It Still Stings: Battlestar Galactica’s Final Five Reveal Was Clunkier Than a Broken Toaster

Editor’s Note: TV moves on, but we haven’t. In our feature series It Still Stings, we relive emotional TV moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction? We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved. And obviously, when discussing finales in particular, there will be spoilers:

“This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.”

Or, you know, it hasn’t and we’re all just flying by the seats of our pants. Take your pick.

For a show that was, at its most fundamental levels, about the cyclical nature of history and the idea of what it means to be human, one might have assumed that acclaimed 2004 sci-fi series Battlestar Galactica would have put a bit more thought into its climactic reveal: the identities of the Final Five Cylons. After all, the Final Five were the show’s thesis in a nutshell: individuals that had been alive through an entire cycle of innovation, destruction, and rebirth, only to watch it all repeat again, and who had experienced the overhauling of their own identities in the process. 

Instead, what Battlestar Galactica fans got was a shoot-from-the-hip plot twist, albeit presented in objectively awesome trappings (the initial meeting of four of the Final Five as “All Along the Watchtower” plays in their heads is extremely cool). However, under closer examination in subsequent seasons, the dramatic reveal required extensive retconning and downright narrative gaslighting to keep from falling entirely apart.

But to get into why the Final Five reveal stings so badly, we must first brush back up on what led there. In its stunning pilot episode, Battlestar Galactica—a remake of the 1978 series of the same name—laid down the show’s backstory. On a series of planets known as the Twelve Colonies, humans created artificially intelligent mechanical beings called Cylons, who in turn achieved sentience and eventually rose up against the humans. After years of war, a truce was brokered between the Cylons and the humans, ushering in a period of peace. However, that peace came to a violent end when the Cylons—now able to disguise their true nature in human-appearing organic bodies—staged a massive nuclear attack on the Colonies, wiping out the vast majority of humanity.

Only around 55,000 humans remained: those who happened to be in space at the time on ships belonging to the Colonial Fleet, commanded by William Adama (Edward James Olmos) of the hulking Galactica, a fossil of a battlestar-class starship that was spared from the Cylon attack only because of how late it showed up to the battle. Led by President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), the former Secretary of Education who is horrified to find herself the highest ranking member of the President’s Cabinet following the attack, the Fleet is forced to flee in search of a new homeworld, with the Cylons always in hot pursuit. 

However, little do the human refugees realize that there are Cylons embedded among them, disguised as their friends and coworkers. Over the course of the first couple seasons of Battlestar Galactica, viewers gradually learned to identify the faces of the seven models of humanoid Cylons, along with what made each of them tick (both metaphorically and kind of literally, considering the derogatory term that many of the humans use to refer to the Cylons is “Toasters”). Meanwhile, whispers of another, even more secret group of Cylons started floating around during the show’s third season: five more unique models whose identities were unknown even to the rest of the Cylons. And, it turns out, to the Final Five themselves. 

At the culmination of Season 3, after plenty of visions, cryptic hints of mysterious cover-ups and conspiracies, and a healthy dash of prophecy, four of the Final Five were finally revealed: Colonel Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), Commander Adama’s second-in-command and longtime best friend; Chief Engineer Galen Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), former resistance fighter Ensign Sam Anders (Michael Trucco), and President Roslin’s top aide, Tory Foster (Rekha Sharma). Later, Saul’s wife, Ellen (Kate Vernon)—previously thought deceased, after Saul killed her for being a Cylon sympathizer—is revealed as the fifth member of the Final Five, alive and well after being downloaded to a new body on a hidden Resurrection Ship. 

If shock value is what showrunner Ronald D. Moore was going for, he got it. Few characters on Battlestar Galactica had been more adamantly opposed to the Cylons than Saul Tigh and Chief Tyrol, and Sam Anders had devoted his life to actively fighting them in the resistance. Plus Ellen was supposed to be dead! Tory was the only one whose reveal felt more like a shrug than a gasp, since she was a latecomer to the show (replacing Roslin’s first aide Billy, played by Paul Campbell, from the first season after his tragic death) and never felt particularly fleshed out as a character compared to the rest. 

