Still not happy with the dancing-robot montage that ended Battlestar Galactica, or just curious to know more? We've told you one way it could have gone, but RDM revealed yet another possible ending, involving Galactica.
Over at the Syfy Channel message boards RDM commented that at one point, he had other plans for the embattled warhorse Galactica. Instead of sending the ship into the sun, piloted by comatose Anders, they would land the ship on Earth, to be discovered thousands of years later.
There was a point in the development process where we discussed the idea of the Galactica not being destroyed, but having somehow landed on the surface more or less intact, but unable to ever get into orbit again (the particulars here were never worked out, so don't ask how she made it down without being torn apart). We talked about them basically abandoning the ship and moving out into the world. Cut to the present-day, in Central America where there are these enormous mysterious mounds that archeologists have not been able to understand (it may have been South America, I can't recall the exact location, but these mounds really do exist). Someone is doing a new kind of survey of the mounds with some kind of ground-penetrating radar or something and lo and behold, we see the outlines of the Galactica still buried under the surface.
If you thought visitors from another world giving up all their technology was a hard pill to swallow, then I can't imagine someone trying to explain this.
It was an intriguing idea and we bandied it about for a while, but ultimately rejected it as a little too cute and also felt that it would violate our contemporary reality, in essence 'branching off' the BSG story in 2009 into a parallel reality, where a Battlestar was discovered in Central America. I wanted the end of the show to directly relate to us, not to a world where that event had occurred.
I'm pretty happy they didn't go with this ending, because it would never have held up to rational thought. Moore also answered some other fan questions on the boards, including why we spent so much time with that trapped bird. But if you're hoping for an actually reason for the birdie well, RDM isn't quite sure what it is himself (great):
The image of the bird was just than — an image. I had no idea what it meant or symbolized, but just saw this picture of a man (didn't even know it was Lee) trying to chase a bird out of his house with a broom. We put it up on the board and then folded it into the story of Lee without trying to define exactly what it meant. I still don't know exactly what it meant. I don't want to.
He also goes on the defensive at great length, about the alleged anti-technology message that many viewers gleaned from the finale:
I wanted to say that I really wasn't trying to make some grand anti-technological statement at the end of BSG. Far from holding Luddite tendencies, I'm actually quite taken by techno-whiz-bang and tend to stop in stores and stare at all kinds of devices that go ping. The end of Galactica's story had to do with human choices, human ethics, and the human heart. The conversation between Head Six and Head Baltar was a discussion of what mankind would choose to do this time through the cycle of time that had repeated itself several times already — that is, would they follow a similar path of destruction, escape, rebirth, etc. There's nothing in the scene to imply that technology is, in and of itself, an evil or pernicious force in our world or any world, rather that man's relationship with his own technology had led to ruin because of the choices and decisions made once that technology reached a certain advanced state of affairs.
That's what I took away from it, personally, but it was hard to know what to think after the rug-pull moment of that final robot montage.
Picture from the mind of Garrison Dean over at This Is A Disaster.
[Via Scifi Wire]