Battlestar Galactica's End Officially After Season 4

Ant writes "First it was off, and then it was back on. Yahoo is now reporting on a release put out by David Eick and Ronald Moore stating that they will conclude Battlestar Galactica at the end of Season 4. They said it was a creative decision, and that they wanted to end the show on their own terms. The show was always planned with a definite beginning, middle and end, unlike many other sci-fi shows and dramas. Sci Fi Channel has accepted the decision. The news had been foreshadowed this spring through statements from stars Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackhoff. Ronald Moore himself had said that the show was heading into its final act, although he said the final act could be one or two more seasons. Now we know that the final act will last for one season. The special 2-hr. episode 'Razor' starts off the season in November. The first regular episodes of Season 4 will air in early 2008."

Good

It was starting to drag near the middle of last season, I'm glad to see they've identified an endpoint. It'd have been a shame to have to watch that show go into the toilet -- better to burn twice as bright for my viewing amusement.

Re:future tech

Wow, congrats, you poked a whole in the premise behind made-up technology in a fictional universe. What will be your next trick? A thrilling deconstruction of the infeasibility of humaniform cylons? Maybe an exposition on the impossibility of FTL drives?

Re:future tech

...FTP engines...

I bet if they used SFTP engines instead the cylons would have a harder time hacking into their computers.

Re:Good

Sending pieces of paper around the ship as a futuristic method of communication??? And you gotta love how they use that 2D table top with the little plastic models of space ships to plan out their 3D space missions. Instead of using a computer for simulation, they move the ships around with their hands!

The entire premise for the show is that this museum piece, Galactica, was built in an age when humans were extremely paranoid about infected networks, as they nearly lost the previous war due to their computers being too powerful and thus, vulnerable to intelligent machines. Galactica is the only ship that survives the Cylon attack precisely because of its low-tech configuration, and it is their major playing card in strategic engagements. In their rebuilding efforts after taking damage, they struggle with this rule to keep it dumbed-down and non-networked. I take it you've missed some key episodes, like the pilot.

Re:Ok but...

what about Pegasus then? How did it manage to survive? It was a modern ship and yet seemed to have networked computers. Clearly they managed to secure their networks because they survived encounters with the Cyclons.

They survived because they made a random FTL jump to the middle of nowhere and had time to figure out what went wrong (i.e. Six's virus in Baltar's program). They had also already been tipped off to the fact that something was wrong with their computers by the fact that the rest of the fleet had been slaughtered.

As implausible events go in BSG, the explanation here is one of the most sensible.

This whole season sucked IMO.

The entire "New Caprica" plot line was pointless if you asked me. Everything in it was predictable with no real insight into the characters and avoiding any real issues. For Example, We never got to see Baltar act as the President on his own. For all the Cylons actions we never really got any insight on WHY they are doing what they are doing. They turned the cylons "with a plan" into simple thugs being brutal just to be brutal.

Frankly for me the show has never lived up to what Season One produced. The show had direction then, to me it lacks it now.

You give them more credit than I do

Old enough to remember watching the original series on TV, I was thrilled with the mini-series, and Season 1 was solid drama with fantastic characterization. Season 2 started strong, but aside from the odd bit of goodness appearing at random, I'd say the show got pretty sketchy after the whole Pegasus thing.

Making it worse, the entire New Caprica plot line which ended the second season went absolutely nowhere, and the spent the rest of the third season hitting a big red reset button which pretty much rewound us to the point right after the mid-season 2 Pegasus arc. Yippe, I love watching a season and a half of TV where the producers produce random plotlines, and Adama and Rosyln, who had previously been inspired characters, were written as "stupid" and thus even the character drama was removed as well.

A real shame in my opinion; however, I'm happy to hear the fourth season will be their last. Perhaps that will inspire them to tell an actual story and we'll end up with a decent finish (and I can just go on ignoring all content between mid-season 2 and the final season =).

--
~AC

Re:Good

Totally agreed. My favourite show currently in production, but Jesus, has it ever sucked the big one this season.

