Battlestar Galactica Finale

In another one of the weird left turns this blog occasionally takes, I really wanted to get my impressions of the end of Battlestar Galactica down in my blog, after having a few days to mull it over, but also while it was fresh in my mind.

I'd self-deprecate about taking the time to write about a mere TV show, and a science fiction show at that, but Battlestar wasn't a TV show or a sci-fi show. It really was the best show on television.

Was. Now, it's over, although there's a little more coming (The Plan).

BSG wasn't the first show I'd come across that was by turns brilliant and so painfully stark that it was nearly unwatchable. If I wanted to spend 45 minutes watching a show that would make me wish I hadn't, I'd pop one of the Shield DVDs and watch that. What made BSG unique was that even at its darkest, it was always working towards a point in the future and of course, RDM and the writers managed to continue to make you care about all the characters, even the ones you hated (except Laura).

I don't have the time or the inclination to bury the whole show in one short blog post.

But the finale- the critics have written about it, and the fans have written about it, and the reaction has certainly been mixed.

Here's my thoughts- first, it delivered exactly what it had to delivered.

After four years, a show about a futuristic aircraft carrier delivered a toe-to-toe (or rather toe-to-foot) battle. There had been some question as to whether the old girl would even make it to the final showdown, but it did, and the cleverness here was that rather than the air to air fight between Vipers and Raiders that so often had typified all versions of BSG, they concentrated on the assault on the Cylon colony and the Battlestar herself. This deck to deck, hall to hall fight was exactly what I think every fan wanted. After so much, how could we not fight to the bitter end ?

And even when halfway through, we seemed to be reaching the truce that we'd have to reach for the Galactica and her crew to survive, we got one final twist. Having gone back and started watching the whole season again, it was clear the writers had done their homework, and remembered the characters inside their drama, and when Tyrol killed Tory, its perhaps morally reprehensible, but at the same time, it's not just understandable, it's perfectly human.

What remains unclear is why Cavil kills himself. I know that's not a throw-away either, yet the whole point of the truce was Cavil's attempt to get the resurrection technology back, so...

For an hour, we got carried through the twists and turns that have made BSG exciting. The battles have always been the easiest part of the show. It's been unfailingly the people that have made this show hard to watch.

And then the Galactica makes that last fateful back-breaking jump, and suddenly, everything changes. Gone is the omnipresent threat of the Cylons. The Galactica comes up over the moon and there it is, our Earth. Not their Earth, but ours, 150,000 years ago.

And this, of course, is where many in the disgruntled fandom of the show groan, because suddenly the dark veil lifts. Personally, I think that of all the endings they could have chosen, this one is by far the bravest. The show that has for four years defined bearably- just bearably- dark, suddenly moves into the light.

Just look at the way the scenes are shot. Out on the serengeti, in the bright slunlight, talking, and loving and just living. Baltar cries about farming. Lee talks about exploring the word. And Adama goes all Highlander and buries his dead love in a cairn and builds a cabin on the mountain-top. This is not exactly what we in the BSG are used to. There are no guns, no knives, no knock downs or drag outs, no trials. And when Lee suggests the survivors just spread their wings and diffuse into what will become our distant pre-history ? Everyone agrees this is a good idea. The darkness isn't just lifted. It's seared away.

Yes, a little far-fetched, and maybe that's saying something about a series where robots have spent four years trying to stamp out or frak the remainder of the human race.

If that last hour has a weakness, it was that it seemed horribly rushed, the agreements and the final dislocation of the human race rushed. But how much of that could any of us have really taken. The dissolution of Starbuck and the final resolution of her relationship with Apollo, Laura's death, and of course, Baltar and Six finally coming to terms, all of that gets completed and that's all we really need after all. Apollo's supposition that all of this has happened before, but all of this doesn't have to happen again, turns out to be true.

Then comes the message- that final message that we'd better be careful- that we should think twice about how human we make our robots. And yes, maybe that was a little heavy-handed.

But in the end, the ride was worth it. And better, for three years, I've been telling Darren that Baltar was their saviour. And I was right.

Last Day Coming

The Cleanse does and doesn't get easier, and with just two days left, it's pretty awesome to have something to look forward to like the return of Battlestar Galactica.

It's easy to put too much of yourself, or just too much period, into television.

But there's something apt about this show returning at the penultimate day of the cleanse. This is not easy television. This is not hard television. This is as hard as television gets. It's unrelenting, it's dark, it's rarified.

Even the lighting, the sound, even the dialogue, tonight what we were treated to was stripped down, laid bare. The colours on 'planet earth' washed out, grays on gray.

And yet, at the same time, a show and a story full of life. The promise of answers to our questions. A message, that oddly, I imagine will fulfill Lee's belief that all of this has happened before, but it doesn't have to happen again.

It reminds me that some of Eric's clients look forward to the cleanse, to its renewal. To the opportunity to break old habits- nutritional- that lock us into a cycle that's self-limiting. Athletes have to have discipline in more ways than just workouts. One of those ways is nutrition. All of this was eaten before, but all of this doesn't have to be eaten again ?

Yeah, silly, I know. But maybe there's something to it anyway.

