"Battlestar Galactica" (reboot): review

L to R: Mary McDonnell as President Laura Roslin, Lucy Lawless as D'Anna/Three, Michael Hogan as Colonel Saul Tigh, Jamie Bamber as Lee "Apollo" Adama, James Callis as Gaius Baltar, Tricia Helfer as Six, Katee Sackhoff as Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, Michael Trucco as Sam Anders, Aaron Douglas as Chief Tyrol, Grace Park as Sharon "Boomer/Athena" Valerii/Agathon, Tahmoh Penikett as Karl "Helo" Agathon, and Edward James Olmos as Admiral William "Husker" Adama

[WARNING: major spoilers. And very long. Pack a lunch.]

Despite all the TV series I've covered as a reviewer, my two all-time favorites remain the somewhat right-tilting "24" (less right-tilting as it went on) and the rather more left-tilting "Battlestar Galactica." In my view, a bit like reading Starship Troopers and Ender's Game in tandem, I think both of these TV series should be watched together although "24" lasted almost twice as long as "Battlestar." I've never fully reviewed "24," which is a hilariously ridiculous series that started off with a scarily plausible premise, but today, I'm reviewing "Battlestar Galactica," a series whose final season I'd originally finished watching right around the time that my mother was being diagnosed with brain cancer (2009). This made Mary McDonnell's portrayal of President Laura Roslin—a woman dying of breast cancer—all the more poignant and painful for me to witness, but it certainly helped to bond me to the series.

"Battlestar Galactica," the reboot, is based on the original series created by Glen A. Larson, which aired way back from 1978 to 1979, riding the science-fiction craze started by "Star Wars" in 1977 and featuring everything from huge spaceships and laser blasters to space dogfights, weird planets, and aliens. Little did people realize that Larson, a Mormon, had smuggled a truckload of Mormon theology into the series, including the notion of a "13th tribe" (in Mormonism, the people who came to the Americas); a "Quorum of Twelve" (Quorum of Twelve Apostles for the Latter-day Saints); twelve colonies based on the Twelve Tribes of Israel; and the ancient human world of Kobol, based on the star Kolob found in the Book of Abraham, a Mormon scripture. And then there's the figure of Count Iblis, who takes his name directly from a Muslim name for Satan, whom Muslims also call al-Shaitan or ash-Shaitan.

The original BSG (everyone's favorite initialism for "Battlestar Galactica") is the story of a deracinated humanity that, suddenly and massively attacked by the Cylons (a race of either reptilian-brained, robot-bodied cyborgs or "saurian"-created robots; the early showrunners weren't too clear on Cylon backstory) finds itself as a ragtag fleet forced to leave its twelve homeworlds and go on the run through the galaxy, spurred on by a legend of the "thirteenth colony," a.k.a. Earth, a "shining planet" where the colonials hope to make a new home. Leading the fleet is the only battlestar—a spaceborne battleship-cum-aircraft carrier—to survive the Cylon attack: the Galactica. Relentlessly pursued by the Cylons, the fleet has many encounters, sometimes with aliens, sometimes with a malefic being like Count Iblis, sometimes with a strangely glowing, crystalline starship weirdly reminiscent of heaven, and in one instance, with another surviving battlestar, the Pegasus. 70s-era Galactica is commanded by the leonine Adama (Lorne Greene); his ship's squadrons of fighters—called Vipers—are commanded by his son Apollo (Richard Hatch) and the rakish, Han Solo-like Starbuck (Dirk Benedict). Along for the ride are second-in-command Colonel Tigh (Terry Carter), fellow pilot Boomer (Herbert Jefferson Jr.), communications officer and pilot Athena (Maren Jensen), med tech Cassiopeia (Laurette Spang) and, among the Cylons, the human traitor Baltar (sci-fi legend John Colicos, who played roles in the original "Star Trek" TV series).

It's hard to believe that 1978's BSG lasted only one season. A spinoff series was attempted, "Galactica 1980," but it too died on the vine, and I don't recall liking it much as a kid. Nevertheless, the series had a lasting impact and spawned numerous novels and games. A movie version of the pilot episode was made; I remember seeing it in theaters. In that version, Baltar ends up being beheaded by the Cylons when his usefulness comes to an end. In the 1978 TV series, however, he lives on. I watched 1978's BSG with wide eyes as a kid; when I was older and caught reruns, I began to notice the series's many flaws, including its constant reuse of the same footage of Vipers landing on Galactica or taking out Cylon ships (always piloted by three Cylons working in sync).

And that was it for years. BSG was a fading memory by the time 2003 came around. Cable TV had become a thing, and with it, the Sci-Fi channel, later renamed SyFy. Then one day—and I don't remember how I found this out since it was 23 years ago—I plopped down on the couch and found myself watching what was billed as a reboot of BSG, but as a miniseries. Behind the scenes, I found out later, the miniseries was being floated by showrunners Ronald D. Moore and David Eick as a possible pilot for a bona fide series. Whatever was going on behind the scenes, I was hooked.

