Only on “Nip/Tuck” can a character utter a line like “Dildo sales are down. It’s the goddamn economy,” and make it sound a perfectly reasonable thing to say. There are aspects I will miss about “Nip/Tuck,” and one of them is its ability to take the most outlandishly offensive situation and make it seem relatively normal, at least within the context of the show. But all good and bad things must come to an end, and “Nip/Tuck,” from Season Three onwards, was equal parts of both. The Sixth Season aired in two parts (with a month break in the middle), which at the time were marketed as Seasons Six and Seven. There is no Season Seven, but there is a 19-episode sixth season, and all those episodes are collected in this set. Through watching this block, however, it certainly seems like two different seasons. Confused? Annoyed? Allow me to elaborate and pontificate.

The first ten episodes are all but unwatchable in their awfulness. Not merely content to disturb viewers, these episodes largely depress as well, although it seems unlikely that was the goal. The flaccid economy, and its effect on the plastic surgery business, is stressed in the first episode, but what does it say about a show when such a topic is one of the bright spots? Sean (Dylan Walsh) is still dating anesthesiologist Teddy Rowe, who used to be played by Katee Sackhoff, but now resides in the body of Rose McGowan, which is a true “what the fuck?” soap opera switch, given that it’s hard to think of two actresses that are any less alike in both their method and appearance. Teddy slowly begins revealing her true, black widow colors as the narrative progresses, and on the camping trip from hell, Teddy’s shit hits the fan and splatters all over the place.

Meanwhile, Christian (Julian McMahon), who is not dying of cancer after all, must contend with a seriously pissed off Liz (Roma Maffia), since now that he’s not dying he doesn’t want to stay married to her. Liz’s reaction is understandable, but that doesn’t make her character arc any more palatable, since Liz is the only person on the show we’ve come to believe is truly decent. Kimber (Kelly Carlson) begins dating Dr. Mike Hamoui (Mario Lopez), a development nobody was asking to see, and if ever you wanted to see Lopez dressed in a corset, garter belt, and stockings, well, now’s your chance. Stills from the episode in which Christian talks him into this get-up are bound to haunt Lopez for the rest of his life, which amuses me to no end. Maybe he can put the scene on his reel should the “Rocky Horror” remake ever get off the ground?

Matt (John Hensley) has taken up miming, only to discover there’s more money to be found in robbing convenience stores in whiteface. As per usual with Matt, things go south with his plans, but never as far as here, where he ends up going to prison, and the episode “Alexis Stone II” is surely one of the most self-loathing episodes of any TV series, ever. And Julia (Joely Richardson)? Well, I think she’s in there somewhere, but as has been par for the course in recent times, Richardson’s mind is obviously anywhere but on her character. The patient storylines, too, are revolting. Characters like The Enigma, Jenny Juggs, and Lola Wlodkowski are amongst the most tasteless the show has ever showcased (which is saying something), and the aforementioned Alexis Stone, who manages a two-episode arc, simply gives transgendered people a bad name. It’s a credit to the series that they didn’t have her whip out a knife and slit Christian’s throat at the end of her tale. These ten episodes are some of the worst the show has ever unleashed, and as tough as it was watching them on broadcast, it was twice as tough sitting through them a second time on DVD. Even the most die-hard fans of the show surely knew that it was time to close up shop when these aired last year.

And one must wonder how many viewers the show lost in that block. How many people failed to come back to the show in January for the final nine episodes? I’m willing to bet plenty, which is a shame because, believe it or not, after years of excess, “Nip/Tuck” managed to deliver a nicely restrained, oftentimes poignant batch of episodes to close out the series. The story picks up a few months after the first ten in the set, and Sean and Christian are going to pick up a lifetime achievement award. Only after they receive the award does Sean discover that Christian bought it via a hefty donation, at which point Sean goes ballistic. And from there, the season peels one layer of the onion away after the next, dissecting McNamara and Troy’s friendship and partnership, all while providing endings for every other character on the show as well (most are surprisingly happy, some a little warped, and in one case we lose a character altogether).

