(BSG) Does it hurt more now to KNOW a series is ending?
How will Battlestar Galactica end?
BSG's final season is going to be a rough ride for survivors both human and Cylon - and an agonising wait for us viewers
But is she a Cylon? Battlestar Galactica's Kara Thrace, AKA Starbuck, played by Katee Sackoff. Photograph: Sci-Fi Channel
The moral minesweeper of a plot isn't the only rollercoaster ride for the new
Battlestar Galactica, which begins its fourth and final season tonight.
From no-brow beginnings, when BSG still had to prove it had outwitted the
shonky source material, the show gained cult respect and a few more viewers by the second year. By season three, it had earned
plaudits as
one of the best show on telly from Time magazine and the
Peabody Panel, only for all that excitement and acclaim to fail to materialise in the form of viewing figures.
The network dithered, and when they did eventually commission a full run, producers Ron D Moore and David Eick opted for the chance to finish their story, and pledged to make season four the last. It returns to Sky One a cult once more; a condemned series, though its final season is its most exciting. The worst thing to happen to Battlestar would be to be hauled off air, so many questions left unresolved.
Suffice to say that the Humans and the Cylons are now both so morally ambiguous, they don't even really operate in shades of grey anymore, just a kind of flickering beige. Last year's Occupation saga took the chest-beating over who is the real terrorist
as far as allegory can stretch. Where last year's opening episodes navel-gazed, this season's first shows kick ***. BSG is just as smart, but it's now a fast-moving space opera. The beauty of a final season is that they're not even expecting to pick up new viewers. Most shows have to hold your hand, but these episodes just grab hold it, and gallop.
The saga itself? There's no immediate explanation as to why
Kara "Starbuck" Thrace suddenly came back from the dead. But the apparent calm the conflicted pilot appeared to show after claiming to have found Earth is short-lived, especially since the crew's initial assumption is that she must be a Cylon.
As for the real sleeper Cylons - the revelation that Tigh, Tyrol, Anders and Tory are four of the enigmatic "Final Five" is a major engine for season 4. It's lost on nobody that three of them were key players in the insurgency on New Caprica, and as they struggle with their true natures, there are devastating consequences for one of them by episode three.
The news that President Roslin's cancer has returned can only speed up her descent into religious fundamentalism and apparent dictatorship, and the grit in her eye - the deliciously manic Dr Gauis Baltar - finds yet another inadvertent form of treachery as reluctant cult leader.
And it's hardly going to be a surprise that the dissent among the Cylons, as they gain further self-awareness, is going to get bloody. Or whatever it is that robots bleed.
It's going to be a rough ride for the human survivors and an agonising wait for us viewers. BSG might not be the king of the ratings, but since
Sci Fi US don't have anything else halfway this brilliant, they're stretching it out as long as they can. Of the 20 episodes remaining, 10 will go out this year and, word is, 10 in 2009.
So the ending isn't quite in sight yet. My guess is it has to end in some kind of unification - that the 12 Cylon models must have some link to the Humans' 12 Gods. But don't expect them to just find Earth and have nice happy ending. Edward James Olmos (Admiral Adama) doesn't know the ending himself yet, so what he told
Sci Fi Wire the other week shouldn't be considered a spoiler - but as for his comment on the subject of who and who won't survive:
"Basically, if it's true to form, no one makes it. I think that people would be shocked, and they'd be hurt, and they would be totally, totally frustrated ... but I've got to tell you, that's a truth that people have to realise."
They wouldn't ... would they?