WARNING! SPOILER ALERTS ABOUND!
As with most of season 4, I went into the BSG finale with grave trepidation and deep misgivings. I’d been hearing from Richard Hatch that the entire season would be more brutal than the other three. Given the early groundwork in BSG that anyone is expendable, I was really worried about having my heart ripped out at any moment during the entire season. Above all else, I abhor unfair ends to characters.

Though the series was set in a constant state of war and eminent destruction, I also felt that many of the characters had earned the right to survive the finale. Thus, I went into the two-parter with a different set of expectations than Jon’s. I wasn’t looking for the answers to the Opera House or who the virtual characters were. Or even what Starbuck was. I was reasonably confident that those issues would be worked out in a way consistent with the rest of the series and in keeping with elements of the original.

They were.

I won’t go into this here save to say that Ron Moore followed the original series fairly closely through to the end (including an Earth that was not Earth and divine intervention). Nothing about the resolution of the plot threads surprised me nor did I find them problematic. What I was worried about whether the endings for the characters would be fair. In my opinion, they were. Do I wish that some of the romances had happier endings? Sure. Would I liked to have seen Brother Cavil torn limb from limb and have his entrails eaten before his eyes? Certainly. But I thought all of the character arcs ended fairly.

And it had an old Centurion Cylon vs new Cylon smackdown (http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Centurions)! You gotta love that! I think that BSG has raised the bar for what television drama can be. It particularly raised the level of the quality of dialogue. I will be forever grateful for having seen it, because it will surely influence my work. However, unlike many others, I am glad the ride is over. It was a brutal trip for me, especially the last half of the 4th season. I can’t go through that again.

Of course, I’ll probably watch Caprica.

A few years back, Jon and I were in a movie theater. One of the trailers shown was for The Island. As we watched as the gorgeous and compelling Ewan MacGregor and Scarlett Johansson flee from perils like the hot and yummy Sean Bean, we realized that we’d seen this film before. ‘It's Parts: the Clonus Horror,’ Jon exclaimed. ‘Why are they remaking a Mystery Science Theater movie?’ Of course, the 1979 film wasn’t made for MST3K. It just fit there extremely well.

I preferred that version to the regular version which I also had the misfortune of seeing while in college. As it turns out, not even the director of Parts knew that they were re-making his film. When he finally noticed, he sued. As noted in the Wikipedia article about the lawsuit (which was settled), there were a number of similarities between The Island and Parts: The Clonus Horror. The one that wasn’t mentioned in a bullet point was that they both sucked. Even Michael Bay’s usual slick and fast paced presentation could not keep the film from tanking.

Such spectacular failures bring me to the conclusion that, perhaps, films about clones being raised for their body parts may not be a good subject for a film. Imagine my surprise to find that there is another film in the works involving clones being raised to donate their organs. This time, as before, it is a dystopian society (British in this case) where this process has somehow become a good idea. But in Never Let Me Go, there aren’t great escapes, harrowing pursuits and exposure to a shocked world of a heinous practice. This is about how one clone (purportedly to be played by Keira Knightley) learns to accept her role in the food chain and eventually succumb to death.

Okay, now I get to see characters go through this reprehensible process with no hope of them ever finding an escape. The author is a fine writer and this book has been lauded all over the place. His works have made some fine films, but this still sounds like a bad trip. Please, put the clones for body parts plots in the circular file.

Better yet, shred and burn them and bury the ashes.