One excellent episode, “Dr. Griffin,” is set almost entirely in a psychiatrist’s office, with Sean and Christian unloading their grievances on one another. Even the patient stories have a great deal of heft to them, and take viewers back to a time when the show was as much about the surgeries as it was the main characters. And then there’s fan favorite villainess Ava Moore (Famke Janssen), who returns to wreak some havoc one last time, for the final two episodes of the series.

I once wrote that when “Nip/Tuck” ended, I wanted to have to “scrape my jaw up off the floor and make an appointment for some reconstructive surgery.” I can’t honestly say that happens here, but I wrote that way back when this show and I were still doing a lovely little dance together week in and out. That dance ended some time ago, and yet I was pretty bowled over by the mature series of notes the show went out on. I think that’s how it needed to be, given that it’s been mercilessly and vacuously titillating viewers for far too long now. Given how controversial many series finales are these days, perhaps the biggest surprise “Nip/Tuck” could’ve given us is a finale that wasn’t controversial at all. Well, mostly not. There is that one last thing with Ava and Matt that might just make your blood boil, but I thought it was just right.

The three stars given to this set are merely an average: Two stars for the first ten episodes, and four stars for the last nine. I don’t know exactly how to tell people to avoid one half of a season box set, whilst highly recommending its second half. You’ll have to figure the rest out on your own.

Special Features: There’s just one measly featurette entitled “Tell Me What You Don’t Like About Yourself: The Psychology Behind Plastic Surgery,” which is just as throwaway as it sounds. No celebration for the end of the show, no commentaries, no deleted scenes, no nothing.

“We’ve always approached each season, just the task of doing it, as so great that, literally, from the very first season on, we’ve completed that season, and it was really FOX’s decision to pick us up,” said Sutherland. “There’s never been one specific season that the next season was guaranteed or ensured. This has been one of the greatest gifts of my life, the ability to do ’24.’ So for me, yeah, it’s something that is absolutely open. I’ve always said that as long as people wanted us to make it, and people were really interested in watching it, I would be interested. There’s a lot of components involved. The task of writing it is far greater than the task of acting in it, so Howard can talk about that for a moment, but certainly, it’s always open to continue on doing it.”

“I sort of second Kiefer’s thoughts about it,” said Gordon. “It’s always been a very year-to-year, minute-to-minute, day-to-day experience. There’s the intellectual and sort of emotional and creative curiosity. The writers sit around, and in the margins of the time when we aren’t working on Season 8 we do ask ourselves, ‘What if…?’ So it certainly is a possibility.”

So there you go: now you can safely enjoy the new season without feeling a sense of dread that they’re entering it with feelings of finality. We’ll get back to Messrs. Sutherland and Howard in a bit, but with that bit of pressing information out of the way, let’s check in to see what some of the other “24” folks are thinking about as they prepare for the premiere…

Cherry Jones was asked how she feels about her character now that she’s had a year to consider some of President Taylor’s executive decisions. “I thought some of them showed extreme sleep deprivation there towards the end, in terms of chiefs of staff and that sort of thing,” she replied, with a smile. “I thought she was kind of brilliant and incredibly pragmatic. When you play a part, you get behind it and you try to figure out why and how, and there was very little that Howard and the boys scripted that I had any trouble fulfilling…including sending my child off to prison! So I loved playing her last season. In each episode, I was always thrilled when I’d see that first script, and with each step, I thought she was incredibly pragmatic…but that’s just my own personal take.”

One of the funniest responses during the panel came when it was suggested to Sutherland that, as the new season kicks off, Chloe seems to be painted slightly out of character. While I know you haven’t seen it yet as of this writing, I’ll tell you that, at least from my perspective, the accusation strikes me as a fair cop: for someone who’s been so techno-savvy throughout the run of the series, you wouldn’t expect her to be so flummoxed by the changes that have gone on since the last time she was in the office. Before Sutherland could even begin to consider a response, however, the woman who plays Chloe – Mary Lynn Rajskub – practically leapt out of her chair in an attempt to defend herself.

