Battlestar Galactica’s series finale, “Daybreak,” is not an easy beast to describe.  From the quiet build of the first hour, to the beautiful character moments, the intense action of hour two, and the weird existential conclusion of hour three, “Daybreak” is all over the map.  All will be revealed?  Well, no — that was a lie, or at best an exaggerration.  Much is fulfilled in the finale, but Ronald Moore and company also leave a lot to the audience’s imagination, for good and ill.

Spoilers ho!

The core of the plot is sound.  In the last hours before abandoning Galactica, Admiral Adama decides to go on one last mission to save Hera from Cavil and possibly rescue the human and cylon races from themselves in the process.  He tells Starbuck that he knows what she is, and she is his daughter.  He says it with so much love and conviction, that it feels real.  And it reminds some of us in the audience that we love Starbuck, too.  It’s such a great moment.

Together, they get the coordinates of the Cylon colony from the Anders hybrid and draw a red line on the floor of the hanger deck.  Volunteers for the suicide mission on one side, everyone else on the other.  Baltar is noticibly on the “stay behind” side, while Doc Coddle is one of the first to cross.  Coddle is turned away, because he’s too valuable to die, and Baltar will through guilt ultimately change his mind.  Baltar’s journey this week is possibly the most plausible and has the best payoff.

They have the smallest side, but it’s enough to crew the mission.  

Then, we discover that the Colony is hidden in the well of a singularity — a black hole.  And that there’s only one spot to jump into, a spot that’s covered by powerful Cylon weapons.  But no matter, hybrid Anders can disable the Colony’s hybrid and give Galactica a fighting chance.

So Adama makes a speech about how the old girl has protected them before, and if they are true to her, she will be true to them and see them home.  With Eddie Olmos’ rousing speech quota fulfilled for the act, they jump straight into the hornet’s nest and start their plan.  There’s a ton of destruction, heavy cannons firing, raiders launching, people dying.  

And then, when the cannons finally go down after Anders connects to the colony’s hybrids, Adama and company spectacularly ram Galactica into the side of the colony and use the ship itself as a way of inserting crew inside.  Meanwhile, a fleet of Raptors moves to invade through the Colony’s roof, and old friends/mutineers Racetrack and Skulls get taken out along the way by a large piece of shrapnel.

Caprica Six and Baltar are reunited as part of the reserve marines aboard Galactica.  Baltar is terrified, but he’s also doing the right thing for once — because of this, you can see the beginnings of a rekindlilng of the love he and Caprica shared in the past.

Lee leads a group of marines and centurions into the Colony, fast-roping down from Galactica and threading their way through the giant craft.  The majority of the defenders are classic Galactica Cylons — and we get to see the new school centurions take on their 1970′s counterparts in an extremely expensive effects sequence.

In the colony science bay, Simon is continuing experiments on Hera.  Boomer can’t take all the guilt she feels, so she breaks his neck and steals her double’s daughter again.  Eventually, she comes across Helo and Athena’s party of marines and hands Hera over to her mother.

But, she says, they can’t go back the way they came — their raptors have been destroyed.

Not to worry, says Athena, they’re not the only ones who have boarded.

Starbuck tells her not to give away the plan, but it was never Athena’s intention.  As Boomer tells them to let Adama know that she owed him one, Athena guns her down.

We then get a flashback of a rookie Boomer getting dressed down by Adama and Tigh.  She should really be taken off of Raptor pilot duty, but Adama decides to give her another chance.  Boomer tells him that when he most needs it, she’ll owe him one.  This amuses the Commander, but little does he know, it will come in handy in the future.

They get Hera back to the ship, but soon lose her amidst the gunfight.  Doral shoots Helo, critically wounding him.  Athena has to decide whether or not to stay with him, or head after her daughter.  Helo urges her to follow Hera, even though he may bleed out if left alone.

Meanwhile, Cavil and his skinjob cronies have boarded the ship in search of Hera.  Like Darth Vader in the beginning Star Wars, he’s flanked by a crew of Centurions.  

And then we get one of the most magnificent sequences in all of Galactica.  Cutting back and forth between the firefight on the ship and the Opera House dream sequence, we see Roslin finding Hera, losing her, Baltar and Caprica Six getting Hera, and taking her into the doors of the Opera House.  Just as in the dream sequence, Athena arrives too late, watching the door slam shut and lock ahead of her.  It’s beautiful, the emotional strength of the sequence accented by one of Bear McCreary’s classic compositions from the first season (“The Shape of Things to Come”).

It turns out that the CIC is the Opera House.  And when Baltar and Six look up at the Opera House balcony to see the Final Five in the fantasy, they also look up to see the real Final Five in the CIC.  Amazing.

Then Cavil and company enter, and Cavil grabs hold of Hera.  He’s going to kill her if they try to stop him from taking her away.

It’s at this point that, Baltar fulfills his ultimate purpose, giving a speech about the cosmic force — god — that has been manipulating events.  It is neither good or evil, but it has been with them throughout the entire time.  It’s now time to stop fighting, to break the cycle of violence, and take a leap of faith.  End the killing, reconcile, have peace.  Cavil is swayed somewhat, but needs something more.

