Would-be screenwriters, novelists and playwrights can learn an important lesson from this past week’s Battlestar Galactica finale. For those not tuned into the BSG universe, the series finale revealed that Starbuck, the plucky fighter pilot who died and came back to life a little ways back, was not quite human. You may think that BSG’s writers mixed up coffee brands in their minds, Starbuck’s Incorporated with Chock Full 0’ Nuts (that heavenly coffee), when they reincarnated Starbuck not as an android or a clone or some other high SciFi concept, but rather as a true angel. In fact, Angel Starbuck allowed the writers to conveniently tie up of a number of loose ends, contradictory story arcs, and mythological red herrings that kept viewers coming back for more Human/Cylon action week after week and season after interrupted season.
In true Deus ex Machina fashion, Angel Starbuck leads the wandering BSG survivors to Earth, not the cinder Earth they'd previously visited, but our own true Earth of 150,000 years ago where the primitive native inhabitants sat around their campfires humming Bob Dylan tunes. The various BSG humans, Cylons and hybrids disembark, toss their advanced technology into the nearest convenient fusion recycler, scatter themselves to the Earth’s four corners and presumably become fruitful and multiply. Having completed her angelic mission, Angel Starbuck simply vanishes, leaving Lee Adama ("Apollo") to wonder on God's inscrutability.
Flash forward to our present-day world on the verge of creating its own Cylons thanks to Japanese robotics advances, and we witness two angels in America. They appear in the guise of Cylon Caprica 6 and Human Gaius Baltar strolling arm-in-arm through the streets of Manhattan, and go about wryly commenting on our civilization’s chance to get the cybernetics thing right this time.
So Battlestar Galactica turns out to have been about angels, not robots; divine intervention, not binary interpolation. A better title for the series might have been "Cylons In The Hands of An Angry God." This is where the other arts can learn a lesson from television in general and Battlestar Galactica in particular. No matter how dire the circumstances, how severe the situation, how irreconcilable the protagonists, there is no conceivable story line that can’t be resolved by supernatural agency.
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