Is it over yet?

This coming Friday is the finale of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series that’s been limping along for the last four years.

I was a fan of the original Battlestar series that ran for just one season back in 1979.  I hid my eyes and pretended I saw nothing (Nothing!) at the Galactica: 1980 mistake.  So when the revival was finally real, I looked forward to it all, even with the casting choices and gender changes from the original.

I’ve never gotten used to the whole seizure inducing, stomach rolling, jittery camera technique.  I have no idea what it adds to the storytelling, but hey what do I know, I’m just a consumer of the product, I’m not a visionary producer or something.

Overall, after staying with this slowly dying show for four years, I can’t help feeling like they never really advanced the show from the original 1979 version.  Last vestiges of humanity looking for Earth.  We got lots of fraks (but oddly few felgercarbs) to make us all grin like adolescent schoolboys who got away with a thinly veiled fart joke.  We got to see some smootching and flirting and almost interesting sexual innuendo scenes.  We got to see a few more flying around and shooting things scenes (but again with the stomach rolling camera movements).  But how did the story really advance.  OK, we got the ‘skin job’ Cylons, but that’s just a way around having to spend some money on CG or guys-in-costume Cylons.  Personally I still think the original “By your command” Cylon voice is far more interesting than all the nearly naked Six and Eight views.

I think we had a lot more material in looking at the Cylon society from the first series – which was never really played out but could have been interesting and a good metaphor about authoritarian structures verses democratic ones, etc.  Instead we got “the final five” who somehow used to be super geniuses who built up the entire ‘new’ Cylon race, but are now just drunken, lovesick, addled members of the fugitive fleet.

Oh, and by the way, the original series never really figured out if the Cylons were our machines who rebelled, or an alien race of machines who rebelled.  The new series “our mistakes made this problem” is just so much more 1960’s ‘down with the man’ retread. 

The whole “Earth is poisoned so let’s move on” thing just seemed like a cheap way of not satisfying the viewers and not having to deal with the whole “are they in the future or are they the Chariots of the Gods” angle.  I noticed the new series started out leaning heavily on Glen Larson’s original Egyptian theme, switched over to some Greek and Roman themes, then just dropped it all.  At least Stargate SG-1 did a better job of explaining the old gods of the past.

I’m glad and grateful for the DVR technology that lets me speed through the episodes, especially this last season, hunting for a few moments of interesting or relevant dialogue.

Will I watch the finale.  Actually I’ll record it and yes I’ll sit down and try to pick through it for something interesting.  But I’m just as glad it is ending.  They’ve been stretching out the last few good ideas for almost 3 years now and filling in with mind-numbing angst-ridden dialogue.

Thanks for reviving the series just to show how dead-end it really was.