing How I Feel as Ron Moore Taking a Shit on My Head, by Dia.
I spent a huge chunk of the day reading other people's reactions to the finale, and I do feel a bit of a catharsis for having done so. But I don't think I'll feel complete until I put down some of my own thoughts, even though they will largely echo and seem lame in comparison to some of the magnificent rants and meta that has gone on these past few days. ;) I'm even quoting some people where I know they said it much better than I could.
Part of me feels that in order to understand why I did not like the finale, all you have to do is read
rawles's recap, here. The beauty of this recap is that she is not embellishing anything, and yet when you see it all written down in black and white you really see what an LOLtastic piece of crap the finale was. (At least, I do. I'm not trying to convince anyone who loved it that they're "wrong" and it sucked. I'm just venting my personal spleen, as it were.)I thought I would start out by listing the things I liked, but I'm realizing that even the things I liked are tied in to arguments about things I hated, which is sad. LOL.
I would have been much better with this finale -- would have merely found it lackluster -- if they had stopped right when the fleet reached Earth. But that is of course when things took a real crazycakes turn. Now, I DID like the shot of the men lying in the grass, especially Tigh and Cottle side by side, because hello that shit is hilarious. But as soon as Gaius started nattering about interacting and reproducing with the "tribal natives," they lost me. I cracked at Em's party that this was when they built an obelisk and started playing the 2001 theme. Then, Lee, Mr. Civilization himself, the show's living representation of progressive ideals whether RDM realized it or not, seeing as how he never gave more than two seconds' thought to Lee anyway, says they should just give up all technology and trappings of civilization and live off the land or whatever. Let's hope they saved some antibiotics or tampons or, like, GARDENING TOOLS or something first? I guess everything that's happened before will happen again, since they're going to be as doomed as the fucking Pilgrims were unless the natives teach them how to hunt in return for, I don't know, THE WHEEL or something.
The fast forward to the future, again, was embarrasing, it was so bad. Just so mockable and ludicrous and painful to watch, particularly when the MSNBC robots footage started, just in case YOU DIDN'T GET IT EVEN AFTER BEING HIT REPEATEDLY WITH A SLEDGEHAMMER. So apparently all along the moral of the story has been that TECHNOLOGY IS EVIL? Um, OKAY. Oh wait, technology is evil, yet, it is all PREORDAINED BY GOD anyway so why bother doing anything. I knew Calvinism had been having a resurgence, but this is ridiculous.
Apparently RDM didn't realize you don't have to take the term deus ex machina QUITE SO LITERALLY.
And, so, Head!Six and Head!Gaius are angels, but so is Kara, only she's a completely different kind of angel because she's corporeal and visible to everyone and doesn't know what she is (and doesn't dress nearly as snazzily) and, well, let's introduce angels but not try to make it a consistent mythos or anything. RDM has since admitted it was essentially to head-hurty to figure out and explain what Kara was, so they just left it open-ended instead of having to think about it. WOW. I AM GLAD YOU BECAME A "WRITER" INSTEAD OF A BRAIN SURGEON, MR. MOORE.
Will add a quote from
dionusia here: "Kara's like Jesus, the classic resurrection story! Except for the fact that Jesus knew who he was and what he had to say to people and what he needed to do. Right. If you make the Divine Plan an important driver of the plot...then you should treat it as if it is important. As it is their angel needed another head-angel to explain things, which is getting really, really crazy. I now imagine that when HeadSix and HeadBaltar are confused, they get headpeople of their own to sort things out. Maybe the headpeople-headpeople know the truth...!"Also, how was Kara the "harbinger of death?" Because.....who died other than a few random people? I'm thinking Cavil was more a harbinger of death than Kara ever was. But, oh right, explaining that would make RDM's unstylishly-coiffed head hurt, so never mind.
(Also, finding out that Head!Six and Head!Gaius were messengers from God all along? OY. Thanks for making those "characters" a whole lot less interesting, psychologically speaking.)
What else. Oh, the whole epic vision about the Opera House was reduced to....chasing a little girl around a spaceship. And the stage is the CIC. Wow, most anticlimactic reveal EVER. Why weren't one of the glowy Final Five sitting in a bathtub then, LOL.
They made the president the guy WHO WALKED AROUND WITH HIS DEAD CAT IN A BAG. Chew on that for a while.
RDM must have been slathering at the bit for years trying to work a STRIP CLUB into his show, and is no doubt thrilled that he finally did. In an episode where the female characters were punished exponentially more than the male characters, it was quite the objectifying icing on the cake.
