Battlestar Galactica

(SPOILERS AHEAD if you haven't seen the show and want to. You've been warned)
I realize that Sci-Fi's Battlestar Galactica ended it's run about two years ago. After much prompting from people, one of which was our very own Matt, and because it was available on Netflix's Watch Instantly service, I finally delved into the series. I realize it being two years finished that might as well be a thousand years pop culturally speaking, as fast as these things tend to fly by. For the most part I enjoyed the show, and besides some minor quibbling, I really didn't mind the finale that much. And, during the run of the show, there were moments (the reveal of the 4 of the 5 final cylons, that leap ahead a year on New Caprica, the midseason cliffhanger in the middle of Season 4 when they found the "original" Earth, the return of Starbuck etc.) Sure, in the end, some of the mythology got convoluted, and ultimately some of the conclusions the finale came too were sort of....odd. But that hasn't stopped me from liking a series before. Heck, I love Lost, one of my top ten favorite shows of the aughts, and it it can be said was rife with these sorts of problems (And to be honest, I definitely was a bigger Lost fan but this was mostly really good and compelling stuff).

That being said, here are two different ways I came up with that they could have ended the show. I realize that they have their own problems, but the writers, in some ways, wrote themselves into a corner with some of the plot points.

1) So, in the midseason's amazing cliffhanger when they found the original Earth only to discover 1) The 13th tribe were a tribe of Cylons and 2) that Earth was uninhabitable because of a nuclear war between cylons that had devastated the planet....I think in some ways that maybe they could have stayed with this Earth and created an alternate history to the Earth, and eventually have themselves be the first humans to reach this place and populate. Have some scientist come up with some Deus Ex Machina machine that would clean up the atmosphere, sort of like the machine Aaron Eckhardt and Rob Lowe suggest they could come up with in the future to allow people to smoke in space. That's only part of it: I would have still had the cylons lead by Dean Stockwell (brother Cavil-who was awesome, as usual, by the way) still have them track down Galactica and the fleet, still have them kidnap Hera and hold her for ransom (for the key to Resurection?) ...decide this is going to be humanity's last stand for their homeland, and have a battle on two fronts, one in space, and then one on land, but Road Warrior style with homemade battle vehicles and what not. Personally, I think it would be cool if mostly it was on the planet...but anyhow, The ending would be much the same, but the Galactica would have its crew ship down to the surface with as much as they could carry, and they would destroy the Cylons by arming the nuclear warheads and slamming into the baseship, and they would have to learn to live on Earth and start anew for the human race. This would have gone a long way to stopping the cycle they all seemed so worried about.

2) My other idea was to go on like they did, but when Starbuck made that final jump, instead of finding a prehistoric Earth, they found Earth in 2009. I mean the finale already had that whole thing where apparently humans also evolved similarly to the ones on the colonies millions of light years away, why not just put them in a different timeframe? So here, I would make their ship appear to throngs like in modern day Los Angeles and/or New York and have them, after some suspicion, be welcomed. But instead of having the Cylons all be defeated when they jumped have a basestar or something follow them intent on revenge and the all the humans would have to work to defeat them, thus uniting the humans and the cylons and helping them learn from eachother and again, through that knowledge hopefully stopping this cycle they were all so worried about.

I know I am forgetting bits and pieces, and things would have to be worked around again, but I think both might have been pretty satisfying in the end. But then again, no finale ever really satisfies everyone. Unless of course, its the finale of The Wire.