That was the WHOLE POINT! You are traveling through space...there are only 50,000 of you left. Cylons are killing you off left and right. Before you know it...there are only 30K humans left and the only ray of hope you have to hang your hat on is finding Earth. You spend a couple of years zooming through space dodging cylon raiders...your best friends getting wacked left and right only to find a planet that is a radiological wasteland; not the paradise and new home you had hoped for.
Now...imagine that is you. How are you going to hold it together? How would you react? Some people will keep going...some people will react violently...and some people will chose to end it all (like Dee).
I thought it was a perfect testament to human nature. Their behavior would certainly be incomprehensible...their faintest of hopes were dashed.
And the human response was more than appropriate in light of the circumstances. I loved the scene at the end when Adama arms up to walk to his bridge and he passes graffiti on the wall “Frak Earth”. The Dee actions were amazingly powerful.
However, the Cylons were what inhabited the planet was a major shark jump IMO. The whole point of the series was humanity earning its right to live again after its prior actions and playing Godd with creating a sentient being was one of them. All that to find out that Cylons existed thousands of years ago?
WTF?
Given that many of them spent quite a bit of time on New Caprica and know that the possibility of other planets to inhabit exist, not the way that they reacted in the show. The remaining survivors all experienced that "game over" scenario multiple times by now and know from the experience on New Caprica that that there might be other worlds that they could find to live on.
I thought it was a perfect testament to human nature. Their behavior would certainly be incomprehensible...their faintest of hopes were dashed.
Real human beings have experienced all sorts of disasters and I've read and seen plenty about how people react. While it's true that some people exhibit incomprehensible behavior during disasters, the people in the show have experienced so many disasters that dashed their faintest hopes that I find entirely new behavior from them unbelievable. The people inclined to give up have already had more than enough reason to do so.
The other problem is that the new behavior is always a slide toward being a self-centered pathetic jerk. Does nobody that survived have any nobility in them? As such, I think the show reflects postmodernism run amok (no good or evil or right or wrong -- only narcissistic self pity and despair).