While the 1978 BSG was painted in mostly primary colors, with the good guys being nobly good and the bad guys being irredeemably bad, this new BSG was a moral murk—dark and gritty in tone, weirdly realistic in how it reflected current-event issues of the era, and populated with flawed, fucked-up (well, frakked-up as they'd say in that universe) characters. In terms of casting, so many people had been race- and sex-swapped from the original series that several mini-controversies spun up right away, gusting like angry dust devils. Dirk Benedict, who had played Starbuck in the original BSG, voiced his displeasure about the new Starbuck, who was now a hotshot, blonde female pilot and first-class frak-up in her personal life—sleeping around, bucking authority, yet somehow still the apple of the commander's eye. Apollo was now something of an unlikable, whiny bitch in a tumultuous relationship with Starbuck. Commander Adama was still a crusty older man, but a new figure, the president of the colonies, was there in the new series as a force to be reckoned with. Colonel Tigh went from being a quietly competent black man to a heavy-drinking, white executive officer barely able to keep it together yet competent in his own way. Boomer went from being a black man to an Asian woman, and Baltar, now given the first name Gaius (he was just Count Baltar in the original), was the stereotype of a foppish English gent, an egocentric genius/coward too driven by lust and other libertine urges to realize that he was betraying humanity. 

Perhaps the biggest change of all was to the Cylons. In 2003, AI was a developing notion (it got a huge mention in "The Matrix" in 1999, but the idea of AI had been around long before that), and the new Cylons followed the by-then-standard sci-fi template of being embodied AI entities that rebelled against their human masters. But the Cylons evolved, and they also developed a notion of God. While the human colonials, on their twelve worlds with the Zodiac names (Aerilon, Gemenon, Tauron, Picon, Sagittaron, Caprica, etc.), were mostly polytheistic if not atheistic or agnostic, the Cylons of this rebooted universe were mostly zealously monotheistic, almost an analogue for fanatical Muslims in post-9/11 America. What's more, the Cylons, having started off as AI servants of the humans, pressed their own evolution forward until there were different varieties of Cylons ranging from (1) robot-bodied "toasters" (a "racial" epithet used by humans) to (2) spacegoing Cylon fighters (called Raiders) that were essentially semi-autonomous cyborgs with dog-level intelligence and emotions to (3) half-humanoid Cylon "hybrids" that controlled the Cylons' base ships (their version of battlestars) to (4) humaniform Cylons, human down to the cellular level, able to blend in with regular humans—talking, sweating, bleeding, laughing, fighting, seducing—but inhuman insofar as there were only twelve models of these Cylons, each model having millions of clones/copies. Back in 2003, before anyone had had a chance to become deeply annoyed by Netflix-style race-swapping and sex-swapping, I admit I was blown away by this utterly new vision of BSG.

The premise of the new BSG is this: humans created the Cylons (which apparently stands for Cybernetic Lifeform Node) to use as servants. The Cylons, having gained enough intelligence to realize their role in human society and to have a God-imbued sense of greater purpose, rebelled. The human colonists won that war after a long and bloody struggle; the Cylons retreated, ostensibly to another world, and were not heard from again for forty years. The humans, meanwhile, set up Armistice Station, where a lone Colonial officer always sits, bored, and waits for a Cylon delegation to arrive. The Cylons send no one. And then one day, after forty years of silence, the bored Colonial officer at Armistice station is startled to see a gorgeous human (Tricia Helfer) flanked by two hulking "toaster" Cylons entering the other side of the station and walking toward him. The robotic Cylons stay behind while the woman walks slinkily up to the officer—who has a picture of a wife and kids on his desk—and asks him in a seductively contralto voice, "Are you alive?" This is a question that will haunt the entire series, and it's one of several major philosophical points that the series explores. The officer, stunned because he guesses the woman must be a highly evolved version of a Cylon, sputters a "Yes," and the woman challenges him with "Prove it." Then she leans in close and kisses the man. Out in space, a gigantic Cylon base ship appears and launches a single, powerful missile at Armistice Station. The missile hits, and the woman refuses to let the officer out of her grip as they kiss. As the station explodes around them, the woman utters a final "It has begun," and thus begins the Cylons' long-awaited revenge against humanity.

On the Earth-like world of Caprica, capital of the Twelve Colonies, Gaius Baltar (James Callis) is a scientist and cybernetics expert currently seeing a stunning blonde woman who looks exactly like the woman we'd just seen on Armistice Station. The Cylons have been infiltrating the colonies for some time now, and this woman wants access to the colonial defense mainframe. She tells Baltar it's for data collection and research, and that her superiors would be very thankful if she could have a peek. Baltar, pulled along by ego, lust, and an incredible level of oblivious naiveté, allows his girlfriend access, aware that what he's doing is wrong but unaware that she's actually a Cylon agent. With access to the defense mainframe, the twelve colonies' networked defenses are taken down by a massive virus—a virus that also infects most of the colonies' battlestars in space because they, too, are part of the network. Only the Galactica, an old bucket of a battlestar about to be decommissioned and turned into a museum, is unaffected by the attack because its commander, Adama (Edward James Olmos), has insisted that the original, un-networked systems remain in place. 