Tigh: I'm telling you, there's Cylon sabotage aboard this ship!
Adama: You're telling me there's sabotage? With music?
No, Colonel Tigh.
That sound you're hearing?
That's the sound of the writers pissing away three years of hard-won credibility in the space of seven minutes.

Re:Good

Spoilers may follow.

I'll gladly recant if I'm wrong, but it seemed pretty obvious to me that Starbuck is the 5th of the final five, so we've seen them all.

And I think that sucks. Having 4 to 5 major characters (Okay, so Tory is not a major character and Anders is debatable) suddenly turn out to be cylons smacks of retcon to me, and it renders all their previous development with these characters flat and uninteresting. I'm mostly referring to Tigh's callous and unflinching bigotry towards the "Toasters," and the relationship between Tyrell and Sharon (Boomer/Valeri, not Athena/Agathon).

If I were to go back and watch season one and two again, this lame Shyamalanesque twist will have already polluted my perception, and those stories will seem meaningless, overpowered by the blunt graceless irony of "but HE'S A CYLON!"

I thought the end of season two was bad, but this is worse. It retroactively ruins parts of the series that were previously good.

Fascinating

Interesting. I wonder what the end game is going to be?

My money is on "Earth is the Cylon home world" or something similarly devious.

Re:Fascinating

How about: Earth is hostile to both Cylons and Galactica?

Re:Fascinating

My money is on "Earth is the Cylon home world"

Cylons: We are your forefathers.

Humans: NOOOOOO0000ES!

Re:Fascinating

My money is on "Earth is the Cylon home world" or something similarly devious.

For crying out loud. Earth is the 13th colony of Cobol, they say so all throughout the series.

The Cylons were using the fleet to find it (Kara's destiny is to find earth, that's why Leoben was so obsessed with getting her trust). And the Cylons were created by the colonies who have no idea where Earth is. There is no chance at all that it's their homeworld.

Re:Fascinating

(BTW, if RDM reads this and I'm close to his master plan, then I want a hat.)

The problem is that there IS NO PLAN. I wasn't sure at first but there have been enough interviews now. RDM and the writers are pulling everything out of their asses. If you think of everything JMS did with B5 to lay foreshadowing, plan payoffs years in advance, just imagine the opposite and you have the RDM approach. And what makes this so massively annoying is that RDM had previously mocked the slipshod "who gives a shit, it's just a show" approach taken by the Voyager producers.

For a show like this you can leave certain character reactions up in the air. Maybe a character will hold up through the events, maybe that character will crack. That's just like real life, you either make it or you don't. But by God, in real life your backstory is fixed. You don't find out you've got an unknown twin brother with an evil goatee, you don't find out your father is actually your arch enemy when it's already been established your mother and he weren't even on the same continent when you were conceived, etc. If there's some huge chain of events going on in the story like some massively complicated Illuminati plot, your understanding of it may change over the course of the story but the original motivation of the conspirators would not. Ok, you've got the cabal and they decide to do w, x, and y to bring about the fruition of z. That's all established. Now maybe some of the cabal decide that z ain't such a hot idea but that doesn't change what w and x were.

When you get right down to it, here are the facts about Galactica:
1. RDM assembled a great cast and crew who know how to put together a great-looking show.
2. His original idea extended no further than the miniseries
3. When the show was picked up for a full season, he set his horizon no further than the next episode
4. The only far-future plot element he had in mind for sure is that the Peggy would make an appearance.
5. Everything else is spitballing.

In other words, there is currently no explanation in mind for why:
1. The Cylons got religion in the first place.
2. What made them think attacking the Colonies would satisfy that religion.
3. What their motive is for pursuing the fleet
4. Why they want to breed when they are already capable of making clones.
5. Why the Cylons now want to find Earth
6. Why Cylons want to look human in the first place when they were fine as machines
7. How characters like Tigh, who was alive before the beginning of the first Cylon War and decades before skinjobs were invented, could in fact be a skinjob, especially when RDM already stated that skinjobs are not based on any preexisting colonial humans.

I'm absolutely convinced that when the final scene of the series finale is done, the Robot Chicken version of M. Night Sharmahoweverthefuckyouspellit will prance onto the screen and say "What a twist!" Either that or we'll get the singing/dancing alien from Space Balls.

