How smart is "too smart"?

This week Christy and I finished watching the new "Battlestar Galactica."  She'd gotten an opinion from a Facebook acquaintance that she would enjoy the series more if she skipped watching the last episode, so I went into the finale with some small bit of trepidation.  I could imagine any number of ways that they could screw up the show or make me hate myself for spending all those hours watching the rag-tag fleet making its way across the galaxy.

So I was kind of surprised when it ended and I thought that it was just about perfect.  Not totally perfect, since I think there were a couple of instances were the writers painted themselves into rather narrow metaphorical (and metaphysical) corners, but much smarter, more self-aware, and more hopeful than I'd been afraid the series would end up being.  I mean, way back in the pilot we had the Commander wondering aloud if humans were worth saving.  I'm not sure that we ever got a "true" answer to that, but where the series ended up... it satisfied me.

Ever since, I've been trying to figure out what it was that made Christy's friend recommend skipping the finale.  Was it the unanswered questions and the ambiguity about some of the characters?  Maybe.  I didn't go into the last episode expecting everything to be wrapped up with a neat little bow.  I thought the ambiguity was perfect.  The questions that didn't get answered didn't need to be answered, because they didn't matter.  The story that they set out to tell got told.  Closure was attained.  (Maybe too much, even.  As Christy said, the ending had a kind of Return of the King feeling to it.  I was waiting for somebody to climb onto a boat with a bunch of elves and sail away, truth be told.)  But there was nothing to hate.  Nothing that made me feel as if I'd been cheated.  In fact, the way the characters played out their individual arcs made me feel more like I was watching real people - and I'm counting both humans and cylons in that blanket term - than I almost ever feel, when I'm watching television or movies. 

Every character had a meaningful motivation.  You hear the phrase, "Every man is the hero of his own story" tossed around a lot, but you don't see writers who have the balls to actually push a story to the point where you can see and understand and relate to the inner hero in every person by the time it's done.  In fact, the concept of "hero vs. villain" kind of faded away by the end.  Good people did bad things for good reasons.  Bad people did good things for good reasons, and hell, they did bad things for good reasons, too!  It was, in the final analysis, one of the smartest, cleverest, most well-crafted bits of character depiction that I've ever seen enacted across such a large ensemble with such clarity.  By the time it was all over, I felt as if I understood not just the Adamas and not just the crew of Galactica, but the twelve humanoid cylons and, to a lesser extent, the centurions, and I understood them not just as objects in a fiction, but in terms of relatable characteristics that I could identify in myself and others.

And maybe that's "too smart."  Maybe that's moving beyond the level of cognitive force-feeding people are used to in their entertainment.  I certainly hope not.  I'd like to give people more credit than that.

But then, I can't imagine the series being improved by skipping that last episode. 

Comments

[Allison]

I never got into BG.... maybe I should go back and watch from the beginning...