Beej

The one central question the series doesn't answer is why the cylons chose to try to exterminate humanity in the second war after having achieved freedom in their war of independence. Also, having wiped out billions, it was certainly within their ability to finish off one surviving battlestar, instead of toying with it like a cat with a mouse. If not for procreation (they still had resurrection), then either kill them or let them go. On the other hand, why does humanity take life so easily, tolerate genocide, and contemplate extinction over loss in a potential nuclear war. I get all that. Just seems vexing we're never told the rationale. Clearly, they were searching for meaning in their existence, and for some of the models, humanity was a big piece in that... be it in exterminating us or living with us. Even if it were as simple as the hardline faction arguing that a child can't become an adult until its parents have died and winning out in a debate. I'd have taken that. As far as the ending, I really can't argue too much. I'm fine with Kara being an angel. I might have cleaned that up a bit so her destiny was to lead her people "to their end" at one earth-like planet (not two) and have let the fleet find the irradiated earth via more secular or prophetic methods. Overall, I like that some things are unexplainable. There is a god, and it's not us or the cylons. Minutia with the habitation of Earth II... sure, I'd not have spelled out a zero technology, hunter-gatherer dogma being imposed on the survivors. They were out of resources to maintain an interstellar fleet. There were zero volunteers to live indefinitely in orbit to keep them operable, and, given their extremely limited military capability, having them in orbit and risking detection was much too great a risk. I'd have them either bring down whatever tools and tech they felt were essential and just have it be lost to time, or I'd have had a brief explanation that the industrial facilities, networks, and metropolitan way of life necessary to live with and maintain that level of technological advancement was just incompatible with co-habitating with early man. The options would be to either share the technology and all but assure a repeat of technology outstripping humanity, or to withhold it and live in modern cities with a permanent underclass wandering the countryside as breeding stock. The solution would be to live out their lives at roughly an 18th century tech level.... steam, sail, domestication of animals, etc. Last quibble is with the timeline. With tens of thousands of colonists dispersed around the globe, all possessed of language, higher math, basic science, agriculture, etc... 150,000 years seems like a long time to achieve our present level of advancement. In a tenth that timeframe, we've come from ancient Egypt to here. Also, how is Hera the missing link and mitochondrial mom? I'm fine if she is, but it deserves an explanation. What about all of the other colonial proginy and the likely interbreeding with the native population? Was their some calamitous event that killed off all purely biological humans and only descendants of hers were able to survive? Some of these are really questions more than objections, but with all that went along with the Hera story, I'd like to have been told why she was the key to humanity's survival, when in the end, they effectively settled for a class-M planet with no guarantee of safety from the cylons. Of course, I suppose she was the key to the cylons' survival as well, just probably not as they would have hoped.