Re:Fascinating

The problem is that there IS NO PLAN. I wasn't sure at first but there have been enough interviews now. RDM and the writers are pulling everything out of their asses. If you think of everything JMS did with B5 to lay foreshadowing, plan payoffs years in advance, just imagine the opposite and you have the RDM approach.

I disagree AND agree. I don't think there's a plan with every step set in stone, but I do think they have an idea for the overall arc the story takes. And there is most certainly TONS of foreshadowing in this series. Let's start with the Cylon's monotheistic God and the fact that the Colonists worship what appear to be Greek deities for starters. How about the fact that they're searching for mythological (for them) place called Earth? How can you say there's no foreshadowing...and then get modded up? :)

In other words, there is currently no explanation in mind for why:
1. The Cylons got religion in the first place.
2. What made them think attacking the Colonies would satisfy that religion.
3. What their motive is for pursuing the fleet
4. Why they want to breed when they are already capable of making clones.
5. Why the Cylons now want to find Earth
6. Why Cylons want to look human in the first place when they were fine as machines
7. How characters like Tigh, who was alive before the beginning of the first Cylon War and decades before skinjobs were invented, could in fact be a skinjob, especially when RDM already stated that skinjobs are not based on any preexisting colonial humans.

It's getting answers to these questions that keeps me (and others) interested in the show. I don't see how you can use this as ammo against the show. The reason I was excited about the announcement was that the answers will be answered within the next 22 eps.

Re:Fascinating

Having watched the Season 3 finale when it came out in the same room with Ron Moore, I can safely say that he's holding out on the things that you're mentioning point by point, and that's not the same thing as having no idea in advance at all.

Re:Earth has already wiped itself out...

Naww, earth is just every-day modern day earth. They'll find it. When they realize we spend most of our time on slashdot and obsessing about tv shows both the cylons and the humans will turn away in disgust.

Not a tabloid this time...

Hopefully this is more reliable than the Doctor Who drivel that was posted here yesterday or the day before.

Drag?

The entire thing has been awesome, with no detectable dragging at all. There has been, on the other hand, plenty of unjustified whining by fans who don't have and shouldn't have creative control over the show.

Unlike some people, I remember when sci-fi on TV was truly awful, for example, 1979.

No what?

FRACK! This leaves a big whole in the Sci-Fi channel line up. I hope they can find a worthy successor.

Good...

It's always good when shows like this _end_ eventually, rather than being cut once the authors run out of random reasons not to get the the goal. Four seasons is an excellent length for this series, and I hope it ends strongly. Or we could have season 5: The cylon invasion of earth.... followed by season six: the escape from earth to find _new heavenly homeworld_ ... and the cycle continues.

It was inevitable

Once they found earth the jig was up. If it was a more primitive earth, the cylons would pound them into the ground and it would all be over, a technologically equal earth and they would likely be outnumbered by the cylons and pounded again (thanks guys for coming and bringing all your enemies along!), a more techologically advanced earth would have pounded the cylons and then assimilated the newcomers onto their society. Trying to drag it out after any of these scenarios would have dragged down the series and alas, it would have sucked.

They have a chance to go out on a high note and I am glad to see they are taking it. Sad, but I was p.o.ed that Deadwood and Rome ended too. There is precious little quality TV out there and the best series are winding down. I will be sad to see the Wire go too. Hopefully all these guys will give us some new quality series.

Who knows anymore?

First Edward James Olmos spills the beans and lets the world know that Season 4 is the final one and /. gets the scoop http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/158218 [slashdot.org]

Then executive producter David Eick directly contradicts Olmos and says that Battlestar is an open-ended adventure and that Season 4 WON'T be the final season, but there is the possibility of having more seasons. http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/12/124725 6 [slashdot.org]

Now, David Eick (and Ronald Moore) says, Oh, JK, what I actually meant to say is that we have no idea what we're doing and we finally decided that Battlestar really is going to end after Season 4. I enjoy watching this show and the fact that its confirmed to end will hopefully make it interesting as they now have the freedom to kill off major characters and finally give the viewers the definitive end they've been waiting for, but with this kind of mis-management, who knows what will happen.

