I finished watching Battlestar Galactica last week. I felt like I waited forever for it to end, because season 4 got split over something like 3 years thanks to the Writer’s Strike. Finally it did, and I kind of feel that I finished it due to guilt over everyone else watching and raving about it, and to support Sci-fi on TV (of course I didn’t watch it on TV…)

What had been a great thing, started getting old and usual. This was a space opera, and even though it was gritty and in your face (there are a lot of intimate camera shots), there still felt like there was a lot of unnecessary drama. It was just Too. Tense. All. The. Time.

The second thing that started turning me off was the religious overtones. There are a lot of themes in BSG, and I can see where religion could fit in. But when the conclusion was revealed, driven by the religious allegory, it was just too fake and far from reality for me to believe. For a series that attempted to realistically portray the surviving human race, the events in the fourth season destroyed their initial efforts. I was really disappointed in this.

Part of the reason of the turnaround was that there was no consistent story arc from the beginning of the series to the end. I’ve read somewhere that they changed the direction after one of the seasons and they even rewrote the second half of the last season. In particular, I didn’t like how the denouement was handled. Being a character driven show, with a large number of support characters. They only explained how a couple of the characters turned out. It felt like they drove into a brick wall of time and then had to stop.

BSG was unique and entertaining, but I kind of feel that it limped across the finish line.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: tv