Battlestar Gateway-ica

A preliminary note to Battlestar fanatics who stumbled upon this post while searching "Galactica kicks ass": This blog will only anger you. Stop reading now. Back-button and go away. You won't like what I'm about to say here in my little corner of the Innertubes.

If you read ahead anyway and are determined to label me a douche, allow me to take the wind out of your puffed-up chest right from the get-go by saying:

I'm an idiot. I write unentertaining things. Of the 200 posts I've published, none of my commenters has ever agreed with my ridonkulous positions on pop culture.

Buh-bye now.

Now--are my three regular readers still here?

Good.

This is for your eyes only:

Battlestar Galactica started out as a friggin' phenomenal show. Remember when I watched every episode, up through the second season, in an unemployment marathon screening one year ago? Remember how I said it was "truly one of the best examples of the science fiction genre, period"?

Well, it was.

It goddamn well was.

If someone offered me a kick in the nuts or free DVD copies of the first two seasons of Battlestar, guess which I'd choose?

But that's exactly where it stopped being unbelievably excellent and became...just slightly above average.

The show sputtered and flamed out halfway through the second season's last episode ("Lay Down Your Burdens"). No spoilers, but I'd thought that finale was just a dream. Then the third season picked up with that deflated turd of a twist, and I sat back on my couch with my head cocked to the side like a retarded Labrador and said, "Huh."

But I persisted. It was still better science fiction than Enterprise, and I watched that entire run with a vapid smile on my face. I plowed through the rest of the shows as they came out on DVD, finally catching up to the live ones just as the final season began. I enjoyed them enough to patiently wait out the mid-season hiatus, and, just as I was getting excited by the possible direction of the final ten installments...

...I just don't know what the point is anymore.

The series became anti-climactic 30 minutes into that premiere. Now it's literally crawling toward the finish line like Simon Pegg's character in Run Fatboy Run.

We're down to the last two episodes. One tonight. One next week.

I almost don't care to watch, though, because even if the producers manage to pull out of this screaming nose-dive with a fantastic finale, it doesn't make up for the fact that the series has become a shadow of what it promised to be. What's more, it's become a bad parody of itself.

Fer frak sake, I always accepted how much smoking and drinking was going on on that damn ship. I'm a liberal guy. I get it. When your civilization is wiped out and life sucks, one expects a few vices to surface. And they surfaced a lot. But last week Adama actually started toking weed.

I don't know how I expected the series to end, but I didn't think it would dovetail with the sensibilities of Pineapple Express or Half Baked.

I hear Adama's new first officer will be Tommy Chong.