Stay tuned for more post-season drama as we discover that nobody at Battlestar Galactica knows what the hell is going on with their own show...

That's fine

I'd rather see the show go out on a high note than to jump the shark. [jumptheshark.com] Two of my favorite shows are Seinfeld and The Simpsons. Seinfeld went out at the top, so whenever I catch a rerun of it, I can be sure I'll enjoy it. With The Simpsons, I usually avoid the reruns because at this point there are more bad episodes than good ones. I hope I'll be able to enjoy reruns of Battlestar Galactica for a long time to come.

Will the snake bite its tail or crawl away?

They have done this many times before.

Either- inexorably the loop closes and the snake bites its tail again or this is the loop where they break the cycle. Perhaps the merged cyclon/human race is how they break the cycle.

Hopefully it will not have a pathetic ending like Bab5 (Ohhh. we are a big nasty race that's afraid to grow up-- god I felt like that ending invalidated the entire 4 years I watched the series up to there).

We always planned it this way!

Sure, they may have planned the series to be exactly that long, but I doubt it. After all, these great creative visions tend to go out the window when the money starts rolling in. Any series with a planned timeline will have that timeline stretched with all sorts of filler if the show is popular enough. They start talking up the timeline again when the ratings slip.

The best recent example of this is Lost. That is another show that supposedly had the entire plot (beginning, middle, end) mapped out from the beginning. However, the show became a huge hit, and everything got stretched out to where a large chunk of the episodes are basically filler that doesn't actually move the story forward at all. Now that ratings are declining, they've put an end date on it. However, had the ratings not slipped, I guarantee they would not be talking about end dates now. In my opinion, the show has dragged on at least a season and a half longer than it should have, and it still have 3 more years to go.

Re:We always planned it this way!

Well, at least Babylon 5 actually did it for real.

/sigh

It's bad enough that we have to wait until 2008 for the next episode. SciFi has really shot themselves in the foot by letting this series go.

Not necessarily

SciFi has really shot themselves in the foot by letting this series go.

Keeping a good series on too long can turn it to crap. I like Galactica, but I'm not as excited about it as I was in seasons 1 and 2. As an example, the long, overdone Starbuck/Apollo melodrama has worn thin for me. With a finite time span, the series will likely tighten up and regain some of the focus I feel it lost in season 3.

Also, hanging on to an idea after it has outlived its usefulness is what makes so many viewers disgusted with the studios in the first place. Instead of churning out more of the same thing ("Hey, the Die Hard movies raked in dough, so let's make another one!"), studios need to keep experimenting. If SciFi takes the HBO approach, and isn't afraid to kill off shows *before* they get crappy, they'll be doing the smart thing, rather than shooting themselves in the foot.

"it was a creative decision"

Right... were they tired of making money? Or maybe they didn't make any money for the network? That seems more likely. So they creatively decided to stop the series because there were no interest from advertisers.

Sorry, I call shenanigan on the "it was a creative decision" bullshit. It's a business.

Good

I haven't had a chance to watch any of them since the pilot. However, I hear it's spectacular. Anyway, I wish more shows would wrap things up and leave a spectacular series. Lost and Heroes come to mind.

I'd be sad when they're over, but happier overall because it was done right.

Saving it from itself

Let us be thankful that our great show, that turned to shit, wont hit rock bottom before they decide to end it. I am happy to hear that it will be ending after this season because that means they ahve to actually advance the story instead of making filler episodes that brought the series down the last couple seasons.

Thank goodness

I love BSG but I would have to see a new BSG 1980.
Still we have the whole caprica series to look forwards too.

Prediction

(Non-spoiler as it's a wild guess) - We've seen four of the final five Cylons. The remaining unknown Cylon comes in multiple sizes, shapes, and genders. And comprises the remainder of the 'colonial fleet'.

The Cylons Have A Plan

And they're finally going to let the writers in on it!