But once the dust settled, it quickly became clear that this massive plot grenade blew a spectacular number of holes in the established groundwork of the show. For starters, there was the long-established backstory of Saul Tigh and Bill Adama as old friends who met while working together on a merchant freighter following the First Cylon War, twenty years prior to the start of the show. Scenes depicting that first meeting show a much younger Tigh, with a full head of hair that had not yet gone gray. Yet somehow he has aged significantly by the start of Battlestar Galactica, as has his wife Ellen, despite the other Cylons not seeming to age at all. One might chalk the Tighs’ aging up to a Final Five feature, except that the much-younger-appearing Anders, Tyrol, and Tory did not visibly age at all over the same time period.

Speaking of Tyrol, in all the *jazz hands* of the Final Five reveal, it seemed to have slipped the writers’ minds that he already had a child with his wife, Cally (Nicki Clyne), which really threw a wrench in the major plot point of human Karl “Helo” Agathon (Tahmoh Penikett) being able to father a child with the Cylon Sharon Valeri (Grace Park), resulting in the first human-Cylon hybrid. Once the series remembered Tyrol and Cally’s kid, a sloppy cheating subplot was shoehorned in, showing that Cally had actually had an affair with Galactica pilot Hot Dog (Bodie Olmos)—a character we had never seen her previously interact with in any significant way—and that he was the father of her child, not Tyrol. That none of this was even remotely hinted at before then was beside the point. Yay for consistency! 

And it wasn’t just plot points that had to be retconned to accommodate the show’s sudden and ill-considered pivot. The Final Five reveal wound up discarding a significant portion of the character development from previous seasons. Suddenly, the warm and funny Chief Tyrol was bitter and mean, lashing out at the people he claimed to love and making everyone around him miserable. Meanwhile, Saul Tigh, who had shown he would rather kill his own wife than abet a Cylon sympathizer, was suddenly surprisingly okay with being a Cylon himself? Sure, he gave some emotional monologues about it, but the Tigh we’d spent three seasons getting to know would have rather clawed off his own skin than accept life as a Toaster. And let’s not even get started on the boozy disaster that was Ellen Tigh suddenly coming back as some sort of Mother Mary-like mastermind. 

While it makes sense that discovering you are the thing you’ve been fighting against for years would trigger an existential crisis, it felt like a cheap betrayal of viewers’ investment in the series and in these characters. It’s one thing to send characters in a new and unexpected direction; it’s another to just CTRL-Z their entire personalities and replace them with something that worked with the writers’ “hey wouldn’t this be cool” eleventh-hour script doctoring. In interviews and on the series’ director commentary track, Ronald D. Moore has admitted that the identities of the Final Five weren’t even a consideration until he decided that the Season 3 finale wasn’t interesting enough and needed to be punched up by revealing four of the Five, saying he “literally made it up in the [Season 3 finale writers] room” and that the writers then “sat and spent a couple of hours talking about who those four would be.” 

Just a couple of hours to undo years of what had at least seemed like careful character development and worldbuilding. Who cares if it took a flamethrower to the intricately woven tapestry of the first three seasons; at least it was fun to watch the flames for a few minutes. 

Yes, the “All Along the Watchtower” scene is well done. It absolutely delivered the jaw-dropping finale that Moore and the Battlestar Galactica writers were going for (Ellen’s later reveal… less so). But looking back, the reveal of the Final Five feels like the moment that the show decided to prioritize flash over substance, whiplash-inducing twists over narrative integrity. Did it ever recover? That’s up to each of us to decide. But whether you loved or hated where it wound up, I have yet to meet a Battlestar Galactica fan who doesn’t think the final couple of seasons could have been better than they were. For my money, a big part of that is due to the writers casually tossing a bomb into the works without considering where the shrapnel might hit. And I deeply wish they’d taken a cue from the Cylons themselves and taken a little more time considering their plan before putting it into effect.  

So say we all. 

Lauren Thoman is a Nashville-based freelance pop culture writer whose writing has appeared in numerous online outlets including Parade, Vulture, and Collider. She is also the author of the novel I’ll Stop the World. Find her at her website, or on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. 

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