Adama, who has just given a decommissioning speech about how humanity can't run from its own sins and has to find reasons for why it deserves to exist, gets the news that the Cylons, not seen for forty years, have suddenly appeared en masse at all twelve colonial worlds and are nuking them. The colonies are at war, but utterly defenseless. The colonies' president, Adar (Colm Feore in a later-season flashback), is killed in the attack along with most of the line of succession. Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), the Secretary of Education and a former teacher, suddenly finds herself president. While some planetside humans survive the initial attack, the remnants of humanity are mostly those in ships that have been shuttling between the various worlds, largely untouched by the attack—about 50,000 people, a stadiumful. Commander Adama wants to stand and fight, but Roslin takes the cooler-headed view that the remains of the human race should get the hell away from the colonies, stay ahead of the Cylons, and find a new home. Adama, after some resistance, finally agrees, but the Galactica needs to arm up for a journey with no apparent end in sight. The best bet is an enormous colonial arms depot called Ragnar Anchorage, which has enough bombs, missiles, bullets, and nukes to last the Galactica for years. At Ragnar, Adama encounters someone who turns out to be another Cylon, a creepily prophetic man called Leoben Conoy. Leoben is suffering from the ambient radiation from the nebula that Ragnar is hidden in, and Adama realizes the man is a Cylon, his "silica pathways" being affected by the radiation in a way that humans aren't. Now aware that Cylons have evolved to look like people, Adama takes this knowledge back to Galactica.

Back on Caprica, pilots Karl "Helo" Agathon (Tahmoh Penikett) and Sharon "Boomer" Valerii (Grace Park) make it to their Raptor (a kind of armored, armed scout ship) and take a small group of people aboard, including Gaius Baltar, who now looks like a desolate, stray dog after the Cylon attack that he'd inadvertently helped facilitate. Helo gives up his spot on the Raptor to let Baltar aboard, unaware of Baltar's role in humanity's betrayal and assuming Baltar, as a gifted genius, would have a lot to contribute to Galactica. Boomer takes the Raptor up and catches up with Galactica. Baltar, meanwhile, lost his Cylon girlfriend when she shielded him during the initial nuclear attack, but he is now seeing ghostly (but teasingly seductive and strangely material) visions of his blonde lover—visions no one else can see. Is this the same woman he'd known on Caprica? Is this someone or something else?

Now loaded with munitions from Ragnar, Galactica and the ragtag fleet fight their way clear of a Cylon attempt to trap them. Many Viper pilots die to save Galactica, and it's while the people aboard mourn their dead that Adama reveals what he claims is a little-known secret: every battlestar commander has been entrusted with the location of Earth, the thirteenth colony. Claiming "I know where it is," Adama reassures a defeated humanity that he will take them there, and he rallies the crowd with the now-famous cry, "So say we all!" Roslin, later on, looks knowingly at Adama and flatly declares that there is no Earth, that it's just a myth, and Adama knows it. Adama, a pragmatist, replies that he was doing what he could to give the people hope, something to give them the will to go on. The final scene of the miniseries/pilot shows us several models of Cylon—all of whom we've seen throughout the episode—coming together... including a model that looks exactly like Boomer.

After the resounding success of the miniseries, a TV series was enthusiastically greenlit, and BSG went on for four seasons before directionless writing, exorbitant production costs, and sagging ratings finally got it cancelled. Seasons 2 and 3 were arguably the best, but Seasons 1 and 4 definitely had their moments. The series did a good job of depicting a religiously pluralistic universe, with polytheistic humans and their scriptures and prophecies on one side and monotheistic Cylons weirdly in touch with mystical, occult layers of reality on the other. Laura Roslin gets her Stage IV cancer diagnosis in the miniseries/pilot episode, and the cancer does its best to beat her down through ensuing seasons until she gets a temporary reprieve after taking some half-Cylon blood from Hera (progressively Lily Duong-Walton, Alexandra Thomas, and Iliana Gomez-Martinez as Hera ages), the product of the human-Cylon union of the human Helo and Cylon Athena, who is the same model as Boomer. Roslin also learns she may be the incarnation of a scriptural prophecy about a dying leader who will guide humanity to a promised land. Boomer, for her part, doesn't realize she's a Cylon at first; she was programmed to be a sleeper agent with the apparent purpose of assassinating Adama. She thinks she's a Raptor pilot in love with Chief Galen Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), but she ends up shooting Adama twice. She fails to kill Adama, though, possibly through an assertion of free will against her programming because, in her conscious mind at least, she loved the old man as a commander. Later in the series, she steals Hera from Athena and Helo, and in the end, after a moment of remorse in which she gives Hera back, she finally pays for all of her sins. Athena, as implied above, falls in love with Helo, and they have Hera. The Cylons theorize that real love is the necessary (mystical?) ingredient for biological reproduction to occur.