Good News

I was on the fence to whether I'd tune in again after that disastrous season finale. It all came down to whether next season would be it's last or now. If I heard they were going for five seasons, I wasn't gonna bother with the fourth. But now I'd like to see how they're going to finish things up.

This show had some great moments. Even season 3 had some good ones. Exodus Pt. II was one of the finest hours in TV history. But RDM clearly had no idea of where he wanted to go with this show. Making those people (in the finale) into Cylons, based on a decision made halfway through season 3, just kind invalidated everything that came before to me. And the idea of pulling the lyrics for "All Along the Watchtower" out of the "ethereal mix" that we're all tapped into was just too stupid for me to ever look at this as a good show again (I read that one in an interview). Some people are just blown away by any manufactured twist. I prefer a degree of coherence to my storylines.

SPOILER - they reach earth, but...

Unfortunately, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, BOTH fleets are eaten by a small dog.

make way

Now the SciFi channel will have room for Stargate Galaxies, and Stargate: The Next Generation, and Stargate Return of the Jedi, and....

BSG Ending

Spoiler, BSG is nothing more than a Cylon social experiment. The 12 colonies are long dead. The first show led to the death of the humans. All the humans and cylon models are really just computers set up in a situation that happened long ago ( the first show ) to try to see if they can find earth the same way the old humans did if they really believe they are human.

Zap, theres season 5 6 7. Humans fighting future cylons. Thats the only way the series could possibly continue. New cast and all. With cameos of every character to ever be on bsg.

and they have a plan

While we all know the Cylons "have a plan" I began to wonder about the writers. People became to dysfunctional for my tastes and the finale where they were singing the same song was just to hokey.

I really liked the show, but this last season wrapped around Kara was too predictable, it more Saturday morning show than anything else.

Good News, Everyone!

1) This is good because, as many have mentioned, going out on a high note is far preferable to shrivelling into unadultered guano before calling it quits. Besides, the sooner they kill it the sooner someone else can "reimagine" it a generation later if we honestly find the concept that compelling.

2) The success of BSG has taught the Sci-Fi Channel some good lessons, and we can hope such lessons are applied as they develop new properties, thereby giving them an edge in the race to suck less.

3) I'm arranging to have my own scifi project [cheeseburgerbrown.com] pitched to the Sci-Fi Channel in the near future. A hole in the schedule means a potential opportunity!

BS

"The show was always planned with a definite beginning, middle and end, unlike many other sci-fi shows and dramas."

Oh, that's complete bullshit. The show's plotting has lurched like a drunken sailor from the pilot setup through various seasons. You can even hear on the DVD commentaries how much they had to change plans as soon as they blew half the season's the budget on the initial prison-ship episode, etc.

Someone must have figured out that this is good marketing mantra when you announce a final season to persuade people it's not just because your story is deflating with a big farty-sound. All of a sudden everyone fantasy series is claiming this: Babylon 5, Lost, Battlestar, etc.

To summarize: Total bullshit.

Re:BS

Babylon 5 does not belong on that list. The show was planned for five seasons. Fox announced that they were canning it at the beginning of the fourth season, so the last two seasons were written into season four, then the show was moved to another network for a fifth season. The fourth season was, arguably, the best. The fifth season was not nearly as good, but you cannot blame the show being canceled when it was on the fifth season, as it had already been announced, before the season started, that the fifth season would be the last.

Hope they milk it

Specifically, I hope they milk the series, by releasing a special edition DVD set, remastered removing the shakey cam. I so desperately wanted to watch the new series, but just am unable to, due to the distraction of the overly artsy and pretentious and unnecessary shakeycam use. This is one technique I hope dies, and if there's one positive to be seen in the demise of this series, it's one less use of shakeycam.

It should be the drama and actions in the show that make me turn my head and make my eyes dart around, not the spasmodic camera operator. Sigh... (I'm ready to form an advocacy group for elimination of shakeycam, heavy plastic packaging, and christmas toys packaging involving plastic ties and milliones of twist ties.)

Reference.

Bears. Beets. Battlestar Galactica.

Am I detecting a jab...

...at Star Wars?