Battlestar Galactica

It can be hard to tell, with the way they edit clips together, if three was really talking to Roslin when she 'revealed' who the fifth of the five cylons still unknown at the start of the season- and to be honest, if the show has a fault, it's in these end of episode previews for next week where the tease becomes something more like a spoiler.

I think what was potentially more flabbergasting than that- after all, Roslin is on many people's short list, cancer or no cancer- was the idea that Tighe, Cylon or not, still has the ability to progenerate. It's hard to imagine someone who's lived that hard a life still being able to produce viable seed. He was a hopeless strung out drunk for years before Adama resurrected his military career, and from all appearances, he was drunk for most of that as well. I know that a long life of alcohol abuse doesn't automatically make you sterile, but the indicators are pretty strong- alcohol abuse directly damages testicular cells.

I know, the title of the blog isn't This Blog is About Reproductive Male Medicine...

There was an awful lot in this episode but there was one thing I'm not sure I understood. When Lee was seeing the live cat- what exactly was he seeing ? And for that matter, what were we seeing ? The cat moved, it cried. But in the end, it had been dead for weeks. Sly allegory about how we see what we want to see ? Even when we kick the always empty food bowl and realise that something is just not quite right ?

Maybe Adama should have brought more than one book. But we'll know soon enough...

Long Run as a Curative for Bad (?) Race

I emailed my coach around lunchtime today, asking if I could push tomorrow's 2 hour run up to this afternoon. I had three reasons I wanted to do this, only one of which I felt was worth articulating. I had done a duathlon in the morning, so the original plan was to do the long run tomorrow.

I mentioned scheduling issues in my email. Because of the way tomorrow is set up for me, the only way to get the run in was to get up at 5 AM and run for two hours, after what was probably going to be another six hours of sleep (if that).

Eric said to go ahead and do the run as long as I was up for it, which I felt I was.

But there were two other reasons I wanted to get out there today and not wait besides the muted joy of knowing that long run is once again out of the way until next week.

The first is that while the duathlon I did will not help me in any measurable way for Lake Placid, going out and running tired will. I've done LP three times and here's what I've learned- if you aren't feeling a little beat during the run, you aren't working hard enough. Getting up on Sunday morning and eating some fruit and drinking some coffee and nailing a two-hour run at 20 seconds a mile faster than IM pace is important, but it doesn't get it done 100%. I wanted to be leg-sore, tired, frustrated. John Hirsch wrote about this on his blog, but this isn't a case of wanting to be able to relive my glory days of massive volume followed by instant recovery (I've yet to have any glory days or massive volume).

The second was that I was annoyed with myself. I lost second place today by eight seconds, and did not feel that I should have lost by eight seconds. It was a failure to achieve a better result, a mental breakdown in will power or a simple lack of ability to go fast on this day. I have nine seasons of coaching field hockey, track, and lacrosse under my belt and I know sometimes you have to get tough with your athletes. Sometimes you have to play bad cop and give a workout that says 'I'm not satisfied with your effort or execution and when that happens, you will suffer.' You're trying to breed a desire to succeed and quite frankly, a fear of failure, and that can be learned even when you know it's coming. I wanted to atone to myself for failing, although there are far more serious things that I should be atoning for, such as every time I say no when my son wants me to do something with him and I feel like a little part of each of us dies. As demanding, irrationally so sometimes, as a 3 year old can be, 'No, I can't right now' never quite feels right

So I went out and ran, with a small bottle of g2 and a cliff shot for food, cranked up the headphones and set out while wife and son were at his swim lesson, which is a one-parent affair.

The first hour was tough. My left leg was sore- achilles, calf, and vastus intermedius. I alternately felt like my lower intestines were either channeling a Chilean volcano or trying to give birth to the Rising Star. My heart rate was up around 143 and my goal is 129-132, a heartrate at which I can run surprisingly fast for a surprisingly long period of time. I actually was considering whether or not to just stop at home at an hour for a while.

Then something funny happened. I relaxed. I started channelling the athlete people tell me I am, the guy that does OK at the races but doesn't exist inside my head, where good is what other people better than me are. My heart rate dropped into the mid 130's but i was running faster. I did the hardest climbing in the last 50+ minutes (I ended up only running 1:52, but who's counting ), ran better, opened up my stride, worked my arms better, felt good. Actually felt good.

The goal of running tired and getting through it really did come to fruition. The preparation for IMLP, itself a springboard for my real focus, IM Florida, actually didn't take a hit despite doing a race in the morning. It was also a reminder that some things feel like they need to be kept close as reminders or motivation, both good (family) and not so good (IM AZ), but that the race this morning was not one of those things. Maybe I'd been slower than last year. Maybe I didn't prevail against a fellow athlete I had outran on the first loop, and only ran even with on the second.

Where will I be in July, that's the real question.

And then at a dinner for people who have worked on Brian's and Hammerfest to raise money for the Myelin Project, Michael D'Addetta mentioned to me I was faster than last year. That came as a surprise, so when I got home I looked it up. 1:25 faster, not the two minutes slower I assumed I must have been based on the results of where other people were around me.

Which is why a certain coach says to base what you do on what you do, not on what other people do....