Galactica's journey over four seasons takes it to a number of different worlds, including Kobol (after Roslin has a vision), the legendary homeworld of humanity and the inspiration for the scriptures that drive human polytheism (in this environment, humans—who mostly seem to speak English—say things like "godsdamn" and "godsdammit" along with everybody's favorite "frak," the colonial analogue for fuck). There's also a bleak world dubbed New Caprica, which turns out to be a disaster, and an "algae planet" where the fleet replenishes its food supply with protein-rich plant life. The algae planet has a structure on it called the Temple of Five that may be a marker on the way to Earth—a planet that Roslin and others have become increasingly convinced does exist. The Cylons, meanwhile, feel the same Earthward pull, and one among them, a D'Anna (Lucy Lawless), has visions of "the final five" Cylons: eight models are known, one of which was destroyed long ago, and while the remaining "Significant Seven" models of Cylon know each other very well, there is a taboo against speaking of the Final Five, so D'Anna, with her tantalizing visions of them, is eventually boxed (put into a sort of cold storage)—until she's taken out of storage once the Five have revealed themselves. Humaniform Cylons have special abilities that come with being artificial life: if their body should die, their consciousness can upload to a new body as a sort of resurrection. "Resurrection ships" full of unconscious bodies wait in space for Cylons to upload into them; resurrection itself looks like a sudden, gasping emersion from an amniotic-like bath or tank, usually with other Cylons surrounding the tank compassionately, helping the newly resurrected (or reborn) Cylon to quickly acclimate to its new surroundings. Cylons can also "project," i.e., decide, within limits, what their surroundings look like. While this doesn't seem to be much help in scenes where humans are torturing Cylons, Cylons can still use this ability as a sort of meditation or as a way to dream or fantasize. Boomer allows Chief Tyrol to see her projected vision of her fantasy home on Caprica, where she and Tyrol have a daughter.

The striking and seductive blonde Cylon, Six, whom we see many copies of, turns out to be a wild card: some versions of her end up helping the humans while other versions fall in love with Baltar or are instrumental in humanity's downfall. But the version of the woman that Baltar sees in his visions turns out to be something more metaphysical: toward the end of the series, we come to understand that she's actually a sort of angel, guiding Baltar in accordance with her view of God's plan.

The Cylons are known by their model numbers. There are the cynical, atheistic Ones (Dean Stockwell as "the Cavils"); the spookily prophetic/religious Twos (Callum Keith Rennie as "the Leobens"); the cynical-but-curious Threes (Lucy Lawless as "the D'Annas"); the medically astute Fours (Rick Worthy as "the Simons"); the asshole Fives (Matthew Bennett as "the Aaron Dorals"); the seductive Sixes (Tricia Helfer as "Caprica Six," "Head Six," etc.); and the earnest, soft-hearted, but sometimes duplicitous Eights (Grace Park as "the Sharons"). As mentioned above, one model, the artistic Daniels (Seven), was destroyed forever—not even boxed. Each model has certain grand personality traits in common, but individually, they all live different lives and, in many ways, approach being human and, in the end, encounter many of the same human social problems arising from collaboration and factionalism. As the Cylons interact more and more with the humans they at first yearn to destroy, they discover human traits, and a potential for goodness and beauty, both in humans and within themselves that give rise to original thought, dissent, and disunity—something that would have been unimaginable in the beginning.

As the four seasons of the new, rebooted BSG progress, something strange starts to happen: the humans and Cylons collectively begin to reckon with the idea that their future—guided by the hand of God or not—might lie in somehow combining. Hera, the half-Cylon, shows both the human and Cylon people a possible way forward—through a sort of fusion of the creators as they merge with their creation. How successful is this merger? What happens to our favorite characters? What eventually becomes of humanity? How real, in this universe, are the humans' gods or the Cylon God? Many of these questions receive partial answers; many questions are left unaddressed.

The climactic moment at the end of Season 1 was the shooting of Adama by Boomer. The end of Season 2 had the humans settling on the austere but human-friendly gray world of New Caprica, but facing the return of the Cylons, who had lost the humans for a year but had finally caught up with them. The end of Season 3 teased the return of Starbuck after her apparent death, and Starbuck's promise to guide humanity to earth despite a prophecy that she was the "harbinger of death" who would "lead humanity to its end." Season 4, despite being the final season, spent a lot of time on a side plot involving Starbuck trying to find the true way to Earth while the fleet meandered along on a different course. By Season 4, a group of rebel Cylons had joined the colonials because they had a different interpretation of God's plan (or the Cylon plan) from the rest of the Cylon collective.