“Is it so hard to believe that a woman wants to be a mother to her child?” she demanded to know, earning much laughter from the audience. “And maybe take her nose out of a book every once in a while? Take a break from the labyrinth of genius that inhabits her brain? And that the world, you know, actually goes on without me, technically?”

Finally, Rajskub took a breath.

“Sorry, I was just really enjoying myself there,” she said, grinning. “I have been at home with the child, and when I get back, all the protocols have changed…you know, whatever a protocol is. I’m kidding: of course I know precisely what it is. But that was actually really a fun place to start. It’s fun to sort of start from an opposite place. And I do think that it’s believable that a place would change its systems enough, because technology moves at a breakneck speed…as does Hollywood.”

On a related note, you’ve probably seen the previews or, failing that, read some of the articles that have been emerging about the new season which indicate that, as things kick off, Jack Bauer is somewhere he’s never been before: in a good place. Obviously, it wouldn’t be much of a season if it stayed that way, so you know it’s not going to last.

“It’s a guarantee that he’s going to have a bad day,” said Sutherland, with a smile. “You have to realize that you’re going to have to work within that place. What Howard and the other writers did, which was such a fantastic thing for me as an actor, was they put Jack in such a positive place at the very beginning of this series that it gave him something to fight for. I think just inherently we have taken the character in some very dark places – the loss of his wife, the estrangement from his daughter, the death of Kim Raver’s character – and one of the great things as an actor is to be able to take all those kind of tragedies and mount those as part of the character for the following season. So to be able to start Season 8 with some kind of hope and give him something to really live for and fight for was a really different and kind of very exciting place to be as a character, and that really resonates. As much as you kind of acknowledge it in the very beginning, it really has some resonance throughout the later episodes.”

It has to be asked, though: didn’t it feel weird to smile?

“I must say, when we first shot it, it felt awkward for me…and I think everybody else involved,” said Sutherland. “The only time Jack Bauer smiled – and just because it happened so rarely, we noted it – was in Season 3, when he had captured Nina and was flying back with her on the cargo plane and he had her in handcuffs, he looked at her and smiled.”

“That,” he added, “was about four episodes before he got to shoot her.”

Katee Sackhoff addressed how quickly she latched onto her character on the series. “I think that Dana is kind of the closest that I’ve ever played to myself, actually,” she said. “You know, I came onto this show, it was written that she’s a computer analyst, and I embrace that every fiber of my being. And every little turn, it just seems to get more interesting. You know, she has a past. I keep saying that, and everyone is like, ‘Oh, she has a past. Is it bad?’ And I’m like, ‘No. She raised show ponies in Kentucky. Yes, it’s bad. It’s ’24’! I mean, come on, it’s not going to be cotton candy and white and fluffy!”

Freddie Prinze, Jr., seemed to be equally excited about his new gig on the show, scoffing at a writer’s use of the phrase “kind of pleased” to describe his feelings on the matter because it didn’t come anywhere close to encompassing what he was going through.

“I received the sides for this part when I was in New York, and they were casting out of L.A.,” he explained. “I went to the casting director’s office, and there were no other actors there. When they brought me in, I said, ‘Look, you’re not waiting for anyone else to get in here, so we’re doing this audition ’til I get it right.’ And she was nice enough to let me get a few cracks at it…and I sent her a big box of cookies when I got the part. I mean, I don’t get offered this kind of a job, period. You know, for most of my career, if I’m in it, I’m struggling to fall in love for 96 minutes, and I always get the girl. And to get a chance to do this is something, as an actor, that you ready yourself for for…well, since I was 21 years old. So, yeah, I was very, very excited.”