To cement the deal, Tigh offers to give the Cavil Cylons resurrection again.  This is enough to move Cavil to agree to a ceasefire — the fighting stops, and everyone waits for the Five to transfer the resurrection knowledge to the colony.

This involves a sort of mind meld between the Final Five, involving a sharing of all their memories.  In advance, Tory tries to warn them about the horrible things she’s done, and asks to be forgiven.  This is not to be the case, though.  Halfway through the transfer, they see her memory of how she murdered Cally and stole Nicky.  Enraged with betrayal and grief, Tyrol breaks the connection — and Tory’s neck.  Cavil views this as a betrayal of their deal and announces an immediate end to the cease fire.  But the humans and their allies have the advantage in the CIC — Simon and Doral are taken down, and Cavil, seeing the writing on the wall, kills himself.

In space, a fluke occurance causes the dead Racetrack’s hand to bump against the nuke launch button on her Raptor console.  The dead recon ship then fires a barrage of nukes at the Colony.  It begins to come apart and careen towards the singularity.

Galactica has to jump, or the ship will be destroyed.  Adama orders Starbuck to do it — to jump anywhere — but she doesn’t know how to get back to the fleet.   However, she does remember the song notes Hera wrote, the song her father composed (well, the song that Bob Dylan composed), and her theory that the notes correspond with numbers.  She figures them out, plays them on the control panel like music on a keyboard and jumps the ship.  To earth — our earth.  The real earth.

If this was the ending of Battlestar Galactica, then I would have been very, very satisfied.  But it’s not — there’s still another hour left, and that final hour is where all the seams show and the “make it up as we go along” plot comes apart.  Some of the great scifi finales of the past are Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “All Good Things …” (also co-written by Ronald Moore), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s: “What We Leave Behind”  and Angel’s “Not Fade Away.”  Alas, “Daybreak”  may not be among them, but have faith true believers, time may revise my current estimate.  

It’s our earth in the prehistoric past.  They land on Africa and discover primative humans with matching DNA to the colonials roaming the plains.  There are designs on starting a new city, but Lee disagrees — the only way to stop the cycle of violence is to dispense with their weapons and technolgy and live primatively on the planet.  The centurions will be given the baseship and allowed to go free — they just have to trust that they don’t return to start problems with the humans in the future.  Surprisingly, everyone agrees, so after the humans and cylon skinjobs are distributed across the planet on different continents (to increase chances of survival), Anders will pilot the fleet into the sun.

Starbuck goes up to say goodbye to him one last time, and leaves her dog tags and wedding ring with him.  As she leaves, Anders’ personality returns: “See you on the other side, Kara Thrace,” he says.  We then watch as the original BSG theme plays, and the fleet heroically makes its way to its ultimate destruction.  This is the last purely great moment of the finale that isn’t spoiled by the nonsense that’s to come.  It’s so sad and so right, and one can’t helped be moved by the final image of the ships that carried them this far and the idea that Sam Anders, such a great character, is now only half-sentient and on his way to his ultimate end.

On the planet, Tyrol tells Tigh and Ellen that he’s done with people and Cylons — he’s going alone to a rugged Island (Great Britain?) off the coast of the northern continent to live in solitude.  It’s sad, but it makes sense after everything he’s been through.

Then we reach some of the biggest bullshit moments in the entire series, of any series, really.

Dying, Roslin would like to get a closer look at some of the wildlife.  Adama concurs, so loads her into a Raptor to fly her there.  At this point, he says goodbye to Lee and Kara — and it’s fairly clear that he doesn’t plan on coming back.  Now, I know that Laura’s about to die, but unless he’s going to commit suicide, there’s no good reason for Adama to leave his family and friends forever, but that’s exactly what he’s doing.  But more on that in a second.

Lee and Kara both agree that that’s the last time they’re going to see him.  Then Kara tells Lee that she’s fulfilled her destiny, and that she can feel that she’s going to be leaving soon, too.  She asks him what he’s going to do — he talks about relaxing, not doing a lot of work, and exploring this new world they’ve found.  When he turns to look at her, we see that Kara has disappeared — she’s just gone, like Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense.  Was she real?  A ghost?  An angel like the head characters?  We’ll never know.  This is the last time we get to see Lee Adama, too, who I assume is now going to live alone on this new world without his father or the love of his life.  And he seems happy about it.  It’s total bullshit.

Roslin slips away on the Raptor, as Adama talks about where they’re going to set down and build their dream cabin.  He realizes she’s gone and slips his wedding band on her fingers, setting down the Raptor, anyway.

We cut to a group of humans, being lead by President Romo Lampkin, down in the plains.  Caprica Six and Baltar get a final visit from the head characters, who we now know are angels (or demons?) of god, manipulating events through the two of them.  We learn that they’re done with them now — that Caprica and Baltar’s lives are no going to be a lot more boring.