One of the grand arcs of the series, which starts off with a clear distinction between humans and Cylons, is the gradual evolution of some Cylons into something more human—far less collectivistic and more individualistic, more open to pursuing destiny on a personal level instead of a corporate one. Not all the Cylons evolve at the same pace in this direction: the chrome "toaster" Cylon centurions, for example, never speak but seem to have their own ideas about what fulfilling their purpose or destiny might mean. Also over the course of the series, the desperate humans initially do what they can to destroy Cylon resurrection ships and the resurrection Hub as a way to make sure that, when a Cylon dies, it can never come back—just the way it is with humans. It's a harsh way to teach the preciousness of life, but because humans are humans, prone both to value and to devalue life, the lesson being taught to the Cylons is garbled and messy, as most human truths are.

The series tackles many relevant themes that often reflect real-life issues in America at the time (2003 and thereafter), e.g., the ethics of Abu Ghraib-style torture and suicide bombings, collective bargaining and labor disputes, the morality of outlawing abortion, the power (and abuse) of religion, and a host of other problems. But as with most Western science fiction, the show's deepest themes deal with the question of what makes us human, whether there is any ultimate meaning, and whether humanity truly deserves a place in the universe. The Cylons are the ones who make the humans aware that humans and AI beings exist in a forever-repeating "cycle of violence," and that something must be done to break that cycle. The show's ultimate conclusion is a step in the direction of a resolution to this problem; the finale ends on a note of hope but with a huge question mark attached because it truly seems that humanity, in starting over, is on the edge of merely repeating the same cycle again. So BSG has elements of Western monotheism and polytheism woven together with more Eastern elements of eternal return, rebirth, and the desire to escape from the samsaric wheel of existence.

Despite the Christian-sounding language of the term resurrection, which the Cylons use to describe what happens when they bodily die and have their consciousnesses uploaded into new bodies, the process conforms more to Buddhist notions of rebirth or Hindu notions of reincarnation—except that the body a Cylon is reborn/reincarnated into is in most ways the same as the body it had just left. In Buddhism and Hinduism, when you start your next life, you carry over no memories or wisdom from your previous life unless you attain the siddhi (special power) to see your past lives. Of course, to attain this siddhi means reaching a certain level of enlightenment, so paradoxically, once you're that enlightened, you don't really need the wisdom of those past lives. How resurrection technology works out practically is never explained in detail; different Sharons (the Eights—Boomer, Athena, etc.), for example, live distinctly separate lives, so when they "resurrect," they retain the memories of their specifically individual past lives, but they can also access the communal data pool to allow them to know and feel the memories and experiences of other Sharons who have lived very different lives. Most murky of all is how the Final Five Cylons—Tigh (Michael Hogan), Sam Anders (Michael Trucco), Tory Foster (Rekha Sharma), Ellen Tigh (Kate Vernon), and Galen Tyrol (Aaron Douglas) are still able to resurrect, despite their having come from a more ancient version of Cylons who had gained the ability to reproduce biologically and had abandoned resurrection.

I should probably back up and explain the background of the Final Five, the planet called Earth, and the eternal return to the cycle of violence in a bit more depth. In Season 4, we learn a lot about the history of Cylons and humans. While Kobol was a human world (although humans might not have evolved there) that eventually spawned the twelve colonies, the first "Earth" that the ragtag fleet encounters in the middle of Season 4 turns out to be the home of a thirteenth colony—a colony of humaniform Cylons who had built their own robotic "toaster" Cylons that eventually rebelled. So the evolution of Cylons into anthropic forms has happened before. In fact, on this first Earth, the humaniform Cylons came so close to being biologically human that they began to reproduce biologically and abandoned their resurrection technology. But the knowledge of that technology was retained in the minds of the Final Five Cylons, who realized that the twelve human colonies would eventually continue the same cycle of violence by building mechanical Cylons that would rebel and then evolve into anthropic form. The Final Five wanted to travel as quickly as possible to the twelve colonies to warn them of the path they were on, but they apparently lacked the technology for FTL (faster-than-light) travel, so they moved as fast as they could, subjecting themselves to relativistic time-dilation effects. By the time they arrived at the twelve colonies, the humans there had already made Cylons, and it was too late to stop this next iteration of the cycle. In the meantime, the Final Five somehow lost their conscious memories of resurrection technology (maybe because of Cavil, the malicious model One, or maybe for other reasons), so they assumed innocuous human identities and lived more or less normal human lives, convinced that they were human. It was only when the Galactica's fleet approached the Ionian Nebula that a "switch" flipped on inside the Final Five's heads, and they began to remember who they had been, and just how old they really were (millennia old). In this same nebula, Apollo, in his Viper, meets Starbuck, who had been thought dead, and Starbuck says she knows the way to Earth. This is what leads the fleet to the first Earth, home of the thirteenth colony of Cylons, but now—in the spirit of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series—a blasted, irradiated ruin.

