Circular Extinction

Battlestar Galactica: The Rebootening was actually a pretty good series, but reflecting back on it, I realize that the parts that I liked best were the beginning and the end.

Not just the beginning showing us that an interplanetary civilization can (and will, if we get to that point) be taken down by lust, but that moment-

-that wonderful moment-

-when a hostile actor decides that things will start and end with vernichtung.

Annihilation.

The Cylons were pretty much carpet-nuking Caprica when the traitor (Traitor? He never did run that test on himself, did he?) Gaius Baltar escaped. When the humans offered unconditional surrender, they were met with...

…silence, and more bombs.

The perfect end to an imperfect story, but not the ending we got.

Five or eight or seven seasons later, after squirming like an earthworm on the sidewalk under the magnifying-glass focused Cylon sun, the remaining colonists... colonize, finding another new planet to replace the scorched Earth.

And we know what happens when the colonizers come calling, don't we?

St. Iain (not me you fucking dolt, the author. No, I'm just a writer, and not a very good one at that. Try and focus, will you?) tells us that:

After the death of (acting) President (Education Secretary or some unlikely shit) Palin, Commander William “Hüsker Dü” Adama spends the rest of his short life jumping in and out of a lake that thinks it's a gin and tonic. The rest of the doughty crew and survivors of the S.S. (spaceship) Minnow, who, despite having lost all their guns when the sole surviving professional athlete in the universe stole the fleet and set the controls for the heart of the sun, are still able to use their ignorance of germs and knowledge of steel to exterminate the local “missing link” autochthones, save for a raped few whose partial DNA survived long enough to confuse things for future genealogists.

And so it ends, with a race escaping genocide perpetrating genocide.

Perfect.