Also, thank god he finally got in the transcendent vision of ADAMA VOMITING that he's been holding on to all these years. I'm so glad we go to see ADAMA PUKE instead of more character interaction. \O/
Chief killing Tory was good for a laugh, but the more I think about it the more disgusted I am with myself for laughing at it. Also, I must quote
queenofthorns here: "Secondly, do we not have ANY PROBLEM with Tyrol being the voice of murderous rage yet again, and being COMMISERATED WITH because of this? You know how Tigh says something about how he would have done the same thing to someone who'd killed HIS wife? Um, TIGH, YOU DID KILL YOUR WIFE."SERIOUSLY. I await Tigh strangling himself any time now.
But, this is an episode, after all, in which committing genocide is not nearly as bad a crime as almost cheating on your boyfriend/brother. (RDM, please page your sex therapist, stat.) Gaius and Six, Ellen and Tigh, Sharon who just shot Boomer in cold blood and Helo, even, sort of, murderer Chief, all get their happy endings....but not those dirty whores who got drunk and kissed near Zak! To quote
alethialia, "Then I contrast their ending with that of Baltar/Caprica and I just can't even be coherent. The guy that betrays all of humanity gets to reunite with his accomplice and play happy family, but the two who never stopped fighting for humanity, they get dicked over? Fuck that." And I say that as someone who LOVED the resolution of Caprica/Gaius. That was probably the only part of the finale that I really loved. Every moment between the two of them was pitch perfect and Gaius saying he knows something about farming was possibly the best line in the entire two-plus hours. That was the only time I teared up at all because I felt genuine emotion instead of authorial hand-waving. I *adored* them in this episode. BUT. The point still remains. To quote RDM himself, "Yeah, I kind of felt that Kara and Lee had never really left a moment in time on the table. They were kind of trapped in that moment perpetually of wanting, longing, feeling but never being able to fully enjoy it or fully embrace it. They just really never left that place as characters."
So, let me get this straight, Ronnie: you're essentially admitting that over the course of four seasons, two of your main characters NEVER EVOLVED OR GREW AS PEOPLE? Because wow, that's a different take than what those characters' fans had, I'll tell you that. I mean, thanks for admitting you're a shitty writer, I guess, but: shouldn't your job have been to MOVE THEM PAST THAT? A lot of us were suckers and really thought that most of this past season was about free will, and making your own choices, and subverting destiny, and Lee and Kara's relationship with each other has seemed to echo that. There was so much talk about "breaking the cycle" that we stupidly thought the whole point with Lee/Kara was that they, too, were going to BREAK THE CYCLE and finally be together without guilt and without rancor but just with love. Ron, I hate to break it to you, but that's where you had been leading those characters. And then you did a 180 (according to some interviews because of Michael Trucco's accident) and decided to just completely fuck over the characters, and the characters' fans, instead. KUDOS, SIR.
And, just to be clear, I did not need Lee and Kara to go off and be blissful and make babies or whatever. I'd kind of always assumed that wouldn't happen -- except, this is supposed to be a dark show and it got this supposedly sunny happy ending, so for a minute there I did wonder -- but, I did expect some kind of true acknowledgment between the characters of their feelings for each other, rather than spending their last scene together like friendly acquaintances asking each other how their day went. Kara just had this intensely emotional scene where she says goodbye to Sam and tells him she loves him, and then....acts like Lee is just some random dude? WHAT THE FUCK? I think I speak for a LOT of Lee/Kara fans when I say that we would have been okay with Kara just disappearing (even though that's still fucking stupid, but whatever), if they had been allowed to share just ONE moment of happiness, or for her to say "I love you, Lee Adama," before disappearing, or SOMETHING. But instead, RDM purposely shit all over Lee/Kara fans because he's never had any respect for them (because we're GIRLS), even though it would have been SO EASY to give them a happy ending just like he gave Ellen and Saul, Gaius and Caprica, and Helo and Sharon. And even, IMO, Bill and Laura, as since Laura had to die, I thought that was one of the nicer ways they could have done it.
To quote
sarmoti, with capslock intact: "THIS IS MAYBE THE ONLY WAY THAT LEE/KARA COULD EVER BE TOGETHER AND YET THEY STILL ARE NOT TOGETHER."It would have been SO EASY to just throw us a bone -- SO EASY to give something to the fans who helped comprise that TEENY TINY VIEWING AUDIENCE YOU WERE STILL HOLDING ON TO -- but purposely didn't, because you're a dick. Charming.
It also now means Lee is ALL ALONE. "Smell ya later, son, I'm gonna go be the Unabomber in a cabin in the woods!" "Smell ya later, Lee, I know I'm the love of your life, but, eh, whatever." Way to leave the supposed "hero" of your show with nothing. I know you don't give two shits about Lee Adama or his fans, but way to really rub it in our faces.