As they leave, Baltar tells Caprica that he spotted some land up in the mountains that would be good for cultivation.  ”I know a lot about farming,” he says, his voice breaking up as the man who fought to escape a working class farmer’s life is embracing it.  ”I know you do,” Caprica says, kissing him.  Of all the characters on Galactica, I think Baltar’s journey is ultimately the most satifying.  He is totally redeemed as a character, as is Caprica Six, and the two now get a second chance of a life together.  It takes some of the edge off of what happened to Adama, Starbuck and Lee.  But not enough.

We then cut to Helo, Hera and Athena nearby, talking about what they’re going to be doing as a family.  They’ve always been the emotional heart of the show, a strong, loving family unit that defies all the odds.  The fact that they’re all alive and together is a good way to end the show.  I’m surprised that Ronald D. Moore let it happen.

Then we cut one last time to Adama, sitting on the site of his future cabin next to the buried remains of Laura Roslin.  He tells her about the light there, how it reminds us of her, and it’s so mercilessly sad that he’s decided to stay alone on this hilltop with the corpse of his dead love.  Seriously — what about his son, or his best friend?  The camera pulls out and the sun sets, and that’s it.  The biggest disappointment is that Adama did not get to say goodbye to Saul Tigh, whose relationship with him was arguable one of the central relationships of the show.  Seriously, Ron — not just a handshake, or anything?  And what about a final reconciliation with Lee — we never really got that, either.

But then, a little more.  We see Hera playing in the grass — and then we cut 150,000 years in the future to our own present day.  Head Baltar is in Times Square, reading a news report about how the remains of “Mitochondrial Eve” — who we are lead to presume is Hera — have been found in Africa.  The camera reveals that Head Baltar and Head Six are reading the story over series “developer” Ronald Moore’s shoulder!  Way to break the fourth wall, guys.

And then, the two head cases spy all the new developments in robotics played on screens in Times Square as “All Along the Watchtower” plays on a nearby boombox.  Yes kids, all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.  We’re creating the cylons ourselves!

Fade to black one last time.

There’s no doubt that the first two hours of the finale will go down as some of the best — but the final hour on our earth was a bit disappointing.  It’s pretty clear to me that Ronald Moore had no reasonable explanation for Starbuck’s resurrection, so by having her just vanish, he made it so that the audience would have to make it up themselves.  It’s lazy writing — implying that she’s some kind of divine being playing her role in God’s plan was extremely unsatisfying.  I know some will like it, but it just shows the overall lack of story plan that’s plagued the show all along.  It defintely hurt the preceeding hours.

Also, Adama’s decision to leave the rest of humanity and live alone with his dead lover may have made dramatic sense, but it didn’t make sense to me for the character.  This is not a solitary man — his son and friend still have great meaning to him.  It may have seemed “poetic” to RDM and his writing staff, but it just didn’t ring true to me.  He wouldn’t have taken them that far just to leave them all on their own.  Since I’m forced to believe that Starbuck was some kind of spiritual avatar of God, then I’ll just let myself pretend that Adama eventually gets it together and explores the new world with his son.

Finally, the head charcters showing up in the present was a bit much.  Did we really need that?  Though it was nice to see that we in the show’s audience are the future of both the Galactica humans and the skinjob cylons, there was something cheesy about two angels showing up to comment on the story.  I’m reminded of It’s a Wonderful Life.  It was a bit over the top for me and very unlike BSG. 

All and all, Battlestar Galactica will be thought of as one of the best scifi series of the contemporary era, remembered with reverence alongside the most beloved shows of the genre.  Its ending, though terribly flawed, is better than the ending of other shows, such as X-Files or Farscape.  And individual arcs and episodes will still stand out as classic and groundbreaking many years from now.  

Still, more than any other “serialized” series, Galactica was made up without any grand plan — Ronald Moore literally wrote it as they went along and was incapable in the end of tying it together in a satisfying way.  Through retcons and other tricks, they avoided the continuity errors of other shows (Lost comes to mind), but they just quite couldn’t end the story.  Starbuck’s ressurrection, finding her corpse on earth, and then her eventual disappearance will never be explained.  Fans will try to rationalize what it means, but in the end, it doesn’t mean anything.  Deus ex machina in its purest sense is tough to rationalize. 

For me the show went off the rails into what TVZ contributor Steve Lee calls “existential melodrama” when it revealed the Final Four Cylons.  At that point, it ceased to be one of television’s greatest examples of military science fiction, and turned into something else entirely.  Fantasy, maybe?  I’m not sure.  As engaging as these final episodes have been, they have also served (I hope) as a lesson to other creative teams — figure out your story ahead of time.  Introduce plot and character points when you know why they’re there, not just for shock value.  You can’t just backfill continuity and expect the viewer to accept it.

Battlestar Galactica was as beautiful and flawed as its finale.  Despite my criticism of the consistency of some of the writing, I am definitely a fan and will miss it for a long time.  The first two seasons will go down in history as some of the best scifi on television, and the beginning of the third season will also be similarly well-regarded.  They’re not going to be making shows like this on the newly rebranded SyFy network, again.

Despite its weaknesses, the finale’s high points still stand out as exceptional.  Four and a half out of five chrome toasters.