Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: C | 19 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT When Will The Work Be Done?
By Jacob Clifton | Season 4 | Episode 20 | Aired on 03.20.2009
"Along with her Cylon mother, and human father," Chip Baltar grins at her, as they walk away through Times Square. She gestures around them. "Commercialism, decadence, technology run amok. Remind you of anything?" Chip smiles. "Take your pick! Kobol, Earth -- the real Earth, before this one -- Caprica, Before the Fall..." Their arms around each other are comfortable and affectionate, like twins. "All of this has happened before," she muses, and he wonders if it really does have to happen again. She smiles.
"This time, I bet no." She plays dice, with the universe. "You know," he says, "I've never known you to play the optimist. Why the change of heart?" She lays it out in math: "Law of averages. Let a complex system repeat itself long enough, eventually something surprising might occur. That too is in God's plan." He leans in, over his sunglasses, with a darker voice. "You know It doesn't like that name." She makes a face; it doesn't like any names at all. It doesn't need them. It is immanence. It's the singularity, already and always. He puts his hands to his temples, smiling. "Silly me. Silly, silly me..." God is wild magic, nameless and implicit in us all: as the angels walk past a panhandler, none the wiser, his radio starts playing Jimi's "Watchtower." And up above him on the news, Aibo does the Macarena, and another robot, and a small army of obstinate tin soldiers, playing fife and drum. Two children kiss another model on its brightly colored face. That scary Japanese woman one makes her faces. The angels walk away, through the crowd, to find the next thing.
THE END
So what's the problem? Few things, but big ones. Two things particularly, which line up with the odd conclusion in a particularly gruesome way. They both have to do with imagination, unfettered imagination, creation. The things you've created, and your responsibility toward them.
The show has been sketched out a year at a time, brilliantly; it is a living breathing thing, which lends it all the power it has. The problem, for me, is when that stops being true. When the plot isn't left alone to figure itself out, because an endpoint has been decided, and nobody feels like doing the work at the end of the season to tie all the threads together.
Fanboys, sometimes they hate the fact that stories work this way. They want it all stitched up ahead of time, with a plan on the books. I don't really understand why, but I know that there's not a show on television, or a novel ever written, that works that way. Things change, stories evolve and grow up, or the people creating them change, or lose interest. But fanboys, sometimes they are loud. So the showrunner has to say, "I know what the last thing is." The last image, or the last word of dialogue, or who's left standing. Maybe it's true, maybe it's a bluff.
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