After all the heavy-duty speculation about how "Battlestar Galactica" will end, we now find ourselves within hours of knowing the truth. It's time for me to lay it on the line, then, and offer my final predictions about the BSG questions that matter most to me.
1. Is the BSG universe theistic? I'm going to go on record as saying, Yes, but only arguably so. I'm sorry if that sounds like a hedge, but I think this answer is most in line with series creator Ronald D. Moore's apparent love of ambiguity. If we think of the matter from a writer's perspective-- especially when we're talking about the creator of a series that has turned out to be quite a hit for the Sci Fi Channel, a hit that will be discussed for years-- a clear, pat conclusion would both undo the prevailing tone of the series, and would leave fans with almost nothing to discuss afterward. The power of ambiguity cannot be underestimated: it's what keeps us coming back to stories like "The Lady or the Tiger," and attracts people to poetry and scripture. Moore knows this. As I noted before, he wrote about his admiration for the way "The Sopranos" ended.
You see, if Moore gives in completely to the theism angle, he betrays a large part of his audience, a part that appreciates the bleak, "empty" universe in which the BSG plot unfolds. We've seen no aliens, no heavenly powers-- and the beings that might be divine might also just be potent hallucinations. Moore has crafted a story that allows secularists and naturalists to take Bill Adama's side and declare that religion is crap.
At the same time, if Moore gives in to the atheism angle, he betrays the set of fans who are betting that all the prophecies, all the creepy coincidences, all the talk of "higher powers" and "plans" and "purposes" and "destinies"-- that all these things are pointing to something beyond normal sight, to a divine reality that has undergirded the series from the beginning. BSG may even have provided us with its own symbol for that reality: the great mandala, a cyclic rainbow, symbolizing eternal recurrence and colored in a way that reassures us that the divine is a loving reality. Is this ultimate reality monotheistic or polytheistic? Who knows? There are many colors, but just one mandala, churning* around and around itself.
I foresee the theophany, when it happens, occurring in such a way that BSG's atheistic and theistic viewers will be able to interpret the visual data however they want. As my buddy Mike pointed out, even Head Six's public-but-invisible heaving-up of Baltar might have a plausibly naturalistic explanation (psychokinesis, not angelic might).
So the series will end with a sci-fi version of that "Pulp Fiction" scene where Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega survive a barrage of bullets. The BSG audience is already neatly divided into Jules and Vincent camps, and like Jules and Vincent, they'll argue for years over what really went down, and what sort of universe BSG was showing us.
One final note before I move on to the next burning question. I think Moore realizes that suddenly adding an extra character-- like God Himself-- at the tail-end of the story would be a cheap, deus ex machina ploy. Such a narrative tactic might have worked (sort of) for Tolkien and those damn Eagles of his, and it might have been fun to watch Sean Connery dismount and regally face the camera during the final moments of "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," but Moore's audience is composed mainly of people who lack a black-and-white, swords-and-sorcery moral sensibility. BSG appeals to a grimmer crowd, I think, and those people won't take kindly to a bright, happy angel popping out of that black hole, chirping show tunes, slapping skin cream onto Admiral Adama's face, healing Roslin's cancer with a merry pink cloud of fart gas, and squealing like an animé chick for everyone to just chill. Not gonna happen. I will, in short, be very surprised to see God reveal Himself in the form of an extra character. Whatever theological answers there are, they'll be found among the cast we know.
2. What will be humanity's fate? Let me tell you how it's not going to end. It's not going to end with "...and then they all died." But before I get to my actual prediction, I'd like to talk about my hopes for how this will end.
What I hope happens is that Moore gives us the full darkness. Either there have never been any humans in this entire drama-- we've been watching robots or simulacra all along-- or so many humans will be wiped out in that final battle that humanity will have too few members to survive. If that's the case, humanity can only hope for rebirth either through some twisted form of Cylon cloning or through billions of years of parallel evolution-- from self-replicating proteins to full-on sapient hominids-- on some distant, earthlike world. I concede that there's a slim chance that humanity will be totally wiped out, but I have a hard time seeing Moore going for such an ending. As I noted in question (1) above, Moore loves ambiguity. An ending in which the human race is definitively wiped out would be decidedly unambiguous. While it might be fun to speculate on what the Cylons might do after the last human is gone, I just don't see Moore showing us this scenario.
My prediction, then? I'm betting on humanity taking heavy losses, with the clear implication that it won't be able to survive without some form of benign or malign Cylon intervention. The human population will be nonzero by the end of the episode.
3. What is Starbuck? This particular question fascinates me mainly because the series has made such a big deal over Kara Thrace's special destiny, and its insistence that she is not-- not, godsdammit!-- a Cylon.
Personally, I think she's either a special type of Cylon (Moore has been known to lie to audiences in his podcasts and interviews in order to preserve the element of surprise), or she's a product of a spooky technology that can create exact replicas of both abiotic objects (like Starbuck's Viper) and living beings (like Starbuck herself), engrams and all.