And, lastly, I just have to close with Kiefer’s response to the question about whether or not he now gets preferential treatment at the airport because of the character he’s played for the last eight years:

“No, honestly, going through the airport security thing, I get in the same line as everybody else and go through the same search as everybody else,” he said. “They probably talk to me a little more than the other passengers, but that’s about it. You know, I think people make a joke more than anything. I’ve always been shocked that people that actually I’m flying with say, ‘Oh, I feel safer on the plane.’ I’m thinking, ‘You must not watch the show because everybody around me gets killed!'”

At the show’s Comic-Con panel, it was revealed that Season 8 will find Jack Bauer trying to keep an assassination from occurring during a peace conference between the presidents of America and Iran…whoops, sorry, make that the totally fictional nation of Kamistan…and that, when things kick off, Jack will actually be – gasp! – happy. (SPOILER ALERT: It won’t last.) On the cast front, new additions to the mix will include Katee Sackhoff, Freddie Prinze Jr., Anil Kapoor, Stephen Root, and Jürgen Prochnow. You can get way more info over at TelevisionaryBlog.com’s wrap-up of the Comic-Con panel, which – even though it’s obviously a couple of months old – seems to be packed with more first-hand information from cast members about the upcoming season than any other site.

The press release for this set finishes up with two sentences: “And Liz says ‘I do’ to the last person you’d imagine. Time to stretch your imagination, fans.” When even the marketing department can no longer take a show seriously, it must be “Nip/Tuck.” As a fan since day one, I’m past resenting the show for failing to be as good as it once was, and have moved on to embracing “Nip/Tuck” for the freakshow it’s become. How freaky you ask? Well, in one episode, when Dr. Troy (Julian McMahon) refuses to give a woman an unnecessary mastectomy, she performs the surgery on herself – in the lobby of McNamara/Troy – with an electric carving knife.

Never a show to be too far behind the times, another installment features a pair of lovers who’ve taken their vampiric bloodlust a bit too far. You’ve seen these folks at goth clubs, I’m sure, but have secretly hoped it was all an act. “Nip/Tuck” is here to show you that the freakshow never ends, and that people do indeed partake in mutual bloodsucking. Surely the most outrageous display of hedonistic debasement comes in the form of the guy who likes to fuck furniture. If I hadn’t been laughing so hard, I might have turned away. What’s most noteworthy about this block of episodes, is that there isn’t a villain in the traditional “Nip/Tuck” sense – no Carver, or Escobar – although Eden (AnnaLynne McCord) does show up a couple times to fan a few flames.

In other news, Kimber (Kelly Carlson) wants to inject collagen into her baby daughter’s lips so she can get a head start on a successful modeling career. Sean (Dylan Walsh) is babied by a girl when he pretends to be an invalid. Later on in the half season, he dates Dr. Teddy Rowe (Katee Sackhoff), and they experiment with hallucinogens in the desert when they aren’t having sex in strange houses. Julia (Joely Richardson) heads back to New York after a tragedy, and Matt (John Hensley) does a huge favor for a McNamara/Troy intern (Adhir Kalyan), after the boy is asked to perform his father’s penis lengthening surgery. In another episode, a patient asks that his member be decreased, as he can’t stop fellating himself; Bradley Cooper’s Aidan returns for this installment, pitching Sean a movie based on his life. And in the biggest news of all, Christian dates Liz (Roma Maffia) in a storyline that by no means should work, and yet miraculously does.

You’ll hate the final moments of the season, and accuse the show of selling out, but hey, haven’t we been making this accusation for several years now? “Nip/Tuck” hasn’t sold out as much as it’s bought into its own trashy hype. It’s ambling toward the finish line of 100 episodes for syndication purposes, and the writers are having a field day unleashing an enormous amount of tasteless depravity along the way. It’s become very much of a drug in that respect. When it’s good, it’s really, really good; when it’s bad, it’s still there for the doing, and I, for one, choose to continue jabbing the needle deep into my arm.

Click to buy Nip/Tuck: Season Five, Pt. 2

Was it a great finale? Absolutely. Was I blown away? Not entirely.

Let’s start at the beginning (which is always a good place to start) — more flashbacks of life on Caprica. Bill is thinking about retiring and entering the private sector, Roslin has a blind date with a former student, Lee gets to know Kara. Great, let’s move on.