It was, I thought, a pretty clever head-fake, and not a bad way to shake up a Season 4 that often seemed directionless and lackadaisical. Starbuck's reappearance at the nebula happened at the end of Season 3; the arrival at the first Earth (no one knew at the time that this was the first Earth) happened in the middle of Season 4, and the final half of Season 4 made up for the slowness of the season's first half, rewarding us with the next phase of the head-fake.

The news that the first Earth is a blasted, barren, uninhabitable wasteland comes as a blow to the entire fleet, and we're treated to different people's reactions to the bleak news. Graffiti like Frak Earth appears on Galactica's bulkheads; President Roslin, driven up to now by the twin urgencies of returning cancer and scriptural prophecy, loses hope and burns her copy of the holy scripture. Admiral Adama turns into a drunken mess, convinced he's led all of humanity here merely to die. Only his son Lee is there to comfort him. Most horrifying of all—the moment when I actually shouted at the TV screen—was when gentle Dee (winsome Kandyse McClure), an important part of the bridge crew and something of a stand-in for Uhura, commits suicide right after reconciling with Lee, whom she had married and with whom she'd had a rocky relationship. I don't think I'd realized, until the moment poor Dee put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger, how much I had cared about that character. Only two moments in the show brought me to such an emotional crescendo, and when Dee was on the ground with blood pooling around her head while crew members rushed to her side in horror, I was utterly annihilated. Dee, of all people! Gentle, solid, reliable Dee. Dee, who as Lee's wife had had to put up with his lovelorn yearnings for Kara (a trope throughout the series, and a long-running theme: Will they or won't they?), but who somehow dredged up the fortitude to forgive his weakness. Dee, who had finally snapped because, well, she was only human.

Even in thinking about that scene now, feeling the sadness all over again, I find it hard to find other shows or movies that have delivered such a gut punch. Maybe only "24" has ever come close to that moment for me, when Jack Bauer is forced to shoot his best friend Curtis in Season 6. I've watched shows and movies that have left me with a lump in my throat or even in outright tears, but I don't think I've ever seen anything that shocked me so deeply. But like "24," BSG could be expensive when it came to sacrificing its main characters, and Dee had been a central figure. To see such a bright, optimistic soul lose hope in the face of this nuked-out Earth was a sign of what the rest of the fleet must have been feeling. As a piece of writing, this was one of the best, most impactful moments in the series. I doubt I was the only viewer shouting No! at his TV that night.

But the whole thing turns out to be the second half of the head-fake because, during Season 4's final battle of the Galactica against the Cylon "colony"—a huge, partly biological vessel parked close to a black hole to conceal itself and arguably the closest thing to a Cylon homeworld (ironic to call it a colony given the Cylon hatred of colonials)—Starbuck is given the order to "blind jump" the Galactica away from the site of the battle. Starbuck reaches into her memory for a group of recurring musical notes that she had converted into numbers in her mind. Punching those numbers into the FTL computer as a set of coordinates, she jumps the Galactica to a totally different part of the galaxy, and we see the damaged battlestar glide over what is recognizably our own moon. As the camera pans up, the Galactica moves toward a planet, and staring at us, in the middle of blue oceans, is the awesome continent of Africa. The fleet has finally reached Earth, but sadly, without so many of the crew and fleet members who had begun the journey from the twelve colonies. Without Dee. So if Starbuck's apparent death and reappearance wasn't enough of a mind-blower, the writers gave us this second head-fake as the now-crippled Galactica and her fleet arrive at our Earth. Starbuck had been told that she had a destiny, and that her destiny was to lead humanity to "its end." But like all prophecies, this one isn't meant to be taken too literally, for the end is also a beginning: with half-Cylon Hera on board, and with recognizably human hominids already roaming the African plains (Tanzania), the end of humanity is also a beginning as Hera becomes modern humanity's MRCA—our most recent common ancestor, also known as Mitochondrial Eve, the putative progenitor of us modern humans. And that's the series's biggest revelation: that we, in our real world, are all part-Cylon.

What BSG suffered from most was bad writing resulting from a lack of specific creative direction. This was obvious from Season 1 onwards: How do you pronounce the surname "Gaeta"? Is it "Gey-ta" or "Gigh-ta"? Why did Colonel Tigh once audibly utter "Jesus" in the pilot episode? Why were people initially saying "goddammit" instead of the polytheistic "godsdammit"? Are Cylons surpassingly strong, or can they be easily captured and tortured? Do the Cylons really have a plan that might or might not be divinely sourced? By Season 4, any notion of a specific plan has been abandoned in favor of a vaguer, more mystical view of the Cylon God's "divine plan." Is there one Cylon God, or are there many human gods? The show provides evidence for both, making this fictional universe evidentially ambiguous. I thought that that was a good move, actually—not revealing the exact nature of ultimate reality. But all in all, the preponderance of evidence leans heavily in favor of Cylon monotheism. The Hybrids who run the Cylons' base ships seem to be in touch with an aspect of reality that unites past, present, and future—a perspective that seems to lie beyond time and space, making prophecy possible, much like the Kwisatz Haderach in Dune, who stands at the nexus of all possibilities. The writing in Season 4, despite flashes of brilliance in the final half, is desultory and rather lost, as if the screenwriters had written themselves into a corner. The season's second half, though, almost makes up for the meandering first half.

