17 years later: Battlestar Galactica's final season really was true to the heart of the series

A rewatch makes you reevaluate the iconic sci-fi series with fresh eyes.

Like most sci-fi nerds, I remember following Battlestar Galactica’s 2004-2009 run on SYFY as a fan. Debating around the mysterious Final 5 Cylons, endlessly theorizing about how or what Starbuck really was after her return, and the shock of that midseason reveal when they finally do reach Earth — just to realize its a barren, nuclear wasteland.

It was a lot of those key reveals and plot points that I remembered the most heading into a rewatch of the series this year (I pulled the trigger on the DVD set, since it wasn’t available at the time on any mainstream streaming service). But … I quickly realized that I didn’t remember much else. A lot of the show’s smaller character moments, twists and turns, and even some major plot points had gotten fuzzy in my head in the decade-and-a-half since the finale aired.

I had mostly memory-holed a lot of the reveals about the Final 5 (aside from their identities) and the specifics of the 13th colony and… honestly a whole lot of what happened in the show’s final season outside of the closing moments of the finale once they finally found (our) Earth.

But coming back and watching it with fresh eyes, outside of the months-long waits between seasons and endlessly fun theorizing about where the series might go next, it really did give me a new appreciation for the type of show and story Ronald D. Moore was telling here.

Yes, it was a big sci-fi action show about humans on the run, trying to survive extermination from the robots they created. But it also tackled a ton of the post-9/11 questions Americans were processing, and took its time getting into the nuance of ethical questions and how they might affect a society when its down to just a few thousand survivors trying to keep the entire human race from extinction.

Battlestar Galactica only gets better with age

Rewatching the series gave me a new perspective on the “head” versions of Six and Baltar, and Starbuck’s return and eventual disappearance in the end. During my first watch, I mostly enjoyed the sci-fi, action and twists so much that I never dwelled too hard on the show’s use of religion and spirituality. But realizing how core that element was to the show’s DNA, really made the finale work differently for me than it did the first time around.

Taken as a sci-fi story, picked apart by nerds (myself included) looking for plot holes and hard answers to questions, the finale was good but had some … sometimes unsatisfying moments. But the second time around, appreciating that BSG was as much a spiritual story as it was a sci-fi story put those “plotholes” into a different kind of perspective. Some force was pulling the strings all along, guiding them all to a new home and finding a way to work together — and “All Along the Watchtower” fit into that because the song is awesome and a perfect tonal fit.

Starbuck was fated to play a role in humanity’s journey, and whatever god or God or gods pulling the strings wouldn’t let even her death get in the way of that. So she came back to life, only to go nose to nose with her own torched corpse upon her return. Once her mission was complete, she vanished. She didn’t get to live a life on Earth because she already had her life. She was simply on borrowed time to complete her mission.

Then there’s the closing epilogue shot, of head Six and Baltar strolling the streets of (our) modern-day Earth, chatting about whether or not this latest version of humanity would follow in the same footsteps as their predecessors. It’s an ambiguous and think-y kind of way to end this story , with these apparent angels still roaming our streets.

But at its core, BSG was always a story about legacy. The legacy of the 12 Colonies after their destruction, the legacy of the 13th Colony, the legacy of the Cylons, and the legacy of what was left of all of them by the time the show came to an end. So Moore used that final scene not just to talk about the legacy of the show, and the characters we’d spent all those years following, but our own legacy. It’s what it was all about.

This has happened before, but will it happen again? That’s the question he was asking from the beginning. And the question we’re still asking today.