Back in the future, Baltar’s vision tells him that he will “take mankind’s remnants and guide them to their end.” Last week, after watching him struggle with the decision in the hanger, I wondered whether or not Gaius would in fact volunteer to go along with the rescue mission. The truth is that it should have been obvious that he would. Creator Ronald D. Moore wasn’t about to take one of the main players out of the game in crunch time.

After an emotional scene between Roslin and Doc Coddle, Laura had a great line:

“Don’t spoil your image. Just light a cigarette and go and grumble.”

Then the planning began for the assault on the colony — that’s when the episode really got going. The final four move Sam to the CIC (more on this later) and Galactica prepares to jump.

Like just about every battle scene in the entire series, this one rocked. Galactica jumps in and immediately starts to get pummeled by the colony’s weapons. After the terrific rescue mission on New Caprica, the show had a lot to live up to, and once the birds were away and Bill ordered his crew to ram the colony, Moore and Co. had cleared the bar. It was very cool to see Lee leading a group of Centurions into the colony. Even when they’re on “our” side, they still scare the ever-loving crap out of me.

It’s still a little incredible that Kara’s group would find Hera so quickly, but Boomer came to their aid. She broke that Cylon’s neck (!!!) and got Hera out of there. It just goes to show what kind of an effect that little girl has on people/machines. After a great scene with Boomer, Athena, Helo and Kara — with Kara’s great line, “Uh, can we not tell her the plan!” — Athena kills her “sister” and the group makes its escape. When Boomer said that she owed the old man, I thought she was referring to the fact that she once tried to kill him, but apparently she was talking about one day when she was a rookie and Bill gave her another chance to complete her raptor landing. (Maybe it’s just me, but I think she owes him more for the attempted assassination.)

Meanwhile, on Galactica, Gaius and Caprica Six are chitchatting while they’re waiting for something to shoot. That’s when they both see both visions, who say, “You will hold the futures of humans and Cylons in your hands.” Now there has been a lot of speculation about what his/their visions represent, but they’re not crazy and they don’t have chips in their heads (or at least Gaius doesn’t). Moore said on “The Last Frakking Special” that Baltar’s visions were divine. They were guiding him down this path, and his storyline over the last few episodes revolved around his possible redemption. He turned over the keys to Caprica’s defense systems to his Six and that allowed the near-destruction of the human race. Granted, he didn’t know that’s what he was doing at the time, but he is still responsible for his actions. Anyway, Baltar starts firing his gun and it turns out that Lee and his gang are just around the corner. Then there was this subtle yet fantastic interaction…

Baltar: Sorry about that.
Lee: Doc, you did good.

Succinct and to the point, that was one of the most touching moments in the entire finale (for me). Lee has always been one of Baltar’s harshest critics and for Gaius to do enough to earn a compliment from him (which was no doubt boosted by the Doctor’s decision to stay on Galactica), it was a major milestone in Baltar’s road to redemption.

So Hera runs off as Helo is shot, and the whole opera house flashbacks begin. This was a very cool way to intertwine the show’s past with its present and give meaning to those dreams. I’m guessing this was Moore’s plan from the start. Usually, when you’re writing fiction, you know how it begins and how it ends, and you’ll figure out the middle later. I think once Moore introduced the opera house dream, he knew that it was going to come full circle as all the parties involved search for Hera on Galactica. The dreams made Caprica Six and Baltar look nefarious, as if they were snatching the girl away. But in fact, they had the best interests of the girl at heart. This all led to Baltar and Caprica Six taking Hera into the CIC, where the final five were positioned above them, same as the dream. Very, very cool.

