Neither a review nor a defense of Battlestar Galactica's finale

It seems that every time anyone out there on the internet has ever brought up RDM BSG since the finale aired, they always preface the substance of their post/article/whatever with "yeah the finale sucked, but remember when the show was awesome?"

Or, "whatever your feelings on the finale..."

In my opinion, this sort of nonsense is completely unnecessary.

Now, this is not a defense of the finale, which other than the Luddite thing (and the fact that the "dying leader" prophecy simply doesn't come to pass) was actually pretty decent. Now, you could argue that "the Luddite thing" was the main point of the finale, since there was that tacked-on coda/epilogue that hammered it home, blah blah blah.

As I said, this is not a defense of the finale. This is just a request for the internet to stop going out of its way to mention its collective dislike of the finale as a requirement for holding any discussion whatsoever about the positive aspects of Battlestar Galactica.

I mean, we all hate "The Woman King" too - hell, I hate "Epiphanies" more than "Black Market" and "The Woman King" put together, but that's just my opinion. (Magic Cylon baby blood < Mr. Rule-of-Law killing a criminal in cold blood or everyone being stupid racist towards the Sagittarons.)

The thing is, "The Woman King," "Black Market," "Epiphanies," and yes, even "Daybreak, Part III" are all just episodes of a show.

And on the whole, that show was awesome.

I mean, hell, if "Daybreak, Part III" disgusts you so much, pretend the show ended on "Sometimes a Great Notion." (The other thing I didn't particularly like about "Daybreak" was that it undid the "holy crap, we are Cylons" wham that "Notion" had implied.)

I can hypothesize that people hate "Daybreak" extra-much because it was the finale, and it was supposed to be this grand concluding statement to the show and sum up the show's morals and values, and those morals and values evidently ended up being "technology is no good." Well, no, the moral of the show is "It's not enough to survive; one also must be worthy of survival." That's been the case ever since Adama said pretty much those words in the Miniseries.

It would be like me hating "Dirty Hands" because I thought the whole political subtext was a tad ham-fisted (or, hell, any time Lee says "hope" or "change" in Season 4.0 - or, to stretch a point, the fact that right around that time they put Roslin in a wig to make her look less like an older Sarah Palin. Don't lie, you were thinking it). The political subtext was a tad ham-fisted, I didn't wholly agree with it... but I still liked the episode. The political subtext of "Sine Qua Non" was absurdly ham-fisted if you buy into the Lee/Obama analogy (which, by the way, is simply ludicrous; to cite one example, as a former CAG and onetime commander of the Pegasus, Lee had more executive experience than Obama did in 2008), but to me, that was the point where the show got out of its slump, and everything from there to the finale was a thundering chourus of awesome. And the messages of those episodes were not necessarily the message of the show as a whole.

Now, maybe the finale should be treated differently. Well, from the start, you have to admit that this finale is completely different to pretty much anything else. Compare it to, say, The End of Time over on Doctor Who and it's almost like examining two entirely different media (although they do both spend way too much time at the end trying to wrap everything up and put a big bow on top). But even if The End of Time was the worst thing Rusty ever wrote, would we be trashing his entire tenure as Who's showrunner?

Point is, the quality of the finale should not color your opinion of the entire show.

And hell, if you wanna complain about the show ending on a sour note, are you forgetting The Plan or did you just wipe that from your memory?

I mean, for my money, The Plan, which came out after the finale, was worse than the finale... but so what? That doesn't change the fact that for 4+ years, Battlestar Galactica was the best damn thing on television.

So, please, internet in general, please stop prefacing all your comments about Battlestar with "no matter what we thought of the finale" or anything along those lines. Leave that to us; when we hook our family and friends on the show, we'll drop that caveat somewhere early on. You don't need to remind us what you thought of the finale; we'd much rather consider the show as a whole, and the show as a whole was awesome.