Let's focus for a moment on Starbuck's destiny, about which much has been made. She has been called both "the harbinger of death"-- a phrase that can be taken literally or metaphorically-- and the one who "will lead humanity to its end."
The term "end" can mean a literal ending, a stoppage. It can also mean "purpose," as when the old Baltimore Catechism asks, "What is the chief end of Man?" (Answer: To glorify God.) So Starbuck, far from representing true, literal death for the human race, might represent a beginning or a fulfillment. Something about her might actually be salvific (or represent something salvific), as Baltar seemed to think when he ranted about how Starbuck was living proof that regular human beings can indeed "cross over" and come back. (But can regular humans do this? Wouldn't this detract from the specialness of Starbuck's nature?)
Of course, if we're talking about a technology that can resurrect (or at least reincarnate) human beings, we're once again left to wonder whether there's anything really divine about this. Perhaps the tech comes from an alien race (as happened in the movie "Stargate," which features a preening, forever youthful alien slave driver whose fountain of youth is, paradoxically, a teched-up coffin). Perhaps it's the same sort of down-to-the-quarks tech that brought Dr. McCoy back to life in "Shore Leave." If Starbuck is truly human, and if she truly was brought back by alien (or billion-year-old Cylon) technology, then humanity's hope might lie in finding and using that tech to perpetuate itself. The humans would need to build it in a way that creates imperfect copies, of course, to simulate genetic mutation and the combination of monoploids into diploids. Genetic variation is key to humanity's survival, otherwise all you've got is an eternal procession of Adamas and Roslins and so on. But again... would this tech work for anyone other than Starbuck? And how might it relate to humanity's "end"?
So, what is Starbuck? My prediction: human or Cylon or whatever her basic nature might be, Kara Thrace is somehow a weakly flickering symbol of hope, the Aurora,** perhaps the human answer to whatever Hera is. (For some reason, I find myself completely uninterested in exploring Hera's nature and significance.)
4. Will we see clear evidence of an eternal return? To me, the question of whether the BSG universe's metaphysics includes the concept of eternal return hinges very much on whether we have been watching nothing but machines that are caught in a sad loop. A rigid eternal return-- one that manifests itself as cultures and languages that do not vary over time and space-- is understandable from a machine's point of view, and we seem to have evidence of this on the show, what with the exact resemblance of 2000-year-old Cylon/Earth culture to present-day, prelapsarian Colonial culture. I've gone over this before, so I won't belabor the point here. Instead, I'll cut right to my prediction: YES. Big yes. The series will, whatever its ending, have a decidedly "And the cycle continues" feel to it. There's simply no other way. The only two religious doctrines that have been hammered into us (aside from the annoyingly trite references to a "dying leader") are these: (1) "Life here began out there," and (2) "All this has happened before; all this will happen again." While I think such an ending makes the most sense if it's Nothing But Cylons, I can see the eternal return making sense even if the BSG universe really does include humans.
5. (Question added 12 hours later) Have we been watching nothing but Cylons? I danced around the issue in the above questions, then after publishing my answers to those questions, I realized I hadn't tackled this one directly. My prediction (which is almost sure to be wrong): Yes-- it's been nothing but Cylons since the beginning. Humanity is long gone, and the Cylons have been replaying this drama for thousands, maybe millions, of years. As stated above, constant readers have all heard my arguments for this viewpoint before, so I won't repeat them here. I'll simply say that this view makes the most sense and has the greatest explanatory power. And even though I'm sticking to my guns with this one, I'll note that the reason I'm likely to be wrong is-- as we've already agreed-- Ron Moore likes ambiguity. Declaring, "at the end of all things," that we've been watching nothing but Cylons would severely depress future DVD sales.****
And those, my friends, are the only questions that deeply concern me-- the only ones I feel are worthy of predictions. Other questions, like what the opera house signifies, or whether Bill Adama and Laura Roslin survive, or what Baltar's going to do, or what makes Hera so important,*** or whether Tyrol will find out that Tory killed his wife, just aren't as compelling to me.
In a few hours, we'll see whether my predictions hold any water.
*The notion of "churning" is important in Hindu thought. It's one reason why the confluence of certain rivers can become a pilgrimage site, as happens for the Kumbh Mela.
**Think associatively: Aurora, dawn, daybreak: the title of the final episode.
***When I contemplate Hera, I keep thinking of that little girl, Elizabeth, in the 1980s TV miniseries "V" who kept saying "preh-tay-lah-mah," which turned out to be lizardese for "peace."
****You might counterargue that knowing the ending of a story doesn't kill DVD sales-- after all, people buy DVD copies of movies they've seen, despite knowing how those movies end. True; I concede this. But a TV series is a huge time investment compared to a movie, which in two hours rushes you to its conclusion. If you know that a series will end in a certain undesirable way, knowledge of that ending will hang over you as you re-watch the series from the beginning. Some people might be gluttons for that sort of self-punishment, but others might decide that the DVD purchase just isn't worth the time and money, considering the already-foreknown payoff.
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