All right, so somehow Cavil gets a hold of Hera, and instead of Bill or someone else putting a bullet in his “brain,” Baltar finally redeems himself. If he’s not on Galactica (the one true, selfless act that Lee was talking about earlier this season), then he’s not there to convince Cavil to give up the girl, and who knows how that confrontation ends. Gaius talks about the visions, refers to them as “angels” and gets Cavil to buy into the whole “let’s break the cycle of violence” plan, providing that the final five give the cylons the key to resurrection. Only the plan goes awry when Tyrol sees Torry’s memory of killing his wife — so he flips out and kills her. Cavil, ever the survivor, says “frak” and offs himself. This doesn’t make any sense to me.

Anyway, now it’s time for Starbuck to take over. Moore did a great job of setting up this scene. From the final four hearing “All Along the Watchtower,” to Hera giving the drawing to Starbuck, to her interaction with her “dad” in the bar, to her working with Anders to try to put the song into some sort of numerical connotation, it was a long, fleshed-out journey. Of course, the fact that she jumped Galactica to a second Earth (which oddly enough, has all the same continents as the original Earth) requires a huge leap of faith. It’s clear now that Moore is pushing the idea of intelligent design, which he (possibly) sees as a compromise between the inaccuracies of the Bible (as they relate to established science) and the finality of atheism. This is confirmed when Bill, Gaius, Coddle and a few others are observing a tribe of prehistoric humans walk by. The fact that humans evolved independently requires some sort of a belief in divine intervention.

At some point, Starbuck/Lee have a flashback to the time that they met, and it turns out that they almost slept together. But the most important part of the flashback was Kara revealing that she isn’t afraid of death. It’s not that she doesn’t know fear, she does, but she’s not afraid of dying, which was yet another clue that she was not human (nor cylon). Whatever she is — some sort of angel that walks the Earth, twice — she is built in such away that she’s not afraid of death, and this lack of fear has allowed her to do amazing things in her time with the fleet. Regarding the other flashbacks, I think we were supposed to see just how close Bill was to not being in charge of Galactica at the time of the attack and what it took for Roslin to convince herself that a move into politics was the right thing for her. I’m not sure why it took sleeping with her former student (though that’s admittedly a bit on the sketchy side, even that late in life), but that’s what it took.

Back to New Earth. Not unlike the finale to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, this one had about five or six endings. It’s understandable — the viewers want to know how each major character moves on, and it’s impossible to do that quickly. I think that this is why they decided to do a two-hour combined finale instead of breaking it up into two episodes. It just wouldn’t have worked as well separately.

All right, so the assumption is that the fleet is willing to give up all of their technology and live and breed with the natives. There’s no other way to explain the lack of technology, so I guess I’m willing to buy it. I just have a hard time believing that the fleet, after arguing about every little thing, would be so homogeneous in its position on this.

Back in April of 2008, I wrote the following on the blog entry for this season’s (first) premiere…

Based on what I’ve read, it does appear that the fleet will find some version of Earth this season. They could arrive in our past, our present or our future, or they could arrive to an alternate version of Earth. They could be the first humans to settle on Earth (maybe the two hybrid babies are Adam and Eve – though all the technology would be a problem) or they could arrive to a futuristic Earth that has the ability to fend of the Cylons. A grimmer possibility is that they arrive to find that the human civilization destroyed itself, not unlike the ending of “Planet of the Apes.”

It turns out I was almost right. (Mind you, this doesn’t mean anything — I floated all sorts of theories on this blog so I was bound to have one or two that turned out to be right.) They did find a “Planet of the Apes”-type Earth, but they found it early in the season, which opened up more possibilities for the finale. It was revealed that Tyrol’s son wasn’t really his son, so the Adam and Eve thing was out (which is probably good, since Moore is going with more of an intelligent design explanation) but it did turn out that Hera was Eve…mitochondrial Eve, that is.

So let’s see…

— After killing Torry, Galen is sick of people and wants to live and die alone. In about five years, I picture him sitting in a tent somewhere cold (with a huge, grizzly beard), wishing that he had some interpersonal interaction. Before he leaves, Tigh says that he would have done the same thing to Torry had she killed Ellen. Apparently, Tigh is the only one who is allowed to kill his wife…

— We were treated to a semi-useless flashback of Ellen and Tigh in the strip club where she says that all she wants to do is spend time with him. So now they get to spend a lot of time together. (How’s that going to work if they don’t have any booze?)