Politically, BSG leaned more left than right. President Roslin was often the intuitive feminine conscience who held Adama back from his most primitive urges. Suicide bombing by the colonials when they were put into camps by the Cylons on New Caprica was shown to be justified—a possible show of sympathy for real-world Muslim suicide bombers. Male figures like Apollo were often depicted as weak-willed, emotional, or even meek (I'm thinking here of the character of Hot Dog, played by Edward James Olmos's son Bodie). In a further show of leftist sympathies, one episode was even devoted to the issue of collective bargaining and class stratification, with Chief Tyrol becoming a champion for the working people on board the ships that provided Galactica with its food and fuel. Strangely, this was the only episode to deal with the problem, and we never heard about it again. 

This happened a lot over the course of the series: interesting ideas and issues were brought up only to be abandoned after a single episode. While BSG was part of the new wave of TV series engaged in long-form storytelling, there were plenty of these episodic mini-plots that often went nowhere. That, too, may be a reason why the show's ratings were sagging by Season 4. Low ratings, plus expensive production costs, ended up dooming the series. I think part of the problem with bad writing was that the writers probably thought they had more time to flesh out various storylines.

But despite the show's left-leaning tendencies, the series showed plenty of military grit and was fairly even-handed about it, giving us many examples of masculine and feminine courage and determination. In a welcome break from political correctness, Starbuck, despite being a hotshot Viper pilot, was depicted as having plenty of personal, professional, and moral flaws—the very opposite of a Mary Sue. By the end of the series, when she mysteriously vanished right while she was having a conversation with Apollo on the second Earth (i.e., our Earth), her ontological status was left up in the air, so we ended up having no idea who or what she really was. Was this more bad writing or the best possible solution for a complicated, important character? And the show's attitude toward Cylon monotheism also trended away from political correctness: while this religious belief started off as a rough parallel to fanatical, jihadist Islam, it evolved over time into something gentler and more sophisticated, edging closer to Christian or Sufic mysticism than to militant fundamentalism.

That said, the series finale was almost surely the best possible note on which to end. Many mysteries got solved; many loose ends were tied up; certain characters who had sorely deserved a comeuppance got their just reward. The revelation that Roslin and Baltar's "opera house" visions were of the Galactica itself, the notion that Kara's musical notes (which were tied to the music the Final Five heard at the Ionian Nebula—a variant of Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower," which Ronald D. Moore thought might be a kind of universal tune that would inevitably arise in some form in any human civilization) were in fact FTL-jump coordinates, and the epiphany that our modern humanity is part-Cylon were all examples of good, deft writing. Remaining loose ends, like Lee and Kara's inability to get together (romantically symbolized by a flashback of a pigeon flying out of an apartment), Kara's weird disappearance during her final conversation with Lee, and the ultimate fate of the members of Galactica's ragtag fleet as well as of Bill Adama, were wisely chosen and mostly well written, in my opinion. I know a lot of people were upset that the series ended on an overtly theological note—the last thing we see are two "angels" in the images of Baltar and Six talking to each while strolling through Manhattan—but I wasn't upset at all because I could see such an ending coming from early in Season 1. This was not hard sci-fi.

I should take time out to congratulate the actors and the hardworking people behind the scenes who put BSG together. The net result was a convincing drama, told in a largely American idiom. My dad came down to watch an episode once, and he told me that the fairly realistic military talk on the show made him feel as if he were watching just a good old war movie; he was barely aware this was a space drama. Hats off to Edward James Olmos and his gravelly, authoritative delivery; Mary McDonnell and her combination of smarts, steeliness, frailty, and sexiness; Jamie Bamber and his earnestness; Katee Sackhoff and her portrayal of cheer, toughness, and wackiness; Grace Park for her melding of sometimes menacing demureness and raw openness; Michael Hogan for his amazing expressiveness as a drunk, as Adama's best friend, and as an ancient wise man; James Callis for his mix of comedy, mad genius, atavistic terror, moral cowardice, and religious exaltation; Aaron Douglas for his gruff toughness; and Tricia Helfer for her amazingly chameleonic ability to play Six in so many different ways. BSG was Helfer's first big acting gig, and I don't think anyone realized, at the time, just how talented of an actress she would turn out to be. There are so many other cast members to thank for their performances as well: Nicki Clyne as the tragically fated Cally; Dean Stockwell as the irascible Cavil; Richard Hatch (Apollo from the old BSG!) as political radical Tom Zarek; Michael Trucco as the earnest-but-doomed Sam Anders; Donnelly Rhodes as the crusty Doc Cottle (he and McCoy should hit a bar and share war stories); Alessandro Juliani as Lieutenant Gaeta, who undergoes a radical character arc; Callum Keith Rennie for his creepy performance as the Cylon Leoben; Lucy Lawless, with her sexy cat's eyes, as the religiously obsessed D'Anna; and Kandyse McClure for what turned out to be a performance that utterly destroyed me. This was truly an ensemble cast, and they all deserve my thanks.

