the never-ending heartbreak of scifi television

(warning: spoileriffic)

The rebirth of the “Battlestar Galactica” television series in 2003 was unexpectedly brilliant: where the original 1978 series was a hokey (if fondly remembered) Star Wars ripoff, the new series was a full-on reboot of the show, with tight writing, a gritty look and a wonderful long-term story arc. Starbuck had become a girl, the president was a schoolteacher, Adama had turned into Edward James Olmos and the Cylons looked like people and were kind of Christian.

Scifi fans embraced the show, and the promise that it would have a finite 5-season run with an actual planned end to the storyline only made them more ravenous—it turns out that people really love a story that actually makes sense, and doesn’t just wander from week to week and then end, as TV so often does.

Over the past seven years, not every episode of the show has been a home run, but it’s remained a solid, intriguing science fiction drama, and it’s mostly held up its promise to tell a compelling long-form story—provided, of course, that the dozens of mysteries the story has spun up over the years can be resolved, and not be put out to pasture with narrative doublespeak like, say, The X-Files did.

Wait—seven years? How do five seasons add up to seven years? The SciFi Channel broke the last season into two parts, with a one-year hiatus in between, doling out ten episodes in early 2008 and then saving the final ten until 2009, a cruel way to treat fans at best, and also raising expectations for the final episodes of the show very high, especially since the mid-season finale ended with the cliffhanger discovery of Earth.

Now there are only 3 episodes left, and it’s not looking good. Rather than explore the really, really big questions hanging over everyone in the show (Why is Earth a desolate wasteland? Where will we go now? Who made the human-form Cylons? And since the human-form Cylons have emotions and blood and go to doctors and stuff, then how exactly are they machines, anyway? And why do they have a God? And who’s been making people have visions?), the show has instead spent most of its final time exploring people’s feelings and looking at how sad or grumpy they are, or who they’re sleeping with, and there’s been a lot of yelling but mostly it hasn’t made sense.

There was one fabulous moment where a deft bit of writing resolved a whole set of questions, but then the story popped right back to who’s-frakking-who and whether that’s really love or what.If they can wrap the series up in a strong, sensible, satisfying way in the next three episodes, the it will stand as one of the great science fiction television shows, but if the last few episodes fizzle, then they’ll have shown their hand as never having had a plan at all, and it will just be remembered as more disappointing TV.