The best review I have come across.
Battlestar Galactica
By Jacob | Season 4 | Episode 20 | Aired on 2009.03.20
What a silly, bloated, preachy, half-assed mess. It's embarrassing to see such great actors saddled with such unvoiceable, pointless activity, for so very, very long. After all the talk about holding something back and pacing yourself for the marathon, one would think the creators would follow their own advice, but then, this episode could have easily been written in 1992 when TV still had an excuse for sucking, so maybe they did.
Caprica Before the Fall: Tigh buys Adama a lap dance, screams "Woo!" sixteen times; Bill barfs on himself and decides to throw a shit fit and retire rather than take a desk job. Sean Ellison turns out to be a hot student of Laura's from when he was a child; she fucks him, smokes a cigarette, and joins Adar's campaign. After a long speech presaging Lee's undying love of democracy, Kara and Lee almost fuck in the same room as Zak but then don't. Caprica Before the Fall was fucking classy.
Galactica/The Colony: Everybody moves Sam's hospice-smelling tank into the CIC so that he can brainwave the Colony's Hybrids. Since they are female, they have orgasms and pass out. After about twenty minutes of "rounding the horn" –– which if you're not savvy means that Adama names each and every room in the ship and then a person in that room says Go! and it's riveting –– the Galactica t-bones the Colony. Next, imagine watching your little brother playing Doom on a PC for approximately sixteen hours. Boomer rescues Hera, and Athena shoots her a million times. Then Helo gets shot a bunch of times and disappears for about an hour and a half. While a bunch of CGI robots shoot at a bunch of other CGI robots, Hera runs off about eleven times for no reason.
The Opera House vision plays out, and Gaius (who joined after all) and Caprica scoop her ass up and take her... into Galactica's CIC. Which is the Opera House, which is cool: all Final Four standing around Sam's tank, glowing. Cavil pops up out of thin air and grabs Hera again, and Tigh promises him resurrection technology in return for Hera, but only after Gaius makes an embarrassing speech about how God doesn't pick sides because he's on everybody's side because we're all friendlies. Everybody immediately starts shooting at each other, only nobody actually dies. Except Cavil, who sticks a gun in his mouth hilariously and for no reason. Meanwhile, Chief chokes the shit out of Tory, because she's a whore and deserves it, but mostly because Ron Moore has discovered that the internet hates Tory and thought he'd give us a little present.
After the Colony is nuked and sent into the black hole with all the 145s aboard, Kara randomly plays "All Along The Watchtower" on the FTL boards, and the Galactica jumps to Earth. That is, our Earth, with North and South America, like we saw when she first came back from the dead because we went to bombed-out Thirteenth Colony Earth. That's a pretty good fakeout: "We're going to find Earth! Before schedule! And it sucks! But just kidding, because then we found Other Earth!" Then there is a lot of grass, some gazelles, and more grass.
Somehow the Fleet randomly shows up and then all the bridge officers lay down and talk racist imperialist shit about our ancestors, and then everybody decides to be freegans and live in dirt huts and make life suck for themselves even worse than on New Caprica, because cities are evil. Sam pilots the entire Fleet into the sun so that just in case anybody starts getting the idea that progress and intellectual development and the human urge to excellence lie anywhere other than somewhere on a scale between inconvenient and vile. There are sixty act breaks for no reason, and then back to more grass every time, so it ends up feeling like the end of that movie with the hobbits where they jump on the bed and then hug in the courtyard and then cry and then Viggo Mortensen and Liv Tyler making weird mouth noises and a necklace and Elijah Wood looking like he's going to throw up.
Then Kara goes, "This just got stupid," and vanishes into thin air because she's Jesus and her resurrection accomplished something or something. Lee stares around for a while and then decides to go climb a mountain. Laura finally dies after a hundred million minutes of staring at the grass and gazelles, and Bill decides to bury her and sit next to the cairn and pretend it's a cabin and talk to himself. Once again, the only emotionally resonant part is Gaius and Caprica, who are back in love and ready to make a go of it as farmers. This is intense because of how Gaius has always defined himself as not-farmer, and so after all the letting go and handing the cult over to Paulla really only has one lie left. It's maybe the biggest emotional step he's taken this whole show, and it's amazing. The angels show up and explain that there wasn't really a point to all of their bullshit except to keep Hera safe long enough to get her to Earth, and then Other Earth. Meanwhile, Helo and Athena teach Hera to surf and grow beans, and the Chief heads off to invent Ireland.
150,000 years later, RDM's hanging out in Times Square, where they've just dug up the remains of Hera –– or "mitochondrial Eve" –– who apparently 1) died early but 2) not before fucking enough cro-mags to populate the entire Earth. A great idea in theory (we're all descended from the Shape of Things to Come) but I guess I don't know enough anthropology to understand how that's not fucked up. Then Chip Six and Chip Gaius are basically like, "God and the Devil are the same thing, which is pretty much everything, but don't call it God because that pisses God off; and I hope you Earthlings of 2009 don't fuck it up like every other time," but even though Six thinks we won't, there's still a montage of Asimo and that creepy Japanese girl robot and like Furby saying probably we will. Because in addition to cities, artificial intelligence is evil and we should all become freegans and it should be Woodstock all the time. Or whatever, the "message" as such is not really clear but I guess we should stop doing terrorism and war-type stuff because the cycle of violence is no bueno whether it's with robots or other people. This part also, though, was awesome, and it ends with the angels walking off through Times Square, and the real "Watchtower" playing because ooooo.