Culture

'Battlestar Galactica' Series Finale 'Daybreak Pt 2' Airs Friday

by Jarrett Martineau | March 20, 2009 at 08:33 am

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It all comes down to this: Starbuck's destiny, Hera's fate, the Final Five, a fleet of marooned humans, and a race of cloned Cylons will culminate in the final episode ever of the highly-acclaimed series Battlestar Galactica.

The Battlestar finale, "Daybreak" (Part 2), will air tonight, Friday, March 20th, at 9pm EST / 6pm PST on the Sci-Fi Channel.

Over the course of an incredible five season narrative arc BSG has navigated its cast of characters through an array of trials, travails, and outer space adventures -- all the while maintaining its signature blend of dark social satire and often morbid melodrama.

Battlestar fans are highly anticipating the show's climactic finish, which will have many loose ends to tie up in its remaining 2 hours of broadcast, but promises an ultimate clash between the ragged remnants of the human fleet and their deeply intertwined Cylon opponents.

But for those who are already mourning the loss of this incredible work of television, there's more to look forward to — a prequel series, Caprica, is it set to begin airing in fall 2009.

It will nevertheless be sad to see BSG draw to a close. David Eick's highly creative 'reimagining' of the show's campy 1970s predecessor

As the quoted passage below accurately observes, part of what has made this new version so compelling has been BSG's willingness to take on the contemporary moral, ethical, and political dilemmas that have defined our time.

The show has been more than simply another iteration of the archetypal clash between man and machine; it has resonanted with audiences precisely because it has done what all good satire should do: it has reflected ourselves back to us in a new light, one that is deeply imbued with a sense of place, time, and history, and one that affirms existence through a collective will to survive against all odds.

"Battlestar Galactica," the TV series that has held up a mirror to post-9/11 politics and paranoia for the past four seasons, comes to an end Friday.

The show's legions of fans may be in mourning, but executive producer David Eick finds the looming finale bittersweet.

"It's a combination of deep sadness and a little bit of relief," he told CNN by phone from Los Angeles.

Eick and his producing partner Ronald D. Moore revived -- or, as they like to say, "reimagined" -- a campy late-1970s space opera about a ragtag group of survivors from an attack that wiped out most of humanity, making it a gritty, tense, and morally ambiguous drama.

Echoes of the traumas that shaped contemporary America are inescapable, from a shot in opening credits that looks like Manhattan before the attacks of September 11, 2001, to questions about curtailing civil liberties in wartime.

Eick says the show is a reflection of its times.