And a special mention to Edward James Olmos, who has the honor of bringing the series to its peak emotional crescendo—the second crescendo I'd mentioned earlier. His bellicose Commander Adama, whose first instinct was to stand his ground and fight the Cylons when they attack the colonies, at first locks horns with Mary McDonnell's Laura Roslin, but over time, Adama comes to see Roslin as both his conscience and as someone strong and wise despite her advancing breast cancer. Roslin ends up promoting Commander Adama to admiral. By Season 4, each now seeing the other as a complement and with both having each other's backs, they are in love with each other, and in the series finale, on our Earth, Adama gives a dying Laura—this series's Moses—a final flyover tour of the beautiful-yet-unfamiliar African terrain, and Laura passes away while looking out the window. She had talked several times, in earlier episodes, about settling on a nice planet and building a cabin, so Bill Adama takes it upon himself to build her place in tribute, and in the final scene we share with him, Adama is sitting outside the cabin, facing east on a hilltop and talking to the departed Laura, whom he has buried next to his new dwelling place:

You should see the light that we get here, when the sun comes from behind those mountains. It's almost heavenly. It reminds me of you.

This isn't the final scene of the finale, but it's the penultimate scene for the people we've followed on this adventure. After a glimpse of Hera, we fast-forward 150,000 years to modern Earth and a bustling New York City. So: BSG is a shaggy-God story. But despite the modern coda, I think it's Adama who really gets the most meaningful moment. Given how President Roslin's death was happening on TV right around the time my own mother was dying of brain cancer, I found his scene both uplifting and hard to watch. So—thank you, Mr. Olmos.

Also deserving of thanks are all of the people behind the scenes—yes, that includes the various writers and especially Ronald D. Moore, the chief showrunner and reimaginer of the BSG universe. Moore was the guy who wrote the series finale "All Good Things" for "Star Trek: The Next Generation," which may be one of that series's top episodes for its raw imagination (in which Picard must think more than three-dimensionally to solve a problem). The musical score, originally by Richard Gibbs but taken over by Bear MCreary, was often haunting, unearthly, and even uplifting at times. The music was definitely one of the characters in the show, and McCreary took pains to keep including not only Gibbs's leitmotifs but also snatches of the theme from the original 1978 series. And BSG's special-effects team, which I imagine must have been huge, also deserves praise for some of the most amazing visuals ever to grace the screen in the early-to-mid Aughts. My only complaints here are (1) there's sound in space, which is physically impossible; (2) population dynamics are such that spreading the remainder of the colonials all over our Earth would only ensure their extinction through population bottlenecks; and (3) when the Galactica makes its final jump and ends up at Earth's moon, we see smoke rising from its aft, which shouldn't be possible: in zero gravity, smoke doesn't rise: it just stays put. Eventually, if the burning spaceborne object doesn't move, the smoke becomes so dense that it puts out whatever's burning. (A similar physics mistake occurs in "BSG: Razor," one of three spinoff movies.) Aside from those quibbles, I thought the VFX were spectacular.

For all of its flaws, BSG had and has so much to recommend it. By my lights, it's one of the best examples of TV out there, uneven writing and all. It's well worth a watch because the good (in terms of story) far outweighs the bad. I'd heard that the series "Lost" (which I never saw) left its viewers with a bad taste in their mouth. It too apparently had loose ends and came to a strange conclusion that a lot of viewers couldn't relate to. I don't know about you, but for me, BSG came to a satisfying conclusion, and it was a hell of a ride along the way. Especially when compared to its utterly corny 1978 ancestor, the rebooted BSG was a magnificent, meaningful work—beautifully shot, beautifully acted, and gorgeous despite its blemishes. While whatever message it was trying to convey about AI might have gotten lost under all of the space battles, gunfights, and mystical religious talk, BSG was undoubtedly saying something about human nature and whether humanity really deserves its place in the universe. That question asked at the beginning—Are you alive?—can be approached from different angles, and BSG did its best to hit as many angles as it could. I will always have an unabashed soft spot for this series. 

Watch BSG with my enthusiastic blessing. It's only four seasons.

• my review of "BSG: Razor"
• my review of "BSG: Blood and Chrome"
• my long, long essay "BSG's Deity: Not Loving and Possibly Insane"