The show was always planned with a definite beginning, middle and end, unlike many other sci-fi shows and dramas.

Methinks so!

Please promise they won't find Earth. Please!

If they do, we'll soon see another crappy spin-off series that uses stock footage to pad the lame down-on-earth plots written around the footage, like we already had to suffer with TOS BSG.

Please, for all that is holy, by the Lords of Kobol, promise me we won't have to endure this again. No human being should be subjected to such horror twice.

Given what happened to B5 in S5...

... Maybe 4 seasons is the charm?

Babylon 5 suffered in season 5 quite a bit, the whole psi war was weak IMO. Granted, that's in comparison to seasons 3 and 4, which few scifi shows in history can hope to do. And yeah, maybe stuff was pulled into S4 because of the ever-present fear of cancellation, but still.

I for one welcome our robotic underwear model

overlords, and volunteer for research into human-cyborg relations of an intimate kind.

Hurry, only one season left!

Mixed feelings.

Similar to another poster, yes I was miffed about Rome and Deadwood ending and now BSG.

Rome ended well, IMO and maybe could have gone on for 1/2 a season...maybe.

Deadwood...big GRRRRR... so much was left hanging and much more to see that 1 or 2 more seasons would
have been a cake walk...well worth the DVD set purchases. Instead !CHOP! that's it, no more soup^W
Swiggen for YUO! (Swiggen...still cracsk me up. anyway)

BSG is somewhere in between, with season 1: fantastic. Season 2: orgasmic. Season3: rag tag fleet part2.

Season 3, IMO had s1 and s2 to live up to, but neither failed nor succeeded completely.

Let me 'splain:
More drama, less cylons. so-so.

Characters had more history and backstory (military -> civilian -> back to .mil) and all the problems
and impediments associated with the transition and back. Difficult, some episodes did it well, some not so much.

The survivors were a 'family' because of surviving. Now families with the family and the motivations,
loyalties and interactions became overly complex. Yeah, that lead to the dreaded love quadrangle, because
it could have been solved in 1/2 and episode's time over a few episodes, but *IT DRAGGED ON for 3 or 4*.
"As the Battlestar turns", indeed. I just kept thinking "Would someone please shoot/stab/fuck someone else
and move the hell on!". Overall, a big "MEH".

Missed, or maybe saved for later, opportunities: The Baltar+Chip-Six interaction with Caprica(Six)+ChipBaltar.
Comedy effing gold right there. When ChipBaltar (the one in Caprica's head/imagination) was introduced I'd
not laughed so hard in a while just because of his demeanor and expressions (priceless).
Never happened. Tigh got decked by CapricaSix, which was worth a "woohoo" and a "daaaammn" and made the
season worth the price for an episode alone, never happened.
(Dr Who, season 2, Daleks vs Cybermen...the trash-talk scene had me in tears. 80 bucks for season2 and I
didn't bat an eye).

Loss of Lucy Lawless/her desecnt into madness, Final Five, the cylon-girl-in-the-tank who steers the ship,
boxed cylons (be interesting if boxed cylons were the one's projecting themselves to Caprica/Baltar, it
would explain a lot). Story arcs that just ended/went nowhere to the disappointment of many.

It comes down to: previous 2 seasons of awesome, boring arcs that got explored at length, exciting arcs that ended
too soon, got ignored or are in the making and a big lack of explosions/cylons/cylon plan in the beginning of
season 3, and eventually some "pulling it out of the fire" writing toward the end.
Mixture of "Holy Shit" and "WTF?" best describes S3.

Season 4?: Won't know until we get there, but if it can make me want to put in the DVDs, starting with the pilot,
then they've made TV on par/above Rome/Deadwood, IMO.

That's saying a lot. I think they can do it when focused, hell s1, s2 and s3.5 proved that.

Like every other Sci-Fi series before it

the serious will end, but Hollywood will continue to make movies of it, like the "Star Trek" series.

I am guessing that they will have a show on the Adamas before Caprica was invaded by Cylons like one hundred years before or something. Sort of like the Enterprise series being before the original Star Trek. There can still be a series based on BSG, but it might have different characters, and might be a prequel. I think the new BSG series will end and then spin off into a few movies before they decide to call it quits.

