I found the last episode very enjoyable but also kinda disappointing.
Although I thought the wrap-ups for the various character threads were very personally satisfying, for me the show failed to integrate the episode's action and dramatic highs with the series' overarching question, so the result was a pretty flat action climax in the CIC, beautiful sendoffs for the main players (especially Adama & Roslin), and the one awful extra ending where Baltar and Six beat you over the head with the Honda Asimo. It had a lot of build up, but in place of a real moment of release for the show to pivot on, there was an awkward end to the action and then the episode was left to sort of drag out its component parts for the second hour.
Instead of all the events of the past four years coalescing into a defining 10 minutes or whatever, we got a wham-bam stop to the plot (Hera found, Cavil dead, oh and by the way here's Earth) that gives us no real insight on whether humanity or AI actually deserves to survive and why. Whatever the two parties' intentions were, the result was that everyone who opposed the colonials and their allies either ended up getting shot or sucked into a black hole or both; humanity survives because it had more guns in the CIC and Racetrack's dead arm fell on the nuke button at exactly the the most convenient moment. Also, extinction wasn't ever really a threat anyway because humans were actually doing just fine for themselves on a continent with more wildlife than all the colonies combined (which only Starbuck knew how to find).
My other gripe, and I'm probably again in the minority here, was with the religious aspect. I've had troubling, shark-jumping feelings since the season three finale when Bob Dylan started playing, and those feeling were confirmed by the ending going fully supernatural. The conflict between humans and AI and the questions of identity and morality that it raises are for me the most interesting part of the show, and making it so that events were being manipulated by magic angels all along just sort of cheapens the whole series for me. It would have been so much better, IMO, if head Six's influence on Baltar had stuck to the Cylons' interest in producing hybrid children in order to fully supplant humanity, and the religious delusions had been another ruse to divide and pacify the human breeding stock.
I'm not saying I hated the finale or anything (the mere fact that it raises these issues makes it probably the best TV show I've ever seen), but for me the whole "God's plan" jag being directly validated held it back from reaching the Blade Runner level of sci-fi achievement. That said, I think "The Plan" could still salvage a lot of what I really liked from the show (especially the first two seasons) in a way that wouldn't interfere with all the wonderful character arcs that ended here. Best case scenario: the One True God/Lords of Kobol are actually just super-powerful aliens who Boxey can kill with a Viper (like how Spock shoots God in "The Final Frontier"). Now that would be a sweet ending.
Also where was Seelix? I like Seelix.