— Helo is going to teach Hera how to hunt. No, Athena is. No Helo is. I get it. They’re happy. (At least Helo didn’t die — when he got shot, I thought he might be Moore’s sacrificial lamb.)

— Bill takes off with Laura to show her some wildlife. The way he said goodbye to Lee and Starbuck (after saying, “I don’t have much time left.”), I thought he was going to fly off into the sun. After all, he can’t leave that raptor lying around for future scientists to find, right? So I’m assuming that after he buried Laura, that’s just what he did. (I’m not sure why he kept talking about the cabin after she died though. I think that’s where the title of the last three hours, “Daybreak,” came from.)

And here’s a tip: If someone tells you that they think their “work is done,” don’t look away. They’re just going to disappear. Starbuck is apparently some sort of angel (who can’t see Baltar’s angels) who was sent to Caprica to help guide the fleet to New Earth. Moore didn’t have a whole lot of options with her when he said that there would be no more “surprise cylons” after they revealed the final five. She couldn’t be a cylon and she couldn’t be human, because she found her body on Earth. So she had to be something else. So that’s what she was — something else.

And then there’s Baltar and Caprica Six, who decided to start a farm. Baltar knows about farming because of his dad, which was one of the purposes of his flashback. And this is one of the problems I have with Lee’s intention to break the cycle by saying, “no cities.” People are eventually going to settle down. When they learn how to grow things, they’re going to stay in one place, and that’s how towns are developed. When there are towns, there are eventually going to be cities. And when there are cities, there are eventually going to be killer robots. Or I guess that’s what Moore is saying.

When we jump forward 150,000 years to modern day New York, was anyone really surprised? It was a really cool transition — the camera hovering over Central Park before shooting up to show all the skyscrapers — and that’s when Moore actually made his cameo. He was the guy holding the magazine about mitochondrial Eve that the vision of Caprica Six was reading.

I get the sense that the vision of Six and the vision of Baltar are actually angels that can take any form. In this case, they took the form of Baltar and Six so that they could communicate with the real Baltar and Six. Moore left them in that form for the final scene for continuity’s sake, as it would have been strange to see two new actors in their place. Moore gets a little preachy here with all of the “technology run amok” talk, and the implication is that we’re headed towards destruction if we continue down this path. I’m not sure exactly what path he’s talking about, but given the montage of shots at the end, he’s most likely referring to the work being done in the world of robotics. I’ve heard this story before.

The vision of Caprica Six says that she thinks this time it will be different, saying that something unexpected may come up because “that too is in God’s plan.” This is when Baltar says something odd, and I’m not really sure what it means…

“You know it doesn’t like that name… Silly me. Silly, silly me.”

Okay, so he’s referring to a higher power, one that he knows well enough to know that “it” doesn’t like to be called “God.” I’m assuming the “silly me” comment refers to the fact that humans will have no other name for “it,” though he may mean something else. Thoughts?

Also, who knew that Bob Dylan didn’t originally write “All Along the Watchtower”? I bet that’s news to him!

So that’s it. The end of a great science fiction show (maybe the best ever?) and less importantly, the end of this blog. I hope everyone enjoyed reading my scatterbrained thoughts each week and that this forum allowed fans to enjoy the series a bit more. During the finale, there were two previews — one for “Caprica,” which I fully intend to blog once it starts, and another for “Battlestar Galactica: The Plan,” which is a two-hour event that shows how the cylons developed their plan to attack Caprica. I knew about the former, but not the latter, so needless to say I’m excited to see what Moore comes up with. I just hope that whatever it is, it doesn’t take away from the finality of the finale. (Try saying that ten times fast.)

3/22 Update: Here’s a link to an interview with Ronald D. Moore. He discusses a number of the last minute decisions, but doesn’t shed any light on why the fleet was so willing to give up its technology.