I recall FarScape ended and then they did a movie of it, but it ended up on the Sci Fi Channel instead of the theatres. Firefly ended up as the Serenity movie. So why wouldn't the tradiation continue after the BSG series ends in season four?

At The Rate...

At the rate that people are dying, Vipers and fleet ships being lost, fuel and food being consumed, they'll be lucky to make it to season 3.5.

Can I stand 22 more eps like last season?

I watched this from the beginning. The mini-series blew me away. The first season raised it up a notch and season 2 kept it their right until the end.

Then they did the flash forward, Apollo in a fat suit, Adama growing a mustache, Starbuck her hair. I have seen less farcical time shifts on southpark. All the characters seemed to forget who they were, and then we got the season 3 attempt to justify the flash forward characters with a pile of bad soap opera. Somewhere they hit the reset button, Apollo became unfat, the others less hairy and the whole New Caprica bit might not have happened.

A number of filler episodes later and we get the season 3 finale that was an improvement over the preceding soap opera, but breaks the essential rules of the games about who couldn't possibly be a Cylon. Now we will get the final season where they attempt to justify the inconsistencies that they introduced by running a series with no real set plan and making it up as they go along. I only had to listen too one podcast to realize they are making it up as the go. No planned arcs here.

After watching then end of season 2 to the end of season 3, I am thinking 22 episodes might be too much of a stretch for them to fill. More than enough to finish off if they have any good ideas left.

Good news and bad news

Well, the bad news is that the best show on television will be coming to and end, probably sometime in mid to late 2008,... But the good news is, at least we won't see our favorite show degrade into endless time travel plot twists, bringing back fat, old and balding actors just to save their career, and Nazis in Space.

BSG starting to suck...

....in a decidedly nonlinear fashion.

WTF - sure it is a monumental task to come up with a great story line. But after Season 3 I would be overjoyed with mediocre.

This, from a huge fan.

Re:Jumped the robotic shark long time ago

You apparently don't know that many geniuses.... neurotic, nutso, emo, and unstable is not as uncommon as one thinks

Re:Crappy ending redux

Hendrix didn't write "All Along the Watchtower".

The season finale was brilliant. Perhaps you would be happier watching Star Trek.

parent is a [show x sucks] troll, but still...

it was just some kind of CRAZY hallucination, like Starbuck really being dead!

We see her hand on the ejector seat lever.
There's a Cylon troop transport luring her there.
She's been declared dead and was saved by a Cylon ship before.
One of the Leobens is obsessed with getting Starbuck to fall in love with him.
Her henpit pressure had equalized to the atmospheric level due to the hole in her windshield.
She holds on to the very last second, and only when her ship breaks apart do we see her throw her brace for it.
Due to the documentary-style special effects, the shaking camera put her viper at the top of the screen when it explodes [web-l.com].

It's weird how many people believe what the characters are telling themselves (she's dead, Jim) rather than what the filmmakers are deliberately showing us (stuff the characters don't know, but we were shown requires far more effort in prop making, filming and editing than stuff people say).

Re:Crappy ending redux

As long as Starbuck doesn't find Patrick Duffy in her shower, we'll be fine.

Re:Crappy ending redux

Then the series finale could suck as many balls as the season 3 finale!

I don't think all the prostitutes in Nevada can suck that many balls. It can only get better from here (says desperately to myself).

Re:Good riddance

this is flaimbait, please some one mod it down. If it sucked so much you would not have wasted your time writing here. Your just a troll. Personally, I think the show is great. Nothing beats the episode where they liberate New Caprica. Galactica intentionally free falling to launch fighters and jumping out at the last minute, priceless!

Re:turn it off

You don't quite understand. I disconnected my TV to have more time for reading, hobbies, projects, etc. No antenna, no cable, no power. I love my house without a TV.

I still download BSG and watch it on my computer because it is so wonderfully entertaining. I also buy the DVD's because the team deserves some of my money for such a creative enterprise.

The TV remains unplugged.