Battlestar Gaylactica Heads Off Into the Sunset

daybreakcolonyfightBattlestar Galactica, our favorite queer vague show of all time ended its four year run on Friday and its final hours lived up to to everything we hoped it would be.

Despite its uber-geeky name, the sci-fi show about the survivors of humanity seeking a new home is likely to go down as one of the greatest television shows of all time. Imagine The Wire in space crossed with the character-driven mysteries of Lost and throw in the sociopolitical relevance of M*A*S*H and you’re halfway there. Of course, the other half of its awesomeness is the fact that it’s a spaceship full of sexylesbian robots.

Confused by the ending? Want to know how the gays wind up winning? Click ahead for a super-duper SPOILER-filled adieu to the best frakin’ ship in the fleet.

If you have not seen “Daybreak”, turn away now. We’re serious about the spoilers!

Since we’re a big gay blog- let’s start with the gay angles on the finale:

Hoshi winds up in charge of the fleet.

Admiral Adama and Co. decide to go on a suicide mission to rescue half-human/half-Cylon moppet Hera, leaving the remains of humanity in the capable of hands of Hoshi, the show’s only remaining somewhat-out gay male character. Okay, we’re sort of stretching here: Hoshi is only revealed to be gay in an online web series that ran on scifi.com earlier this year, but for a show that reads like a Dostoyevsky novel, there’s precious few fanboys who don’t know that Hoshi is now-dead mutineer Felix Gaeta’s main squeeze. Of course, that just adds to the irony– Gaeta turned against Adama and sought to bring him down, but his boyfriend wound up being the person Adama leaves in charge of the fleet, saying he can’t think of someone who commanded more respect than Hoshi. Poor Gaeta must be rolling over in his grave– or would be if his body had not been jettisoned into space.

Unfortunately, we won’t be seeing the spin-off “Admiral Hoshi’s Big Gay Space Cruise” anytime soon since Adama’s suicide mission leads to the the discovery of Earth– our Earth — and the fleet winds up abandoning their space faring ways to settle on our planet at the dawn of Mankind. Call it one small step for gays and one giant leap for Colonial-kind.

Did Baltar’s followers settle Lesbos?

Thanks to a whole lot of fulfilled prophecy and the machinations of angels/ demons that look like Tricia Helfer and James Callis, the Colonials make it to our pale blue orb in the distant past, when our ancestors are little more than walking monkeys. Desperate to escape the cycle of violence that has plagued their civilization, the remains of the Galactica fleet decide to forge their swords into plowshares and settle across the planet. In the last moments, Baltar gets a spine and leaves his female harem of religious zealots to their own devices. We’d like to think they settled on a little Greek island and spent the rest of their days composing odes to the flower of womanhood. Somebody write some fanfic about this, stat.

Alright, so both of those gay angles are pretty silly, but the finale’s message was about ending divisions and ultimately, about the power of love and the importance of seeing each other as human beings, regardless of who we are or where we came from. Human, Cylon, believer in God or gods, gay or straight– in its final hours, we see enmity dissolve into compassion; a message that is applicable to gays and lesbians as it is to anyone on the planet– which, according to BSG is made up of human-Cylon hybrids.

Sure, we still don’t really know who or what Starbuck really is, how Adama got the entire fleet to give up everything in exchange for an extended camping trip on a pre-civilized Earth or why God has such an affinity for Bob Dylan songs, but like a great symphony, BSG managed to take all the disparate themes it had played throughout the series: Duty to law versus the realities of survival, the question of whether love is selfish or selfless, the dangers of belief being the flip-side of the sustaining power of hope and recapitulatd them into a gorgeous thematic whole.

If Battlestar Galactica leaves us with one lasting message it’s that we may be victims of fate and circumstances out of our control, but we do have a choice in how we choose to deal with the hand we are dealt. It’s a message as applicable to our daily lives as it is to the massive challenges we face, not just as gays and lesbians, but as a species.

One other note: The finale reminded me of how, in a strange way, the gay and lesbian rights movement has become inexorably tied to religion. It’s not something that any of us have sought, but as religious zealots have thrown scripture and brimstone at us in their quest to damn us as sinners, gays and lesbians have found themselves answering questions about God’s love, grace and faith. While some reject belief and religion as bigotry dressed up in superstition, others have found their sexuality to an intrinsic part of their spiritual identity. Like the Cylons and the Humans in Galactica, it seems unlikely that one day gays and lesbians will triumph over the religious right or vice versa. Instead, perhaps naively, we look to the day that our differences are cast aside and our common humanity will prevail.

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