And that's it for Kara, really? Bad enough to give us this insane retcon that the thing that scares her the most is not being remembered, when that is not supported by the past four seasons of text AT ALL, but, apparently in the podcast RDM has said that the main reason she tried to have sex with Lee on the table is because she's a big old slut -- oh Ron, you've been TRYING SO HARD for years to tell us Kara is a big old slut, and I guess you've finally done it! Somewhere, Dirk Benedict is smiling -- and, that because Kara always leaves, it was fitting for their relationship to end that way. Again, if that was the case, WHAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF MAELSTROM AND STWOM? Are you just admitting that as far as you're concerned Kara NEVER CHANGED? REALLY? More the fools we, then, who have been following a character evolution for years, and part of that evolution was learning to let people love her.
Here I'm going to quote the brilliant
rawles at length: "And if he wanted to have a coherent theme, the whole BLANK SLATE thing going extra for Kara who literally WAS RESURRECTED and rarely happy and NEVER AT PEACE in her first life would have worked well. It is just so utterly counterintuitive to have your theme be about making the choice to break a cycle and then have these two people who have been in this endless cycle (which you have just played up in flashbacks) of almost-there-but-not-quite and bad timing and hurting each other and other people and strip them of their choice. Neither Lee or Kara had any agency whatsoever in their endings. They don't get to take the blank slate and make a choice to be together or not be together, to be better people or not be better people, to make the same mistakes or make new ones. Kara goes because apparently the only reason she ever existed was her ~*~destiny~*~ and Lee is left without her because it is also his destiny to always be watching her FLY AWAY just out of reach or whatever the fuck. And I guess we're supposed to think that's fine for Kara because Lee will remember her and, you know, they just made up that being her life's desire ten minutes ago. And I've also seen people talking about how Lee's ending was affirming because he is finally free from blah blah and can be his own man. Uh. No. It is not self-affirming to make no choice to be alone, but rather have literally every person in the universe you love just leave you. It is also especially stupid because the episodes leading up to this one were about Kara letting go of her original life and getting affirmation from Lee (and less meaningfully from Adama) that they didn't care what she was and, in Lee's case, all that was important was that THEY WERE BOTH STILL THERE. Which of course makes the one most self-contradictory and unsatisfying and random thing that could ever happen to be for her to just NOT BE THERE ANYMORE. LITERALLY."At least Katee has had the balls to admit she was less than thrilled with Kara's fate because...how could she be? That ending felt to me like RDM had nothing, ultimately, but contempt, for both Kara and for Lee. Just...contempt. Ugh.
It just makes me wonder why they bothered having the Lee/Kara scenes in "Six of One" or "Islanded..." AT ALL. Or showing them being awesome together in "The Oath" and "Blood on the Scales." WHY EVEN BOTHER DOING THAT? WHAT WAS THE POINT?
Also, let's LOL for a while that the only reason that stupid pigeon scene was in the finale was because RDM thought having someone chase a pigeon would BE COOL. NO REALLY. And then he did eenie meenie minie moe to see if it would be Lee, Bill, or Gaius. I would rather have seen Bill chase a pigeon than puke all over himself, just sayin'.
In conclusion, I feel insulted, and violated, and duped, and crushed, and I hate myself for feeling that way, because god knows Ronald D. Moore couldn't give two fucking shits. Maybe when Caprica gets canceled after two episodes, he'll give a little bit of a shit. Happy Failures, Ron!
Anyway, if you haven't read
shipperfey's lovely ficlet in which she makes things right with Kara, please do. She put a lot more thought into it than RDM did into the finale. Also, cosetteferaud does her best to make us feel better about the whole thing here. And workerbee73 has a post on The Art of Episode Divorce here.Oh, and I didn't get to why I hate Ron Moore even more than Chris Carter: because at least Mulder and Scully eventually got together, even if it was too little too late. At least he gave us that. CHRIS CARTER IS MORE GENEROUS THAN RON MOORE WTF. My world is tilting on its axis.
Short version: most of my anger is about Lee and Lee/Kara, but not all of it. I thought a lot of the rest of it sucked, too. Also, the fact that most of my anger IS about Lee and Lee/Kara? I make no apologies for it. It's not like the rest of the show had been so great lately that I had PLOT to cling to. ;P And if you did like it, more power to you. I really, really, really wish I had, as I'd be in a much better emotional state of mind right now.
HOWEVER, that does not change the fact that I have had SO MUCH FUN on LJ and IRL over the past couple of years with my fellow fans. From getting to share new bonding experiences with
em_meredith and nnaylime, to meeting people like nicole_anell and everyone at Em's finale party, to introducing the show to oeilade and girlunravelled, to nattering on at length about Lee with dionusia, queenofthorns, and bop_radar, to laughing extremely hard at every post of sarmoti's, to making recent discoveries of awesome people I can't believe I didn't have friended for years, like airings and taragel, I don't regret a minute of it. And especially to all the folks at sasa_hq, the greatest Lee/Kara forum on the internets. A million thanks to canadiangirl_86 for being our fearless leader. I love you all.P.S. I watched a couple of Arrested Development episodes that featured Franklin. That really did help. "I'm not kissing that old bitch!" "That's my wife you're talking about!"
