This is going to take a long time to address, but whatever. Massive quote pyramid ftw.
What? Name a character flaw for Helo or Sharon. They always do the "right" thing and it drives me nuts.
Seriously? Helo, while always having good intentions, is incredibly stubborn and very short-sighted. And Sharon is often extremely selfish, disregarding what other people think (even Helo) and pursuing her own agenda.
The characters are not multi-faceted by any stretch of the imagination. And I don't think character flaws are an important theme in the show at all. Flaws as a species Moore is quick to point out, but those never seem to be reflected in the "good" characters.
I couldn't disagree more, name any character in the show and I could pick out a couple of obvious flaws in their personality. The range and variation of these flaws has always to me made the show very believable in terms of the characters.
Regarding your other paragraph, there is a lot to respond to, but I'd like to make an overall point: the underlying theme of your resentment towards the end of the show seems to stem from the fact that not every single thing was explained. And for some reason, you seem to think that means that nothing was thought through, but I am completely unable to follow the logic here and can only assume you are used to straightforward shows where everything has a sensible explanation at the end. Plus, if every detail had been explained in full it would have made for an incredibly dull finale. I absolutely love the fact that, while all the characters' stories are resolved, it leaves a lot of questions unanswered and gives the viewer a chance to use their imagination.
Helo is stubborn, true, but that's not a real character flaw, it's a trait. Especially considering he's a stubborn paragon of virtue. Sharon can be selfish, yes, but that is still not a significant character flaw. That's not what it takes to make a well-rounded, complex character. Virtually everyone is selfish. And mostly she seems to be selfish concerning her own survival and that of her child's. Can't really call that a flaw.
Now to respond to some individual points. THOSE WHO WANT TO AVOID SPOILERS, STOP READING NOW:
And the problem when you set up a mythological plot line that you don't have an idea of how to close, it ends up being retarded in the end.
First of all, you are basing this on the assumption that Moore was making it up as he went along, which is a pretty huge assumption and one I entirely disagree with. Of course there will have been big specifics he won't have known from the beginning (as is the case with literally all TV shows, because you don't know how many series will be commissioned, whether you can get all the actors back, etc), but the overall direction is completely consistent throughout the four series.
Second of all, what do you even mean by "close"? As I've said, all the plot lines were resolved, but it left questions unanswered, which is infinitely more interesting than "it turns out there are gods" or "no gods I'm afraid, here's a perfectly sensible scientific explanation".
It's not a huge assumption. It's not even an assumption at all. Listen to the commentaries or podcasts he did (on the DVDs, and really an excellent feature because audio commentaries are wonderful at providing insight to the creative process of a series), or read some interviews: he liked to toss things up in the air and pick them up later. He cites a number of both included and not-created plotlines over the years that he more or less started because he thought they could be interesting, and then would just finish later. For example, in the first interview I found with Moore, he said (on the "make up on the fly" nature of the show): " I do feel good that the process I always believed in and really defended -- about feeling the story instinctively as you go through it, and not being tied to, "Oh, we know exactly how it's going to end up" -- that that was true. We were able to get there and could say, "We've been making this mosaic, and now we just need to put the final touches on it and we'll have a complete picture." There's loose threads and things that don't quite work, but I think that's in the nature of almost any show."
And I don't really feel that the direction was consistent through the four seasons. The first two seasons were more or less a traditional drama set in space with some action. Season 3 started introducing more mythological stuff, and by season 4 it was Lost in space.
As to my comment on knowing how to close, I'm talking about knowing how a certain plot line will end when you start it. Now, this is not necessary, I think, provided the plot is a realistic one that can be closed off by a realistic conclusion that would not need to be planned in advance. For example, Adama getting shot or the Cylons taking over New Caprica are both events where the plot does not necessarily need to be planned out beforehand because it's fairly easy to craft a comprehensible and realistic plot out of them. But when you have a shared dream sequence/prophecy plot in your show that takes up a good chunk of 4 seasons, you need to have a good idea how to close it or else it's going to feel weak. That the whole significance of the Opera House was to lead Hera down a hallway into the CIC was incredibly, incredibly weak, and feels to me that it was just tied off at the last moment.
As for the resolutions, it was not that it left questions unanswered that made it weak. It was that the few answers it gave were retarded. I loved the Sopranos finale. But the Battlestar finale I hated because: 1. It gave extraordinarily unsatisfying endings to some of the characters (Kara, Chief, Lee, MOTHERFUCKING CAVIL SHOOTS HIMSELF, Tigh) 2. It made no goddamn sense (angels? Deus ex machina? People want to farm 140,000 years before crops are domesticated?) 3. It was a catastrophically poor send-off to a show I had loved for two season, really liked for another, and tolerated for the last, and 4. It included a disingenuous, undeserved, subversive and frankly hypocritical shot at where humanity has made it to.
The Opera House vision was to direct Hera down a hallway. BIG FUCKING deal.
What a randomly bizarre thing to get worked up about.
I explained above why I was pissed about it. It was built up to be such a huge thing, so much was devoted to it, they ruined a good chunk of the season 3 finale for it, and it turned out to be the equivalent of a direction marker in a hallway. Pretty emblematic about a lot of the problems I had with the plots in season 3 and 4.
The first Earth they found was a fake Earth, and don't worry, there's a real one over here!
Um, no the first one they found was their real Earth and 13th colony. But it was destroyed and uninhabitable.
Yeah, you're right. But I still think it reeked of deus ex machina and was completely unsatisfying. The thing they had been questing for for 4 seasons turned out to be destroyed; I thought my faith was renewed in the show. But then they magically jump away perfectly to an ideal replacement because of a song or something.
Kara wasn't alive or a Cylon, she was just an ANGEL! And so was Baltar's head 6!
That is the implication yes, but the details are left very open. The visions of Baltar and 6 in the other one's head are one thing, but Kara was a physical reality. Clearly you wanted some logical scientific explanation, but as I've said, that would have ultimately been incredibly dull and anti-climactic.
I wanted something, anything. I'm OK with some of the questions being unanswered, but it went full retard by just not giving anything. Such a cop-out. My roommate literally couldn't stop laughing at this scene when he watched it the first time, it was so ludicrous. A central figure comes back from the dead, does a whole bunch of stuff, single handedly drives the plot forward, and then disappears into thin air at the end without an explanation? Give me a break. Some things demand some form of explanation, because it reeks of an unresolvable tangent.
Because how can we retcon all the stuff we've already established? And the real reason Hera's so important? Because she's a massive whore and fucks the entire human population!
Wut? Now you're just making things up.
Well, I'm not really.
See, at the end, you can hear the news describing the discovery of an "Eve" i.e., a human all present day humans are direct descendants of, and that it's Hera (or at least that's the clear implication). Which, considering there were 40,000 humans still alive at the end of the show means that the entire human population was either wittled down to a few people, everyone else was infertile, or...
What it really was was another attempt to retcon meaning; i.e. everyone's spent the last 2 and a half seasons saying how important this kid is, so how do we make her significant considering the only plot she's influenced is about 6 Amber Alert situations? Oh right! Display our vast knowledge of genetics by making her the direct ancestor of every modern human!
But yeah, I was at least happy in the knowledge that all my least favourite characters would die of starvation and famine. Because all the people who want to farm will discover that there's gonna be a long, long wait until crop domestication with a couple ice ages in between! And they're completely unprepared for life in the wild!
tl;dr: RAGE