Battlestar Galactica - Sometimes a Great Notion

What would you do if all your hopes fell to ashes. How would you respond if all your dreams of heaven turned into hell? Such are the questions put to our long-suffering heroes in last night's episode of Battlestar Galactica. Unfortunately, the unmitigated despair we got for an answer was far from inspiring. We waited a year for this?

It's probably not a good sign that my wife's reaction was: "Do we really have to sit through nine more episodes of this? Can't they just answer our questions and be done with it?" The best thing about BSG has always been the story it told, but after last night I've lost the plot. Even the answers they finally gave were depressing, especially the anticlimactic identification of the final Cylon. I'm not sure what was worse: Who they picked, or the admission that they only decided at the end of last season. The Cylons had a plan; did the writers?

Still, as Carmen Anders notes, BSG has given us some dark and dreary episodes in the past, and they always paved the way for something better. If all seems lost now, that doesn't mean it will end that way, and really, we could hardly have expected sunshine and puppy dogs after all that has happened. Our characters have been hanging their hopes on Earth for years now, and to finally get there and find it worse than what they left could hardly fail to devastate them. It's not a fun way to begin the final episodes of the series, but it was brutally honest.

On that score I particularly liked the brief scene when Adama was walking to Tigh's quarters with a loaded gun, as Galactica's crew fell to pieces around him--it perfectly revealed his loss of control and concern. I also agree with Barbara Nicolosi that Dualla's and Kara's storylines were particularly well done. They were shocking, but made a certain terrible sense in retrospect.

So in the end, I still have hope for Galactica, but I'm not sure what I'll do if it comes to nothing.